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language has for thinking and for the expression of thought, for
social relations, and for all activities of life.
If, despite recognition of these connections people often resist
seeing the essence of the nation in the speech community, this
hinges on certain difficulties that the demarcation of individual
nations by this criterion entails.5 Nations and languages are not
unchangeable categories but, rather, provisional results of a
process in constant flux; they change from day to day, and so we
see before us a wealth of intermediate forms whose classification
requires some pondering.
A German is one who thinks and speaks German. Just as there
are different degrees of mastery of the language, so there are also
different degrees of being German. Educated persons have
penetrated into the spirit and use of the language in a manner quite
different from that of the uneducated. Ability in concept formation
and mastery of words are the criterion of education: the school
rightly emphasizes acquiring the ability to grasp fully what is
spoken and written and to express oneself intelligibly in speech
(Vienna: 1907), pp. 1 ff., and Spann, Kurzgefasstes System der Gesellschaftslehre (Berlin: 1914), pp.
195 ff.
5
Moreover, let it be expressly noted that with every other explanation of the essence of the nation,
difficulties turn up in much higher degree and cannot be overcome.
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Nation and State
and writing. Only those are full members of the German nation
who have fully mastered the German language. Uneducated
persons are German only insofar as the understanding of German
speech has been made accessible to them. A peasant in a village
cut off from the world who knows only his home dialect and
cannot make himself understood by other Germans and cannot
read the written language does not count at all as a member of the
German6 nation. If all other Germans were to die out and only
people who knew only their own dialect survived, then one would
have to say that the German nation had been wiped out. Even
those peasants are not without a tinge of nationality, only they
belong not to the German nation but rather to a tiny nation
consisting of those who speak the same dialect.
The individual belongs, as a rule, to only one nation. Yet it
does now and then happen that a person belongs to two nations.
That is not the case merely when he speaks two languages but
rather only when he has mastered two languages in such a way that
he thinks and speaks in each of the two and has fully assimilated
the special way of thinking that characterizes each of them. Yet
there are more such persons than people believe. In territories of
mixed population and in centers of international trade and
commerce, one frequently meets them among merchants, officials,
etc. And they are often persons without the highest education.
Among men and women with more education, bilinguists are rarer,
since the highest perfection in the mastery of language, which
characterizes the truly educated person, is as a rule attained in only
one language. The educated person may have mastered more
languages, and all of them far better than the bilinguist has;
nevertheless, he is to be counted in only one nation if he thinks
only in one language and processes everything he hears and sees in
foreign languages through a way of thinking that has been shaped
6
That the concept of national community is a matter of degree is also recognized by Spahn (loc. cit.,
p. 207); that it includes only educated persons is explained by Bauer (loc. cit., pp. 70 ff).
39
Nation, State, and Economy
by the structure and the concept formation of his own language.
Yet even among the "millionaires of education7 there are
bilinguists, men and women who have fully assimilated the
education of two cultural circles. They were and are found
somewhat more frequently than elsewhere in places where an old,
fully developed language with an old culture and a still slightly
developed language of a people only just completing the process of
acquiring culture confront each other. There it is physically and
psychically easier to achieve mastery of two languages and two
cultural circles. Thus, there were far more bilinguists in Bohemia
among the generation which immediately preceded the one now
living than at present. In a certain sense one can also count as
bilinguists all those who, besides the standard language, have full
mastery of a dialect also.
Everyone belongs as a rule to at least one nation. Only
children and deaf-mutes are nationless; the former first acquire an
intellectual home through entry into a speech community, the latter
through development of their thinking capacity into achievement
of the capability of mutual understanding with the members of a
nation. The process that operates here is basically the same as that
by which adults already belonging to one nation switch over to
another.8
The language researcher finds relationships among languages;
he recognizes language families and language races; he speaks of
sister languages and daughter languages. Some people have
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