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IN nineteenth-century Europe, the rise of interest in exotic languages as well as local dialects coincided with colonial expansion and the creation of a European regime of nation-states. Through the dichotomizing discourses of orientalism, Europe created itself in opposition to a broadly defined "East" that often included not only Asia but also Africa. As Said (1978), Olender (1992), Mudimbe (1988), and others have pointed out, scholars of language and ideas about linguistic differences played a significant part in the development of such categories of identity. Arguments about language were central in producing and buttressing European claims to difference from the rest of the world, and claims to the superiority of the metropolitan bourgeoisie over "backward" or "primitive" others, whether they were residents of other continents, other provinces, or other social classes.
Language could be central to these arguments because by the mid-nineteenth century language came to be seen as crucially unaffected by human will, individual intent, or the particularities of social life (Formigari, 1985; Taylor, 1990). Although Saussure's argument for a "science of language" that would be divorced from the everyday speech of its speakers is today the most familiar of these formulations, earlier approaches that differed sharply in other ways nevertheless shared this view of language's independence. To them, languages were natural objects, consequences of spiritual or even biological differences between populations.
August Schleicher was expressing a quite general naturalism when he noted that "languages are organisms of nature; they have never been directed by the will of man" (1869, pp 20-21).(1) A corollary was that identifying languages was the same as identifying nations: "From the relations of separate languages, or groups of languages, to one another, we may discover the original and more or less intimate affinity of the nations themselves . . . " (Lepsius, 1863, p. 24). Like many other scholars of his time, Lepsius was asserting the now familiar Western idea that links one culture with one language, and maintains that the culture of a community is thus best studied through its language. Moreover, the equation of one language with one culture was endowed with political significance: a linguistically united community ("nation"), when tied to a territory, could claim to deserve a state of its own. In effect, exactly because...