Creating Languages in Central Europe during the Last Millennium

Languages are formed into discrete entities, as we know them nowadays, by the technology of writing in the service of power centers, usually state capitals. All the choices made on the way – planned or not – amount to standardization which intensifies as the literate percentage of population increases. Long-lasting extant states and religions decidedly shaped the constellation of written languages across Central Europe. Having emerged in the 10th and 11th centuries, this constellation was dramatically remade during the religious wars and, from the 15th to 17th centuries, by the invention and spread of printing, marking a growing correlation between vernaculars and written languages. After 1918, Central Europe's multiethnic empires were replaced by nation-states, giving rise to the political principle of ethnolinguistic nationalism which holds that the nation-state is legitimate only if it is monolingual and monoscriptural and does not share its official language with another polity. This book provides an overview detailed history and linguistic analysis of how the many languages of Central Europe have developed from the 10th century to the present day, when cyberspace changes the rules of the game.

Tomasz Kamusella is a Reader in the Institute of Transnational and Spatial History at the University of St Andrews, UK. He researches language politics in a comparative and interdisciplinary manner. His other interest is the rise and spread of ethnolinguistic nationalism as the primary ideology of nation-formation and state-building in Central Europe.

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
Conclusion