Articles/Essays/Chapters in Books
- Norberg, J. "The Mother Tongue at School." Untying the Mother Tongue. Ed. Antonio, C; Dal Bol, F. ICI Berlin Press,
2023. 84-103.
(last updated on 2024/11/25)
Abstract:
This paper focuses on a key contradiction in nineteenth-century nationalist ideology, namely the opposition between the emphasis on the sacred status of the mother tongue, on the one hand, and the use of universal mandatory schooling as a means of homogenization, on the other. The influential philologist Jacob Grimm insisted that only people whose mother tongue was German counted as members of the German nation; the mother tongue was the key criterion of authentic belonging. Yet Grimm also realized that mandatory schooling imposed a uniform language across a wide territory, wiping out local dialects and effectively giving shape to a more linguistically unified people. He thus witnessed how modern mass instruction forged a more standardized culture at the expense of the more natural-seeming transmission of language within families. In Grimm’s writings on education, the valorization of the mother is continually disturbed by the presence of a surrogate figure, the school teacher.
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