Languages and Nationalism Instead of Empires by Nomachi, Motoki; Kamusella, Tomasz;

Short description:

This volume probes into the mechanisms of how languages are created, legitimized, maintained, or destroyed in the service of the extant nation-states across Central Europe.

Long description:

This volume probes into the mechanisms of how languages are created, legitimized, maintained, or destroyed in the service of the extant nation-states across Central Europe.

Through chapters from contributors in North America, Europe, and Asia, the book offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the rise of the ethnolinguistic nation-state during the past century as the sole legitimate model of statehood in today’s Central Europe. The collection’s focus is on the last three decades, namely the postcommunist period, taking into consideration the effects of the recent rise of cyberspace and the resulting radical forms of populism across contemporary Central Europe. It analyzes languages and their uses not as given by history, nature, or deity but as constructs produced, changed, maintained, and abandoned by humans and their groups. In this way, the volume contributes saliently to the store of knowledge on the latest social (sociolinguistic) and political history of the region’s languages, including their functioning in respective national polities and on the internet.

Languages and Nationalism Instead of Empires is a compelling resource for historians, linguists, and political scientists who work on Central and Eastern Europe.

Table of Contents:

Introduction  1. Language or Dialect? Nation-Building in Central Europe  2. Language and Place in Recent Eastern European Linguistic Regionalism  Part 1: State Languages  3. The Russian Standard Language from the Empire Through the Revolution and Stalinism to Perestroika  4. Attitudes to Linguistic Accuracy among Russian-Speaking Social Media Users  5. Rethinking the Graphization Process of the Belarusian Language in Eastern and Western Belarus During the Interwar Period  6. Urban Oral Ukrainian of the 1920s as Reflected in Early Soviet Literature  7. Democratizing Linguistic Forms: Language Regulation and Diachronic Shifts in Czech  8. Script Revitalization? Reemergence of Old Scripts Among South Slavs  9. Ideology Against Language: The Current Situation in South Slavic Countries  10. Change and Variation in the Bulgarian Language of Internet and Social Media  Part 2: Substate Languages  11. The Latvian (In)Dependence and the Latgalian Language Question  12. Silesian: Between Suppression in Poland and Flourishing on the Web  13. Codification of Vojvodina Rusyn: Language Ideology in Kosteljnik's Grammar of 1923  14. Standardizing Vlach Romanian in Eastern Serbia: A Remissive Issue