Ricerc@Sapienza

Although the relationship between language and nation is generally considered a product of Romanticism, it actually dates back to ancient times, rooted in the history of the Near East first, and then Greece and Rome. And, if the sixteenth century, instead, offers the first evidence of a formal thematization of the relationship between language and state, it is only during the French Revolution that the unprecedented political role played now by language, would put the relationship between language, nation and state in a new perspective. In fact, this new function of language constitutes one of the major factors involved in the ensuing formulation of state-nation concept in the nineteenth century. It is ‘within the language’, more than in other areas, that the opposing ideas of the universalism of the Enlightenment and the Romantic exaltation of the concept of ethnos, meld. The ideology, according to which there must be a coincidence of nation, language and state, would become a widely shared and lasting model in Europe. (Indeed, the current political crisis is witnessing a revival of some themes and concepts of the nineteenth century).