Pre-Modern German Language Ideologies and the Making of Linguistic Racism (Luther, Opitz, Schottelius)

While recent scholarship in pre-modern German studies has shown an awareness of the need to reflect on ideas about race and race-making, the definitions and practices of race and the classification of human diversity remain largely ocularcentric. The sensory process of listening to the spoken word can allow for racial ideologies to remain more deeply rooted than in seeing. Employing recent theories on the politics of racialized listening and of linguistic racism, I examine a set of highly canonical pre-modern German works by Martin Luther (1483–1546), Martin Opitz (1597–1639), and Justus Georg Schottelius (1612–72). I do so with the aim of tracking their strategies of delineating and forming a national community through theories of Germanic prosody, lexica, grammar, pronunciation, orthography, and articulation. In addressing these canonical works as pre-modern makings of linguistic racism and raciolinguistics, I aim to encourage scholars to consider race through language, spoken and heard.