Barbarian

In modern times barbarian has fallen into relative disuse, but in previous centuries it carried great potency, as savage still does. Although the term is rooted in Barbary, the area of North Africa southwest of Egypt, the basic sense has always been “an uncivilized person.” Furthermore, it has been used in a culturally exclusive fashion to stigmatize successively those who were “non-Hellene,” then “non-Roman,” then “non-Christian,” then “one of a nation outside Italy,” that is to say, foreigners whose language and customs differed from those of the speaker or writer. In addition to these xenophobic denotations, the word usually implied one who was an infidel and cruel, embodying barbaric behavior. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary , dated 1549 and in Scots dialect, is revealing in its admission of prejudice: “Euere nation reputis vthers nations to be barbarians” (“All nations regard others as barbarians”).

Barbarian also has a linguistic aspect, being a Greek form of the Latin term balbus , meaning “stammering.” It is thus rooted in demeaning attitudes toward foreign languages, seeking to belittle them by making them sound like infantile babbling through derisive imitation. A classic instance is Hottentot , which according to Olfert Dapper in his description of the people in 1670 “is a word meaning ‘stutterer’ or ‘stammerer’ on account of their clicking speech.”