2001/09/01 by M. Scott Shell · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Historical Linguistics and Language Studies #Historical and Linguistic Studies
paper · doi:10.1353/ncr.2003.0059
openalex publication_date 2001/09/01 · openalex created_date 2022/05/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/21
Ever since the Biblical myth of the Tower of Babel, analysts have identified language difference as a potent cause of division and conflict. We might question Solorzano y Pereyra's view in Politica Indiana (1648) that "the diversity of languages is the greatest cause of religious warfare, national discords, and civil seditions," 1 but it is often difficult to identify a more fundamental and ubiquitous cause. Where empires once extirpated a people's language as a sign of domination, and where nation-states once sought their own form of totalizing dominance for the national tongue, language conflicts are now often a complex tangle of hegemony and resistance that threatens to re-create Babel on a global scale.