Peter Burke. Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004

Abstract

What is the relationship between language and community in early modern Europe? How is language ‘discovered’ during this time and what are the tensions and changes in community wrought with and by this discovery? These are the questions that Peter Burke's Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe asks as he brings much needed attention to the distinctive role of language in both expressing and constituting community and vice versa in the early modern period. Burke's work is structured around five thematic trends embedded in a historical framework: (1) the continued importance of Latin, (2) vernaculars competing for dominance in newly available domains, (3) standardization before ‘language policy,’ (4) the centripetal force of language mixing, and (5) the centrifugal force of language purism. All of these prefigured the new link between language and nation that developed from the French Revolution onwards. By engaging with the multiple and inter-animated languages and communities of Europe during this time, Burke provides a counterpoint to national(ist) histories, which create a simplified picture of the organic growth of a single language and claim an isomorphic relationship with community as (proto-)nation. Burke focuses on the standardization of vernaculars in tension with increased codification of Latin and a new linguistic purism reacting to an increase in and even celebration of language mixing, and thereby resists subordinating complexity to a historical narrative.