Introduction

The changing status of language and linguistic diversity constitutes one of the most incisive shifts in the transition from Enlightenment thought to Romanticism and the 19th century. These changes will here be traced in three interweaving strands: the taxonomy of relations (differences and similarities) between languages and language families, language as the medium of human cogitation, and language as the infrastructure of social communication. These shifts occurred against the backdrop of a long-standing European tradition of linguistic reflection, in which many fundamental tenets, inherited from earlier centuries, remained unchanged. One of these fundamentals was the notion that the ability to communicate thoughts in ordered speech was one of the prime distinguishing criteria between humans and animals, much as the capacity to record speech in writing was a prime distinguishing criterion between civilized and savage societies. Much of this linguistic thought was anthropological in nature, i.e. reflecting on the nature of humankind in general, and essays on the origin of language in the history of mankind flourished in the undifferentiated universalism of the Enlightenment,“language” and “mankind” being taken in the singular as general essences, non-countable, much like other abstract notions such as “guilt” or “mortality”.

Against this anthropological interest in language in the abstract, as a mental and human faculty, there was also an intensifying preoccupation with the differences between individual languages as current in different societies. That certain languages resembled each other more closely than others, and that these resemblances might be explained as the result of descent from a common ancestor, had since the late Middle Ages been widely-established knowledge for the languages we now call “Romance” and “Germanic”. But how these language “families” were related to the biblical benchmark languages of Greek and Hebrew, and how to account for the bewildering variety of languages inventorized in the course of Europe’s growing world domination, posed an increasingly awkward conundrum.

The comparative-historical view of linguistic diversity

Two revolutionary events triggered a paradigm shift in late-Enlightenment linguistics. The first was Herder’s emphasis on language’s capacity to evolve into different variants. Herder saw this diversifying tendency not as an anomalous drifting off from proper standards, but as language’s (and indeed humankind’s) defining, central characteristic. The second was Sir William Jones’s description of Sanskrit (rather than Hebrew) as a benchmark language for linguistic comparison. While Herder made the evolving diversity of vernaculars the central focus of linguistic thought, Jones abandoned the ingrained recourse to Hebrew and to a biblically-informed view of ancient history, and gave a scientific basis to linguistic comparison by founding a systematic comparatism. The combined implications for a new historical-comparative linguistics were spelled out in Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier of 1808 and triumphantly demonstrated by the various historical grammars of Rasmus Rask and by Franz Bopp’s formal typology and taxonomy of a language family soon known as “Indo-European”.

The Indo-European paradigm became the dominant mental template for schematizing cultural relations in the 19th century. It ordered resemblances and differences in a historicist-genealogical model, where closer or more distant resemblances were explained by languages having “branched off” from each other at a more or less recent period in the past. A three-tiered order arranged the twigs, boughs, and branches on the Indo-European tree trunk as, respectively, dialect variants “within” a language, language differences within a language family, and deep-seated familial differences between those language families (“Romance”, “Germanic”, etc.). The subsequent decades saw the classification of remaining problem cases such as Armenian, Albanian, Lithuanian, and Celtic, as well as definitively non-Indo-European languages like Hungarian, Finnish, or Basque.

This “family tree” model was a triumph of scientific systematization, and as such it had a wide and diverse impact. In the world of learning, it demonstrated the methodic usefulness of the historical-comparative method, and led to the rise of the modern philologies alongside the old-established classics. Wider afield, it lent interest to languages and dialects which until then had been dismissed as uncouth vernaculars spoken by uneducated rustics, which in turn had an emancipatory effect on the many speakers of those idioms, often in the peripheries of the great empires, which were now gaining serious scholarly attention. And ultimately, it was to furnish a new criterion of nationality. Nations were now defined as groups of people identified by a common, separate language. To have one’s idiom classified as “a language” meant also that the speakers formed “a nation”, and that realization either transformed or formed many national movements in the 19th century. Groups which until 1800 had primarily identified themselves by means of their legal constitution (current or remembered), religion, or historical inheritance, now re-defined their identity, indeed their “nationality” by the criterion of language (examples range from the Basque Country and Ireland to Hungary and Croatia). Others freshly articulated a newly emerging national identity by using the novel criterion (Estonians, Albanians, Bulgarians).

The floating and informal three-tier distinction between dialect variant, language, and language family also had a three-tiered impact on cultural stances taken, where, below the level of the national movements proper, there were the manifestations of mere regionalism among dialect speakers (Walloon, Plattdeutsch) while at the higher level of aggregation there were the pan-movements encompassing entire language families: Pan-Slavism and Pan-Germanism. The demarcations between these levels were, to be sure, floating, impressionistic, and contested. There is no objective criterion as to which linguistic variants demarcate either “dialects” or else “languages”, and the relation between dialect/language and regional or national identity is therefore an elastic one. Anomalies can be found in abundance (e.g. the dual standard of Norwegian developed in the 19th century), and in many cases the linguistic taxonomy does not map neatly onto the emergence of a national movement, with non-linguistic factors playing a decisive role. Frisian and Occitan were philologically recognized as important languages with a long-standing written and literary heritage but, by and large, mobilized regionalist rather than national-separatist movements. Yet, conversely, almost no cultural or national emancipation movement of the 19th century fails to use the argument of linguistic identity as the main trump card among its claims for a place on the European map – even if the language in question is not that of the activists themselves (e.g. Baltic Germans and Anglo-Irish), but that of a peasantry on whose behalf they speak.

It was, then, almost indispensable, in order to claim a distinct nationality, to have a distinct language – loose and problematic though the category of the “distinct language” might be in the case of closely related neighbours. What was spoken in present-day Bulgaria and Macedonia, in Flanders and Holland, might by different activists be seen as either dialect variants of a joint language or a superimposed (Slavic or Germanic) mega-language, or as separate languages. In the case of the Slavic languages of the former Yugoslavia, such debates between integrationists and particularists have continued into the present century.

The metaphysics of language

This fundamental importance of the language argument for national identity politics depended itself on a fresh appreciation of the importance of “language” as such in human culture. Language could be seen pragmatically as a communicative medium and social infrastructure, or metaphysically as the very operating system of the human mind, the mental faculty that schematizes one’s experiences and affects into a cogitative intelligence. This idea that language provides the cognitive template of ratiocination became generally accepted in the century after Herder, especially following the linguistic-anthropological thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt. And this in turn meant that, if language was (following Herder) characterized by its capacity to ramify into different variants, each specific to the nation where they developed, then each nation with its own language possessed its own linguistically-defined operating system to articulate its own character and mentality. In other words, the vernaculars of Europe became the backbone of an ethnographic division of Europe into differently-thinking, differently-feeling nations, each with their separate, specific, and ethnically inherited character. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to see that the study of language shows considerable overlap with the developing study of folklore and oral culture, the writing of national literary histories, and the investigation and edition of written sources in the nation’s vernacular – a complex of pursuits which were grouped together under the name of philology.

In the philological view, society relates to literary culture and to language as hardware relates to software and to operating system. The metaphysics of language meant that different mentalities and indeed “souls” were attributed to nations speaking a Germanic, Romance, or Slavic language; these nations were as a result deemed temperamentally uncongenial and incompatible. And as nations that had changed their language in the course of history were deemed “degenerate” (this is the reproach levelled by Grimm at the Gothic and Frankish tribes whose descendants had become Spaniards, Italians, and French), so too the maintenance of the inherited language became a moral imperative for each nation.

It is no surprise to see numerous language purification movements across the European map in the course of the century. Language purism was, of course, nothing new: from the 17th century onwards there had been scholars attempting to regularize the language, improve its standards, and to resist bastardization by coining vernacular neologisms to replace loanwords. The history reaches from 17th-century coinages like Dutch driehoek and German Dreieck (to replace the Latinate “triangle”) into the 19th century. English coined “foreword” to replace “preface”, and German replaced the letter C (considered a Latin intrusion) with the more “Germanic” letter K wherever possible, even, posthumously, in the name of Jacob/Jakob Grimm. There had been 18th-century proposals in many countries to purify the lexicon, to teach a “proper” pronunciation and diction, and to ensure the continued social currency of the country’s vernacular. While these various pre-1800 initiatives in their rhetoric often invoked the classical virtues of civic “love of country” and filial piety towards the ancestral standards, they were meant as societal and civic interventions, driven by an Enlightenment concern for public welfare, and not yet informed by the metaphysical fear that, since language constituted the very backbone of ethnic identity, a linguistic drifting-off would constitute a collective-moral degeneration. All the same, pre-1800 language engineers were often invoked and cited as examples by 19th-century purists, and thus retrospectively invested with (proto-)nationalist meaning.

Language maintenance had, in fact, been the self-appointed or government-appointed task of public academies. The Florentine Accademia della Crusca (founded in 1583) is probably the European prototype, its emulation by the Académie française in turn setting the model for other European countries. The Vocabolario of the Crusca Academy (1612), aiming to enshrine the idiom of Dante as the standard for the entire Italian peninsula, was the inspiration behind the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1692), which in turn became a European prototype. This institutional regularization was especially important in Catholic countries, where Latin remained the language of religious liturgy. In the Protestant countries, the various vernacular Bible translations provided a country-wide linguistic standard through the deeply penetrating, trans-local, and long-lasting medium of religious worship. But even in Protestant lands (and also in Orthodoxy, where the relation between state, language, and religion was differently-aligned), we see a new lexicographical drive emerge just before 1800 (Dr Johnson in England, Adelung in Germany, the Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa ordered by Catherine the Great in Russia). Dictionaries containing the complete word-inventory of a given language would henceforth become powerful and prestigious publications in the normative standardization of what were becoming “national” languages. One can trace the development through successive editions of the Crusca Vocabolario. The fifth edition, instigated by Napoleon, thus re-importing into Italy a French model which had originally itself been adopted from the Italian example, was finished after arduous work and in a fervent Risorgimento climate as a national enterprise, with a flag-waving dedication to King Vittorio Emmanuele (1863). Meanwhile, the great German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm was in progress and had triggered copycat enterprises, all of them under national-patriotic inspiration, in England, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Most of these dictionaries were now compiled, following the Grimm model, “on historical principles”, aiming to explain words, not just in their meaning(s), but also in their provenance, etymology, and various successive morphologies from period to period. This illustrates the intellectual dominance, from the mid-century onwards, of the historicist outlook. Everything cultural, if it was to be understood properly, needed to be understood in its derivation and development, its root system, its transmission across generations. Language not only tied individuals together in a social, civic framework, but also in a transgenerational, ethnic inheritance.

Language as social-communicative infrastructure

The double bonding function of language, both diachronic across the generations and synchronic among the members of a society or cultural community, posed a dilemma to those aiming to cultivate it – especially in a revivalist context, where there was no standard or orthography codified by state education or by religious instruction. What standards and which orthographical conventions should be adopted for the language? Two approaches were possible, and both found followers; but they were often mutually antagonistic. The first emphasized the diachronic-historicist dimension, and felt that spelling and standards ought to ensure a connection with the past and with the literary remains of previous generations. This argument was particularly strong if the literary remains of the past could provide cultural prestige that was lacking in the present. The other approach emphasized the synchronic-social function, and felt that the language ought to be firmly rooted in, and facilitate communication amongst, the present-day community of speakers; accordingly, spelling and standards should reflect contemporary popular usage. These conflicting aims have triggered language and orthography quarrels throughout Europe; the paradigmatic case is the Greek conflict between katharevousa and Demotic. Also, in spelling proposals, the guiding principle could either emphasize phonetics (“write as you speak”, a tenet first formulated by Adelung in 1782), grammar (letting the spelling reflect underlying paradigms and syntagms), or etymology (the historical derivation and antecedents of words). These considerations often diverged, leading to frequent contentions; the colourful Slovene “ABC war” is among the best known. This quarrel reflected diverging international allegiances (by taking spelling cues from German, from Czech or Croat, or from Cyrillic-Slavic orthographies), but most of all betrayed a generational tension between different cohorts of language activists, each with their own set of values: from late-Enlightenment to Romantic to nationally-activist.

19th-century language concerns experienced a tension between the assertive powers of the state and its minorities. The French Republic had famously patented state centralism as a corollary of popular sovereignty; and its drive to create a fully homogenized public sphere under an undivided People in fraternal concord included the declaration of legal equality (and the need to merge in civic assimilation) for all its minority populations – and, at the same time, the undesirability for any population within the Republic’s borders to use any language except French. Henri Grégoire, who had taken legislative initiatives for the full civil emancipation of the Republic’s Jews and ex-slaves, in 1792 also prepared government policy on the extirpation of local languages and dialects. Most European states in the following century gradually abandoned their ancient laissez faire attitude in matters of language policy and adopted a French-style linguistic centralization model, propagating the use of the the national language through mass education and other means. The period after 1820 also sees a growing state preoccupation with the language’s (now “official”) orthography, and in some cases (Denmark, Romania, Atatürk’s Turkey, and Hitler’s Germany) even with the choice of alphabet or letter type. For those minorities within the state whose language was different from the state standard, this created tensions given the new identitarian importance attached to “having a language of one’s own”. Thus the investigation and cultivation of peripheral vernaculars acquired a sharp political edge in the course of the century. Whereas in many cases such interests may have begun as a purely scholarly, a-political endeavour, a philological pursuit for academics and gentlemen of leisure, they could not fail to acquire a more contested and programmatic continuation in a climate where language became the point of intersection between civic and ethnic identity politics. In many cases, a generational drift is noticeable where early cultivators of the language (Kopitar, Dobrovský, Halbertsma, Le Gonidec), who laid the groundwork for their successors, are criticized by those successors for having been lacking either in political commitment or in scholarly rigour (by the ideological and academic standards that had developed in the meantime).

The physical presence of language: Territory and ethnicity

While language was placed under the political mortgage of ethnic and/or civic loyalties, it was also instrumentalized as an important demarcation criterion for the territorial divisions of Europe’s post-Napoleonic state system. In particular in discussions concerning the outlines of a post-Napoleonic successor state for the erstwhile Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, we see an idea take hold: that the political borders of an aspirational “Germany” should coincide with the outlines of the German language area. This unavoidably created conflicts in those areas where the German language area was blurry in its outlines – that is to say: almost everywhere, with Alsace and Schleswig-Holstein as the most obvious flashpoints. Even so, the idea took hold everywhere. The politicization of linguistic identities tended in almost all European cases to entail a territorialization. Languages were equated not with groups of speakers, but with the geographical footprint taken up by those speakers. Everywhere in Europe, this created competing and overlapping territorial claims in those many areas where people spoke an uneasily-classified dialect or lived intermingled with speakers of other languages.

This territorialization of language often proceeded by arguing that the speakers of a given language shared bonds not only of communication, but also of shared descent and shared ethnicity. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the taxonomies of language and “race” (however that slippery term might have been defined in different contexts) were closely intertwined; in Ernst Haeckel’s phylogenetic “family tree” models, morphological differences and similarities were schematized as proximities of related descent, both for living organisms and for languages, and the concept of the “Aryan” arose conjointly in linguistics and ethnography.

Thus, language areas were seen also as the geographical spaces inhabited by members of the concomitant “races” or nationalities, and this strengthened the tendency to give a political application to such ethnic-geographical groupings. This line of thought had been propounded at a formative moment in European history – the collapse of the Napoleonic empire between 1812 and 1815 – by Ernst Moritz Arndt, who proposed the reconstitution of a German state to cover all territories where Germanic tribes had dwelt and where the German language (in all its dialects) was spoken. Arndt’s line of thought found its most fully-fledged expression a century later in The frontiers of language and nationality in Europe (1917) by the Istanbul-born American geologist and diplomat Leon Dominian (1899–1936). Dominian’s linguistic-ethnic-territorial mapping of the various cultural communities of the Balkans was especially influential in the American proposals during the Paris peace conference of 1919 (in which Dominian was a member of the US delegation) for carving up the defeated Ottoman Empire along lines of “nationality” as defined by language.

The Romantic-Nationalist preoccupation with language thus created three strong and lasting patterns for subsequent decades and centuries: it defined language, in its transgenerational continuity and genealogy, as the primary criterion of Europe’s cultural plurality; it affected both the civic (state-based) and the ethnic (tradition-based) ideal of collective cohesion, and yoked these two aspects, civic and ethnic, together into an uneasy, ambivalent sense of what constituted “nationality”; and it applied the idea of language-based nationality geographically into a modular array of overlapping and contested “language areas”, each ideally forming, for their advocates, the territory of an aspirational nation-state.