Folklore, Ethnology, Philology: National Sciences and Global Connections

Folklore and ethnology were from their beginnings closely associated with language. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz used languages to identify and categorise peoples, and he influenced the German-speaking scholars who coined the earliest ethnological terms, the first of which came in the 1740s. Largely through Johann Gottfried Herder’s writings, from the late 18th century the idea of the Volksgeist helped to valorise language and popular traditions as authentic markers of cultural distinctiveness. With the 19th-century development of the comparative historical study of languages, especially Indo-European and Uralic, the possibility appeared of positing much deeper historical origins for modern European nations, above all for those nations whose written histories began in relatively recent times. As it developed within the German university system in the course of the 19th century philology encompassed not just language and literature but mythology, folk traditions, law, medicine and history, all understood in relation to German culture as a whole. As folklore studies were professionalised and institutionalised, ‘national’ folklore studies tended to be largely defined by the extent of a distinct language, while dialect studies frequently drew on folk traditions to give representative examples of localised speech using storytellers as privileged informants – as we show in the case of Irish dialectology.