WHO SOUNDS MOST WORTHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS? AURAL CULTURAL DIVERSITY, THE CONCEPT OF HUMANITY AND THEIR RELIGIOUS INVESTMENTS IN GERMAN LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES

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ABSTRACTThis article introduces aural cultural diversity as an important criterion with regard to human rights. By ‘aural cultural diversity’, I mean thinking about human diversity based not on ocular‐centric notions of race but on how the particularity of peoples becomes manifest in their differentiated manners of listening and responding to the sounds of spoken language. The concept of humanity, although it presents itself as inclusive and universal, emerges from a Christian theory of monogenesis. The fall of the tower of Babel and the subsequent diversity of spoken languages is a problem for theories of the origins of humanity ordained by God. The German ‘science’ of comparative linguistics can be viewed as a strategy to maintain Christian control over aural cultural diversity, creating hierarchies between languages based on seemingly objective grammatical and lexical rules. It bore consequences for the human rights of those peoples who spoke languages in non‐standard, deviant or unexpected ways. While it is well established that the theory of Indo‐European language groups was used as a defence against virulent nationalism and fascism in Germany, are there more subtle and lasting consequences of dehumanisation based on listening to a hierarchy of sounds marked as ‘different’ and ‘other’?