Language and Substantive Concepts: Part 2 – Speaking in Tongues

This is the second of a three-part post focusing on what I term, following Caroline Coffin, the “language of history” and substantive concepts.

After the first post set out a broad theoretical framework, this post aims to set out an approach to teaching a specific sub-category of substantive concepts: foreign-language terms.

I’ll be presenting on this topic with colleagues at the upcoming Schools History Project (SHP) conference in Leeds in July 2025, so this is also a first attempt to set out and develop a broad methodological approach to this work.

Questions, comments, and criticisms are very much welcome!

 

Most of the weighty conceptual terms we use in history teaching are in the English language.

Some are not.

In this case, it might seem to our students that we’re speaking in tongues, flipping not just from everyday English to the “language of history”, but from English to another incomprehensible language altogether. What does all this mean, and what does it demand of our teaching?

In a number of instances, we may use non-English-language terms as substantive concepts. This is particularly relevant to teaching non-Anglophone histories, that is, the histories of non-English-speaking peoples, although there are instances where it might apply to the history of English-speaking peoples as well. Crucially, this implies that we must also instruct students in the use of other languages. In the last post, I put forward the argument that teaching students the language of history meant we had to approach aspects of our history teaching as if we were teaching another language. In this post, I’ll make the case that, in a few instances, we might approach history by actually teaching (very small bits of) other languages.

This post will examine this curious but vitally important sub-set of substantive concepts – those which are used in the teaching of history in English-speaking classrooms, but which are themselves non-English-language terms.

 

Foreign-Language Concepts

First of all, what do I mean by using non-English-language (or foreign-language) terms as substantive concepts?

Very broadly, I’m arguing that certain concepts can only be expressed by words that are not well-established in the English language. And by “not well-established”, I mean that these words are not used, understood, or recognised widely by native English-language speakers.

I don’t mean here all words that are composed of non-English-language morphemes (the component building-blocks of words). For example, the concept “genocide”, discussed at some length in the lastpost, is made up of a Greek prefix (“geno-”: race or tribe) and a Latin suffix (“-cide”: to destroy or kill). It has two morphemes which are not native to the English language. However, the term itself has been widely used by native English-language speakers since it was coined in 1944 and is therefore fully established in the English language.

I also don’t mean all words that are borrowed from other languages. Many are now also fully established in the English language, to the extent that they are commonly used and their meanings widely recognised. Take, for example, “parliament”, derived from the Old French “parlement” (from the stem “parley”: to speak). Or “fascism”, derived from the Italian “fascismo” (from the stem “fascio”: group, association, bundle). In both cases, the words, once borrowed from non-English languages, have become common terms used in the English language, developing their own specific word associations amongst English speakers (e.g. House of Commons, MPs, sleaze; Mosley’s Blackshirts, Nigel Farage, Harry Enfield’s parents…).

The conceptual terms I have in mind here are, rather, those which otherwise would very rarely appear in the language of a native English speaker. A handful of examples, drawn from my own history teaching and research experience, are given below (but there are of course many others).

German	French	Spanish	Russian
Volksgemeinschaft Führer Rechtsstaat Putsch	Coup état Détente Revanchism (revanchisme) Rapprochement Etatism (etatisme)	Conquistador Reconquista Caudillo Pronunciamiento	Dual power (dvoevlastie) Dual faith (dvoeverie) Vozhd’ Soviet Gulag

 

It’s worth noting that, at this stage, although most of these terms are used in their non-English-language original forms, some may more usually be translated into English-language approximations or rendered in anglicised spellings (as in the Russian examples “dual power” and “dual faith”, or French examples “revanchism” and “etatism”, given above). This does not, however, mean that these concepts have become, in themselves, part of common English-language vocabulary with readily understood meanings. They still have to be treated in many ways as if they are non-English-language terms.

 

Foreign Concepts, Foreign Languages

Asking students to learn concepts in other languages is an added burden on our teaching and may seem like a needlessly complex task on top of everything else we have to do as history teachers.

So why bother?

The first, and simplest, reason is that foreign-language terms often represent concepts that are not adequately represented by common English-language terms. That is, there are no English-language terms that have semantic equivalence (carry the same conceptual meaning) to foreign-language terms. Put most simply, this means there is no word in the English language which can accurately or meaningfully translate them.

If this seems a little abstract, let’s consider a concrete example.

The German term, “Volksgemeinschaft”, originally dates from the late 18^th or early 19^th century. It was widely used in Germany by a range of groups after that time (USHMM, 2024), and was deployed in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945 to express an idealised and aspirational vision of the German nation. Literally translated, it can be rendered into English as “national community” or “people’s community”. This corresponds directly to its two German morphemes, “Volk-” (people/nation) and “-gemeinschaft” (community). But these translations are meaningless to native English speakers – there is no English-language concept equivalent to this term.

In fact, “Volksgemeinschaft” carries with it a huge range of ideas, assumptions, biases, prejudices, aspirations, and myths which only the German word itself, placed in context, can really convey. To give a sense of its conceptual scope and specificity, here’s how German social historian, Detlev Peukert, described the Nazi understanding of the term:

The need [for the Nazi movement] was to restore the disrupted ‘normality’ of life, a utopian normality, to be sure, with a social hierarchy which was somehow ‘just’ and in which everyone had a niche where he could feel secure and respected: in short, a true ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft) from which all sources of friction and unease had been removed, all reminders of ‘conspiracy’, all abnormality, all that could jeopardise the ultimate ‘ideal order’. (Peukert, 1993)

 

Peukert’s careful unpicking of this term here indicates another important point. Beyond conveying ideas that don’t naturally occur in the English language, foreign-language conceptual terms can also provide ways into the subjective viewpoints of those who coined and used them in the past. This touches on an idea that I’ll develop in my next post and revolves around two ways of thinking about a concept: as a category of analysis and as a category of practice.

As Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper (2000) pointed out, “Many key terms in the interpretative social sciences and history – ‘race,’ ‘nation,’ ‘ethnicity,’ ‘citizenship,’, ‘democracy,’ ‘class,’ ‘community,’ and ‘tradition,’ for example – are at once categories of social and political practice and categories of social and political analysis [my emphasis].”

By a category of analysis, Brubaker and Cooper meant that a term is used analytically – as we do with substantive concepts in the history classroom – to examine the past. A category of practice, by contrast, they described as a category “of everyday social experience, developed and deployed by ordinary social actors” – in other words, a term developed and used by people to describe the world around them.

It follows, then, that many substantive concepts have a dual function and meaning:

• they are objective: as categories of analysis, they can be used to analyse and conceptualise the past;
• they are subjective: as categories of practice, they reflect the beliefs and experiences of those who, themselves, experienced the past and used these terms to describe it.

Let me bring this back to our concrete example, “Volksgemeinschaft”. This term is useful, not just because it helps us to objectively analyse and conceptualise the kind of nation the Nazis tried to create, but also because it reflects the Nazis’ own subjective mindset. As Peukert’s use of the term, above, demonstrates, this was one gripped by an obsessive desire to re-establish a mythical lost “norm” in German society and politics by purging enemies and abnormalities in order to achieve social, political, and racial homogeneity. Without using and examining the language in which this apocalyptic vision was expressed, we cannot begin to unpack the meaning it carried at the time. And that leaves our understanding of the past impoverished.

 

Etymology and Morphology: Finding Patterns in Unfamiliar Languages

If we choose to include foreign-language concepts in our teaching, how do we then introduce them to our students?

Some of the key strategies useful to introducing English-language concepts will also work with introducing foreign-language terms. These include strategies which focus on the etymology and morphology of words.

Let’s return to “Volksgemeinschaft”. Etymologically, this word derives from its two morphological components, “Volk-” and “-gemeinschaft”. Students given the right prompting can often infer the meaning of the prefix “Volk” (“the people” or “nation”, similar to English “folk”), which they sometimes recognise from the brand “Volkswagen” (telling them that this literally translates as “People's Car” helps this morpheme stick). Direct teacher instruction is more likely to be needed to provide the meaning of the morpheme “-gemeinschaft” (“community”), which has no common usage in a native English speaker’s vocabulary.

Etymologically and morphologically deconstructing foreign-language concepts can, in the same manner as English-language concepts, also unlock further concepts in that language. Knowing that the German morpheme “Volk” orients a word to the idea of “the people” or “nation” can help in the future when introducing, for example, the concept of a “Volkspartei” (a party with a claim to represent the whole German people, across class and social divides, vaguely approximating the expression “big-tent party” but with no direct parallel in English language).

Similar etymological and morphological similarities can be found to link other concepts given above, for example:

• Conquistador and Reconquista (“conquistar” = “to conquer”)
• Dual power (dvoevlastie) and Dual faith (dvoeverie) (“dvoe” = “dual”, denoting parallel and overlapping structures)
• Coup état and etatism (“état” = “the state”)

 

Finding Equivalence: Translating Non-English Terms Into Another Foreign Language

Where a non-English-language concept describes an idea which does not directly exist in English language, it may even be used to introduce concepts in other foreign languages.

Consider the German term “Führer”. In the context of Nazi Germany, this denotes the concept of a dictatorial supreme leader with personal power and authority to lead a modern single-party, totalitarian-type state. The term translates awkwardly into English as “supreme leader”, a term which carries little of the conceptual weight of “Führer” and has no concrete examples to support it in the modern English-speaking world. In other countries with experience of modern personalised dictatorships, however, a variety of non-English-language terms do exist to describe a supreme leader, including the Russian “Vozhd”, used for Stalin in the USSR; the Italian “Il Duce” for Mussolini; and the Spanish “Caudillo” used for Franco.

These terms all carry their own specific conceptual weight and meaning and are ultimately dependent on the national and temporal context in which they originate. However, conceptually they also have considerable semantic equivalence with the German “Führer”. Therefore, if students already have an understanding of the meaning of “Führer”, this term may provide a useful conceptual reference point for introducing them to “Vozhd”, “Il Duce”, or “Caudillo”.

Putting it most simply, in the absence of a precise English-language equivalent, a non-English-language term such may in effect be used to translate other foreign-language terms into a form that students can understand.

 

This is, intellectually and academically, an entirely valid exercise, one which scholars themselves have employed to introduce relatively unfamiliar terms to the readers of their books, as the examples below illustrate.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Allen Lane (2008)

Richard Sakwa, Soviet Politics: In Perspective (Second Ed.), Routledge (1998)

At the same time, there is of course an important limit to this approach. Although “Führer” has rough equivalence with “Vozhd”, “Il Duce”, and “Caudillo”, it is not completely identical to it. No two conceptual terms ever carry exactly the same meaning in history.

This might seem like a basic point, but it’s worth emphasising. Having taught students that Hitler became German “Führer” after Hindenburg’s death in 1934, we cannot then turn to Stalin and say he was the Soviet “Führer”. Enough contextual differences exist between them (Hitler: a Nazi, a fascist, an authoritarian nationalist; Stalin: a Communist, an authoritarian socialist, a [selective] internationalist) to mean that we can only say that the term “Vozhd” was used in a similar way to the term “Führer”.

Nevertheless, recognising the semantic equivalence of non-English-language terms does open up the possibility of using those terms to refer to one another more broadly. If students have already learned one foreign-language term, it can equip them to learn another. Some additional examples are given below.

Non-English-Language Term	Rough English-Language Definition	Other Foreign-Language Equivalents
Soviet (Russian)	An elected revolutionary council of workers, soldiers, and/or peasants, typically led by socialists	·         Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte (German)
Putsch (German)	An actual or attempted overthrow of a government by a small group using force of arms, possibly led by the military	·         Coup état (French) ·         Pronunciamiento (Spanish)
Gulag (Russian)	A system of punitive labour/prison camps with a prescribed role in the industrialisation of a (typically socialist) state	·         Laogai (Chinese) ·         Kwalliso (Korean)

 

Mastering Foreign Phonology: Challenges and Benefits

The maxim, “if they can say it, they can write it”, is important to learning all new vocabulary, and also holds water for non-English-language terms. But this presents a notable additional challenge for teachers, as it requires us to have the confidence to accurately pronounce words in other languages in front of students. Anecdotally, I’ve found teaching Russian history that this is one of the biggest headaches that teachers face.

Firstly, the phonemes (word sounds) of non-English-language terms are often unfamiliar to those who do not speak those languages and therefore particularly challenging to pronounce. Secondly, those terms’ graphemes (their written forms) often do not resemble those of English-language words.

This second fact actually makes it even more important that students know how to say non-English-language terms than those in English language. If they have no mental picture of what the word in front of them sounds like, they are unlikely to be able to even recognise it in the future, let alone master its use. The word simply collapses into a jumble of letters.

Going back the Volksgemeinschaft, in order to understand how to pronounce of this term, a speaker will need to know that, in German:

• “V” sounds roughly like an English “f” (rather than “v”)
• “mein” sounds roughly like the English “mine” (rather than “mean”)
• “sch” sounds roughly like the English “sh” (rather than “sk”, as in “school”)

Moreover, they will need to know that this term has four syllables: Volks-ge-mein-schaft, and it will be useful (but not totally necessary) for them to know that the emphasis in the word lies on the first syllable (Volks).

We have to assume that none of this will be intuitive to those who do not speak the languages from which words have been taken. Therefore, we have to assume that students will not be able to make any use of these terms without the teacher showing them how to, and enabling them to, pronounce them.

When teaching Russian and German history, I’ve found repeated choral practice in the classroom (“Repeat after me!”) to be key. But this can only happen once the teacher themselves is confident in their own pronunciation. To get to that point, we need to rely on non-English-language expertise around us. It can certainly help having a speaker of the language from which concepts have been taken in your department. If that luxury is not available, consulting the MFL department for pronunciation practice is also a good idea. There may also be online resources that can support with pronunciation, including online dictionaries with audio recordings or recorded pronunciation guides. (An example of such a guide for Russian-language history terms, made by myself and a native Russian-speaking colleague, can be accessed here).

Finally, it’s worth noting that we can’t be chasing perfect pronunciation from students. In order to use a word, they need to be able to reproduce its sound well enough for it to be recognised as the word in question. And that, of course, should be the standard we set ourselves as teachers introducing the pronunciation to them in the first place.

 

Foreign-Language Learning and History: The Bigger Picture

I’ll add just one final point to what is already a very long post (thank you and well done if you’re still reading!).

Behind all this lies what I consider to be a much bigger picture, and that is the relationship between history and foreign-language learning more generally.

A few years ago, I presented some research to a small conference on Russian and Soviet history in Rome. The conference itself was an illustration of the importance of language learning to historical research – around half of the attendees were Russian, the others included a German academic, two English (myself included), two Americans, one Russian-American, one Japanese-American, one Finn, and one Israeli.

Apart from the Russians, all but one of whom presented their research in English (their second language), we had all conducted our research using foreign-language sources. Those who were not native English speakers were also presenting their research in their third or fourth language.

At the end of the conference, I chatted to the German academic. He complained how resistant students at his German university were to reading a single 20-30 page article in English. The comment bowled me over. Imagine asking a typical cohort of English students of history to read anything written in another language! And yet the “language of history” is, in fact, international. It is composed of many and all languages, of which English is only one. Put most simply, most of the history of the world – including much of the history which we teach students in schools (let alone universities) is not Anglophone.

The deplorable state of language learning in the UK doesn’t help our cause here. As of 2022, the UK had the highest rate of monolingualism of any European country except Turkey and by far lowest rate of bi- and multilingualism of any western European country (Statistica, 2024). The general contempt of many native English speakers in the UK towards other languages means that many people seem to think monolingualism is a natural and permanent human state.

It’s not. Today, “[a]pproximately 6,500-7,000 languages exist in 200 sovereign states. Half the world is bilingual.” (Maher, 2017). The world is not monolingual. Neither was the past. History is not the past in the English language. It is the past in all languages.

If the young people we history teach in schools go on to study it at university, they should be able to understand this intuitively. (I wonder how many actually do; when I went to university two decades ago, I certainly didn’t.) If those young people then go on to conduct research into the history of a non-English-speaking people or country, they must be able to use other languages. And even if they don’t study any history after they leave school, they at least deserve to know that the past can often only be meaningfully expressed by using languages other than English.

It is unrealistic and unreasonable to expect history teachers to teach students other languages. But we can and should be able to induct them into the conceptual world of those languages, where our topics demand it.

If we don’t, students in our classrooms will continue to imagine we’re speaking in tongues.

 

Further Reading

Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’”, Theory and Society 29: 1 (2000), pp. 1-47

John C. Maher, Multilingualism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press (2017)

Detlev J. K. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (trans. Richard Deveson), Penguin (1993)

Statistica, “Share of citizens in European countries reporting they speak a foreign language 2022”, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1426025/share-citizens-europe-speaking-foreign-language/ (2024accessed 10.05.25)

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Volksgemeinschaft (People’s or National Community)”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/volksgemeinschaft-peoples-or-national-community#:~:text=Introduction,-Link%20copied&text=The%20term%20Volksgemeinschaft%20means%20%E2%80%9CNational,concept%20was%20not%20strictly%20defined (2024; accessed 10.05.25)