Lingue, nazioni e confini nel carteggio D’Ovidio-Schuchardt

The article discusses the contrast between the scholarly and militant writings produced by H. Schuchardt in the second decade of the twentieth century. The letters that the German linguist and the Italian philologist F. D’Ovidio exchanged between 1919 and 1921, which focused on the annexation of South Tyrol to Italy and the language-nation pair, serve as the point of departure. In the face of Schuchardt’s justified reputation as a “cosmopolitan” linguist, linked to his major works, the essay highlights the principle upheld by the scholar in the early post-war years, namely the concept of the ethno-linguistic border as the only legitimate political frontier. Such a “regression” to linguistic nationalism and the vision of nation-states calls into question the conditioning that the bloody clash of nationalities and the so-called “war of spirits” exerted on European intellectuals at the time of World War I, but it also allows us to reflect on today and on the relationship between linguistic identity and state borders, once again exposed to political manipulation.