The redesign of Skopje's main square and the wider central area in the last six years has been a top priority of the Macedonian government. The project, called Skopje 2014, provoked intense domestic debate and controversy as well as international reaction and concern. Although officials say that project's aim is to unify ethnic Macedonians, it has produced several lines of political, intra-ethnic/interethnic as well as intra-cultural/intercultural divisions in the fragile Macedonian society. The aim of the paper is to offer reflections about its mobilizing potential among ethnic Macedonians in a set of social, economic, and political contexts. In that sense, four areas of mobilization are suggested: (1) around new identity markers; (2) around the name dispute and against threats (real or imagined) to the ethnic and national identity; (3) against the internal Other, that is, the ethnic Albanian community, as well as critics of these identity politics; and (4) in reaction to the global financial crisis and problems within the EU.

On the north wall of Cracow's Church of the Annunciation (better known as the Carmelite Church at Piaski) hangs a long-ignored inscription. A simple stone tablet unprotected from the elements, its words have faded over the past century. One must strain to make out its cryptic message: “On September 11, 1883, Polish villagers gathered in Cracow solemnly celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of the relief of Vienna by John Sobieski, in remembrance of which this stone has been funded.”

This article analyzes inter-cohort differences and intra-cohort changes in language proficiencies, use patterns and attitudes in a society undergoing a radical political and cultural transformation. My analysis focuses on Ukraine, a country with an asymmetrical bilingualism where the new independent state mildly promotes the titular language but the formerly dominant Russian maintains an active presence in most social domains and individual repertoires. While confirming earlier findings on the small scale of age differences, this study detects the end of the inter-cohort shift toward Russian. Another important finding is that the apparent continuity with a slow drift toward the titular language in Ukraine as a whole conceals two radically different developments in the two geographical “halves” of the country. The study demonstrates an advantage of combining a synchronic analysis of inter-cohort differences with a diachronic analysis of intra-cohort changes.

A photograph of Pope John Paul II shaking hands with Ján Čarnogurský, First Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, at the Vatican appeared in full color on the cover of the February 1990 issue of Rodinné spolocčenstvo. Čarnogurský symbolizes the speed of Czechoslovakia's political revolution and the important role that individuals who had gained political experience as dissidents played in Czechoslovakia's post-Communist government. Just 2 months before meeting with the Pope, Čarnogurský, a Roman Catholic activist in Slovakia, had been awaiting trial in Bratislava for editing the Slovak secret church's most politically-oriented samizdat periodical. Hundreds of demonstrators, organized by the Slovak secret church, had already been protesting his arrest for several weeks when the Velvet Revolution began in Prague on 17 November 1989.

Azerbaijan's complex history has weaved a tapestry of linguistic, cultural, and national identities among Azerbaijanis through centuries of political, social, and linguistic integration. In the current post-Soviet era, this identity is undergoing another period of change, with influences from intra-state ethnic, religious, and sociopolitical institutions as well as from regional and international powers. This article centers on linguistic identity among Azerbaijani youth at three types of schools: Azerbaijani-medium, Russian-medium, and English-medium. The authors seek to discover whether and to what extent the language of instruction in each type of school affects linguistic identity, which in turn has implications for national identity. The article first discusses the existing literature on language and identity in second language acquisition and socio-educational linguistics. It then examines Azerbaijan's linguistic and political history through the lens of the latter framework, as a context for an analysis of the data from surveys and focus groups. The article analyzes the relationship between medium of instruction in school and students' perceptions of language and identification with various language groups, and discusses the findings of a significant correlation between language of instruction and linguistic identity, with its implications for national identity.

The Selkups, a linguistic community known as Ostyak Samoyeds until the middle of the twentieth century, currently exist in two separate territorial groups in the regions of west-central and northwestern Siberia. In all, 3,612 people identified themselves as Selkups in the last Soviet census of 1989. Since there is great divergence in dialects among the various groups, some specialists suggest classifying them as three different languages: Northern, Central, and Southern Selkup. Here the Selkups of Tomsk province, who speak the central and southern dialects, will be referred to collectively as Southern Selkups.

Caught between political allegiance to the Soviet Union and a shared history with West Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) occupied an awkward position in Cold War Europe. While other countries in the Eastern Bloc already existed as nation-states before coming under Soviet control, the GDR was the product of Germany's arbitrary division. There was no specifically East German culture in 1945—only a German culture. When it came to matters of national identity, officials in the GDR's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) could not posit a unique quality of “East Germanness,” but could only highlight East Germany's difference from its western neighbor. This difference did not stem from the language and culture of the past, but the politics and ideology of the present: East Germany was socialist Germany.