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Ecclesiastical Pressures and Language Politics: The Boundary Work of Albanian Language in the 17th-18th Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2022

Albert Doja*
Affiliation:
University of Lille, France. Clersé CNRS UMR 8019.

Abstract

In this article, I examine early religious literature in the Albanian language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which, in combination with ecclesiastical rivalries and a differential opposition to Ottoman rule, must have promoted an inherent cultural process of differentiation, especially between Greek-speaking and Albanian-speaking Orthodox Christians. In particular, I argue that the contradicting motivations of political contradistinction, Enlightenment propagation, Orthodox evangelism, ecclesiastical confrontation, and missionary counteraction lead inadvertently to a boundary work of the social reorganization of linguistic and cultural difference.

Type
Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for the Study of Nationalities

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