Multilingualism in Enlightenment Europe

Abstract

The book under review is an English-language collective monograph called “Language Choice in Enlightenment Europe: Education, Sociability, and Governance”, written by authors from the Netherlands, Italy, Russia, Estonia, and Croatia (edited by Vladislav Rjéoutski and Willem Frijhoff). The subject of the monograph is the language choice in the European countries of the 18th century. This is the sixth book in the Languages and Cultures in History series, and it includes an introduction, eight articles by the international team of authors, and an alphabetical index of names and places mentioned. The Enlightenment was marked in Europe by the gradual abandonment of Latin in education and public administration and its replacement by vernaculars. At the same time, there are peculiarities in every country, particularly in the Russian Empire and Croatia. Archival materials (private letters, memoirs, official questionnaires, statistics) make this book extremely valuable. The authors analyse the linguistic situation in France, the Netherlands, Central Germany, the Estonian Governorate, Croatia, the Hungarian Kingdom, and the Russian Empire. Language choice is discussed at the micro-level (e.g. within one family) as well as at the macro-level (e.g., in education, public administration, among the nobility or clergy). The book will be of great interest to historians, linguists, sociologists, anthropologists, as well as to specialists in international relations.