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Language, History, Ideology: The Use and Misuse of Historical-Comparative Linguistics

Online ISBN:
9780191866609
Print ISBN:
9780198827894
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Language, History, Ideology: The Use and Misuse of Historical-Comparative Linguistics

Camiel Hamans (ed.),
Camiel Hamans
(ed.)
Associate Secretary-General, Comité International Permanent des Linguistes
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Hans Henrich Hock (ed.)
Hans Henrich Hock
(ed.)
Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University of Illinois
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Published online:
23 May 2024
Published in print:
25 April 2024
Online ISBN:
9780191866609
Print ISBN:
9780198827894
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Since its beginnings, historical-comparative linguistics has had its “encounters” with ideology. Eighteenth-century pioneering arguments for a Finno-Ugric family met with strong resistance from Hungarian nationalists. In Indo-European studies, the problematic “beech tree” argument placed the homeland near Germanic and thus supported the “Nordic” origin of the “Aryans”; Russian nationalists see archaeological sites like Arkaim as the home of the “Aryans” and themselves as the descendants of these “Aryans”; and Indian nationalists try to locate the Indo-European homeland in India. To further political agendas, “alternative” histories have been proposed for Moldovian and Maltese, and for a language like Afrikaans an absolutely white origin was defended. Parallel to these developments and partly interacting with them, the rise of nation states, with their insistence on a single national language, led to the suppression of minority languages and dialects; conversely, the split of former Yugoslavia led to split of the former common language, Serbo-Croatian, into four languages in order to supply the successor states of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia each with its own “national language.” Finally, even practicing linguists may be led astray by their biases. This volume presents twelve in-depth studies of cases where ideology has influenced historical-comparative linguistic work or has led to the rejection of comparative-historical linguistic findings, or where linguistic nationalism has affected the historical development of languages.

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