Volk

The German noun Volk (German pronunciation: [fɔlk]) translates to people, both uncountable in the sense of people as in a crowd, and countable (plural Völker) in the sense of a people as in an ethnic group or nation (compare the English term folk).

Within an English-language context, the German word is of interest primarily for its use in German philosophy, as in Volksseele ("national soul"), and in German nationalism – notably the derived adjective völkisch ("national, ethnic").

The term Volk in the medieval period (Middle High German volc) had the primary meaning of "large crowd, army", while the more general sense of "population" or "people" was expressed by diet (adjective dietsch, deutsch "popular, of the people"). It was only in the early modern period that deutsch acquired the meaning of an ethnic self-designation. Beginning in 1512, the Holy Roman Empire was named Imperium Romanum Sacrum Nationis Germanicæ, rendered in German as Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation, suggesting that Latin germanicus "German, Germanic" was now expressed by the adjective deutsch.

Volk is the cognate of English folk and also overlaps in the usage of the latter as in Volksmusik "folk music", Volksglaube "folk belief" etc. In the 18th century, German Volk was mostly reserved for "crowd" or "mass of the population", while the concept of "a people" or "a nation" was now expressed by the Latinism Nation. Use of Nation in this sense was replaced by Volk after 1800, explicitly in the context of emergent German nationalism.

Compounds in which Volk- translates to "populace" or "nation" include Volksentscheid (plebiscite, literally "decision of/by the people") Völkerbund (League of Nations). The somewhat obsolete meaning of the common people, hoi polloi, working class is visible in the brand name Volkswagen "people's car", historically a name chosen by the German Labour Front in 1937 for a car designed to be affordable to the "common man".

In contrast to German Volk being elevated to the sense of "nation" in the early 19th century, English folk came to be seen as inelegant at around the same time, being mostly replaced by the latinate people. It re-entered formal or academic English only through the invention of the word folklore, coined in 1846 by William J. Thoms 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, e.g. folk art (1921), folk-hero (1899), folk-medicine (1898), folk-tale (1891), folk-song (1847), folk-music (1889), folk-dance (1912).

In German philosophy of the late 18th and 19th centuries, Volksgeist is used in the sense of "national spirit", not necessarily in reference to the German nation, but still strongly correlated with the development of a German national identity in the wake of the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire.

The völkisch movement originates in this time, proposing the formation of a German nation state as a solution to the "German Question". Johann Gottlieb Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation, published still during the Napoleonic Wars from 1808 onwards, asked, in the eighth address, "What is a Volk, in the higher sense of the term, and what is love of the fatherland?," He answered that it could only be that "particular spiritual nature of the human environment out of which he himself, with all of his thought and action... has arisen, namely the people from which he is descended and among which he has been formed and grown into that which he is". The movement combined sentimental patriotic interest in German folklore, local history and a "back-to-the-land" anti-urban populism with many parallels with expressions of Romantic nationalism in other parts of Europe, such as the writings of William Morris. "In part this ideology was a revolt against modernity," Nicholls remarked.