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2021, Words in Space and Time: A Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe

On Terminology and Preconceptions During the past two centuries the concept of “a language” (Einzelsprache) has been a highly politicized category of thinking about politics and societies in Central Europe. Today, the region is divided among nation-states. The founding and existence of practically all these polities has been justified with the ethnolinguistic strain of nationalist ideology. Nationalism proposes that a legitimate state (that is, nation-state) should be for one nation only. Typically, the population in an already extant non-national (pre-national) polity is announced to be a nation, thus making this non-national polity into a nation-state. However, in the case of ethnolinguistic nationalism, the nation is believed to be primary, not the state. The nation precedes its state. But without the prop of a state, another element of the social reality must be employed for defining what the nation is. Since the early nineteenth century the Einzelsprache has been employed in Central Europe in this function. Einzelsprachen (languages) are actualizations of the human biological capacity for speech, confusingly also known as “language” in English. Hence, to distinguish between this capacity and its actualizations I fall back on the specialist German terminological distinction made between these two, namely Sprache and Einzelsprachen (or Einzelsprache in singular). I keep the article-less English term “language” to refer to the biological capacity for speech, while the un-italicized German term “Einzelsprache” for talking about languages that take the plural form and in singular must be preceded by an article. The concept of Einzelsprache is not self-explanatory either. It emerged between the second century BCE and second century CE in the Judeo-Graeco-Roman cultural and political milieu of the Middle East and the Balkans. Later, the concept spread across the “tri-continental” Roman Empire and was adopted in the Islamic Caliphate. The emergence of this concept is connected to the invention, and use of, the then novel technology of writing. The material difference between speech and written text was conceptualized as starkly dichotomous. From this point of view, linguistic difference came in two opposed forms, namely, that of languages (Einzelsprachen) endowed with a written form, alongside “dialects” that typically were not recorded in writing.