Say It Again
In the Book of Judges, the men of Gilead hold the fords of the Jordan against the fleeing Ephraimites. Anyone who wants to cross has to say one word: shibboleth. The Ephraimites can’t make the “sh” sound, so it comes out sibboleth. That one sound is enough to get a man killed. The text puts the dead at 42,000.
We still use the word. A shibboleth is any small detail of speech that gives away which group you belong to. Most of the time it’s harmless: how you say “scone”, whether you call it a “potato cake” or a “scallop”. You just find out somebody’s from Sydney.
Sometimes it’s lethal.
In October 1937, Dominican soldiers under the dictator Rafael Trujillo moved through the border region with Haiti. Survivors described the soldiers holding up a sprig of parsley and asking people what it was called. Perejil. Native Spanish speakers roll the r. Many Haitian Kreyòl speakers don’t. Estimates of the dead run from several thousand to tens of thousands. It’s remembered as the Parsley Massacre.
And then there’s coffee.
In the former Yugoslavia, Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks can understand each other with almost no effort. For most of the twentieth century, linguists called it one language: Serbo-Croatian. Then the country broke apart, and so did the language. Small differences that had once just marked a region became flags.
Take coffee. In Croatian it’s kava, in Serbian kafa, and in Bosnian kahva, with the h kept from the Turkish kahve, a reminder of five centuries of Ottoman rule. It’s the same drink, poured into the same small cups, with one letter between each version. In a country at war, that one letter can tell people where you prayed, which army you’d want to win, and which side of the line you lived on.
There’s a story that’s told in different versions: in Bosnia during the war, a café in Croat-held territory priced its coffee by the word you used. Kava cost you one Deutsche Mark. Kafa wasn’t sold. And for kahva, the price was a bullet. I’ve never been able to trace that sign to a photograph, a named café or a first-hand source, so treat it as a story, not a record. But it’s survived for thirty years because everybody who hears it believes it’s possible. That’s the point. Nobody hearing it thinks the menu is far-fetched.
We usually think of language as a bridge. It’s how strangers do business, how enemies sign treaties and how a café sells you breakfast. It’s also a border, and every speaker carries their own checkpoint. You can change your clothes, your name and your address. Changing the way your mouth learned to make sounds as a child is much harder.
Next time someone picks up your accent and asks where you’re from, it’ll probably be curiosity. Just remember that for a lot of history, that same question had very different consequences.
