Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
The significance of language and literature as formative to national identity is a major trope within studies of nationalism. The act of imagining and realizing a nation and a nation-state along these lines has been tackled from multiple angles including folklore, linguistics, historical studies of educational institutions and their curricula, with a prominent place reserved for textbook analysis. Even though historical studies for the most part have underscored the rapidity and novelty of these processes, a temporal claim that is part and parcel of the larger and fundamental assertion that nationalism is a modern phenomenon, these processes are negotiated over a period of decades. In Braudelian terms, the standardization of a national language would fall somewhere between conjoncture and événement.