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Text from: Review by Bev Thurber, Linguist List (May 29, 2025)

"This thematic collection aims at a rather broad audience that includes, but is not limited to, historical linguists as well as anthropologists and historians. It stated aim is to show that historical-comparative linguistics is not “a field for harmless drudges and antiquarians”: instead, it has far-reaching consequences as it connects (and clashes) with nationalist ideologies. These go all the way back to the field’s genesis in the eighteenth century, and the ideal of a national language goes back even further.

The twelve papers collected here all address different aspects of the relationship between nationalism and historical-comparative linguistics. They are the result of discussions held during presentations at the Annual Meetings of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in 2013 and 2014. In their introduction, Camiel Hamans and Hans Heinrich Hock set the stage for the essays by noting that they fall into four broad categories:

• the relationship between comparative-historical linguistics and ideology,
• bias in comparative-historical linguistic research,
• ways in which people have tried to rewrite linguistic history to support ideology, and
• linguistic change in response to nationalist ideology."

Complete review by Bev Thurber, Linguist List (May 29, 2025)

Author Information

1. Introduction, Camiel Hamans and Hans Henrich Hock

2. Misunderstanding historical linguistics: Three Uralic examples, Johanna Laakso

3. Ideologies and linguistic development in North Germanic, Kristján Árnason

4. Ideology and recent attacks on historical-comparative methodology: Historical linguistics under siege?, Hans Henrich Hock

5. Indo-European linguistic palaeontology and ideology: Nice wheels!, Hans Henrich Hock

6. Historical linguistics and the Macedonia name issue: What's in a name?, Brian D. Joseph

7. Celtic and English language contact and scholarly attitudes, Anders Ahlqvist

8. Borrowing and historical-linguistic ideology, Johanna Laakso

9. The origin of Afrikaans: Purism or language contact?, Camiel Hamans

10. Moldovan and Maltese and the poverty of historicism in Romance linguistics, John Charles Smith

11. The breakup of the national language of the former Yugoslavia: Speeding up language change, Ranko Bugarski

12. The European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages: Turning the tide against linguistic nationalism, Camiel Hamans

13. Methodological nationalism and (anti-)historicism in the history of linguistics: Linguistic essentialism, Ferdinand von Mengden and Britta Schneider