Scholars and the reframing of Europe: the
complex relationship between language, race
and nation during the Great War
FRANCESCA ZANTEDESCHI
SPIN (UvA) Research affiliate
Delegates attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 were given the
arduous task of establishing the terms of the peace after WW1, including the
criteria by which to determine the boundaries of new states emerging from
the collapse of the old multinational empires. Given that U.S. President
Woodrow Wilson had laid so much emphasis on the principle of ‘self-
determination’, language was considered by many as the best element to
establish nationality in ethnically mixed territories. A legacy of the
nineteenth century, the apparently straightforward identification between
language and nation was nevertheless complicated by pervasive ideas about
race, as the taxonomies of language and race became increasingly
entangled.
By presenting selected works by two scholars – Leon Dominian, a
geographer, and Antoine Meillet, a linguist –, this paper analyses the main
and most widespread arguments propounded in support of the
identification between language and nation during the Great War. It also
explains why this principle turned out to be exceedingly problematic at the
time of the redrawing the political map of Europe, and how the ambiguous
relationship between language and race persisted during the early years of
twentieth century.
Keywords: World War 1, new states, making borders, language, race.
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Introduction
When the delegates convened at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris,
they were given, among others, the task of solving what would be the
guiding principle by which to define and draw up the boundaries of the
new states, in particular those born from the ashes of the defunct Austro-
Hungarian Empire. In an article on the languages spoken in that Empire
by the various nationalities, published in the Journal de la société
statistique de Paris, in 1915, the French physician and anthropologist,
Arthur Chervin, had observed, with good reason, how language had come
to serve political aims, especially with regard to the question of self-
determination. In it, he aimed to analyse ‘with the aid of indisputable
scientific documents, without bias and without passion’, the ethnic
composition of Austria-Hungary. His objective was therefore to present
the results of official administrative surveys on religion and, above all,
the language spoken by its inhabitants. However, after immediately
discarding religion, on the ground that it did not provide ‘such conclusive
information as the spoken language’, he turned his attention to the
‘spoken mother tongue’. This, according to him, represented an
important proof that the nationalities were constituted by ‘perfectly
distinct linguistic units’. He argued that, ‘whatever the primitive and
remote origin of the races which populate the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
the spoken language has now become the determining factor of the race
which the various nationalities claim for themselves in their present
habitat and the raison d’être of their political aspirations’.1
Chervin’s statement identifying language as the main element by which
a nation was to be defined conveys an assumption that certainly did not
appear novel at that time; it was indeed a by-product of the evolving
concept of nation, an ongoing process that began at the turn of the
nineteenth century, according to which peoples were to be distinguished
by cultural factors – above all linguistic ones. Even though the
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association of language to nations was by no means simple (as there are
languages without nations, just as there are nations with more than one
‘national’ language), language indeed became one of the principal factors
used in the identification of nations. Further still, as language also
conveyed a sense of ethnic (or racial) identification, given that language
studies was directly correlated with the proliferation of race thinking
throughout the century,2 the taxonomies of language and ‘race’ became
increasingly intertwined.3 The full complexity of the tripartite nexus
between language, race and nation came to the fore during the drafting
of the Peace Treaties at the end the First World War on the question of
‘reframing’ Europe based on a ‘natural and scientific solution’.4
According to the ‘nation-state principle’, in effect, there was ‘perfect
congruence between political and ethno-cultural unity’.5 Moreover, this
principle spurred decision-making at the time of the peace treaties,
which in turn led to the redrawing of the political map of Europe.
Language, then, was therefore invoked as a ‘natural’ criterion by which
to define and draw the boundaries of the new territories (nation states).
In this article, I would like to focus on precisely how this close nexus
between language and nation was advocated by certain scholars during
the Great War as the guiding principle for reframing Europe once the war
had ended. Indeed scholars played a fundamental role in redefining the
borders of central and eastern European states, since they were given
the task, as the French linguist Antoine Meillet explained in the foreword
of his book, Langues dans l’Europe nouvelle (1918), of not providing
‘ready-made solutions’ or ‘lead[ing]’, but ‘enlighten[ing] those who have
the responsibility to act’.6 However, in order to grasp the complexity of
the problem, it will be necessary to explain the awkward coexistence
between ‘language’ and ‘race’ in greater detail. By the same token,
throughout the century the ‘myth of race’ was intertwined with the ‘myth
of nation’: in fact, both ‘provided complex social, cultural, historical, and
political narratives that sought to solidify inherent similarities and
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differences amongst individuals and communities’.7 The close
interconnection between these three concepts, facilitated by the fluidity
of ‘race’ theories, emerged to its full extent during the First World War,
in particular during the peace negotiations. Accordingly, in the following
pages, I will try to ‘verify’ Anna Morpurgo Davies’ assertion whereby, ‘if
one disregards the personal opinions of some scholars, the development
of professional linguistics in the nineteenth century [...] ends up with a
clear division between language and race’.8 The fact is that the debate on
the relationship between language and race (and of those of the nation),
far from being limited to professional linguists, was a common concern
of all those who, in one way or another, were confronted by the task of
defining the characteristics (and hence, also the boundaries) of a nation.
Finally, the analysis of the relationship between language, race, and
nation will help to clarify the deepening entrenchment of nationalist
ideologies in ethnic (or cultural) principles from the end of the
nineteenth century onwards, not only because the idea of the nation
changed meaning in the late nineteenth century ‘under the influence of
science, and specifically of evolution and race theories’,9 but also because,
inevitably, nationalism was transforming European politics and
scholarship.10 Some recent works have indeed emphasized both the
influence that human and social sciences (such as ethnology, history,
physical anthropology, psychology, etc.) had on nationalism and vice
versa, and the transnational dimension of the development of the
national sciences, which spread in the context of international
relations.11 This international frame of reference provides the context in
which (cultural, physical, psychological) national differences were
‘scientifically’ elaborated and explained, and (more or less deliberately)
manipulated for political purposes. However, as Chris Manias has
explained, contrary to what happened in the earlier period, which were
characterised by consolidation of scientific networks and disciplines, the
decades preceding the Great War testified to a growing ‘splitting and
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fragmentation’. The reasons for this were many, and related to both
political factors (such as the exacerbation of inter- and intra-national
rivalries, and the repercussions of ‘New Imperialism’ on ‘public
consciousness, domestic politics and the human sciences’), as well as
more scientific factors, for instance, the ‘challenging the idea of progress’,
and the growing importance of countries previously considered
‘peripheral’ to intellectual production in the international scholarly
context. This led to increasingly scientific specialism and
differentiation.12
It is in this context, then, that I would like to introduce and explore a few
selected works by Leon Dominian and Antoine Meillet, as they are useful
in understanding the issues at stake in the negotiations that culminated
with the signature of the 1919 Peace Treaties. Leon Dominian was a
naturalised American Armenian geographer, who made a detailed study
of the political and linguistic situation in Europe and Near East, for the
benefit of Americans; Antoine Meillet, on the contrary, was a French
linguist who had participated in the meetings of the Comité d’études, held
by the French government in 1917 to determine the country’s peace
objectives. Their works provide an opportunity to reflect on some of the
major disputed questions as a result of the correlation between language
and nation, such as the impossibility of using them as a reference
framework for the redrawing of the map of Europe, and the need to
dampen exacerbated nationalisms through the search for an
‘international’ (neutral) language.
Nation, language, race: a tricky relationship
The language/nation convergence developed significantly in the
nineteenth century in the context of nationality movements and the birth
of nation-states. Before the coming of national languages, however, the
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linguistic landscape of Europe was rather jumbled: the vast majority of
people were illiterate, and languages were for the most part learnt orally.
Moreover, different written languages existed within the single political
unit, which could be accounted for by the different functions assigned to
them: administrative, literary, religious and so on. By the end of the
eighteenth century, national languages were deemed capable of ‘replacing
a heterogeneity of linguistic modes responding to diversified uses’ and
‘representing the nation’, which therefore responded to the increasing
demands of the modern state.13 In contexts where multilingualism was the
norm, a single idiom was chosen as the official language of the state. The
equivalence of state language and national language is therefore the result
of a long evolutionary process of both linguistic and political-legal
conceptions of the nation and the modern state. Accordingly, the status of
‘national language’ was also attributed to written language, as it became
codified, officialised, controlled and disseminated by state institutions in
all domains of public life.14
The equivalence of language and nation is not only the product of a
particular conjuncture, brought about by the consolidation of states into
national entities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it was
also the product of progress in human and social sciences – in particular,
the linguistic disciplines – that accompanied the creation of those states.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the aesthetic and socio-historical
discourse developed by German romanticism placed language, as an
expression of the spirit of a people, at the heart of the legal and political
definition of the nation.15 In the absence of a unifying state – as was the
case for the German-speaking territories –, language ‘was thought to
testify to native speakers’ shared historical descent from a common
cultural origin’.16 Philology was then applied with the aim of
understanding historical cultures based on the analysis and interpretation
of their texts. From a historical-scientific point of view, philological
practice laid down the foundations of an independent discipline of
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philological-historical scholarship, as well as its correlated sub-
disciplines, such as historical linguistics, cultural-philological
interpretation and philosophical hermeneutics.17 At the beginning of the
nineteenth century, the transformation of philology from an auxiliary
science to an autonomous scientific discipline seemed to confirm the idea
that language was ‘one of the most significant elements in understanding
the development of a nation’.18 Its success was also a result of the social
function exercised by literature as a cultural activity that participated in
the construction of collective identities. Having become the main tool of
medieval historical study, philology was given the task of tracing the
origins of the nation. By facilitating ‘the creation of a “scientific” national
history that projects both the national language and the national ideology
into the distant past’, the new philology thus provided a scientific tool
capable of proving the ‘antiquity’ of nations.19
At the same time, the idea of the close nexus between language and race
was gaining ground. As ‘the basis of somatic features that are stable over
time’, in fact, race was thought ‘to reflect – and codetermine – the specific
fundamental characteristics of language and the cultural forms associated
with it’.20 It was facilitated by both the inherent ambiguity of the notion of
race itself, and the issues implicit in linguistic studies, as was the case of
the monogenesis/polygenesis debate. This debate centred on the origins
of languages, that is, whether or not they had a common origin, and the
extent to which their differentiation had taken place over time
(monogenetic hypothesis) or, conversely, the multiple origins of
languages analysed in relation to population and geography (polygenetic
hypothesis).21
Another issue widely debated among linguists and others, and which was
to have important repercussions in terms of ‘race’ theories, related to the
question of whether European tongues descended from a single, ancestral
Indo-European language. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the
German writer and philosopher, Friedrich von Schlegel, devoted his
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attention to a major study of Sanskrit, Über die Sprache und Weisheit des
Indier (1808), in which he argued that not only this sacred Indian language
was ‘the most regulated, the most efficient, the most poetic’ language and
the least confused, but also that a number of other languages, including
Greek, Latin, Persian and German, owed their origins to it. He was the first
to use ‘comparative grammar’ in the ‘historical-genealogical’ sense, i.e. as
a means of demonstrating the common descent of several languages from
a single mother tongue.22
The passage transforming a linguistic category into a racial one was short.
The idea spread that this linguistic kinship originated from a people from
northern Europe or the Caucasus who migrated during proto-history to
the Indian peninsula, Persia and Europe. In 1849, on the occasion of the
prestigious Volney Prize, annually awarded to the best philosophical and
comparative study of languages, the German comparative philologist,
Friedrich Max Müller, ‘first presented his ideas about the existence of a
distinct Aryan language and civilization’.23 Not long after, he published
Comparative Mythology: An Essay (1856), in which he claimed that
comparative philology could provide ‘insight into a period “when Sanskrit
was not Sanskrit, Greek not yet Greek, but when both, together with Latin,
German and other Aryan dialects, existed yet as one undivided language”’,
and ‘would allow “the archives of the most distant antiquity of the Aryan
race” finally to be opened’.24 The superiority of the Aryan race, defined as
the ‘race of Indo-European speakers’, was also claimed at that time by the
French diplomat, writer, and ethnologist Joseph Arthur, Comte de
Gobineau. Despite not having invented the aesthetics of races,25
Gobineau developed a theory of racial differences, whereby he identified
the roles of the natural laws governing the social world, in his work, Essai
sur l’inégalité des races humaines (4 vols., 1853-1855). Among his basic
premises, he argued that the inequality of languages corresponded
exactly to the inequality of races, and that the white race, especially the
Aryan one of Germanic peoples, was superior to others. In that same
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period, Ernest Renan published the essay Histoire générale et système
comparé des langues sémitiques (1855), whose books I and V (‘Questions
of Origin’ and ‘Conclusions’) were devoted to the construction of a
genuine theory of ‘Semitic peoples’, and ‘transposed a series of linguistic
considerations into an ethno-cultural issue’.26 In the case of German
philologists, in the nineteenth century they interpreted language as
evidence of ethnic descent and created influential myths of cultural
origin around the perceived starting points of their own mother
tongues.27
Such linguistic racial determinism was endorsed by the Belgian linguist
Honore -Joseph Chave e, who transformed the language/race partnership
into a linguistic principle (‘telle race, telle langue, et telle langue, telle
race’), in his book Les langues et les races (1862), according to which he
established a kind of hierarchy of languages.28 Relying on the comparison
of Indo-European and Semitic inflections and syntactic forms, Chave e
argued that the two languages did not have a common origin and that,
consequently, Indo-Europeans and Semites belonged to two different
primitive races.29
Needless to say, the racial-linguistic affinity had also become
commonplace outside linguistic circles.30 For instance, Edward Augustus
Freeman, the English historian mainly known for his History of the Norman
Conquest (6 vols., Oxford, 1867-79), asserted in 1879 that the ‘doctrine of
race, in its popular form, is the direct offspring of the study of scientific
philology’. This was not to say that ‘scientific philologers’ believed that
language ‘was a certain test of race’, nor that men who speak the same
tongue ‘are necessarily men of the same blood’; rather, it was ‘the natural
instinct of mankind’ to connect race and language:
It does not assume that language is an infallible test of race; but it
does assume that language and race have something to do with one
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another. It assumes, that though language is not an accurately
scientific test of race, yet it is a rough and ready test which does for
many practical purposes. To make something more of an exact
definition, one might say, that though language is not a test of race,
it is, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, a presumption of
race; that though it is not a test of race, yet it is a test of something
which, for many practical purposes, is the same as race.
Similarly, Freeman believed that even though nationality was not
grounded in philological science, language was ‘the best guide’ to group
races and nations, to ‘mark them off one from the other’.31
Of course, not all authors agreed on the strict determinism between
language, race and nation. Abel de Hovelacque contributed to the heated
debate regarding the defining (political or cultural) characteristics of the
French nation, which had taken place following the loss of Alsace-
Lorraine because of the Franco-Prussian war (1870-71), and marked the
beginning of the Third Republic. He wrote that the ‘theory of races,
languages and nationalities’, was ‘specious’, for being at odds both with a
number of scientific as well as political concepts it relied on, such as the
right of free association, which was inherent in republican democracy.32
He explained further that this theory had been ‘officially affirmed and
seemed to receive its first practical endorsement’ during the unification
of Italy. And yet, Hovelacque continued, ‘this purported unity of the
languages and races of Italy was mere fiction. The Italian people was one
by necessity and by aspiration, it was not one [...] either in terms of its
language or race’. In Europe, there are no places where race coincides
with language. It is even rare for language to coincide with nationality,
i.e. with ‘voluntary political union’. And he therefore dismissed racial
determinism: ‘It is therefore just as inadmissible to pretend to base the
idea of nationality on race as to pretend to base it on language’.33 Abel
Hovelacque, who was an anthropologist and linguist, in 1876 was
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appointed professor (and from 1890 director) of the E cole
d’anthropologie. In 1867 he founded, together with Chave e, the Revue de
linguistique et de philologie comparée (1867-1916) (The Journal of
Comparative Linguistics and Philology), which sought to integrate
linguistics into the natural sciences, considering language as ‘a living
organism and argued for the rigorous application of evolutionary
transformism in linguistics’.34 In France, in that period, a generation of
anthropologists-linguists (among others, Hovelacque, Girard de Rialle,
and Julien Vinson) devoted themselves to analysing the question of the
origins of language and its evolution. Following in the footsteps of the
anthropologist Paul Broca, they admitted the distinction between
langage (immutable and an integral part of man) and langues (which are
transformed according to political events and social conditions).
According to Hovelacque, the faculty of language was acquired by man,
and the ‘precursor of man’ (a being in transition between man and
animal) had acquired it through different places, thus giving rise to
different human races. The plurality of languages thus contributed to the
original plurality of races.
And yet, by the end of the century, many scholars still confounded the
biological characteristics of a population with its linguistic or cultural
heritage. The term ‘race’ became commonplace, as was transposed from
linguistic to physical groups, and combined with ideas drawn from social
Darwinism to produce theories of racial inequalities and superiorities.35
The complexity of the relationship between language, race and nation, as
well as the different criteria with which to define the nation (voluntary
political association or ethnic-cultural group?), and the contradictions
they conveyed, would fully surface at the time of the 1919 Peace Treaties.
Delegates at the Paris Conference attempted to identify the scientific and
natural criteria with which to redraw the borders of the new states. That
was the reason they called on experts (geographers, historians, linguists,
economists, etc.) to redefine a geopolitical situation which, principally
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due to the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman
Empires, had become potentially explosive.
Leon Dominian: language as ‘cohesive power of
nationality’.
In September 1917, the American president Woodrow Wilson
authorised Colonel Edward M. House, a diplomat and Wilson’s personal
adviser, ‘to organize forces to gather and prepare for use at the Peace
Conference the most complete information possible, from the best and
latest sources, for consideration by the Peace Commissioners’.36 This was
known as ‘The Inquiry’, a group of experts directed by House himself,
which had the task of collecting and analysing data on the geographical,
ethnological, historical, economic, and political problems of those areas
subject of the peace negotiations.37 Two months later, Isaiah Bowman,
geographer and director of the American Geographical Society (AGS)
since 1915, placed the resources of the Society at the government’s
disposal, thus becoming the centre of ‘The Inquiry’.38 ‘The Inquiry’, which
was ‘entirely independent of any political hypothesis’, was composed of
about 150 specialists and scholars in all fields, from political and
diplomatic history to international law, from economics to geography,
from physiography and cartography to education and irrigation. The
‘cartographic force’ of the AGS was handed the task of drawing up maps
which could ‘visualize not only all manner of territorial boundaries, but
distribution of peoples, number and local densities of population,
religions, economic activities, distribution of material resources, trade
routes, both historic and potential strategic points’.39 All these reports,
studies, and maps were to be used subsequently by the American
negotiators at the Paris Peace Conference to support the final peace
negotiations. Among them, Leon Dominian was called in February 1919
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by the commission in Paris to deal with Turkish and the Near East related
issues.
Of Armenian origin, but born in Istanbul, Leon Dominian (1880-1935)
was not really trained in geography, since he studied geology and mining
engineering in Belgium; he travelled in Asia Minor and Turkey, and lived
for a time in Malta. He was fluent in many languages, Armenian, Turkish,
Arabic, Italian, French, English, and Spanish. In 1903, he moved to the
USA, becoming a naturalised citizen there ten years later; indeed, in
1912, he joined the AGS. In 1918, Dominian engaged in a consular career,
which continued until his death. The following year, he was assigned to
duty with the American Commission to Negotiate Peace at Paris.
As a member of the AGS, Dominian published a number of reviews and
articles in the Bulletin of the American geographical society, namely on
Balkan peninsula and Turkey, but also the linguistic areas of Europe.
Dominian would further develop the arguments from his articles in the
book The frontiers of language and nationality in Europe (1917), in which
he reviewed all the disputed areas of speech in Europe, but also Asia
Minor. As was pointed out by the American geographer, W.L.G. Joerg,
who wrote a short memoir dedicated to him, the book ‘supplied the
desired detailed discussion of the problem of nationalities in Europe and
the Near East and their geographical setting’.40 In a letter sent to Isaiah
Bowman on 19 February 1915, Dominian mentioned the idea of writing
an article and drawing ‘a set of maps showing linguistic boundaries’ in
Europe, explaining that the suggestion came from Madison Grant, a
member of the AGS Council, under whose direction he would later carry
out the work.41 In his correspondence with the director of the AGS,
Dominian went into detail about the nature of his intended work, also
explaining which maps would be needed to complete it, including a map
of Europe ‘showing tendency of political boundaries to grow in
accordance with linguistic frontiers’. He pointed out that the data he had
collected revealed ‘splendid conformity between physical features and
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linguistic distribution’ and that, even though it had no claim to
originality, the work would be consisted of ‘strictly impartial statement
of facts, with very detailed mention of sources’.42 Confronted with
Bowman’s misgivings about the work, which he considered not only
‘exceedingly difficult’ but also extremely complex, partly due to the
absence of any dependence of linguistic boundaries on physical features,
Dominian responded (citing Gruber’s Grundriss des Romanischen
Philologie and the Atlas linguistique de France) that ‘while this is
occasionally true, it is generally possible to trace genetic connection.
Sometimes the sequence back is lost and it looks as if surface features
had never intervened, but the deeper you delve into the subject the more
you find the reverse to have happened’.43
Published in the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (June
edition, 1915), entitled ‘Linguistic areas in Europe: their boundaries and
political significance’, Dominian’s main argument was that national
frontiers could best be distinguished by linguistic characteristics, and, as
a general rule, boundary lines should follow the separation of languages.
According to Dominian, ‘linguistic lines of cleavage have twofold
importance’ when they are considered as ‘political boundaries’. First of
all, they are sanctioned by national aspirations, so that it is rarely
possible to separate the idea of language from that of nationality. Except
in very rare cases (e.g., Belgium and Switzerland), language is the
‘cohesive power of nationality’, and it has ‘cementing qualities’, since it
is ‘the medium through which shared success, achievement or struggle
and sorrow are expressed’.44 Second, linguistic lines of cleavage conform
considerably to physical features: in fact, there is a strict correlation
between language and its natural environment. Since linguistic areas
‘have been largely determined by the character of the surface covered or
delimited’, determination of linguistic boundaries ‘implies due
recognition of selective influences attributable to surface features. But
the influence of region upon expansion or confinement of language is far
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from absolute. The part played by economic factors’, in fact, ‘have been
of prime importance’.45 Dominian then examined both some
controversial linguistic boundaries – for example, the Franco-Flemish
one, the Franco-German in Alsace-Lorraine, the Danish-German, the
Italo-German, the Italo-Slavic, a.s.o. – and main linguistic areas of Europe,
of which he outlined the political and economic history, to conclude that:
1. ‘Zones of linguistic contact were inevitably destined by their very
location to become meeting places for men speaking different languages.
[…] The confusion of languages on their site is in almost every instance
the result of human intercourse determined by economic advantages’.
That means that ‘language always followed in the wake of trade and
Babel-like confusion prevailed along channels wherein men and their
marketable commodities flowed’.46
2. ‘The growing coincidence of linguistic and political boundaries must
be regarded as a normal development’, and ‘modern reconstruction of
nationalities is based on language’, as the history of Europe during the
nineteenth century shows (e.g., the unification of Germany and Italy as
well as the disentanglement of Balkan nationalities). In this sense, ‘the
Congress of Vienna failed to provide Europe with political stability
because popular claims were ignored during the deliberations’; this is
why ‘inhabitants of linguistic areas under alien rule’ were now
‘clamouring for the right to govern themselves’.47
Dominian further developed his main arguments in the book he would
publish a couple of years later, including parts that he had previously
been forced to omit from the article, and extended his study to the
Turkish area because of its significance for European international
affairs.
Quite interestingly, whereas Dominian had summarily dismissed the
issue of ‘race’, considering its political significance as ‘trifling’ in both the
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article and the book, on the contrary, Madison Grant, who wrote the
introduction to the book, brought it to the fore. Grant was a member of
the governing board of the AGS from 1913 to 1935,48 besides being an
American lawyer and wildlife conservationist, and later President of the
New York Zoological Society; he was also a fervent eugenicist and
advocate of scientific racism. In 1916, he published the best-selling book
The passing of the great race or the racial basis of European history, in
which he advocated the biological and cultural superiority of the ‘Nordic
race’ (Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon groups) over all other people, and dealt
with the fate of the ‘Nordic type’ in the United States of America.49 In his
introduction to Dominian’s book, Grant explained the lack of ‘race
consciousness in Europe’, arguing that ‘although race taken in its modem
scientific meaning – the actual physical character of man – originally
implied a common origin; today, it has little or nothing to do with either
nationality or language, since nearly all the great nations of Europe are
composed, to varying degrees, of two and sometimes all three of the
primary European races’. That is why language rather than race should
be relied on as a basis for nationality, even though ‘lines of linguistic
cleavage frequently represent lines of race distinction as well’. In his
opinion, the current war could probably have been avoided if,
subsequent to the Franco-Prussian war, the borders between the two
states in Alsace-Lorraine had been drawn up in conformity with the
linguistic reality. Finally, national aspirations ‘expressed and measured’
by a common language’ ought to serve as a monitor for future peace.50
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Fig. 1. L. Dominian, ‘Part of Europe showing languages having political significance’, in:
The frontiers of language and nationality on Europe (1917), 334.
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Both the article and the book were widely criticised, and Dominian was
accused not only of occasionally exhibiting anti-German sentiment, but
also of knowing little about Germany and the history of the German
language.51 Moreover, the Romanian-born American sociologist, Max
Sylvius Handman, reproached Dominian for using mainly second-hand
literature and sources, except in the case of Turkey. This had not only led
him to overlook ‘the deeper underlying causes of nationalistic
antagonisms’, but also to present merely a one-sided stance. Hence, even
though the book paid ‘a great deal of attention to the subject of national
characters and geographical influence, […] discussions of this subject
will not be worth taking seriously until we have first developed a
technique for the study of national characteristics and then found out
something definite about them’.52
Following the convergence of linguistics and geography, which came
about as a result of the upsurgence of ethnically and linguistically-based
European nationalisms by the end of the nineteenth century, Philip
Jagessar has commented that ‘language was increasingly viewed as a
mappable phenomenon that could provide a new, stable, variable for
demarcating and organising space’.53 Linguistic geography, which spread
as a branch of dialectology from the end of the nineteenth century, dealt
with the analysis of linguistic phenomena from the perspective of their
geographical distribution, taking into account historical, social and
geographical factors. The publication of the Atlas Linguistique de France
(1902-1910) by the Swiss linguists Jules Gilliéron and Edmond Edmont,
consecrated linguistic geography as an autonomous discipline.54
Moreover, ‘language areas were seen also as the geographical spaces
inhabited by members of the concomitant “races” or nationalities, and
this strengthened the tendency to give a political application to such
ethnic-geographical groupings’.55 Consequently, linguistic geography
proved particularly suited to redrawing the borders of the states that had
belonged to the fallen multilingual empires. This explains not only
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Francesca Zantedeschi 19 |
Dominian’s interest and work within the AGS, but also why linguists and
experts on linguistic issues were gradually integrated into the French
Comité d’études, which met in the ‘Salle des cartes’ of the Sorbonne
Institut de géographie from 1917 to 1919, to clarify French military
ambitions and prepare for peace. The Comité was set up by the Deputy,
Charles Benoist, to deliberate in particular on what to do with the Dual
Monarchy, and what place should be given to the principle of
nationalities. In particular, since the conditions for peace had to be
agreed upon by the other allies, it was necessary to identify possible
areas of conflict within the Entente. In this sense, geographical, historical
and philological knowledge made it possible to identify and clarify
difficulties.56 At the outset, the Comité was composed mainly of
geographers and historians. In 1918, experts from other disciplines were
added, namely linguists: Antoine Meillet, scholar of Iranian and
Armenian studies, and Slavic languages; the Slavist, Paul Boyer,
specialising in Russian; Émile Haumont, specialising in Slavistics; Hubert
Pernot, specialising in Modern Greek Studies, and founder (1919) and
Director of the Institut néo-héllenique at the Sorbonne; and Paul Verrier,
specialising in Scandinavian languages and literature.
According to Isabelle Davion, the Comité was the ‘laboratory of the new
diplomacy’, and reflected the need to provide support to diplomatic work
by offering specific expertise on extremely technical issues.57 However,
the Comité was never really involved in decision-making processes. It
was powerless, not least because of its independence from diplomatic
and governmental spheres. Thus, its influence was limited to providing
notes and statistics on highly specialised subjects, and consultations
based on specialist status. Nonetheless, some of its members were later
appointed as experts to the Peace Conference, as it was the case of the
geographer Emmanuel de Martonne, a specialist in the construction and
comparison of ethnographical maps,58 who succeeded in obtaining the
formation of ‘Greater Romania’.59
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Antoine Meillet: languages in ‘new Europe’.
Born in Moulins, France, Antoine Meillet (1866-1936) was one of the
leading linguists of his time, particularly in the field of historical-
comparative philology of the Indo-European languages. In 1891, he was
appointed director of comparative Indo-European studies at the École
pratique des Hautes-Études in Paris and taught Armenian from 1902 until
1906, when he was appointed Professor of comparative philology of the
Indo-European languages and of general linguistics at the Collège de
France. In 1921 Meillet created the Revue des études slaves, together with
Paul Boyer and André Mazon. That same year, and until 1937, he was
also appointed as President of the Institut d’études slaves, established in
1919 by Ernest Denis, which ‘served as a steering instrument for the
French Institutes in the East, especially those in Prague and Warsaw’.60
Antoine Meillet divulgated some of his main ideas on language and
nation through a number of articles published in the multilingual journal
Scientia, rivista internazionale di sintesi scientifica (International journal
of scientific synthesis),61 as well as in his book, Les langues dans l’Europe
nouvelle (1918; 2nd ed. 1928). These publications were all inspired by
the tragic events afflicting Europe at that time. His intention was to
present ‘the linguistic situation of Europe as it stands’, and not as the
product of ‘vanity and national claims’ that had been exaggerated since
the nineteenth century.62 He blamed the ‘German block’ for triggering
and carrying on the war against several nations: Serbia, Russia, France,
Belgium and England. As he explained, the only allies of the Germans
were two groups who had survived by oppressing other nationalities:
the Magyars, who managed to make themselves the sole masters of a
country in which they had been in a minority against the Serbo-Croats,
the Romanians, the Ruthenians and the Slovaks; and the Turks who had
dominated Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, Slavs, Christians from Syria, Jews
by force.63 Meillet drew on the contrasting examples of the Russian and
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Austro-Hungarian empires to substantiate his arguments, both of which
had populations belonging to mixed language groupings. He argued that,
whereas non-Russian speaking population occupied mainly the borders
of the Russian Empire, those who spoke Russian formed a compact and
united people; the situation in Austria-Hungary was quite different. Of
the two states constituting the Habsburg Empire, Austria had no
language of its own, except Czech; on the contrary, Hungary had an
official language, Magyar, which was the idiom of the largest and most
influential group in the kingdom, but the mother tongue of less than half
the population. The linguistic conditions of Russia and Austria-Hungary,
he concluded, were in no way comparable: on the one hand, there was a
huge number of people with the strongest possible unity speaking one of
the great languages of European civilisation; on the other, groups had
been brought together by chance, and rejected Magyar or German as
their official language and language of civilisation, aspiring to
disassociate themselves. Here, language was the vehicle through which
peoples opposed one another.64
Meillet was also critical of Germany’s expansionistic ambitions, which it
achieved partly by endlessly multiplying the principle of nationality, and
partly, by promoting its own linguistic expansion over the small national
languages. This was the case of the small states bordering on the Baltic
Sea, whose languages of civilisation could not compete, because of their
very limited influence, with the spreading of German as a ‘language of
business and high culture’.65
In his book, Meillet defined the situation in Europe as ‘paradoxical’: while
material civilisation, science and art were becoming increasingly unified,
the languages that served this civilisation were extremely varied, ‘and
they were becoming more numerous every day’, and each nation, no
matter how small it was, wanted its own language. He therefore argued
there was a link between language and nation, despite the fact that
nation was not always expressed through language, ‘nor is a particularity
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of language sufficient to give a national consciousness’. Even though
belonging to the nation was ‘a matter of feeling and will’ and the nation
was not characterised by any kind of ‘material’ elements, Meillet
continued, and ‘the fact remains that language is the first, clearest and
most effective character by which a nation is distinguished. Where
differences of language disappear, national differences tend to disappear
as well, and where national feeling is lacking, differences of language
tend to disappear’.66
Meillet also devoted a chapter to the question of the relationship
between language and ‘race’, the latter defined by physical traits.
Moreover, he rebutted the thesis of the Austrian linguist and ethnologist,
Friedrich Müller, who classified languages according to the physical
character of those speaking them in his work Grundriss der
Sprachwissenschaft (1876-1887). Meillet, on the contrary, believed that
there was no such inevitability between a language and the ‘race’ of those
who spoke it, and the limits of race and language were revealed by the
fact that they could ‘never coincide exactly’. ‘No doubt, it is possible to
observe a degree of concordance between languages and ethnic types
[…]. But such concordance is due to the fact that the languages now used
in the world appear to be almost all the result of the divergent evolution
of a relatively small number of earlier languages, and that historical and
geographical conditions have resulted in the distribution of languages
and races which, despite not corresponding exactly, do have some
common features’.67
Generally speaking, by illustrating the contemporary linguistic problems
of his century, Meillet aimed to illustrate how languages could lose their
unity and how common languages were created. An advocate of the
fundamental unity of European culture, Meillet feared that the Entente’s
victory would lead to a multiplication of national languages, which would
not only be pointless – being intrinsically weak, they were destined not
to go beyond the borders of the nations for which they were created –,
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Francesca Zantedeschi 23 |
but also detrimental to internationalisation of civilised life. In his
opinion, for Europe to overcome its ‘linguistic fragmentation’ and the
resilient crises that such situations engendered, a second language was
needed for international relations. In light of the failure of existing
languages, he pleaded for the adoption of an artificial language (such as
Esperanto and Ido), which would provide international relations ‘the
simple practical instrument they lack’. Moreover, an artificial language,
to be used only in international relations, had the advantage of never
having, or at any rate not for a long time to come, ‘qualities that enable it
to compete with national languages outside the limited and relatively
humble objects for which it will be made’.68
Conclusions
In 1928, the second edition of Meillet’s book, which was improved and
enriched thanks to a comprehensive statistical analysis by Lucien
Tesnière, a specialist in Slavic languages, German and French, attempted
to come to terms with the outcome of the 1919 Peace Treaties. While the
Treaties had left the geo-political situation of Western Europe practically
unchanged (except for Alsace-Lorraine, returned to France), they had
totally overturned the reality of Eastern Europe. Meillet suggested that
linguistic criteria had been fundamental in drawing the new frontiers:
‘linguistics did not expect to be accorded such an honour’.69
No doubt, as the linguist Patrick Sériot has observed, the Treaty of
Versailles typifies the belief that the ‘distinction between languages’
matches the ‘distinction between nations’. However, even if the
fundamental criterion according to which ‘where there is language, there
is a nation’ appeared quite straightforward, it soon turned out to be
inoperative. Sériot has therefore defined the ‘boundary-makers using
spontaneous linguistics’ (‘la linguistique spontanée des traceurs de
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| 24 Francesca Zantedeschi
frontières’) when thinking of the discontinuous and the homogeneous;
on the contrary, field linguistics reveals a complex, heterogeneous and
continuously evolving situation. However, as Sebastien Moret has
argued, this approach to linguistics was embraced not only by non-
linguists (as Dominian’s has shown), but also by professional linguists.70
The desire to achieve a ‘scientific peace’ had led the Entente
governments to employ experts they considered capable of finding a
solution for drawing up the boundaries of the new states, which could be
both natural and scientific.71 Yet, as the subsequent historiographical
research on these expert committees has shown, their influence was
eventually limited to furnishing notes and statistics on highly specialised
subjects, and consultations based on specialist status.
In fact, the US peace plan advocated by Woodrow Wilson, which took the
form of a peace brokered on the principles laid down in the Fourteen
Points, came up against a labyrinth of interests making its
implementation very difficult. The Peace Treaties failed to supplant
national rivalries at the root of the war, and the conditions for further
conflicts remained. The harsh political, economic and military conditions
that were imposed on Germany soon proved unrealistic, while the
dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire fuelled national tensions in
many of the new states. Commenting on the new European order, Isaiah
Bowman noted indeed that ‘where there were approximately 8,000 miles
of old boundary about the former states of central Europe, there are now
10,000 miles, and of this total more than 3,000 miles represent newly
located boundaries. Every additional mile of new boundary, each new
location, has increased for a time the sources of possible trouble between
unlike and, in the main, unfriendly peoples.’72
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As for the relationship between ‘language’ and ‘race’, at the dawn of the
new century the two notions began to undergo a certain differentiation,
and their immediate juxtaposition were not unanimously accepted.
Nevertheless, their relationship remained ambiguous (or at least was
never clarified), and the use of racial (and ethnic) categories to define the
nation emerged strongly in the first decade of the twentieth century. Not
surprisingly, the words of Edward Augustus Freeman come immediately
to mind: while juggling the ambiguity of those concepts, he was confident
in saying that ‘community of language is, in the absence of any evidence
to the contrary, a presumption of the community of blood, and it is proof
of something which for practical purposes is the same as community of
blood’.73
Endnotes
1 A. Chervin, ‘Les langues parlées en Autriche-Hongrie par les différentes
nationalités d’après le dénombrement de la population de 1910’ (Part I), in:
Journal de la société statistique de Paris, 56 (1915), 105-137. Arthur Chervin
(1850-1921) was a physician, director of the Institut des bègues (Institute of
stutterers), from 1878. He was also president of the Société d’Anthropologie
(1901) and Société de Statistiques (1904). In the article, as well in his books
L’Autriche et l’Hongrie de demain (1915), and De Prague à l’Adriatique;
considerations geographiques, ethniques et économiques sur le territoire
(corridor) faisant communiquer les Tchèques avec les Yougoslaves (1919),
Chervin advocated the creation of a kind of ‘Marche slave’, in order to guarantee
European peace. Accordingly, this common territory would connect northern
Slavs with southern Slavs, where Czechs and Yugoslavs could live side by side.
On the contrary, it would also allow Austrians and Hungarians to cease being
neighbours, thus preventing the merging of Hungary with the ‘groups of German
provinces’.
2 B. Ashcroft, ‘Language and Race’, in: Social Identities: Journal for the Study of
Race, Nation and Culture, 7/3 (2001), 311-328.
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3 J. Leerssen, ‘Language interest: Europe. Introductory survey essay’, in: J.
Leerssen (ed.), Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (Amsterdam,
2018), https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898
4 S. Moret, ‘Linguistique et nouvel ordre européen autour de la Grande Guerre’,
in: Cahiers de l’ILSL, 26 (2009), 132.
5 P. Alter, Nationalism (London, 1989), 92.
6 A. Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle (Paris, 1918), 7.
7 M. Turda & M.S. Quine, Historicizing Race (London & New York, 2018), 51.
8 Morpurgo Davies, ‘Razza e razzismo’, 56.
9 G. Sluga, The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870-1919
(Basingstoke, 2006).
10 R. McMahon (ed.), National Races. Transnational Power Struggles in the
Sciences and Politics of Human Diversity, 1840-1945 (Lincoln, 2019), 35.
11 To mention but a few: Sluga, The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics,
1870-1919; C. Manias, Race, Science, and the Nation (London & New York, 2013);
C. Reynaud Paligot, De l’identité nationale: science, race et politique en Europe et
aux États-Unis, XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris, 2015); R. McMahon, The Races of Europe.
Construction of National Identities in the Social Sciences, 1839-1939 (London,
2016); Id. National Races.
12 Manias, Race, Science, and Nation, chap. 7.
13 A.M. Thiesse, La création des identités nationales (Paris, 1999), chap. 2.
14 D. Baggioni, Langues et nations en Europe, 12.
15 A. Renaut, ‘Logiques de la nation’, in: G. Delannoi & P.A. Taguieff (eds.),
Théories du nationalisme (Paris, 1991), 29-47.
16 T. Benes, ‘From Indo-Germans to Aryans’, in: S. Eigen & M. Larrimore (eds),
The German Invention of Race (Albany, 2006), 167-181.
17 R.S. Leventhal, ‘The Emergence of Philological Discourse in the German States,
1770-1810’, in: Isis, 77/2 (1986), 243-60.
18 A. Morpurgo Davies, La linguistica dell’Ottocento (Bologna, 1996), 98.
19 P.J. Geary, The Myth of Nations (Princeton and Oxford 2003), 24-25 & 32.
https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-159898
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20 A. Burgio, L’invenzione delle razze (Roma, 1998), 99.
21 As Morpurgo Davies explained, by the middle of the century, with the growth of
linguistics and comparative-historical studies aimed at establishing linguistic
kinship, the problem of language and race formed part of ‘the cultural background
against which the history of linguistic thought should be considered’. M. Davies,
La linguistica dell’Ottocento, 227.
22 S. Timpanaro, Sulla linguistica dell’Ottocento (Bologna, 2005), 44 ff.
23 Turda & Quine, Historicizing Race, 74. Since Indo-Iranian-speaking peoples
used to call themselves ‘Ari’, the term ‘Aryan’ was used to identify Indo-European
peoples who had settled in India, Iran and Europe thousands of years earlier.
24 J.R. Davis & A. Nicholls, ‘Friedrich Max Müller: The Career and Intellectual
Trajectory of a German Philologist in Victorian Britain’, in: Publications of the
English Goethe Society, 85/2-3 (2016), 87, DOI:
10.1080/09593683.2016.1224493.
25 In George Mosse’s words, Gobineau ‘was not an original thinker, but a
synthesiser who drew on anthropology, linguistics, and history, in order to
construct a fully furnished intellectual edifice where race explained everything
in the past, present, and future’; Toward de Final Solution, 49.
26 D. Paone, ‘The general history and comparative system of the Semitic
languages, by Ernest Renan. 1863’,
http://heritage.bnf.fr/bibliothequesorient/en/history-semitic-languages-
renan-art
27 T. Benes, In Babel’s Shadow. Language, Philology, and the Nation in Nineteenth-
Century Germany (Detroit, 2008).
28 S. Auroux, Histoire des idées linguistiques. Vol. 3: L’hégémonie du comparatisme
(Sprimont, 1989), 290-292; A. Morpurgo Davies, ‘Razza e razzismo: continuità
ed equivoci nella linguistica dell’Ottocento’, in: P. Cotticelli Kurras, G. Graffi
(eds.), Lingue, ethnos e popolazioni: evidenze linguistiche, biologiche e culturali
(Roma, 2009), 55.
29 Although Chave e’s influence was very limited outside the country, and
linguistic classifications did not necessarily go hand in hand with ‘racial’ or
ethnological ones, it is certain that at the time there was great confusion among
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09593683.2016.1224493
http://heritage.bnf.fr/bibliothequesorient/en/history-semitic-languages-renan-art
http://heritage.bnf.fr/bibliothequesorient/en/history-semitic-languages-renan-art
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linguists, fuelled, not least, by the ambiguity of the term ‘race’. M. Davies, ‘Razza
e razzismo’, 66 ff.
30 M. Davies, La linguistica dell’Ottocento, 226.
31 E.A. Freeman, ‘Race and Language’, in: Historical Essays, Third Series (London:
1879), 173-230. See also, C. Hutton, ‘Race and Language: Ties of “Blood And
Speech”, Fictive Identity and Empire In The Writings Of Henry Maine And
Edward Freeman’, in: Interventions, 2/1 (2000), 53-72, DOI:
10.1080/136980100360797.
32 A. Hovelacque, Langues, races, nationalités (Paris, 1875), 8.
33 Hovelacque, Langues, races, nationalités, 9-22.
34 P. Desmet, ‘La Revue de linguistique et de philologie comparée (1867-1916)’,
in: Orbis, 37/01 (1994), 349.
35 S.G. Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image (Baltimore & London, 1999).
In particular, the French anthropologist Georges Vacher de Lapouge adapted
Darwin’s theory of evolution to a vision of society, and attempted to organise his
vision of the racist world into a coherent system. He developed the thesis of the
superiority of the Aryans in several works with a sociological background. After
dealing with the question of the multiplicity of European ‘races’ and the mismatch
between languages and ‘races’, Vacher de Lapouge conjectured that a native Aryan
people had originated among the mists of the North Sea; an idea that later would
serve the political ideology of the anti-democratic and racist extreme right; J.-P.
Demoule, Mais où sont passes les Indo-Européens? Le mythe d’origine de l’Occident
(Paris, 214), 145-147. See also, P.-A. Taguieff, ‘Racisme aryaniste, socialisme et
eugénisme chez Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854-1936)’, in: Revue d’histoire de
la Shoah, 183 (2005), 69-134.
36 ‘Inquiry of the American Geographical Society for the Information of the Peace
Commissioners’, in: Science, 48/1250 (1918), 590-592.
37 https://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/related-records/rg-256.
See also L.E. Gelfand, The Inquiry. American Preparations for Peace, 1917-1919
(New Haven & London, 1963).
38 In December 1918, Bowman sailed for France as Chief Territorial Specialist,
but he quickly assumed an administrative role as well, gaining the ear of
President Woodrow Wilson and his chief adviser, Colonel Edward House. He
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/136980100360797
https://www.archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/related-records/rg-256
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thus played a major role in determining distribution of land areas and national
borders, especially in the Balkans, as part of the Paris Peace Conference. G.C.
Carter, ‘Isaiah Bowman, 1878-1950’, in: Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 40/3 (1950), 335-350.
39 ‘Inquiry’, 592.
40 W.L.G. Joerg, ‘Memoir of Leon Dominian’, in: Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 26/4 (1936), 197.
41 ‘Dominian, Leon, 1913-1935’, in: ‘Correspondence between Isaiah Bowman
and Leon Dominian regarding matters of the American Geographical Society
during the time Dominian was on staff, through his time at the U.S. Department
of State and the American Consular Service’, American Geographical Society of
New York Records, 1723-2010, bulk 1854-2000,
https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agsny/id/28780
42 https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agsny/id/28781
43 Leon Dominian’s letter to Isaiah Bowman, 25 February 1915,
https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agsny/id/28785
44 Dominian, ‘Linguistic areas’, 402-403.
45 Dominian, ‘Linguistic areas’, 402.
46 Dominian, ‘Linguistic areas’, 438.
47 Dominian, ‘Linguistic areas’, 439.
48 J.K. Wright, Geography in the making. The American Geographical Society,
1851-1951 (1952), 147.
49 C.C. Alexander, ‘Prophet of American Racism: Madison Grant and the Nordic
Myth’, in: Phylon, 23/1 (1962), 73-90.
50 M. Grant, ‘Introduction’, in: L. Dominian, The frontiers of language and
nationality in Europe (New York, 1917), XV-XVIII. As explained by J. Leerssen,
the ‘applied geography’ of such authors as Dominian and Grant, but also William
Z. Ripley (author of The races of Europe, 1899), ‘had given intellectual support
to the agenda of various diaspora nationalisms in North America’; J. Leerssen,
‘Ethnography and ethnicity: Introductory survey essay’, in: J. Leerssen,
Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (Amsterdam, 2018),
https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-160535
https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agsny/id/28780
https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agsny/id/28781
https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agsny/id/28785
https://ernie.uva.nl/viewer.p/21/56/object/122-160535
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51 Before publication, both text and maps were ‘censored by an expert
committee’. Among the criticisms Dominian’s article received, those by
professor A.H. Palmer, reported here;
https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agsny/id/28804
52 M.S. Handman, ‘The Frontiers of Language and Nationality in Europe by Leon
Dominian’, in: Journal of Political Economy, 27/5 (1919), 417-419.
53 P. Jagessar, ‘Geography and linguistics: Histories, entanglements and
departures’, in: Geography compass, 14/11 (2020), 3-4,
https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12540
54 However, the ALF contributed above all to ‘spreading the idea that each
language fact is unique, and that consequently dialects as closed, clearly
circumscribed entities do not exist’; P. Se riot, ‘La clôture impossible (l’espace en
ge ographie linguistique: la querelle du continu et du discontinu)’, in: G. Nicolas
(ed.), Géographie et langages(s). Interface, représentation, interdisciplinarité.
Actes du Colloque IUKB-IRI (UNIL) de Sion, 1997 (Sion, 1999), 227-248.
55 Leerssen, ‘Language interest: Europe’.
56 G.-H. Soutou (ed.), Les experts français et les frontières d’après-guerre. Les
procès-verbaux du comité d’études 1917-1919, https://socgeo.com/wp-
content/uploads/2016/11/Les-experts-français-et-les-frontières-daprès-
guerre-MEP.pdf
57 I. Davion, ‘Introduction’, in: G.-H. Soutou (ed.), Les experts français, 19.
58 G. Palsky, ‘Emmanuel de Martonne and the Ethnographical Cartography of
Central Europe’ (1917-1920), in: Imago Mundi, 54 (2002), 111-119.
59 See also T. Ter Minassian, ‘Les géographes français et la délimitation des
frontières balkaniques à la Conférence de la Paix de 1919, in: Revue d’Histoire
Moderne et Contemporaine, 44/2 (1997), 252-286.
60 J.-C. Chevalier, ‘Les linguistes français et les pays d’Europe de l’Est de 1918 à
1931’, in: Cahiers de l’ILSL, 8 (1996), 59.
61 In 1915, Scientia inaugurated a specific section called ‘Enquiry on the main
present questions of an international character’, which dealt specifically with
war-related issues. Between 1915 and 1922, Meillet published in it a number of
articles dealing specifically with the issue of language and nation, namely: ‘Les
langues et les nationalités’ (vol. 18, 1915), ‘La situation linguistique en Russie et
https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agsny/id/28804
https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12540
https://socgeo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Les-experts-français-et-les-frontières-daprès-guerre-MEP.pdf
https://socgeo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Les-experts-français-et-les-frontières-daprès-guerre-MEP.pdf
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en Autriche-Hongrie’ (vol. 23, 1918), ‘Les langues dans le bassin de la Mer
Baltique’ (vol. 24, 1918), ‘L’unité linguistique slave’ (vol. 27, 1920), ‘L’Unité
romane’ (vol. 31, 1922).
62 A. Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle (Paris, 1918), 7.
63 A. Meillet, ‘Les langues et les nationalités’, in: Scientia 18 (1915), 192.
64 A. Meillet, ‘La situation linguistique en Russie et en Autriche-Hongrie’, in:
Scientia 23 (1918), 209-216.
Meillet made a distinction between ‘parler’ (language), ‘cultivated languages’
(written languages with literature), and ‘languages of civilisation’ (whose
strength is assessed according to the competence acknowledged in comparison;
these are all Indo-European languages); P. Caussat, ‘Langue et nation’, in:
Histoire Épistémologie Langage, 10/2 (1988), 195-204.
65 A. Meillet, ‘Les langues dans le bassin de la Mer Baltique’, in: Scientia 24
(1918), 383-392.
Following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) between the Bolshevik
government of Russia and the Central powers, Russia renounced all territorial
claims to Finland (which it had already recognised as an independent and
sovereign state), and to the future Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and
Lithuania), Belarus and Ukraine.
66 Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle, 93-96.
67 Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle, 86, 89.
68 Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle, see Chapter XXV, ‘Les essais de
langues artificielles’, 319-330. For more information see, S. Moret, ‘Autour des
Langues dans l’Europe Nouvelle. Une réception de Meillet par les adeptes des
langues artificielles’, in: Histoire Épistémologie Langage, 41/2 (2020), 157-176.
It is noteworthy that in the inter-war period, there were new developments in
the pursuit of the universal language projects, which were quite different from
the nineteenth-century efforts for several reasons. Firstly, there was increasing
mention of an ‘auxiliary language’ (it was futile to try to eliminate the diversity
of mother tongues; this ‘universal language’ only claimed to be a language of
communication) and an ‘International Auxiliary Language Association’ was
created (US). Secondly, in contrast to the projects of the end of the previous
century, the enterprise was now the domain of linguists. Thirdly, the centre of
Studies on National Movements 8 (2021) | Articles
Francesca Zantedeschi 33 |
gravity crossed the Atlantic, with the consequent marginalisation of European
linguistics; D. Baggioni, ‘Préhistoire de la glottopolitique dans la linguistique
européenne, de J.G. Herder au Cercle linguistique de Prague’, in: Langages,
21/83 (1986), 35-51.
69 A. Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle (Paris, 1928, 2nd edition), IX.
70 P. Sériot, ‘La linguistique spontanée des traceurs des frontières’, in: Cahiers de
l’ILSL, 8 (1996), 277-304; Moret, ‘Linguistique et nouvel ordre européen’, 136.
71 Moret, ‘Linguistique et nouvel ordre européen’.
72 I. Bowman, The new world. Problems in political geography (Yonkers-on-
Hudson, New York, 1921), 3.
73 Freeman, ‘Race and Language’, 224.