2023-10-05 11:56:25
The name of the winner of the 2023 edition of the Nobel Prize for Literature will be revealed this Thursday, October 5 at 1 p.m. An award whose prestige reflects on the country of origin of the author but also on the language of his work.
Since the creation of this prize, France has been the country most awarded by the Swedish Academy. However, the language of Molière only comes in second place on the podium, after English. In total, 25 languages have received the Nobel Prize, a minority among living languages.
Shakespeare’s language in the spotlight
Among the 119 Nobel laureates, 34 wrote in English. Among them, we of course find British people, such as Rudyard Kipling, the youngest award-winning author – at the age of 41 – in 1907, and Irish people like William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw.
It was not until 1930 that the prize was awarded to an American, Sinclair Lewis. From the 1990s, authors from South Africa, Saint Lucia, Canada, Nigeria and even Tanzania received the most prestigious literary prize.
A “Eurocentrism”?
In the top 10 languages of works whose authors received a Nobel Prize for Literature, we find only European languages. English, French and German are on the podium and combined for more than half of the awards. Next come Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Russian, Polish, Danish and Norwegian. This over-representation of English-speaking, French-speaking, Scandinavian and Slavo-speaking writers is worth the price created at the beginning of the 20th century for accusations of Eurocentrism.
In recent decades, however, non-European laureates have been given more pride of place. Mandarin Chinese managed to obtain eleventh place, with two winners: Gao Xingjian, based in France, in 2000, and Mo Yan in 2012.
Languages belonging to the Asian and Middle Eastern linguistic domains remain underrepresented. There is only one Arabic-speaking author, the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, only one Turk, the novelist Orhan Pamuk, and only one Japanese, Kenzaburō Ōe.
Absent subscribers: Persian, Hindi, the languages of the Indochinese peninsula but also African languages. No work written in Swahili, Fulani or Amharic was awarded an award.
Some rare languages
The Nobel Prize, on the other hand, was awarded to writers representing the Hebrew, Bengali, Hungarian or Serbo-Croatian languages.
In addition, the jurors of the Swedish Academy have rewarded rare languages in the past: Yiddish with Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978, Icelandic thanks to Halldór Laxness in 1955, and even a regional language, Provençal, with the poet Frédéric Mistral, in 1904. These three languages have around 300,000 speakers each.
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