{"id":23,"date":"2008-02-05T17:56:50","date_gmt":"2008-02-05T15:56:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=23"},"modified":"2008-06-01T16:50:37","modified_gmt":"2008-06-01T14:50:37","slug":"the-contest-of-language-before-and-beyond-nationalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=23","title":{"rendered":"The contest of language: Before and beyond nationalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The contest of language:<\/strong> Before and beyond nationalism. Ed. by W.<\/strong> Martin Bloomer<\/strong>. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Pp. 274. ISBN 9780268021917<\/a>. $30.<\/font><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Pramod K. Nayar<\/strong>, University of Hyderabad<\/em><\/p>\n

A collection of essays that deals with the links between language and national\u2013cultural identity, The contest of language<\/em> is a useful, if disconcertingly eclectic, volume. It is useful to study the political history of a language when nationalism (or the nation, as we know it today) did not exist. The opening essays, dealing with Latin, Syriac, and the Irish lexicon, locate the modes through which certain languages acquired dominance\u2014modes that involve institutional, academic, and textual politics in social, political, and cultural realms. Thus, while Latin humanistic culture was the cornerstone of the debates over Italian in Dante\u2019s time, Syriac\u2019s negotiations with Greek (and emergent Christianity) and the Irish-Gaelic lexicon\u2019s working with contemporary ideas of kingship and sovereignty both point to very complex engagements with structures of political, mercantile, and theological power. Nationalism, these essays demonstrate, was often peripheral in communities, even though strong views of ethnic identities or popular (and vernacular) culture did exist. Language and imperial divisive politics have often gone together.<\/p>\n

Studying late antiquity, Dimitri Gutas<\/strong> shows how non-Arabs were initially excluded from the ambit because Islam was rooted in Arabic, and it took the Abbasid dynasty to use Arabic culture, based on the language, to unite the empire. Haun Saussy<\/strong> demonstrates that philosophers who wrote language manuals actually invented social communication by drafting rules of linguistic conduct. Susan Blum<\/strong>\u2019s essay shows how the Chinese rarely worry about linguistic difficulty and how most people acquire multiple varieties of language\u2014her argument ties in with Suzanne Romaine\u2019s idea of discrete languages as a European invention. Thus, Blum shows, linguism and nationalism don\u2019t always go together. Tony Crowley<\/strong> explores both the Irish resistance to and support for the English language in the early modern period, and also the ways in which Gaelic has survived.<\/p>\n

Richard Hunter<\/strong> returns to classical Greece to explore, in great detail, the link of language evolution with literary genres. Looking at Greek poetry, Hunter explores debates over authenticity and purity with the appropriation of genres into the classical scheme. Martin Bloomer<\/strong>\u2019s fascinating essay shows how literary figures as diverse as Robert Browning and Seamus Heaney have retained Latin as a source of memory, pointing to the fact that Latin is not really a dead language because it is the stuff of memory itself. The battle against English and the compulsory enshrinement of Gaelic, Seamus Deane<\/strong> argues, has caused its own slow demise. Vittorio H\u00f6sle<\/strong> argues that a process of inversion is taking place, where English is essaying the role of Latin as the new academic lingua franca.<\/p>\n

The volume\u2019s focus on national and cultural identity as they are shaped by language is very welcome. The book\u2019s organization, which returns to antiquity and classical times, shows how debates about languages have often excluded the nation from their focus. In other cases, nationalism has directly affected the \u2018shape\u2019 of language. The collection\u2019s range, both temporal and geopolitical, provides an overarching view of these debates. This is a useful historical study of languages and the many ways they interact with politics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The contest of language: Before and beyond nationalism. Ed. by W. Martin Bloomer. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Pp. 274. ISBN 9780268021917. $30. Reviewed by Pramod K. Nayar, University of Hyderabad A collection of essays that deals with the links between language and national\u2013cultural identity, The contest of language is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}