Everything about Folk totally explained
Folk is one of the
Germanic roots that mean "(of) the people" or "our people" (as opposed to different
clans,
tribes, or
nations). The English word
folk has cognates in most of the other Germanic languages.
Folk may be a Germanic root that's
unique to the Germanic languages, and not derived directly from
Indo-European; though some non-Germanic cognates such as Latin
vulgus, "the common people", have been suggested.
Etymology
The
Modern English word "
folk", derives from
Old English "
folc" meaning "
common people", "
men", "
tribe" or "
multitude". The Old English noun itself came from
Proto-Germanic "
*fulka" which perhaps originally referred to a "
host of warriors". Compare
Old Norse "
folk" meaning "
people" but more so "
army" or "
detachment",
German "
Gefolge" (host), and
Lithuanian "
pulkas" meaning "
crowd". The latter is considered to be an early Lithuanian loanword from Germanic origin, cf.
Belarusian "полк" - "
połk" meaning
regiment and German "
Pulk" for a group of persons standing together.
The word became colloquialized (usually in the plural "folks") in English in the sense "people", and was considered unelegant by the beginning of the 19th century. It re-entered academic English through the invention of the word
folklore in 1846 by the
antiquarian William J. Thoms (1803-85) as an
Anglo-Saxonism. This word revived folk in a modern sense of "of the common people, whose culture is handed down orally", and opened up a flood of compound formations, eg. folk art (1921), folk-hero (1899), folk-medicine (1898), folk-tale (1891), folk-song (1847), folk-dance (1912). Folk-music is from 1889; in reference to the branch of modern
popular music (originally associated with
Greenwich Village in
New York City) it dates from 1958. It is also regional music.
Cognates in other Germanic language
Folk has a
cognate in almost
every other Germanic language, all deriving from Proto-Germanic "*fulka", some are listed below:
In all Germanic languages, the variant of "folk" means "people" or something related to the people.
Folk in German
» For other uses, see Volk (disambiguation).
Background
In
German the word
Volk can have several different meanings, such as
folk (simple people),
people in the ethnic sense, and
nation.
German
Volk is commonly used as the first, determing part (
head) of
compound nouns such as
Volksentscheid (
plebiscite, lit. "decision of/by the people") or
Völkerbund (
League of Nations), or the car manufacturer
Volkswagen (literally, "people's car").
19th century and early 20th century
A number of
völkisch movements existed prior to
World War I. Combining interest in
folklore,
ecology,
occultism and
romanticism with
ethnic nationalism, their ideologies were a strong influence on the
Nazi party, which itself was inspired by
Adolf Hitler's membership of the
Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers' Party), even though Hitler in
Mein Kampf himself denounced usage of the word
völkisch as he considered it too vague as to carry any recognizable meaning due to former over-use. Today, the term
völkisch is largely restricted to historical contexts describing the closing 19th century and early 20th century up to Hitler's seize of power in 1933, especially during the years of the
Weimar Republic.
Nazi era
During the years of the
Third Reich, the term
Volk became heavily used in nationalistic political slogans, particularly in slogans such as
Volk ohne Raum — "(a) people without space" or
Völkischer Beobachter ("popular observer"), an NSDAP party newspaper. Also the
political slogan Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer ("One people, one country/empire, one leader").
Even though Hitler in his book
Mein Kampf often mixed up specific biological and zoological terms such as
race,
species, and others, the Nazi-era use of
Volk could
not, depending on context, be interpreted as "race", "Germanic", or "European." In Nazi propaganda, several
peoples made up a
race, so these two terms didn't denote the same thing during the Nazi years. The
German people was considered part of the
Germanic race which latter officially included the Scandinavians, the English, and the Dutch as well (while Hitler himself also included the Celts), so
Volk didn't equal
Germanic either. Nazi-era publications on pre-history only differed whether their
Germanic race equalled the
Indo-European race or the
Germanic race itself was part of a
family of Indo-European races, since
indogermanisch is the common German term for
Indo-European.
Today
Because
Volk is the generic German word for "people" in the ethnic sense today as well as for "people entitled to vote" (
Wahlvolk), its use doesn't necessarily denote any particular political views in post-1945 Germany. However, because of its past, the word is rarely used with
Bevölkerung serving as a substitute.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Folk'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://folk.totallyexplained.com">Folk Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
