Languages are artefacts of culture, meaning they are created by people. They are often used for identity building and maintenance, but in Central and Eastern Europe they became the basis of nation building and national statehood maintenance. The recent split of the Serbo-Croatian language in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia amply illustrates the highly politicized role of languages in this region, which is also home to most of the world’s Slavic-speakers. This volume presents and analyzes the creation of languages across the Slavophone areas of the world and their deployment for political projects and identity building, mainly after 1989. The overview concludes with a reflection on the recent rise of Slavophone speech communities in Western Europe and Israel. The book brings together renowned international scholars who offer a variety of perspectives from a number of disciplines and sub-fields such as sociolinguistics, socio-political history and language policy, making this book of great interest to historians, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists interested in Central and Eastern Europe and Slavic Studies.

Contributors to this volume include:

Andrej Bekeš, University of Tsukuba, Japan
Wayles Browne, Cornell University, USA
Andrii Danylenko, Pace University, USA
István Fried, University of Szeged, Hungary
Catherine Gibson, University College London, UK
Robert Greenberg, Hunter College of the City University of New York, USA
Brian D. Joseph, The Ohio State University, USA
Tomasz Kamusella, University of St Andrews, UK
Keith Langston, University of Georgia, USA
Jouko Lindstedt, University of Helsinki,
Finland Paul Robert Magocsi, University of Toronto, Canada
Roland Marti, University of the Saarland, Germany
Elena Marushiakova, Independent Scholar
Vesselin Popov, Independent Scholar
Alexander Maxwell, Victoria University in Wellington,
New Zealand Michael A. Moser,University of Vienna, Austria
Motoki Nomachi, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan
Anna Novikov-Almagor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Anita Peti-Stantić, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Irina Sedakova, Institute for Slavic Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
Sarah Smyth, Independent Scholar Dieter Stern, Ghent University, Belgium
Klaus Steinke, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Paul Wexler, Tel-Aviv University, Israel