ONLINE PLUS Language and Power - Einzelansicht

Tutor: Dr Habil Tomasz Kamusella, Reader in Modern History (University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK)

Historians and social scientists see language(s) as an unanalyzable ‘black box’ that only linguists can comprehend. Yet, with the rise of ethnolinguistic nationalism in the 19^th century, making and unmaking languages has become the basis of doing politics in Central and Eastern Europe. Linguists and scholars often double as politicians in this region. As a result, some of their pet hypotheses may be imposed on millions with horrific consequences, as now exemplified by Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine. The module aspires to shed light on the mechanisms of language politics by focusing on cases drawn mostly from the Slavic-speaking areas.

1 Introduction and Methodology
A Concepts, Terminology
B Counting Languages or Playing Power Games?

2 Ethnolinguistic Nationalism: Norm or Aberration?
A History and Uses of this Ideology
B Operationalization for Analysis: Normative Isomorphism

3 Case Study: Upper Silesia Between Language, Nationalism and Religion
A From Estates to Nations
B Silesian: A Dialect, Language or bάρbαρbαρ Barbarbar?

 4 The Politics of Script
A Yugoslavia: Between Croatian and Serbian
B Belarus: Belarusian and Polish Between Cyrillic and Latin Letters

5 The EU and the Balkans, Again
A Bulgaria: The Politics of Script
B Bulgaria’s 2019 Ultimatum: ‘Macedonian Does Not Exist’

6 The Politics of Mutual (In)Comprehensibility
A Arabic: A Latin of Modernity?
B Czech and Slovak, Norwegian(s), Moldovan and Romanian

7 Russian: Between Ruthenian and the Russkii Mir
A What is in the Name?
B Between Monocentric Russian and World Russians

8 Yiddish and German: Victims’ and Murderers’ Languages?
A The strange Case of Heinz Kloss
B Should Yiddish-language Sources Be Used to Study the Holocaust?

Addendum: Korienizatsiia in communist and postcommunist Ethiopia?

Seminars: Friday & Saturday, 4 academic hours (45min) each teaching day. (8 teaching days in total at 4 academic hours, yield 32 academic teaching hours for the entire module.)

Teaching Method: 30-minute introductory remarks (brief lecture) by the tutor for both the morning and afternoon session. However, as a matter of pedagogical principle, the seminars should be student-led. Hence, the students are to discuss a given seminar’s subject matter in pairs and/or as a group (whatever is most appropriate), on the basis of the required readings.

Assessment: 1 research analytical essay. 3 ECTS > 8-12pp (1p=250 words; hence, 2,000-3,000 words); 5 ECTS > 15-20pp (=3,750-5,000 words).

Assessment scale: 5 (excellent) to 1 (fail)