Overview

With forty-two extensively annotated maps, this atlas offers novel insights into the history and mechanics of how Central Europe’s languages have been made, unmade, and deployed for political action. The innovative combination of linguistics, history, and cartography makes a wealth of hard-to-reach knowledge readily available to both specialist and general readers. It combines information on languages, dialects, alphabets, religions, mass violence, or migrations over an extended period of time. The story first focuses on Central Europe’s dialect continua, the emergence of states, and the spread of writing technology from the tenth century onward. Most maps concentrate on the last two centuries. The main storyline opens with the emergence of the Western European concept of the nation, in accord with which the ethnolinguistic nation-states of Italy and Germany were founded. In the Central European view, a “proper” nation is none other than the speech community of a single language. The Atlas aspires to help users make the intellectual leap of perceiving languages as products of human history and part of culture. Like states, nations, universities, towns, associations, art, beauty, religions, injustice, or atheism—languages are artefacts invented and shaped by individuals and their groups.

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9789633864173

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Reviews

The author's grasp of historical events and cultural and political processes is evident on every page, as he provides detailed insights into the political processes of the region that have linguistic relevance: the instalment and use of writing systems, social and religious movements, independence movements, nationalism, the rise of nation states, and many other events, all described in copious yet relevant detail. This is truly an important work and should be used by scholars and students from many fields and for many years to come. http://ahea.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/ahea/article/viewFile/474/842 -- Anna Fenyvesi * Hungarian Cultural Studies *

The author's grasp of historical events and cultural and political processes is evident on every page, as he provides detailed insights into the political processes of the region that have linguistic relevance: the instalment and use of writing systems, social and religious movements, independence movements, nationalism, the rise of nation states, and many other events, all described in copious yet relevant detail. This is truly an important work and should be used by scholars and students from many fields and for many years to come. http://ahea.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/ahea/article/viewFile/474/842 -- Anna Fenyvesi * Hungarian Cultural Studies * In circumstances, when theory is most eager for the factual side of historical development, the appearance of such books as T. Kamusella's seems to be of high significance. This review is very much needed, inspiring, and full of new ideas for investigation; it should be a handbook for everyone who is interested in language as a part of cultural, intellectual, national, and/or state history and also in comprehensive and not politically engaged studies. https://doi.org/10.5325/hiperboreea.9.2.0277 -- Liudmyla Novikova * Hiperboreea *

Author Information

Tomasz Kamusella is reader in modern history in the School of History at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, Britain.

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