ABSTRACT
The process of construing speech through the technologies of writing (scripts) and printing produced a lot of new Einzelsprachen (languages) from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. This process accelerated when, in the wake of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the concept of Einzelsprache was secularized. No longer did a “proper” language have to be identical with the “holy tongue” of the original or approved translation of a “holy book.” The only continuity from this previously normative equation was script. New Einzelsprachen, generated by the now officially and legally approved translation of the Bible into vernaculars, almost always retained the “holy tongue’s” script. It was the Latin alphabet in the case of the vernacular Einzelsprachen of Roman Catholics, Cyrillic for Orthodox Slavophones’ and Romancephones’ languages, or the Hebrew abjad in the case of the vernaculars employed for writing and printing by Judaists (Jews). The rise and functional separation of secular Einzelsprachen from this or that “holy tongue” was also underwritten by the normative separation of state and church, especially in the wake of the religious wars. After the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 with the so-called Peace of Westphalia (a series of treaties signed at the Westphalian cities of Osnabrück and Münster), a new political norm of sovereignty was accepted in Western and Central Europe. This development gave rise to the centralized territorial state, whose ruler (typically, a monarch) enjoyed the exclusive right to decide about the religion of the realm in line with the principle, cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion). People professing another religion (or denomination) either had to convert to the state’s religion or leave. This normative principle of religious homogeneity underpinned the sovereign centralized territorial state. In this normative insistence on the homogeneity of the state’s population, the early territorial state is the direct forerunner of the modern nation-state, whose population (construed as a nation) must be homogenous in one way or another. In today’s Central Europe this normative homogeneity is typically of a linguistic character.
