Becoming Azerbaijani through Language: On the Impact of Calil Məmmədquluzadə’s Anamin Kitabi
Journal: Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks
Year: 2015

As a unifying principle in nationalism, language has played a crucial role in the development of western European nations, foreign-dominated countries in Eastern Europe, as well as in the borderland regions of the Russian and Ottoman Empires. During the nineteenth century, linguistic nationalism spread from European megacities to these distant borderlands. In this dissemination, intellectuals, mostly Turcophone Muslims from the Russian Empire who circulated between St Petersburg, Crimea, Kazan,