Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries by Ágoston Berecz is a study at the crossroads of the history of nationalism and language policy. The book offers an in-depth analysis of the politics of names, more specifically given names, surnames, and toponyms, during the period of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, focusing on twenty-one counties in the east of Hungary that covered Transylvania, the eastern part of the Banat, and Partium. While Berecz often demonstrates his competence in linguistics, in particular, etymology, the book is a delicate social and cultural history of nationalism and the interaction between the peasantry, urban intellectuals, and the state, relying on the close reading of one particular aspect, the politics of naming. The incredibly rich source base is interpreted against the backdrop of relevant theories of nationalism and compared to a variety of European contexts, ranging from the Basque country to Malta and Finland.The book is divided into three parts, each of them further subdivided into three chapters. Part 1, entitled “Peasants,” investigates the premodern rural setting before the arrival of either nationalism or the state. The first chapter demonstrates the slow but palpable transition in peasants’ name-giving practices from the confessional to the national era during the mid- and late nineteenth century, marked by the slow decline in Christian names in favor of national ones, some of them recently coined, some recently reinvented. Chapter 2 describes how peasants approached the use of surnames, and shows how little relevance standard surnames carried in a rural environment. In particular, family names were used flexibly among Romanians (many of them carried German or Hungarian surnames); but in all ethnic-cultural settings, their relevance was largely outnumbered by bynames, so that even authorities had to use them to identify individuals. Chapter 3 demonstrates that peasants were rarely interested in the origin of their toponyms. If peasants created etymologies for their toponyms at all, they referred to meaningful events in communal life such as the founding or the relocation of their village, Tatar raids, and occasionally the Ottoman era; but these etymologies had nothing in common with the national historical narratives promoted by national activists. Part 1 thus portrays a peasant world whose locally fixed values markedly differed both from the homogenizing and standardizing agenda of the modern state and of the national activists, regardless of which nation they advocated for.At the heart of Part 2 are national activists. Chapter 4 examines the nationalist leaders who projected their visions on the canvas of family names. If a name did not “match” the “actual ethnicity” of its holder, she or he could be “claimed” as a lost son or daughter of the nation and, writ large, these “discrepancies” could cater to the myth of the suppressed Magyardom, Romaniandom, etc. At the same time, demonstrates Berecz, names deriving from other languages were quite common among Romanian peasants and elites alike; elite Romanians also often spelled their names according to Hungarian or German orthography, and mobile people often used their names in different languages depending on the linguistic context. As we learn from chapter 5, the Magyarization of names was a quite widespread phenomenon among Romanian families that were mobile or striving for upward mobility. In chapter 6, Berecz analyzes the versatile activities of national activists, in particular those of scholars who fabricated “proper” place names that would hint at ethnic continuity, bridging the most ancient chapters in the history of their nation with their present. In particular, the Saxon and Hungarian mountain tourism movements played pivotal roles in naming remote places left unmarked by peasants. They usually did not aim to change already existing names, regardless of their language. It was only the major Hungarian mountain tourism association that planned the replacement of Romanian names on a mass scale. The association strived to rebaptize places with names that held no meaning for the locals, but this endeavor failed because of the lack of mass support, infrastructure, and the reluctance of the imperial army, which was responsible for drawing the cartographies of the Empire. This part of the book demonstrates well the creativity of national elites in inventing national imaginaries and also the obstacles in communicating them.Part 3 discusses the policies of the Hungarian nationalizing state to change the nomenclature of its citizens and communities. Chapter 7 examines the regulations regarding given names. In theory and by law, the state demanded that all newborns be registered with a Hungarian or Hungarianized name. But in practice, even local authorities proved far more flexible and entered names in their vernacular forms into registries (though often spelled according to Hungarian rules). Non-translatable names, however, were entered into the registry untranslated, giving a further argument for nationalist leaders to promote Latinized or Germanic names. Chapter 8 demonstrates the increasing pressure on upwardly mobile Romanians to spell their family names according to Hungarian orthography (dropping -u, for instance). In the final chapter, Berecz analyzes the drive for topographic change that created (quasi-)Hungarian commune names throughout the country. Part 3 thus studies how the Hungarian state intruded into the everyday life of its citizens and alienated a large part of its population by forcing people to name themselves, their children, and the places of their habitat in awkward-sounding, meaningless ways.The difference between the lives, values, and milieus of the peasantry and those of the urban intelligentsia and governmental officials before the age of nationalism has been amply demonstrated in the literature. Nonetheless, reading the first part of Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries can be still shocking, as one cannot stop wondering whether peasants and national activists had anything in common at all. Besides speaking different dialects and vernaculars and earning their living differently, Berecz demonstrates that they were different even at the level of the most banal everyday practices, such as naming themselves, their offspring, and their environment. The fact that the idea of the “nation” arrived in the village from the city is by no means a novelty; yet, after reading Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries, the distance this idea had to travel from the national activists to the future members of the nation seems even larger than one would have imagined.Nationalists had to mold the populace in their image, and this practically meant that every single thought in the mind of the peasants had to be replaced by something that made little sense to the peasant experience. Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries is a delicate analysis of a small, banal but revelative part of this process. As Berecz shows, the premodern practices around naming were extremely complex and inconsistent, loanwords came and went, and idioms were adjusted to local circumstances. Nationalists were not the first to find these practices outdated—already Habsburg Emperor Joseph II had been convinced that abandoning traditional Jewish names was needed to arrive into the paradise of modernity—but it certainly were national activists who invested the most effort into turning previous naming practices upside down. Reading Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries, one hardly believes that nationalists had a chance at all. Almost everything was stacked against them, claims Berecz, and the process could go wrong on so many levels.Nonetheless, at the end of the day, the national activists and the state won the battle: while nicknames still exist in smaller communities, given names in their standardized forms and surnames became an everyday reality for all layers of society. Similarly, neither are maps filled with nomenclature in several languages nor are the mountains left nameless. Instead, each peak, hill, and meadow has been named by the state in the language of the state, and people do use this nomenclature.Berecz locates his work in the classic antagonism of ethno-symbolist and constructivist paradigms of nationalism theory. Based on in-depth empirical research, he offers a corrective to both Anthony D. Smith and the Gellnerian school. While he shows the importance of the relatively intransgressible group boundaries in this particular geographical and historical setting, he also calls into question whether one may talk about any preexisting ethnic culture, given the ad hoc nature of peasant life that did not allow for an ethnic culture but only a local one. On the other hand, he also questions a pure modernist, top-down paradigm that argues that nations were born without a navel. Instead, Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries shows that any nationalistic imaginary had to limit itself to certain societal and cultural realities—and that the peasants did have an agency in the process of nation-building as well.While the annual output of nationalism studies may fill entire libraries, one rarely encounters such a thoroughly researched and original study as Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries. The book is a must-read for all scholars interested in nationalism, the making of the modern state, and the change in rural societies. Moreover, linguists studying language design and policy will also appreciate the depth of this study and its convincing contextualization.