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This chapter constructs a historical context for the study of language(s) in central Europe, emphasising its multilingual and multiethnic nature and the tension between the emergence of ‘national’ languages and the persistence of linguistic minorities. The main argument is that by focusing on the changing position of, and experiences with, one language – German – across the region it is possible to explore the complex ways in which language is implicated in social change at local, national, and transnational levels. At the same time, the authors emphasize that ‘context’ is understood as a dynamic and continuous process, not a static backdrop. The study concentrates on the relationship between policies and experiences with language in Hungary and the Czech Republic (as multi- and as monolingual spaces), and so this chapter provides historical profiles of language use, language contact, language learning, language spread and language decline in these two countries, drawing on documentary and secondary sources. It also includes an account of the master narratives / dominant discourses on ‘Germans’ or ‘German-speakers’, against which the personal narratives in Chapters 5 and 6 can be pitched.

Chapter Four examines another exemplary novel, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (“Mademoiselle Noralia’s Armchair,” 1949), by the journalist, novelist, and critic Peyami Safa. In a narrative and discursive idiom animated by regional colloquialisms, French medical and psychoanalytic terminology, archaic Ottoman Turkish, Arabic prayer words, and Kurdish borrowings, Safa’s novel provides yet another account of the failure of the nationalist phonocentric project to meet its ideal goal. Unlike The Time Regulation Institute, however, Matmazel Noraliya’nın Koltuğu (which is organized by scenes of the translation and rewriting of such texts as Rimbaud’s “L’Éternité” and Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy), can be said to aspire to the transcendence of linguistic difference and the reconstitution of a new order of signification in the nationalization and Islamicization of ethnic and religious difference. My reading of Safa’s novel emphasizes the collapse of this assimilating authorial agenda, but affirms it, at the same time, as a mark of the ineradicable internal heterogeneity of the Turkish language.

This chapter analyzes the relationship between language, religion, and violence as one of a mutually constitutive and reproducible one. This imbricative relationship is located in the contours of linguistic nationalism by examining the category of language as a social collectivity mediated and mobilized through three distinctive modes of language as discourse, as practice and an identity. In each of these three modes of analysis, language becomes a site and source of violence in its subjective, objective and symbolic forms. The relationship between language and religion has resulted in the territorial partitioning of geo-linguistic and cultural space of the Indian sub-continent. The inter-linkages in the discourse, practice and identity further expand and complicate this relationship in various other socio-cultural and ideological arenas to examine the political formation of community identity and its re/production during the times of democratic nation and state formation in India.

At the height of British Imperial power, the relationship between literature and Empire seemed self-evident: the expansion of ‘England’ caused an explosion of English literature. English literature and the British Empire were the twin children of the English Renaissance, that extraordinary widening of intellectual and geographical horizons during Elizabeth I's reign. This association of the age of reconnaissance with the era of renaissance is one of the enduring myths of modernity. Since the sixteenth century, the coincidence of the discovery of the routes to the Indies and the rediscovery of ancient texts has been held to mark the break between the ‘middle’ ages and the modern world. However, only in retrospect did the Elizabethan era come to be seen as a golden age, and only with the rise of linguistic nationalism in the nineteenth century were literature and Empire traced back to common roots in the late sixteenth century.

This chapter offers a historical account of how polities have operated in a linguistically diverse society. Although societal multilingualism has been commonplace throughout human civilization, official multilingualism is clearly a modern phenomenon. However, whether the use of a language is mandated by policy or law, or is a matter of convention, polities have always had to deal with linguistic diversity. Therefore, instead of comparing the language(s) that receive official recognition, the chapter uses law as a site to examine the internal language practice of a polity in different historical periods. The account shows that official multilingualism today, encapsulating contemporary ethics and politics, has characteristics that distinguish it from treaded paths of linguistic management.

Chapter 2 reviews the histories of linguistic nationalism in Québec, Tamil Nadu, and Jaffna to underline how different political outcomes have influenced their ideologies of linguistic purism and contributed to present-day taxonomies of colloquial and literary, spoken and written, and modern and classical French, Tamil, and English. It also identifies the mid-nineteenth century in Québec and South Asia as a critical time during which Anglo-Franco imperial conflicts gave rise to theories of modernity and instigated identity politics and nationalist movements in more or less virulent forms. In South Asia, the concept of “diglossia” distinguishes between the purist styles of literary Tamil (modeled on a classical language) and the impure regional styles of colloquial Tamil to entail both cosmopolitan and primordial narratives of linguistic change. In Québec, norms of ethnolinguistic identification construct divergent pathways for minorities to self-identify with a heritage language and French or English as their civic language.

The priest and teacher Neofytos Doukas (c.1760–1845) was one of the chief proponents of linguistic archaism in modern Greece. A romantic religious nationalist, he believed that the Greeks (i.e. the Orthodox Christians who recognized the Patriarch of Constantinople as their religious leader) should learn to speak Ancient Greek as their natural language. This chapter analyses the ideological presuppositions behind Doukas’ rhetoric (with its mixture of pagan Greek, Jewish, and Christian references) within the context of the Greek language question and nation-building, and against the background of attitudes to the Ancient Greek language adopted by other leading contemporaneous Greek intellectuals. The chapter also compares and contrasts Doukas’ failed attempt to revive Ancient Greek as a spoken language with the successful revival of Hebrew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.