Much has been written about the role of print technologies in the early history of national languages in Europe. Benedict Anderson's line of thinking about nation-states as imaginary communities, both delimited and created by the rise of local vernacular languages made into preservable idioms by print, however, is probably the one that continues to generate the most engaging scholarship across the disciplines. Katie Chenoweth's book is one example of such authoritative contributions.

The prosthetic tongue is a beautifully written and engaging text that sets out to be ‘the first to approach “de-constructively” the history of French language’ (33). Jacques Derrida's concept of deconstruction and his philosophical writings on language, including Of grammatology (1967), underlie the main arguments of the book. Its ‘central deconstructive gesture is to denaturalize the modern French language’ (3) by revealing how its birth as a mother tongue, presented in subsequent centuries as organic and self-evident, has been a historical construction, ‘constituted and conditioned’ (3) through writing and printing. The seven chapters of the book are introduced by a prologue. It is a comprehensive outline of the main theoretical points and an accessible introduction into the analytical toolkit Chenoweth deploys to tie the book's many discussion points into a coherent set of arguments. Each chapter sheds new light on the work of well-known sixteenth-century authors, analyzed through their contribution to the standardization of French via print technology. In chapter 2, Geoffroy Tory's Champ fleury (1529) is recast to demonstrate that much of what language historians now regard as ‘the rise’ of the vernacular was, in fact, the result of a series of deliberate gestures whereby philologists, ‘vernacular technicians of the letter’ (20), were invited to write in French, that is, ‘to intervene technologically in the life of their language’ (19), in order to elevate its status. In chapter 3, ‘Teleprinting’, emblems such as the Gallic Hercules, a woodcut image of a mythical figure and humanist ideal of eloquence in Tory's Champ fleury, are shown to argue that the concept of French as a mother tongue is also the result of a deliberate process of mechanization, broadcasting ‘the imagined intimacy of the vernacular language and its community’ (105) to the community. Orthographic reforms and early proposals of graphization by authors, such as Jean Dubois, Louis Meigret, and Jacques Peletier are discussed under ‘Phonography’ in chapter 4 that views accents, orthography, and typography as ways in which print technology ‘reanimates voice through reading’ (140) and sets up an enduring tension between the spoken and the written word (‘the phonographer and the printer’, 184) to this day.

Katie Chenoweth's critical approach to the early standardization of French as prosthesis, ‘an artifice at work’ that renders the component parts of the mother tongue ‘palpable’ (9), is a remarkable read and a convincing analysis that deserves to be studied closely by philosophers, literary critics, and language historians.