Lang Policy (2010) 9:375–377
DOI 10.1007/s10993-010-9168-1
BOOK REVIEW
Tomasz Kamusella: The Politics of Language
and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe
Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke, 2008, 1168 pp, Hb £130,
ISBN 9780230550704
Bernard Spolsky
Received: 15 April 2010 / Accepted: 18 April 2010 / Published online: 12 May 2010
Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010
On an earlier occasion (Spolsky 2004), I complained about what I labeled
linguicentrism, the tendency to deal with language policy as though only language
mattered. This authoritative study of Central European language policies over the
centuries is a welcome example of the approach that I argue for, an account of
the close relations between changing sociolinguistic ecology and the political and
religious history of the communities. It concentrates on four major languages,
Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and Slovak, tracing the growth and standardization of
each from origin to ‘‘the short twentieth century’’. It sets this against a background
that gives more information than many other sources on all the other languages
involved in the ecology, including obviously German and Russian but also Latin,
Hebrew and Aramaic, Albanian, Romani, Greek and Tatar, to mention just a few.
Whatever else, this volume is a rich repository of data from several centuries of the
history of European languages, and will serve as a first book of reference on the
languages included.
The close tie between religious (in earlier years) and nationalist (from the
nineteenth century) ideologies and language policy—status, form, and teaching—is
constantly emphasized. There are key analyses that might surprise many of us: for
instance, that ‘‘nation’’ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Poland referred to a
small elite group of nobles who preferred to speak French or German, and the extent
to which the emerging status of vernacular languages depended on the Protestant
Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. There are also exhaustive
accounts of the development, modification, and status of the many scripts in which
these languages were written, and of the religious and national significance of the
scripts. There is ample information also on the language activists—grammarians,
purists, and lexicographers—and their contributions to the codification of the
varieties.
B. Spolsky (&)
Faculty of Humanities, Department of English, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel
e-mail: [email protected]
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376 B. Spolsky
Kamusella draws a vivid picture of the changing nature of the societies and their
political structure, as they changed from complex multilingual and multiethnic
kingdoms with influential religious institutions, through dual empires (Austro-
Hungary and Czecho-Slovakia), to increasingly homogenous and monolingual
nations produced by altered territorial demarcation or ethnic cleansing. Linguists
who study language endangerment usually concentrate on third world indigenous
languages threatened by world languages; here we see a different side of the story,
tracing medium-size languages wiping out smaller minorities—a vivid illustration
of the principle of ‘‘big fish eat smaller fish, and medium eat tiny’’. The major
effects of international decisions after the world wars and of the collapse of the
Soviet Empire are clearly explained.
The book starts with definitions of Central Europe (a loosely defined concept but
here made specific) and a theoretical consideration and careful definition of the
concepts of language, nation and state. It then describes the major languages
involved in Central Europe and their changing official status as they were recognized
by various authorities as languages of government, worship, or instruction. The third
chapter, a detailed monograph in itself, looks at all the other languages that have
entered into Central European history, serving as a useful and balanced mini-
encyclopedia. In these three chapters, the relevance of the recognition of vernaculars
and the spread of literacy is stressed.
In Part II, the transition from religious to nationalist motivation in the nineteenth
century is explored for each of the four focus languages: Polish and the rise of the
Polish nation-state, Hungary and the codification of Magyar (but the lack of
territorial fit leaving Hungarian a minority language in surrounding nations and
keeping significant internal minorities), Czech and its development into the
principal language of a dual state called Czechoslovakia, and Slovak and its growth
into the minority language of Czecho-Slovakia (hyphenated by the Slovaks).
Part III maps the ‘‘triumph of nationalism’’ in the twentieth century. Poland starts
as a multiethnic nation-state but Polish is a minority language under German and
Russian dominance; Poland emerges (after Communist rule) through ethnic
cleansing of various kinds as an ethnically homogenous nation-state. Hungary is
regularly conquered and partitioned, with Magyar minorities produced in surround-
ing nations, but it too emerges finally as an ethnically pure nation-state. The Czechs
go through a period of German-Czech bilingualism, then dominate their minorities
in Czechoslovakia, but finally lose the Slovak half. The Slovaks live under Czech
domination, rediscover their national past, and finally achieve political indepen-
dence while remaining literate mainly in Czech.
These final chapters touch on but do not develop the fate of Central Europe and
its languages as they join the European Union, making clear that the story is
incomplete. It is probably unreasonable to expect the author of a major study like
this (over 1,000 pages long) to wait another half century to trace future changes.
Obviously, joining the European Community has permitted economic development
on the one hand and emigration on the other (Polish is now a major language in
Dublin). Also, in spite of the nationalist nature of European language policy with its
insistence on the sovereign monolingualism of the members, it has started to expose
these languages too to globalization and the inexorable march of English.
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Book Review 377
A second significant effect of EU membership has been the externally forced
acceptance of the place of Romani and the fact that Roma was one of the two major
groups never granted full recognition and civil rights. Whether this will happen or
just remain lip service to the rights of an under-privileged community remains
unclear. The second group was the Jews, removed from the Central European scene
by pogroms, emigration and the Holocaust. Kamusella recognizes the contribution
of the Holocaust to ethnolinguistic homogeneity, but does not go so far as another
recent historian of modern Europe (Judt 2005) who sees acknowledgment of the
European role in the murder of Jews as a major issue in its identity.
This is a fine and invaluable study, perhaps over-detailed and making it difficult
to see the wood for the trees: the richness of particular details leaves it to the reader
to draw generalized conclusions. But there is no question that it constitutes what the
blurb claims is a ‘‘magisterial study’’ likely to remain the standard work for a
generation. We must be grateful to Kamusella for his meticulous scholarship and to
Palgrave Macmillan for publishing a book with more pages that I have been allowed
words to review it.
References
Judt, T. (2005). Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945. London: William Heinemann.
Spolsky, B. (2004). Language policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author Biography
Bernard Spolsky, editor emeritus of this journal and professor emeritus at Bar-Ilan University, is
currently editing the Cambridge Handbook of Language Policy and writing a monograph on religion and
language management.
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