ABSTRACT
The “genetic” ( Stammbaum -style) classification of languages (Einzelsprachen) has been preferred by scholars and nationalists alike since the mid-nineteenth century because it allows for the allocation of distinctive languages to ethnolinguistically defined nations (groups of people). Einzelsprachen are imagined as self-contained entities, completely separate from one another. This radical discontinuity, at the conceptual level, can be easily translated into territorial discontinuity, or into a state frontier. In a quantum leap of ideologized thinking about the linguistic, the non-territorial character of a language is territorialized into the boundaries of an ethnolinguistic nation-state, in accordance with ethnolinguistic nationalism’s principle of the normative isomorphism of language, nation, and state: Language = Nation = State. The modern-style statehood underpinned with the norm of (Westphalian) sovereignty does not allow for overlapping territories or jurisdictions in the case of nation-states recognized as independent and sovereign (“normal”). Hence, multilingualism and polyglossia are seen as an “aberration” from the perspective of ethnolinguistic nationalism, since these phenomena are a form of social and spatial overlapping of languages, which blurs any sharp divisions among them.
