Linguistic purism

Linguistic purism is the effort to preserve or restore a language by resisting or replacing forms perceived as foreign, corrupting, or otherwise undesirable. It may target vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, or writing.

Loanword: A word adopted from one language into another. Purists often target borrowed words, proposing native alternatives or adapting them to local patterns.
Atticism: A movement that promoted the style of classical Attic Greek as a model for later Greek writing. It illustrates how purism can idealize an earlier prestige variety rather than reject foreign words alone.
João de Barros: A sixteenth-century Portuguese historian and grammarian who wrote about the Portuguese language. His grammatical work helped frame Portuguese as a language worthy of deliberate cultivation.
Language policy: Laws, rules, and institutional practices that shape language use and status. Purist aims can enter education, government, broadcasting, and official terminology.
Descriptivism: An approach to language that describes how people use it without prescribing how they ought to speak or write. It contrasts with purism's evaluation and attempted correction of particular forms.
Calque: A word or expression formed by translating the parts of a foreign model. Calques can preserve a foreign pattern even when every word is native.
Diglossia: The coexistence of distinct language varieties used in different social settings. Greek purism developed amid a lasting divide between learned and vernacular forms.
Josef Jungmann: A Czech philologist and poet whose dictionary contributed to the revival of written Czech. His lexical work supplied Czech writers with resources for expanding the language.
Corpus planning: The deliberate development of a language's forms, including its spelling, vocabulary, and grammar. Replacing or standardizing forms is a central practical route for purist intervention.
Prescriptivism: The practice of prescribing rules for how language should be used. Purism is a kind of prescriptive project when it ranks forms by origin or perceived purity.

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