During the long nineteenth century, the Herderian motto that language
reflects the soul of the nation proved to be a pivotal agent in forming
ethnies, nations and national territories as well as in excluding
linguistic minorities. In the spring of 2005, the Groningen Research
School for the Study of the Humanities hosted a workshop on the subject
of Ethnolinguistic nationalism in the Netherlands, Flanders and the
Scandinavian countries. The workshop was organized and attended by a
select, interdisciplinary group of scholars whose papers are presented
in this volume, XXXIII in the series Groningen Studies in Cultural
Change. The volume opens with introductory and theoretical surveys on
the theme of nationalism, followed by critical surveys of each of the
above-mentioned regions and nations. The contributions to the volume
consist of the discussion and development of some interesting new fields
of research on the subject.