In the 1890s, the initials “KKK,” and sometimes just the letter “K,” were emblems of the revolutionary brotherhood that challenged the Spanish colonial state in the Philippines. The letters stood for the longer formal name of the “Kataastaasan Kagalang-galang na Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan” [Highest and Most Respectable Society of the Sons of the Country], but the group was generally referred to simply as the “Katipunan” [Society]. “K” appeared as a kind of logo on flags, seals, pledge forms, and other documents and markers of the revolutionary organization.Footnote ¹ Though the language of the revolutionaries, Tagalog, had been written with Roman letters for centuries, it had never used the letter “k” until a few years before the revolution was waged under the banner of that very letter—instead, the hard “k” sound was usually represented with either a “c” or “qu,” according to Spanish spelling conventions. Why, then, was this radical organization's name not the “Cataastaasan Cagalang-galang na Catipunan”? Why “KKK” rather than “CCC”?

The answer that we will find is both particular and general. At a general level, the answer has to do with the power of orthography to represent a language, not just literally, but also emblematically and politically. In this way “k” is no different from other letters, alphabets, or scripts that might stand as flags or markers of a language, banners of its being, proof of its uniqueness. In historical moments where a spoken language can be represented by more than one script, that visual difference between the scripts generally marks a political difference as well. A script represents something more than just the sounds or words of a language; it represents a political identity that can be flagged by the choice to employ that script over another. The story of the “k” in the Philippines has to do with this more general phenomenon: orthography, or script, is politically contested.

More specifically, however, we will find that the use of the “k” as an emblem for the revolutionary movement of the Philippines is one of a number of cases where the “k” is used by a group to mark its assertion of autonomy from a more powerful group that has historically dominated it. That the “k” in particular is common to these struggles has to do in part with the different but overlapping histories of two groups of languages which come to be represented by versions of the Roman alphabet: those which represent the hard “k” sound with a letter “k,” and those which represent the same sound with either “c” or “qu.” What we will find is that in part because of the histories of colonialisms and the languages attaching to them, the letter “k” in particular is a site of ideological, anti-colonial contestation in areas dominated by Latin-language states, institutions, or peoples. Here, the letter “k” itself comes to represent visually the difference and distinction of a language whose viability, legitimacy, or autonomy is in question.

This investigation into the story of “k,” then, is local and global, but also about the interactions between those worlds. At a local level in the late-nineteenth-century Philippines, my research shows that we might be able to connect different moments and movements in nationalist politics by tracing the use of the letter “k.” The contestation over the use of “k” in the late-nineteenth-century Philippines emerged from local desires and conflicts, but enlisted theories, models, and expertise from across the globe. In this apparently first, and comparatively quite early, example of an anti-colonial “k,” we see a particularly rich controversy surrounding its introduction, a controversy in which local and global, indigenous and foreign, authentic, and imposed, were categories whose meanings were contested and shifting.

My argument begins with an investigation into some of the early uses of the letter “k” in written Tagalog. Though “k” is now in standard use, when it was adopted for the first time in printed Tagalog published in Manila, in a bilingual paper in 1889, a controversy erupted that was expressed in terms of several different competing historical, cultural, and especially political meanings. The new spelling system was alternatively lauded and vilified; praised as rational and derided as senseless, promoted as a tool for the progress of the nation and attacked as an agent of foreign forces. These heated disagreements were primarily between young men who self-identified as “natives” of the Philippines, each of whom claimed authority to judge the worth of the proposed changes, though not all of them were native Tagalog speakers.Footnote ² This story is one of complex political alliances and differences in which arguments over purity, utility, and rationalization were mobilized both for and against the new orthography.

Once we understand the terms in which the argument over the letter “k” was waged, we will turn our attention to explaining why the “k” has been a particular subject of attention of orthographic reform in other times and places: in other words, why “k” stands for decolonization. The argument will touch on both formal qualities of orthographies and the spoken languages that they represent, and the historical-political context in which those languages are spoken and spelled.

A New Tagalog Orthography

In 1889, a new bilingual newspaper appeared in Manila, printing its news and articles both in the official language of government, business, and higher education (Castilian), as well as in the language indigenous to the area surrounding Manila (Tagalog). At the time, other newspapers were printed only in Castilian, with the exception of one other bilingual paper that had only begun its run about six months earlier. Castilian had never become mother tongue to many in the Philippines; few Peninsular Spaniards lived outside of the walled city of Manila, and friar orders had elected to learn and convert in local languages rather than to teach the natives the Spanish tongue. The appearance of a number of bilingual newspapers starting around 1889, then, marked the beginning of an effort among publishers to reach beyond the Castilian-language readership (peninsular and local Spaniards, foreigners, and highly educated natives and mestizos) to a broader reading public that was not literate in Castilian. This new bilingual newspaper, La España Oriental [Eastern Spain], was also distinctive because it was secular in orientation, and sought to “transmit to the indigenous people all that which is within the reach of their intelligence and useful to their civil and political state,”Footnote ³ including lessons in agriculture, commerce, hygiene, and other practical sciences. One of its editors and primary writers was Isabelo de los Reyes, a young Ilocano man (not a native speaker of Tagalog), who would a few years later be imprisoned by the Spanish authorities on suspicion of being involved with the revolution. That suspicion was based in part on his prolific efforts to publish secular bilingual newspapers during the years leading up to the revolution.Footnote ⁴ The secular thrust of Eastern Spain is more noticeable when we compare it to the religious orientation of its bilingual competitor, the Revista Católica de Filipinas (Catholic Review of the Philippines).

Though the Catholic Review was pioneering as a bilingual newspaper, it was part of a much older tradition of printed Tagalog texts that were almost always religious in character. Given this difference in orientation between the two newspapers, we might expect the Catholic Review to have objected to the secular aims of Eastern Spain and its neglect of religious themes. Instead, the Catholic Review took issue with the way that the new paper spelled the Tagalog language. The editors of Eastern Spain had introduced a new orthography in a footnote, writing that they would “use the orthography recently introduced by … learned Orientalists … believing that it better composes and represents the words of the Tagalog language.”Footnote ⁵ The footnote then briefly outlined the features of the new orthography, of which we will focus on one: the introduction of the letter “k.”Footnote ⁶

Before we can understand why the “k” was proposed and what its significance was, we need to review briefly a few features of the history and grammar of the Tagalog language. A member of the Austronesian language family, Tagalog has changed very little, grammatically, since the sixteenth century, but its appearance has changed dramatically.Footnote ⁷ Before the arrival of the Spaniards in the Philippines in the sixteenth century, Tagalog had its own script, as did several other related languages of the islands.Footnote ⁸ When the Spanish arrived, they recorded the sounds of Tagalog in the Roman alphabet, using Spanish rules of spelling and pronunciation. This Spanish, romanized orthography became standard for printed texts and the older, pre-Hispanic alphabet fell into disuse. Thus late-nineteenth-century Tagalog was spelled like Spanish languages were, and the fricative glottal stop (pronounced more or less as “k” is in English) was spelled with either a “c” or “qu” (the former before an “a,” “o,” or “u,” and the latter before an “i” or “e.”) The new orthography used by Eastern Spain represented this sound always with a “k.”

Though Castilian and many other European languages conjugate verbs by changing their endings, Tagalog conveys much more of its grammatical information than they do by using prefixes and suffixes, as well as in-fixes (particles that are added in the middle of a root rather than at its beginning or end). The result of the combination of Spanish orthography with Tagalog grammar was a plethora of spelling irregularities. As an example, if we use the letter “k,” we can represent the common Tagalog verb root “kain” (“to eat”) and its relative “kinain” (“was eaten”) with the same initial letter, the latter being exactly the former with the addition of the infix “in.” Using Spanish orthography, the root “cain” had to exchange its first letter, to become “quinain.” The new orthography was presented by the editors of Eastern Spain as a reform to rationalize and regularize spelling in a way that would make it easier to identify the root and the grammatical insertions or appendages of Tagalog words.

Is “K” a Foreign Agent?

Soon after this first issue of the bilingual Eastern Spain hit the streets of Manila with the new orthography, the Catholic Review ran a series of articles attacking the orthography, to which Eastern Spain replied with a series of articles in its defense. Pascual H. Poblete, a writer, editor, and translator for the Catholic Review, attacked the credentials of those who developed the new orthography, writing that “I am not a philologist, but I am a Tagalog, by which I mean to say that with respect to my native language, I can say, without bragging, that I know Tagalog better, simply much better than any Orientalist gentleman (European or filipino not being pure Tagalog).”Footnote ⁹ None of the cited “Orientalists” were native Tagalog speakers, and their supposedly expert authority was suspect for Poblete because, as he argued, “Tagalog is not learned in any book put together by academic authorities of language, because up until now it has not occurred to us to form a nucleus of individuals who would [and here he echoed the motto of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language] standardize, purify, and give splendor to our words. Each Tagalog is an academic of his tongue.”Footnote ¹⁰ For Poblete, the new orthography was imprecise and impractical; he wrote that if it were implemented, “almost all the Tagalogs” would read the spellings incorrectly, “since they aren't Orientalists by virtue of anything other than having been born in the Orient, nor are they learned philologists.”Footnote ¹¹ Poblete's colleague at the Catholic Review, Pablo Tecson, also assailed the new orthography, and the authority of those who had developed it, charging that to tamper with the spelling of the language was to tamper with the language itself, that to find fault with the orthography that was commonly used was to accuse the language itself of being illogical and inferior.Footnote ¹² Tecson positioned himself as a champion of the Tagalog language and invoked against the “Orientalists” the authority of a “classic” Tagalog author, the great nineteenth-century poet Francisco Baltasar (Balagtas).Footnote ¹³ Baltasar's Tagalog, then, was the authoritative language, and Poblete and Tecson suggested that in advocating the new orthography Eastern Spain was in effect insulting the great poet and all Tagalogs.

If the Catholic Review appealed in its articles to its readers' patriotism towards the Tagalog language, it did so in a way that rendered that patriotism as also directed towards Spain and the Spanish language. The new orthography was both impractical and unpatriotic because Tagalog was, they argued, a Spanish language, and so must be spelled accordingly. This was most clear in the way that the letter “k” in particular was singled out for criticism on the basis of its being “foreign,” particularly “German.” Poblete protested that Tagalogs did not know the letters foreign to Castilian, “because their first teachers in the reading and writing of the Phoenician alphabet … were the Spanish, and not the English or the Germans,” and he appealed to his readers' patriotic feelings both for Tagalog and for Spain when he wrote: “Furthermore, Tagalog compatriots: If our religion, our laws, our customs and our entire mode of being are Spanish, why do we have to use some letters that are not genuinely Spanish? Are the letters that have been taught to us not enough for us to express our ideas and thoughts? Then let us invent those that would be precise: better yet, let us revive our primitive alphabet, before we use a letter of origin foreign to our Mother country.”Footnote ¹⁴

In Poblete's rendition, his “Tagalog compatriots” were profoundly Spanish, and Tagalog was a Spanish language. This claim could be made in the context of a multilingual Spain; Castilian was the language of the state, but the nation of Spain was multilingual, and so to the list of Castilian, Asturian, Basque, and Catalonian, one might add Tagalog. Poblete's suggestion to “revive the primitive alphabet” rather than use “foreign” characters can not have been serious, given the practical difficulties of using characters which were neither familiar to anyone at this point, nor available in any existing typesets; thus his suggestion should be read as a claim of hyperbolic absurdity, to underscore just how offensive the “German” letter was. By labeling the letter “k” as “German,” Poblete thus marked it as politically subversive to Spain, appealing to anxieties about the declining status and power of Spain as a global empire in contrast to the ascendant Germany (unified 1871; first colony 1884) that had recently challenged Spain in the Carolinas. Madrid's anxiety over Germany's colonial appetite had inspired its 1887 Philippine Exhibition, intended to tighten the strings of empire that bound the Philippines to the peninsula.Footnote ¹⁵

The Catholic Review writers Poblete and Tecson, then, attacked the “foreign”—that is, non-Tagalog, and non-Spanish—origins of the new orthography. They claimed the orthography was suspect both because the people who developed it were not authentically Tagalog, and because the spellings that it employed—particularly the use of the “k”—were traitorous to Tagalog and to Spanish. In contrast, the Catholic Review writers invoked the authorities of the native speaker and classic poet's text, as well as patriotism towards both Tagalog and Spanish. As we shall see, protestations of patriotism directed at both the Philippines and Spain also underwrote political claims that were far more controversial than a single letter might indicate, claims that a strongly regionalized Spanish state should include the Philippines as a region of Spain, not a Spanish colony. The writers of the Catholic Review thus entered into ongoing and quite delicate political arguments about the relationship between the Philippines and Spain and about the potential threats to the political bond between them. The “k” was significant for many in these debates who disagreed about what it represented.

Orthographic Reform as Political Reform

How should we understand the Catholic Review's vitriolic attacks on the new orthography? We have already seen how a “German” label could resonate with the prospects of Spain's decline. “German”-ness, and accusations of “foreign” influence, also carried more particular associations, however. To understand these, we will have to take a closer look at the history of the new orthography, and its association with a group of young reformers. One of the “Orientalists” credited by Eastern Spain for developing the new orthography was T. H. Pardo de Tavera, a medical doctor, scholar of languages, and member of one of the few filipino Spanish creole families (his with some Tagalog parentage) for whom Spanish was a mother tongue. Pardo de Tavera had studied at the School of Oriental Languages in Paris, and a result was his pioneering 1884 scholarly work, published in Spanish, comparing pre-Hispanic scripts of different indigenous languages of the Philippines. Studying the ancient alphabets of the Philippines gave Pardo de Tavera ideas about how to improve on the Hispanized system of romanization then in use. He saw in the old syllabic alphabets a way of spelling that more naturally fitted the languages of the Philippines than the Hispanized Roman orthography, which, he later noted, “disfigure[d] the physiognomy of many words.”Footnote ¹⁶ Reverting to the pre-Hispanic script, however, would have been impractical, whereas the Roman alphabet had clear advantages—it was already in use in typesets in Manila (for Castilian, Tagalog, and other native languages of the Philippines), it was familiar to those who could read and write, and it was the alphabet shared not just with Castilian, but with other important European languages. The way forward, then, seemed to be to improve the system for romanizing Tagalog.

Pardo de Tavera publicly introduced his new orthographic system for Tagalog in his next contribution to the study of Philippine languages, Sanskrit in the Tagalog Language.Footnote ¹⁷ The body of this work consisted of a list of Tagalog words that he believed had a Sanskrit origin; each entry identified the word's Sanskrit root and briefly traced its likely transformation, giving the Tagalog in both the old spelling and the new one. Pardo de Tavera prefaced the work with a brief explanation of the new spellings, which were written “with Latin characters that correspond more accurately to the orthography of the word, according to the ancient Tagalog characters, than do the letters now used according to Spanish orthography.”Footnote ¹⁸ Pardo de Tavera was able to recognize the structure of Tagalog and suggest a new orthography for it, not because he studied Tagalog to the exclusion of other languages, but exactly because he studied Tagalog in comparison with foreign languages. That his spellings originated in his knowledge of foreign languages made them, for Pardo de Tavera, no less “natural” for Tagalog; instead, they were more accurate or true to Tagalog's internal logic. For him, the linguistic principle of one letter for one sound was objectively beneficial. He saw no need to preserve the older spellings of Tagalog, whether for the sake of consistency with Spanish spellings, or for the sake of using spellings immortalized by Baltasar.

Pardo de Tavera's Reference Pardo de Tavera1884 book inspired similar study and conclusions by José Rizal, a broadly educated young native-Tagalog-speaking doctor, who was in Europe pursuing advanced studies and working to promote political reforms in the Philippines, along with other Filipinos about whose projects we will hear more below.Footnote ¹⁹ When Rizal first read the book on ancient alphabets, he, too, was inspired to work out and promote a new orthography that would be “more rational and logical” than that then in use, and independently of Pardo de Tavera, he developed some of the same spelling reforms.Footnote ²⁰ He used the new orthography when he translated into Tagalog Schiller's Wilhelm Tell as well as some stories of Hans Christian Andersen, and was inspired in part, as he was to explain later, by “the study that I was making at that time of the primary schools in Saxony where I saw the great efforts of the teachers to simplify and facilitate the education of the children.”Footnote ²¹ Rizal hoped that his own efforts to develop a simpler orthography would “alleviate the work and facilitate the first steps of the children,” because he, like the publishers of Manila's bilingual newspapers, thought that the future success of the country lay in education.Footnote ²² He had admired the educational system and progress of the German nation, and he hoped Germany's successes could be duplicated in the Philippines.Footnote ²³

Rizal first published the new orthography in Noli me Tangere (1887), capturing in this Castilian-language novel, set in the contemporary Philippines, the occasional interruptions of Tagalog into the Castilian spoken by some native Tagalog speakers. Rizal later wrote that he used the new orthography in this printed work, “hoping that the Philippine public would adopt it after a reasonable discussion of its usefulness and convenience.” Footnote ²⁴ That Rizal used a new orthography in this novel is often invisible to its students of today; because the spelling that was new at the time has since become standard, its newness disappears before the eyes of the reader of modern Tagalog. The new orthography was for Rizal part of the forward-looking project of the novel: a project to expose the problems of the Philippines in order to inspire its people to solve them, and to garner political support to do so from contemporaries of any nation.

Without being aware of each other's work, then, both Pardo de Tavera and Rizal developed a new orthographic system that each believed would be more appropriate for the present and future needs of the Tagalog language and its speakers. Through Rizal's efforts, the new orthography came to be used and advocated by many of the young men who were working, whether in the Philippines or in Europe, to promote liberal and secular political reforms in the Philippines.Footnote ²⁵ By 1889, members of this international coalition of progressive Filipinos had begun La Solidaridad (“Solidarity”), a fortnightly published first in Barcelona and then in Madrid, to promote the cause of liberal political reforms in the Philippines by proposing to bring its laws and administration in line with those of Peninsular Spain. While the newspaper's supporters often had political leanings more radical than those publicly professed by the paper, the paper promoted liberal bourgeois ideals of political, economic, and social development in the Philippines. It proposed that Spain reign in the unique power and influence that the friar orders had over political affairs in the Islands, power and influence that was quite unlike anything the Orders enjoyed in the Peninsula. Aiming to secure the sympathies of potential allies in peninsular Spanish political circles, La Solidaridad was consistently critical of any administration in Madrid or Manila that it saw as bending to the partisan interests of friar orders, and it was often officially prohibited from circulating in the colony. Many of those involved with the paper were those who had already worked to promote the new orthography, including Mariano Ponce, Pedro Serrano Laktaw, and Marcelo del Pilar, in addition to Rizal and Eastern Spain's de los Reyes.

In 1889, the same year that Solidaridad appeared and just a couple of years after Rizal's novel and Pardo de Tavera's Sanscrito, Pedro Serrano Laktaw, a schoolteacher and one of the young men working to promote political reforms, published the first volume of his Spanish-Tagalog dictionary. The work was both the first dictionary that used the new orthography, and the first book ever published in which Tagalog prose appeared in the new orthography in whole phrases and sentences, rather than as just single words.Footnote ²⁶ The author announced in the work that he “hope[d] to make a contribution to philology by adopting the orthography employed by learned Orientalists … . In this manner, it is easy to distinguish the root and the affixed components of each word, writing is less complicated, and the spoken word is represented more accurately, none of which is true with the orthography which has been used until now.”Footnote ²⁷ Serrano Laktaw hoped that by simplifying the process of reading and writing, the new orthography would improve instruction in the Philippines; if it was easier for students to first learn to read and write in Tagalog, he thought, it would also be easier for them to learn to read and write in Castilian. These themes were echoed in the book's prologue, written by Marcelo H. del Pilar (more famously known for his political agitation and writings in Solidaridad), who emphasized the importance of teaching Castilian to students in the Philippines; he hoped that the book would “contribute to the diffusion of Castilian in this archipelago, which [being] a part of Spain, should be Spanish in its language, just as it is Spanish in its government, Spanish in its religion, in its sentiments, in its habits and in its aspirations.”Footnote ²⁸ Del Pilar professed patriotism to Spain and Spanish law, while simultaneously professing respect for the Catholic religion (when in its proper sphere, outside of that law), strategies he commonly pursued in La Solidaridad. Del Pilar promoted teaching the Spanish language in the Philippines because it was through that language that the more secular, liberal laws and administration of peninsular Spain could be brought to the colony. Friar orders had traditionally opposed teaching Castilian in the islands because they exercised political power there in part through keeping Castilian, and so the texts, ideas, civil liberties, and contested politics of Peninsular Spain, out of reach to all but a very few of the islands' elites.Footnote ²⁹ For del Pilar, Serrano Laktaw, Rizal, and the rest of the young propagandists, Spain was a place where they had more liberties and more opportunities for debate and criticism than they did in their home country, and Castilian was the language through which they were able to access those liberties.

It was in the pages of La Solidaridad that Rizal outlined his position on the new orthography and articulated its political meaning, in his 1890 “On the New Orthography: A Letter to My Countrymen.” In this piece Rizal responded to the Catholic Review's Tecson and Poblete, both by addressing their criticisms, and more broadly by explicitly discussing the issues of patriotism and language the two authors had raised. Rizal encouraged his readers to think of the question of orthography as a political question, but he encouraged them to reach different conclusions from those of the Catholic Review. Eastern Spain had also responded to the criticisms of Tecson and Poblete, but its response had focused on the logic of the new orthography and its utility; Eastern Spain did not overtly push the political implications of their position perhaps because of the censorship of the Manila press. Rizal had more room to advocate certain political positions, however, in La Solidaridad.

Rizal opened his appeal with a picture of a classroom in the Philippines, painted to accentuate problems that he thought were holding back the country:

Inviting his readers to identify both with the suffering boys and with him, he reminded his “countrymen” that he was a native Tagalog speaker, asserting the authority of authenticity that The Catholic Review had denied Pardo de Tavera. Noting that both he and Pardo de Tavera had simultaneously worked on a new orthography, without knowledge of each other's work, he wrote that when he found out afterwards, he “rejoiced because I saw that I was not the only one with that idea, that it had appeared almost simultaneously in our minds.”Footnote ³¹ The scientific validity of their work was confirmed by their having produced the same results independently.

After a long section where he detailed the technical features of the old and the new orthography, he came to the question of patriotism, and what spelling had (and had not) to do with it. Again, he invoked the Tagalog readers' sympathy for their former selves, as boys struggling in the classroom, and for their own sons, actual or imaginary, who would continue to toil up this mountain unless a new orthography was adopted:

In contrast to others' claim that the new orthography would help Tagalog speakers learn Castilian, Rizal made it clear that he thought it was not primarily for the sake of the privileged few who studied the Spanish language and who went on to study other languages that the reforms should be introduced. Instead it was for the sake of most Tagalog children, who would likely never become literate in Castilian. What he proposed, he stressed, was that Tagalog should be made easier for Tagalog children to learn to read and write. Tagalog was linguistically distinct from, but equal to, Castilian, and the logic of orthography dictated that it follow that distinct nature.

Rizal rebuked the provincialism of Tecson and Poblete that objected to the supposed “foreign-ness” of the letter “k,” writing:

Mocking the shallowness of the professed patriotism of his opponents, Rizal teased that even the absurd suggestion of a millinery patriotism would be more logically sound than an alphabetic patriotism. (Though such patriots might look ridiculous in their unfashionable hats, at least their hats would have a concrete connection to Spanish agriculture and manufacture in a way that letters of the alphabet lacked.) He closed his piece with an invitation to those who were skeptical of the new orthography, inviting them to join the men who are interested in “the free sphere of scientific facts.”Footnote ³⁴ He was confident that “in the end [the reform] will come to be generalized … we are sure that, convinced of its advantages, [the skeptics will] have to consider it to be nothing but the national, rational, and easy writing of our harmonious language.”Footnote ³⁵

Rizal's article took on the writers of the Catholic Review for having focused on the foreign and especially the allegedly German influence of the orthography. It may have been that those writers knew something of the scholarly, social, and political connections of those promoting the new orthography. Pardo de Tavera's linguistic training in France, though “foreign,” does not seem to be the primary target; the interloping letter “k,” the focus of their anxieties, was German. Their criticism included both the repeated claim that the letter “k” was particularly German and that it was definitely not Spanish (and therefore not Tagalog). They gleefully reminded their readers of the supposed German origins of the new orthography, signing one of the articles with a pseudonym “hindí aleman” (“not German”), and demonstrating a point about conjugating Tagalog verbs by using the Castilian word for “German” (“aleman”) as if it were a Tagalog verb root, coining words for “to do German” (“umale-aleman”), “was made German” (“inaleman”), and “to be made German” (“alemanin”).Footnote ³⁶ Germany might have been a particular target both because of the anxieties about rising German power in Spain's Pacific world, and because Rizal, already a controversial figure at this point, had at times admired Germany and compared it favorably both to Spain and the Philippines, as we have already noted. It is also possible that connections between Isabelo de los Reyes, the editor of Eastern Spain and author of much of its content, and those who were more visibly members of the reform movement, including Ponce and Rizal, were either known or suspected, and that the Catholic Review wanted to taint its competition by associating it with the more controversial newspaper La Solidaridad. In claiming to be simultaneously loyal to Tagalog and to Spain, the writers of the Catholic Review invoked Solidaridad's own claims to be motivated by loyalty to Spain and concerned to preserve Spanish sovereignty in the Philippines. The Catholic Review's invocation of Spanish loyalty both echoed the reformers' own protestations, and, perhaps, challenged them.

The heated exchanges between Eastern Spain and the Catholic Review continued for several months. Nevertheless, in January of the following year (Reference Bello1890), the two papers merged, apparently because neither could afford to continue publishing in competition with the other. This merger represented not only a failure of the bilingual publications, in the sense that the reading public could not support both papers, but it also indicated that despite the fierce debate in the pages of these publications about Tagalog orthography and the differences between the two papers' positions on the role of religion, some of the main goals of the two papers were similar. Both considered themselves advocates of Tagalog education and vehicles for uplifting the Tagalog people; the argument about orthography underscored a deep rift in how they believed these goals could best be achieved, but that they could merge into one bilingual paper is testament to the urgency that both camps felt for the project of having a bilingual paper, no matter what the orthography it employed or the status it accorded religion. Indeed the staffs of the two papers had overlapped, despite that certain members of each had attacked the other so virulently. The new bilingual publication, La Lectura Popular [The Popular Reader or Popular Reading], was run by de los Reyes, the moving force behind Eastern Spain, but who had also worked on the Catholic Review. The major figures from the Catholic Review became contributors to The Popular Reader as well.Footnote ³⁷ In the pages of the new paper, some of the Tagalog articles used the new orthography (or certain aspects of it), and some used the old. The inconsistency in its own pages seemed not to trouble the staff.

Whether the fight had been the occasion for expressing personal rivalries which then resolved themselves, whether the respective parties simply tired of polemics, or whether those concerned became focused on other, more pressing projects, we do not know. In this brief period, however, the orthography had been introduced and fought over, in terms of its political and patriotic merits. While all of those involved in the debate agreed that there was political significance to orthography, they differed over that significance. Noticeably, however, the new orthography would resurface in the Philippines a few years later as a different kind of symbol, one that was distinctly not German, but also and primarily, distinctly not Spanish.

“K” for Katipunan

The new orthography was not immediately adopted more broadly; in the months following the controversy that I have described, the letter “k” was not consistently used by bilingual periodicals in Manila in spelling Tagalog (even those which were associated with de los Reyes, who had initially promoted it in Eastern Spain). By 1892, however (two years after Rizal wrote about the orthography in the pages of La Solidaridad), the “k” did clearly and consistently re-emerge as a symbol of the secret revolutionary brotherhood, the Katipunan, the organization that began the Philippine Revolution.Footnote ³⁸ As early as its first year, official Katipunan documents appear to have been written using “k.” Once they got their own press they went to great lengths to acquire the letter types essential for communication, and had special difficulty acquiring some of the letters “needed” to print Tagalog type, including the letter “k.”Footnote ³⁹ Sometime in 1896, just before the society was discovered by the authorities (a discovery that sparked the revolution), the Katipunan was using membership forms printed with the letter “k,” and a close look at this form reveals that this letter is of a different typeface than that of the other letters, showing that the “k” was apparently not common enough in typescripts in Manila to easily produce a page of Tagalog writing using it, something confirmed by historian Agoncillo.Footnote ⁴⁰ This inconvenience and the deliberate nature of the Katipunan's use of “k” suggest that its use was considered to be significant. Even more telling is the way that the letter “k” itself came to symbolize the Katipunan, which we can see by briefly looking at a few different versions of their flags. The Katipunan commonly used as a symbol the initials of the first three words of the name: “Kataastaasan Kagalang-galang Katipunan,” or “K.K.K.” Not every Katipunan flag used the letter “k,” but many did, and, notably, the letter was on some flags the only figure (see Figure 1).Footnote ⁴¹

Figure 1

Three of the many different Katipunan flag designs. The figure in the middle of the bottom flag is the pre-Hispanic Tagalog script for “ka.” (Author's drawings, with help from Robeson Bowmani, based on those in Agoncillo's Revolt of the Masses [1996]).

The prominence of the letter “k” in the Katipunan imagery and documents has at least two important implications. First, while the Katipunan is generally taken to be the movement of the people, or the masses, as opposed to the elite nationalist movement of the propagandists who we have met in the pages above, their orthographic choices suggest a continuity between those who advocated the new orthography in 1889, and those who founded and directed the new society of the Katipunan a few years later.Footnote ⁴² This continuity suggests that the ideology of the Katipunan, at least at the higher levels of the popular but hierarchical organization, might have been quite directly related to the work of the propagandists and ilustrados, not divorced from it.Footnote ⁴³ While research remains to be done to better understand these connections, that the Katipunan adopted the “k”—when it had only recently been introduced and had quickly disappeared from public use—requires explanation.

Second, that the Katipunan did adopt the letter “k” and that they used it emblematically suggests that the imagery or visual difference from written Spanish might have been part of the reason it was adopted. While the “k” may well have been embraced by this revolutionary organization for its pedagogical benefits, its use as an emblem exploited its symbolic significance. That the letter “k” appeared on the flags of the revolutionary society highlights one of the functions of orthography: that of signifying, or “flagging,” the nation.Footnote ⁴⁴ As Woolard has written, “In countries where identity and nationhood are under negotiation, every aspect of language, including its … forms of graphic representation, can be contested. This means that orthographic systems … are symbols that themselves carry historical, cultural, and political meanings.”Footnote ⁴⁵ How a language is represented visually in writing—its orthography—helps to render that language as distinct from another in a way that is politically meaningful. In this case, the banner of the letter “k” might be taken to indicate the way that the distinctiveness of the language—its difference from Spanish—was part of the claim of the revolutionaries to self-rule. We have our own language; we should have our own government. This work of distinction is often part of the nationalist work that orthographies can do; that in this case a letter of the alphabet actually became a symbol for the flag suggests that it was particularly effective as a symbol of that distinction.

Flagging the Nation

This work of the visual representation of a language as different and unique (and the related political claim to sovereignty) has been part of various political struggles. The look of a language can be held as a point of pride, and taken as a symbol of national identity. This can be seen perhaps most clearly when the script of a language is entirely unique to that language, as in the case of the distinctive han'guˇl script of Korean. Fouser tells us, “[s]ince the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the han'guˇl [script] has been one of the strongest symbols of Korean national identity and pride. Attacks on han'guˇl are perceived as an attack on the sovereignty and pride of the Korean people.”Footnote ⁴⁶ But more commonly, the script of a language is contested not because it is a script that is shared with no other language, but because that language can be written in either of two ways, each of which has different political significance. The visual representation of a language is merely one of the many ways that it might be differentiated from its neighbors and relatives for political and ideological reasons, as Irvine and Gal have shown us. Yet as a particularly visible form of differentiation (quite literally), which has been quite commonly employed, it is worth considering this particular kind of differentiation on its own.Footnote ⁴⁷

Consider what the stakes can be when a language can be spelled according to two different kinds of writing systems: the Cyrillic as opposed to the Roman alphabet is what distinguishes Serbian and Croatian from each other. Though neither alphabet is unique to either language, in this context each alphabet comes to be iconic of one language in contrast to the other, and so also of the associated political identity.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the Dutch East Indies, colonial efforts to romanize Malay languages (written in Arabic script prior to these efforts) might be read as an effort to distance the archipelago from the Islamic world.Footnote ⁴⁹ The orthographic distinction need not be this extreme, however, and even minor changes can be taken as emblematic and important in the work of distinguishing a language. For example, as Vikør has shown us, as early as the sixteenth century strong political tensions between Denmark and Sweden led to orthography becoming a medium of distinction between the two otherwise quite similar languages. The resulting Swedish ä and ö, versus the Danish æ and ø, constitute “a difference which even today it seems impossible to abolish, because it still serves as an identity marker.”Footnote ⁵⁰ That the dominated group (the Swedes) were those most interested in distinguishing their language from that of the dominating group (the Danes) resonates with our revolutionaries in the Philippines, and indeed, as we shall see, the work of orthographic distinction has often been particularly attractive to those who perceive themselves to be asserting self-sovereignty against foreign, colonial, or imperial domination.

In post-colonial contexts, discussions of orthography tend to focus on the relationship between the (newly) national language and the language of the former colonizer, even (and perhaps especially) when those languages would appear to be the same. For example, in the nineteenth-century Spanish American states, intellectuals argued over whether there were distinct American Spanish languages (or an American Spanish language), which had rules of pronunciation and spelling different than those of the peninsular (Castilian) tongue.Footnote ⁵¹ For these new American republics, defining the uniqueness of an “American” language (or languages) was part of a project of defining and codifying differences between the nation (or nations) of the Peninsula and those of the Americas. These differences were made both more difficult and more pressing to specify because of the creole nature of the nations and nationalisms. The discussions addressed both the nature of the language (was the American language Castilian, or its own distinct language?) and its representation (should it look Spanish, or should it use different spelling conventions?). A similar discussion took place in the English-speaking North American colonies as they became a post-colonial republic, when some favored “a new language for a new Republic—a ‘Federal’ language, as it was called.”Footnote ⁵² Though the movement lost steam, one of its legacies is that Americans go to the “theater” rather than to the “theatre,” thanks to Noah Webster's perseverance. Though orthographic differences between American English and British English are minor, they constitute “by far the most wide ranging reform of the English language ever successfully carried through, and there is little doubt that it owed its success to a spontaneous desire to reinforce the new national identity by means of a new national language.”Footnote ⁵³

Webster's reforms to the English language bring us back to an important aspect of orthography, and orthographic reform movements, which escapes us if we focus only on representational qualities. Orthographic reform often appeals to the value of rationalizing languages. Webster, for example, had earlier hoped to introduce more radical changes to English, because he wanted “to perfect regularity,” and Rizal had written that he wanted to make Tagalog spelling “more rational and logical.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In a linguistic world in which rationality and therefore status were accorded to European languages, but less so to languages of other places, a rationalized orthography for Tagalog might highlight what was thought by some linguists of the era, including Pardo de Tavera, to be Tagalog's highly developed state, one which was close to “perfection” as a language, and thought to accompany a comparatively high state of civilization.Footnote ⁵⁵

But a more practical consequence of rationalizing spelling was the ease that it could give to literacy efforts. In Rizal's words, one of the aims of rationalizing the language was “to simplify and facilitate the education of the children.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Del Pilar and Serrano Laktaw, too, promoted the aim of making Tagalog spelling more rational, regular, and simple by emphasizing the possibilities for more widespread literacy.Footnote ⁵⁷ The push to widespread literacy was also a significant factor in the process of both the rationalization and the standardization of major European languages, and these, in turn, were often linked to desires to standardize across variants of a language. In France, as Eugene Weber has shown us, literacy efforts played a part in promoting a standard national identity in the nineteenth century: a standard orthography was part of the arsenal which the state used to make Frenchmen out of peasants.Footnote ⁵⁸ And though appeals to standards of English had been made long before the nineteenth century, it is in that century that the notion of a standard English is deployed in the name of mass literacy.Footnote ⁵⁹ Though in both of these cases standardization was largely about privileging a uniform spoken language over regional variants, English orthographic reformers of the nineteenth century, like their Filipino counterparts, were concerned to find a “more perfect alphabet” for the English language.Footnote ⁶⁰

It makes sense that the claims of literacy, rationalization, and standardization would be made by the would-be reformers of Tagalog, both because their interests in national modernization were in line with those of linguistic reformers elsewhere during the nineteenth century, and because these aims were, at face value, congruent with their broader claims to be pursuing reforms for the Philippines within Spanish administrative structures. As the later anti-colonial revolutionary Katipunan shows us, however, the orthography itself suggests another reading, one which could not be made within the publicly reformist stance of the propagandists. In our original example, then, despite the protestations of those who advocated the orthographic shift to the letter “k,” in fact the “k” did and does become a sign of difference, a marker that distinguished visually the local language from the language of the colonizers: the Tagalog language, rendered according to Castilian orthography, was filled with “qu” and “c,” whereas in the reformed orthography, it is riddled with “k.” Even more particularly, however, the shift to the letter “k” not only changed the shape of Tagalog words, but it helped obscure the Spanish origins of some Tagalog words.Footnote ⁶¹ As we will see, “k” promotes the same kind of amnesia in other post-colonial orthographies, but before we turn to other examples we need to understand how that erasure is performed in Tagalog.

From Castilian to Tagalog

As with most languages, the origins of many of Tagalog's root words can be traced to other languages. In the Tagalog that is spoken today, roots can be traced at least to Sanskrit, Malay, Arabic, Chinese (Fukien), English, and Castilian, but the great majority of the foreign roots in Tagalog are Castilian.Footnote ⁶² These are sometimes terms that have no pre-Hispanic Tagalog equivalent (such as relo or relos for “watch,” from the Castilian reloj), but newer technological terms were not the only Castilian words that became Tagalog roots. It is difficult to distinguish visually the Spanish origins of some of the most common words of informal spoken Tagalog, thanks to the eventual success of the new orthography: the Castilian ¿Cómo está? (How are you?) has become kumusta, for example. While the Castilian roots in Tagalog would not have been considered by more conservative linguists to be part of the Tagalog language until relatively recently, they would have entered a version of the spoken language by the time of our story.

It is instructive to look at how Castilian words were treated in the Tagalog text of Eastern Spain. Many of those for which there were no Tagalog equivalents were printed in italics, which had the effect of marking them as “foreign.” To take examples from the first page of the first issue, we find “prensa” (press), “Evangelio” (gospel), “gobierno” (government), “administracion” (administration), and “ciencia” (science). But there were other Castilian words and words of Castilian derivation in the Tagalog column of the same page of text that the translators chose not to italicize: “kastilang” (meaning “Castilian,” from “Castilla”), “arteng” (meaning “arts,” from arte), and “industria” (“industry”). In contrast to the italicized words, these Castilian words blend into that text—some of them with suffixes added according to rules of Tagalog grammar—in a way that suggests that they could already be considered to be Tagalog. The first of those examples is the most instructive: the new orthography changed Castilla to kastila.Footnote ⁶³ While the new orthography might have made it easier to identify the Tagalog root of a Tagalog word (to paraphrase Pardo de Tavera's characterization of its utility), it did not make it easier to identify the Castilian root of a Tagalog word. Instead, the “k”s worked to mask the Spanish origins of Tagalog words: Spanish roots, rendered with the “k” in the new orthography, no longer looked Spanish. The new orthography accepted Castilian words, but it accepted them as Tagalog words, hiding their Spanish origin. It made it easier for Tagalog, a language that borrowed words from Castilian, to have its own vocabulary, different from the Castilian (in spelling, at least), and equal to it. By severing the very real links between Castilian and Tagalog that had been visible in the shapes of words, the new orthography enacted a separation between the two languages. In this sense, the new orthography was a “traitor” orthography, a traitor to Spain and to the Spanish language.

The writers of the Catholic Review protested that the new orthography was disloyal to Spain, but they never complained about this kind of separation. They complained that under the rules of the new orthography, the language became more like the foreign languages of German, French or English, but perhaps the bigger threat was that Tagalog became itself a language foreign to Spain—not more like German, French, or English, but just less like a Spanish language. Why did the writers of the Catholic Review, so loyal to Spain and the Spanish-ness of the Tagalog language, and eager to question their competitor's loyalty, not lodge this complaint? Perhaps they thought that imputing German connections to their competitors—those who advocated the new orthography—would be more damning than calling them anti-Spanish.

But a different possibility is worth considering: perhaps it was their patriotism to Tagalog that kept them from calling attention to how the “k” disfigured the Castilian words that were increasingly part of the vocabulary of Tagalog. To complain that Spanish words would no longer be recognizable as Spanish would, after all, implicitly acknowledge that Spanish words were an important part of the Tagalog language—“pure” Tagalog did not express the range of terms that one would need as an educated Tagalog in the advanced and cosmopolitan city of Manila. Tagalog was no longer “pure” Tagalog, and could not remain “pure” in a world of technological change and economic development. The Tagalog so loved by the writers of the Catholic Review was the Tagalog of Baltasar's “Florante at Laura”—“classical” Tagalog, fit for metrical romance poetry, but not for describing the new penal code for the Philippines or the latest agricultural techniques. To dwell upon the de-Hispanization of loan words in Tagalog, then, might be to call attention to the limitations of “pure” or “classical” Tagalog; if a language was the essence of its speakers, then Tagalogs might also be marked as pre-modern, simple, or unsophisticated.Footnote ⁶⁴

“K” is for De-Kolonization

The tension enacted between the writers of the Catholic Review and those who advocated the new orthography is one which we find repeated, in different ways, in other times and places where orthographic reform is under discussion. The writers of the Catholic Review took a position that would have preserved the historical continuity of existing written Tagalog texts. Both sides of the debate claimed that their position was that which would promote literacy. Those who advocated the new orthography touted the principle of simplicity and consistency in rendering sounds into writing. But perhaps the most significant aspect of the new orthography was its distinctive look. We can find the letter “k,” particularly, working similarly in the orthographies of other languages of would-be post-colonial, or newly post-colonial, nation-states in which the language of the colonizer became embedded, to various degrees, in the local language.

For example, an explicit object of discussion, and subject of resolution, at the 1983 conference on Quechua and Aymara Writing was how to distance these indigenous languages of Peru as much as possible from Spanish—the language both of the former European colonizer, and the language of the political formation which dominated these indigenous groups in the post-colonial nation.Footnote ⁶⁵ One of the resolutions of the congress was to replace Spanish loan words with words devised from indigenous Quechua and Aymara roots; when this was not possible, the loan words were to be spelled according to Quechua and Aymara orthographic rules.Footnote ⁶⁶ In other words, the orthography was explicitly meant to distance the look of the written languages from the look of Spanish. Specifically, the congress resolved to use the “k” rather than “c” or “qu,” a decision which, along with others, emphasized the aim for autonomy of Quechua and Aymara speakers, and their “struggle[s] for their material, political and social recovery.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Similarly, discussions about Mayan languages have revealed the importance of the symbolic representation of the “k” in relation to the legacy of Spanish colonialism.Footnote ⁶⁸ In a 1987 conference of Mayan language speakers, the representation of “k” versus “c” and “qu” was among the most controversial topics; the system chosen by the conference was one which retained Roman letters (for the sake of availability of technology to reproduce it), but which adopted the “k” in place of “c” and “qu,” “because it demonstrated less overt influence from Spanish … eliminat[ing] obvious and imposed Spanish correspondences.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The conference delegates rejected the orthographic and political conclusions of an earlier 1949 conference of linguists, in which “c” and “qu” were retained in an explicit effort to “use … Spanish orthographic symbols … as a vehicle for national integration.”Footnote ⁷⁰ In these cases, then, when the “c” and “qu” were retained, it was for the sake of conforming to Spanish; in contrast, when the letter “k” was used, it was justified in part by the desire to lessen the influence (whether lexographical or political) of that same colonial language. For speakers of these indigenous languages, Spanish is a doubly colonial language: the language both of the conquistadores and of contemporary nation-states.

Tagalog, Quechua, Aymara, and Mayan languages are examples of languages that existed before Spanish conquest, which have selectively adopted words from the language of the colonizer. In these cases, the orthographic shift from “c” and “qu” to “k” has particular resonance as a marker of a pre-Hispanic language. However, the orthographic move away from the language of the colonizer might be even more pronounced in cases where the language itself is taken to be born of colonialism, for example, with Haitian Creole (kreyòl). As Schieffelin and Doucet have noted, kreyòl as a language is generally taken to have a grammar derived largely from West African languages, with a lexicon largely from French.Footnote ⁷¹ By changing the orthographic rules of kreyòl, then, the language becomes in its visual representation recognizably distinct from French, in a way which is illustrated by the name of the language itself: Creole, in the French orthography, becomes kreyòl, in the òtograf ofisyèl (official orthography) of Haiti.Footnote ⁷²

One more example might help us to see the significance of the visual separation and so political distinction that the “k” can perform. In 1960s New Caledonia, an emerging independence movement, based on a new pan-Melanesian identity, named itself “Kanak.” “[T]he new name,” Clifford tells us, “is a critical appropriation of the generic French colonial label ‘Canaque.’”Footnote ⁷³ Here, the “k” indicates the critical re-appropriation of the French, and the difference between a term that indicates how the colonizers did not distinguish among the various ethno-linguistic groups of the area, and a term that indicates a strategy of political and cultural affinity employed by members of those groups against colonial domination.

As far as I know, in none of these cases did those advocating the reforms cite a precedent in the example of another language that had similarly shifted from “c” or “qu” to “k”; whether they were aware of such precedents, I do not know. It is no coincidence, however, that the struggles over orthography in all of these cases involve the same letter. In all of these cases, the letter “k” was foreign to the language of the colonizing power, whether French or Spanish. By the time that these European countries were in the business of colonization, the letter “k” was not native to either French or Spanish orthographies (which preferred the “c”), while German preferred the “k” to the “c,” and English, ever irregular, used both.Footnote ⁷⁴ By the time our anti-colonial orthographers came around, then, the “k” could itself symbolize something not Spanish, or not French. By way of comparison, we might consider current disagreements about Cornish. Advocates of reviving the Cornish language are divided over which spelling system is best; one of the significant issues is whether or not to use the letter “k.” The advocates of the “k” (like their nineteenth-century predecessors in the Philippines) are champions of a system based on rationalized representation of basic phonetic units, and argue that the spelling is simpler and more accurately follows pronunciation.Footnote ⁷⁵ What the advocates of the “k” lack in this case, however, is both the same political urgency to standardize and distinguish their language, and the ability to clearly distinguish it visually from the language of a “colonizer” (English) by using the “k.” Cornish, then, is unlikely to become Kornish for more than a few.

It is a combination of historical accidents and circumstances, then, that seems to make “k” a particularly rich site for orthographic contestation; the predominance of French and Spanish colonization in much of the globe gave many languages “c”s and “qu”s during the colonial era, which have since adopted, as part of a move toward decolonization, an orthography based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Itself a child of modern linguistics and movements for language reform, the IPA was devised in 1888 (just before “k” was introduced in Tagalog) as a tool to allow every language to be recorded according to a common standard. The IPA grew out of some of the same scholarly activity in which Rizal and Pardo de Tavera developed the comparative skills which gave them the idea to use the letter “k;” that letter was in use in the works on Sanskrit with which Pardo de Tavera studied Tagalog in comparison. Though the IPA was first introduced in France (a “Latin” language country), the alphabet reflected, in part through its use of the letter “k,” the predominance of English and German contributions to the science of linguistics. Indeed, one of those linguistic scholars, the Prussian Lepsius, had developed a Standard Alphabet decades before the IPA itself was codified, which was intended to make it possible to record every language in the world with a uniform alphabet regardless of the orthography of one's mother (presumably Western European) tongue. The introduction of his work illuminates yet another important aspect of orthographic standardization and reform that is particularly relevant to the “k.”

Lepsius explained that a standard alphabet had become necessary because the diversity of orthographies of what he called the “principal European alphabets” were hindering the work of linguistic science. The letter “c,” he noted, was one which “especially” was “not to be admitted into a general alphabet,” because it had “a different value in the principal European alphabets.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus the “k” was preferred to the “c.” While Lepsius was concerned that different European orthographies prevented European scholars from using each other's texts, more practically and probably more significantly, he thought, the standard alphabet would make it possible for European missionaries to share texts.Footnote ⁷⁷ Thus the IPA was as much, perhaps, a product of missionary activity as it was of comparative linguistic science. This point can help us remember that the story of the “k” is one that is limited to particular colonial contexts for reasons of the histories of both linguistic and religious conquest. Though Tagalog, Quechua, Aymara, and Mayan languages have shifted to the “k” in an effort to differentiate themselves from Spanish, we might do well to remember that the colonization of these areas and peoples was as much Catholic as it was Spanish. For many African languages, romanization was also a tool of Christian missionaries (hence Lepsius's concern that the alphabets be standardized), but in that continent those missionaries were largely Protestant, eager to translate the Bible into local languages.Footnote ⁷⁸ Those Protestant missionaries, often speakers of English, German, or Dutch, would have used the “k” according to the orthographies of their own mother tongues, and so that many African languages use “k” is as much a product of European and Christian colonization as is the “c” and “qu” in areas colonized by Spain and France.

Clearly, “k” does not stand for de-colonization in all times and places. If the “k” is visually distinct from the look of Romance languages, and this is part of what is at work for anti-colonial nationalist orthography, we might note that even in English—which does often, though not always, use the “k,”—that letter can be visually distinct in ways that appeal both for politics and marketing. Product names sometimes use “k” to make an English word into a distinctive brand name (“Krazy Korn”). More weightily, while the “k” of “Ku Klux Klan” is probably from the Greek letter (not German), the visual distinction of “k,” and the distinction of Klan terminology (its chapters are “Klaverns,” for example), may work in some of the same ways to encourage members of the group to feel themselves to be distinct from outsiders. The association of the letter “k” with the Klan was strong enough that, beginning in the 1960s, those on the left in the United States could comment on their country's injustice by referring to “Amerika.”Footnote ⁷⁹ However, in places colonized by “Latin” languages (and peoples associated with them), we often see that, through a combination of historical circumstances and formal properties of spoken and written languages, a kind of orthographic nationalism and decolonization has been brought to us by the letter “k.”