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The mother tongue at school
(2023)
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.
This chapter makes the case for a literary history that accounts for the multilingual nature of medieval Denmark, giving particular attention to Danish, German, and Latin. It relates such a project to current research interests such as crossing the boundaries of national philologies; demonstrates the need for it by reviewing existing surveys of the period; and outlines some lines of enquiry, including the translation and transmission of texts, that it could pursue.