The Making of a Mother Tongue: Standardizing European Minor Languages - The Case of Occitan, Yiddish, and Belarusian
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Final Report Abstract
The project examines the standardization process of three "minor" European languages – Yiddish, Occitan, and Belarusian – from an interdisciplinary cultural-historical perspective at the crossroads of history and philology. The case studies shed light on the comparability of Eastern and Western European nation and region-building processes. In both cases, dichotomous perspectives, such as the assumption of geographically anchored forms of nationalism (Hans Kohn) or the paradigm of backwardness (Ernest Gellner), have influenced historiography to the present day. The period covered by the project spans from the mid-19th century to the 1930s, i.e. almost a century. This relatively long period is structured by a thematic approach; structural similarities in the three standardization processes examined serve as a guideline. The starting point for both the selection of the case studies and their analysis is the precarious situation of "minor" languages, which stands in sharp contrast to the prestigious Nobel Prizes awarded to the Occitan writer Frédéric Mistral (1904) and the Yiddish author Isaak Bashevis Singer (1978), who were explicitly honored as authors of minority languages. However, in public, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Svetlana Alexievich in 2015 was repeatedly accompanied by the question (mostly based on ignorance of Belarusian society and culture) of why an author writing in Russian was singled out as Belarusian. Against this background, the project examines the techniques used by language activists while standardizing "their" "minor" language: collecting, organizing, and writing, before having a look at the actors in this process: Their role in academia and the press is analyzed, as well as their interactions with their imagined and factual audiences. In a further step, the focus is put on the concepts that the language activists developed to increase the prestige of "their" language and at the same time to distinguish them from their "major" neighbors – in this case French, German, and Russian: Dialect versus language, role models and counter-images, visualizations of the past. The fact that all three of the languages examined in the project have not yet been standardized in a binding manner and their continued existence is therefore at considerable risk raises the question of the "failure" of language activists: To what extent is this constitutive for the (self-)understanding of "minor" languages and what is its analytical value-add for historical work?
Publications
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Die Macht der Wörter? Die Standardisierung des Jiddischen und des Belarusischen in den 1920er und 1930er Jahren. Zukunft der Sprache – Zukunft der Nation?, 69-82. De Gruyter.
Niedhammer, Martina
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Ihr, Juden, werdet Euch erheben, wenn Belarus sich erhoben hat. Belarusische Intellektuelle und die Idee einer belarusisch-jüdischen Symbiose im frühen 20. Jahrhundert. Münchner Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 2022/1
Martina Niedhammer
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Jüdisches Leben in Belarus im 20 und 21. Jahrhundert. Münchner Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 2022/1
Martina Niedhammer
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Zmitrok Bjaduljas Poem „Juden“ (1915). Ein Aufruf an die belarusischen Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg. Münchner Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 2022/1
Martina Niedhammer & Claire LeFoll
