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Lingua Franca-Circular Icon

Lingua Franca

Language and writing in academe.

Can You Explain What a Shibboleth Is?

By Geoffrey K. Pullum April 18, 2018
ephraim_map

I could hardly believe my ears. The BBC, on a radio news program and then again on the 8 a.m. news, quoted a British politician as saying “I think we must also recognize that there are real economic reasons why people have played up the issue of the Irish border and the need to have the shibboleth of the Good Friday agreement,” and as an aid to listeners they explained that “shibboleth” meant “outdated or unimportant idea”!

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ephraim_map

I could hardly believe my ears. The BBC, on a radio news program and then again on the 8 a.m. news, quoted a British politician as saying “I think we must also recognize that there are real economic reasons why people have played up the issue of the Irish border and the need to have the shibboleth of the Good Friday agreement,” and as an aid to listeners they explained that “shibboleth” meant “outdated or unimportant idea”!

Staggering misinformation, I thought. But then just last week I happened to use the word shibboleth in another context while chatting over lunch with a well-educated American couple, and they asked me what a shibboleth was. They had never encountered the word before.

Maybe it’s old-fashioned of me to think that everyone knows the main Old Testament stories. So let me briefly relate the tale (originally told in Judges, Chapter 12) that led to the borrowing of the word shibboleth from ancient Semitic dialects into English.

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Roughly 3,000 years ago a tribal leader named Jephthah served six years as leader of the Israelites. He came from a tough background. He was the illegitimate son of a prostitute, and his brothers had forced him out. He had been living in Tob, way out east of the river Jordan. But the elders of Gilead, in a large swath of land along the east bank (including Manasseh, Gad, and Reuben), needed a tough bastard to head up their military struggle against the people of Ammon, and chose Jephthah for the role.

One tribe who refused to support Jephthah in his war against the Ammonites was the Ephraimites, whose homeland was way to the west of the Jordan (see the map above). They became his enemies.

At one point in his campaign, Jephthah’s militia had captured an area south of the Sea of Galilee where the Jordan River could be forded. He and his men tried interrogating potential river crossers about their ethnicity to see if they were Ephraimites. Typically those who were Ephraimites had enough sense to deny it. But Jephthah happened to know a key fact about the phonology of the Ephraimitic dialect: It lacked a distinction between s and sh.

In English, sin and shin are different words; so are mess and mesh; and the sole difference in each case is the quality of that frictional sound — the hissing of s versus the shushing of sh. There are languages like Icelandic and Hawaiian that don’t employ any such difference. Ask a monolingual Icelander to say fish and usually you will hear what sounds like fiss. The Ephraimites’ dialect was like that.

So Jephthah’s men took to asking each traveler arriving at the ford to repeat back a word meaning “stalk or ear of grain” (it also means “river in flood”). The word was pronounced shibboleth in the dialect of the Gileadites. Monodialectal Ephraimites would say “sibboleth” instead, and would be killed on the spot. This simple dialect-based diagnostic enabled Jephthah and his men to kill a horrifying total of 42,000 Ephraimites.

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Today in modern English a shibboleth is (according to Webster’s Third New International Dictionary either (1a) a speech sound the utterance of which is a key indicator of a dialect or language difference, or (1b) a custom that has a similar outgroup-detecting function, or (2a) a word or saying or catchphrase characteristic of some group and typically not carrying much meaning, or (2b) a style of speech considered to pick out some group or class.

I have no idea where the BBC got the idea that at some point shibboleth had ever meant a small or unimportant detail.

It turns out that the Labour Party politician who used the word, Barry Gardiner MP, fully understands that shibboleths are primarily linguistic. He pointed out later, after the brouhaha arose in the press, that he had used the word “in its sense of ‘pass word’ or ‘test of membership’,” and had never intended to imply that he “thought the Good Friday Agreement was in any way outdated or unimportant.” (It might have been better if he had called it a fetish, or a bugaboo.)

He was suggesting that opponents of Brexit were exaggerating the Irish problem, using “Oh, but what about the Good Friday Agreement?” as a kind of catchphrase: It was becoming a signature locution for anti-Brexiteers. I don’t agree with his reasoning (to me, the return of a policed border between Eire and Northern Ireland after Brexit, without some kind of U.K./E.U. customs union, looks like an incipient administrative nightmare that could indeed reinvigorate violent Irish republicanism); but that’s beside the point here. The BBC seems to have ignorantly promulgated a linguistic error.

[Earlier this post said shibboleth meant “ear of corn”, but of course corn was a much later import from the Americas, unknown in the ancient Middle East. Thanks to Amit Almor for the correction. —GKP]

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
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