Language And Nationalism In Europe

'Providing a useful introduction to how the linguistic map of Europe has altered over two millennia.' -Nations and Nationalism'A highly readable and insightful collection.' -Political Studies'This book gives an insight into why, historically, it has been so difficult to maintain a particular language and how some have even come to constitute a barrier to communication.' -Times Higher Education SupplementThis book examines the role of language in the present and past creation of social, cultural, and national identities in Europe. To what extent do ethnic and national identities depend on the occurrence of distinct languages? What linguistic, geographical, political, and social forces led to the rise of these distinct languages? How are these different languages social and political constructs? A select team of international contributors consider these and other questions, drawing on evidence from the majority of European countries.

This work focuses on the ideological intertwining between Czech, Magyar, Polish and Slovak, and the corresponding nationalisms steeped in these languages. The analysis is set against the earlier political and ideological history of these languages, and the panorama of the emergence and political uses of other languages of the region.

This work examines the role of language in the present and past creation of social, cultural and national identities in Europe. It considers the way in which language may sometimes reinforce national identity.

This book examines the role of language in the present and past creation of social, cultural, and national identities in Europe. It considers the way in which language may sometimes reinforce national identity (as in England) while tending to subvert the nation-state (as in the United Kingdom). After an introduction describing the interactive roles of language, ethnicity, culture, and institutions in the character and formation of nationalism and identity, the book considers their different manifestations throughout Europe. Chapters are devoted to Britain and Ireland; France; Spain and Portugal; Scandinavia; the Netherlands and Belgium; Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg; Italy; Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic; Bulgaria, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Albania, Slovenia, Romania, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo; Greece and Turkey; the Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the Baltic States, and the Russian Federation. The book concludes with a consideration of the current relative status of the languages of Europe and how these and the identities they reflect are changing and evolving.

This book discusses the historical record of the idea that language is associated with national identity, demonstrating that different applications of this idea have consistently produced certain types of results. Nationalist movements aimed at ‘unification’, based upon languages which vary greatly at the spoken level, e.g. German, Italian, Pan-Turkish and Arabic, have been associated with aggression, fascism and genocide, while those based upon relatively homogeneous spoken languages, e.g. Czech, Norwegian and Ukrainian, have resulted in national liberation and international stability. It is also shown that religion can be more important to national identity than language, but only for religious groups which were understood in premodern times to be national rather than universal or doctrinal, e.g. Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Serbs, Dutch and English; this is demonstrated with discussions of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the civil war in Lebanon and the breakup of Yugoslavia, the United Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

`A major addition to the curent literature on the challenging topic of how national identities are moulded.' - Michela Biddiss, Department of History University of Reading

"A selected bibliography": pages 348-356.

This revised second edition is a comprehensive overview of why we speak the languages that we do. It covers language learning imposed by political and economic agendas as well as language choices entered into willingly for reasons of social mobility, economic advantage and group identity.

Leon Bridges delves into what, at the time of the books writing, was the cutting edge of the linguistics field.