Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker

Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Published by De Gruyter Mouton 2010

Mother Tongues and Nations

The Invention of the Native Speaker

Thomas Paul Bonfiglio

Volume 226 in the series Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM]

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781934078266

Overview
Contents

About this book

This monograph examines the ideological legacy of the the apparently innocent kinship metaphors of “mother tongue” and “native speaker” by historicizing their linguistic development. It shows how the early nation states constructed the ideology of ethnolinguistic nationalism, a composite of national language, identity, geography, and race. This ideology invented myths of congenital communities that configured the national language in a symbiotic matrix between body and physical environment and as the ethnic and corporeal ownership of national identity and local organic nature. These ethno-nationalist gestures informed the philology of the early modern era and generated arboreal and genealogical models of language, culminating most divisively in the race conscious discourse of the Indo-European hypothesis of the 19th century. The philosophical theories of organicism also contributed to these ideologies. The fundamentally nationalist conflation of race and language was and is the catalyst for subsequent permutations of ethnolinguistic discrimination, which continue today. Scholarship should scrutinize the tendency to overextend biological metaphors in the study of language, as these can encourage, however surreptitiously, genetic and racial impressions of language.

First book to historicize the metaphors of "mother tongue" and "native speaker" as products of the anxieties of national identity in the emergent nation states.
Demonstates that organicist theories of language are of folkloric origin, as are the arboreal models for language — the “family trees” — that they generated.
The illumination of the current persistence of the biologizing and consequential racializing of language in the confusion between competence and performance.

Author / Editor information

Thomas Paul Bonfiglio, The University of Richmond, VA, USA.

Topics

Frontmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	I
Contents Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	IX
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1: Deconstructing the native speaker Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	8
Chapter 2: Nativity and the nation state Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	21
Chapter 3: Antiquity and the absence of ethnolinguistic nationalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
Chapter 4: From sermo patrius to lingua materna Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
Chapter 5: Abstracting the secular: Ethnolinguistic nationalism in the eighteenth century Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	122
Chapter 6: Reconstructing Eden: Genealogies of language in the nineteeth century Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
Chapter 7: Scholarship in the maternal arboretum of language Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	218
Backmatter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	224

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
Audience: Academics and students in the fields of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. Language researchers in anthropology and culture studies.
Pages
- Front matter: 9
- Main content: 244
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 14
Keywords: Historical Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; Anthropology

eBook

Published: June 29, 2010
ISBN: 9781934078266

Hardcover

Published: June 15, 2010
ISBN: 9781934078259