Language, Religion and National Identity in Europe and the Middle East

A historical study

Author
John Myhill | University of Haifa
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027227119 | EUR 115.00 | USD 173.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027293510 | EUR 115.00 | USD 173.00
 
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This book discusses the historical record of the idea that language is associated with national identity, demonstrating that different applications of this idea have consistently produced certain types of results. Nationalist movements aimed at ‘unification’, based upon languages which vary greatly at the spoken level, e.g. German, Italian, Pan-Turkish and Arabic, have been associated with aggression, fascism and genocide, while those based upon relatively homogeneous spoken languages, e.g. Czech, Norwegian and Ukrainian, have resulted in national liberation and international stability. It is also shown that religion can be more important to national identity than language, but only for religious groups which were understood in premodern times to be national rather than universal or doctrinal, e.g. Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Serbs, Dutch and English; this is demonstrated with discussions of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the civil war in Lebanon and the breakup of Yugoslavia, the United Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
“It should be stressed that this is an important work. Myhill compels us to look in a multidimensional way at the great identity conflicts and genocidal disasters of modernity, providing a challenging and provocative close reading of the evolution and interaction of a large number of ethnic and national groups.”
“It has always been clear that language is linked to nationalism and nationalism to language. What John Myhill has done here is to show for the first time that this easy equation ignores the linguistic facts. It may be true that a "language is a dialect with an army and a navy". But it is not just the army and the navy that matter. It also matters that some languages are more obviously languages than others.”
“[...] the book will interest anyone who wants to read (or re-read) facts and data about European and Middle East nations in the light of the influence of language and religion, two main driving forces of the identity of human beings.”
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2021. Two Linguas Francas? Social Inclusion through English and Esperanto. Social Inclusion 9:1  pp. 75 ff. DOI logo
Hager, Anna
2022. The Syriac Orphanage and School in Beirut: Building an Elite Transnational Syriac Identity. Studies in World Christianity 28:3  pp. 311 ff. DOI logo
Joseph, John E.
2012. Nation. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, DOI logo
Koutrelakos, James
2013. ETHNIC IDENTITY: SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN WHITE GROUPS BASED ON CULTURAL PRACTICES1,2. Psychological Reports  pp. 130729083742000 ff. DOI logo
Koutrelakos, James
2013. Ethnic Identity: Similarities and Differences in White Groups Based on Cultural Practices. Psychological Reports 112:3  pp. 745 ff. DOI logo
Laliberté, André
2022. The Legacy of an Accommodative Secularism: Religions and Taiwan’s Responses to COVID-19. Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies 14:1  pp. 75 ff. DOI logo
Myhill, John
2010. THE ISLAMIZATION OF ARAB NATIONALISM. Critical Review 22:1  pp. 19 ff. DOI logo
NARDELLA, Federica
2020. The Late Ottoman Şarkı and the Interweaving of Registers: Towards an Ideology of Song. Musicologist 4:1  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
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Screti, Francesco
2024. Contested languages in the contemporary Italian press: an analysis of language ideology. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development  pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Tabachnik, Maxim
2019. Defining the nation in Russia’s buffer zone: the politics of citizenship by birth on territory (jus soli) in Moldova, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Post-Soviet Affairs 35:3  pp. 223 ff. DOI logo
Tabachnik, Maxim
2019. Untangling liberal democracy from territoriality: from ethnic/civic to ethnic/territorial nationalism. Nations and Nationalism 25:1  pp. 191 ff. DOI logo
Tabachnik, Maxim
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Zhou, Minglang
2019. Conclusion. In Language Ideology and Order in Rising China,  pp. 283 ff. DOI logo
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Linguistics

Language policy

Philosophy

Philosophy

Main BIC Subject

CF: Linguistics

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  2006045869 | Marc record