Rath Prize Laudatio 2006 (Jury: Cathleen Giustino, Paula Fichtner, Helmut
Konrad)
The jury charged with awarding the R. John Rath Prize for the best article
in the Austrian History Yearbook, volume 37 (2006) is pleased to report that
the winner is Alexander Maxwell, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of
Nevada, Reno, for his article "Why the Slovak Language Has Three Dialects: A
Case Study in Historical Perceptual Dialectology".
In this original interdisciplinary study, Dr. Maxwell productively combines
the techniques of contemporary perceptual dialectology with
nineteenth-century Slovak linguistic theory to illuminate the specific
historical processes that encouraged the mid-nineteenth century division of
Slovak into Western, Central, and Eastern dialects and the eventual
elevation of Slovak to the status of a language within a Slavic continuum.
His discussion touches on many national aspects of the Habsburg monarchy, as
well as much broader cultural issues, such as the role that religious
differences continue to play in shaping one community's perception of
others. Using numerous contemporary discussions of linguistic theory,
including writings of Ján Kollár, L'udovít Štúr and Anton Bernolák, he shows
that the tri-partite dialectic division, still recognized today and often
taken as a natural "fact", is a political and social construct, the outcome
of efforts among patriotic Slovaks to join Catholic and Lutheran forces
among Slavs in northern Hungary in defending their cultural identity against
mounting pressures of Magyarization. His conclusions tellingly underscore
that we should not accept glib generalizations about the interplay of
national identity and language in Central European political thought and
action.
In brief, Dr. Maxwell uses the linguistic history of the Slovak people, who
are both part of the history of the Hungary and the Habsburg monarchy to
raise provocative philosophical issues about the nature of causality in
historical processes, thereby moving our entire field into the larger
intellectual arena where it belongs. For both its broad-ranging mastery of
detail and conceptual suggestiveness, his work clearly merits the R. John
Rath Prize for the year 2006.