Multilingualism, Nationhood, and Cultural Identity: Northern Europe, 16th-19th Centuries

Before the modern nation-state became a stable, widespread phenomenon throughout northern Europe, multilingualism-the use of multiple languages in one geographical area-was common throughout the region. This book brings together historians and linguists, who apply their respective analytic tools to offer an interdisciplinary interpretation of the functions of multilingualism in identity-building in the period, and, from that, draw valuable lessons for understanding today’s cosmopolitan societies.

Willem Frijhoff is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at VU University, Amsterdam, and is now G.Ph. Verhagen Professor of Cultural History at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. His scholarly work focuses on cultural, linguistic and religious identities in early modern France, the Netherlands and North America.
Marie-Christine Kok Escalle has been Associate Professor of French Culture and Intercultural Communication at Utrecht University, and after her retirement she continued as Senior Researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (Utrecht University). Her scholarly interests include the cultural role the French language has played in the Netherlands, specially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the development of intercultural competence through foreign language learning and teaching in the past as well as nowadays.Karène Sanchez Summerer is Professor and Chair of Middle Eastern studies at Groningen University, specializing in a relational cultural and social history of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and its communities. She has published on multilingualism and language policy in Palestine during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods. Her last publications include ’Unsilencing Palestine 1922-1923. Hundred years after Frank Scholten’s visit to the Holy Land, Contemporary Levant, 2024; ’Orthodoxy and solidarity: Niqula Khoury’s journey to the League of Nations’ (with S. Irving) in ’Palestine’s Christians and the Nationalist Cause. The Late Ottoman and Mandatory Periods, edited by Erik Freas, Routledge, 2024.