nation-state

This paper aims to provide a brief mapping of what I call “the ignored languages of the Bulgarian literary space”. It attests to the lack of desire to memory texts written in languages other than that of the nation-state (Old Slavonic, Slavonic, Bulgarian) - Hebrew and Ladino, Armenian, Arabic, Persian, Osmanli and Turkish - because, since its constitution at the end of the 19th century, the Bulgarian literary historiography has been anchored on adequacy: one nation, one literature, one language, and thus provides a national and monolingual canon.

Languages which until the 18th and 19th century were only tools to communicate attained new roles with the appearance of the nation-states and nationalism. They were associated with national identity. It was assumed that every nation had a language and that every language group could claim a nationhood. Bilingualism was seen as a prestigious attainment provided the language next to the “language of the nation” is not associated with a nation or an ethnic group which is perceived as a threat to the nation. The unprestigious language which belongs to the “other” is suppressed or ignored. Cases from Greece and Turkey show that this preference/rejection practice is still experienced in our times as a problem of human rights.