Creating Languages in Central Europe During the Last Millennium

T. Kamusella

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137507839
• eBook ISBN: 9781137507846
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

After 1918 Central Europe's multiethnic empires were replaced by nation-states, which gave rise to an unusual ethnolinguistic kind of nationalism. This book provides a detailed history and linguistic analysis of how the many languages of Central Europe have developed from the 10th century to the present day.

1

Preliminaries

Abstract: As a preparation for the analysis offered in the book, the basic concepts employed in it are presented and defined. First of all, the difference between language (Sprache) and ‘a language’ (Einzelsprache), before the dichotomy of ‘a language’ and dialect is explained. A discussion of the currently accepted models of the emergence of standard languages and ethnolinguistic nations closes the chapter.

Kamusella, Tomasz. Creating Languages in Central Europe During the Last Millennium. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137507846.0005.

Language or languages?

Nowadays, we live in the world that is flamboyantly described with the ubiquitous and vague enough adjective ‘modern.’ When asked, scholars and people at large tend to come up with varying definitions or rather less rigorous ad hoc statements of what such a ‘modernity’ is about. I do not wish to enter the fray, but propose that the modern world – or rather the stage on which it unfolds – is constructed from elements belonging to the three categories that some quite unreflectively take for granted, namely, of nations, states and languages. They (including scholars, of course) construe these elements as discrete, long-lasting (or even ‘eternal,’ at least, from the standpoint of a person’s lifetime), and obvious to such a degree that they do not require or merit any deeper thought. The elements appear so ‘normal’ and commonplace that a widespread popular belief has emerged claiming that these elements (though in changing configurations) ‘have always been with us.’

On the other hand, during the last half century curious and enterprising scholars have shown that nations and states are invented (imagined) into being by groups of humans (Anderson 1983; Gellner 1983; Goscha 1995; Hroch 1985; Winichakul 1994). These two types of artifacts are part and parcel of today’s (modern) human social reality. We, as members of the species of Homo sapiens sapiens, spin this reality with words, constantly interacting with one another through talking (Austin 1962; Searle 1995). Speech makes humans and their groups what they are. In English this foundational activity and its wide-ranging ramifications are referred to with the general term ‘language,’ preceded by no article. The human world, spun through and with language, is construed as ‘culture’ in opposition to ‘nature’ (or material reality) that existed before the humankind. The material reality continues to exist irrespective of people’s wishes and acts and will remain unperturbed after the human species has finally become extinct.

This language-generated social reality is essentially invisible to the camera. It is impossible to capture on film or otherwise detect such artifacts of culture (social reality) as nations or states. They are real and part and parcel of the human social world only to humans partaking in it and knowing of these artifacts through interaction with other humans. The artifacts reside in the human mind as collectively agreed upon ideas, encoded in the brain through specific states and arrangements of neurons. In this way humans remember and ‘know’ about nations, states and other artifacts of culture of which the human social world is made, and which humans need to live and interact with one another, organized in groups. This close intertwining of the largely invisible (and unknowable to nonhumans) human social reality with the material reality of Earth’s surface where people reside is a reflection of the dual biological (genetic) and cultural (language-based) evolution of the modern human (cf. Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Shennan 2009).

Languages in the plural, as actualizations of the foundational (biological, evolutionary) human capacity for speech or ‘language’ in general (always in the singular and with no article in front of it), are as much invented and imagined into being as nations or states (cf. Iakovlev 1928; Kamusella 2004; Pennycook 2010; Peterson 1927; Preston 1989). Importantly, language-in-general (or Sprache in German) is part of nature (biological, material reality), while languages (or Einzelsprachen in German) of culture (social reality). In English the use of the same word ‘language’ for both does not allow for a clear distinction between the two, unlike the German terms that I introduced above especially for the sake of conceptual clarity.

Humans being a social species par excellence, they invariably live in groups. Distance – be it spatial or social – between groups produces isolation that results – among other things – in linguistic differentiation. At the basic level human groups (that is, biologically and culturally self-reproducing communities) speak different – as in the popular term – languages (cf. Nettle 1999). I prefer to speak of ‘lects,’¹ as this neologism appears (for now) to be free of any ideological, overtly political and other value-laden connotations that hinder and muddy dispassionate analysis.

The term ‘a language’ (my attempt at rendering German Einzelsprache into English) comes in an ideological package with that of ‘dialect.’ Often, the latter is perceived as something ‘worse’ or ‘lower’ than a ‘proper language.’ In this perspective dialect is seen to be a trait typical of ‘uncultured’ human groups (for instance, ‘tribes’) that ‘stand on a lower rank of civilizational development’ than the invariably ‘Western (European) learned commentator.’ The reader can immediately sense how this dichotomy of ‘a language’ and dialect creates a pernicious divide between ‘us and them.’ The former are imagined to be the ‘harbingers of progress and cultivation’ and the latter (from the former’s perspective) are seen as characterized by ‘backwardness and ignorance.’ This kind of rationalization about the human world, as typical of European thought, can be traced back to ancient Greek writings in which Greek-speakers are opposed to ‘barbarians.’ Unable to converse in the Greek language, barbarians spoke what appeared to a typical Greek ‘gibberish,’ subsequently recorded in Greek as bar-bar (βαρ βαρ), and aptly rendered as ‘blah blah blah’ in the English lect (Kramer 1998: 86–87; Valpy 1860: 23).

During the age of European (Western) colonialism and imperialism, this pseudo-linguistic differentiation of peoples (human groups) allowed for drawing an ideologically ‘justified’ line of strict division between colonizers and the colonized. ‘Back home’ in Europe (or the West) this dichotomy also obtained, and to a degree still does, between the educated and empowered who speak ‘properly in the language’ of a state capital and the socially removed ‘riff-raff’ talking in ‘a broken language,’ ‘kitchen language’ in the very same capital, or worst of all, in a ‘dialect’ (‘jargon,’ ‘idiom,’ ‘patois,’ ‘argot’ and so on), when the subaltern group’s speech is spatially farther removed from that of the elite’s. The speech of the population residing in the state’s far-flung provinces is often branded with the term ‘dialect’ (cf. Cameron 1995; Smith 1984; Tollefson 1991).

The dichotomy of ‘a language’ (Einzelsprache) and dialect

The dichotomic relation between the concepts of ‘a language’ (Einzelsprache) and dialect deeply ideologizes European (Western) thinking about the linguistic, preventing many of us from perceiving languages and dialects in a neutral fashion, as lects. From the linguistic vantage they are all the same, meaning that there are no inherent differences in status among them. Status, or saying that this lect is ‘better’ than another, and that one is a ‘dialect’ and the other a ‘language’ is an extralinguistic imposition, an imposition that is not part of language. It is human groups that in constant interaction with one another place an ideological value – positive or negative – on lects that they happen to speak and write.

Maintaining that dialects are ‘worse’ or ‘lower’ than languages, or that a dialect is ‘part’ of this or that language, so it ‘cannot’ be a language in its own right is a reflection of the unequal relations among human groups. The aforementioned dichotomy is a synecdoche, shorthand for domination. If Group A dominates in extralinguistic (that is, social, political, cultural or economic) terms over Group B, the latter’s lect must be a dialect, while the fomer’s lect is a language. In today’s Europe of nation-states, it usually means that lects of regional or minority groups in a polity are construed as dialects belonging to the elite or dominant group’s lect, elevated as the state’s national or official language.

Perception of the social reality changes, depending on the vantage from which we choose to do the watching. What is seen as a language from one perspective may appear to be a dialect from another. Often, the subaltern group from its own (in-group, emic²) perspective sees its lect as a language, and considers the dominant group’s branding of this lect as a mere dialect to be an unjust imposition (from outside or above). At times, this disagreement may deepen into misunderstanding and distrust among the groups concerned. The dominant group doing the watching from the outside (etic) perspective cannot comprehend why the subaltern group is unable to see the ‘obvious reality on the ground’ that its lect is a dialect, not a language. Both groups fail to recognize that they do not talk about lects (or more generally, about the linguistic), but instead engage in an extralinguistic power game, which they fight with ‘linguistic’ arguments. This kind of ideological struggle may turn quite ugly especially among ethnolinguistic nation-states as, for example, in the case of Bulgaria and Macedonia. The former recognizes Macedonia as a state but not the latter country’s Macedonian language, which the Bulgarian authorities claim to be a dialect of the Bulgarian language (Friedman 2003: 281).

In the European (Western) tradition, not only is this dichotomy of import for thinking about the linguistic, but it is also a basic instrument of making, or imagining, lects into dialects or languages. This technology of power struggle among human groups was firmly imposed on the rest of the world during the age of high imperialism and in the course of the Cold War that happened to coincide with decolonization.

The importance of the opposition of dialect versus ‘a language’ (Einzelsprache) for language-making is hard to overestimate, which necessitates delving into its origins. Apparently, the dichotomy arose, as many other elements of European (Western) culture, in Graeco-Roman antiquity.³ In Ancient Greek the word glossa (γλῶσσα), first meant the organ (muscle) of the ‘tongue.’ This meaning is attested in Greek writings from the eighth-century BCE. Three hundred years later, in the fifth-century BCE, the word began to be employed for denoting ‘a language or dialect’ (that is, a lect). In the third-century BCE this new meaning was deployed for referring to peoples speaking different languages. Thus, the equivalence between the concepts of ‘a people’ and ‘a language’ (Einzelsprache) made its first recorded appearance (Liddell and Scott 1940: 353).

Later, but in parallel with the term glossa, the Greek word dialektos (διαλεκτος) was coined. First, in the early fourth-century BCE, it was intended to denote ‘discourse’ or ‘conversation,’ especially in the context of learned discussions among philosophers and scholars. By the middle of this century it also began to stand for ‘speech,’ ‘language,’ and ‘common language.’ In the second-century BCE dialektos came to mean ‘a language of a country,’ thus becoming synonymous with glossa in this semantic field. And importantly for the rise of the current distinction between ‘a language’ (Einzelsprache) and dialect, beginning in the late first-century BCE, dialektos was intended to denote ‘a spoken language,’ as opposed to ‘a written language,’ that is, glossa (Liddell and Scott 1940: 401).

These semantic distinctions were gradually grafted onto the language of imperial Rome. The native Latin word lingua was attested in the early second-century BCE to mean ‘the organ of tongue’ and ‘the particular mode of speech in a given country or region’ (Glare 1982: 1032–1033). These meanings corresponded closely to those of the Greek glossa, so with the rise of the intensifying Latin–Greek bilingualism among Rome’s literati in the late second-century BCE glossa was marginalized in Latin as a term for ‘a collection of unfamiliar words’ (that is, a ‘glossary’). And the neologism glossema was coined for ‘an unusual word requiring explanation’ (Glare 1982: 767).

In the 30s of the first-century BCE the Greek loanword dialectos was attested in Latin for ‘a dialect, a form of speech’ (Glare 1982: 536). Thus, almost immediately the Greek distinction of the late first-century BC between ‘spoken language’ (dialektos) and ‘written language’ (glossa) was adopted by Latin writers and duly reflected in the opposition between dialectos and lingua. The distinction was consolidated in the Greek texts of the first and second centuries CE that frequently were translated into Latin. The prime example of this Graeco–Latin bilingualism was the New Testament, composed in Greek during the first-century CE and translated into Latin in the late second-century CE, before the canonical Latin translation of the entire Bible (or Vulgate, meaning ‘in or for common use,’ the name firmly established in the thirteenth century [Maas 1912]) was completed at the turn of the fifth-century CE (Kenyon 1903: 81).

In this way, in the world of Western Christianity, where Latin dominated for written purposes through the Middle Ages until the Reformation, the terminological distinction between those lects endowed with a written form and those without one became part of the Western intellectual (and political) tradition, alongside the equation of lects with peoples. A lingua (‘language’) was associated with a natio (‘people,’ ‘race,’⁴ ‘set of people,’ ‘the people of a country, or state’) (Du Cange 1885: 116; Glare 1982: 1158), and at times with a gens. The latter term, in addition to the aforementioned meanings shared with natio, also came to be used for referring to ‘a region of a country, occupied by a people,’ and in medieval Latin was used to denote such a distinctive people, living in a polity’s region and differing from the rest of the country’s inhabitants in language, customs, religion, or, as we would say today, in ethnicity (Glare 1982: 759).

Interestingly, medieval authors writing in Latin shunned the word dialectos and in its stead, at the turn of the thirteenth century, developed the neologism linguagium for a regional lect or a lect with no written form⁵ (Du Cange 1885: 117). It appears that the word ‘dialect’ re-entered the Western discourse on language during the Renaissance, though authors disagree as to whether this was by way of the renewed study of Ancient Greek or of Latin mediated (or not?) by French (cf. Ciorănescu 2005: 291; Meldi 2004: 152). For instance, during the 1570s, in the case of English, ‘dialect’ was deployed to mean ‘a subordinate form of a language, a manner of speech peculiar to a group of people’ (Dialect 2014: 2; Murray 1893: 307–308).

With this development, the modern understanding of a dialect appeared: a lect not endowed with a written form, spoken in a region of a polity, by the region’s inhabitants, or by an ethnic (ethnolinguistic) group living in the region. Interestingly, this lect, defined as ‘a dialect,’ must be subsumed into the (written) language of the polity as the language’s ‘subordinate form.’ On the one hand, this relationship reflects the ancient and medieval tradition of equating peoples (ethnic groups) with their lects (languages). The subordination of a dialect to ‘its’ language is a reflection of the subjection of a regional or minority group speaking this dialect to the state’s elite who speak, write, shape and decide about the state’s language.

On the other hand, this unequal relationship is also a result of the adoption of the modern concept of exclusive (absolute) sovereignty. It became one of the basic principles of modern statehood originating with the rise of the territorial state (or the direct precursor of today’s nation-state) after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) (Krasner 1999: 11). In this line of thinking, only a single monarch, or government, has the right t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: (Central) Europe and the World
• 1  Preliminaries
• 2  Setting the Stage in Europe
• 3  The Question of the Middle
• 4  From Nationalism to the Internet
• E-Illustrations
• Bibliography
• Index