Language and National Identity: Comparing France and Sweden (review)

This revised presentation of Oakes’s 2000 dissertation, completed at the University of Melbourne, Australia, examines the role language plays in the construction of national identity. The study is organized around a comparison of French and Swedish national identities. First, a content analysis of social, historical, political, and economic data regarding the role of language in the construction of national identity in each of the countries is presented. Next, the author describes a survey that she conducted in the two countries. Her approach is multidisciplinary, though her analysis and explanations rely on a theoretical framework from the social psychology of language.

Chs. 1–3 introduce concepts necessary to the analysis and interpretation of the data contained in following chapters: ethnicity, civic and ethnic nations, nationalism, and linguistic variation within an ethnolinguistic community. Next, topics associated with the social psychology of language are treated: language attitudes, language ideology and power relationships, social identity theory (SIT), and ethnolinguistic identity theory (ELIT).

Ch. 4 provides a general perspective of language and national identity, including the concepts of linguistic consciousness, standardization, prescriptivism, language purism, and language myths. A historical overview of the emergence of each nation’s language and identity precedes a review of each nation’s attitudes to language change and spelling reform in the modern era.

In the subsequent chapters, language and identity issues are described for each country in the context of the national, European, and global arenas. Here the framework of comparing and contrasting the situations in France and Sweden is particularly useful as the discussion touches on the different effects of various social, political, and economic decisions on the use and function of language as it pertains to the construction of national identity. Salient notions include that of ‘the Other’, linguistic and nonlinguistic boundaries, and convergence/divergence. The author demonstrates how both countries have made recourse alternately to regional minority groups and to immigrants as linguistic Others as necessary contradistinctions in order to form a national identity through language. Linguistic and nonlinguistic boundaries create social spaces in which language and identity may have different relationships to each other, resulting in phenomena such as the indirect use of language as a socially acceptable basis for discrimination, the use of language to resist forces of assimilation and globalization, or the possibility of language shift. Strategies for the construction of national identity have involved the nation’s convergence toward and/or divergence away from minority groups, European neighbors, and other countries on an international playing field, such as the United States.

In Ch. 8, O describes the methodology for the construction of the questionnaire used in her survey of secondary school students in France and Sweden, and presents the series of hypotheses on which it was based. Her original hypothesis had predicted a high degree of national and linguistic consciousness in France, and this was borne out among the French students. But contrary to her expectations, she also found a high degree of national and linguistic consciousness among the Swedish students. Likewise, her findings concerning French and Swedish attitudes towards regional and immigrant languages were the reverse of what her hypothesis predicted.

The final chapter contains a summary and evaluation of the book’s contents and suggestions for future research. One noteworthy conclusion is that the official rhetoric and actions by agents on the national level do not necessarily guide or coincide with the construction of national identity at the grassroots level.

The value of O’s research lies in her unique comparison of the history of official policies and actions concerning language and national identity to the synchronic study of speakers at a grassroots level. This book will be appreciated by those with interests in the areas of language attitude studies, the effects of language standardization, the globalization of English, and more particularly by those monitoring linguistic pressures in Europe.