Politics and the Slavic Languages

Tomasz Kamusella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000395990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Eastern European History
• Index: History

During the last two centuries, ethnolinguistic nationalism has been the norm of nation building and state building in Central Europe. The number of recognized Slavic languages (in line with the normative political formula of language = nation = state) gradually tallied with the number of the Slavic nation-states, especially after the breakups of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. But in the current age of borderless cyberspace, regional and minority Slavic languages are freely standardized and used, even when state authorities disapprove. As a result, since the turn of the 19th century, the number of Slavic languages has varied widely, from a single Slavic language to as many as 40.

Through the story of Slavic languages, this timely book illustrates that decisions on what counts as a language are neither permanent nor stable, arguing that the politics of language is the politics in Central Europe. The monograph will prove to be an essential resource for scholars of linguistics and politics in Central Europe.

1 A brief unnatural history of languages in Europe

What is a language?

Language (Sprache in German)¹ in its oral nature, or speech, is a continuous phenomenon. Any differences in this continuous stream of intra-human (intra-species) interaction are a mere reflection of the division of humankind into groups. But people do flow from one group to another, and they cross group boundaries on a regular basis. Hence, any difference in Humanese (or the all-human language – that is, biological capacity for speech) is negotiable and bridgeable, even if rhetorically posed as ‘huge’ and ‘insurmountable.’ People can acclimatize to such differences (or ways of talking) and even switch between them at will. Language, understood as humankind’s biological propensity for speech, developed by way of evolution as this species’ basic instrument of group formation and maintenance. Language’s primary (evolutionary) function is the production of social cohesion, bonding people into groups (and by the same token the creation of boundaries between groups). It is a mesh of everyday face-to-face interactions that underpins a cohesive group of this kind. Uniquely, in comparison to other species of animals, language allows human beings to exercise such individualized (unmediated) interactions with two or even three people at once, which allows for more time-effective group building and maintenance. Other species are compelled to build and maintain cohesive groups more laboriously, exclusively by one-on-one interactions (e.g., through grooming) (Dunbar 1993).

In contrast to language (Sprache) as the biological capacity for speech, the concept of a language (Einzelsprache in German), or one of many languages, is a construct, a product of human ingenuity (culture), which emerged in the Graeco-Roman world, between the 2nd century bce and the 2nd century ce. In the West, the coalescence of this concept of Einzelsprache is intimately connected to the rise of the technology of writing, or graphic representation of language on stone, wooden tablets, papyrus, parchment or paper.² Differences in speech (‘oral language’) were construed as ‘dialects,’³ and those in writing as ‘languages.’ Writing allowed for shaping arbitrarily selected chunks of Humanese (Sprache) into discrete languages (Einzelsprachen). First, different scripts produced separate languages, as in the case of the Greek alphabet for the Greek language or the Latin letters for the Latin language. Due to the rise of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire, the Hebrew script of the Hebrew original of the Old Testament was added to the other two scripts, thus reinforcing the novel norm of languages as discrete entities (Einzelsprachen), each connected to its own specific system of writing (Kamusella 2016a; Makoni and Pennycook 2007).

The now widely accepted biologizing view of languages must be addressed. According to this view, languages are like ‘organisms’ that ‘are born,’ ‘live,’ ‘propagate’ and finally ‘die.’ It is another ‘just-so story’ of anthropomorphization and myth making. Languages are produced, shaped and decided upon by humans and their groups. Without humans, there are no languages. The sole agent in the story of languages is the human being, though nowadays this story tends to be retold, especially in Central Europe, as if languages were autonomous living creatures endowed with agency. As though languages out of their own volition created human groups and boss them around (cf Schleicher 1869). This is the cherished foundational myth of ethnolinguistic nationalism, or as such, an error of thinking.

In reality, humans alone invented the concept of ‘a language’ (Einzelsprache) and the technology of writing. With the use of both, humans in Europe created countable and discrete languages as artifacts, not that much different from the wheel or the steam engine. In the late 19th century, humans (or rather some influential scholars, whose ideas gained popularity, especially those of Charles Darwin and August Schleicher [cf Schleicher 1869]) cast such languages in the role of biological organisms that ‘naturally’ divided humans into groups. Depending on which language one was heard (or believed) to be speaking, a human was seen as ‘naturally’ belonging to this or that group, since that time dubbed ‘nations’ (Böckh 1866). Ethnolinguistic nationalism was created, and its popularity spread rapidly in the role of a new political faith in this modern Europe, at which point religion was gradually dethroned as the main instrument of group building and maintenance. The ideology of (ethnolinguistic) nationalism, like religion previously, is employed for statehood construction, legitimization and maintenance. Nationalism continues to pull proverbial wool over people’s eyes (Cornish 1936; Dominian 1917). And mind you, in the previous statement, I have just erred. Languages, ideologies or any elements of culture are products of human ingenuity alone. I stand corrected: humans, with the use of this ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism, pull wool over their own eyes and choose (mistakenly) to see languages as ‘real’ agents of nation and state building (Göderle 2016).

Languages are not asteroids that fell down to earth or devices implanted in human heads by some extraterrestrials. Neither are languages gifts from gods in the heavens, though the Judeo-Christian-Muslim (Abrahamic) tradition has often maintained that the language of this or that holy book – be it Hebrew, Latin or Arabic – is god’s own speech, a ‘holy language.’ These aforementioned gods and heavens are also human creations, elements of culture, and as such, they are dependent solely on human will. All elements of social reality are generated and maintained through language (Sprache) use by humans alone, including languages (Einzelsprachen) (Searle 1995).

A brief unnatural history of languages in Europe

With the spread of the technology of writing in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, during the late Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages, the genres of writing, known as ‘grammar’ and ‘dictionary,’ were invented. Greek and Latin grammars and dictionaries as actualizations of these genres became the model of how to apply writing for creating languages (Einzelsprachen), seen as self-contained discrete entities, and were soon adopted by enterprising Jewish and Muslim literati for delimiting the Einzelsprachen of Hebrew and Arabic, respectively. In a highly normative (‘authoritative’) manner, grammars and dictionaries proclaim what ‘properly’ belongs to a language and what is (or should be kept as) extraneous to it. This kind of written mental policing – in the course of formal education – teaches children (or future literati) to see the continuous and unwritten phenomenon of speech as composed of separate Einzelsprachen. Grammars and dictionaries as meta-artifacts of culture allow for imagining and maintaining through writing a boundary between languages. These potent meta-artifacts make languages into ‘clearly tangible’⁴ objects with ‘established norms’ of writing, spelling, coining words, forming phrases and sentences or rhyming. Schools and examinations institutionalize and enforce such norms as ‘correct,’ while students comply because observing these norms offers access to a variety of sought-after professional jobs, by default earmarked for literati versed in this or that Einzelsprache (cf Considine 2014; Illich 1981: 5–34). In the age of full literacy, children speaking different varieties (‘dialects’) of an official language or an altogether different Einzelsprache at home have no choice but to acquire this prescribed official language in school. Teachers assess such children’s everyday speech as ‘incorrect’ or even ‘foreign’ against the benchmark of the written form of the official Einzelsprache (cf Kosi 2018: 96, 101–102). In contradiction with the facts, the oral is posed as secondary to the written, while the latter is conferred with the role of the gold standard to which the oral must conform. As a result, the discrete character of ‘written languages,’ though initially highly counterintuitive, becomes ‘normal,’ solidifies and spreads.

Another step in this process, which in spatial terms was initially limited to Europe’s ‘Western Christian’ sphere, came with the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. Both seemingly opposed ideological trends underwritten by religion provided for the translation of the Bible into vernaculars. These translations cut out new ‘dialects’ (‘oral languages’) from the seamless commonality of Humanese (Sprache) and made them into discrete ‘written languages’ (Einzelsprachen).⁵ In turn, as soon as a new language was accepted as official in a territory (polity or administrative region), those with an ‘imperfect’ command of the Einzelsprache’s written standard were declared as speakers of ‘dialects’ that ‘belong’ to this official language (cf Burke 2004; Kamusella 2015). Afterward, Europe’s maritime and continental empires imposed the idea of Einzelsprache and ‘its’ (usually cognate) dialects on the rest of the world, for better or worse, making each into a seemingly universal concept, quite unreflectively accepted as the ‘natural norm’ of ordering or sorting the linguistic in today’s world. During the 20th century, the Einzelsprache became the sole legitimate unit of the linguistic, like the nation-state in the case of the political (Kamusella 2012a).

Figure 1a From uncountable and continuous Sprache to discrete and countable Einzelsprachen

That is why the number of languages (Einzelsprachen) is nowadays posed as finite; and languages are commonly believed to be countable objects, construed as self-contained separate entities. Obviously, the actual number of languages fluctuates – that is, it increases when new Einzelsprachen are created or decreases when people stop speaking (and writing) this or that Einzelsprache. This seemingly countable character of languages is a product of the implementation of the European (Western) concept of Einzelsprache with the use of the technology of writing. In the modern age, this fact was most visible when imperial administrators and missionaries searched in vain across colonies for Einzelsprachen as they knew them from Europe. When they did not find such ‘real languages,’ they set out on the self-imposed task of creating languages in the likeness of the European model of Einzelsprache, mainly through translating the Bible into such colonial languages-in-making. Although colonial languages created in this manner were intended for colonized populations (Indigenous peoples, disparaged as ‘natives’ in colonial terminology), no Western missionary or administrator cared to consult the target population on whether they would be interested in such a project, on how such a language should be built or on the basis of which section (‘dialect’) of a given dialect continuum. These choices were made ‘for them’ and imposed from above. In critiques of Western colonialism and imperialism, language making is rarely noticed and commented on, though this process was part and parcel of the Western mission civilisatrice (cf Errington 2008; Mülhäusler 1996; Stoll 1982).

Furthermore, Einzelsprachen are often – though entirely erroneously – seen as agents in their own right, with the capacity to decide about the fate of humans and their groups. But languages are not destinies. This anthropomorphization of languages is a mask yielded by an elite to better control nondominant groups. In other words, they are technologies of power relations (also referred to as ‘language ideologies’). Members of an elite communicate to the others what a language ‘wants’ or ‘compels’ ‘us’ to do, to wash their hands o...