Book on language and nationalism

[hartmut at ruc.dk]

Dear John,

this sounds like an extremely interesting book and I will definitely read it. 
am just wondering about one sentence in your blurb,

"while [nationalist movements] based upon relatively homogeneous spoken
languages, e.g. Czech, Norwegian and Ukrainian, have resulted in national
liberation and international stability".

I do not know about Ukrainian, but I wonder if Czech and Norwegain can count as
"relatively homogeneous spoken languages". As to Czech, I only remember Petr
Sgalls 1986 paper, Sgall P. (1986), Czech: Crux Sociolinguistarum. In Rosenbaum
and Sonne, eds. Pragmatics and Linguistics. Festschrift for Jacob L. Mey.
Odense: Odense University Press and if I remember correctly, he strongly
deconstructs the myth of homogeneity of Czech. As to Norwegian, it is amazing
to see how a language with widely diverging dialects and, deliberately, no
standardization of spoken language at all (listening to Norwegian tv for a few
hours is a feast for the sociolinguist) can function so well - a living proof
that language standardization is not a precondition for functioning of a
language in the modern world. Written Norwegian with its twin normative peaks
of nynorsk and bokmål is a different matter again, but even in its written form
Norwegian is not relatively homogeneous, not even within the two official
"standards". I admit that for spoken Norwegian, mutual intelligibility of
varieties is greater than for German (and, I guess, Arabic)but I think this has
more to do with willingness to understand each other than with objective
measures of diversity.

But maybe I should read the book first!

Hartmut Haberland




Zitat von John at research.haifa.ac.il:

| It seems that the attachment I sent for my book didn't come through,
| so I'm adding this to my message.
| 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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