While there are works that trace the evolution of the study of language, note the editors, few make explicit connections between the technical and intellectual history of the discipline and broader historical processes of nationalism and colonialism. This collection of essays makes those connections, in diverse settings ranging from the centers of academic Europe to African missionary stations in Namibia. The seven contributions explore such topics as the 19th-century French debate over the boundaries of romance dialectics and its connections to an ideology of assimilation to the norms of urban civilization, the contestation over the standardization of Swahili and Gikuyu in pre-World War I French West Africa and attempts to linguistically segregate educated and politicized Africans from English language spheres of colonial and metropolitan power, and Chinese efforts to modernize their script in the late-19th and early-20th centuries as part of a nationalist response to growing Japanese political and military power. Annotation ©2007 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Read Less