Two monolingual polities – Iceland and France

Abstract

TOWARDS PARSIMONY Scholarly study of language policy started at the level of the state. In particular, early scholarship concentrated on the problems faced by nation states when they were first gaining independence, whether during the spread of national autonomy in nineteenth-century European countries, such as discussed in Haugen's classic study (1966a) of the development of the national language for Norway, or in post-First World War Europe with the new nations created by the Treaty of Versailles and their efforts to achieve standard languages through cultivation, or in the rapid burst of national independence following the collapse of European-based empires after the Second World War, or currently in the new nations produced by the breakup of the Soviet Union. Each of these periods had different characteristics. Nationalism, with its search for national identity and Great Traditions, was a strong motivator for language management in the nineteenth century. Both the French Revolution and German Romanticism held a view of nationalism that assumed that a single unifying language was the best definition and protector of nationhood. Choosing an appropriate national language and purifying it of foreign influences was a major activity. These ideas were still strong in language management after the First World War, but the major European powers assumed that newly created states established with the breakup of the Turkish and Austro-Hungarian empires would be happy to take on international languages alongside cultivation of their vernacular languages.