Federalism and superstition speak low Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; the counterrevolution speaks Italian, and fanaticism speaks Basque.
- Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac

Language ideology plays an important, yet often ignored, role in the creation and maintenance of community. In the context of the nation-state and its formation, in particular, the way in which language ideology manifests itself in the public discourse regarding nationhood acts to shape its potential for nationhood. According to Benedict Anderson (1983) this potential is set in motion by the modularity and piracy of the political model of nationalism. The mold that was cast in the formation of the first European nation-states is used, according to this concept, to set in motion, by means of piracy, the formation and maintenance of all nation-states since.

Although this concept of modularity of nationalism is compelling, specifically in reference to colonialism, it is incomplete; nationalism, I argue, is not simple modeled, pirated and executed, but is constructed in dialogue with culturally specific ideas regarding nationhood that act to reinforce claims of national sovereignty. Linguistic ideology has the potential to both perpetuate and contest this end and, certainly within the context of standardization and historization, become much more complicated for the formers of nation-states than expected.

In order to establish the centrality of cultural perception and practice to the importance of language and linguistic ideology in the formation of nation-states I intend to trace language from its pre-national potential to its role in the formation of nation-states in the context of specific models. Second, I will discuss the maintenance of language and its various contestations in the context of these nation-states before moving on to the role of language ideology in this maintenance. Finally, I will discuss the applicability of the modularity of nationalism and emphasize the role of cultural perspective in the shaping of the public discourse surrounding nationalism.

According to Eric Hobsbawm (1990), language in the pre-national era possessed no political potential. Although quite an assertion, void of national boundaries and the whole invasive institution of the nation-state, language was at this time left to itself to fission and fusion, flowing around and through geographic barriers. As such, language acted as only one variable among many to indicate belonging in a local community. It is only when movements working at the macro-political scale began to form, with the nation-state as their ‘natural’ end, does language become a potential criteria for proto-nationalists (Anderson 1983).

The appropriation of language as a primary variable of belonging from its inception lacked any element of pragmatism (Hobsbawm 1990). This is, no doubt, a product of the inherent contradiction between a specific local vernacular becoming a macro-level ‘national language’ and the perpetuation of the language as a natural outgrowth of the population, often through myths and genealogies concerning its origin (Hobsbawm 1990, Keane 1997). It rests completely on the claim of “a universality that transcends local particularities” – directly at odds with the assertion that cultural perspectives and practice shape the formation of nation-states and a ‘national language’ (Keane 1997). This establishment of a national community may manifest itself in many ways at present, but at the time of the nation-state’s inception it is argued that two strategies of formation were the most prevalent: assimilation, in France, and ethnonationalism, in Germany (Brubaker 1998).

Rather than conceptualizing the nation as an ethnolinguistic entity, language became the tool of assimilation for the French revolutionaries as a strategy toward establishing the French nation-state. Linguistic variety, they asserted, was counterrevolutionary while linguistic unity was believed to be “indispensable to Republican citizenship” (Brubaker 1998). As can be seen, French nationalism was in no way a product of perpetuating an ‘organic’ ethnolinguistic identity; instead, French nationalism was a product of war. Before the Battle of Valmy in 1792, nationalism proper did not exist in France and it was only as a reaction to being “besieged by enemies within and enemies without” that xenophobic, at home, and expansionist, abroad, forms of nationalism erupted (Brubaker 1998). In the ensuing expansionist-assimilationist formation of the French nation-state linguistic unity was an appendage of the political. “Only when all citizens speak the same language,” according to revolutionary leader Abbé Grégoire (1792), “can all citizens communicate their thoughts without hindrance.” With this goal in mind, the potential nation-state of France set out to form a unified linguistic public without reference to myth or genealogy of origin. In fact, their strategy of assimilation, the deliberate attempt to make similar, is incompatible with this ethnolinguistic, organic conception of the nation. “It is one thing to make all citizens of Utopia speak Utopian, and quite another to want to make all Utopiphones citizens of Utopia” – the former describing the strategy of France, while the latter describes that of Germany (Brubaker 1998).

In the wake of the French occupation, the Romantic movement in Germany provided patterns of thought leading to the repoliticization of the ethnocultural understanding of nationhood. After the catastrophic defeat of 1806, Karl August Fürst von Hardenberg wrote to Friedrich Wilhelm III: “We must do from above what the French have done from below.” Using Herder’s concept of Volksgeist, the Prussian reformers aimed to express through nationhood what was constitutive of the public (Brubaker 1998). This “deliberate and artificial creation of the state,” as Brubaker (1998) put it, engendered a tension between ethnonational and state-national ideologies that continues to haunt Germany to this day. While it may be difficult to make this case for modern Germany, this tension since the inception of the German nation-state has given rise to a constant debate over conceptions of German nationhood that were not present in France, and while France and Germany are much more similar today that they were at their inception, this tension has led to different roles of language in these two nation-states. While in France language has maintained its status as a tool for assimilation, the role of language in relation to national ideology in Germany has at different times taken on different roles. Anderson’s (1983) assertion of the modality of nationhood, thus, dissolves in part. If language may become an element of proto-nationalist cohesion, like what was seen in France, then how does the conception of the Utopiphones becoming citizens of Utopia (Brubaker 1998) function within this theory?

One similar factor with regard to language in the formation of these various manifestations of the nation-state is the act of standardization. According to Silverstein (Brenneis 1987) this phenomenon is one which requires institutional maintenance, and demonstrates linguistic hegemony over the norm of the community with which it is acting. These institutions, he argues, perpetuate that they are created as endpoints of “the natural, evolutionary working of the ‘invisible hand’” (Brenneis 1987). Such generalizations, in the context of the formation of the French nation-state in particular, however, do not stand; the instrumental use of language, and subsequently its standardization, were never veiled in ‘organic’ rhetoric, but were openly asserted to be a political necessity for the unification of a democratic France. This does not discount the role of hegemony in the formation and dissemination of linguistic ideology in the case of France, however. The unification occurring during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period, Brubaker (1998) asserts, was an indirect result of the pervasiveness of French in the institutional settings of the army, the schools, and the administration. Therefore, while no mentioning of ethnolinguistic nationalism was present, the act of standardization was clearly hegemonic.

The manifestation of these two ‘original’ nation-states, despite the assertions of the modality of nationalism after the establishment of the nation-state as an entity in Europe, does not in any way exhaust the ways in which language and linguistic ideology have shaped the formation of all nation-states. Within the context of colonization, for instance, the formation of the nation-state of India led to multiple contestations of official language which led to the eventual formation of a multilingual nation-state. Since the partition of India and Pakistan, neither Hindi nor Urdu have been successful in becoming a national language, not to mention the several hundred other languages present in the region (Breckenridge 1993). In opposition to the modularity of the nation-state, the fate of Hindustani and the history of Hindi and Urdu in India does not fit into any narrative of either the colonial authority or indigenous resistance to it, and certainly not the formation of a pirated model of nationhood. Anderson, in this case, overestimates the power of nationalism to, as Breckenridge (1993) puts it, “overawe other forms of emotional commitment.” It is not appropriate, because of such overestimations, to discard the concept of the modularity of nationhood totally, however.

In the appropriation of language into the arsenal of nation-state formation, one may in the context of the formation of the French nation-state put forth by Brubaker (1998) ignore the role of language ideology. The populations effected by the standardization and establishment of a ‘national language’ in the formation of the nation-state did not simply accept the fact that they must speak a new language, register, or dialect, however – languages such as Breton and Basque still have speaking populations, though small, in France proper in part due to this resistance. In all cases of nation-state formation, it is the particularity of cultural perspective and performance and the resulting linguistic ideology that shape the standardization, or contestation of standardization, of a ‘national language’. This concept of modularity, as proposed by Eisenlohr (2007), is best understood as “the effect of successive appropriations, rejections, and recastings of publicly circulating discourse about the nation.” All processes in a population are mediated, to an extent, by the culture of that population, and as such the concept of the piracy of a political model that is applicable to the formation of every nation-state is absurd. This being said, the formation of nation-states which in the end are very similar in structure, relatively, in as much as there are few manifestations of the nation-state being used throughout the world, grants Anderson’s (1983) concept some legitimacy. If the ideal of the nation-state is one fixed in the formation of France and Germany, as Brubaker (1998) purports, it can surely be argued that the various cultural ideas and practices regarding language create a dialogue on the part of its users that, in as much as every populated portion of the planet is a part of some nation-state, manifest various roles of language in the formation and maintenance, and potential destruction, of the nation-states in which the people reside.

Thus, what can be taken from the historical analysis of the establishment of the nation-state in France, Germany, and colonized India shows, with just these few examples, the ways in which language ideology is shaped by the cultural perspective and performance of the individuals residing in the geographic areas being nationalized. To answer the question posed, ideologies of language may both contribute to and undermine the shaping of ideas of nationality and national identity. The French viewed language as an instrument that needed to be played by all citizens of France in order to be truly democratic, while in Germany language was truly ethnolinguistic and an ‘organic’ outgrowth, and India perceived it to be representative of, in some ways, religion and in others, specific geographic locations, that led to the present day absence of an official language and a language of administration specific to the state.

The formation of these, and other, nation-states inevitably involve the establishment of the universal over the particular. When such is the case one may have no doubt that ideas regarding local language and the role of a national language in the life of the people will, coupled with action, shape the reality of their nationalization in the particular. While the idea of the nation-state may have specific connotations in reference to its earliest forms, the application of such forms in pre-colonial, post-colonial and modern formations of the nation-state has resulted in altered manifestations of the nation-state actual and its policy regarding language, as result of responses from the local. Anderson’s (1983) modularity, if taken to include the shaping, reshaping and contestations of the processes of nation forming and the maintenance of the nation at the local level, is a useful conceptualization in as much as it effectively takes into account these various manifestations of ‘national language’ formation and justification.

(References)

B. R. O’G. Anderson, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, Rev. ed ed., London: Verso, 2006.

C. A. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer, Orientalism and the postcolonial predicament: perspectives on South Asia, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

D. L. Brenneis and R. K. S. Macaulay, The matrix of language: contemporary linguistic anthropology, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996.

R. Brubaker, Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Eisenlohr, P, 2007, 'Creole Publics: Language, Cultural Citizenship, and the Spread of the Nation in Mauritius', Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 49, no. 04. 10.1017/S0010417507000825

E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality, 2nd ed ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Keane, W, 1997, 'Knowing One's Place: National Language and the Idea of the Local in Eastern Indonesia', Cultural Anthropology, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 37-63. 10.1525/can.1997.12.1.37