Back from a conference in Warsaw. „Residues and Innovations within Imperial Orders: Political Assemblies in Continental Europe, 1800–1850”. The question is – I hear you cry – what I have got to do with a topic like that. Well, my presentation was about the struggle for linguistic emancipation in the Hungarian parliament and its connection to the sacralization of language that had been going on an at least since the late 18th century. Calling language a “sacred property” and the cultivation of language a “sacred duty”, venerating the leaders of the language reform movement as “prophets” or “saviors”, or speaking of Hungarian as the most ancient language created by God are only some elements of this sacralization that I’m not the first to observe (see e. g. István Margócsy’s “My Goddess, My Fate, My Everything, Hungarian Language!”). It may even be said that the language issue was part of the concurrently emerging “nation-religion” which authors like András Gerő described not as a contingent by-product but the very essence of nationalism. My only regret is that I’ve missed to add “LANGUAGE” as a separate entry to my recently published book on Secular Religions. But this is just one omission, for you learn about new possible additions almost every day.

Ferenc Plathy: The Apotheosis of Kazinczy (the leader of the language reform), 1859.
Btw, this is not to say that all this is mere nonsense that should be overcome by a more rationalistic approach to language. Without such devotion (or, if you like, “fanaticism”) no transformative politics is possible. It is in fact a paradoxically realist conclusion that when politics is understood not as “business as usual”, the administration of daily affairs, but as politics PER SE, in its true essence, it becomes inevitably inseparable from so-called “religious” aspects.
My own contribution will be published later, but here is the short abstract of my paper for the conference:
“A non-negligible factor of every parliament’s operation is the language in which debates are conducted and accepted laws are formulated. The language of the Hungarian parliament (more exactly the Diet of the Estates) was traditionally Latin, and although the idea of making Hungarian an official language was raised already at the end of the 18th century, its realization was the work of so-called “reform diets” between 1825 and 1844. The paper examines how language became one of the most important issues in parliamentary debates of the time, how it was related to other topics, and most of all, how it became the basis of a peculiar parliamentary (and extra-parliamentary) rhetoric in which language appeared as a “sacrament”, the main politico-religious symbol of emerging nationalism, all this in opposition to the centralizing and Germanizing tendencies of the Habsburg Empire. Although the explicit aim of this was to return to the allegedly ancient heritage of Hungary (in terms of language and cult), it was in fact an element of the modern phenomenon of “nation-religions” that were also present in other European countries, replacing or overriding former denominational commitments.”