ABSTRACT
German Studies Review 41.3 (2018): 551–565 © 2018 by The German Studies Association.
Cultural Hierarchies and Vital Tones:
Herder’s Making of a German Muttersprache
Tanvi Solanki
This paper investigates the anthology of Volkslieder collected and published by
Johann Gottfried Herder, variously considered a cultural nationalist, a relativist,
and a universalist. He is credited as having introduced the idea that a Mutterspra-
che was an anthropological necessity, key to the identity of the Volk. I examine
how he deployed hierarchies structuring cultural and linguistic diversity in order
to refne a Muttersprache that could be transmitted to German poets. Per Herder,
each Muttersprache had its own untranslatable, originary “vital tone,” which he
attempted to translate in his Volkslieder, a collection of poems from a diverse
array of linguistic cultures.
The Acoustic Foundations of the “Mother Tongue”
In his 1836 essay “Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und
ihren Einfuß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts” (“On the Diver-
sity of Human Language Construction and its Infuence on the Mental Development
of the Human Species”) Wilhelm von Humboldt, comparative linguist, philologist,
and, most prominently, a central fgure for the founding of the Humboldt University,
proclaimed that “the language of the fatherland” is linked to its inexplicably individual
dimension: its sound (Laute). Due to the “strength and intimacy” of these sounds,
they aroused a kind of “sudden magic.” Embedded in each speaker was a natural
inclination toward the sounds of the mother tongue that belied any kind of reason or
language on the level of the intellect:
If language, by its origin out of the depths of man’s nature, did not enter into true
and authentic combination with physical descent, why otherwise, for both the