Linguistic Nationalism and the Politics of ‘Dialects’ – The Case of Slovakia
January 20th, 2014
Struggles over linguistic classification inevitably concern political stakes. Sociolinguists are theoretically aware that “language-dialect” disputes have political causes, though in practice find it difficult to tear themselves away from irrelevant linguistic facts. Even taxonomies of “dialects,” however, may have important political stakes. Slovak patriot Ľudovít Štúr twice used the politics of dialect classification to shape Slovak nationalism: once to justify the codification of a distinctively Slovak grammar and orthography, and separately to justify his particular
standardization.
Main Research:
- The Habsburg and Ottoman Empires and their successor states
- Nationalism, particularly linguistic nationalism
- Everyday life in Europe, 1750-1950
- European cultural history
- The social history of clothing
- The history of sexuality
- History teaching pedagogy
Publications:
- (Ed.) The East-West Discourse: Symbolic Geography and its Consequences, Oxford 2010.
- Choosing Slovakia: Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism, London 2009.
- Reciprocity Between the Tribes and Dialects of the Slavic Language, translation of Ján Kollár’s Wechselseitigkeit with a 72-page introduction “Ján Kollár’s Linguistic Nationalism”, Bloomington 2008.