Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central
Europe: A Conceptual FrameworkAcknowledgments
First of all, the volume’s co-editors, Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, and Catherine Gibson, wish to thank the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center at Hokkaido University
for making this volume possible. We hope that it may facilitate the completion of Atlas ofLanguage Politics in Modern Central Europe and significantly add to the scholarly andcartographic quality and accurateness of this work-in-progress. We also extend a word of
our gratitude to the volume’s other contributors, whose commentary essays on the Atlas
help us see the project’s strengths and weaknesses, so that we could build on the former
and ameliorate the latter.
The project, Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe, as conceived
and initially conducted by Tomasz Kamusella, was launched in the academic year
2008/2009, in Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, thanks to a Research Funding Initiative
grant from the Long Room Hub, and a Start-up grant from Trinity College’s Researchand Innovation. A word of thanks also goes to Moray McGowan and Jason McElligott in
Trinity’s Long Room Hub for their sustained encouragement and support.
An idea of this Atlas budded in the wake of the publication of Kamusella’s extensive monograph The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central Europe(Palgrave 2009). The cartographic presentation of his findings from this work shouldmake them more readily available to general public, due to the attractive and succinct
form.
The funding, which Kamusella could allocate from the two aforementioned grants
for map-making, was not sufficient to entice any cartographer in Ireland to undertake such a commission. Fortunately, courtesy of the common market ensured by theenlarged European Union, Kamusella was allowed to commission the experienced cartographer, Robert Chmielewski, based in Warsaw, Poland (as usefully recommended
by the renowned Polish historian, Jerzy Tomaszewski). Stretching every cent available,
Kamusella managed to complete eleven maps. Then, not able to stop himself in tracks,
from his own pocket he paid for the drawing of another, twelfth, map Non-State Minority, Regional and Unrecognized Languages, and Written Dialects in Central Europe,
19th – 21st Centuries, followed by its map-size legend.
Furthermore, Kamusella wishes also to thank A. D., Trinity College, for kindly
agreeing to proof read the completed maps. Her meticulousness and close attention paid
to detail let Kamusella and Robert Chmielewski improve these maps considerably.
Kamusella believes that one cannot speak about languages as a socio-political phenomenon without making them somewhat more tangible by the way of illustrations. In
the case of this Atlas-in-making, his illustrations of choice are title (and sometimes sam-3ple) pages of authoritative or first grammars and dictionaries of the covered languages,
and also of unique books and publications in these languages marking the beginning or
end of a certain salient tendency.
Numerous illustrations were originally gathered to accompany this volume.
Unfortunately, they could not be included due to the cost. Nevertheless Kamusella
wishes to thank the following persons and institutions for their help in locating andsecuring these illusrations: Ahmet Alibašić, Asmir Aljić, Nidzara Beganovic, the staffof the Center for Advanced Studies, and the Gazi Husrev-beg Library staff in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina; Antonis Maratheftis, Cyrpus Library, Nicosia, Cyprus; theEstonian National Library staff, Tallinn; the National Library of Finland staff, Helsinki/ Helsingfors; the National Library of Romania staff, Bucharest; and the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, Amherst MA, USA.
In the absence of clear-cut grants that could be utilized for scholarly map-making,Kamusella already presented the completed maps to specialists and scholars interested
in the subject matter. First, in the scope of the two following lectures: ‘A Steel Hand
in a Kid Glove: Language in Modern Central Europe’ (Long Room Hub, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland) in October 2009, and ‘Language and Politics in Postcommunist
Europe’ (Eastern Europe after 1989: The 7th Lewis Glucksman Memorial Symposium,
Long Room Hub, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland) in December the same year. Later in
December 2009, these were followed by two overview presentations of the Atlas heldin December 2009 in the Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japanand at the seminar organized by the Japan Society for the Study of Slavic Languages
and Literatures (former Japan Society for the West Slavic Studies). Last but not least,a small exhibition of the maps also took place in the aforementioned Slavic ResearchCenter. The serendipity of Kamusella’s visit to Japan, on the kind invitation of Motoki
Nomachi at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, was such that it swiftly led to ourcooperation and thus made this volume possible.
Our hope is that making the completed maps available to a wider public anddiscussing what they intend to represent may contribute to attracting more funds forcompleting the project. In his email letter of 12 March 2009 to Kamusella, the doyenof British historians, Eric J. Hobsbawm, wrote “Thank you for sending me the material
on your proposed Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe. [...] [I]t seems
clear to me that your proposed Atlas will be of enormous interest and value.” We trustthen that with generous advice and help of our colleagues and grant-making institutions
we will be able to meet Hobsbawm’s generous prediction.

4

Reflecting on the Project Atlas of Language
Politics in Modern Central Europe
Yukiyasu Arai

The Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe is a very interesting projectthat will try to portray the linguistic order of Central Europe using new approaches
and methods. Its aim is to offer “a synthetic insight into the mechanisms and history of
how languages have been made, unmade and deployed for political action in the age ofnationalism (19th – 21st centuries).”This interdisciplinary Atlas is unique in its approach and scope. When I was inhigh school in a small town in the north-west of the United States, I found a European historical atlas in the town library. It did not touch on linguistic matters at all,being a straightforward historical atlas. But, I still clearly recollect that among the maps
included in this atlas there was one that showed the language situation in Europe during
the 18th or 19th centuries. Scanning this map carefully, I spotted the color of the German
language on the banks of the Volga river. This made me think about how these people
had got there in the first place. In due course, I discovered that they came from the Holy
Roman Empire at the invitation of Empress Catherine II. A good map has the capacity tosurprise readers by highlighting the presence of certain phenomena in places where wewould not expect them to be. A clear answer and deeper explanation of such surprises
can only be found in an accompanying explanatory text or in another book. Hence, I predict that the project under discussion, when it has finally yielded the promised Atlas, willoffer rewarding surprises not only to high school students, but to scholars as well. Thesesurprises stand a good chance of translating into a renewed impetus for sociolinguistic
research on history and social changes in Central Europe.
A map, as Benedict Anderson famously proposed, enables people to imagine theworld. If a map represents a delimited territory, this depiction provides users from among
this territory’s inhabitants with a heightened sense of belonging to the place made visible
through cartography. People begin to see this territory as their own, while those living
outside it come to be perceived as “Others.” All boundaries inscribed onto a map cannot
avoid making this kind of distinction. Maps also work for a particular ideology. If a
map draws a territory of a nation larger than the territory it presently occupies, it gives
rise to the feeling among some readers, especially for people belonging to the nation inquestion, that they have lost something and it needs to be restored. It is not easy to make5

Yukiyasu Arai

any map neutral, since it may, consciously or unconsciously, benefit one group andharm the interests of others.
Also, the maps of modern times do not contain empty spaces. People cannot live
without space; however, it does not mean that all land belongs to someone. White space
simply makes us feel uncomfortable, even if it exists in reality. We should understandthat this type of modern mindset was formed during our schooling, when we are trained
to read a map and form expectations of what a map should look like.
The world is changing and so is the way we draw maps of the world. The way theAncient Greeks looked at the world used to be very influential. Looking at a historicalmap of the world, European scholars still exaggerate the role of the Greeks in the otherparts of the world. I always doubted European maps which, in my view, attributed
too much space to Greek colonies (painted in colors), such as in the maps of “Dialect
continua in Central Europe, 9th century” and “Dialect Continua in Central Europe,c. 1050,” specifically with regards to the Crimean Peninsula and Anatolia. Rulers inthese areas might have used Greek as the official language or even lingua franca, but
how can we know that all those who lived there spoke Greek? The border between
Greeks and others was not totally controlled and did not prevent migration. Especiallyin the case of Anatolia, I always wondered how people absorbed Turkic languages soquickly after the Seljuk Empire and Ottomans took hold the territory. In the study by
the linguist Gou’ichi Kojima, he found many little-known languages during his fieldwork in Anatolia in the 1970s–1990s, in both the eastern and western parts. I do notthink these languages came to Anatolia during the time of Ottoman rule, but some ofthem date back to old times. The Turkish government will never admit the existence of
these languages, but you can find these living languages in the region (if the people arewilling to speak out). In this context, the atlas needs to take special care with regards topolitics. It is very easy to say, “we will make an atlas of the Armenian genocide,” which
is another political question which European scholars love to discuss in one dimension
or another, but from a sociolinguistic point of view, casting light on ignored languages
seems to be more valuable. For this reason, if possible, I would strongly recommendthat Gou’ichi Kojima to join the project to contribute a map of Anatolia, both in the pastand in modern times, to make the atlas more vivid and more interesting.
Speaking of languages used by those people who ruled and were ruled, the atlasseems to make other confusions, similar to that which I described earlier in relation to
Greek in Anatolia and Crimea. For instance, the legendary King Rurik, who is said tobe a Viking, came from the north. He and some of his decedents supposedly could not
speak Slavic but they ruled the Slavic-speaking area inhabited by Bulgars of Bulgarian
Empire, who are said to be originally Turkic people. The original Bulgars are said tohave been quickly absorbed into the Slavic people so that Turkic language features
disappeared at quite an early stage during its formation. However, they continued tohave some impact, comparable to the case of England after the Norman conquest. The
development of Romanian, of course, would be a very interesting case too.
The formation of states in Europe was intertwined as the rulers of Europe intermarried one another. As a result, I wonder how the atlas will reflect the entangled
relationship of European rulers’ claims to the sovereignty of their remote domains.

6

Reflecting on the Project

The House of Habsburg is a famous case, in which Sicily, Spain, the Netherlands, andAustria were once ruled by one King. In what language did a new king speak with his
subjects when he moved from another place, for example Sigismund (1368–1437) who
became a king of Luxemburg first, then Hungary and Holy Roman Empire, and finally
Bohemia. Or Sigmund III (1566–1632) who first became King of Poland-Lithuania(1587) and then of Sweden (1594) and many other places. Do the kings and their followers have any impact on language politics or is it outside of the scope of this atlas?
The dynamic changes to the vernaculars in the region were brought about by the
relations between languages. For this reason, the atlas pays special attention to language contacts and linguistic areas. The attempt made in this atlas is very important andsignificant, but the influence of the linguistic hierarchy between rulers and the ruled, I
would argue, had an even greater impact on language dynamics, especially for the formation of a language. However, the atlas seems to leave this question out of its scope.
Partly, this is because it is simply very difficult to show these language hierarchies
on the map. An idea that might be worth pursuing is to create a digital version of theatlas, to enable viewers to select different topic-based layers to make them appear anddisappear on the map, such as information on minorities, linguistic areas, movementsof the king and aristocrats, and so on. For the printed version, different themed sheetsof polyester film could be used to overlay the base map.
History is a very important component of this project, but so far it is not so clear
why the atlas starts in the 9th century and goes to from 11th to 19th centuries. There aremany historical events to consider, such as the year 1848, which some scholars consider the start of modern history (other scholars think that the end of Thirty Years War
was the beginning of modern history, as well as “international relations” in politics). It
is likely that more maps are planned for the final atlas. Hopefully, the historically-important years of 1648 and 1848 will feature in the completed atlas to make the atlas
attractive to historians as well.
There is also a technical problem in the map of “Non-state minority, regional
and unrecognized languages, and written dialects in Central Europe, 19th to 21st centuries,” which puzzled me. One of the reasons that I was confused was that I could
not see the difference at first glance what the notes on the map were trying to say:
“2 Latgalian, Language name” and in next line “7 Osmanlıca, Extinct or Declining
Language.” I had to think for several minutes before figuring out that 7 Osmanlıca is initalics. Moreover, in the map, only the numbers are shown and it was very hard for me
to distinguish between 7 in italic and 7 in non-italic. Therefore, I would suggest more
visible differentiation of the numbers on the map.
On the same map, it will also be interesting to see how the map will deal withminorities who moved from one place to another. Terry Martin described how Poles,
amongst others, in Soviet Union moved from borderlands to inner areas in his magnificent book The Affirmative Action Empire (2001), which also describes how this experience was later used for massive deportations from one place to another within Soviet
territory in the case of Germans, Kalmyks, Chechens, and so on. In an extreme case,Turkey and Greece agreed to exchange their people in 1923 according to belief (Islamor Christianity) and regardless of the language they spoke. After this event, Muslims

7

Yukiyasu Arai

who spoke Greek in Turkey and Christians who spoke Turkish in Greek appeared. Will
this map reflect these population movements and impact as well?
Since the first birthday present that I requested from my parents at the age ofthree was a puzzle of the map of Japan, the maps in the Atlas attract me very much. So,
putting all the above comments aside, I am very much looking forward to see the resultof this project. As I outlined at the beginning, maps have the power to present a newimage of the world and tell interesting stories. Hopefully some part of my comments
will be reflected on in the completed Atlas.

8

Languages, Nation and States, Borderand Borderlands: A Critical Assessment
Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly

Introduction

Examining the role of languages in shaping borders and borderlands offers fundamental
insights into nation and state formations. In particular, languages themselves may act asagents of bordering processes and borderland formations, along with other concurrent
mechanisms that may have been used by states to mark borders. As is evidenced inTomasz Kamusella’s work-in-progress, and this Atlas of Language Politics in Modern
Central Europe,1 the role of language in shaping border and borderland processes isneither historically nor culturally constant. And, as this essay argues, this role appears to
be currently undergoing significant transformation.
Indeed, this Atlas is of great use to borders and borderlands scholars because it
documents the history of Central European languages and discusses the tug-of-war
between a state of dialect continua, that is a linguistic continuum across Central Europe,and that of isomorphism, suggesting a tight overlap between language, state, and nation.
In particular, from the perspective of border scholars this Atlas sheds light on whether
language is structural or of the domain of agents in the praxis of statehood, state border,
and borderland formation.
As suggested in this introduction of this volume, the progressive disappearance ofa continuum made up of a multitude of dialects “without borders,” but yet uniting andseparating all the people, communities, and regions of Central Europe, is a process thatstarted in the 19th century and is closely related to the concurrent nationalistic ideologyof European states and empires. It is best exemplified with the post 1919 creation of
Yugoslavian language (Serbo-Croato-Slovenian) in former Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia (Czech and Slovak) in former Czechoslovakia when both countries were formed.
What is significant, at the time, is the prominence language played in legitimizing statehood, something that is now being undone.
On the contrary to this history, in the contemporary period most educated individuals speak some English not for identity’s sake, but rather for convenience. An example
1 From now on “The Atlas.”9

Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly

is the rise to linguistic supremacy of English following years of domination of Frenchacross all European Union (EU) institutions. Today, French has lost its status as working language of the EU, yet it is not for reasons of identity or culture. It is simply thatpublic officials of all EU institutions conduct most of their business in English; it isremarkable because the European Union does not have a language policy per se, but
has only determined to limit the number of European tongues used and translated forthe purpose of European Union business to 20 official languages.
Another contemporary and equally striking example is that more Chinese people
are learning to speak English than there are students of the English language in thewhole of Europe. Are there political or border-related implications for the European
Union or for Chinese anglophiles? Probably no obvious ones because the evolutionof languages may be too complex to be perfectly correlated to politics, but there is ahistory of languages that is deeply rooted to identity and nation formation, and statedevelopment, that was fundamental to early 19th and early 20th century discourses,
and particularly to Western and Central European political discourses. Borders andlanguages then started to form spaces of national belonging, and were perceived asmechanisms of both inclusion and exclusion; a new idea then. Indeed, in general,people who spoke a specific language belonged to a community but with unclear links
to a specific identity or national belonging, and sometimes even to a specific state; thisis much less the case today.
While reviewing some of the assumptions and findings of the Atlas, this essay
discusses in turn the linguistic dimensions of nationality and statehood, the linguistic dimensions of state borders and borderland formations, and the implication of the
Atlas’s findings for our social scientific understanding of borders and borderlands. The
material presented in this chapter suggests that, as documented by this Atlas, while
language isomorphism has become prominent in central European countries such as
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia,
Montenegro, and Kosovo,2 and is therefore prominent across most European states,
and certainly most states members of the European Union, in a parallel process, overthe last quarter century, language has been displaced as a fundamental and defining
attribute of nationality and citizenship by a complex of embedded attributes that open
or close borders to their carriers.

The Linguistic Dimensions of Nationality and Statehood
Historically, language has been one of the defining attributes of nationality and statehood.
It was, in 19th century Europe, almost a visible attribute, and certainly a visibly defining
characteristic of a people or a nation; as evidenced by, for instance, the policies regarding
language grammar books and maps that were central tools of nation and state building.
These were policies of a few important states and empires but, as documented in thisAtlas, these were “competing” with nearly 150 spoken minority, regional languages andwritten dialects alive throughout Central Europe (see in this book the maps on “Non-State
2 See in this book “The Isomorphism Series.”

10Languages, Nation and States

Minority, Regional and Unrecognized Languages, and Written Dialects in Central Europe,
19th – 21st Centuries” and the “List of Non State Minority, Regional and Unrecognized
Languages, and Written Dialects in Central Europe, 19th – 20th Centuries.”)
The idea that language matters to nations and to states has its roots in the worksof German Romantics of the early part of the 19th century. At the forefront of theseRomantics was Herder, for instance, who assumed that language was the authentic
expression of an original culture, which allowed individuals to express profound sentiments and where tongue and soul met in cultural representation.3 Tony Judt and Denis
Lacorne suggest that his followers A. W. Schlegel and J. G. Fichte further expanded thislinkage from soul to language to culture. In “Discourse to the German Nation” (1808)
Fichte probably articulated best this form of Romantic linguistic nationalism in his
expressed disappointment that German people did not have a common political history
like the French.4 Instead, he asserted that their “unique asset” was their common andprimitive tongue, German. Schlegel’s contention that the German language was purer
than all other continental European languages, which had emerged from the various
regional languages across Europe and resulted from bastardisations of Latin, made aforceful impact then. His contemporary, Fichte, saw in German a primordial and defining element of the German people as well. He suggested that the German language
helped Germans become a modern united people who were able to embrace the valuesof the Enlightenment of justice, individual rights, and equality.
Germany, however, is an exception in that it is a federal state that is also monolingual. Indeed, it would be very difficult to argue that the borders of other federal states,
such as Belgium, Canada, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States, or even unitarystates, such as France or the United Kingdom, are fundamental expressions of theirunique cultural and linguistic origins. Indeed, these are examples of multilingual andmulticultural states, but France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, are also
examples of states where a dominant culture is conveyed by one language only, both inschools and in the media. And most laws, regulations, and public debates take place inthose dominant languages only.
Subsequent debates have questioned this Romantic link from soul to language
and culture to nation and statehood. Meinecke, for instance, suggested that a common
language may lead to a dominant culture—a political culture, primarily sustained bya pre-existing language.5 Renan, on the contrary, argued then that solidarity was thefounding factor in the formation of political nations. He also contended that nations
resulted from the historically reaffirmed desire to “live together.”6 For Renan the roleof language, or for that matter, the role of race, religion, ethnicity, or a community
3 See Herder (1772) The Treatise on the origin of language; Michael Foster (2002) Herder:
Philosophical Writings. Cambridge University Press. Cited in Tony Judt and Denis
Lacorne (2004) Language, Nation and State. Palgrave McMillan.
4 J. G. Fichte (1968) Addresses to the German Nation. Harper and Row, NY.
5 F. Meinecke (1970) Cosmopolitanism and the National State. Princeton; Princeton University Press.
6 E. Renan (1997) Qu’est ce qu’une nation. Paris; Mille et une Nuits.

11

Emmanuel Brunet-Jaillyof interests, is irrelevant; Renan’s best example were the UK and the USA, or Spainand South American states, which share a language but were not nations. What was
missing, in his view, was the “will to be together” in the sense also used by Arendt thatpolitics is the “will to act together,” where past choices are actualized daily.7
It is as a result of those romantic and national utopias of the 19th century thatcertain languages in the 1900 were re-asserted by governments to serve identity, nationalistic, and state goals. In some countries, by the turn of the 20th century there were
fully fledged linguistic policies that informed nationalist politics and lasted until thelater part of last century. Many regions or communities of Europe had their own language in the early part of the 19th century, but it is the nationalistic awakening for
instance of Hungary, Greece, or the Baltic countries, and others around them, that led
to the discovery and assertion of specific national languages, nations, and states during
the 20th century. Clearly, it is the works of folklorists and grammarians, then, which
was fundamental to the affirmation of certain national languages, while in the process
other local or regional tongues were slowly disappearing. A prototypical example isFrance, where Oc and Oil languages divided the land along a north-south invisible line
running from the city of Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast to the city of Basel in the Franco-German-Swiss borderlands region. Within the Oc language (southern) region, local
tongues such as Languedocian, Provencal, or Catalan seemed to have nearly vanishedby the end of the second part of the 20th century. In other words, history shows us that
there is no inevitable relationship between language and nation, or language and state,because language has to be claimed, produced, and disseminated explicitly as a nation
and/or state making tool in order for it to function as such. During the 19th century,
there was an ideology of one language and one nation, but there are nations and statesthat are multi-linguistic.
Furthermore, what is arguable, as is demonstrated in the works of Ferdinand
Brunot, namely the “History of the French Language and Literature,” is that the 19thand early 20th century emergence of the national French language is built up uponvanquished and demeaned regional tongues, but it is also possible that the dominationof French only crept in very progressively as other regional languages were possibly
spoken but not written as much, and also possibly progressively taught less as well.8
In the case of France, this process is documented with the generalization and mandatory schooling of children, that actually led to the progressive imposition of Frenchas the dominant primary school language in France by Minister Jules Ferry in 1879.
The imposition of French in primary schools opened the door then to a progressive
imposition of a unique language to a nation in the making. French, however, did notsuddenly impose itself, but only very progressively replaced regional and local patois
and other dialects; for a lengthy period of time French communal schools were unofficially bilingual in most regions, with the possible exception of the Île-de-France region.
Patois, however, were still spoken in the late 1970s and since then have re-emerged as
7 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 243.
8 Ferdinand Brunot (1905–1937) L’Histoire de la Langue Française et Littérature. Paris;
Armand Colin. Cited in J. C. Chevalier (1970) Les lieux de mémoire.

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Languages, Nation and States

many vectors of regional identity formation in Brittany, Alsace, Catalonia, Corsica,
Languedoc, and Provence, for instance, where they are re-appearing in high school
curriculum since the decentralization laws of the 1980s that downloaded aspects ofeducation policies to newly formed French regions.
More broadly, today across the European Union (EU), people speak national andregional languages; indeed, although there are about 35 national languages, many areoverlapping and used in more than two countries,9 as well as across EU member-states,
and a large number are local and regional languages. Overall, Europeans speak German (24%), French (16%), English (16%), Italian (16%), Spanish (11%), Dutch(6%), Greek (3%), Portuguese (3%), Swedish (2%), Danish (1%), and Finnish (1%).
However interestingly, according to Euromosaic, a European Commission-sponsoredresearch project on EU minority languages, there are over 48 minority languages inthe EU-12 member-states of the 1980s and 1990s.10 And while the number of minority
languages recognized by the European Commission is much smaller than the nearly
150 documented in this Atlas,11 research-in-progress has suggested about 90 minority
communities where language is the defining feature of ethnic identity across the current
EU’s 27 member-states.12
Indeed, the most common language is English. English is the mother tongue for
16% of the European population, but a further 31% of EU citizens speak it well enoughto hold a conversation. The second most-spoken language is German, the mother tongue
for 24% of EU citizens and spoken as a second language by another 8% of EU citizens. French comes in third, with 28% of the EU population speaking French. Italian
is fourth, spoken by 16% of the EU population, while Spanish is spoken by 15% of the
population. Apart from their mother tongue, about 75% of people in the Netherlands,
77% of those in Denmark, and 75% of those in Sweden can speak English well enoughto take part in a conversation. In Luxembourg, 86% of people are likely to speak Frenchwell enough to take part in a conversation; in Belgium, this is the case for 38% of the
population. In Luxembourg, 77% of people who do not consider German their mothertongue can speak it well enough to take part in a conversation. Other countries where
many people know German are the Netherlands (59%) and Denmark (49%). Compared
9 Armenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese,
Polish, Portuguese, Roma, Romanian, Ruthenian, Sami, Serbian, Slovenian, Slovakian,Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.
10 Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain,
Portugal, the United Kingdom, Greece.
11 See in this book the map “The List on Non-State Minority, Regional and Unrecognized
Languages, and Written Dialects in Central Europe, 19th – 21st Centuries.”
12 See for instance: http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/lang/languages/langmin/euromosaic/synthesis_en.pdf accessed June 4, 2006. See also, the web pages of Euromosaic. http://
ec.europa.eu/education/policies/lang/languages/langmin/euromosaic/index_en.html
accessed June 4, 2006. See also. http://www.eblul.org/ The European Bureau for Lesser
Used Languages documents and studies most used and lesser used languages in the European Union.

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Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly

to 1990, the proportion of people who can speak English well enough to take part in aconversation has increased in most member-states. The largest increases took place in
the Netherlands (15%), Greece (13%), and Belgium, Denmark, and Italy (9%). Finally,
when asked what two languages they find most useful in addition to their mothertongue, 69% of the EU respondents answered English, 37% French, and 26% German.
This linguistic diversity led the European Union to limit the number of official
languages to 20; with 20 official languages, the Union assumed that language will
never be a barrier for EU-published legal documents.13 This diversity is an important
aspect of the EU’s social and cultural dimension, and it is striking that so many citizensof Europe speak so many languages, although 47% speak only their mother tongue
and English. Also, while language is a significant feature of the culture of cross-borderregions, it is important to underline that it is not related to the emergence of cross-border regions in the European Union. Indeed, there were very few cross-border regions
prior to the 1980s, and those were multi-linguistic cross-border communities. Indeed,
what the above points to is a possible period of revival of regional and local languages;
Catalonia is such an example, where living and speaking Catalan is necessary in public
life—even if you are not originally from Catalonia—as demonstrated by René Pujol,
the regionalist leader of Catalonia, born in Andalusia, but a strong defendant of Catalan
language. In other words, language is still an attribute of nationality, but it is being
challenged by the diversity of languages spoken by Europeans today. Indeed, morethan half of Europeans speak more than two languages. All in all, the identity of theEuropean Union is not based on a single language, but on the strength of multiple
languages. In the 1990s, for instance, the European commissioner for Social Affairs,
Padraig Flynn, claimed that “Europe’s strength lies in its ethnic, linguistic and cultural
diversity.”14
In brief, the above illustrates the strength of the agency of language, the influenceof language policy in the complex processes of identity formation, and the linkages
to nation building and to statehood development, where language undeniably plays
an important role. What the above points toward is the strong and clear link fromnation-building to language policy; what is less clear is the linkage from language tonation and to statehood that is the very praxis documented by this Atlas, linking the
Dialect Continua to the Isomorphism of Language in Central Europe. Indeed, what
remains at stake is to link nationalist language policy to the bordering process andpolicies of states, a historical development that is fundamentally structural where established states, kingdoms, and empires mutually recognize their peers in the international
world system, but where the linguistic attribute or attributes of those constituting unitsof the international world system are nearly irrelevant, as argued below.
13 The 20 official languages are: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French,
German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish, and Swedish. Irish is an official (treaty) language and became a fullworking language on January 1, 2007.
14 Flynn, P. (1993) European Social Policy: Option for the Union. Green Paper. Commissionof the European Union: p. 14.

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Languages, Nation and States

The Linguistic Dimension of State Borders andBorderland Formations
Much more so than language or languages, it is clear that originally, it is borders thatare fundamental to the existence of the era of the modern state order, because borders
delineate the territorial possessions of princes, kings, and emperors. It is also because
an overarching international legal system, grounded in the 1648 peace of Westphalia,
established a world order where kingdoms and empires recognised each others’ sovereign use of violence over and within a given territory.
Delineations as dotted lines of inclusion or exclusions are profoundly entrenched
into the human psyche; indeed, delineations—in the forms of borders, boundaries,
frontiers, and borderlands are discussed in most ethical/religious traditions. Jewish,
Christians, Confucian, Islamic, and Liberal traditions, however, differ on how to ascertain borders; settlement may be acceptable, and purchase, inheritance, and secession
are also issues of contention. What is clearly unacceptable is conquest. Yet, it is conquest that best explains the establishment of borders, for instance, between Rome andthe rest of the world. Limites made of stone or turf delineated the Roman Empire andorganized it according to spatial hierarchies where cities, provinces, and regions played
an important role within those Roman borders.
It is during the Middle Ages that borderlands emerged as a rather vague systemof spatial organization that was primarily connected to the control of cities and their
immediate regions, alliances between fiefdoms, and where borderlands were the rather
unclear zones of differentiations between those areas. This was a historical period
where borderlands were particularly fluid and were really only zones of transitions
between settled communities; these were not unlike the many languages and written
dialects documented by this Atlas, where thirteen languages families (Albanian, Baltic, Finno-Ugric Finnic, Finno-Ugric Ugrian, Germanic, Greek, Indic, East and West
Romance, Semitic, North and South Slavic, and Turkic) link and divide Central Europe,
but rarely actually follow the boundary lines of established states in the 19th and 20th
centuries.15 The writing systems found in Central Europe, for instance, include Runes
that are present in most of the Nordic states but also the Lovat’ and Dnieper valleys,
as far inside continental Central Europe as Kyiv in Ukraine. Similarly, Armenian ispresent in Kyiv in Ukraine, and also in Lublin, Poland, Belgrade, Serbia, and half ofTurkey from Istanbul to Ankara and south to Konya. Hebrew is also found in Estonia,
Lithuania, Belarus, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Moldova, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. But,
none of those follow state boundaries and fulfill any language isomorphism in any
period detailed in this Atlas.
The international recognition of boundaries is a marker of the nascent modern
political order that resulted from the peace of Westphalia of 1648, a treaty that established the boundaries of sovereign and territorially demarcated states, and brought
together England, France, Dutch-land, German Princedoms, Muscovy, Poland, Turkey,
15 See the map in the Atlas “Central Europe’s Writing Systems in 2009 and in the Past.”

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Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly

Spain, and Sweden. This treaty marked a new era of nation-state building and of nationalism. From Westphalia onward, Kingdoms, Empires, and then States progressively
implemented nation-building policies without accommodating for local and regional
identities and cultures in borderland regions.
In the same vein, the idea of the frontier captures the challenge that borderlands
pose to nation-states. Indeed, the idea of frontier emerged in the earlier 20th century
with the works of the great American historian Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontierin American History (1920), a book describing the culture emerging from the progressive invasion and settlement of the North American continent by European andAsian immigrants. The frontier characterizes a cultural borderland where settlers areadvancing across lands and, as they are transforming the land, they are progressively
also being transformed by it. Turners’ views have been used to qualify the north frontierof China,16 for instance, and the German Bohemia language frontier with Czechs.
The Westphalia world order remains central to our understanding of territorial
authority because it underscores the authority states have to regulate all other types ofauthority top-down and it is an internationally recognized system, where a set numberof territorial units divide people and nations, and where the recognition by other states
forms the basis of a stable international relation system. This conception of the world
was stable until the 1919 Treaty of Paris, where George Clemenceau, David Lloyd
George, and Woodrow Wilson, redistributed authority the world over so as to serve
their imperial powers and possibly prevent another great war. However, a new and disturbing, yet unclear, idea was presented by the president of the United States, Woodrow
Wilson, when he suggested that people’s self-determination should affect fundamental
decisions. Despite being the watchword at the Paris conference, self-determination
only became one of the principles organizing the international world system thirty
years later during the arduous deconstruction of the great nationalist empires that had
emerged during the 19th century (British, French, Prussian, Austro-Hungarian, Italian,Portuguese, Spanish, and of the United States). It is during those years, in between thetwo great wars, that self-determination and a certain understanding of what nations
are, that crept into politics and fuelled some of the most ignominious discussions andconflicts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Indeed, because language was perceived as one of the keys to nationhood, some states, kingdoms, and empires instituted
policies of one language, one nation, and forcefully implemented linguistic claims. Butothers did not; hence, Belgium and Switzerland established their identity despite their
linguistic diversity, and Germany and Austria also developed distinct national identities
despite the same language.17
This idea of self-determination was a turning point in the stability of the Westphalia world order because it brought back nations and people in international relations
and, for instance, the number sovereign countries expanded from 51 present at the first
General Assembly of the United Nations in 1945, to 194 in 2007. Obviously, despite
16 Peter Hessler (2006) Oracle Bones. Harper Collins.
17 Piller, L. (1991) “Naturalization Language Testing and Its Basis in Ideologies and National
Identity and Citizenship” The International Journal of Bilingualism: p. 261.

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Languages, Nation and States

being rather vague, the idea of self-determination had to do with the rediscovery ofpeople and nations, and about the very nature of those people and nation’s culture, andpossibly of other attributes such as religion, and ethnic and regional belonging, andindeed also language. Woodrow Wilson suggested fourteen points that underscored theimportance of the freedom nations should have to determine the nature and institutions
that would represent them in the international system, a system that would guarantee
their political independence and territorial integrity whether these nations formed alarge or a small state. Obviously, central to the success of each nascent new country was
their international recognition and that of their borders.
During the first part of the 20th century, scholarship on borders and frontiers
focused on land settlement: ideal boundaries are not settled because they are geographical sites where humans cannot settle.18 Similarly, Holdich and Lyde categorize
boundaries according to their merits in nurturing or restraining tensions between settledcommunities, and possibly wars between states.19 Boundaries can have a function: for
instance, Brigham suggests they may provide economic balance, while Boggs argues
that their role that may vary in time and space to minimize tensions between states.20
Furthermore, Spykman brings back borderlands as places bound to limit power relations across boundaries, while Peattie and Jones suggest that borders are about state
power, but that international organizations have a role in limiting tensions.21
All in all, borders delineated sovereign spaces as determined by the peace ofWestphalia. During the Middle Ages, they were primarily about mediating spaces.
More recently, they were about buffering spaces. What is striking, however, is the limited discussion about the perception and role of borderland communities as organizedpolities with their own distinct culture and language. Yet, it is notable that students
of nationalist movements, i.e. movements that since the Treaty of Paris 1919 havecontested the hegemony of kingdoms, empires, and other central governments, which
in some instances are nation-states (such as France), and reasserted such attributes as
identity—ethnic, religious, cultural or linguistic—to the original nature of local-regional political institutions. Indeed, the very nature of internationally-defined bound18 Ellen Churchill Semple (1911) Influences of Geographic Environment (New York: Holt),
as cited in Julian Minghi (1963) “Review Article: Boundary Studies in Political Geography” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 53(3): pp. 407–428.
19 Holdich, Thomas H. (1916) Political Frontiers and Boundary Making. London, UK:
MacMillan; Lyde, Lionel William (1915) Some Frontiers of Tomorrow: An Aspiration for
Europe. London, UK: A. & C. Black.
20 Brigham, Albert Perry (1919) “Principles in the Determination of Boundaries” Geographical Review 7: pp. 201–219; Boggs, Whittermore (1940) International Boundaries: A
Study of Boundary Functions and Problems. New York: Columbia University Press.
21 Spykman, Nicholas John (1942) “Frontiers, Security and International Organization”
Geographical Review 32: pp. 430–445; Peattie, Roderick (1944) Look to the Frontiers: A
Geography of the Peace Table. New York: Harper; Jones, Stephen B. (1959) “Boundary
Concepts in the Setting of Place and Time” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 49: pp. 241–255; Jones, Stephen B. (1959) “Boundary Concepts in the Setting ofPlace and Time” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 49: pp. 241–255.

17

Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly

aries depends on their local political and cultural influence and their level of activism.
For instance, Keating argues that stateless nations are affirmed and affirming. Indeed,
these movements are often bounded to a specific territory, but their identity may also
result from a specific combination of language and religion or ethnicity.22 In highly
nationalistic and centralized states, it is not unusual to see the emergence of pluri-national, fluid, yet affirmed communities, such as Basques, Catalans, Provencal, Bretons,
Normans, Walloons, or Flemish people, among others, who change the nature of theborder policies and the borderland politics. The unifying and symbolic, yet dividing
and exclusionary, role of borders may be undermined by stateless nations that perforate
and weaken the integrity of state borders because of their reasserted national characteristics, whether they are ethnic, religious, social, economic, or linguistic.
According to Tony Judt’s Postwar, an outstanding history of post-World War II
Europe, two important events in the history of Europe have resulted in profound transformations of boundaries, borders, and borderlands. The first was when negotiation andinternational agreements over European borders culminated in the Treaty of Paris of
1919, the second episode takes place in 2004–2007, just prior to the expansion of theEuropean Union to include the former Soviet bloc Central European states of Bulgaria,
the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungry, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia,
and Slovenia.23 It is important to note that the role of language in mediating theseborder disputes and debates changed quite profoundly during the intervening years.
Margaret Macmillan underscores that both languages and maps were used by Poles,
Czechs and Slovaks during the 1919 Paris negotiations, when aggrandized regional
maps and linguistic claims were made on borderlands.24 This is also documented byCaitlin Murdock in Changing Places regarding the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands.25
But during the 2004–07 negotiation mediated by the European Commission, language
becomes irrelevant; instead, what is at stake is integration into the European Union andboundary settlements, a non-negotiable issue. The European Supreme court stepped in
to resolve the most complex cases regarding important natural resources.
How does one link language to nation and citizenship in cases where linguistic
requirements do not exist, or when they do but are challenged by stateless nations?
Indeed, today citizenship is less about identity and nationalistic belonging than it isabout rights. Some states, particularly nation-states, implemented rights and obligationsof citizenship that include language mastery, but this is not the case for all. For instance,
Ireland, Israel, Italy, or Sweden do not have any linguistic requirements as part of theirnaturalization process. Other countries, such as Germany or the Netherlands, do.
The above therefore illustrate how the agency of languages has had limited
historical and fundamental influence on boundaries and borders of states. But, it also
22 Michael Keating (2001) Plurinational Democracy: Stateless Nations in a Post-sovereignty
Era. Oxford University Press.
23 Tony Judt (2005) Postwar. The Penguin Press.
24 Margaret Macmillan (2003) Paris 1919. Random House.
25 Caitlin Murdock (2010) Changing Places: Society, Culture and Territory in the Saxon
Bohemian Borderlands. University of Michigan Press.

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Languages, Nation and States

reasserts the long-lasting influence of languages in the historical development of local,
regional, and national communities, and their frontiers and borderlands, which may theneither strengthen or weaken bordering processes among other factors still debated in
the literature. In other words, linking language to nation and to the bordering process ofstates, kingdom and empires, makes little sense but for the nationalist idealistic periodthat spans the second part of the 19th century and most of the 20th century; indeed,as documented in this Atlas, in 2009, most European member states have achieved or
aspire to achieve isomorphism of language. All in all, it is arguable that language isonly one attribute of citizenship among many, but then it is also important to underlinethat in most cases one-language, one-nation policies are not the exception. Finally, it isstriking that this Atlas mapping writing systems overlaps with the international boundary line of the European Union—that is, it follows the eastern boundaries of Finland,
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine,and Albania. The remaining exceptions are Greece, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Kosovo,
Serbia, Montenegro, and Vojvodina. The following section looks at the implications of
those findings for our understanding of borders.

Implications for Our Social Scientific Understanding of
Borders and Borderlands
Since September 11, 2001, borders and borderlands have come back to the center ofnumerous discussions in the media and in academia. Most of these focus on issues ofborder security, hence, also addressing current debates on the spatial and functionaltransformations of state’s territorial policies.26 Obviously, the forces at play are espe26 Anderson, James, O’Down, Liam, and Wilson, Thomas (2002) “Why Study Borders
Now? New Borders for a Changing Europe: Cross Border Cooperation and Governance”
Regional and Federal Studies 12(4): pp. 1–13; Andreas, Peter (2000) Border Games.
Ithaca: Cornell Studies in Political Economy; Andreas, Peter and Biersteker, Thomas(2003) The Rebordering of North America. New York: Routledge; Brunet-Jailly, Emmanuel (2006) Journal of Borderland Studies, Special Issue on Security and Borders 21(1);Brunet-Jailly, Emmanuel (ed.) (2007) Borderlands. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press;
Newman, David (2005) “The Resilience of Territorial Conflict in an Era of Globalization”
in M. Kahler & B. Walter (eds.) Territoriality and Conflict in an Era of Globalization.
Cambridge University Press; Newman, David (2006a) “The Lines That Continue to Separate Us: Borders in Our Borderless World” Progress in Human Geography 30(2): pp.
1–19; Newman, David (2006b) “Borders and Bordering: towards an Interdisciplinary
Dialogue” European Journal of Social Theory 9(2): pp. 171–186; Newman, David (2009)“Contemporary Research Agendas in Border Studies: An Overview” in Wastl-Water, Doris(ed.) A Companion to Border Studies. Ashgate Publishers; Paasi, Aansi (1996) Territories,
Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons; Ganster, Paul (2003) “Transboundary Environmental Cooperation: A Conversation on Issues in Research and Methodologies” Journalof Borderland Studies 18(1): pp. 51–60; D. Johnson and S. Michaelson (1997) Border
Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics. University of Minnesota Press. H. Van Houtum,
O. Kramsch and W. Zeirhofer (eds.) (2005) Bordering Space. Ashgate.

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Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly

cially visible in borderland regions where economic, social, cultural, and politicalasymmetries have either served, or come into conflict with, the security agendas ofstates. The current scholarship on borders and borderlands focuses our attention on thesubtle ways in which borders, as territorial markers, and functional—fluid vectors—ofdemarcation, may be transforming or evolving. It is in these spaces that languages playa fundamental role of bridging (or distantiating) humans across geographical hedges,
and enabling (or disenabling) solidarity in borderland regions and across borders. But
then what is the place of languages in this new era?
As I have suggested elsewhere,27 to understand borders and borderlands, social
scientists need to focus on lenses of analysis that underscore the tug-of-war between
agency and structural processes in the multi-scalar construction / de-construction ofstates, and their concurrent impact on border regions and policies. Certainly, in mostcases governments set borders, but borders and borderland processes (tensions, integration, and dis-integration) are a pointed reminder that international agreements are
not always enough to establish boundaries. Indeed, beyond international agreements
between governments, to understand borders we need to understand the complex,
intermeshed networks of government policy that interact to produce those internationalboundaries, establish border and borderland policies and functions, and their impact
on the people of those regions. National governments are key players, yet governing iscomplex and policy analysts note the increasing influence of complex policy processes
that sway what central governments can do in borders and borderlands.28 Among thosefactors, local political clout establishes linkages between communities and across international boundaries, and the local culture—i.e. ethnic, religious, linguistic, or a culturalsense of belonging—grounds those linkages across borders and borderland regions.
There are, obviously, many instances of borderland communities that have establishedlinkages when contiguous. Scholars describe borderland cultures, languages than span
across borderland regions, or policy network and symbolic regimes in North America
and in Europe.29 This Atlas documents such linguistic borderlands of Central Europe
very well: it shows for instance that in 2009 writing systems divide Central Europe into
Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek systems clearly. The only countries/regions that use morethan one writing system are in Crimea, Vojvodina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo.
Furthermore, this Atlas also shows that most Central European countries following aperiod of “hesitations” between dialectic continuum and isomorphism (1974–1989); allhave adopted isomorphic policies today.
Yet the context (of this linguistic achievement) discussed in the literature on
the global economy, new technologies, and free trade suggests a transformation of
the relations of states and other government tiers with market forces that make the27 Brunet-Jailly, Emmanuel (2005) “Theorizing Borders: An Interdisciplinary Perspective”
Geopolitics 10: pp. 633–649.
28 Hooghe, Liesbet and Marks, Gary (2001) Multi-level Governance and European Integration. New York: Rowan and Littlefield.
29 See articles by Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, Jaidev Singh, Patrick Smith, and Don Alper,
in Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly (2004) “The Canadian American Border” Journal of Borderland Studies 19(1).

20Languages, Nation and States

governing of regional and local borderland communities much more complex. For
instance, Sassen suggests new legal regimes “un-bundle sovereignties” and “denationalise territories,” which in turn have “disturbing repercussions for distributive justiceand equity.”30 Similarly, Brenner claims that state spaces are being recalibrated, whichleads regional-central government relations to be redefined from vertical, coordinative, and re-distributive, to horizontal, competitive and developmentalist.31 In the samevein, Keating, focusing on multination states in Europe, finds that along with constitutional reforms, an asymmetry of rights develops, which further differentiates local
and regional constituencies in a process where federal and centralized states seem toprogressively resemble each other.32 Castells, focusing on the information communication revolution, suggests a fundamental transformation of the relationship between
politics and market forces: “spaces of places” and “spaces of flows.”33 In other words,
a radical transformation of local—central relations, and relations with the rest of theworld’s economy with geopolitical implications, mark the current era.
The literatures comparing such transformations across international case studies
suggest that processes of multilevel governance have emerged that transform the natureof states. Government and politics retreat from equalization as they build on increasingly salient economic, social, and political differences of places. Decentralization anddownloading of policies progressively empower local and regional actors, and economic, social, and political asymmetries develop. Yet, these processes are particularly
visible in borderland regions where economic, social, and political asymmetries either
serve, or come in conflict with, the recent security agenda of states.
These top-down analyses of institutional changes and functional downloading,however, do not debate as effectively how local power and politics is also beingtransformed by these structural changes. Some borderland scholars focusing on theagency of borderlands document various trends where borders disappear as a resultof economic regions,34 or bend as a result of their far-reaching activities,35 as well as
bottom-up processes, such as agents resisting the newly implemented security agenda
for economic, cultural, or political reasons.36
Borders are not just hard territorial lines. They are structures/institutions that
result from bordering processes and are thus about people. And for most settled ter30 Sassen, S (1996) Losing Control. Columbia University Press.
31 Brenner, Neil (2005) New State Spaces. Oxford.
32 Keating, M. (1999) “Asymmetrical Government: Multinational States in an Integrating
Europe” Publius 29(1): pp. 71–86; Keating, M. (1999) “Les nationalites minoritairesd’Espagne face a l’Europe” Etudes Internationales 30(4) : pp. 729–743.
33 Castells, Manuel (1989) The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic
Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
34 Ohmae, Kenishi (1990) The Borderless World. New York, Harper.
35 Xiangming, Chen (2005) As Borders Bend: Transnational Spaces on the Pacific Rim.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
36 Brunet-Jailly, Emmanuel (2007) Borderlands. University of Ottawa Press; L. Amoore(2006) “Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror” Political Geography 25: pp. 336–351.

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Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly

ritories they are predominantly about inclusion and exclusion, as they are woven into
varied cultural, economic, and political fabrics. Bounded territories and borderlands
are the outcome of the continual interactions and intersections between the actions ofpeople (agency) within the constraints and limits placed by contextual and structural
factors (structure).
Thus, our understanding of borders is limited by what Yosef Lapid called the“Territorialist Epistemology.”37 Borders started as Roman Limites built of stone or turfin North Africa, Germany, and Britain because Romans viewed boundaries as markers
between sovereign states, and also enjoyed world hegemony. As a result, our understanding of borders has erroneously remained fixed on boundary lines. But, borders
are no longer only about territorially bounded authorities. They are not just sea andair ports of entry, or border crossings. Borders are also increasingly virtual or simply
impalpable (i.e. electronic borders, non-visible borders based on biometric identification and control, or electronic devices set to track flows of goods or people, such as
tracking financial transactions, spywares of all kinds). Etienne Balibar suggested thatborders are “vacillating, multiplied and reduced in their localisation, thinned out anddoubled, no longer the shores of politics but the space of the political itself.”38 In short,there is a growing literature that is now suggesting that we are developing an understanding of borders that goes beyond the “territorialist” and geopolitical intellectualand policy traditions.
Hence, our focus on bordering processes and policies is critical to our understanding of what borders are. This leads to a focus on the agency of borders, whichis the activities of social, economic, and political individuals (agents) and the processes of production and re-production of borders—the bordering and de-bordering
praxis—which are economically, politically and culturally embedded at a given time inhistory and within a given space. Then, borders result from competing production andre-production practices that are fundamentally rooted in individual actions, themselves
deeply rooted in economic, political, and cultural interests and motivations where language plays a role.
These individual actions result from competing cultural, economic, and politicalinterests and motivations however, and concurrently, these become fundamental to
our understanding of bordering processes. These individual actions are deeply rooted
in local culture and may reflect a variety of cultural characteristics of the borderland
regions: language, religion, ethnic belonging, territorial sense of belonging, all may
play a defining role. Similarly, immigration across international boundary lines affects
the very nature and culture of the newly settled borderland region. These are the praxis

37 Lapid, Yosef (2001) “Introduction” in Mathias Albert, David Jacobson, Yosef Lapid (eds.)
Identities Borders Orders: Rethinking International Relations Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
38 Etienne Balibar, 2004, “Europe as Borderland” The Alexander von Humboldt Lecture in
Human Geography, University of Nijmegen, November 10, 2004, Accessed June 2008 at
http://socgeo.ruhosting.nl/colloquium/Europe%20as%20Borderland.pdf

22Languages, Nation and Statesthat underlie and challenge international boundary lines and bordering processes—inaggregate they are human tidal waves against states!39
In a world of multi-identity, world border policies also adapt to filtering flows ofpeople, goods, and money by focusing on the very attributes embedded in cross-bordercarrier, whether human, good, or capital; language is only one of them and sometimes
it is not. Indeed, because of the importance of the security agenda for states such as
Canada and the United States, or the European Union, border security agencies havedeveloped a focus on attributes other than those found in traditional security policy,
such as linguistic ability, or ethnic, religious, or territorial sense of belongings, which
underline individual embedded security. Whereas languages are receding from theforefront of citizenship recognition, other specific attributes have become more relevant and these are generally collectively used in preclearance policies. These policies
were introduced originally in the 1950s between Canada and the United States, forinstance, and have been generalized since 9/11.40 In 2009, only two Canadian Airport
routes were not equipped to provide such a process: Saskatoon and Regina. All in all,over 11 million passengers are pre-cleared yearly just between Canada and the USA.
Indeed, as the knowledge of language is receding from the forefront of statehood, thebordering process now includes embedded attributes that both minimize the importance of the frontier, or the boundary line, and the location of the border and borderland,
and fundamentally define the carrier as an enabled or disabled border crosser.
Conversely, borders and borderlands have become geopolitical spaces of contentions where asymmetrical economic, social, cultural, and political forces are either
serving, or in conflict with, the agenda of central governments; further to this, theyshow the subtle ways in which borders as territorial markers are being transformed
into functional, fluid vectors of demarcation, which are profoundly dependent uponbordering and de-bordering praxis. From the perspective of security, local or regional
language is less important than specific inner attributes of residence, birth, or documented crossings. Hence, for instance, the recent rediscovery of passports in the UnitedStates, where less than 50% of the population carried one traditionally because speaking English in the local idiom was good enough to go to Canada and back until the late1970s. Today, borders remain territorial but the new filtering mechanisms are moreconcerned with the embeddedness of bordering processes. These are less territorial
because all flows of money, goods, or people have to carry within themselves specificattributes that determine their origins and their community of belonging rather thanbeing located within a given territory; and their embedded character becomes thenfundamental to their successful border crossing.41 For instance, in the 1970s, in prac39 David Spener (2009) Clandestine Crossings: Migrants and Coyotes on the Texas-Mexico
Border. Cornell University Press.
40 Government of Canada (2010) “Preclearance Act Review – Information Document”
Accessed July 2010. http://www.canadainternational.gc.ca/can-am/bilat_can/preclearance-​p­ recontrole.aspx?lang=eng
41 A good example of physical embeddedness of security is found in the technology used toread the iris of individual border crosser.

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Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly

tice one did need a passport to cross the Franco-German border, and today one does
not; today, a national identity card or driver’s licence is enough. It carries biometricidentification readings that further enhance the power of these requirements. These areindividualised and simultaneously virtualized. Indeed, with biometric identification the
carriers are pre-identified as welcome border crossers even if they only rarely need totravel across the boundary line. Their own bio-metrics physically embed their rights.
Biometric passports and North American Nexus Cards policies implement mechanismsof pre-clearance of individuals that carry those attributes, for example, if they are frequent crossers. Here again, the Atlas demonstrates effectively the great yet possibly
waning wealth of Central European dialects and regional languages. Indeed, someof the regions that offer the greatest number of minority and regional languages arelocated in the recently-formed states of Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, former
Yugoslavia (particularly Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia), and Greece. The current
praxis may indeed further enhance isomorphisms or be the dawn of a new era whereindividual agency, region, and community-building will also give birth to renewed linguistic innovation and praxis.

Conclusions
In the end this Atlas teaches us that languages are numerous and diverse in Central
Europe; it also demonstrates that this diversity, as an indicator of the dialectic continuum running across Central Europe, has given way to state isomorphism. Thanks to
its time serial maps, the Atlas shows that in the last century state policies of isomorphism may have reached their goal at a time when the relevance of language to statehood and nation building was vanishing because of the fundamental embeddedness
and complexity of statehood rights, where language was only a small defining factor.
The embeddedness of specific attributes was successfully implemented for goods andfinancial flows until 9/11, when such processes started to become primary requirements
for travellers. These new security mechanisms fundamentally transformed borders andborderlands because our geographical understanding of space and of precise boundaryline then became irrelevant. Belonging is not determined by where you come from orwhere you go, but by the very legal attributes embedded in an individual, the product,or the financial flow one is part of. Clearly, the characteristics embedded in an individual that can cross borders are related to specific state citizenships and the attributes of
their citizenship; for instance, British citizens today are the only ones in the world thatcan go to over 170 countries with no visa. These border crossing rights are fundamentally linked to broad definitions of citizenship-based rights, but based less so on placeof birth and sense of belonging, or language or religion or ethnic belonging. Hencethe 19th century idealistic characteristics have been replaced by much more specificindividual attributes such as place of residence, cumulative crossing history, or criminal
record, or again, skills, training, or work experience that confer border-crossing rights
to their carriers. Thus it is, the embeddedness of specific attributes that lead to an individuation of the right to cross borders. Language has lost its “visible” individualizing
and nationalising character, and its linkage to citizenship and statehood is much less24

Languages, Nation and States

obvious. Languages may become less regulated and return to their primary function ofcommunication, once again diversify along territorial and dialectical continuums, withEnglish linking foreign communities and people within the European Union. Language
may once again be woven into local and community identities in a multitude of complementary territorial and linguistic patchworks linking individuals to their immediate
community, yet differentiating individuals from their regional or national belonging.

25

空白ページEthnolinguistic Atlases: Theoretical andMethodological Reflections
Catherine Gibson

The Genre of the Ethnolinguistic Atlas

Kamusella rightly identifies the centrality of language in understandings of statehoodand national forms of identification in Central Europe in the past two centuries. However, there is also something very Central European about ethnolinguistic atlases as agenre of thematic cartography. In the mid-19th century, ethnolinguistic maps emerged
as a popular medium for visualising the sub-division of Central Europe’s inhabitants
into homogenous and self-contained ethnolinguistic groups. Ideas about ethnographic
mapping were exchanged and circulated around the region, usually through the mediumof German, inspiring efforts by individual cartographers such as Pavel Jozef Šafárik’s
1842 map of the Slavic languages and Heinrich Berghaus’ ethnographic and language
maps (Sprachkarte) in his Physical Atlas (1849), to imperial-sponsored projects in the
Romanov and Habsburg Empires to map the linguistic diversity of their inhabitants,
such as Petr Keppen’s (Peter von Koeppen) Ethnographic Map of European Russia(1851) and Karl von Czoernig’s Ethnographic Map of the Austrian Monarchy (1855).
Central European maps of this type have been the subject of several excellent scholarly
monographs over the past decade (Petronis 2007; Seegel 2012; Hansen 2015; Staliūnas
2016). Although these maps usually bore the title of “ethnographic map,” or rather theliteral translation of this term into one of the regional languages (Ethnographische Karte,Этнографическая карта etc.), the spoken language of the majority of inhabitants wasoften used as the basis of defining a region’s ethnic character. In practise, most of theseso-called ethnographic maps were thus technically speaking ethnolinguistic maps.
Kamusella’s Atlas can thus be positioned within this specific genre of thematic
cartography which has historically had a strong presence in Central Europe, both as aresult of and a contributing factor to the salient politicisation of language questions in theregion. In the short commentary that follows, I present a handful reflections on the Atlasin-progress which I hope will serve both as an appraisal of the work thus-far completed
and offer some suggestions for how the project might be developed. Moreover, by situating the Atlas in a broader historical and theoretical context, I attempt to draw attention
to some of the assumptions we often make when making or reading maps and bring a27

Catherine Gibson

heightened awareness of cartographic methods to the fore. In responding to the Atlas,
I draw mainly from the experience of my own research on 19th century ethnolinguistic
maps of the Romanov Empire, as I believe that many of the debates that preoccupied
cartographers then also yield useful insights and food for thought for contemporary
ethnolinguistic map-makers.

Mapping and the Linguistic “Spatial Turn”
Whereas many scholars have noted the political transformations affecting the classification and taxonomisation of languages in Central and Eastern Europe (Kamusella 2009;
Maxwell 2015), less attention has been paid to the role of maps in constructing anddisseminating ideas about the subdivision of dialectal continua into discrete languages.
As I have argued elsewhere, the use of cartography to visualise the various speech andwritten forms employed in Central Europe over the course of history has focused ourattention on the territorial distribution of the speakers of a language and on the borders
between different languages (Gibson forthcoming). In short, ethnolinguistic maps havebeen a driving force in spatializing our thinking about languages. For this reason, alinguistic overview of Central Europe presented through the medium of cartography
differs in crucial ways from the information presented about the region’s languages
in other formats, such as census records, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, grammars, andspecialist monographs. It is important to flag these points of divergence from the outset,
as they influence how we read and interpret the information conveyed through maps.
Firstly, printed maps present a static snapshot and are generally unable to convey information about variables that move. As a result, languages spoken by itinerant,
migrant, or nomadic populations often end up underrepresented in ethnolinguistic maps
because they cannot be attached to a specific territory. Whereas statistics about these
speakers can be tabulated in numerical form based on their presence within the bordersof an administrative space (e.g. n speakers in x district), their lack of a definable andfixed territory means that their presence is often not acknowledged on maps.
Secondly, ethnolinguistic maps do not generally indicate population density andthus tend to visually extenuate the presence of languages spoken over a wide geographical area by a small, low density population, and diminish the graphic impact of languages spoken by a large number of people concentrated in a more compact territory.
For the same reason, ethnolinguistic maps struggle to handle contexts where different
languages are spoken in cities and towns, compared to the areas surrounding them.
Usually, the scale of the map is not large enough to detail the linguistic composition
within a town or city. Kamusella acknowledges this limitation and attempts to address
this in several ways. For example, on Map A4 “Dialect Continua in Central Europe,c 1910” he prints the names of towns and cities in more than one language. He also
adds another layer of complexity by underlining the names of town inhabited by Turkic-speaking Armenian communities. Still, in most cases ethnolinguistic maps focus on
mapping those linguistic groups with an identifiable “geo-body” (Winichakul 1994).
Thirdly, another sociolinguistic situation that is tricky to translate into the cartographical medium concerns regions where the inhabitants are multilingual. Whereas

28Ethnolinguistic Atlases

Kamusella uses hatching in several instances to denote the presence of areas where
two or more dialect continua or languages areas overlap, this method of renderingsuggests the cohabitation of speakers of different languages, rather than bilingualism
or multilingualism. For instance, the region of Latgale in present-day eastern Latvia ispresented on the maps as an area of overlap between the Baltic and North Slavic dialect
continua and language areas. In practise, many people in this region are multilingualand speak several different languages in their everyday life. Moreover, there has been
centuries of contact between Baltic (Latgalian), North Slavic (Russian, Belarusian, Polish), and Germanic (German, Yiddish) languages and dialects in the region, which havemutually influenced one another. Despite this, the maps reinforce the idea of the region
as a meeting point of two dialect continua rather than an area of confluence.
Finally, all lines on maps have undergone a degree of simplification and “smoothing” (Monmonier 1991: 29). In the case of ethnolinguistic maps, this process of flattening and enclosing speakers muffles the messiness and ambiguities of linguisticclassification. For this reason, the future publishers of the completed Atlas should beurged to print the work no smaller than A4 size so that readers may fully engage withthe details of the maps.

The Cartographic Language
In tandem with the development of ethnolinguistic cartography as a popular genre of
demographic mapping in 19th century Central Europe, practitioners sought to establish
common cartographical conventions for the graphical visualisation of demographic
statistics. As the geographer Mark Monmonier reminds us, maps depend on a “graphic
code for storing and retrieving data in a two-dimensional geographic framework”(Monmonier 1991, 18). The international statistical congresses held between 1853–76
attempted to create guidelines and conventions for measurement, notation, and expression with the aim of achieving a scientific universalism (Palsky 1999; Randeraad &Molnár 2011). Most map-makers today, including amateurs who might not be directly
familiar with these international cartographical standards, unconsciously subscribe
to a set of graphical conventions to denote certain elements and characteristics when
making ethnolinguistic maps. The key to decoding the map is explained on the map’slegend, however most of these tropes have become so widespread that readers are able
to retrieve a substantial amount of information from ethnolinguistic maps even if thetext on them is written in a language or script they do not understand.
Some features of the ethnolinguistic cartographical language include:• a geopolitical base map with city names and sometimes also administrative and/or borders marked to orientate the reader;• each linguistic group is assigned its own colour or shade, which is used to denote

its territorial distribution;• proximate colours are used to suggest linguistic proximity or kinship between

groups, while contrasting colours are used to suggest a greater degree of linguistic difference;

29

Catherine Gibson• cross-hatching or some form of shading indicates the presence of mixed regions;• linguistic areas and their speakers are bordered, either by thin delineating lines

surrounding the shaded areas or by the contrasting colours used for neighbouring groups, which clearly mark the transition point from one linguistic area toanother.

Just because this cartographical language has become ubiquitous does not meanthat we should be uncritical in the ways that we use it. By bearing in mind the 19th
century origins of much of our thinking about ethnolinguistic mapping, we become
attuned to how many of these linguistic cartographical tropes serve to emphasise differences rather than similarities between peoples and languages. The use of solid lines orcontrasting colours to demarcate linguistic groups risks attributing a degree of solidity
and impermeability to linguistic borders, which is at odds with the complex sociolinguistic reality that Kamusella is trying to convey. The visual similarities between thelines delineating linguistic groups and those signifying state administrative boundaries
convey the impression that these linguistic frontiers are somehow solid and observable,or that crossing a linguistic threshold is like traversing a state border crossing. Whilevisualising difference and drawing borders between the in-group and out-group may
have been on the horizons of imperial or state administrators and nationally-minded
intellectuals, it is important that the Atlas also provides a platform to challenge, or atleast to question, this.
I will illustrate some of the dangers of this approach with a more detailed commentary on Map C1 “Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State in Central Europe,
1931,” which particularly stood out for me. The three Baltic states are represented on
the map as nation-states, with Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian as official languages,
respectively. Yet the map masks the linguistic diversity which existed within thesestates at the time; while these three languages many have been the official languages,
they were not spoken (especially not on an everyday basis) by a significant proportionof the population. Moreover, minority legislation in Estonia and Latvia in the 1920s
protected the interests of speakers of languages other than the official state language.
The idea that Estonia and Latvia were moving towards the nationalist ideal of the“isomorophism of language, nation, and state” can thus be challenged, especially inthe 1920s. In addition, from the Lithuanian perspective, interwar Lithuania was not astate that fulfilled the isomorphism of language, nation, and state as Poland “occupied”
their national capital of Vilnius (Wilno) and the surrounding area. It strikes me that inmapping the coincidences of language, nation, and state, Kamusella presents a rather
simplified overview of the linguistic situation in the region that inadvertently risks
supporting the very nationalist claims that he is trying to subvert.
Overall, I strongly recommend that each map in the finished Atlas be accompanied by an extensive commentary, similar to the format used by Paul Robert Magosci
in his Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (1993). This is vital to historicize the
myriad of changes Kamusella is drawing attention to and also to point out importantnuances and subtleties that it was impossible to include in maps for the technical reasons outlined above. Possible questions that could be brought to the attention of the30

Ethnolinguistic Atlases

reader in this commentary are: How have perceptions of what constitutes a language ora dialect at any given time changed? How are the borders between languages definedin a particular time and space? How have the relationships between different languages
been conceived and changed over time? What are the key turning points, in Kamusella’s opinion, in the chronological history of languages in Central Europe and how dothese correspond to the periodisation of the maps?

The Politics of Ethnolinguistic Maps
Benedict Anderson famously argued that the census, map, and museum are three institutions of power that had a profound impact on the way that states imagined the people they ruled over, the geography of the territory, and legitimated their right to rule(Anderson 1991). In doing so, Anderson reminds us that maps do not merely illustrate or
represent, but are constructed objects. These artefacts are used by actors to disseminate
and legitimise specific ways of viewing the world (Harley 2002). The ways in whichmaps functioned as powerful instruments for restructuring territories and drawing borders was especially visible in Central Europe following World War I. At the Paris Peace
Conference, national delegations used maps to propose plans for the division of Central
Europe into new territorial units, whose frontiers were to correspond (in theory) to ethnolinguistic borders in accordance with the principle of “national self-determination”(Wilkinson 1951; Crampton 2006).
Kamusella’s Atlas, it seems to me, has two political points of engagement. On
the one hand, Kamusella sets out to challenge teleological nationalist accounts of the“awakenings” of nations and the development of primordial national languages. Thelong temporal scope and wide geographical area of coverage of the map plates enables Kamusella to make a convincing argument about how languages are constructed,
disintegrated, and reconstructed over time. On the other hand, alongside challenging
nationalist narratives about the historical development of languages in Central Europe,
Kamusella uses the Atlas to draw attention to non-official regional languages andso-called dialects, such as his native Silesian, Samogitian, Võro-Seto, and Latgalian,
to name but a few examples. The Atlas thus functions as an instrument for promoting
awareness of minority, regional, local, lesser-used, or “micro-languages” (Dulichenko
1981) that have often been overlooked or deliberately omitted from nationally orientated accounts. Moreover, through his mapping of the distribution of the Romani
language in Central Europe, Kamusella draws our attention to an ethnolinguistic groupthat is usually marginalised from historical accounts of the region and “silenced” from
ethnolinguistic maps (Harley 1988). For this reason, the Atlas will surely gain the attention of regional language activists across Central Europe. Whereas there have beenother atlases that map Central Europe’s minority and/or “endangered” languages (e.g.
Moseley 2010), one of the strengths of Kamusella’s work lies in the way he challenges
readers to question the commonplace hierarchy of “a language” and “a dialect” bydemonstrating the historical and political contingency surrounding these labels.

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Catherine Gibson

Concluding Remarks
All map-makers are faced with many difficult choices. Not only must they decide what
to include and exclude, the scale and frame into which this data is projected, and thecartographical language (conventions, techniques, and symbols) used to communicate
the desired information, but they also face the practical challenges of finding skilled
draftsmen, printers, publishers, and sources of funding for this expensive type of publication. Kamusella sheds light on some of these trials and tribulations of being a ethnolinguistic map-maker in his Acknowledgements and chapter on “The Concept of the
Atlas.” At the end of the day, every map is a compromise between the cartographer’svision and the need to work within the constraints imposed by the media.
Despite some of the theoretical and methodological pitfalls of ethnolinguistic
cartography detailed above, I strongly support Kamusella’s decision to employ cartography as the format through which to present an extensive overview of the historyof the development of languages in Central Europe. Kamusella’s previous work on
the trajectories of Polish, Czech, Slovak, and Magyar in the 19th and 20th centuries
ran to more than 1000 pages (Kamusella 2009); a similarly-detailed study on all the
languages and dialects in Central Europe over the last millennia is unfeasible. Just as
cartographers in the 19th century marvelled at the power of maps as a methodologicaltool to synthesise and accessibly communicate their many years of statistical, linguistic, and ethnographic labour, Kamusella’s Atlas aggregates an enormous amount ofdata into an informative, analytical, and very visually appealing series of images, whichshould be accessible and of interest to a broad audience.
By shining a spotlight on the methods and sources used, the decisions taken andpaths not followed, the dialogue on the Atlas-in-progress presented in this volume takes
important steps towards demystifying the map as an object of unquestionable authority.
It reminds us that maps are crafted objects, and a technology of mechanical reproduction that shapes our spatial discourses about the sociolinguistic landscape.

Errata on Estonia and Latvia
Errors in a mapping project of this scope are inevitable. In the collaborative spirit
behind Kamusella’s endeavour, I take the liberty of drawing attention to some minor
mistakes so that they can be corrected in the completed version of the Atlas.
• Map A1 “Dialect Continua in Central Europe, 9th century”: Semigallians is themore common spelling in English rather than Zemgalians.
• Map A2 “Dialect Continua in Central Europe, c 1050”: Semigallians are missing
from this map.
• Map A3 “Dialect Continua in Central Europe, c 1570”: The Bishopric of Piltene
was also part of Denmark between 1560–1585.
• Map A4 “Dialect Continua in Central Europe, c 1910”: The Pale of Settlement
did not include the eastern tip of Courland province; the territory of Latgale inwestern Vitebsk province should be included within the Slavic dialect continua(to indicate the presence of Russian, Polish, and Belarusian dialects); all of the32

Ethnolinguistic Atlases

Baltic and North-West provinces should be hatched as part of the North Slavic
dialect continua, similar to the shading of all of the Habsburg Empire as part of
the German dialect continua.
• Map A5 “Dialect Continua in Central Europe, c 2009”: There is a substantial
presence of North Slavic in many parts of Estonia and Latvia; Rīga (not Riga) is
the Latvian name for the capital city (also applies to Maps B1, B2, C1, C2, C3,
D1).
• Map B2 “Central Europe’s Writing Systems in 2009 and the Past”: Was Hebrew
ever an official script in Courland?
• Map C1 “Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State in Central Europe, 1931”:
The name of the eastern region of Latvia should read Latgale not Latgalia; I
would argue that Lithuania was “aspiring to fulfil” isomorphism due to the conflict with Poland over Vilnius/Wilno during this period.
• Map C3 “Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State in Central Europe, 2009”:
Latgalian is not an official language in Latvia in its spoken form, even in theregion of Latgale. It is only recognised in the State Language Law as a historical written variety of Latvian. Võro/Seto is likewise not an official language in
Estonia.

References
Anderson, Benedict (1991). “Census, Map. Museum,” from Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition. London: Verso: 163–185.
Crampton, Jeremy W (2006). “The Cartographic Calculation of Space: Race Mapping and theBalkans at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.” Social & Cultural Geography 7, no. 5:
731–752.
Dulichenko, Aleksandr (1981). Slavianskie literaturnye mikroiazyki: voprosy formirovaniia irazvitiia. Tallinn: Valgus.
Gibson, Catherine (forthcoming). “Shading, Lines, Colors: Mapping Ethnographic Taxonomies
of Western Russia, 1851–1875.” Nationalities Papers.
Hansen, Jason D (2015). Mapping the Germans: Statistical Science, Cartography & the Visualisation of the German Nation, 1848–1914. Oxford University Press.
Harley, J. B (1988). “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe.” Imago Mundi 40: 57–76.
Harley, J. B (2002). The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. John
Hopkins University Press.
Kamusella, Tomasz (2009). The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central
Europe. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
Magocsi, Paul Robert (1993). Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Ser: A History of East
Central Europe, Vol 1). Seattle WA: University of Washington Press.

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Maxwell, Alexander (2015). “Taxonomies of the Slavic World since the Enlightenment: Schematizing Perceptions of Slavic Ethnonyms in a Chart.” Language & History 58, no. 1:
24–54.
Monmonier, Mark (1991). How to Lie with Maps. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Moseley, Christopher, ed. (2010). Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, 3rd edn. Paris, UNESCO Publishing. Online version: http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/
atlas [Accessed 28 March 2017].
Palsky, Gilles (1999). “The Debate on the Standardization of Statistical Maps and Diagrams(1857–1901). Elements for the History of Graphical Language.” Cybergo: European
Journal of Geography.
Petronis, Vytautas (2007). Constructing Lithuania: Ethnic Mapping in Tsarist Russia, Ca.
1800–1914 (Ser: Stockholm Studies in History, Vol 91; Södertörn Doctoral Dissertations,
Vol 21). Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis and Södertörn: Södertörns högskola (distributed by Almqvist & Wiksell, Stockholm).
Randeraad, Nico and Molnár, Debra (2010). States and Statistics in the Nineteenth Century:
Europe by Numbers. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Seegel, Steven (2012). Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of
Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Staliūnas, Darius, ed. (2016). Spatial Concepts of Lithuania in the Long Nineteenth Century.
Boston: Academic Studies Press.
Wilkinson, Henry Robert (1951). Maps and Politics: A Review of the Ethnographic Cartography of Macedonia. Liverpool Studies in Geography. Liverpool: At the University Press.
Winichakul, Thongchai (1994). Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

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Language in Central Europe’s History
and Politics: From the Rule of cuius regio,
eius religio to the National Principle ofcuius regio, eius lingua? 1
Tomasz Kamusella

The Multilingualism of Central Europe

There are many definitions of Central Europe. For the sake of this chapter it is the middle
one-third of the continent, or the zone bordered by Italy and the German-speaking polities of Germany and Austria in the west and the multilingual Russian Federation in theEast. I exclude Scandinavia from the purview for the sake of brevity (Magocsi 2002: xi).
The general linguistic shape of Central Europe as we know it today emerged
between the arrival in the 10th century of the Hungarians (or rather a coalition of Finno-Ugric and Turkic ethnic groups) in the Danube basin and the 14th century founding of
the Romance-speaking principalities of Walachia and Moldavia (that is, the predecessorsof modern-day Romania and Moldova). In the middle of the region the East Romance
languages of Moldovan and Romanian, alongside the Finno-Ugric one of Hungarian,
are spoken from the Black Sea to Austria, which is part of the German-speaking zone.
This multilingual belt separates the North and South Slavic dialect continua (that is, geographically continuous zones within which language changes gradually from locality tolocality; the cleavage of mutual incomprehensibility occurs where two continua meet).
At present the former is identified with Polish, Czech, Slovak, Belarusian, Ukrainian,and Russian, while the latter with Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin,
Macedonian, and Bulgarian (Schenker and Stankiewicz 1980; Dulichenko 2011).
At Central Europe’s southern end terminating in the Mediterranean and the Bosporus, the Indo-European isolates (mutually incomprehensible languages, with no cognates) of Albanian and Greek rub shoulders with Turkish, which is part of the Turkic
dialect continuum extending to Kazakhstan, Central Asia, and eastern China. In the
1 Motoki Nomachi and Catherine Gibson kindly commented on this chapter, while its
prose was kindly streamlined by Michael O Gorman and Catherine Gibson. Obviously all
remaining infelicities remain the sole responsibility of the author.

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Tomasz Kamusella

North, the sole surviving Baltic languages of Lithuanian and Latvian are squeezed
between the North Slavic dialect continuum and the Finno-Ugric language of Estonian.
All the mentioned idioms belong to the Indo-European family of languages, with the
exception of the Finno-Ugric ones and Turkish (Plasseraud 2005).

Religion, Language and Identity
Until the modern times (18th – 19th centuries) people in Central Europe chose to express
their identity through religion rather than language. Non-scripture (“traditional”) religions disappeared in the region in the late 14th century when Christianity was adopted
in Lithuania. On the other hand, the northward expansion of the Ottoman Empire fromthe 14th to 17th centuries spread Islam across the Balkans. During the 14th and 15th
centuries, expulsions and persecution caused Ashkenazim (Germanic-speaking Jews)
to leave Western Europe for the middle and northern sections of Central Europe, andSephardim (Romance-speaking Jews from the Iberian Peninsula) for North Africa andthe Balkans. Afterward, the majority of the world’s Jews (those who confessed Judaism) lived in Central Europe until the Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany during
World War II.
All three monotheistic faiths come complete with their Holy Writs and respective
traditions of literacy, most visibly expressed by various scripts (alphabets) employed
to write in the “sacred languages.” Accordingly, Jews write in the Hebrew charactersof the Hebrew-language original of the Pentateuch and Muslims in the Arabic letters of
the Arabic-language original of the Koran. In the case of Christians, those who pay allegiance to the pope in Rome (Catholics) write in Latin (Roman) letters of the Vulgate,or the official Latin translation of the Bible. The Uniate, or Greek Catholic, churches
are an exception to this principle, most employing the Cyrillic-based Church Slavonicin liturgy. Those who adopted Christianity from Byzantium, and at present consider the
ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople (Istanbul) the highest authority in the Orthodox Church, were allowed a greater degree of multilingualism. Greeks (and earlier
also Orthodox Slavs, Albanians and Turks under Constantinople’s direct ecclesiasticalcontrol) write in Greek letters of the ancient Greek-language original of the New Testament. In the mid-9th century the Slavs of Greater Moravia (today’s Czech Republic,
Hungary, southern Poland, and Slovakia) adopted Christianity from Byzantium, but
in the Slavic language of Salonika written in a specific script, Glagolitic. In scholarly
literature this language is called Old Church Slavonic, as named by the linguist andAustrian civil servant Barthlomäus (Jernej) Kopitar in the early 19th century. In the10th century Cyrillic (developed in the Bulgarian Empire) replaced Glagolitic and thelanguage, known as Church Slavonic (and whose corpus includes some local dialectfeatures), remains the language of liturgy among Orthodox Slavs (mainly in the eastern
Balkans, Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine) to this day.
Regarding the issue of literacy, faith, and identity in the context of Central Europe,
it is necessary to mention Armenia and Georgia, which were the first two states to adopt
Christianity as their state religion in the early 4th century. This event was later coupledwith the devising of the specific Armenian and Georgian scripts, which were used in the36

Language in Central Europe’s Historytranslation of the Bible into Armenian and Georgian. With time the Georgian Church
became part of the Orthodox Church, while the Armenian (Apostolic) Church retained
its singular character and organization. Christianity and the respective traditions of literacy, complete with their specific scripts, let the Armenians and the Georgians survive
as separate ethnic groups when their lands were overrun by Byzantium, Muslim Arabs,
Zoroastrians, Islamic Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia. The subsequent destruction of the two Armenian kingdoms in the 11th and 14th centuries at the hands of
Byzantium and the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, respectively, drove waves of Armenian
refugees out of their homeland. They established themselves as a significant diaspora
in Central Europe. Most lost their native language and spoke the Turkic idiom of Kipchak, and later, other languages dominant in Central Europe. Until the modern times,
however, they wrote all these languages in Armenian characters.
In the Catholic areas of Central Europe, due to the rise of distinctive and durable
polities and reaffirmation of the secular power in them, people began to write in the
new administrative languages of German (12th – 13th centuries), Czech (14th – 15th
centuries), Polish (15th – 16th centuries), and Croatian (16th – 17th centuries) using
the Latin script. The only exception was northwestern Croatia’s Adriatic littoral, where
the Catholic Glagolitic-based tradition of Church Slavonic liturgy survived until themid-20th century.2 In the Orthodox zone of the region, Romanian began to be used for
official purposes in the 16th century and was written in Cyrillic until the mid-19th century. The Cyrillic-based Slavic idiom of Ruthenian (seen as the common predecessorof Belarusian and Ukrainian) was an official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania(coterminous with present-day Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine) until the end of the
17th century. In the Ottoman Empire the Ottoman language (Osmanlıca or Old Turkish)and Persian were employed for administration and literary endeavors, respectively, andpredictably both were noted down in Arabic characters. In the 15th century the needarose among Bosnia’s Slavophone Muslims to write in Slavic, which was done in the
Arabic script. Slavic publications in Arabic characters written and published there until
the early 1940s are perceived today as the beginnings of the Bosnian language.3 Muslim Tatars who settled in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the 14th century followed
the same practice of using Arabic letters to write in Ruthenian and Polish. In a similar
fashion, ethnic Greeks and Albanians professing Islam wrote down their idioms in the
Arabic script too. Likewise, from the 15th century when Jews developed their written tradition in the Germanic language of Yiddish and the Romance idiom of Spanyol(Ladino), they wrote both in Hebrew characters.
In the Catholic segment of Central Europe the development of new written languages in the 16th and 17th centuries is connected to the Reformation, which called forthe translation of the Bible into the ethnic languages of the faithful. Later, the Catholic
Church also adopted this approach in an effort to reform itself and reverse the spread of
2 In the 14th and 15th century (until the 1430s), the Glagolitic script was used also in
Bohemia.
3 There was also a tradition written in a specific Cyrillic script “Bosančica,” created in
the 10th or 11th century, which can be regarded as the beginnings of a Bosnian literary
tradition, as well.

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Tomasz Kamusella

Protestantism. Hence, Protestant and Catholic translators made Hungarian into an official language in the Ottoman fief of Transylvania, ushered into being Estonian, Latvian,
Lithuanian, and Slovenian, revived Czech and Croatian, and inspired Slovak. This last
language was actually formed in the first half of the 19th century, mainly under the
influence of the novel force of nationalism (Burke 2002; Fine 2006).
The splitting of the north and center of Central Europe between Catholicism andProtestantism (mainly Lutheranism) was also reflected in scriptural practices. Catholics
employed the Antiqua type of the Latin alphabet, while Protestants the Gothic type
(Black Letter, Fraktur). It was not an absolute norm, as Catholic German-speakers andCzech-speakers employed Gothic, while Calvinist Hungarian- and Polish-speakers
used Antiqua. In the nationalist 19th century the use of Gothic was gradually limited
to the German language, though some Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian books were
published in Gothic until the interwar period.
Another effect of the Counter-Reformation was an attempt to bring the Orthodox population of the Catholic polities of Poland-Lithuania and historical Hungary(coterminous with today’s Hungary, Slovakia, southwestern Ukraine, northwestern
Romania, northern Serbia, and northwestern Croatia) into a union with the Catholic
Church. As a result, Uniate (Greek Catholic) Churches were founded. They accepted
the authority of the pope but kept their Cyrillic-based Slavonic liturgy. In the case of
Transylvania’s Uniate and Orthodox Romanians, this change facilitated the adoptionof Romanian as their language of liturgy, increasingly written in Latin characters. Significantly, today the Ukrainians perceive their Greek Catholic Church as their national
Church (Barbour & Carmichael 2000; Myhill 2006: 88–90).

Modernity, Language and Nationalism
At the beginning of the 19th century the invading Napoleonic armies brought the ideaof nationalism to Central Europe as part and parcel of modernization expressed throughthe centralization of state administration and transportation networks, industrialization,
popular free elementary education, and conscript military service and suffrage for all
males. German and Italian nationalists worked out the specifically Central European
form of nationalism that is aptly qualified with the adjective “ethnolinguistic.” Thisideology entailed that all the speakers of various dialects construed as a single language
form a nation. In turn, the contiguous area inhabited by the members of such a linguistically defined nation should be organized into their nation-state. The success of theKingdom of Italy (1861) and the German Empire (1871) built in this way from a varietyof polities encouraged the rise of various ethnolinguistic national movements acrossCentral Europe. These movements endangered the existence of the multiethnic empiresof Russia, Austria, and the Ottomans, between which the region was then divided (Gellner 1983; Hroch 2000; Fishman 1973; Kamusella 2001 and 2004).
In the Habsburg hereditary lands (that is, the Austrian Empire after 1804), German replaced Latin as the official language at the close of the 18th century. However,an outcry against this imposition in the Hungarian half of the monarchy led to the reinstatement of Latin in the Kingdom of Hungary, where it remained the official language

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Language in Central Europe’s History

until the mid-19th century. The 1867 restructuring of this empire into Austria-Hungary
made Hungarian the official language of the Kingdom of Hungary. In the Austrianhalf of the Dual Monarchy German remained the most important language, but in the
non-German-speaking crownlands (administrative regions) and communes Croatian(Serbo-Croatian), Czech, Polish, Slovenian, and Cyrillic-based Ukrainian (pressure
exerted in the 1850s for coaxing Ukrainians to write and print in Latin characters eventually failed) were introduced as official, co-official, and auxiliary languages. In the
Hungarian half of the empire only Croatian was recognized as official in the kingdom’s
Croatian lands, though Serbian (Cyrillic-based Serbo-Croatian), Slovak, Romanian,and Cyrillic-based Rusyn were grudgingly accepted as media of education and pastoral service. In Bosnia, occupied by Austria-Hungary in 1877, apart from German,variously named Slavic (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbo-Croatian) was employed in administration and print, in Latin characters for Catholics (identified as Croatians), in Cyrillic
for Orthodox (identified as Serbs), and in Arabic characters for Muslims (identified as
Bosnians).4
In the western provinces of the Russian Empire German and Polish were used as
official languages. The former on the territory of present-day Estonia and Latvia, andthe latter in what today is Lithuania, Belarus, and central Ukraine. The developmentof the Russian language began with Peter the Great’s early 18th century decree to use
modernized Cyrillic (Grazhdanka or civil script modeled on the Latin script, or its
most popular form today, Antiqua) for the production of non-ecclesiastical books in
Church Slavonic. In the second half of the 18th century, Russian written in Grazhdanka
was standardized on the basis of Church Slavonic and the dialect of Moscow. The
use of Russian for literary pursuits and administration spread in the first half of the
19th century. In the second half of the century Russian replaced German and Polishas the sole official language in the western provinces. A ban was placed on Belarusian and Ukrainian because they were construed as “unworthy peasant” dialects ofthe (Great) Russian language. The fledgling use of Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, andCyrillic-based Moldavian (Moldovan) in elementary schools was tentatively allowed in
1905. Then, German and Polish were reintroduced as languages of instruction as well
(Haugen 1966; Hroch 1985 & 2000).
In the Ottoman Empire the population was divided into non-territorial confessionally-defined millets. Thus, Orthodox Greek-, Slavic-, Turkic-, and Albanian-speakers
belonged to the Orthodox millet and their Muslim counterparts to the Muslim millet.
The administrative language of the latter millet was identical to the empire’s official
language, Ottoman written in the Arabic script. In the Orthodox millet antiquated Byzantine Greek dominated, though some use of Church Slavonic was reluctantly acceptedin low-key liturgy and elementary schools in some Slavophone areas. In the 18th century the Sultan replaced local Romanian rulers in Walachia and Moldavia (southern andeastern Romania) with more loyal Greek administrators from Constantinople, which
4 One has to keep in mind that the Muslims started to publish their non-Croatia-oriented
newspaper in the Latin script. In addition, they also published a non-Serbia-oriented
newspaper in Cyrillic.

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Tomasz Kamusella

led to the replacement of Cyrillic-based Romanian with Byzantine Greek as the official
language. The Ottomans reversed this arrangement in the 1820s when the Greek War of
Independence led to the founding of an independent Greece (1832), where Byzantine
Greek replaced Ottoman as the sole official language.
The period from the 1810s to the 1910s was marked by the retreat of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans due to the rise of autonomous and then independent(predominantly) Christian nation-states, encouraged by the West and Russia. Bulgarian, Montenegrin, and Serbian national leaders who used Cyrillic to write in Church
Slavonic, but also in vernaculars mixed with Church Slavonic, marked their ethnic
difference via-à-vis one another by referring to the tradition of medieval polities andOrthodox patriarchates erected in them. These patriarchates had continued to exist after
the incorporation of the polities into the Ottoman Empire in the 14th century. The first
Balkan nation-state founded purely on the basis of language was Albania (1913), or thepolity for Albanian-speaking Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics.
In the 1880s the movement for the replacement of Byzantine Greek (Katharévousa, or “purifying language”) with modern-day Greek (Demotic) unfolded in
Greece. Between 1917 and 1974, first Demotic and then Katharévousa were announced
successively as the official language, before the former won the contest, apparently
definitively. The two varieties of Greek did not diverge into two different languages
because the linguistic difference was not translated into an ethnic cleavage but a political one. Greek conservatives sided with Katharévousa and liberals with Demotic. On
the other hand, the liturgy in Greek Orthodox churches continues to be said in theancient Greek of the New Testament.
Likewise, to this day Church Slavonic is preserved as the language of liturgy in
Slavic Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches. Modern vernacular-based Slavic languages written in Cyrillic were initially reserved for temporal matters. This new trend
spread from Russia to the Balkans, where the tsar reaffirmed his international roleas the protector of Christians (the Ottomans agreed to this in a treaty of 1774). The
codification of Bulgarian followed the Russian model of mixing elements of Church
Slavonic and the Slavic dialects of eastern Bulgaria, Serbian, as employed in Serbia
and Montenegro, also followed this pattern of mixing Church Slavonic with the local
Slavic dialects of Belgrade and Cetinje. However, in the second half of the 19th century
the idea of creating a common Serbo-Croatian language for the Slavic-speakers in thewestern half of the Balkans won the day. Nevertheless, Catholics were to write thislanguage in the Latin script and Orthodox Christians in Cyrillic. The Albanians were
undecided whether to write their own language in Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic characters, or a mixture of those before they settled on the Latin alphabet in 1911.
The significance of ethnic languages written in their specific scripts for separate(usually national) identification rose with the spread of popular literacy. Although fullliteracy was achieved among Central Europe’s German-speakers and Czechs by the1870s, elsewhere in the region the process was completed only after the founding of
the communist regimes in the wake of World War II. Earlier, literacy was a privilege ofthe narrow elite (often only its male half), meaning the nobility (later the intelligentsia
and middle class), “professional Ottomans” (Muslim administrators) in the Ottoman

40

Language in Central Europe’s History

Empire, and clergy. In the Catholic zone of Central Europe the elite employed Latin,
the knowledge of which spread eastward among Orthodox adherents due to the riseof the Greek Catholic Churches. The 18th century disavowal of Church Slavonic wasaccompanied with the elevation of Latin and German as the languages of learning andprogress in Russia. Besides, beginning in the 18th century French emerged as the language of cultured discourse across all of Europe. It remained the main sociolect ofCentral Europe’s and Russia’s aristocracy and richer nobility until their destruction
as a cohesive group during and after World War I. The modernization of the Ottoman
Empire, which commenced in the 1840s, also made French the language of choiceamong the elite there.
Due to this modernizing process in the Ottoman Empire, beginning in the 1860s
Sephardim accepted French as the preferred language of instruction in their schools.
Its influence was such that they gradually switched from the Hebrew to Latin script for
writing and printing in their ethnic language of Spanyol. On the other hand, despite thebans on the use of Hebrew characters in legal documents and contracts in Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire, Ashkenazim stuck to their Hebrew script for writing in
Hebrew and Yiddish. Simultaneously, thanks to the emancipation of Jews in Germany
and Austria-Hungary and to the establishment of Russian-language elementary schools
for Jews in Russia, German and Russian alongside Polish and Hungarian became theirmain languages of interethnic communication. However, the Dreyfus affair (1894) inFrance convinced many Jews that full assimilation would never be possible in Europe.
As a result, at the turn of the 20th century the Jewish national movement developed. One section revived Hebrew as a living language and proposed to establish a
Hebrew-speaking Jewish nation with its national polity in Palestine. The other groupmade Yiddish, reviled even by some Jews as a “corrupt jargon,” into the national language of Ashkenazim who wished to stay in Europe as a distinct but accepted minority.
The Holocaust annulled the latter option and paved the way for the modern Hebrew(Ivrit)-speaking Jewish nation-state of Israel (1948).
Interestingly, wishing to bridge the linguistic gap between Ashkenazim andSephardim, and later with an eye to providing a language of neutral communication, L.
L. Zamenhof from the town of Białystok (then in Russia, today in Poland) developed
Romance-based Esperanto (1887), the most successful artificial language ever. It could
have become an official language of the League of Nations but France intervened to stopsuch a development. In the interwar period Esperanto was hugely popular in Germany
and the Soviet Union until the 1930s when Hitler and Stalin banned this language andpersecuted Esperantists, who were accused of “rootless cosmopolitanism” (Kamusella
2008: ch 3; Okuka and Kren 2002; Todorova 1992; Tornow 2005).

Linguistic Nation-States
In the course of the Great War, the German and Austro-Hungarian occupation administrations banned Russian and discouraged the use of Cyrillic in Russia’s western
provinces. Russian was replaced with German and Polish as official languages. Then,
practically for the first time in history, Belarusian (in Cyrillic and also in Latin charac-

41

Tomasz Kamusellaters), Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, and Yiddish (in the Hebrew script) were employed
for local administration and as languages of instruction in elementary and secondary
schools. This practice encouraged the coalescence of ethnolinguistic national movements with the use of which Berlin and Vienna hoped to create a buffer zone between
postwar Russia on the one hand, and the German Empire and Austria-Hungary on theother.
Interwar Period
The collapse of the Central Powers, coupled with the breakup of Austria-Hungary andthe revolutionary turmoil in Russia, opened up Central Europe for a political reorganization. The Western Allies, pressured by delegations of various national movements,
agreed to create ethnolinguistic nation-states in this region, that is, polities for nations
speaking their specific languages, not shared by any other nations or polities, namely:
Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary (or one-third of the former Kingdom of Hungary), and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (since
1929, Yugoslavia). The sole non-national polity of interwar Central Europe was theFree City of Danzig, predominantly inhabited by Germans. Short-lived independent
Belarus and Ukraine were divided between Poland and the Soviet Union. However, theadministrative division of the latter polity was based on ethnonational union republics
with their specific languages as official ones. Thus, Ukrainian was the official languageof Soviet Ukraine. Soviet Belarus was exceptional in the fact that in addition to Belarusian and Russian, Yiddish and Polish were also used there as co-official languages until
1938. Hence, three scripts were in use in interwar Belarus: Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Latin.
The Soviet authorities consciously used language as an instrument of politics andsocial engineering. For instance, in order to prevent the rise of a Turkicphone Muslim
nation that extended from the middle Volga to Crimea and the Caucasus, and from what
today is Kazakhstan to Central Asia, which would have endangered the demographically dominant position of the Russians, the Bolsheviks banned the long-establishedArabic script-based Turkic languages of Tatar and Chaghatai employed for widespreadcommunication among Turkic Muslims. The use of Tatar was limited to Tatarstan andelsewhere it was replaced with the brand-new languages of Azeri, Bashkir, Chuvash,
Crimean Tatar, and Kazak, developed on the basis of local dialects. Chaghatai disappeared completely and in its stead Karakalpak, Kyrgyz, Turkmen, and Uzbek werecreated. Furthermore, in 1923 the Arabic script was replaced with the Latin alphabet
for writing these languages, as the latter was perceived to be a “tool of progress.” In the
1930s Cyrillic superseded the Latin script for writing these languages. Thus, in reality
the changes in script made the Soviet Union’s Turkic Muslims unable to peruse earlier
writings in “reactionary” Arabic script-based Tatar and Chaghatai.
The developments in Central Europe and the Soviet Union convinced Turkish
nationalists that their cause could be served only by giving up the Arabic-speaking areasof the Ottoman Empire and converting the Turkish-speaking core into a Turkish nationstate. The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed in 1923. Ottoman (Osmanlıca), repletewith numerous Arabic and Persian linguistic loans, was replaced with vernacular-based
Turkish and intensively purged (“reformed”) of non-Turkic elements especially in the42

Language in Central Europe’s History

1930s and 1940s. Impressed by Soviet linguistic and social engineering, the Arabicalphabet was replaced with the Latin script for writing Turkish in 1928. This event
triggered the Cyrillicization of the Latin alphabets of the Turkic languages in the Soviet
Union due to the Kremlin’s fear of opening a channel of Latin-script based communication that would allow for the flow of unwanted ideological influence from Turkey to theSoviet Union. Interestingly, like in Greece, the ongoing competition between Ottoman
and radical reformist Turkish was not translated into a new ethnolinguistic cleavage,
but rather the former became associated with pro-Islamic conservatives and the latterwith westernizers (the army, liberals and socialists) (Estraikh 1999; Grenoble 2003;
Ioffe 2003; Kamusella 2006; Shevelov 1989; Smith 1998).
The normative imperative of one language for one nation-state was of suchimportance for statehood legitimization in Central Europe that the par excellence multiethnic polities of Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes
proclaimed Czechoslovak and Serbo-Croato-Slovenian as their respective official andnational languages. The two languages were a constitutional fiction as in reality, both
Czech and Slovak were used in Czechoslovakia, while bi-scriptural Serbo-Croatian and
Latin script-based Slovenian were used in the Kingdom. After the 1929 proclamationof Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croato-Slovenian became eponymously known as Yugoslavian.
The ethnolinguistic nation-states engaged in various (frequently extralegal) policies that, through voluntary or forced assimilation of ethnolinguistic minorities, were to
produce ethnolinguistically homogenous populations in these polities. The remaining
linguistic difference was frowned on as a possible source of irredentism and delegitimization of statehood. In this atmosphere the two-century-old tradition of grassroots
multilingualism in the vicinity of the Slovak capital of Bratislava disappeared, wherepreviously predominantly illiterate Croatian-, German-, Hungarian-, and Slovak-speaking peasants had lived next to one another in the region’s villages. In order to cross the
linguistic divide they exchanged their children for a couple of months at a time so thatthey would become fluent in all the languages spoken by neighbors (Liszka 1996).
World War II
The interwar division of Central Europe into ethnolinguistic nation-states was briefly
overturned during World War II when German and Russian replaced in their official
capacity other languages in the northern half of the region. The breakup of Czechoslovakia and the founding of an independent Slovakia with Slovak as its official language
meant the end of Czechoslovak. Likewise, the breakup of Yugoslavia into Croatia andGerman-dominated Serbia spelt the end of Yugoslavian. Croatian was declared the former polity’s official language and Cyrillic was banned there. By the same token, theCyrillic-based language employed in wartime Serbia became known as Serbian.
The Communist Years
After 1945 all Central Europe, with the exception of Greece, found itself either in theenlarged Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), or in the Soviet bloc (Bulgaria,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania), or, at least initially, in the Soviet
sphere of influence (Albania and Yugoslavia, which remained communist polities

43

Tomasz Kamusellaeven after they broke with Moscow). During and after the war until 1950, vast borderchanges and huge multidirectional ethnic cleansing were effected. About 47 million
people were expelled or displaced. The most visible result of this exercise was thedisappearance of German-speaking communities in Central Europe and of German as
the region’s leading language of interethnic communication.
The Holocaust perpetrated by Nazi Germany claimed the lives of 5 million Jews
and 0.5 to 1 million Roma (Gypsies). The recurrent waves of anti-Semitism in the Soviet
bloc sent most of the Jewish survivors either to Israel or the West. The ethnolinguistic
distinctiveness of the Roma tended to be denied in the Soviet bloc. They were defined
as “lumpenproletariat” (the lowest, most degraded stratum of the working class) andtheir traditional way of life was destroyed through forced sedantization (Bakker &Kyuchkov 2000; Magocsi 2002: 186, 189–193).
In this way, an unprecedented level of ethnolinguistic homogeneity was achievedin Central Europe’s nation-states. The non-national polity of the Free City of Danzig
was removed from the map. The postwar constitutional construct of the Czechoslovak
people consisting of the two fraternal nations of the Czechs and the Slovaks was seenby the latter as an instrument of the perpetuation of Czech dominance over Czechoslovakia. In 1969 the polity was transformed into a bi-national federation with genuine full Czech-Slovak bilingualism. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, annexed by theSoviet Union, were made into union republics with their respective languages accorded
official-cum-national status; unusually, the Cyrillic script was not imposed on theselanguages.5 However, the ideological drive to mold the Soviet Union’s inhabitants into
a potentially global-wide communist people (or nation) with Russian as their “international language” (“interlanguage”) meant the swift (and often forced) linguistic Russification of the three Baltic republics in certain spheres (Barbour & Carmichael 2000;
Grenoble 2003; Isayev 1977).
Neither the constitutional fiction of Yugoslavian nor the unitary character of thestate was possible to maintain in postwar Yugoslavia. The polity was federalized. Slovenian and the newly formed Cyrillic-based language of Macedonian were excluded fromthe commonality of Yugoslavian and made into the official and national languages of
the Yugoslav Republics of Slovenia and Macedonia, respectively. The officially-named
Serbo-Croatian / Croato-Serbian language was retained as the common language forother republics, but it was customarily written in Latin characters in Croatia, in Cyrillicin Serbia, and in both scripts in Bosnia and Montenegro. However, the dialectal baseof this language slightly differed in all the four republics, as provided by law. Furthermore, in Serbia’s Autonomous Province of Kosovo Albanian was made co-official,while in Serbia’s other Autonomous Province of Vojvodina this status was shared by
Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, and Rusyn. A similar Soviet-style autonomous region
was established for Hungarians in Romania, with Hungarian as a co-official language,
but it was short-lived (1952–1968) (Greenberg 2004; Lučić 2002).

5 In the Soviet Union, prior to World War II, all the official languages were written in Cyrillic with the exception of Armenian, Georgian and Yiddish.

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Language in Central Europe’s History

After Communism
Post-Soviet States
The fall of the communist system in 1989 also spelt the end of communism as a viable ideology of statehood legitimization. These events precipitated the breakup of thestudiously non-national communist polity of the Soviet Union into 15 ethnolinguistic
nation-states, including Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Ukraine in
the case of Central Europe. The transformation into ethnolinguistic national polities
was most successful in the case of the three Baltic republics where no official status
was accorded to Russian, though Russian-speakers account for as many as one-third ofEstonia’s and Latvia’s inhabitants. In Ukraine, an Autonomous Republic of Crimea wasfounded with Latin alphabet-based Crimean Tatar and Russian as co-official languages.
In Belarus, after the period of 1991–1995 when Belarusian was the sole official andnational language, Russian was made into a co-official language, though de facto it isthe dominant language, which effectively de-Belarusified the polity. Thus, at present
Belarus is the only Central European nation-state that does not draw statehood legitimization from language. De-communized Sovietism functions as the legitimator of thisstate.
In Moldova Cyrillic was replaced with the Latin script for writing Moldovan,
which for all practical reasons made it identical with Romanian. This, coupled witha drive to unite the country with Romania, alienated Russian-speakers concentrated
east of the Dniester River. With Russian help, in 1992 these Russian-speakers waged asuccessful secessionist war and founded the unrecognized polity of Transnistria. As in
the case of Belarus, Transnistria draws its legitimacy not from language but decommunized Sovietism. The citizenry is defined as a “multinational people” (reminiscent of
the Soviet Union’s Soviet people/nation), while Cyrillic-based Moldovan, Russian, andUkrainian were made into co-official languages. Significantly, all of them are united by
the same script, perhaps, reflecting the Kremlin’s 2002 decision to impose Cyrillic forwriting the languages of the “peoples” (nations, ethnic groups) native to the territory of
the Russian Federation.6
In an effort to reestablish the territorial unity of Moldova, autonomy was granted
to Transnistria and Moldovan (constitutionally kept separate from Romanian) remains
the state’s official language. In addition, the autonomous region of Gagauzia was established for the Gagauzes, or Turkic-speaking Orthodox Christians, whose language isclose to Turkish. In the Soviet times Cyrillic was used for writing Gagauz, but today
the Latin script is employed for this purpose. In Gagauzia Russian is recognized as aco-official language.

6 This federal law was passed to prevent the implementation of the Autonomous Republicof Tatarstan’s decision to supplant Cyrillic with the Latin alphabet for writing Tatar. In
doing so,Tatarstan wanted to emulate the script change already implemented in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.

45

Tomasz Kamusella

The Fate of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia
In 1993 Czechoslovakia split into the two ethnolinguistic nation-states of the Czech
Republic and Slovakia. Interestingly, only then, for the first time in history, was Czech
made into the sole official language in the Czech lands (earlier it shared this role eitherwith German or Slovak). The breakup of Yugoslavia was followed by bloody wars andsuccessive waves of ethnic cleansing. Eventually, between 1991 and 2008 the processspawned seven polities, including six clearly ethnolinguistic nation-states. The lattergroup is composed of Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia.
In order to conform to the normative paradigm of ethnolinguistic nationalism the previously common language of Serbo-Croatian was split into Latin script-based Bosnian
and Croatian, Cyrillic-based Serbian, and bi-scriptural Montenegrin.7 In reality about
half of the publications produced in Serbia are in Latin characters. Latin script-based
Serbian is used by liberal and pro-European Serbs, while the official Cyrillic version is
employed by nationalists and conservatives.
Bosnia does not conform to the usual paradigm of the ethnolinguistic nation-stateas this polity is composed of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska (not to be confused with Serbia proper). In the former entity Bosnian andCroatian are employed, both written in Latin characters, while Cyrillic-based Serbian
is used in the latter entity. Initially, in Bosnia, religious rather than linguistic difference(or a religious heritage ascribed from above in the case of non-religious persons) wasused to differentiate between Bosnians, Croats and Serbs, construed, respectively, as
Muslims, Catholics, and Orthodox. It is only nowadays that the ethnoreligious difference is translated into the linguistic one.8 Similarly, Serbia is not a model of an ethnolinguistic nation-state either because of its Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, where
after the split of Serbo-Croatian, Croatian was added to the four co-official languages
alongside the new statewide language of Serbian.
Kosovo is the sole non-ethnolinguistic nation-state spawned by the breakup of
Yugoslavia and the only recognized one of such a character in today’s Central Europe.
The polity’s de facto official and dominant language is Albanian and Kosovo’s Albanian-speakers define themselves as Albanians. Hence, Kosovo is a second Albaniannation-state, which is in clear breach with the unspoken principle of Central Europe’s
ethnolinguistic nationalism that the speakers of a single language form a nation, whichshould live in its own single nation-state. The Kosovan constitution of 2008 accords
the status of a state co-official language to Serbian, while at the local level Bosnian,
Romani, and Turkish also serve as co-official languages.
However, a linguistic difference that could be translated into a Kosovan language
does exist. There are two Albanian dialects, Tosk spoken in southern Albania and7 Between 1920 and 2008 six languages emerged out of official Serbo-Croato-Slovenian[Yugoslavian], namely: Bosnian, Croatian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Serbian andSlovenian.
8 Sometimes Bosnians and their language are referred to as “Bosniak” and the label “Bosnian” is reserved for Bosnia’s entire citizenry, irrespective of ethnic, religious, or linguistic
difference.

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Language in Central Europe’s History

Gheg in northern Albania and Kosovo. Although two-thirds of Albanians speak Gheg,
standard Albanian, codified after the war in communist Albania, is steeped in Tosk.
Nowadays standard Albanian is increasingly interlaced with Gheg or even replaced by
it in publications produced in Kosovo. However, most agree that more space should bemade for Gheg in the standard, rather than transform Gheg into a separate language ofKosovan (Greenberg 2004; Kamusella 2008; Lučić 2002; Pipa 1989).
FutureIt is worthwhile remarking that, as in the case of Czech and Slovak, all the four post-Serbo-Croatian languages are mutually comprehensible, although it must be rememberedthat Czech and Slovak stem from two different dialectal bases, while the post-Serbo-Croatian languages from the very same dialect. However, with time the separation
reinforced by different linguistic practices and state borders may be translated into
gradual incomprehension among these languages’ speakers born and raised in the newstates. This phenomenon is already clearly visible among the younger generation ofCzechs and Slovaks who were not exposed to the bilingualism of federal Czechoslovakia. The same happens in the case of Serbs and Macedonians, as the latter in the paststudied Serbo-Croatian and had few problems understanding the Serbian variety of thislanguage. On the other hand, at the political level, such processes of differentiation canbe denied or opposed, usually from outside. For instance, Romania (alongside many
Romance-speaking Moldovan citizens) does not recognize the separateness of Moldovan, considering it to be nothing more than Romanian with a handful of regionalisms
and Russian linguistic loans thrown in. Bulgaria takes a similar stance vis-à-vis Macedonian, considering it Bulgarian written in the Serbian-style Cyrillic (cf Velichkova
1992).
In the two successive rounds of European Union (EU) enlargement in 2004 and2007, ten Central European linguistic nation-states joined the EU. As a consequence,
their respective national languages also acquired the status of official Union languages.
These languages are: Bulgarian, Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, and Slovenian. Prior to 2007 only two scripts were in official
use in the EU, Latin and Greek. With the accession of Bulgaria, Cyrillic was added tothis repertory.
EnglishThe intensive development of economic, cultural, and social relations, alongside tourism, in postcommunist Central Europe made it necessary for agreements to be madeon effective means of communication, something that was not foregone due to half acentury of enforced isolation in the Soviet bloc, which tended to enforce nationallyconditioned monolingualism. In the 1990s English emerged in the role of the main language of interethnic communication in the region. Central Europe’s inhabitants decided
on this language for pragmatic reasons, as English is currently the sole language ofworldwide communication. On the other hand, they shunned the region’s two former
lingua francas, German and Russian, as irretrievably tainted by their association withthe atrocities of nazism and communism, respectively. French, the pre-World War II

47

Tomasz Kamusellasociolect of the region’s elite and a popular lingua franca in Romance-speaking Romania and elsewhere in the Balkans even in the communist period, now also lost this status
to English.
The privileged position of English as the language of wider communication inCentral Europe was recently fortified by the founding of the transitional international
English-language administrations in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the stream of refugees
from both polities to the United States and the United Kingdom. Today these erstwhile
refugees and their offspring, who speak English with a native fluency, regularly shuttle
between their countries of residence and origin. This phenomenon is repeated on aneven wider scale in the case of about 3 to 4 million inter-EU migrants from Central
Europe, who after 2004 have moved mainly to the English-speaking polities of theUnited Kingdom and Ireland. Other old EU members, geographically much closer toCentral Europe than the United Kingdom or Ireland, namely Germany, Austria, France
and Italy, elected to keep their job markets closed to Central European migrants (which
they could do until 2011). Perhaps this doomed any remaining possibility of reviving
French and German as languages of interethnic communication in Central Europe.

Non-State Languages
RomaniIn the wake of the fall of communism Roma intellectuals and leaders from many Central European countries began to cooperate in order to address the dire economic andsocial plight of the Roma, but also to codify their Romani language and to create aRomani national movement. The first efforts to publish in Romani were undertaken in
the interwar Soviet Union (in Cyrillic) and in communist Yugoslavia (also in Cyrillic).
Two-thirds of the world’s 10 to 12 million Roma live in Central Europe, mainly in the
Balkans, Romania, Hungary, and Slovakia. They usually adhere to the dominant religion in a given polity, that is, in Central Europe, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity,
Islam or, more rarely, Protestantism. Likewise, they tend to write in the script of thenational language of the polity where they live, that is, in the Cyrillic, Greek, or Latinalphabet. Despite many centuries of persecution at least half of the Roma continue to
speak Romani. Besides the language, they use their specific customs, way of life, andendogamy to maintain their ethnic difference. The traditional orality of their culture
stands in the way of making Romani a written language. Various codifications of Romani, based on different dialects, and conducted using the Cyrillic, Latin, or Greek script
have been created in Central European polities. Interestingly, the Romani Wikipedia isavailable in Latin characters and the Indian script of Devanagari, which is a reflectionof New Delhi’s 1970s policy to recognize and support the Roma as one of India’s
peoples (ethnolinguistic nations).
There are no regular schools with Romani as the medium of education, yet it isgenerally recognized as a minority language. At present the only place in the world
where Romani is employed as an official language is the municipality of Shuto Orizari
within the administrative borders of the Macedonian capital of Skopje. But in line with
the Kosovan constitution, further municipalities in Kosovo may adopt this language as48

Language in Central Europe’s History

co-official. Romani is an Indo-European language of the Indic branch which comprises
the Indo-European languages of India and Pakistan.
National Minority Languages
The construction of ethnolinguistic nation-states in Central Europe required the ethnic
and linguistic homogenization of populations in such polities. The next step to achieving this goal was to spread the officially adopted standard of the national language,
which necessitated the liquidation of dialectal variety. Administrative measures andother social factors including universal popular education, the recruitment of massconscript armies, and ultimately the pervading of society by the truly ubiquitous mass
media of radio and television were mobilized to this end. However, frequently changing borders, persisting historical or religious legacies, and persecution triggered bylinguistic and ethnic difference (perceived as unjust by the target group) repeatedly
nullified state-directed efforts to homogenize the population and to eliminate dialectal
differences, especially so in the borderland regions, which changed hands most often.
With Soviet approval, Central Europe’s communist regimes used ethnolinguistic
homogenization as an instrument for their own legitimization. After the fall of communism democratization allowed for increasingly freer expressions of surviving ethnolinguistic and dialectal difference, which often began to be deployed for political ends
due to the fact that the linguistically defined national polity remained the foundation of
the political organization of the region. Bowing to this revival, and under the pressureof the West (expressed in the form of the French-organized Balladur Plan), most Central Europe’s states in the 1990s contracted bilateral treaties with neighboring statesin which they agreed to recognize and protect national minorities ethnolinguisticallyassociated with the nation of the neighboring polity. The European Council completed
this process with the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities,
which entered into force in 1998.
Stateless National, Ethnic Minority, Regional and Immigrant Languages
These steps fell short, however, of recognizing and reaffirming the languages of nations,or of ethnic, religious, and regional groups who could not be directly identified withany state. The problem was slowly recognized and addressed by the European Council
through the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages that entered into
force in 1998. An NGO, the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages (EBLUL),
founded in 1982 in Dublin (initially to canvass for making Ireland’s co-official Celtic
language of Irish an EU official language, an aim achieved in 2008), strove to support
the recognition and use of these languages, and closely cooperated to this end with theEuropean Union and the Council of Europe.9 However, when everything is said anddone, the actual decision to recognize such a language rests exclusively with the stateon whose territory it is spoken. Not surprisingly, many Central European nation-states,
having invested so much in the building and maintaining of ethnolinguistic homogeneity (or its illusion), are reluctant to grant such recognition.
9 This Bureau was disbanded in 2010.

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Tomasz Kamusella

In Central Europe small ethnic and regional languages abound in the borderlands of the former Kingdom of Hungary, all of them Slavic, namely: Cyrillic-based
Rusyn (today in eastern Slovakia, eastern Hungary, southwestern Ukraine, Serbia’s
Vojvodina, and eastern Croatia), and Latin script-based: Banat Bulgarian (mainly inwestern Romania and eastern Serbia), Bunjevac (Serbia’s Vojvodina and southern
Hungary), Čakavian and Kajkavian (western and north-central Croatia), Prekmurjan
Slovenian (northeastern Slovenia), and Burgenland Croatian (eastern Austria). Twofurther languages belonging to this group already became fully recognized national
languages complete with their respective nation-states, that is, Bosnian and Slovak.
In the meeting zone between the West Romance and South Slavic dialect continua,
the Slavic languages of Molisean (cognate with Croatian) and Resian (cognate withSlovenian) emerged in what today is northeastern Italy.
In southern Italy and Sicily, the Latin alphabet-based Arbëresh is spoken, while
the Greek script-based Arvantika is spoken in central Greece; both are cognate with
Albanian, or its Tosk dialect. The remnants of the Romance-speakers who used to be
the link between the West and East Romance dialect continua, are today spread thinly
across the Balkans from Greece and Bulgaria to Croatia’s Istria. Their three distinctive
groups go by the names of Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, and Istro-Romanians.
(The two former groups are also referred to as “Vlachs”). They write their languages
variously in the Latin, Greek, or Cyrillic script. In southern Bulgaria, and across theborder in northern Greece, the Muslim Slavophone group of Pomaks live. They usually
write their Pomakian language in Greek letters.
In the former meeting zone between the West Germanic and North Slavic dialect
continua (after 1945 shifted by ethnic cleansing to the Oder-Neisse line) the following
Slavic languages (with strong Germanic influence on lexicon, syntax, and phonology)
emerged: Mazurian (in present-day northeastern Poland), Kashubian (northern Poland),Upper and Lower Sorbian (eastern Germany), Silesian (southern Poland, and thenortheastern corner of the Czech Republic), and Moravian (the southeast of the Czech
Republic). At the confluence of the current Belarusian, Polish, and Ukrainian borders
the bi-scriptural (Cyrillic and Latin) West Polesian language coalesced (also construed
as Podlachian in Poland). In a similar manner Goralian (Podhalanian) emerged in the
Polish-Slovak borderland of the High Tatars.
In Latvia and Lithuania the use of former parallel dialectal bases of Latvian
and Lithuanian have revived Latgalian in eastern Latvia and Samogitian in western
Lithuania. Significantly, Latgalian- and Samogitian-speakers amount to one-third of
all Latvian- and Lithuanian-speakers, respectively. Latvia protects the northwestern
littoral of the Gulf of Riga, dubbed as the Livonian historical territory, which is of morecultural and tourist importance than linguistic, because the remaining speakers of the
Finno-Ugric language of Livonian are few. In Estonia southern Estonian, which used
to be a former dialectal basis of the Estonian language, was also revived. Nowadays it
comes in two closely related varieties, one used by the Lutheran inhabitants of the Estonian town of Võro and its vicinity and the other by Orthodox Finno-Ugric-speakers,
who refer to themselves as Setus. Thus, it is usual to refer to this language as Võro-Seto.

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Across Central Europe some languages other than Romani, Yiddish, or Spanyolremain in diasporic use. The most important ones include Karaim and Armenian. The
former is the idiom (akin to Crimean Tatar, and Krymchak, or the Hebrew script-based
language of Crimea’s Jews) of the Karaites (Karaims), that is, the Turkic-speaking community who profess a religion (Karaism) close to Judaism. They write their language
in Hebrew characters. The traditional Armenian diaspora has only a limited knowledgeof Grabar (the classical language of the 4th century Armenian translation of the Bible)used in the liturgy, or modern Armenian, for that matter. After the fall of communism
they were joined by numerous Armenian immigrants from post-Soviet Armenia, who
speak contemporary Armenian. During communist times, as part and parcel of theSoviet bloc’s ideologized cooperation with Asia’s communist states, Vietnamese andNorth Korean immigrant communities made an appearance in Central Europe. Nowadays, they have been joined by further immigrant (refugee) communities of Chechens,
Chinese, Georgians, Indians (mainly Hindi- and Punjabi-speakers), Kazaks, Nigerians,
Russian-speakers, and Ukrainians, among others.
Some of the mentioned languages are tiny, weak, or even moribund, and thus usually of little or no political significance (Istro-Romanian, Livonian, Mazurian, Lower
Sorbian, Megleno-Romanian, Molisean, Banat Bulgarian, West Polesian, Prekmur-Slovenian, or Resian). Some are fully or almost fully recognized as national languages ofstateless nations (Aromanian, Sorbian, and Rusyn). Others are recognized as specific toregional groups of a nation enjoying its own nation-state (Čakavian, Goralian, Kajkavian, Kashubian, Latgalian, Samogitian, or Võro-Seto). Still others are construed aspertaining to separate ethnic groups which do not express any clear desire to transformthemselves into nations (Arbëresh, Arvantika, Burgenland Croatian, Čakavian, Kajkavian, Kashubian, or Pomak). Some of these languages are also deployed for building
political movements that may be qualified simultaneously as regional and national(Bunjevac, Kashubian, Moravian, or Silesian). Unfortunately, languages of immigrant
and refugee communities are neither recognized nor employed by administration or
schools in order to facilitate their integration into Central Europe’s societies.
Interestingly, although the Silesians constitute the largest ethnic or national
minority in today’s Poland (according to the 2002 Polish census), neither they nor theirlanguage are recognized in the country. Similarly, no recognition was granted to Goralian. In emulation of the French example, Greece does not recognize any minorities orminority languages on its territory, except Turkish. Bulgaria considers Pomak speecha dialect of Bulgarian. Romania claims Aromanian, Istro-Romanian, and Megleno-Romanian as the southern dialects of Romanian, but the speakers of the three languages
dispute this. Although Čakavian and Kajkavian are more different from standard Croatian than Bosnian, Montenegrin, or Serbian, they are nevertheless construed as dialectsof Croatian (Blanke 2001; Dulichenko 2003–2004; Hannan 1996; Kamusella 2008: ch
3; Magocsi 1996; O’Reilly 2001; Tornow 2005; Wicherkiewicz 2003).

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Selected Bibliography
Bakker, Peter and Kyuchkov, Hristo, eds. 2000. What Is the Romani Language? Hatfield, Hertfordshire: Gypsy Research Center and University of Hertfordshire Press.
Blanke, Richard. 2001. Polish-speaking Germans? Language and National Identity among theMasurians since 1871 (Ser: Ostmitteleuropa in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, edited by
Herder-Institut, Marburg, vol 24). Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag.
Barbour, Stephen and Carmichael, Cathie, eds. 2000. Language and Nationalism in Europe.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Burke, Peter. 2004. Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dulichenko, Aleksandr D. 2003–2004. Slavianskie literaturnyie mikroiazyki. Obraztsy tekstov(2 vols). Tartu: Izdatel’stvo Tartuskogo universiteta.
Dulichenko, Aleksandr D. 2011. Osnovy slavianskoi filologii (2 vols). Opole: Uniwersytet
Opolski, Instytut Filologii Polskiej and Opolskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk.
Estraikh, Gennady. 1999. Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development (Ser:Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Fine, John V. A. 2006. When Ethnicity Did Not Matter in the Balkans: A Study of Identity
in Pre-Nationalist Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia in the Medieval and Early-Modern
Periods. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Fishman, Joshua. 1973. Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative Essays. Rowley MA:
Newbury House Publishers.
Gellner, Ernest. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greenberg, Robert D. 2004. Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and Its
Disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grenoble, Lenore A. 2003. Language Policy in the Soviet Union (Ser: Language Policy, vol 3).
Dordrecht: Kulwer.
Hannan, Kevin. 1996. Borders of Language and Identity in Teschen Silesia (Ser: Berkeley
Insights in Linguistics and Semiotics, vol 28). New York: Peter Lang.
Haugen, Einar. 1966. Dialect, Language, Nation (pp 922–935). American Anthropologist. Vol
68, No 4.
Hroch, Miroslav. 1985. Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative
Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European
Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hroch, Miroslav. 2000. In the National Interest: Demands and Goals of European National
Movements of the Nineteenth Century: A Comparative Perspective. Prague: Faculty ofArts, Charles University.

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Ioffe, Grigory. 2003. Understanding Belarus: Questions of Language (pp 1009–1047). EuropeAsia Studies. Vol 55, No 7.
Isayev, M[agomet] I[zmailovich]. 1977. National Languages in the USSR: Problems andSolutions. Moscow: Progress.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2001. Language as an Instrument of Nationalism in Central Europe (pp235–252). Nations and Nationalism. Vol 6, No 2, Apr. London: Blackwell and Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2004. On the Similarity between the Concepts of Nation and Language (pp107–112). Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism. Vol 31.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2006. The Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State: The Case of Central Europe (pp 57–92). In: W. Burszta, T. Kamusella, and S. Wojciechowski, eds. Nationalisms across the Globe: An Overview of Nationalisms of State-Endowed and StatelessNations (Vol 2: The World). Poznań, Poland: Wyższa Szkoła Nauk Humanistycznych i
Dziennikarstwa.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2008. The Politics of Language and Nationalisms in Modern Central
Europe. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave.
Liszka, József. 1996. Das Tauschkind-System im slowakischen Teil der Kleinen Tiefebene (pp58–72). Zeitschrift für Balkanologie. Vol 32, No 32.
Lučić, Radovan, ed. 2002. Lexical Norm and National Language: Lexicography and Language
Policy in South-Slavic Languages after 1989 (Ser: Die Welt der Slaven, vol 14). Munich:
Verlag Otto Sagner.
Magocsi, Paul Robert, ed. 1996. A New Slavic Language Is Born: The Rusyn Literary Language of Slovakia (Ser: East European Monographs, vol 434; Classics of Carpatho-Rusyn
Scholarship, vol 8). Boulder CO: East European Monographs (distributed by Columbia
University Press, New York).
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe (Ser: A History of East Central
Europe, vol 1). Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
Myhill, John. 2006. Language, Religion and National Identity in Europe and the Middle East:
A Historical Study (Ser: Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Okuka, Miloš and Krenn, Gerald, eds. 2002. Wieser Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens (Vol
10: Lexikon der Sprachen des europäischen Ostens). Klagenfurt: Wieser.
O’Reilly, Camille C., ed. 2001. Language, Ethnicity and the State (Vol 2: Minority Languages
in Eastern Europe Post-1989). Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave.
Pipa, Arshi. 1989. The Politics of Language in Socialist Albania. Boulder CO: East European
Monographs (distributed by Columbia University Press).
Plasseraud, Yves, ed. 2005. Atlas des minorités en Europe: de l’Atlantique à l’Oural, diversité
culturelle (Ser: Collection Atlas-Monde). Paris: Autrement.

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Shevelov, George Y. 1989. The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century(1900–1941): Its State and Status (Ser: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute Monograph
Series). Cambridge MA: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (Distributed by Harvard
University Press).
Smith, Michael G. 1998. Language and Power in the Creation of the USSR, 1917–1953 (Ser:Contributions to the Sociology of Language, vol 80). Berlin and New York: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Schenker, Alexander M. and Stankiewicz, Edward, eds. 1980. The Slavic Literary Languages:
Formation and Development (Ser: Yale Russian and East European Publications, no 1).
New Haven: Yale Concilium on International and Area Studies.
Todorova, Maria. 1992. Language in the Construction of Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Bulgarian Case. Berkeley CA: Center for German and European Studies, University ofCalifornia.
Tornow, Siegfried. 2005. Was ist Osteuropa. Handbuch zur osteuropäischen Text- und Sozialgeschichte von der Spätantike bis zum Nationalstaat (Ser: Slavistische Studienbücher, Neue
Folge. Vol 16). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Velichkova, Slavka. 1992. Tendentsii v ezikovata politika na Republika Makedoniia. Sofia:
Izdatelstvo na Bulgarskata akademiia na naukite.
Wicherkiewicz, Tomasz. 2003. The Making of a Language: The Case of the Idiom of Wilamowice. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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The Concept of the Atlas of Language
Politics in Modern Central Europe 1
Tomasz Kamusella

Introduction

Language is such a commonplace phenomenon that it frequently escapes one’s conscious
attention and becomes a “transparent,” seemingly obvious, category. Perhaps because ofthis, and also because of the fact that language is repeatedly actualized in a plethora ofdifferent realizations (or languages), language, since the emergence of humanity, hasbeen the most potent marker of group identity. The Enlightenment values of progress anduniversalism attempted overcome this divisive nature of language, but with only limited
success. Peoples and states have frequently quarreled, gone to war, and even committed
genocides over language as a symbol of group identity and group difference.
Using the example of Central Europe, the Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe offers a synthetic insight into the mechanisms and history of how
languages have been made, unmade, and deployed for political action in the age ofnationalism between the 19th and 21st centuries. This interdisciplinary Atlas is uniquein its approach and scope as, to my knowledge, no similar work has been attempted sofar. Significantly, it makes a wealth of specialist and otherwise inaccessible information
readily available to the expert and general reader.
As remarked above, language has always been a significant marker of group identity and of cultural separateness in the case of polities. But this has been so to a highly
unusual extent in modern Central Europe, where the politicized equation of languagewith nation and state became the sole legitimizing basis of state-building in the region
after World War I. The idea of normative isomorphism (or, tight spatial and ideological overlapping) of language, state, and nation (also known as ethnolinguistic or ethnic
nationalism) emerged in the first half of the 19th century in the German Confederationand in the Apennine Peninsula, where, respectively, a German Empire and a Kingdom
of Italy were founded, as nation-states for the ethnolinguistically defined nations of Germans and Italians.
1 The prose of this article was kindly streamlined by Michael O’Gorman and Catherine Gibson. I also thank Motoki Nomachi and Catherine Gibson for their advice and suggestions
for improvement. Obviously all remaining infelicities are the author’s sole responsibility.

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Later, ethnolinguistic nation-states closely fulfilling this isomorphism’s requirements emerged in Central Europe in three successive waves, after World War I, afterWorld War II, and in the wake of the collapse of communism (marked by the breakups
of Yugoslavia beginning in 1991, of the Soviet Union in 1991, and of Czechoslovakia in 1993). The process triggered vast political, social, and economic instability andupheavals. This was because the ideologically motivated endeavors aiming at bringing
about the spatial overlapping of state territory and nation (with “nation” understood as
all the speakers of a national language) necessarily disregarded historical borders andnecessitated the unprecedented mass expulsions of “foreigners” (or those speaking languages other than the national one). Simultaneously, it frequently involved a programof “repatriations” (in effect, the compulsory immigration) of the national language’s
speakers to “their” nation-state from “foreign” states; the result was the removal of language communities from areas of their traditional settlement because frontier changes
had allocated those areas to ethnolinguistic nation-states with national languages otherthan their own.
When the achievement of this goal of the tight overlapping of language, nation,and state was frustrated or proved for some reasons impractical, specious “constitutional languages” were sometimes called into existence by legislation to ensure thatan aspiring nation-state would not violate this isomorphic principle. The best known
examples of this phenomenon include the Serbo-Croato-Slovenian (Yugoslavian) language in Yugoslavia and the Czechoslovak language in Czechoslovakia, both of whichwere legislated into existence in the interwar period. Likewise, the breakup of Yugoslavia required the parallel breakup of Serbo-Croatian, so that Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia, as newly-emergent ethnolinguistic nation-states, could conform to
the isomorphic principle, and thus acquire their separate national languages of Bosnian,
Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian, respectively. Similarly, when the non-Romance(that is, Slavophone) population and the local Fourteenth Russian (until 1991, Soviet)
army thwarted the unification of the newly independent post-Soviet Moldova with
Romania in the 1992 war, the continued existence of Moldova as a nation-state in its
own right required the constitutional preservation of Moldovan as its national and official language, though for all practical purposes it is the same language as Romanian.
Thus far, however, the interdisciplinary field of the study of language politics
from the perspective of nation- and nation-state-building has been the focus of relatively few comprehensive works. This comes at the detriment of research, especially on
Central Europe, where language has been ideologized to such an unprecedented degree
that it has become the sole legitimizing basis of statehood in this area of Europe.
Historians, sociologists, and political scientists tend to treat languages as a “blackbox,” and do not analyze how they are constructed and deployed for political and othersocially significant ends. Likewise, although linguists and sociolinguists are well awareof the constructedness of national languages, they often either disregard the influenceof politics and ideology on language-making, or unreflectively follow politically correct national narratives that obtain in their home nation-states by restricting their linguistic research to what a given national political correctness requires. On the other
hand, anthropologists, who are best suited to bridge this cognitive gap, do not pursue

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all-embracing research on Central Europe, preferring to focus on narrower case studies,
usually from outside Europe, or more broadly speaking, from outside the territories
perceived as constituting the West, or of the developed world. (As the popular observation has it, “sociologists study the West, and anthropologists the Rest.”)The Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe aspires to ameliorate
this situation. On one hand, when completed, in an easily accessible and attractive formof overview maps accompanied by explanatory texts, it will provide social scientists
with information on the formation and ideologically motivated construction of languages. This will be analyzed against the backdrop of border and population changes,
triggered by the processes of nation- and nation-state-building. On the other hand, thisAtlas will also allow linguists and sociolinguists to situate their intimate knowledgeof the region’s languages in the context of Central European history and politics, disentangled from the straitjacket of national master narratives and the myths which thesenarratives spawn and perpetuate. Furthermore, the Atlas will help European Union(EU) and NATO political analysts, along with the interested reader, to comprehend
the dynamics of politics and history in modern Central Europe, a politically significant
region that extends alongside (and in places, straddles) the EU’s current eastern andsoutheastern frontiers. In the near future, those polities which currently lie outside of
the post-2013 EU border, may also become part of the European Union.

The Basic Assumptions
In order to progress with the Atlas, it was necessary firstly to identify concepts withwhich it would be possible to problematize the constructed character of languages andtheir highly politicized use for nation- and nation-state-building in Central Europe.
After deciding on such concepts, the second stage was to devise practical cartographical ways in which they could be operationalized and presented in the form of a map
series.
Thanks to my previous research on these issues (Kamusella 1998, 2001, 2004a,
2004b, 2006, 2009), I came to the conclusion that the concepts of dialect continuumand normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state were the most appropriate
conceptual tools for problematizing the subject matter. On the one hand, they allowed
me to analyze social and political processes, as reflected in language change, while on
the other hand, they lent themselves relatively easily to cartographic representation.
Both features considerably facilitated the design and execution of relevant map series,
chronologically illustrating how the dynamics of the interaction of language with political and social forces unfolded in Central Europe.

Central Europe?
Having decided on these issues, the problem which emerged was how to define Central
Europe. It is quite a malleable term, and is to a degree as imagined as Europe itself,
which is commonly construed as a continent, though in reality it is a subcontinent(or large peninsula) of Eurasia, as is also true of the Indian subcontinent. The usual

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definition of a continent prescribes that it should be a large and continuous landmass
surrounded by seas and oceans, and not connected to any other similar landmasses byanything more substantial than a narrow land bridge. The only two continents that do
not meet these criteria are Europe and Asia, because of the late 18th century consensus to delineate the border between them along the Ural Mountains and the Caucasus
Mountains (Wolff 1994: 154–155, 196–197).
The end of the 18th century also coincided with a change in the conceptualization of the regional division of Europe. Earlier, one spoke of Southern and Northern
Europe with the Alps and the Carpathians as the rough dividing line. In this model,
what today is Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Russia, and the three Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, then belonged squarely to Northern
Europe (Wolff 1994: 141). The “invention of Eastern Europe,” as Wolff terms it, in areal sense occurred when the Habsburgs (“Austria”), Prussia, and the Russian Empire
partitioned Poland-Lithuania in the late 18th century. Contemporary commentators inFrance, Britain, and the Holy Roman Empire who shaped the discourse of politics,
presented their western part of Europe as “civilized” and in opposition to the “oriental”
and “barbaric” eastern section of the continent, identified as Russia and the Ottoman
Empire. To Western eyes, both of these were decidedly non-European.
A complication later arose, commencing in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars withthe founding of the German Confederation, which began the extension of the zone of“civilized western Europe” some distance eastward. This initiated a process of further
eastward encroachment of this western area of supposed higher civilization, which continued over the course of the 19th century. By the turn of the 20th century, this area wasshared by the German Empire in the north and Austria-Hungary in the south. To the eyeof the Western observer, both polities appeared to be somewhat “immature” membersof Western Europe, tainted by their contacts and common borders with Russia and the
Ottomans. In the emerging ideological pecking order, German and Austro-Hungarianpoliticians and intellectuals, simultaneously aspired to membership of this “better”
Western Europe, and also tended to draw a line between their countries and this “menacing” Eastern Europe.
The Great War, which pitted the German and Dual empires both against the “real”
Western Europe, on the one hand, and against Eastern Europe, embodied by the Russian
Empire, led to the emergence of the concept of Mitteleuropa, first translated into English as “Middle Europe,” before “Central Europe” became a standard English-language
term in the mid-20th century. Central Europe developed a clearer identity as an area
composed of nation-states rather than only of the marchlands of three multinational
empires after 1918. The empires either disappeared or withdrew from the region andwere decisively replaced by a group of national polities, each of which was created
and legitimized by the application of the logic of ethnolinguistic nationalism. This
short-lived, interwar Central Europe composed of nation-states disappeared during
World War II. After 1945, when Europe was split between two ideological and military
blocs separated by an impenetrable “Iron Curtain,” the continent appeared to be neatly
divided into Western and Eastern Europe again, despite the formal or legal restorationof the group of nation-states on the eastern side of the frontier (Wolff 1994: 14–15).

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This dualistic, Cold War political division of the continent came to a (now weknow, tentative) end after the collapse of communism, which led to the terminationof the Cold War in 1989. That event was followed by the 1991 breakup of the Soviet
Union, which yielded on its former western flank the resurgent nation-states of Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania, and also the entirely new nation-states of Belarus, Moldova,
and Ukraine. With the disappearance of the Cold War binary West-East conception ofEurope, a space was created in the 1990s for the reemergence of the concept of Central
Europe in politics and culture. (Obviously, not all the polities concerned or their elites
have consistently identified with this space.)
However, the continual eastward enlargement of the European Union and ofNATO seems to have involved the extension of the boundaries of Western Europe(construed as “our common Europe”) at the expense of Central Europe. Thus, in thelate 2000s, the conceptualization of the continent as consisting of Western and Eastern
Europe gained considerable purchase in both public and scholarly discourse. The coreof Eastern Europe is identified with “European Russia,” as (at least, so far) no serious
Western or Russian politician has proposed that Russia could become a member of the
EU or of NATO.
Given the conceptual and political malleability or indeterminacy of the conceptof Central Europe, in the Atlas I decided to follow the pragmatic and practical approach
employed by the Canadian scholar Paul Robert Magocsi in his unequalled Historical
Atlas of Central Europe (2002). But even he, before coming to his current stance on
what Central Europe is, engaged with terminological problems, as evidenced by therevealing difference in the title of the first edition of his atlas in 1993, Historical Atlasof East Central Europe. “East” was a throwback to the Cold War years, when Central
European scholars working in the United States contested the then-obtaining dual division of Europe, and advanced the proposition that Central Europe, bisected by the Iron
Curtain, consisted of West and East Central Europe. Heuristically, it was difficult tomaintain this distinction, as scholars from states classified as belonging to West Central
Europe (for instance, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, or Switzerland) preferred tosubsume them in the category of Western Europe. Hence, it did not make sense toqualify Central Europe with the adjective “East,” because nobody wanted this term’scounterpart of West Central Europe.
Bearing this in mind, and also the fact that neither politicians nor scholars contest
the definition of Europe as an imagined continent extending from the Urals to Portugal(including the country’s Azores in the middle of the Atlantic), Magocsi proposed to treat
the middle one-third of this landmass (extending between 10ºE and 30ºE longitude) as
Central Europe (1993: xi; 2002: xi, xiii). In my Atlas I follow his decision. However,
Magocsi decided to exclude Scandinavia, the Baltic Sea and the Baltic republics ofEstonia and Latvia from the quadrant of his base map of Central Europe, perhaps concluding that these regions belonged to a tentative region of Northern Europe. However,his maps do include western Anatolia, though technically it is part of Asia, because
both the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) and its successor, the Ottoman Empire,
straddled the Bosporus, as Turkey does today. Essentially, all such subregions of acontinent and continents themselves are imagined, like nations and states (cf Grataloup2009).

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But the involvement and importance of Scandinavia and the territories of Estonia
and Latvia for the northern half of Central Europe is comparable to that of Byzantium
and the Ottomans for the southern section of Central Europe. Having taken this into
consideration, alongside the practicalities of cartography, I decided to commission aquadrant as my Atlas’s base map that includes within its frame the southern reachesof Norway, Sweden, and Finland, and also Estonia, Latvia, and Russia’s Baltic littoral
with the former imperial capital of St. Petersburg. Likewise, given their importancefor the history of Central Europe, I took the decision to extend the quadrant’s eastern
limit slightly to the east, in order to take in the area of Moscow, Crimea with almost
all of eastern Ukraine, central Anatolia with the Turkish capital of Ankara, and Cyprus.
I believe that these extensions of scope add to the explicatory value of the Atlas (cfKamusella 2009: Introduction).

Other Woes
The goal of the Atlas is to shed light on the interface between politics and language-making in modern Central Europe. In the preparatory phases of the project it emerged that
it was also indispensable to probe into a more distant past, in order to trace the lineagesof certain developments which shaped or still continue to impact on the region. As aresult, the troublesome issue of different linguistic forms of place-names (toponyms)
and of other administrative or geographical names had to be confronted.2 As I proposedin my article devoted to this issue (Kamusella 2004a), I made an effort to use the formsof the names that were either widely adopted or official in a given period to which a
map pertains. In parentheses I gave the forms that are current today.
This seemingly simple solution to the widespread problem of the anachronistic
use of place-names in most literature on Central Europe published today has its disadvantages too.3 Firstly, in the maps in the Atlas depicting Central Europe in the 9th century and in 1050, the use of today’s forms of place-names was generally unavoidable.
This is because official or prevalent forms from those two periods are either unknown,or display such a high incidence of variance in the few preserved records as to be of
marginal practical value as cartographic toponyms. This is especially true of the northern half of Central Europe, where the technology of writing was only haltingly introduced at the turn of the second millennium CE. In the case of Latin or Greek official
forms on the territory of the Eastern Roman Empire or of the defunct Western Roman
Empire, I did include them with modern-day forms in parentheses. I also included some
2 Obviously, the question of different linguistic names of toponyms is “troublesome” only
in today’s world of standardization and uniformization, underpinned by the ideology ofmonolingualism and monoscripturalism. There is nothing inherently “unnatural” about theuse of numerous different linguistic forms of place-names committed to paper in a variety
of writing systems.
3 During the last decade it is becoming quite a common trope—in Anglophone publications
on Central Europe at least—to include a note on place-names at the beginning of a monograph or a table/index of place names in various languages.

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The Concept of the Atlas

recorded original Slavic place-names in the area that is Germany today and Norse onesin the Baltic southern littoral and Rus’.
Secondly, a further issue concerned the transliteration of historic and contemporary place-names from the Cyrillic, Arabic, and Greek scripts. In most cases I follow
Magocsi’s Historical Atlas of Central Europe, though I double-checked the correctnessof his transliterations against other atlases and printed sources, the latter mostly in
Cyrillic and the Greek alphabet. This allowed for significant corrections, as in the useof Katharevousa Greek forms of place-names prior to 1974, and Demotic Greek ones
after this date, when the latter form of the Greek language replaced the former one
as the official language. In the transliteration of Osmanlıca (Ottoman Turkish) placenames and in the use of modern-day place-names in Turkish, often a confusion appears
as to the employment of the letters [ı, I] and [i, İ], that denote two different Turkish
phonemes. For instance, a name given in minuscule letters is spelt correctly, as in Girit
for Crete, but in capitals it is given incorrectly as GIRIT, where it should read GİRİT.
Thirdly, some places, especially capital cities (old and new), as well as bigger
or renowned cities and regions, have recognized Anglicized forms of their names. In
such cases I supply the Anglicized names, though, where it is of practical value, I
append the names with their official forms in local languages. In those cases where astate recognizes two official or national languages, I adopted the convention of giving
the two official linguistic forms of a place-name separated by a slash, as in the case of
Finland’s capital of Helsinki/Helsingfors, where the forms are of Finnish and Swedish
origin, respectively.
Fourthly, I tried to stick to the official names of states featured on the maps.
Thus, I do not use “Germany” for the Holy Roman Empire. In the case of the East
Roman Empire, popularly known as the “Byzantine Empire,” I append the latter withthe polity’s official Byzantine Greek name, Romania, in parentheses. In the case of the
Ottoman Empire, I employ a similar concession for the sake of easy comprehension
and in order not to alienate readers unduly, by either adding the word “caliphate” to“empire” (hence, the “Ottoman Empire-Caliphate”) or by putting it in parentheses. In
one instance, I also give the official Ottoman form of the state’s name, that is, the “Sublime Ottoman State.” But in order not to make the picture too familiar for the reader,which might in itself be misleading, I chose to give the name of the Crimean Khanate
also in its original Turkic form, as Kırım Hanlığı.
Another problem with the names of polities is that although we know of the existence of some of these polities, we have no way of knowing what their official names
might have been. That is the case, for example, with the exonym “Greater Moravia,”
a name which is derived from a Latin reference to this polity recorded in a medieval
chronicle. Although, it is known that the polity was referred to as Rus’, it is unknown
if that was just a customary name or also official name of the realm. As until the mid11th century, the Rus’ ruler used the title of khagan (or great khan), in one of themaps I decided to use the term “Rus’ Khaganate.” The capital of Rus’ was in Kyiv (orKiev in Russian), hence why historians popularly refer to this polity as Kievan Rus’. I
sometimes follow the practice, but instead using the Russian form of the city’s name, I
settled for the Ukrainian one since Kyiv is today the capital of Ukraine (hence, “Kyivan
Rus’”).

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Tomasz Kamusella

On the map of Central Europe’s dialect continua in the 9th century I followed
Magocsi’s (2002: 11) convention of featuring the names of ethnic groups, even thosewhich were recorded in the late medieval chronicles of the 13th and 14th centuries, andas such appear to be anachronistic inventions of chroniclers. It is especially true of the
Czechs, Polanians, and Slovaks, from which the respective national master narratives
derive the present-day nations of Czechs, Poles, and Slovaks (Jasiński 2007, Urbańczyk
2008). This issue will also be discussed in an explanatory text to accompany the map.
Another contentious issue was that of the origin of the Romancephone populationin what today is Romania and Moldova. The proponents of the Romanian national
master narrative claim a demographic and linguistic continuity between the Roman
province of Dacia that existed within the Roman Empire’s frontiers for a century andhalf (106–271 CE) and the Danubian principalities of Walachia and Moldavia that coalesced in the 14th and 15th centuries. Their Hungarian counterparts, and seemingly
the majority of international scholars, point to the fact that such continuity has notbeen documented with adequate written and archeological records. They propose that
Romance-speakers, whose descendants became a Romanian nation in the 19th century,
had migrated to this area from the Balkans at the turn of the second millennium CE.
Hence, the Romancephone Vlachs of today (Aromanians, Istro-Romanians and Megleno-Romanians), still living in the Balkans, appear to be the original population fromwhich the Romanians stem.
Of the two interpretations about the origins of the Romanians and the Moldovans,the latter interpretation seems to be better documented and more persuasive, and I
decided to represent it in the dialect continuum maps for the periods of the 9th and the
mid-11th centuries. Obviously, I will explain the decision at length in an explanatory
text to accompany these maps. Should evidence come to light in clear support of thenational Romanian stance on this issue before the completion of the Atlas, I would
propose to correct the maps accordingly.

Conventions
Certain conventions had to be employed in order to emphasize the changing dynamics of the complex relationships between linguistic reality and culture, construed inthis work as political and social forces. The obvious choice was color coding. I chose
dialect continua as the foundation for this color coding, to which I ascribed different
colors. In the cases of related continua, I employed various shades of a single color toindicate their degree of closeness. This, in turn, allowed me to employ darker (thus,
appropriately distinctive) shades of these colors for writing the names of languages andethnic groups (popularly, though unnecessarily disparagingly, referred to as “tribes,”
especially in the context of the Middle Ages, or in imperial Russia’s officialese until
1917) featured on the maps. This device also easily lent itself to the color coding ofvarious writing systems that originated for writing different languages that were (are)invariably related to one dialect continuum or another.
This color coding of information about dialect continua, languages, names of
ethnic groups speaking them, and scripts employed for writing these languages allows

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The Concept of the Atlas

the maps to be grouped into series and for a coherence to be maintained between theseseries. In turn, this device helps emphasize the dynamics of unfolding relationships
between the linguistic, on the one hand, and the political and the social, on the other.
Obviously, because the genetic classification of languages, as proposed by August
Schleicher in the mid-19th century, is not the only possible one, I also included acomposite map of linguistic areas. To emphasize the fact that this method of language
classification, as developed by areal linguists, differs radically from that of genetic
linguistics, a completely different set of colors was developed for denoting Central
Europe’s linguistic areas. On this basis, in the future I plan to develop a series of mapsof linguistic areas, which would complement the dialect continua series.
The political reality is depicted on the maps as various political and administrative borders rendered in black. The same color is used for writing the names of states,
regions, and localities. Thus, these elements remain quite distinctive, though they do
not dominate the maps as is the norm in conventional atlases. This part of the historicand the present-day reality of Central Europe is quite well known, so relegating it to thebackground does not diminish the value of the Atlas to the reader. On the contrary, theforegrounding of the linguistic through the use of color draws the reader’s attention tothis rarely analyzed aspect of Central Europe, which is the Atlas’s primary goal.
Dialect continua are usually depicted as solid blocs of color. However, occasionally, when speakers are (or were) bilingual in languages from two different dialect
continua, or speakers of two different languages live (or lived) side by side, intermingling stripes of two colors reflect such a situation. When a population speaking alanguage from a different dialect continuum is (or was) thinly spread (for instance, Yiddish-speaking Jews before World War II, or Roma today) in areas where the majority of
inhabitants use languages from different dialect continua, the presence of the former isrendered by lines, rather than stripes.

What Is a Dialect Continuum?
Prior to the invention of writing and the codification of languages (as discrete artefacts),
spoken language changed gradually from village to village and from region to region. In
this manner, chains of gradually changing (but still mutually comprehensible) dialects
are created. These dialects (or local language forms), shading from one into another,
form dialect continua. People speaking dialects from different dialect continua do notunderstand one another. However, this barrier of incomprehensibility may be easily
bridged by multilingualism.
Dialect Chain
Dialect A
Adjacent
More DistantFar-Flung
Dialect B
Dialect F
Dialect Z
Degree of com- Full mutual
prehensibility comprehensiwith Dialect A bility

Good mutualcomprehensibility

63With more
Poor, but still
distance, lessretained, mutual
mutual compre- comprehensihensibility
bilityTomasz Kamusella

The Dialect Continua Map SeriesThis was the first series, consisting of five maps, to be completed for this Atlas. The
idea was to show that until the modern period linguistic and political borders did notconverge in Central Europe. This began to change when ethnolinguistic nationalism
emerged in the 19th century and became a standard component of state building projects
and of state legitimization in the region after World War I. Vast voluntary and involuntary population movements (including expulsions and genocide), combined withoften dramatic changes in political borders, led to the growing convergence between
linguistic and political borders in Central Europe. The degree of this convergence ishigh (though not full) and quite unusual compared both to other areas of the world andto Central Europe itself in the period before 1918.
I decided to use the concept of dialect continuum in order to depict the phenomenon of the convergence of political and linguistic borders as driven by the normative urge introduced by ethnolinguistic nationalism, because borders between dialect
continua are the only linguistic borders that can be incontrovertibly discerned fromthe linguistic reality alone. Fundamentally, from the linguistic (dialectal) perspective,
territories inhabited by speakers of languages from a single dialect continuum are notdivided sharply from one another. Dialectal change is gradual throughout the entire
area within a dialect continuum and, as such, cannot coincide with sharp political borders. This state of things may come to an end when ethnolinguistic nation-states havesucceeded in replacing dialects with their respective standard languages. But now, inan age of open borders and free population movement, together with borderless mass
media and the internet further eroding the compartmentalization of states, it may prove
impossible to achieve such an ethnolinguistic ideal.
I plan to complement the dialect continua series with maps for the five following
periods, not yet depicted, namely, 1250, 1721, 1917, 1930, and 1943.

What Is “a Language”?
The popularly accepted definition of “a language” (meaning one of the plethora ofexisting languages) goes back to Leonard Bloomfield’s 1926 deceptively simple proposal that languages are language forms that are mutually incomprehensible, while
dialects are language forms that, despite differing from one another, are neverthelessmutually comprehensible. In the 1960s Einar Haugen showed that mutual comprehensibility is not a symmetrical phenomenon. Speakers of language/dialect 1 can understand language/dialect 2, while the speakers of the other do not necessarily understandthe former (1966a).
Furthermore, there are recognized languages that are either fully mutually intelligible, or at least, are so to a considerable degree; Czech and Slovak, Bulgarian and
Macedonian, and Moldovan and Romanian are three such pairs of languages. In lightof Bloomfield’s definition, they should be classified as dialects. On the other hand,dialects of such languages as Arabic or Chinese are frequently less mutually intelligible
than French and Italian, or even German and Polish. Somehow, however, these dialects

64The Concept of the Atlasof Arabic or of Chinese are not categorized as separate languages. To consider anothercategory, the German dialect of Low German is mutually comprehensible with Dutch,
yet Dutch is not believed to be a dialect of German, nor is Low German supposed to bea dialect of Dutch. Nor, indeed, is the existence of a common Dutch-German language
proposed.
Reflecting upon this dilemma, Haugen came to the conclusion that (written,
standard) languages are socio-political constructs, carved from a segment or segmentsof a dialect continuum, and shaped, usually with the use of writing, by decisions taken
at a given cultural and/or political center. Although we commonly believe that languages consist of dialects, this is an anachronistic understanding, brought about by
the socio-political forces that created and still create entities, which we recognize as
languages. To put it briefly, dialects are older than (written, standard) languages, hence,from the linguistic point of view, it is erroneous to subsume the former in the latter. It israther an act of political will (Haugen 1966 and 1966b, Kamusella 2004b).
Consequently, at least in the Western approach to language, there is no linguistic
definition of “a language,” with the partial exception of the highly specialized German term Einzelsprache. Such a definition can be only of a political or sociolinguistic
character. As a result, it is appropriate to state that linguists do research on dialects or
language in general, but not on languages.
The Atlas delves into the interface between the linguistic, on the one hand, andthe political and the social, on the other. Languages being political projects, it would beinappropriate to present the subject matter through the lens of one of these projects. For
instance, Bulgaria recognizes Macedonia, but declines to recognize the Macedonian
language. By excluding this language from my maps, I would side with the Bulgarian
stance, which would mean adopting one of the national master narratives that obtain inCentral Europe. I decided to approach this dilemma head on, by adopting the “emic”(in-group) understanding of what languages are (or were). Thus, the same or similarvarieties of a single language may bear different names in different periods (Belorussianand Belarusian) or in different regions separated from one another by a political border(Moldavian, Moldovan and Romanian). I also feature languages not recognized by thestate on whose territory they are spoken by a language community which believes it
to be a separate language in its own right (for instance, Silesian) (cf Kamusella 2001).

A Different Approach to the Analysis of Language Differentiation:
Linguistic Areas
The concept of dialect continua emerged from the so-called genetic classification of languages, as proposed in the mid-19th century by August Schleicher. In this approach toconceptualizing linguistic difference through time, one construes languages as discrete
entities that bifurcate and produce new languages, thus also implying a hierarchy. Thus,
falling into the error of anthropomorphism, linguists speak of “parent” and “children”
languages when explaining this concept to laymen. Lineages, often quite spurious, arecreated and present the reader with the appealing image of a “genealogical tree” oflanguages, within which one speaks of “language families” and their “branches.”65Tomasz Kamusella

In this biologizing approach, languages are treated as autonomous individuals or
species, as though independent of humans. However, in the world in which we live,
languages are not able to exist independently of their human producers, users, andmanipulators. Furthermore, it is typical of a human to speak, or otherwise use, many
dialects/languages, which, especially given the increased social and spatial mobility
characteristic of the modern world, have created numerous channels of exchange
among different languages/dialects. This led in some cases to the emergence of entirely
new languages, pidgins (trade languages with no language communities using them ineveryday life, that is, outside the commercial context), and creoles (pidgins adopted bylanguage communities as their everyday languages). In other cases, it led to the rise ofmultilingualism or multidialecticism, especially in the linguistic borderlands between(or, in the overlap of) various dialect continua (cf Kamusella 1998).4
Thus, genetically different languages (or dialects) become related through various shared elements of culture and history, and by certain linguistic commonalities.
The effect of this is to blur the previously sharper linguistic border between dialect continua. In this manner, as proposed by Hugo Schuchardt in the 1870s, linguistic areas areformed, also known as linguistic leagues (or unions), from the original German term
Sprachbund. This, apparently more realistic approach to languages as more diffuse andmalleable phenomena, does not lend itself to such an appealing reification as that which
genetic linguists found for their theory in the form of a genealogical tree. What is more,
if languages were not self-contained entities, they could not serve as an ideologicalbasis for the creation of ethnolinguistically defined nations or polities (cf Kamusella
2004b). Hence, this approach to the analysis and presentation of the linguistic remains
the preserve of one group of specialists, so-called areal linguists.
The first linguistic area proposed, and to date the best researched, is the Balkan
Sprachbund. It groups the Slavic and Romance languages employed in this area, alongwith Albanian, Greek, and sometimes Turkish. Other linguistic areas are more contested and there is no clear agreement about their membership, which perhaps reflects
the complicated routes of linguistic contacts and influences that follow the dynamics ofsocial, political, and economic relationships among human groups.
In the Atlas, I included one composite map of Central Europe’s linguistic areas
in 1930. It is a composite map, as it represents two different schemes of such linguistic
areas. I plan to divide this 1930 map into two, separating the two conceptual schemes,
and then to add two more of the same kind to illustrate Central Europe’s linguistic areas
as they are now at the beginning of the 21st century.

4 Also, some languages, which we learned to classify as straightforwardly belonging to agiven linguistic family, cease to fit into their categories so definitively when they are scrutinized more closely. For instance, English is generally categorized as one of the Germanic
languages. On the basis of its grammar, this is clearly true. However, if one takes into
account the vocabulary, the majority of which is of Romance origin, English appears to be
more of a Germanic-Romance creole.

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The Question of Writing
In the Western world, what makes a language a language is quintessentially writing.
Commenting from the historical perspective, we live in a strange period where everybody, from childhood onwards, is expected to be able to read and write. Full literacy is a
recent phenomenon though, dating back only to the 19th century in Northern America,
Western Europe, and Australia; to the mid-20th century in Central and Eastern Europe,and to the latter half of this century in some other regions, notably in post-Soviet Central Asia, East and South East Asia, and Latin America. This development still eludes
Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.
As previously indicated, writing has been known in the southern half of Central
Europe since antiquity, though it reached the northern half only in the 9th and 10th
centuries. From the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period, writing was the preserveof clerks, churchmen, and the narrow stratum of administrators and politicians. It was
a component of the ideological package grounded in one religion or another. Hence, all
the scripts employed today in Europe stem directly from so-called “holy languages,”
the Greek script from the Greek original of the Gospels, the Latin script from the Vulgate (the official Catholic Latin translation of the Bible), and Cyrillic from the (Old
Church) Slavonic translation of the Bible.
I have completed a single, composite map of Central Europe’s writing systems
with the political and administrative borders drawn as they were in 2009. The present-day distribution of the use of the different scripts in this region is marked in blocsof color. I also marked the furthest extent of each script in the past using lines. (Andreviewing this map, I see now that I have omitted to mark the use of the Arabic script insome areas of today’s Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine by Muslim Tatars to write their
Slavic speech.)
I intend to develop a map series that would depict the use of scripts in Central
Europe in the 9th century, 1050, 1250, 1570, 1721, 1910, 1917, 1930, 1943, 1974, and2009.

The Isomorphism Map Series
I use the term “isomorphism” to denote a tight spatial and ideological overlapping of thenational language, the nation that speaks it, and that nation’s nation-state. This model ofnormative isomorphism underpins the dynamics of ethnolinguistic nationalisms as they
unfolded in Central Europe, especially in the wake of World War I. This isomorphism
has guided and legitimated the process of nation-state-making in this region to this day(Kamusella 2004b and 2006).
The necessary requirements of this normative isomorphism are the following:
1 The speakers of a language constitute a nation (ergo, their language is a national
one).
2 The territory inhabited by this language’s speakers should be made into thenation’s nation-state.

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Tomasz Kamusella

3 The nation’s national language cannot be shared in its official (national) capacitywith any other nation or polity.
4 No autonomous regions with official languages other than the nation’s national
one can exist in the nation’s nation-state.
5 By the same token, no autonomous regions with the nation’s language can exist
in other polities.
To this scheme, one can add further, ideal (though, in practice deemed as non-essential) requirements, which ethnolinguistic national movements and states nevertheless aspire to implement. These requirements are:1 All the nation’s members ought to be monolingual.
2 All the nation’s members should permanently reside within the borders of theirrespective nation-state.
3 Members of other nations (that is, speaking other languages) must not be permitted to reside permanently in the nation’s nation-state.
In the isomorphism map series, I depict languages (represented in the colorsof their respective dialect continua) as coterminous with the boundaries of the states
where they are used as national and official languages. Obviously, these maps reflect
not a linguistic reality, but the reality of language politics, as desired and implemented
by states. The success of this political drive is illustrated by the relative intensity ofcolors employed to depict states. Those states which are shown in vivid colors fulfill
the essential requirements of the normative isomorphism, while those depicted in palecolors do not, though in most cases they aspire to the same ideal.
In addition to the three maps already completed (1930, 1974, and 2009), I plan toproduce three further maps for the periods: 1910, 1917–18, and 1943.

Non-State Minority, Regional and Unrecognized Languages, andWritten Dialects in Central Europe
For the period from the late 19th century to the early 21st century, I developed a map,complemented by the same A3 size detailed legend done in color, of the non-stateminority, regional and unrecognized languages, and written dialects in Central Europe.
The number of these languages and written dialects is such that the names of only a few
could be written in full on the map. The rest were replaced by numbers explained in thelegend. All the names and numbers are in the colors used for the respective dialect continua to which these languages belong. I also decided to represent the Romani (Gypsy)
language in detail, consisting of the different dialects (and/or languages?) employed for
rudimentary literacy and educational purposes in different states and regions of Central
Europe. Because neither Roma nor non-Roma claim them to be separate languages, I
resorted to marking them, in alphabetical order in capital letters, not numbers.
I intend to develop at least one other dual panel map of such languages for thelong 19th century.

68The Concept of the Atlas

Portraying Languages
In the course of the work on the maps thus far completed, I came to the conclusion that
there is something lacking in this cartographic representation of languages as social,
cultural, and political artefacts. No amount of talking about languages as such artefacts
can convey a clear, complete, and comprehensive understanding on how and what they
actually were or are in all their complexity (cf Mühlhäusler 1996).
But what does it mean? What is this elusive quality of language-ness that weendow languages with within the confines of the modern (Western) concept of “a language”? I believe that it is writing; hence the popular belief has it that a language
without a written form is not a language at all, but at best, a dialect.
Apart from writing per se, it is all the conventions connected to this technology
for recording something reified as a language on paper, on parchment in the past, or
nowadays, in cyberspace. Initially such conventions developed in an unplanned manner at the hands of the first scribes, chanceries, and printers. When the Western ideaof standard(ized) language emerged in the early modern period, certain procedures for“regularizing” and controlling such languages were also established. These procedures
include the development of authoritative translations of sacred texts, authoritativegrammars, and dictionaries that were—and continue to be—prescribed for official,school, and other public use (and ideally, for private use, too). Such conventions andauthoritative publications are often under the control of a carefully selected group ofscholars organized as an Academy (which can be national, linguistic, or scientific incharacter and designation).
Bearing this in mind, I decided to complete the presentation of Central European
languages in the Atlas with scans of title and sample pages of:- authoritative (most extensive) dictionaries and grammars,- one of the earliest books (periodicals) published in a language,- and in some cases of the translations of fundamental religious texts into theselanguages,- or of some other publications that are of significance for the featured languages.
I gathered relevant illustrative material of this kind for several languages, butmuch remains to be done in this field. I presume that the illustrative section of the Atlas
will never be exhaustive and will rather present selected examples of the aforementioned types of publications, pertaining to some languages.

Plans
As mentioned above, in addition to the completed 12 maps, I intend to add:
- five maps in the dialect continua series- three maps in the linguistic areas series- ten maps in the writing system series- three maps in the isomorphism series

69

Tomasz Kamusella- and an additional map on non-state minority, regional and unrecognized languages, and written dialects.
Hence, 23 more maps, that together with the completed 12 maps, would yield 35
maps in total.
In addition, I intend to introduce another map series on the forced population
movements and genocides in Central Europe during the 20th and 21st centuries. This
period, in a quite atypical manner in comparison with earlier (Central) European history, was characterized by large-scale expulsions and genocides, perpetrated mainly inthe name of German national socialism, Soviet communism, and a number of ethnolinguistic nationalisms. These policies either decisively changed the make-up of theextant language communities, extinguished such communities, or forcibly moved themfrom place to place. As a result of this unprecedented social engineering, the linguistic
boundaries of the dialect continua in this region were made to coincide quite closelywith the frontiers of the Central European ethnolinguistic nation-states.
In order to comment on this tragic aspect of 20th century Central Europe, I intend
to develop a 1917 map on the World War I population movements, a 1930 map on theinterwar population movements, a 1943 map on the 1938–1943 World War II population movements, a 1974 map on the postwar 1944–1950 forced population movements,
another 1974 map on the 1951–1989 Cold War population movements, and a 2009 mapon the postcommunist population movements.
This would mean adding six more full-scale maps, yielding a total of 41 suchmaps.
I plan to complement the 1917 map with four small maps. One would illustrate
both the 18th and 19th century expulsions of Muslims from the Black Sea lands (which
Russia seized from the Ottoman Empire), and the subsequent process of repopulatingthese lands with Christian settlers from Western and Central Europe, and from theBalkans. The second map would indicate population movements brought about by the
Balkan Wars and by the redrawing of international borders that followed. The third
would concentrate on the German genocide of the Herero in South West Africa. The
fourth would concern the Ottoman massacres (genocide) of Armenians in 1894/95 and1915.
It may be necessary to supplement the 1943 map with a small insert map on
the genocide of Jews and Roma (Gypsy). Likewise, the first 1974 map may have tobe accompanied by a small map (or a short sequence of small maps) on the Jewish
settlement in Palestine and Israel, and on the simultaneous expulsion of Arabs/Palestinians from this region. I also plan to add two insert maps to the 2009 map, one on the
population movements and genocide during the post-Yugoslav wars, and another on
the free population movements, after 2004 and 2007, from the new EU member statesto the old Fifteen.
In this way, eight small maps would be added to the main ones in this series.
Central Europe, as seen through the spectacles of a given language and an ethnolinguistic (or other group) ideology attached to it, tends to look like a different place,
if compared to how it appears viewed through the prism of other languages. The con-70

The Concept of the Atlas

sequent use of English and English-based transliteration for the aforementioned maps,
unfortunately, levels out some of these salient differences. But without grasping thesedifferences, it is difficult to comprehend how Central Europe may appear to a person
brought up and educated in the context of one or other ethnolinguistic nationalism andthe national master narrative built on it.
In order to tackle this shortcoming, I propose to develop a series of smaller, more
schematic maps with about 80 names of states, regions, and localities featured on each.
In the interests of simplicity, I propose to show state frontiers as they were in 2009,
and not to complicate the visual presentation unduly with the representation of otheradministrative borders.
The names featured on these maps should be given in the following Central European languages:
1 Pre-national ones:a) Latinb) Biblical Hebrew vs Ladinoc) Classical / Byzantine Greekd) Church Slavonic / Rutheniane) Frenchf) Grabar (or Kipchak in Armenian letters) vs Armenian
2 National / Official onesa) Albanian (Gheg vs Tosk?)b) Arabicc) Belarusian: official vs Tarashkevitsa vs Latin script-based Belarusiand) Bosnian vs Montenegrin vs Serbiane) Bulgarian vs Macedonianf) Croatian vs Čakavian vs Kajkaviang) Czech vs Slovakh) Danishi) Estonian vs Võro-Setoj) Finnish vs Swedishk) German: Antiqua vs Frakturl) Greek: Demotic vs Katharevousam) Hungariann) Italian vs Neapolitan/Siciliano) Latvian vs Latgalianp) Lithuanian vs Samogitianq) Moldovan vs Romanian vs Cyrillic-based Moldovanr) Norwegian: Bokmål vs Nynorsks) Polisht) Russianu) Slovenianv) Turkish vs Osmanlıcaw) Yiddish vs Spanyol

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Tomasz Kamusella

3 Selected official/national languages of autonomous regions and non-state minority, regional and unrecognized languages, and written dialectsa) Sorbian: Lower vs Upperb) Gagauz vs Crimean Tatarc) Kareliand) Kashubiane) Livonianf) Low German vs Dutchg) Megleno Romanian vs Aromanianh) Romanii) Rusyn
The current tally would add 38 such small maps to the Atlas.
In cases when a language is written in a script other than the Latin one, the English-language transliteration of these names should be given, ideally, on the map to enable the reader to pronounce these names. Furthermore, these maps could be enrichedwith the maximal territorial claims for respective ethnolinguistic national projects, andalso with the frontiers of historical polities which the proponents of these national projects claim as “early states” of their respective nations.
In accordance with the aforementioned plans, the Atlas in total would consist of
41 full scale maps and 46 insert maps.
It is clear that more illustrative material remains to be gathered for the Atlas.

References
Bloomfield, Leonard. 1926. A Set of Postulates for the Science of Language (pp 153–164).
Language. Vol 2, No 3.
Grataloup, Christian. 2009. L’Invention des continents. Comment l’Europe a découpé le monde.
Paris: Larousse.
Haugen, Einar. 1966. Dialect, Language, Nation (pp 922–935). American Anthropologist. Vol
68, No 4.
Haugen, Einar. 1966a. Semicommunication: The Language Gap in Scandinavia (pp 280–297).
Sociological Inquiry. Vol 36, No 2.
Haugen, Einar. 1966b. Language Conflict and Language Planning: The Case of Modern Norwegian. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Jasiński, Tomasz. 2007. Początki Polski w nowym świetle (pp 7–18). Nauka. No 4.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 1998. Das oberschlesische Kreol: Sprache und Nationalismus in Oberschlesien im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert [The Upper Silesian Creole: Language and Nationalism
in the 19th and 20th Centuries] (pp 142–191). In: Markus Krzoska und Peter Tokarski,
eds. Die Geschichte Polens und Deutschlands im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Ausgewählte
Baiträge. Osnabrück, Germany: fibre.

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Kamusella, Tomasz. 2001. Language as an Instrument of Nationalism in Central Europe (pp235–252). Nations and Nationalism. Vol 6, No 2, Apr.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2004a. Place-Names and Objectivity in Historiography: The Case of Silesia in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Spaces of Identity. No 1.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2004b. On the Similarity Between the Concepts of Nation and Language(pp 107–112). Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism. Vol 31.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2006. The Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State: The Case of Central Europe (pp 57–92). In: W. Burszta, T. Kamusella, and S. Wojciechowski, eds. Nationalisms Across the Globe: An Overview of Nationalisms of State-Endowed and StatelessNations (Vol 2: The World). Poznań, Poland: Wyższa Szkoła Nauk Humanistycznych i
Dziennikarstwa.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2009. The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central
Europe. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe (Ser: A History of East Central
Europe, Vol 1). Seattle WA: University of Washington Press.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 1993. Historical Atlas of East Central Europe (Ser: A History of East
Central Europe, Vol 1). Seattle WA: University of Washington Press.
Mühlhäusler, Peter. 1996. Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in
the Pacific Region. London: Routledge.
Urbańczyk, Przemysław. 2008. Trudne początki Polski (Ser: Monografie FNP. Seria Humanistyczna). Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego and Fundacje na Rzecz
Nauki Polskiej.
Wolff, Larry. 1994. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the
Enlightenment. Stanford CA: Stanford University Press.

73空白ページA Few Words on Tomasz Kamusella’s
Atlas of Language Politics in Modern
Central Europe
Michael Moser

Tomasz Kamusella’s Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe is an impressive project that certainly offers more than just a view of language politics in Modern
Central Europe. It also presents, to a certain extent, a view of the history of the dialect
continua of Modern Central Europe. The maps that will be briefly discussed here illustrate: dialect continua in Central Europe in the 9th century (A1); dialect continua inCentral Europe, c. 1050 (A2); dialect continua in Central Europe, c. 1570 (A3); dialect
continua in Central Europe, c. 1910 (A4); dialect continua in Central Europe c. 2009
(A5); linguistic areas (Sprachbünde) in Central Europe c. 1930 (B1); and, finally, Central Europe’s writing systems in 2009 and the past (B2).
In the following, I will outline a brief assessment of the maps and a short discussion of the program on which they are based. I should perhaps anticipate that myperspective is that of a Slavist who adheres to a quite traditional approach to the field, but
is ready to share a couple of views with the author of the maps, their introduction, anda number of other publications, including his impressive monograph (Kamusella 2009).
Since I understand that representatives of various fields have been invited to review the
project, I will deal almost exclusively with the interpretation of Slavic varieties and only
exceptionally refer to issues extending beyond that scope.
The map on dialect continua in Central Europe in the 9th century (A1) offers ascheme of well-known and partly disputed names of medieval tribes (ethnic groups) andlinks them to certain areas. Tomasz Kamusella makes clear in his introduction that he isperfectly aware of the problems associated with the tribal names, which are more often
than not are attested only in later sources and might in fact be “anachronistic inventionsof chroniclers.” What we see on the map are a few striped areas that are meant to indicate mixed border areas and contact zones, but beyond that one primarily sees compact
areas suggesting that they were settled by more or less mono-ethnic groups. But can webe so certain that this was actually the case in 9th century Central Europe if we take alook at what an ethnicity usually meant in the Early Middle Ages (cf. Pohl 2002)? I am
also sure that Tomasz Kamusella is aware that it is virtually impossible to delineate, forexample, the confines of Great Moravia in a way that would be in agreement with all

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Michael Moser

divergent scholarly views. Still, I would like to comment that Kamusella tends toward
the assumption of a comparatively large Great Moravia with a quite far reach to thenorth, the east, and the west, which I personally do not find that convincing.
As signaled in the Introduction, Kamusella knows perfectly well that many
Slavists will be surprised by his term Rus’ “Khaganate” in reference to the 9th century.
I personally believe that this was an excellent choice given the fact that this seems to be
the only term attested in contemporary documents.
What I personally miss on the map are glottonyms. Many people who will turnto the atlas will probably also be interested in what is known about the names of thedialect(s) or dialect continua that were in use in the 9th century because they give acertain hint as to how the contemporaries tended to view the structure of the continua.
To my knowledge, the only endonymic glottonym that was used for Slavic during thattime was “Slavic” (slovenьskъ językъ).
With regard to the map on dialect continua c. 1050 (A2), one might be surprised
to see most eastern parts of modern Austria and Germany depicted as parts of the Slavic
dialect continuum solely. In fact, this seems to be a bit anachronistic. At that period oftime, Slavic-speaking communities might have persisted in some parts of these areas,
but in many places they already coexisted with Germanic dialects if they had not yet
switched to their neighbors’ language. With regard to the term “Kyivian [sic on themap, instead of Kyivan] Rus’,” Tomasz Kamusella writes the following: “Because thecapital of Rus’ was in Kyiv (or Kiev in Russian), historians popularly refer to this polity
as Kievan Rus’. I sometimes follow the practice, but instead using the Russian formof the city’s name, I settled for the Ukrainian one, since today Kyiv is the capital of
Ukraine (hence, ‘Kyivan Rus’).” The choice to refer to Kyiv rather than to Kiev has tobe welcomed, and not only due to political correctness. It could be added at this pointthat the reference to the capital in the name of the medieval state of “Rusʼ” in fact stems
from modern times. Contemporaries used the term “Rus’” alone, but it had at least two
different meanings: the inner Rus’ of the Kyiv-Pereiaslav area on the one hand, and theouter Rus’ in terms of the realm of the Rus’ (Varangians) on the other (on the meaningsof Rus’, see Plokhy 2006).
Map 3 (A3) presents dialect continua in Central Europe, c. 1570. Here, one ison the contrary surprised that only a tiny bit of Austrian Carinthia and a rather smallpart of Styria (primarily contemporary Slovenian) are marked as at least partly South
Slavic-speaking. To my knowledge, Slovenian dialects were better preserved in thearea at that time. What we do not see on the map—and this is certainly not easy to
depict—is the linguistic situation of a lot of towns in many regions of Central Europe,
where German often played a considerable role as a leading language of the burghers,
and the same applies to the towns of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the roleof Polish beyond the continuum. Tomasz Kamusella might have intended to convey anidea of these facts by placing German names such as Laibach, Agram, Brünn, Preßburg,or Kaschau before the contemporary ones, but this is not entirely clear. Beyond that,
although Tomasz Kamusella is perfectly aware of the enormous problems of rendering
toponyms (he justly speaks of “the troublesome issue of different linguistic forms ofplace-names and of other administrative or geographical names”), one might still won-76

A Few Words

der—even if only for technical reasons—why the háček is used for place names like“Niš” or “Košice,” whereas “Chernihiv” or “Krements’” [sic] (the latter in brackets
after Polish “Krzemieniec”) are transcribed from Ukrainian according to the Library ofCongress system. Altogether, apart from some of the most well-known toponyms suchas Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, and Vienna, but also considerably less-known ones such as
Tver (instead of Tver’), the system of rendering place names is sometimes a bit inconsistent and tends to be “statist” to such a degree that one even reads “MACARISTAN(Hungary),” in reference to the years after 1526. Bearing this in mind, it is not entirely
clear, on the other hand, why one reads “Gdańsk/Danzig,” and not the other way round,or “Poznań” (but not “Posen”). What one might still miss on this map is at least an
attempt to demonstrate how the contemporaries usually viewed the dialect continua.
After all, in the 16th century observers did have ideas of different languages within thecontinua prior to modern nationalism and they used various glottonyms for them.
The next map to be discussed here is that on dialect continua in Central Europe,c. 1910 (A4), prior to the outbreak of World War I. Here the statist perspective is still
so strong that one finds now not only “Danzig (Gdańsk)” or “Posen (Poznań),” butalso “Varshava (Warszawa),” “Keltse (Kielce),” “Kamenets-Podol’sk (Kamianets-Podil’skyi)” or “Czernowitz (Chernivtsi),” yet on the other hand, for whatever reasons,“Praha/Prag (Prague),” “Kraków (Cracow),” or “Lwów (L’viv).” If in the case of the
Galician cities the autonomous status might perhaps come into play as a good reason
for this toponymic device, one wonders why the Hungarian place name was chosen
as the primary form in “Zágráb/Zagreb.” Moreover, one is surprised to read, with reference to the year of 1910, the name “Saray-Bosna/Sarajewo (Sarajevo).” Why one
now finds “Moskva (Moscow),” but on the other hand “St Petersburg” solely (and not“Sankt-Peterburg (St Petersburg)”), is not entirely clear either. What the maps do notconvey is the situation of the many minority groups of Central Europe, such as thatof the Burgenland Croats and the Tatars of the Białystok area, to name just two ofthem. In this regard, one can be ready to accept Tomasz Kamusella’s argument in the
introduction and look forward to the promised map: “For the period from the late 19th
century to the early 21st century, I developed a map, complemented by the same A3
size detailed legend done in color, of the non-state minority, regional and unrecognizedlanguages, and written dialects in Central Europe. The number of these languages andwritten dialects is such that the names of only a few could be written in full on the map.”
Still, viewers of only the existing maps might get the impression that Jews and Romaare the only significant historical minorities in Europe. Moreover, modern glottonyms
are still consistently absent from the maps. I now miss them even more than before
because, apparently, it is above all the languages and not so much the dialect continua
as such that have been in the focus of language politics. Decisions on toponyms are still
disputable in a number of cases. Frankly, I fail to see why Vienna is now at a sudden
called “Wien (Vienna).” Perhaps the author wanted to underline the highly explosive
nationalized situation in Central Europe on the eve of World War I to emphasize hisargument that it was primarily the nationalization of groups and languages that led tothe catastrophes of the 20th century?

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Michael Moser

The last map on dialect continua in the course of history depicts the situationof dialect continua in Central Europe, c. 2009 (A5). Here one-colored blocs prevail,although some stains and spots mark the presence of minorities such as the Roma in
most parts of Central Europe, Turks in the German-speaking area, and the like. The
substantial presence of speakers of other languages such as Turkish in a number ofCentral European towns and cities is now marked by colored underlining of the namesof the towns. I find this method highly appropriate and would recommend applying it to
the maps on earlier stages too (i.e. the above-mentioned historical presence of Germanor Polish-speakers in the towns of Central Europe). Now, some of Central Europe’s
minorities are made visible too, although one could perhaps have expected to see moreof them. With reference to the 21st century, one might still regret that the question of
how the continua have been used for the make-up of languages is not raised. This is true
even more so because since the 19th century a couple of more or less successful efforts
have been made to give new structures to specific continua by adding new idioms withthe status of full-fledged standard languages onto the map of the languages of Central
Europe. In those processes, various pieces of the areas have been typically claimed for
different linguistic movements.
I will not discuss the map on “linguistic areas (Sprachbünde) in Central Europe, c.
1930 [B1]” here because I personally agree that “the term ʻlinguistic areaʼ has become
empty as a result of excessive use” (Sture Umland 1990: 477). Tomasz Kamusellahimself concedes that quite frequently “linguistic areas are more contested” than the
Balkan “Sprachbund,” and that “there is no clear agreement about their membership.”
A propos: As an Austrian, I am deeply surprised to see Austria not counted as a memberof the Danubian linguistic area. If such an area should exist in whatever sense, Austria
seems to be part of it, if not for historical reasons then certainly due to the fact that theAustrian variant of German played a crucial role for language contacts in that area.
The last map to be assessed is that of ‘Central Europe’s Writing Systems in 2009
and the Past [B2].’ This map is particularly useful, but I would like to encourage theauthor to add at least some small pieces of information on the periods when certain
scripts were used in a given area on the map itself. This map also demonstrates thateven if various colors are used for the atlas in a very professional way, it is not always
that easy to distinguish the lines and follow their course. Such problems are probably
inevitable. Perhaps they could be reduced or even be overcome in a parallel online
version of the atlas, where one could activate or deactivate various delineations.
***

After this brief assessment of the seven maps, I would like to switch to a general discussion of the ideological foundations of the map as outlined in Tomasz Kamusella’s
introduction. First and foremost, I agree with his statement that “language, since theemergence of humanity, has been the most potent marker of group identity.” However,I am not entirely sure how I should interpret the remark that “the Enlightenment valuesof progress and universalism were proposed to overcome this divisive nature of language, but with limited success.” If it is true that “peoples and states have frequently78

A Few Words

quarreled, gone to war, and even committed genocides over language as a symbol ofgroup identity and group difference,” and that precisely this was the most horrible
outcome of the nationalist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, then I would also
argue that modern nationalism has significantly contributed to the linguistic and ethnic or national diversity of Central Europe. Above all, certain linguistic communities
might not have persisted at all if there had been no national movements directed against
attempts to suppress linguistic and cultural identities in the name of another nationor also in the name of some alleged internationalism of whatever background. Other
languages might not have been developed into full-fledged languages. They might
still be regarded as dialects of other idioms that had been acknowledged as languages
before, either owing to a slightly earlier national movement or to earlier developments
when languages were created out of dialects for other reasons, such as the wish to
spread the word of God in the vernaculars. To make the point clearer, whoever likes
the fact that Slovak exists as a widely acknowledged language against the backgroundof Czech—with Slovak formerly being regarded as a bulk of Czech dialects—or evenagainst the background of Magyar—with Slovak formerly being regarded as a bulk of
Slavic dialects whose shortcomings can be overcome only by using Magyar—, should
not condemn nationalism altogether. Without a Slovak national movement, the Slovak
language would simply not exist. Moreover, to be sure, the same basically applies toCzech and Magyar, too. Can one imagine the rise of Hebrew as a full-fledged modern
language without Jewish nationalism?
It is a matter of fact that the national movements of the 19th and 20th centuriescaused a lot of damage and harm, but in my view their assessment apparently requires
a dialectic approach. The same also applies to the concrete historical manifestations of
the ideas of “progress and universalism,” which also had very harmful consequences
for the development of the languages of the world. If we interpret the French Revolution not only as one of the triggers of national movements, but also as one of the mostimportant outcomes of European Enlightenment, then we should not overlook the factthat precisely “the Enlightenment values of progress and universalism” and attempts
at overcoming the “divisive nature of language” caused the French revolutionaries toimpose the French standard language as the language of the revolution on the population of France. In turn, this significantly contributed to the oppression and partial
extinction of the minority languages and dialects of France. Can one thus claim thatCentral Europeans should regard France—or also Great Britain—as best-practice models in terms of linguistic diversity or language policy altogether? Did “Enlightenment
and Progress,” as opposed to Central European nationalism, foster linguistic diversity
in the Americas? Where could one really find a convincing best-practice model?
It is certainly true that “the idea of normative isomorphism (or, tight spatial andideological overlapping) of language, state, and nation (also known as ethnolinguisticor ethnic nationalism)” became a powerful ideology or that “the ideologically motivated endeavors aiming at bringing about the spatial overlapping of state territory andnation (with ‘nation’ understood as all the speakers of a national language) necessarily
disregarded historical borders.” However, it might be too one-sided to depict “unprecedented mass expulsions of ‘foreigners’ (or those speaking languages other than the79Michael Moser

national one)” as the necessary result of any nationalism. After all, national movements
also had a strong emancipatory and democratic accent, at least in their beginnings. Is
it not an exaggeration to claim that in Central Europe “language has been ideologized
to such an unprecedented degree that it has become the sole legitimizing basis of statehood”? It is clear that Tomasz Kamusella’s presentation of the ideas of isomorphism ofstate, language, and nation cannot be just downplayed as mere fiction. Radical nationalist movements in fact propagated precisely those assumptions. Yet nationalism has notalways been that radical and some nationalists did develop quite reasonable ideas on
the coexistence of different nations within the confines of one state.
Moreover, weren’t the European empires (and not only the Central European
Habsburg and Hohenzollern Empires) nationalist themselves, in that they at least propagated some kind of “banal nationalism” (Billig 1995), but more often than not justsided with one of the ethnically based nationalisms of their realm? Can Western Europe
be regarded as an exclusively positive alternative to the allegedly exclusively negative nationalisms of the 19th and 20th centuries? Isn’t one of the outcomes of Central
European ethnolinguistic nationalisms in fact more linguistic diversity than in Western
Europe, with linguistic diversity meaning a variety of modern standard languages moreor less meeting all demands of modernity?
Even if one might not agree with each and every detail of this atlas there can be
no doubt that Tomasz Kamusella’s project is a great endeavor that deserves full support.

References
Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage Publications.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2009. The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central
Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Plokhy, Serhii. 2006. The Origins of the Slavic Nations. Premodern Identities in Russia, Ukraine,and Belarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pohl, Walter. 2002. Die Awaren. Ein Steppenvolk in Europa, 567–822 n. Chr. (2nd ed). Munich:
Verlag H. C. Beck.
Sture Urland, Per. 1990. Contact Linguistics: Research on Linguistic Areas, Strata, and Interference in Europe (pp. 471–506). In: Polomé, Edgar C. ed. Research Guide on Language
Change. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 471–506.

80

Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central
Europe: The Sample Maps

空白ページ

The Completed Maps: Bibliographies
Tomasz Kamusella

A. The Dialect Continua Series

1. Dialect Continua in Central Europe, 9th Century
Atlas histori e Shqiperise. 1972. Tirana: Nish mjete mesimore e sportive “Hamid Shijaku,” p 12.
Barford, P. M. 2001. The Early Slavs: Culture and Society in Early Medieval Eastern Europe.
London: The British Museum Press, p 399.
Berthold, Lothar et al., eds. 1981. Atlas zur Geschichte (vol 1: Von den Anfängen der menschlichen Gesellschaft bis zum Vorabend der Großen Sozialistischen Oktoberrevolution 1917).
Berlin: Zentralinstitut für Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Gotha
and Leipzig: VEB Hermann Haack, Geographische-Kartographische Anstalt, p 20.
Chambers Atlas of World History (Ser: Chambers Paperback Reference Books). 1975. Edinburgh:
Chambers, map 37.
Channon, John. 1995. Historical Atlas of Russia. London: Penguin, p 21.
Engel, Josef. 1970. Grosser historischer Weltatlas (vol 2: Mittelalter). Munich: Bayerischer
Schulbuch-Verlag, pp 60–61, 66–67, 74–75, 95.
Hagen, Rolf M. 1980. Norsk historisk atlas. Kart – oversikter – årstall – tabeller. Oslo: J. W.
Cappelens, map 38.
Kovács, Péter et al., eds. 2007. Történelmi világatlasz. Budapest: Cartographia, pp 28–29; 107,map I.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 1996. A History of Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p 59.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle WA: University of Washington Press, p 11.
Orcier, Pascal (Orsjē, Paskāls). 2005. La Lettonie en Europe. Atlas de la Lettonie/Latvija Eiropā.
Latvijas atlants. Riga: Apgāds Zvaigzne ABC and Paris: Belin, p 22.
Tazbir, Julia. 2006. Atlas historyczny od starożytności do współczesności. Warsaw: Demart, pp
8–9.

2. Dialect Continua in Central Europe, c 1050
Atlas histori e Shqiperise. 1972. Tirana: Nish mjete mesimore e sportive “Hamid Shijaku,” p 14.
Berthold, Lothar et al., eds. 1981. Atlas zur Geschichte (vol 1: Von den Anfängen der menschlichen Gesellschaft bis zum Vorabend der Großen Sozialistischen Oktoberrevolution 1917).
Berlin: Zentralinstitut für Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Gotha
and Leipzig: VEB Hermann Haack, Geographische-Kartographische Anstalt, p 25.
Chambers Atlas of World History (Ser: Chambers Paperback Reference Books). 1975. Edinburgh:
Chambers, map 39.

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Bibliographies

Engel, Josef. 1970. Grosser historischer Weltatlas (vol 2: Mittelalter). Munich: Bayerischer
Schulbuch-Verlag, pp 74–75.
Kovács, Péter et al., eds. 2007. Történelmi világatlasz. Budapest: Cartographia, pp 31; 109,
map III.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 1996. A History of Ukraine. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, p 74.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle WA: University ofWashington Press, p 14.
Nicolle, David. 2008. The Ottomans: Empire of Faith. Ludlow, Shropshire: Thalmus Publishing, pp 10–11, 13.
Regan, Krešimir et al., eds. 2003. Hrvatski povijesni atlas. Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, p 131.
Tazbir, Julia. 2006. Atlas historyczny od starożytności do współczesności. Warsaw: Demart, p
12.
Vermaseren, B. A. 1981. Atlas der algemene en vaderlandse geschiedenis. Groningen:
Wolters-Noordhoff, pp 26–27.

3. Dialect Continua in Central Europe, c 1570
Berthold, Lothar et al., eds. 1981. Atlas zur Geschichte (vol 1: Von den Anfängen der menschlichen Gesellschaft bis zum Vorabend der Großen Sozialistischen Oktoberrevolution
1917). Berlin: Zentralinstitut für Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR,
Gotha and Leipzig: VEB Hermann Haack, Geographische-Kartographische Anstalt, p 40.
Chambers Atlas of World History (Ser: Chambers Paperback Reference Books). 1975. Edinburgh: Chambers, maps 57 and 70.
Darby, H. C. and Fullard, Harold. 1970. The New Cambridge Modern History (vol 14: Atlas).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 70–73.
Engel, Josef. 1970. Grosser historischer Weltatlas (vol 3: Neuzeit). Munich: Bayerischer Schulbuch-Verlag, p 111.
Krallert, Wilfried et al. 1958. Atlas zur Geschichte der deutschen Ostsiedlung (Ser: Monographien zur Weltgeschichte, vol 4). Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, maps 8, 10–11.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle WA: University ofWashington Press, pp 47, 99, 105, 108.
Nicolle, David. 2008. The Ottomans: Empire of Faith. Ludlow, Shropshire: Thalmus Publishing, pp 116–117.
Orcier, Pascal (Orsjē, Paskāls). 2005. La Lettonie en Europe. Atlas de la Lettonie/Latvija Eiropā.
Latvijas atlants. Riga: Apgāds Zvaigzne ABC and Paris: Belin, p 32.
Regan, Krešimir et al., eds. 2003. Hrvatski povijesni atlas. Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, pp 133–134.
Tazbir, Julia. 2006. Atlas historyczny od starożytności do współczesności. Warsaw: Demart, pp
16–17, 20–21.

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Bibliographies

Unat, Faik Reşit. c 1955. Tarih atlası. Istanbul: Kanaat Yayınları, pp 30–31.
Vermaseren, B. A. 1981. Atlas der algemene en vaderlandse geschiedenis. Groningen:
Wolters-Noordhoff, pp 30–31.

4. Dialect Continua in Central Europe, c 1910
Atlas histori e Shqiperise. 1972. Tirana: Nish mjete mesimore e sportive “Hamid Shijaku,” p 30.
Berthold, Lothar et al., eds. 1981. Atlas zur Geschichte (vol 1: Von den Anfängen der menschlichen Gesellschaft bis zum Vorabend der Großen Sozialistischen Oktoberrevolution 1917).
Berlin: Zentralinstitut für Geschichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Gotha
and Leipzig: VEB Hermann Haack, Geographische-Kartographische Anstalt, p 110, 113.
Bodea, Cornelia et al., eds. 1996. România. Atlas istorico-geografic. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, pp 125–131.
Böttcher, E., ed. c 1925. Teubners Geschichtsatlas. Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, pp 20, 24.
Chambers Atlas of World History (Ser: Chambers Paperback Reference Books). 1975. Edinburgh: Chambers, maps 93 and 94.
Darby, H. C. and Fullard, Harold. 1970. The New Cambridge Modern History (vol 14: Atlas).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 78–81.
Engel, Josef. 1970. Grosser historischer Weltatlas (vol 3: Neuzeit). Munich: Bayerischer Schulbuch-Verlag, pp 157–158, 163.
Gilbert, Martin. 1993. The Dent Atlas of Russian History. London: Dent, p 74.
Krallert, Wilfried et al. 1958. Atlas zur Geschichte der deutschen Ostsiedlung (Ser: Monographien zur Weltgeschichte, vol 4). Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, maps 18–19.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle WA: University ofWashington Press, pp 99, 105, 108, 119.
Nabert, Heinrich. c 1994. Der Verbreitung der Deutschen in Europa 1844–1888 (Ser: Schriftenreihe, vol 12). Ahlhorn: Bund für deutsche Schrift und Sprache.
Nicolle, David. 2008. The Ottomans: Empire of Faith. Ludlow, Shropshire: Thalmus Publishing, pp 151, 160.
Orcier, Pascal (Orsjē, Paskāls). 2005. La Lettonie en Europe. Atlas de la Lettonie/Latvija Eiropā.
Latvijas atlants. Riga: Apgāds Zvaigzne ABC and Paris: Belin, p 39.
Regan, Krešimir et al., eds. 2003. Hrvatski povijesni atlas. Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, p 182.
Sellier, Jean and Sellier, André. 2007. Atlas des peoples d’Europe Centrale. Paris: La Découverte, pp 26–27.
Tazbir, Julia. 2006. Atlas historyczny od starożytności do współczesności. Warsaw: Demart, pp
35–39.
Unat, Faik Reşit. c 1955. Tarih atlası. Istanbul: Kanaat Yayınları, pp 34–35.

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Vermaseren, B. A. 1981. Atlas der algemene en vaderlandse geschiedenis. Groningen:
Wolters-Noordhoff, pp 54–55.

5. Dialect Continua in Central Europe, c 2009
Berthold, Lothar et al., eds. 1982. Atlas zur Geschichte (vol 2: Von der Großen Sozialistischen
Oktoberrevolution 1917 bis 1976). Berlin: Zentralinstitut für Geschichte der Akademie
der Wissenschaften der DDR, Gotha and Leipzig: VEB Hermann Haack, Geographische-Kartographische Anstalt, pp 6, 12.
Bodea, Cornelia et al., eds. 1996. România. Atlas istorico-geografic. Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, p 135.
Böttcher, E., ed. c 1925. Teubners Geschichtsatlas. Leipzig: B G Teubner, pp 20, 24.
Breton, Roland. 2007. Atlas jazyků světa. Soužití v křehké rovnováze. Prague: Albatros, pp 18,
35.
Chambers Atlas of World History (Ser: Chambers Paperback Reference Books). 1975. Edinburgh: Chambers, maps 101 and 107.
Darby, H. C. and Fullard, Harold. 1970. The New Cambridge Modern History (vol 14: Atlas).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 82–85, 147, 171, 178.
Engel, Josef. 1970. Grosser historischer Weltatlas (vol 3: Neuzeit). Munich: Bayerischer Schulbuch-Verlag, pp 184–185, 194–195, 197.
Gilbert, Martin. 1993. The Dent Atlas of Russian History. London: Dent, pp 160–161.
Krallert, Wilfried et al. 1958. Atlas zur Geschichte der deutschen Ostsiedlung (Ser: Monographien zur Weltgeschichte, vol 4). Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, maps 22–24.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle WA: University ofWashington Press, pp 130–173, 175, 198, 203, 223.
Nicolle, David. 2008. The Ottomans: Empire of Faith. Ludlow, Shropshire: Thalmus Publishing, p 184.
Orcier, Pascal (Orsjē, Paskāls). 2005. La Lettonie en Europe. Atlas de la Lettonie/Latvija Eiropā.
Latvijas atlants. Riga: Apgāds Zvaigzne ABC and Paris: Belin, pp 71–75.
Regan, Krešimir et al., eds. 2003. Hrvatski povijesni atlas. Zagreb: Leksikografski zavod Miroslav Krleža, pp 300–301, 307–309.
Sellier, Jean and Sellier, André. 2007. Atlas des peoples d’Europe Centrale. Paris: La Découverte, pp 37, 42, 52, 54, 56, 59, 64, 68, 78, 81, 97, 113–114, 125, 136, 142, 151, 155,
161–162, 164, 168, 174, 178, 185.
Tazbir, Julia. 2006. Atlas historyczny od starożytności do współczesności. Warsaw: Demart, pp
98–100.
Unat, Faik Reşit. c 1955. Tarih atlası. Istanbul: Kanaat Yayınları, p 45.
Vermaseren, B. A. 1981. Atlas der algemene en vaderlandse geschiedenis. Groningen:
Wolters-Noordhoff, p 60.

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B. Maps to Be Developed into Separate Series
1. Linguistic Areas (Sprachbünde) in Central Europe, c 1930
Décsy, Gyula. 1973. Die linguistische Struktur Europas. Vergangenheit, Gegenwart, Zukunft.
Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Haarmann, Harald. 1976. Aspekte der Areal-typologie. Die Problematik der europäischen
Sprachbünde (Ser: Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik, vol 72). Tübingen: Narr.
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 2006. The Citcle That Won’t Come Full: Two Potential Isoglosses
in the Circum-Baltic Area (pp 182–226). In: Matras, Yaron et al., eds. Linguistic Areas:
Convergence in Historical and Typological Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Lewy, Ernst. 1942. Der Bau der europäischen Sprachen (pp 15–117). Proceedings of the Royal
Irish Academy. Ser C, vol 48, no 2.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle WA: University ofWashington Press, p 175.
Nabert, Heinrich. c 1994. Der Verbreitung der Deutschen in Europa 1844–1888 (Ser: Schriftenreihe, vol 12). Ahlhorn: Bund für deutsche Schrift und Sprache.
Skalá, Emil. 2001. Středoevropský jazykový svaz (pp 77–85). In: Přednášky z XLI. běhu Letníškoly slovanských studií. Prague: Univerzita Karlova.
Skalička, Vladimír. 1935. Zur mitteleuropäischen Phonologie (pp 151–154). Časopis pro
moderní folologii. No 21.
Skalička, Vladimír. 1968. Zum Problem des Donausprachbundes (pp 3–9). Ural-altaische Jahrbücher. Vol 40.
Trubetzkoy, Nikolaj S. 1931. Phonologie und Sprachgeographie (pp 228–234). Travaux duCercle Linguistique de Prague. No 4.

2. Central Europe’s Writing Systems in 2009 and the Past
Breton, Roland. 2007. Atlas jazyků světa. Soužití v křehké rovnováze. Prague: Albatros.
Inglebert, Hervé. 2009. Atlas de Rome et des barbares IIIe-IVe siècle. La fin de l’Empire romain
en Occident. Paris: Autrement, pp 34, 38–39, 60.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2009. The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central
Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp 1–364.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle WA: University ofWashington Press, pp 9, 14, 17, 28–29, 108, 113, 119, 203.
Tazbir, Julia. 2006. Atlas historyczny od starożytności do współczesności. Warsaw: Demart, pp
11, 16–17, 21, 32.

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C. The Isomorphism Series
1. Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State in Central Europe, c 1930
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2006. The Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State: The Case of Central Europe (pp 57–92). In: W. Burszta, T. Kamusella, & S. Wojciechowski, eds. Nationalisms Across the Globe: An Overview of Nationalisms of State-Endowed and StatelessNations (vol 2: The World). Poznań, Poland: Wyższa Szkoła Nauk Humanistycznych i
Dziennikarstwa.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle WA: University ofWashington Press, p 175.
Regarding the political and administrative borders, and also place-names, please, see the literature in B1 (map: Linguistic Areas [Sprachbünde] in Central Europe, c 1930)

2. Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State in Central Europe, 1974–1989
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2006. The Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State: The Case of Central Europe (pp 57–92). In: W. Burszta, T. Kamusella, & S. Wojciechowski, eds. Nationalisms Across the Globe: An Overview of Nationalisms of State-Endowed and StatelessNations (vol 2: The World). Poznań, Poland: Wyższa Szkoła Nauk Humanistycznych i
Dziennikarstwa.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle WA: University ofWashington Press, p 203.

3. Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State in Central Europe, 2009
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2006. The Isomorphism of Language, Nation, and State: The Case of Central Europe (pp 57–92). In: W. Burszta, T. Kamusella, & S. Wojciechowski, eds. Nationalisms Across the Globe: An Overview of Nationalisms of State-Endowed and StatelessNations (vol 2: The World). Poznań, Poland: Wyższa Szkoła Nauk Humanistycznych i
Dziennikarstwa.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle WA: University ofWashington Press, p 222.
Regarding the political and administrative borders, and also place-names, please, see the literature in A5 (map: Dialect Continua in Central Europe, c 2009)88

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D1. Non-State Minority, Regional and Unrecognized Languages, andWritten Dialects in Central Europe, 19th – 21st Centuries
And

D2. List of Non-State Minority, Regional and Unrecognized
Languages, and Written Dialects in Central Europe, 19th – 21stCenturies
Breton, Roland. 2007. Atlas jazyků světa. Soužití v křehké rovnováze. Prague: Albatros.
Dulichenko, Aleksandr D. 2003–2004. Slavianskie literaturnye mikroiazyki. Obraztsy tekstov (2vols). Tartu: Izdatelstvo Tartuskogo univerziteta.
Janich, Nina and Greule, Albrecht, eds. 2002. Sprachkulturen in Europa. Ein internationales
Handbuch. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Kamusella, Tomasz. 2009. The Politics of Language and Nationalism in Modern Central
Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp 1–364.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2002. Historical Atlas of Central Europe. Seattle WA: University ofWashington Press, p 222.
Maruškovič, Viliam. 2008. Európa jazykov a národov na prahu tretieho tisícročia. Europa lingarum nationumque. Martin: Matica slovenská.
Okuka, Miloš and Krenn, Gerald, eds. 2002. Wieser Enzyklopädie des europäischen Ostens (vol10: Lexikon der Sprachen des europäischen Ostens). Klagenfurt: Wieser.
Price, Glanville, ed. 1998. Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell.
ROMLEX. http://romani.uni-graz.at/romlex/
Wikipedia. Accessed: 2009.

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