Esra Almas
Research Project
The Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and Black Sea, 1820–1948
Project Team:
2021 – 2024
Key Question
Can we deepen our understanding of the origins of Middle East nationalism by studying the region's language ideologies?
Project Summary
| Historians, literary scholars, linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists will come together to examine the role of language ideologies in cultural and political discourses in and around the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. |
This is a collaborative, multidisciplinary project examining the role of language ideologies in cultural and political discourses of modernity and modernization in and around the Middle East in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We bring together historians, literary scholars, linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists to jointly study the articulation, circulation, and mobilization of ideas about language death and revival, language reform, and language modernization in the contexts of empire, emerging nationalisms, and a modernized or quickly modernizing world. We also examine the role of developments in linguistics, philology, and adjacent disciplines in informing and shaping such ideas. Some of the questions that animate the discourses this project examines are: what does it mean for a language to be or become a modern language? Can, and should, a dead language be revived? Some of the questions the project leaders ask are: how do notions of native tongue, language family, vernacular dialect or register interact with concepts such as empire, nation, motherland? What role, if any, did language reformers think sacred languages should play? How does the relation between language and the body figure in projects of (re)generation of modern polities and individuals? By studying authors who spoke and wrote in a variety of languages of the Eastern Mediterranean, and their interaction with the political and cultural bodies and movements that played important roles in shaping the modern Middle East, this project aims to reconstruct, and draw new insights about, the rich nexus of language, identity, and modernity.
Topics
Research Team
Dima Ayoub
Dima Ayoub
Associate Professor of Arabic and former C.V. Starr Junior Faculty Fellow in International Studies
Middlebury College
Orit Bashkin
Marilyn Booth
Marilyn Booth
Khalid bin Abdallah Al Saud Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab World
University of Oxford
Itamar Francez
Annie Greene
Annie Greene
Historian
Na'ama Rokem
Na'ama Rokem
Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature & Comparative Literature
University of Chicago
Holly Shissler
Project Narrative
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Languages Between State and Empire: Modernity, Monolingual Fantasies, and Linguistic Realities
Conference
Languages Between State and Empire: Modernity, Monolingual Fantasies, and Linguistic Realities
Speakers at this conference examined the interplay between language reform and nation-building in the post-Ottoman era.
The Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea
Conference
The Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea
This conference considered the role of language ideologies in the formation of Middle East nationalism.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Languages Between State and Empire: Modernity, Monolingual Fantasies, and Linguistic Realities
Conference
Languages Between State and Empire: Modernity, Monolingual Fantasies, and Linguistic Realities
Speakers at this conference examined the interplay between language reform and nation-building in the post-Ottoman era.
The Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea
Conference
The Quest for Modern Language Between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea
This conference considered the role of language ideologies in the formation of Middle East nationalism.
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