How Romance Studies Shaped the Ukrainian Language and How the Ukrainian-Romanian Conflict Helped to Create Ladinian: A (Very) Entangled History of A-Political Science

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, language sciences played an eminently political role in Central Europe. They helped to produce or lessen differences, to create narratives of exceptionality or togetherness, or to underscore cultural historicity. The Habsburg Monarchy, where manifold languages were in use, was linguists’ preferred field of inquiry. Often migrating throughout the Monarchy and thus dealing in various ways with Central European cultural diversity, these linguists could thereby easily become political intellectuals. While many of them did indeed openly engage in political activity, I will deliberately leave those cases aside and concentrate on linguists who continued to perceive themselves as scholars; a position Johannes Feichtinger, referring to Pierre Bourdieu, called “autonomously engaged” (Feichtinger 2010, 35–36). As I will argue, however, the factor of scholars entrapped in the culturalizing monarchy, where language, history and finally ethnicity began to shape scholarly inquiry, had a pronounced influence on the production and transformation of language knowledge and the ways in which it became intertwined with politics.