Pontus Lindgren-Ciampi: Purism and National Identity: The construction of language and national identity in Serbian and Bulgarian nineteenth-century purist discourse

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to analyse how the Serbian and Bulgarian nineteenth-century intellectual elites constructed concepts of national identity in media-discourses on linguistic purity, as well as how these purist discourses were situated within their unique Balkan cultural-historical contexts. The dissertation places itself in the field of historical sociolinguistics which suggests a contextual approach to language change in the past and the discourses shaping them. Nevalainen (2015) has subsumed this approach under the integrationist notion of “layered simultaneity”. This notion implies that the meanings which a specific sociocultural community—the Balkan nineteenth-century intellectuals, in the case of this study—simultaneously produces in discourse, are always the outcome of an infinitely complex interplay of historical, social, political, ideological, and cultural contingencies, relations, and entanglements.        

The material examined in this study consists of fifteen Serbian and Bulgarian periodicals, four pamphlets, and one book. These publications were either originally published in the periodical press or constituted a vital part of debates that had been initiated in the periodical press. All were published in the period of the Serbian and Bulgarian ‘National Revivals’ (1804–1878) and represent platforms where the members of the expanding bourgeois public sphere debated the questions of purism, language, and national identity. The primary sources stretch from 1830 to 1874. This period was formative for the construction of complex and interacting sets of cultural practices and symbols which were intended to define the nation externally – in relation to other nations and unite it internally. According to the then prevailing Romanticist cultural ideology, language was the prime definer of cultural difference and the utmost expression of the unicity of a people.

Purist discourses on language and national identity are always embedded in specific historical and cultural contexts and can hardly be understood without taking these dynamic frameworks into consideration. The broad picture that emerges from the results of this thesis shows that the convergences and divergences in the purist discourses of the Serbian and Bulgarian intellectual elites are dependent on several contextual factors. A convergent factor was the common starting point in the Pax Slavia Orthodoxa, where higher cultural meanings were defined by the ideology of the Orthodox churches. Yet, divergent were the historical and cultural contexts in which these elites entered into dialogue with the ideological paradigms of Enlightenment and Romanticism that to such and eminent degree shaped the cultural side of modern European nation-building.