Methodological nationalism and (anti-)historicism in the history of linguistics

Abstract

Abstract This paper investigates two parallel, conflicting and yet interdependent, discursive traits on human language all through the nineteenth century and beyond. One – empirically grounded in the Comparative Method as a scientific tool – is the growing awareness of the historicity and the fluidity of language. At the same time, the discursive construction of bounded and homogeneous national languages was an essential ideological requirement for the political nation building process in Europe. We identify the seeds of both lines of thinking in the writings of Johann Gottfried Herder at the beginning of a long nineteenth century and we see both of them struggling in the sometimes idiosyncratic reasoning of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours at the end of it. The underlying methodological nationalism, we conclude, has prevailed in pre- and post-Saussurean linguistic theory and methodology up until today.