Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker

Author:   Thomas Paul Bonfiglio
Publisher:   De Gruyter
Volume:   226
ISBN:  

9781934078259


Pages:   253
Publication Date:   15 June 2010
Recommended Age:   College Graduate Student
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
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Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker


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Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Thomas Paul Bonfiglio
Publisher:   De Gruyter
Imprint:   De Gruyter Mouton
Volume:   226
Dimensions:   Width: 15.50cm , Height: 1.60cm , Length: 23.00cm
Weight:   0.511kg
ISBN:  

9781934078259


ISBN 10:   1934078255
Pages:   253
Publication Date:   15 June 2010
Recommended Age:   College Graduate Student
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.

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

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