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The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders (Palgrave Handbooks)
This book analyzes the creation of languages across the Slavophone areas of the world and their deployment for political projects and identity building, mainly after 1989. It offers perspectives from a number of disciplines such as sociolinguistics, socio-political history and language policy.Languages are artefacts of culture, meaning they are created by people. They are often used for identity building and maintenance, but in Central and Eastern Europe they became the basis of nation building and national statehood maintenance. The recent split of the Serbo-Croatian language in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia amply illustrates the highly politicized role of languages in this region, which is also home to most of the world’s Slavic-speakers. This volume presents and analyzes the creation of languages across the Slavophone areas of the world and their deployment for political projects and identity building, mainly after 1989. The overview concludes with a reflection on the recent rise of Slavophone speech communities in Western Europe and Israel. The book brings together renowned international scholars who offer a variety of perspectives from a number of disciplines and sub-fields such as sociolinguistics, socio-political history and language policy, making this book of great interest to historians, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists interested in Central and Eastern Europe and Slavic Studies.
Hardcover
First published June 3, 2015
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About the author
Tomasz Kamusella
25 books3 followersA Polish scholar pursuing interdisciplinary research in language politics, nationalism, and ethnicity.
Wikipedia info: Tomasz Kamusella
Wikipedia info: Tomasz Kamusella
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June 19, 2016
The frequent arbitrariness of national borders in Eastern Europe goes without saying, and just as contentious is where to draw a line between the various languages (or is X "just a dialect" of Y?). Emigration has brought various Slavic languages to Western Europe and Israel with interesting sociolinguistic results. These issues are the subject of the 24 papers in this 2015 collection.
"Handbook" isn't really an appropriate title for this book. It isn't a handy reference limiting itself to the scholarly consensus with each author writing to the same template. Rather, it is an uneven collection of papers, some of which offer original work in the field. The writing styles differ drastically, with e.g. the paper on Croatian by Peti-Stantic & Langston citing Pierre Bourdieu and arguing at length on general sociological theory, while other papers prefer to keep things concise and focused just on their limited area. Most objectionable in calling this a "Handbook" is the inclusion of a paper by Paul Wexler. This scholar has a peculiar view of the origin of the Yiddish language that virtually no one else in the field agrees with (some even question if Wexler himself really believes what he writes). Wexler's paper here is mainly just a space for him to reiterate that theory instead of dealing with specifically Slavic themes like the book title suggests, and he extends his views of ethnogenesis to the Romani language as well, with equally unsatisfying results.
Still, anyone interested in the Slavic languages overall will find much to enjoy. There are papers on the most famous Slavic minorities like the Rusyns (Michael Moser) and Sorbs (Roland Marti), but we also get contributions on minorities that are likely to still seem very exotic to most readers like the Burgenland Croats (E. Wayles Browne), the Banat Bulgarians (Motoko Nomachi), and Gorani of eastern Albania (Klaus Steinke). I had no idea that the Polish language once had a significant presence in the Latvian region of Latgalia until I read Catherine Gibson's paper here.
The lack of contributions on issues of language, borders, and identity within Russia weakens this collection as a pan-Slavic overview. (Something could be said about recent work on resurrection of Pomor identity or Siberian issues.) The Russian language is discussed here, but only among diasporas in Israel and Ireland.
"Handbook" isn't really an appropriate title for this book. It isn't a handy reference limiting itself to the scholarly consensus with each author writing to the same template. Rather, it is an uneven collection of papers, some of which offer original work in the field. The writing styles differ drastically, with e.g. the paper on Croatian by Peti-Stantic & Langston citing Pierre Bourdieu and arguing at length on general sociological theory, while other papers prefer to keep things concise and focused just on their limited area. Most objectionable in calling this a "Handbook" is the inclusion of a paper by Paul Wexler. This scholar has a peculiar view of the origin of the Yiddish language that virtually no one else in the field agrees with (some even question if Wexler himself really believes what he writes). Wexler's paper here is mainly just a space for him to reiterate that theory instead of dealing with specifically Slavic themes like the book title suggests, and he extends his views of ethnogenesis to the Romani language as well, with equally unsatisfying results.
Still, anyone interested in the Slavic languages overall will find much to enjoy. There are papers on the most famous Slavic minorities like the Rusyns (Michael Moser) and Sorbs (Roland Marti), but we also get contributions on minorities that are likely to still seem very exotic to most readers like the Burgenland Croats (E. Wayles Browne), the Banat Bulgarians (Motoko Nomachi), and Gorani of eastern Albania (Klaus Steinke). I had no idea that the Polish language once had a significant presence in the Latvian region of Latgalia until I read Catherine Gibson's paper here.
The lack of contributions on issues of language, borders, and identity within Russia weakens this collection as a pan-Slavic overview. (Something could be said about recent work on resurrection of Pomor identity or Siberian issues.) The Russian language is discussed here, but only among diasporas in Israel and Ireland.
Displaying 1 of 1 review