Book on language and nationalism

[John at research.haifa.ac.il]

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John Myhill


Language, Religion and National Identity in Europe and the Middle East
A historical study
John Myhill
University of Haifa

Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 21

2006. ix, 300 pp.

Hardbound
90 272 2711 X / USD 138.00 / EUR 115.00

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.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements  vii

Introduction  1–26

Premodern national churches, Roman Europe, and the Caliphate  27–70

Small languages and national liberation  71–117

Big languages, delusions of grandeur, war, and fascism  119–176

Language, religion, and nationalism in Europe  177–227

Language, religion, and nationalism in the Middle East  229–276

Conclusion  277–281

Bibliography  283–293

Index  295–300

“It has always been clear that language is linked to nationalism and
nationalism to language. What John Myhill has done here is to show for the
first time that this easy equation ignores the linguistic facts. It may be
true that a "language is a dialect with an army and a navy". But it is not
just the army and the navy that matter. It also matters that some languages
are more obviously languages than others.”

Peter Trudgill



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