This book discusses the historical record of the idea that language is associated with national identity, demonstrating that different applications of this idea have consistently produced certain types of results. Nationalist movements aimed at 'unification', based upon languages which vary greatly at the spoken level, e.g. German, Italian, Pan-Turkish and Arabic, have been associated with aggression, fascism and genocide, while those based upon relatively homogeneous spoken languages, e.g. Czech, Norwegian and Ukrainian, have resulted in national liberation and international stability. It is also shown that religion can be more important to national identity than language, but only for religious groups which were understood in premodern times to be national rather than universal or doctrinal, e.g. Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Serbs, Dutch and English; this is demonstrated with discussions of the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the civil war in Lebanon and the breakup of Yugoslavia, the United Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1–26 Premodern national churches, Roman Europe, and the Caliphate 27–70 Small languages and national liberation 71–117 Big languages, delusions of grandeur, war, and fascism 119–176 Language, religion, and nationalism in Europe 177–227 Language, religion, and nationalism in the Middle East 229–276 Conclusion 277–281 Bibliography 283–293 Index 295–300

"It has always been clear that language is linked to nationalism and nationalism to language. What John Myhill has done here is to show for the first time that this easy equation ignores the linguistic facts. It may be true that a "language is a dialect with an army and a navy." But it is not just the army and the navy that matter. It also matters that some languages are more obviously languages than others." Peter Trudgill