Abstract
Language planners espousing pan-nationalism influenced the orthography of standard literary Croatian and Norwegian Bokmål. Specifically, ‘Slovak’ intellectuals Jan Herkel and Jan Kollár influenced the Croatian orthography of Ljudovit Gaj, and ‘Danish’ intellectuals Rasmus Rask and N. M. Petersen influenced Knud Knudsen's Bokmål. Slovaks and Danes influenced Croatian and Norwegian orthography because Croats and Norwegians imagined the ‘national language’ in pan-national terms: Slovaks participated as fellow Slavs, and Danes as fellow Norwegians. The influence of pan-nationalism helps problematize teleological narratives of ‘national awakening’, since the emergence of the ‘Croatian’ and ‘Norwegian’ literary languages cannot be analysed solely in terms of Croatian or Norwegian nationalism.
This article discusses two cases in which pan-nationalism influenced the orthography of a national literary standard, specifically investigating the impact of nineteenth-century pan-Slavism on the standardization of literary Croatian and the impact of nineteenth-century pan-Scandinavianism on the standardization of Norwegian Bokmål. The Croatian literary standard took the form it did partly because of the influence of Jan Herkel and Jan Kollár on Croatian journalist and language reformer Ljudevit Gaj. The Bokmål literary standard took the form it did partly because of the influence of Rasmus Rask and N. M. Petersen on Norwegian educator and linguist Knud Knudsen. Today, Herkel and Kollár are seen as ‘Slovaks’, and Rask and Petersen as ‘Danes’. Nevertheless, Herkel, Kollár, Rask and Petersen did not influence the Croatian and Bokmål literary standards as foreigners or outsiders. Instead, they intervened as members of an imagined national community transcending the limits of Croatian and Norwegian nationalism as now understood. Herkel and Kollár were Pan-Slavs, influencing other Slavs; Rask and Petersen were Pan-Scandinavians, influencing other Scandinavians. This study emphasizes the role of pan-nationalism on language planning as evidence of contingency in the early phases of so-called ‘national awakening’ in the nineteenth century. National awakening involved competing projects, and the projects that eventually triumphed, such as the Croatian and Norwegian national projects, once competed with other rival national concepts.
Conceptualizing nationalism, pan-nationalism and their influence
Analysing language planning as ‘national’ or ‘pan-national’ poses terminological difficulties. The terms ‘nation’, ‘national’ and ‘nationalism’ are, of course, notoriously contested: scholars have invested them with so many different meanings that a significant scholarly literature exists merely to summarize and compare the different approaches. 1 The term ‘pan-nationalism’ also has its complexities, not least because it contains within it all the ambiguity of the term ‘nationalism’. 2 We therefore preface our argument about the impact of pan-nationalism on particularist Croatian and Norwegian nationalisms with a brief terminological discussion.
We start from the empirical observation that during the nineteenth century phrases such as hrvatski narod, slovanski narod, den norske nasjon, den skandinaviske nasjon appeared in the works of novelists, journalists, activists and politicians. We suggest that the nearest equivalent to the words narod and nasjon in English is the word ‘nation’. The repeated invocation of the ‘nation’ in social life helps construct the nation, in the words of Rogers Brubaker, ‘as a practical category, as classificatory scheme, as cognitive frame’, 3 and thus as an important object of study. Taking such a social constructivist approach bypasses unprofitable debate about whether any particular national concept is correct or incorrect: indeed, we are doubtful that the words narod and nasjon refer to any particular object in the physical world.
Slightly adapting a famous analysis proposed by Benedict Anderson in 1983, we suggest that the ‘nation’ [narod, nasjon], as historical actors invoked and imagined it, referred to a community imagined as inherently limited and capable of legitimating political demands. 4 Historical actors characteristically invoked the narod and the nasjon while engaging in political activism. They invoked the ‘nation’ in the hope of instigating social change, in an effort to influence or persuade others.
In the two case studies discussed below, patriot-linguists specifically hoped to influence orthographic conventions. Their ‘nationalism’ took the form of language planning. Robert Kaplan and Richard Baldauf argued that ‘in its simplest sense, language planning is an attempt by someone to modify the linguistic behaviour of some community for some reason’. 5 Obviously, language planning has many potential dimensions, but the debates analysed below neglected questions of accent, grammatical structure, syntax and register, focusing instead on which letters ought to represent particular sounds. Interest in orthographic questions was widespread during the early nineteenth century: patriot-linguists across Europe were debating orthographic questions, and writing grammar books, dictionaries and similar reference works.
The patriot-linguists discussed below specifically wanted to standardize spelling in such a way as to facilitate literary exchange between Croats and other Slavs, and between Norwegians and other Scandinavians. They understood both their ‘nation’ and their ‘language’ in expansive terms: they imagined a Pan-Slav narod speaking a common ‘Slavic language’, and a Pan-Scandiavian nasjon speaking a common ‘Scandinavian language’. Neither these ‘nations’ nor these ‘languages’ enjoy much currency nowadays, either from scholars or from public opinion at large. Nevertheless, historians may legitimately study unfamiliar or exotic national concepts that played a role in the past.
Indeed, we suggest that expecting historical actors to share contemporary ideas about which nations exist would impede analysis: imposing anachronisms is always unhelpful. Some readers may have strong opinions about which national concepts are ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’. Nevertheless, our social constructivist approach allows us to profess agnostic indifference as to the existence of either a Slavic or a Croatian nation or language, and similarly to the existence of either a Scandinavian or Norwegian nation or language. We consider only the extent to which such concepts were or were not popular. Pan-national concepts, though they currently enjoy little popularity, proved highly influential during the nineteenth century.
While we justify using the terms ‘nation’ and ‘national’ mostly on the grounds that our objects of study used Slavic and Scandinavian equivalents, we employ the term ‘pan-national’ as an analytical term, even where historical actors might have preferred other terms. We view ‘pan-nationalism’ as a type of nationalism, and our understanding of it rests on two criteria. First, pan-nationalism implies a ‘nation’ that extends across state frontiers: different regions inhabited by members of the same nation are ruled by different governments. The criterion of multiple-statehood applies even when pan-nationalists did not seek a common state but instead sought literary or cultural forms of unity. Secondly, subsequent historical events never brought the different regions under the same government. This retroactive criterion was originally suggested by John Breuilly, who distinguished ‘pan-nationalism’ from ‘unification nationalism’. 6 According to Breuilly, ‘unification nationalism’ eventually resulted in a single national state, where ‘pan-nationalism’ did not: a pan-nationalist movement whose adherents founded a state would cease to be ‘pan-nationalists’ and become ‘unification nationalists’ instead. Nineteenth-century German-speaking patriots seeking a German state were thus ‘pan-Germans’ if they lived in Austria, but ‘unification nationalists’ if they lived in Bavaria, because Austria did not lastingly combine with united Germany while Bavaria did.
Both criteria apply to pan-nationalism in nineteenth-century Croatia and Norway: neither a greater Slavic state nor a greater Scandinavian state existed, and neither exists today. Should a greater Slavic state one day emerge, perhaps our ‘pan-nationalists’ will then have to be reinterpreted as ‘unification nationalists’. In the meantime, however, ‘Croats’ who sought unity between Croats and other Slavs qualify as pan-Slav nationalists. Since no pan-Scandinavian state exists, similarly, nineteenth-century Norwegians who advocated unity between Norway and other Scandinavians qualify as pan-Scandinavian nationalists.
When Breuilly formulated the multiple statehood criterion, he equated the establishment of a state with ‘success’. He thus defined pan-nationalism as a form of failed nationalism: had it ‘succeeded’, it would have established a state. Breuilly's understanding of the success/failure criteria can, however, be misleading, because the pan-nationalists themselves below did not actually seek a state. When nineteenth-century patriots invoked a ‘Slavic nation’ or a ‘Scandinavian nation’, the unity they imagined would be better characterized as literary or cultural than political. State formation has at most an indirect and tenuous relationship to language planning and does not make a good yardstick for measuring the impact of orthographic reform proposals.
The pan-nationalists we study not only ‘failed’ to establish Pan-Slavic or Pan-Scandinavian states but they also ‘failed’ to impose their planned orthographies in toto. Nevertheless, they ‘succeeded’ in that they influenced the Croatian and Norwegian literary standards, and thus affected the orthographic and literary practices of millions of people. Croats use the letters {š}, {č} and {ž}, and these letters were originally introduced from the pan-Slavic motive to make Croatian orthography resemble the orthography of other Slavs, specifically with orthography of Slovaks and Czechs. Norwegians use the letter {å}, which was introduced from the pan-Scandinavian motive to make Norwegian look more like Swedish. Popular memory typically conflates literary standards with ‘national languages’, imagined as exclusive to the nation. The Croatian and Norwegian cases thus prove instructive: in both cases, national memory and historiography have tended to forget the role of pan-national feeling in the codification of literary standards.
Pan-Slavism and the ‘Croatian’ letters {č, š, ž}
As peace returned after the Napoleonic wars, the Habsburg Empire annexed the former French province of Illyria. Some of the former French territory became the crownland of Dalmatia, some became the crownland of Illyria, and some was annexed to the Hungarian crownlands. The Habsburg domains had long consisted of several distinct provinces, each with their own legal traditions, though increasingly united under a common legal structure. 7 While the Habsburg monarch governed all of the territory that would eventually become the Republic of Croatia, that Croatian territory was divided into several different administrative and legal units.
Zagreb, the most important city in the territory of the future Croatian republic, was part of the Kingdom of Hungary, but also the capital of a self-governing province with its own parliament, the Sabor. Hungary, the largest single unit in the Habsburg lands, was noted for its polyglot population: its inhabitants spoke not only Hungarian but German, Romanian and Slavic; its Slavic population lived not only in the southern regions of Croatia, Slavonia and Vojvodina but also in the mountainous northern uplands that currently form the Slovak Republic. As national ideas spread in the early nineteenth century, Zagreb became an important centre of linguistic nationalism. The rise of national feeling has been retroactively described as the ‘Croatian National Revival [Hrvatski narodni preporod]’. At this time, however, activists in Zagreb promoted a national concept more pan-Slavic than Croatian particularist. 8
The story of pan-Slavism properly begins with Jan Herkel (1786–1853), the Slovak lawyer who coined the word in 1826 comparative grammar published by Buda University Press. Herkel took an interest in Slavic cultural awakening throughout the Kingdom of Hungary, and indeed in other Slavic provinces of the Habsburg monarchy. He defined pan-Slavism as ‘unity in literature’, adding that ‘the only impediment to the literature of the Slavic nations was diversity of letters for writing, in other words orthography’. 9 Herkel took some interest in grammatical structures, favouring some noun declensions and verb endings as embodying ‘the genius of the Slavic language’, while stigmatizing others as ‘merely one-sided, dialectal, and by all means not based on sound logic’. 10 His most striking proposal, however, was a new alphabet with 27 letters. Herkel's alphabet mostly resembles the Latin alphabet, but also contains three additional Cyrillic letters, {ч, ш, x}, and a final letter of his own invention {ƶ}. Herkel's final letter corresponded to the Cyrillic {ж}, which Herkel judged ‘too different from European letters’. 11
Herkel's grammar did not much impress his contemporaries. Perhaps the greatest Slavist of the century, Pavel Šafařík (1795–1861), who had even helped raise money for Herkel's work, characterized it in a letter of 13 July 1829 as ‘crazy – such must be the judgement of every understanding Catholic’. 12 Herkel's work did, however, win praise from Jan Kollár, probably the most important pan-Slav activist. 13
Jan Kollár (1793–1852) spent most of his life as a parish priest to the Lutheran parish in Pest, Hungary's commercial centre, a location that enabled him to interact with Slavs travelling up and down the Danube, or studying at the University in Buda. He is best remembered as the author of a romantic epic poem, Sláwy dcera, in which the narrator describes his romantic love for the goddess Sláwa (1824, expanded in 1832). Kollár's most influential prose work, however, was a polemical tract calling for ‘literary reciprocity between the tribes and dialects of the Slavic nation’. As the title of the book suggests, Kollár imagined a single Slavic nation encompassing Russians, Poles, Czechs, etc. as Slavic ‘tribes’, and speaking a single Slavic ‘language’. Kollár specifically imagined that the Slavic language contained four ‘main dialects’, which were in turn subdivided into ‘smaller dialects or subdialects’. Kollár classified Croatian as a ‘smaller dialect or subdialect’ of the Serbian or Illyrian ‘main dialect’ of the Slavic language. 14
Kollár exhorted Slavs to see themselves as members of a single nation. Somewhat anticipating contemporary discussions of ‘identity’, he urged his fellow Slavs to rethink their self-understanding as follows: The Pole is not just a Pole, but a Slavo-Pole, he studies not just the books of his own dialect, but those from the Russian, Czech and Serbian; The Russian is not just a Russian, but a Slavo-Russian, and knows not only the books of his own dialect, but also Russian, Czech, Serbian dialects.
15
Slavs of all ‘tribes’ should take an interest in the literary output of the entire Slavic world, and all Slavs should read literary works in other Slavic ‘dialects’. To that end, Kollár wanted ardent Slavs to study, to exchange letters, to exchange books, to found bookstores and university chairs, and to compile dictionaries and grammars. 16
To facilitate the learning of other Slavic ‘dialects’, Kollár also urged orthographic reform. While he neither used Herkel's alphabet nor proposed an alphabet of his own, he called for ‘a uniform, philosophical orthography based in the spirit of the Slavic language, on which all Slavs should agree, or at least those who use the same letters’. Kollár also offered puristic guidelines for future orthographic reformers to follow. In short, he thought Slavs should imitate other Slavs: ‘Neither Hungarian, nor Italian, or German should have any influence on Slavic orthography’. 17
Kollár's ideas attracted considerable interest. His essay on literary reciprocity was translated into Russian, Serbian (twice) and Croatian. The Croatian translation appeared in Danica, the literary supplement to an important Zagreb newspaper edited by Ljudevit Gaj (1808–1872). 18 Gaj, arguably the leading figure in this period of Croatian history, had met Kollár while studying in Budapest and ultimately became one of his most faithful disciples. After his studies, Gaj settled in Zagreb to work as a journalist and publisher.
Gaj's numerous published works include an influential spelling primer, issued bilingually in Slavic and German as Kratka osnova Horvatsko-slavenskoga pravopisaňa / Kurzer Entwurf einer kroatisch-slavischen Orthographie [‘Brief Outline of a Croatian-Slavic Orthography’, hereafter the Kratka osnova]. 19 The Kratka osnova did not mention Kollár by name but shows Kollár's influence right in the title: Gaj presented his work not as a Croatian orthography but a ‘Croatian-Slavic’ orthography.
Kollár's influence is also visible in Gaj's specific orthographic suggestions. The literary conventions of Croatian and Slavonian authors, as codified in nineteenth-century grammars and textbooks, borrowed orthographic conventions drawn from other languages. Lanossovich's 1778 textbook, for example, had used the ‘Hungarian’ digraph {cs} for the sound /tʃ/ and the ‘Italian’ digraph {sc} for the sound /ʃ/. 20 In their place, Gaj introduced the letters {č, š}, devised in Bohemia and then used by both Czechs and Slovaks. 21 The anonymous 1779 textbook Kratki Navuk za pravopiszanya horvatzko za pòtrebnost nàrodnih skol / Anleitung zur kroatischen Rechtschreibung, zum Gebrauche der Nationalschulen ['Short introduction to Croatian orthography, for use in national schools’, hereafter the Kratki Navuk], similarly used ‘Hungarian’ digraphs {ly, ny} for the sounds /ʎ/ and /ɲ/. 22 Gaj replaced the Hungarian {y} with a Czech diacritic, writing {ľ, ň}. 23 Gaj also replaced the Kratki Navuk's ‘Hungarian’ digraphs {cz, sz} for the sounds /ts/ and /s/ with the letters {c, s}, symbols that appear not only in Czech but also in Polish. 24 Gaj thus designed his ‘Croatian-Slavic’ orthography to resemble other Slavic orthographies. Inspired by Kollár, Gaj wanted written Croatian to resemble other ‘dialects of the Slavic language’.
Gaj's Pan-Slavism was typical of the time: other Slavic intellectuals in the Habsburg domains believed in a great Slavic nation divided into tribes, and in a great Slavic language divided into dialects. Consider an 1846 ‘grammar of the Illyrian Slavic dialect’, which first appeared in Gaj's journal Danica and was subsequently printed as a book. Its author, the philologist-patriot Věkoslav Babukić (1812–1875), was subsequently appointed the first language professor at the Royal Academy in Zagreb. Babukić followed Gaj's orthography, complete with the letters {č, š, ž}, even if he replaced Gaj's {ľ, ň} with {lj, nj}. 25 Babukić spent his career in Zagreb and is often described in the scholarly literature as a ‘Croatian’ linguist or awakener. Nevertheless, he consistently imagined a ‘language’ geographically extending far beyond even the most expansive vision of greater Croatia. He equated the ‘Illyrian dialect’ with the ‘dialect of Southern Slavs’ generally, and also included grammars of the ‘Polish dialect’ and the ‘Czech dialect’ as embodying ‘the spirit of the Slavic language [duh slavjanskoga jezika]’. 26
Gaj's proposals were not the last word in the history of literary Croatian. The noted dictionary of Serbian philologist Djuro Daničić (1825–1882), for example, is credited with introducing the symbol {đ}, which both Gaj and Babukić had written with the digraph {dj}. 27 The government of interwar Yugoslavia propounded the notion of a ‘Serbo-Croato-Slovene’ language, and postwar socialist Yugoslavia the notion of ‘Serbo-Croatian’. After the collapse of Yugoslavia, the extensive reform of literary Croatian inspired some scholars to speculate about the ‘recodification’ of Croatian. 28 Nevertheless, Gaj's work has proved an important milestone in the development of the Croatian literary standard, and the letters {č, š, ž} are still in use.
Scholars typically describe Gaj as a Croat. He was born in Krapina, a small town in provincial Croatia, not far from the border with Styria. He spent most of his working life in Zagreb, where his journalism and activism shaped the intellectual and cultural life of lands that would eventually become the Republic of Croatia. In 2009, he was even featured on a Croatian postage stamp. Nevertheless, Gaj understood his Croatian-ness as tribal and dialectical: he subsumed Croatia and Croatian within a broader Slavic context.
National historiographies, however, have often inaccurately characterized Pan-Slavs as particularist nationalists. 29 While scholars have, for example, generally acknowledged that Gaj had ‘a Pan-Slavic orientation’, 30 they have mostly studied Gaj in the context of Croatian history, and ascribed to him a Croatian particularism. 31 Robert Stallaerts, for example, claimed that ‘Ljudevit Gaj believed the national Croatian identity could only be preserved through the creation of a common language’. 32 Other scholars have depicted Gaj as contributing to Illyrianism, understood as a proto-Yugoslav national movement. 33 Tobias Strahl imagined Gaj ‘creating a South-Slavic nation on the basis of language’, and even omitted the word ‘Slavic’ from the title when referring to the Kratka osnova: ‘Gaj published a Croatian grammar, Kratka osnova hrvatskog pravopisa’. 34 Ivo Goldstein similarly misrepresented the title of Gaj's grammar, which he gave with the translation ‘Kratka osnova hrvatskog pravopisa (Foundations of Croatian Orthography)’, while Milan Moguš gave ‘Kratka osnova horvatskog pravopisaňa [a short outline of Croatian (i.e., Kaikavian) orthography]’. 35 All of these incorrect titles conceal Gaj's pan-Slavic orientation. We will see that Norwegian historiography likewise obscures the influence of Pan-Scandinavianism.
Pan-Scandinavianism and the ‘Norwegian (Bokmål)’ letter {å}
In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the great powers compensated Sweden for the loss of Finland by removing Norway from the Danish crown and giving it to the Swedish crown. As a possession of the Swedish king, Norway enjoyed a higher degree of political autonomy than in the previous four centuries under Danish rule. This newfound political autonomy, however, did not erase the Danish cultural legacy.
When Denmark and Norway parted ways in 1814, the Norwegian constitution stipulated that the official literary standard used in Norway was to be called norsk [Norwegian]. Under Danish rule, however, Norway had lost its literary distinctiveness, and Norwegians used written Danish as their literary standard in 1814. Writing in this Danish-called-Norwegian provoked increasing dissatisfaction as the years progressed, since many perceived too wide a gap between spoken Norwegian and the inherited literary standard. Norwegian savants spent much of the nineteenth-century debating possible reform schemes.
Norwegian debates about script reform, however, contained many important players who lived beyond the Norwegian frontier and undertook script reform from pan-Scandinavian motives. Several intellectuals throughout Scandinavia argued that Danes, Swedes and Norwegians should emphasize their commonalities rather than their differences. Their movement came to be known as pan-Scandinavianism.
Language was at the centre of the pan-Scandinavian movement from the very start. Although the word ‘Scandinavianism’ [Skandinavisme] itself first appears in written sources only in 1843, the movement's intellectual roots can be traced back to the late eighteenth century. 36 Men of letters studying Old Norse language and literature came to increasingly view the historical and linguistic roots shared by Danes, Swedes and Norwegians as a precious heritage. From the outset, such visions of a shared Scandinavian identity inspired initiatives for practical cultural cooperation. Most notably, the year 1796 saw the founding of the Copenhagen-based Skandinaviske Litteratur-Selskab ['Scandinavian Literary Society’], which, according to the preface to the first issue of the society's in-house journal Skandinavisk Museum, had as its main goal ‘to forward the unification and propagation of the Scandinavian languages and literature’. 37 The anonymous author, most likely the society's secretary Jens Kragh Høst (1772–1844), had specified earlier that there really ‘only is one main language in the three Northern realms, but it has split into two dialects, Danish and Swedish, which have become strangers to one another, and are considered by both natives and foreigners as two separate languages’. 38 It should be noted here that Høst, as was common at the time, had not yet recognized Norwegian as a language separate from Danish.
The first important contribution to harmonizing the Scandinavian orthographies came from the famous Danish linguist and comparative philologist Rasmus Rask (1787–1832). Rask considered the recent relabelling of written Danish in Norway as ‘Norwegian’ as being ‘strange as […] speaking of a Swiss or Austrian language’. 39 He instead imagined Scandinavian literary unity in terms of a Danish/Swedish binary. The title of his 1826 Forsøg til en videnskabelig dansk Retskrivningslære med Hensyn til Stamsproget og Nabosproget [Essay on a scientific Danish orthography with regard to the root language and the neighbouring language] suggests that his recommendations for Danish spelling reform were partially based on the observed similarities with the ‘neighbouring language’, meaning Swedish, even though he also drew extensively on the common Scandinavian heritage of Old Norse. The guiding principle, however, was that spelling should be brought closer to the pronunciation of educated speakers.
Language purism suffuses Rask's orthography. For example, he preferred ‘Danish’ consonants {s} and {k} to ‘foreign’ consonants like {c, q, x, z}. His desire to expunge German influences in particular extended to the spelling of his own name, which he changed from ‘Rasmus Christian Rasch’ to ‘Rasmus Kristian Rask’. Significantly, Rask also discouraged the Fraktur typeface, preferring Antiqua instead. He similarly rejected the use of capital letters for nouns, which was still common in Danish at the time, though not in Swedish.
While Rask rejected foreign influences, he sought (re)connection with Old Norse and Swedish. Rask's most important recommendations regarding the harmonization between Danish and Swedish included the use of {å} instead of {aa} for the sound /ɔ/, the removal of the silent {e} after a long vowel (e.g., troe > tro), and the double writing of long vowels (e.g., piil > pil). Like many language reformers after him, Rask did not view Swedish influences as foreign. On the contrary, he thought an intensified focus on Scandinavia would help liberate Danish from German influence. Nationalization and pan-Scandinavianism thus went hand in hand.
Rask's work was defended, promoted and popularised by his close friend Niels Matthias Petersen (1791–1862), historian, philologist, and in 1845 the first professor of Nordic Languages at the University of Copenhagen. In 1837, Peterson wrote a Kortfattet dansk Retskrivning [concise Danish orthography], and in 1845, a long article titled ‘Den nordiske oldtids betydning for nutiden’ [on the significance of Norse antiquity for the present]. In the latter text, Petersen advocated a single common Scandinavian literary standard, free of German influences. In contrast to Rask, however, Petersen recognized Norwegian as a language separate from Danish. In Petersen's mind, full Scandinavian integration was crucial for Denmark, otherwise everything Danish would fall victim to German cultural and political expansionism. 40 The brewing separatist movement in the Danish duchies Schleswig and Holstein explained his existential fear. 41 But Petersen was also an impassioned pan-Scandinavianist who saw far-reaching linguistic unification as a sine qua non for the establishment of a truly pan-national Nordic literature. 42 The common literary standard was to be based on Rask's orthography, which ultimately came to be known as the Rask-Petersen orthography. 43 Hoping to familiarize his readers with this new standard, Petersen wrote his article using the new orthographic principles, including the use of the letter {å}, antiqua and lowercase letters for nouns.
Pan-Scandinavian orthographic reform schemes faced a strong backlash from proponents of the traditional orthography, foremost among them the historian and philologist Christian Molbech (1783–1857), who had codified this orthography in 1813, supplemented by an extensive dictionary in 1833. The Scandinavian context featured explicitly in the debate. Whereas Petersen championed full orthographic unification, Molbech maintained that any form of harmonization would not just be difficult, as Petersen had argued, but impossible: ‘Danish and Swedish are no more dialects than Spanish and Portuguese; they are two languages, each with their own literature’. 44 More importantly, Molbech saw any attempt to artificially draw Danish closer to Swedish or Old Norse as a threat to the survival of an independent Danish literature. Re-establishing the lost orthographic unity ‘would lead our civilized language back to barbarity’. 45
Though the phonemic reforms proposed by the Rask-Petersen orthography found few supporters in Denmark, they were enthusiastically adopted in Norway almost from the start. The novelist and schoolteacher Maurits Hansen (1794–1842) implemented most of their orthographic recommendations in his 1837 Norwegian grammar. To be sure, Hansen himself played down Rask's influence, depicting Rask as merely the latest embodiment of a longer tradition dating back to the seventeenth century. 46 Hansen's work nonetheless demonstrates that the phonemic principles developed by Danish linguists became a guiding line for the gradual reform of the Danish-Norwegian written standard from the very beginning.
The historian Ludvig Kristensen Daa (1809–1877), one of the few outspoken Norwegian pan-nationalists of the era, also drew an explicit link between language reform and pan-Scandinavianism. In the preface to a Swedish-Norwegian pocket dictionary from 1839, he wrote: Acceptance of Rask's orthography would mean a big step in making the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish languages comprehensible to all the inhabitants of the Scandinavian countries. It would contribute to increasing the value and standing of our literature by encouraging its practitioners and by bringing the different national characters closer together.
47
Daa's dictionary is consequently one of the earliest texts to apply Rask's orthography systematically, albeit with two exceptions. First, the typefaces of Norwegian publishers did not have the character {å}. Indeed, Norwegian printers still used the Fraktur type; as Daa put it, ‘we have still not abolished this tasteless medieval depravity’. Daa therefore had to use the {aa}. Secondly, Daa rejected Rask's {k}, {g}, {sk} before {e}, {ø} and {æ}, using instead {kj}, {gj}, {skj} which he considered both more in line with spoken Norwegian and closer to Swedish. In this case, Daa criticized Rask for not following his own principles. 48
The phonemic line pursued by Hansen and Daa would be most influentially employed by the Norwegian linguist Knud Knudsen (1812–1895), headmaster of a secondary school in Christiania (present-day Oslo). In the first of many publications on orthographic questions, Knudsen propounded the ‘Norwegianization’ [Fornorskning] of the existing standard. Inspired by Rask, Knudsen based Norwegianization on phonemic-orthographic principles and the ‘cultivated daily speech’, specifically of educated classes living in the cities. He called the dialect spoken in Norway dansk-norsk [Danish-Norwegian], which he imagined as separate from Danish. Yet a number of his reform proposals were identical to Rask's, including the use of {å}, the removal of the silent {e} and the double writing of long vowels; the last two would be adopted into official spelling in Norway in 1862, and the {å} in 1917. In the end, Knudsen's many writings on the issue laid the foundations for the variety of Norwegian that is known since 1929 as Bokmål [‘Book language’].
Knudsen thought that plans for a common Scandinavian written language ‘would be impossible to execute’, but endorsed Daa's proposal for orthographic harmonization from the pan-national motive of making the three national literatures more accessible to each other. 49 Yet while he initially spoke of three separate languages, Knudsen eventually came to see Norwegian, Danish and Swedish as ‘just versions of Scandinavia's original common language, with only minor differences between them; they are […] ‘dialects’, and not truly distinct languages like German and French’. 50 He therefore opined that language reformers in all three countries should always keep an eye out ‘for the brother peoples and should, in cases where the circumstances allow it, always go for the option that leads to unity, rather than away from it’. 51 His own dedication to ‘Norwegianization’ thus came with notable modifications, as the proposed changes should never estrange Norwegian from the ‘brother dialects’.
This pan-national orientation marked one important difference between Knudsen's orthography and the alternative developed by the autodidact Ivar Aasen (1813–1896), whose work as a lexicographer and grammarian eventually won him a direct stipend from the Norwegian parliament. Aasen called his variety Landsmål [‘language of the country’], and based it on a wide variety of Norwegian dialects found primarily in the countryside. Aasen published a grammar in 1848 and a dictionary two years later, generally favouring forms that were supposedly least affected by Danish or German and closest to Old Norse. Unlike Knudsen, Aasen saw Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Icelandic as distinctive ‘languages’ belonging to the Nordic or Scandinavian language family. 52 Aasen's orthography also stuck to the traditional conventions: he retained the {aa} and the use of capital letters for nouns. Furthermore, he was strongly opposed to the phonemic principle.
Knudsen and Aasen differed not only in their underlying linguistic and social assumptions but also in their imagined relation to the rest of Scandinavia, implying an ideological positioning toward pan-Scandinavianism. Knudsen argued that Aasen and his supporters, whom he baptized the ‘Norwegian-Norwegians’, wished to lead us away from a Nordic linguistic community, rather than towards it. They behave as if they do not know that outside of Norway (or the Norwegian common people, really) there also is a Sweden and a Denmark; they overlook what, both in time and space, is larger and nearer – the North in its entirety, in fact – and they shove it aside for that which is smaller and farther away, for the sake of that Norway that lies high up on mountain flanks or lies buried underground, as well as for the sake of Iceland, the Old Norse and Icelandic. This is particularly the case for what concerns the spelling of words.
53
Norwegian society was divided over the question regarding which of the two variants represented the country's true national language. A feeble compromise was found when Knudsen's and Aasen's orthographies were granted equal status as the written standard by parliamentary resolution in 1885, with a measure of mutual antagonism persisting ever since. In 1917, the {å} was adopted as the official spelling for both varieties without much contention. This stood in sharp contrast to Denmark, where Rask's proposal would only be implemented after a long and contentious process in 1948. 54
Today, Knudsen is known as the ‘Father of Bokmål’ and the champion of Norwegianization. Although this Norwegianization increasingly distinguished the Norwegian literary standard from the previous Danish standard used in Norway, it was never anti-Danish, and the gradual development of Bokmål included the adoption of spelling reforms that harmonized it with not only Danish but also Swedish. Paradoxically, then, the nationalization of written Bokmål brought Norwegian orthography closer to that of its Scandinavian neighbours.
Despite the fact that Knudsen was a dedicated Scandinavianist, and that he had written an essay with the unambiguous title Om tilnærmelse mellem Norsk, Dansk og Svensk [On the convergence between Norwegian, Danish and Swedish], only a few scholars have interpreted Knudsen's orthographic work in the context of pan-Scandinavianism. 55 Scholars commonly acknowledge that Knudsen, together with Daa, participated in the Scandinavian orthography meeting of 1869, which advised spelling reform in all three countries based on the Rask-Petersen orthography. 56 Lars Vikør called Knudsen's presence ‘a significant fact showing that Norwegianization and Scandinavian harmonization were not necessarily incompatible with each other’. 57 Yet, others have downplayed the meeting's significance, while a comprehensive 4-volume history of the Norwegian language that came out in 2016–2018 overlooks it completely. 58 Similarly, while it is recognized that Knudsen owed his insistence on a phonemic orthography to Rask, the fact that Rask also championed Scandinavian harmonization in pursuit of these principles has been mostly forgotten. 59 Conflict over the respective merits of the Knudsen and Aasen orthographies appears in Norwegian historiography as a purely internal affair.
In Norway as in Croatia, therefore, the pan-national context has fallen from memory. Few Bokmål users today realize that the {å} they write is an inheritance from the glory days of pan-Scandinavianism, or that some of the fundamental principles of their orthography were first put to paper by a world-famous Danish linguist who did not even acknowledge the existence of Norwegian as a separate language. Let us conclude by pondering the significance of pan-nationalism on particularist national movements.
Conclusion: pan-nationalism and teleological narratives of ‘national awakening’
The Croatian and Norwegian cases differ in many respects. Croatia and Norway obviously have different political, economic, military and literary histories. While both Croatian and Norwegian savants spent much of the twentieth century inconclusively debating questions related to language planning, the national connotations of the various standards differed significantly. Most Norwegian patriots mostly accept Bokmål and Nynorsk as equally ‘Norwegian’, even if they embody different ideologies of Norwegian-ness. By contrast, Croats view Cyrillic as ‘Serbian’. While a few Yugoslav-minded Croats accepted both alphabets, most did not. There are many parallels between Pan-Slavism and pan-Scandinavianism, but no Scandinavian equivalent to Yugoslavism.
Nevertheless, the Croatian and Norwegian cases resemble each other in one interesting respect: both literary Croatian and Norwegian Bokmål were influenced by pan-nationalism. We have argued that the standardization and codification of Croatian and Norwegian cannot be understood solely within the Croatian and Norwegian national contexts. Slovaks influenced Croatian orthography, and Danes influenced Norwegian orthography.
More generally, the linguistic nationalism of the romantic age cannot be studied solely within the confines of the ‘nation’ and ‘national language’ as they exist today. Pan-nationalisms are only a subset of national movements that never led to independent states. In the early phases of the national movement, neither the nation nor the language had fully coalesced in the minds of patriots.
Most obviously, the influence of pan-nationalism highlights contingency in the development of Croatian and Norwegian nationalism. Ernst Gellner rightly observed that ‘nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness, it invents nations where they do not exist’.
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Nevertheless, social constructivist approaches have not much influenced popular or scholarly understanding: popular history clings to narratives of ancient pasts, which nationalism theorists call ‘primordialism’. Ronelle Alexander has summarized the linguistic ideology of newly independent Croatia as follows: the thousand-year dream of a pure Croatian state, unfettered by any foreign intervention had come true. Now it was even more vital to honor this thousand-year heritage by ridding the language of every possible tinge of impurity, and also to set the historical record straight by removing all suggestions that the Croatian language had not been unique and self-contained from the very outset.
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The profound influence of ‘Slovaks’ on Croatian orthography is difficult to reconcile with primordialist narratives of a ‘self-contained’ Croatian language: the broader Pan-Slav context must be taken into account. Scholars of Norway have also succumbed to the lure of primordialism. In an essay on Norway's ‘language history and literary history’, Steinar Gimnes wrote that many of the different cultural endeavors in the mid-19th c[entury] had a distinctive national stamp, a growing national consciousness, a conviction that Norway, young as a country but ancient as a kingdom, was intimately related to his heroic past, and that it was important to foster that inherent relationship.
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While pan-Scandinavian feeling provides evidence of growing national consciousness hearkening to the past, it is difficult to reconcile with nostalgia for a specifically Norwegian past. In practice, both Croatian nationalism and Norwegian nationalism emerged in recent times, and, as recently as the nineteenth century, were both strongly influenced by pan-nationalism, which is to say, by alternative national concepts.
More generally, the influence of pan-nationalism enables scholars to problematize inappropriately teleological narratives of ‘national awakening’. Nationalist movements in their early phases have often invoked metaphors of ‘awakening’ or ‘revival’, and several theorists have proposed schematic models to promote a comparative analysis of the various ‘awakenings’ in different parts of the world. 63 Hroch famously posited a three-stage model in which ‘scholarly interest’ (Phase A) led first to ‘patriotic agitation’ (Phase B) and ultimately to a ‘mass national movement’ (Phase C). 64 Other scholars subsequently theorized the establishment of an independent state as ‘Phase D’. 65 Still other scholars, furthermore, have independently proposed other stage-theory models. 66
In recent years, however, social constructivist scholars have become uncomfortable with the metaphor of ‘awakening’. Swenson, for example, criticized ‘the teleological story of national awakening in which conflicts and diverging ideas are left aside’. 67 Pollock similarly judged the metaphor of awakening ‘problematic – not only because it implies ‘the people’ were previously unawake or unaware but because the implication that precedes this ‘always already’ existing nationalism’. 68 Other critics have associated the metaphor of awakening with ‘the essentialist approach’ or ‘essentialist theories’. 69 Ronald Suny perhaps most memorably criticized what he called ‘the “Sleeping Beauty” view’ of nationalism, describing its emergence as ‘as eruptions of long-repressed national consciousness, as expressions of denied desires liberated by the kiss of freedom’. 70
Growing awareness that such teleological narratives are problematic, however, has not inspired many non-teleological narratives of national awakening. While there is no space here for a comprehensive bibliography, the scholarly literature abounds with studies of loyalty to region, religion or empire; studies of borderlands or cities as sites of inter-ethnic rivalry or coexistence, and studies of national indifference in its many guises. In seeking what Valery Tiskhov eloquently called a ‘post-national understanding of the nation’, social constructivist scholars have in essence abandoned the study of nationalism itself to primordialists and neo-primordialists. 71
The influence of pan-nationalism on the Croatian and Norwegian national movements, however, suggests ways to construct non-teleological narratives of ‘national awakening’. During the early phases of national awakening in both the Slavic Balkans and Scandinavia, patriots imagined not only the particular nation that eventually formed a state but also a broad pan-national community transcending state frontiers. They also undertook concrete activism designed to further that broader national unity. The leaders of the Croatian and Norwegian ‘mass national movements’ built the Croatian and Norwegian states on the foundations established by patriots who did not see themselves as Croats or Norwegians: both the ‘scholarly interests’ of Herkel and Høst and the ‘patriotic agitation’ of Kollár, Gaj, Rask and Petersen played important roles. Hroch and his successors assumed the national movements would remain essentially isomorphic as they passed through the stages. Nevertheless, activities undertaken during Phases A and B of one national movement demonstrably contributed to Phases C and D of another national movement. Considering the influence of these non-state-forming national concepts can introduce contingency into narratives of national awakening.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
