ABSTRACT
The metaphors of lactation, the organicity of languages and the genealogic vision of language families as single rooted trees, which are intimately linked to the notion of the mother-tongue, are augmented by the metaphors of territoriality and nativity. National languages are fundamentally unmixed and directly linked – both in a religious and a secular sense – to their origins through an unbroken line. Languages are trees in a double metaphorical sense: their roots connect them to their historical origins and to the nation and landscape in which they originated. The new national bourgeois social order, which established its power in the course of the nineteenth century, was in need of a new set of political metaphors of socio-political unity and cohesion in order to distinguish itself from the former power structures of the aristocratic Ancien Regime. Nations and national languages are both conceived of in territorial terms and associated with specific landscapes.
