The Role of Language and Language Practices in the “Everyday Nationalism”

Abstract

In 1995, M. Billig’s “Banal Nationalism” was published for the first time. This pioneering work initiated a new way of studying “nation” and “nationalism”. Somewhat later, the concept of “Banal nationalism” was clarified and supplemented by the concept of “Everyday Nationality”, that together compose “Everyday Nationalism’s” research. The study, which is directly based on M. Billig’s “Banal nationalism”, examines how elites mobilize elite (state) symbols, nationalist discourses, and other material and immaterial elements that form the usual landscape and semiosphere of the territory. Instead of this, “Everyday Nationhood” try to show, how people reinterpret elite symbols and nationalist discourses or create their own versions of nationhood enacted as everyday practices. Actually, among the elements that serve as a daily reminder of people’s place in the “world of nations” are language and language practices, as well as small deictic words (“domestic policy” / “foreign policy”, “us” / “them”, “here” / “there”, etc.), which are used by mass media and other services that we read, listen, watch, etc. Finally, ideas, that seem banal to us, turn out to be ideological constructs of nationalism. The idea of “language” should also be considered a historical construct of nationalism. The concept of “language”, at least in the sense that it seems obvious to “us”, is an “invented permanency” created in the era of the nation-state. Language does not create nationalism as nationalism creates language; or, rather, nationalism creates “our” common view, that there are “natural” and indisputable things called “languages” we speak.