[lit-ideas] Re: Not completely not Norwegian
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 15 Apr 2019 10:32:05 +0900
How come these codes are divided in accordance with our contemporary national
boundaries (largely)?
For both language and genetics, specific explanations are complex. That said,
the assumption of consistency between race, language, and culture in a
geographically bounded area is an artifact of European Romanticism, the
foundation on which contemporary right-wing nationalism is constructed.
Ethnological and historical facts demonstrate unequivocally that this
assumption is nonsense. Human history is filled with wars and migrations that
result in mixtures of peoples, languages, and cultures united in political
entities of uncertain but always finite duration.
Languages like German, Norwegian and Swedish are differentiated as part of
nation-building projects. Languages like Hokkien, Hakka or Cantonese are, while
as different from each other as Germanic or Romance languages in Europe,
treated as “dialects” to subsume them in another nation-building project.
Thus a bit of wit well known to linguists. “What is a language? A dialect with
an army.”
John
Sent from my iPad
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