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Chapter 5, ‘Language as Medium, Language as Message’, is dedicated to the role of language in the scholars' life‐work. It discusses their contribution to the renewal of the national language. It demonstrates the possibilities which language provided for arguments about the antiquity, continuity, unity and uniqueness of national history. It then goes on to address problems of intellectual transfer, originality and imitation. On the basis of textual analysis an attempt is made to illustrate how translations and adaptations were exploited as shortcuts in the process of creating national culture. These include the Lithuanian version of Robinson Crusoe, translations of historiographical texts from German into Hungarian and the use of translations for the creation of modern political language in Romania.

This chapter explores the implications of national ideologies in the domain of languages and literatures intermixed with the colonial difference. It looks at the Haitian Revolution, wherein language was intrinsically related to community formation and to geopolitical configurations. Indeed, the Haitian Revolution is crucial for envisioning a new scenario of geopolitical configurations and for understanding the function of languages for political interventions and for building communities. “An other tongue” is the necessary condition for “an other thinking” and for the possibility of moving beyond the defense of national languages and national ideologies—both of which have been operating in complicity with imperial powers and imperial conflicts.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, a qualified kind of ethnogenesis can be observed among the educated classes of the Western world. In the course of their social emancipation a new political identity emerged, one orientated towards the fatherland, the state, and its population. This new ethnic consciousness bridged older identities such as estate, profession or religion. It originated in connection with the great eighteenth-century social movement of patriotism, which became more and more politicised. The philosophical discourse about the nature of language, which had existed since antiquity, intensified immensely during the eighteenth century. John Locke and George Berkeley in Britain and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac in France provided important stimuli in this respect. Johann Gottfried Herder was the first to take vernacular languages and popular poetry seriously as expressions of the culture of illiterate peoples. This chapter examines how national languages were invented and looks at the divergent situations in which the first national languages were used in Europe.

This chapter first outlines the linguistic situation of Italy in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It then investigates the role that schooling had in spreading Italian in the post-unification period, with particular attention given to issues that concerned the female sex, now that state schools catered for young girls as well as boys. Controversies surrounding women's education were as alive as ever in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a decisive role being played by the question of how mothers could effectively and competently contribute to make Italian the language used in the family. If mothers could not instruct their children to use the national language competently — something that was now perceived as a good citizen's duty — female teachers, the ‘maestre’, were called to step in. They were entrusted with the quasi-religious task of spreading education and language to children, irrespective of the hardships and sacrifices that their poorly paid and unjustly undervalued profession imposed upon them. In a difficult linguistic situation, in which access to Italian still had to be gained with effort and study, Tuscan women (even if uneducated) were, contrary to the majority of women across the peninsula, in the privileged position of being considered the repository of an unspoilt form of language which flowed naturally from their lips. Some renowned non-Tuscan men of letters actively sought their help and assistance to give the language of their works that spontaneity they so much aspired to and did not possess.

This chapter examines developments in Irish language and literature during the period from 1845 to 1921. It explains that during the 1840s, Irish had ceased to be the everyday language of all but a small proportion of the people of the island. However, during the 1920s, the status of being the national language was accorded to Irish under a native government representing the people of the greater part of Ireland. The chapter attempts to explain how this anomalous situation came about.

This chapter discusses how women’s periodicals contributed to debates over Hindi as a national language and literature and analyses the language used in women’s periodicals. It is organized chronologically and thematically around the Hindi movement. Many writings in women’s periodicals rejected the mainstream Hindi nationalist agenda of standardized and Sanskritized Hindi. Instead, they chose to publish in a language that came close to the lingua franca of the targeted audiences and which nevertheless claimed the status of a national language. Moreover, writers who were not always native speakers of a Hindi dialect retained the flexibility of Hindi and created a language different to the one envisioned by the Hindi literati. Therefore, Hindi women’s periodicals were vital not only in shaping and creating political discourse on women and society but also envisioned the creation of modern Hindi as a national language and the language of the people.

Academics experienced some of the same accusations of disloyalty and mistrust as Mencken during World War I, which led to the firing of faculty members for treasonous teachings. It was in this embattled and uncertain context that the literary canon of “American literature” and the field of linguistics as the scientific study of language were constituted. Professors of English noted that one of their most evident methods of demonstrating national loyalty as a profession was to highlight their expertise in the study of what was presumed by many to be the national language. Like Mencken, they sought to capitalize on the growing fascination with U.S. English and the governmental interest in legitimating the existence of an undeclared national language. This chapter situates the new methodology of linguistics in the 1920s in this postwar environment. Linguists participated in the larger historical trends of interwar language institutionalization, and the field of study was constituted in relation to the language politics of the day both in terms of its existence as an academic field and its coalescing methodologies.

The focus in this chapter is on the complex ‘layering’ of language policy – an exploration of the multiple levels at which language policies are formulated and the conflicts between them, from supranational EU and transnational corporate/commercial strategies promoting multilingualism in various forms, through national domestic and foreign cultural policies continuing to foster the idea of ‘national’ languages, to local-level lobbying of indigenous and migrant minority groups – and on the ways in which these policies/policy discourses impact on individual and collective lives by creating particular kinds of space.

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.

This essay argues that an examination of the cultural effects of decolonisation can yield a clearer appreciation of the combined role of both coloniser and colonised in the making of the postcolonial order. Taking an approach informed by Michel Foucault, Jean-François Bayart and Romain Bertrand, it shows that the ethnic tensions which erupted over questions of national language planning, multilingualism, and culture in postcolonial Malaya, and persist through to the present, cannot be explained away as a simple “colonial legacy” inflicted by British divide-and-rule policies. They must also be recognised as the result of a particular hegemonic configuration, produced and maintained through the agency of postcolonial subjects themselves.

In exploring the connections between the emergence of periodical literature for women, girls, and children and socio-political conjunctures, this chapter examines how the variety of literary genres bore upon women’s, girls’, and children’s periodicals. Moreover, it discusses how the women’s periodicals become important as a genre at a crucial historical conjuncture in the formation of a national Hindi language and literary canon. The discussion of Stri Darpan and Grihalakshmi, both first published in 1909, is far more elaborate than the discussion of Arya Mahila. Taken together, these works provide evidence of a confluence of ideologies that were at times complementary, sometimes opposed, and at all times intervening in, as well as shaping feminist, domestic, and religious ideologies for women.

Held in September 2003, the conference on ‘Unity and diversity in European culture, c. 1800’ was a joint initiative on the part of the British Academy and the German Historical Institute London. It tackled a topic of central importance to the historiography of Europe during the period: the transition from the cosmopolitan culture of the Enlightenment to the self-consciously national cultures of the nineteenth century. The nine papers, when presented at the conference, were divided into three sessions in which attendees discussed topics ranging from art and its publics, the idea of a national opera, the invention of German music, political culture, cosmopolitanism, patriotism, nationalism, the cultural policy of the British state in European perspective from 1780 to 1850, the invention of national languages, representations of the past in Irish vernacular literature from 1650 to 1850, the marked decline in the degree and importance of patronage by the churches and the nobility, the decline of international languages in favour of national vernaculars and the significance of the ‘fine arts’ as being conducive to social harmony, economic prosperity and political stability.

This chapter summarizes issues discussed during the conference on ‘Unity and diversity in European culture, c. 1800’, held in September 2003. Emma Winter opened the first discussion session by suggesting that the replacement of traditional patronage by the market place and the gravitation of the centre of the art world from Rome to Paris were more contested than would appear from the paper presented by James Sheehan. With reference to John Deathridge's paper, Siegfried Weichlein suggested a connection between the rise of German idealism and Germany's retrospective identification with abstract symphonic music, with which Deathridge agreed. Coming back to Sheehan's paper, one participant pointed out the irony that in the eighteenth century the opera was quintessentially Italian while at the same time uniquely cosmopolitan. Volker Sellin suggested that Napoleon Bonaparte hampered rather than fostered German nationalism by abolishing many of the smaller free imperial cities, ecclesiastical territories, and so on in favour of modern states. Other speakers discussed topics related to cultural university and diversity in Europe, including cosmopolitanism, patriotism, nationalism and the invention of national languages.

Since the nineteenth century, language and literature had been the subject of intense debates about the progress and reform of India. In the context of Hindi, such arguments gave rise to a cultural identification with the language, over a wide geographical area and in opposition to Urdu, English, and to earlier multiple linguistic saṃskāras. The growing support for Hindi, along with its politicization in the 1920s on the wave of Mahatma Gandhi's nationalism, suddenly made the question of a national language (rāṣṭrabhāṣā) appear plausible and even urgent. The provincial contest between scholars of Hindi and Urdu became an issue of national politics. This chapter examines how the nationalist perspective influenced Hindi debates on language and literature and on the role of the writer, how Hindi intellectuals reacted to the new publicity of the literary sphere, and the publicity and evaluation of Hindi literature based on prizes, popularity, and criticism.

This chapter examines the development and roles of the English and the national language in several members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) including Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. In all these countries, except Burma and possibly Laos, English is playing an increasingly important role, especially as a language of communication. The analysis reveals that economic progress and political development can be successfully achieved without mass recourse to English.

This chapter presents Minae Mizumura's arguments regarding external language—that people, since discovering language, did not read and write the language they spoke, and that they communicated through the language of a neighboring civilization that exerted influence. These languages are referred to by Mizumura as universal languages. Mizumura develops her argument around three main concepts: universal language, local language, and national language. In explaining her notion, Mizumura draws from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) as a foundation. She focuses on Anderson's understanding of the formation of national languages through nationalism. The chapter examines how, during the Enlightenment period, Europeans began to ignore Greek and Latin in their pursuit of knowledge, and thus read and write in their own languages. It concludes how this “golden age” of national languages ended as a result of the rise of the novel as a literary genre.