Language and Nation Building

Abstract

From a physical point of view, languages can be said to be located in specific territories. This is an idea that became central in the process of nation building in nineteenth-century Europe. It is indeed in that historical and geographical context that, perhaps unwittingly, much of the twentieth-century discourse on language purism and pluralism finds its earliest roots. In the specific case of English, the link with a particular territory probably began to be established earlier. With reference to 1362, when English replaced Norman French as the legislative language of Britain, Seton-Watson observed the following:

One might […] risk the generalisation that, though England was a land of human civilisation from the time of Julius Caesar, and even earlier, an English nation and an English language only came into existence in the fourteenth century. From this time only dates the history of England, as opposed to the history of the people of Britain.

(Seton-Watson, 1977, p. 30)

Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste, ná Béarla cliste (Broken Irish is better than clever English).

—Irish proverb