Kamusella, Tomasz, Nomachi, Motoki, Gibson, Catherine (Eds.)
The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders
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.
Tomasz Kamusella is Reader in Modern History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His monographs include Silesia and Central European Nationalisms: The Emergence of National and Ethnic Groups in Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia, 1848–1918 (2007) and The Politics of Language and Nationalisms in Modern Central Europe (2009).
Motoki Nomachi is Associate Professor in the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan. He wrote and edited The Grammar of Possessivity in South Slavic: Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives (2011), Slavia Islamica: Language, Religion and Identity (2011, with Robert Greenberg) and Grammaticalization and Lexicalization in the Slavic Languages (2014, with Andrii Danylenko and Predrag Piper).
Catherine Gibson is currently completing an Erasmus International MA at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, United Kingdom, and the University of Tartu, Estonia. Her research focuses on transnational history and ethnolinguistic nationalism in the Baltic states.
Contributors to this volume include:
Andrej Beke , University of Tsukuba, Japan Wayles Browne, Cornell University, USA Andrii Danylenko, Pace University, USA István Fried, University of Szeged, Hungary Catherine Gibson, University College London, UK Robert Greenberg, Hunter College of the City University of New York, USA Brian D. Joseph, The Ohio State University, USA Tomasz Kamusella, University of St Andrews, UK Keith Langston, University of Georgia, USA Jouko Lindstedt, University of Helsinki, Finland Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto, Canada Roland Marti, University of the Saarland, Germany Elena Marushiakova, Independent Scholar Vesselin Popov, Independent Scholar Alexander Maxwell, Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand Michael A. Moser,University of Vienna, Austria Motoki Nomachi, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan Anna Novikov-Almagor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Anita Peti-Stanti?, University of Zagreb, Croatia Irina Sedakova, Institute for Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia Sarah Smyth, Independent Scholar Dieter Stern, Ghent University, Belgium Klaus Steinke, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany Paul Wexler, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
