EAN: 9783110188264

LINGUISTIC AUTHORITY LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY AND META...

How does a country find itself 'at war' over spelling? This book focuses on a crucial juncture
in the post-communist history of the Czech Republic  when an orthographic commission with a
moderate reformist agenda found itself the focus of enormous public controversy. Delving back
into history  Bermel explores the Czech nation's long tradition of intervention and its
association with the purity of the language  and how in the twentieth century an ascendant
linguistic school - Prague Functionalism - developed into a progressive but centralizing
ideology whose power base was inextricably linked to the communist regime. Bermel looks closely
at the reforms of the 1990s and the heated public reaction to them. On the part of language
regulators  he examines the ideology that underlay the reforms and the tactics employed on all
sides to gain linguistic authority  while in dissecting the public reaction  he looks both at
conscious arguments marshaled in favor of and against reform and at the use  conscious and
subconscious  of metaphors about language. Of interest to faculty and students working in the
area of language  cultural studies  and history  especially that of transitional and
post-communist states  this volume is also relevant for those with a more general interest in
language planning and language reform. The book is awarded with the The George Blazyca Prize in
East European Studies 2008.

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