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This proposal is to fund one year of salary replacement to support the completion of a book about the development of the state in early modern Europe. My book argues that a crucial but unrecognized component of statebuilding was the management of public speech and foul language. While scholars have long studied the history of language, they have done so largely by considering literary, printed texts. My study, by contrast, employs sociolinguistic concepts to examine the actual words of everyday people in the archival documents of renaissance Venice. I demonstrate that early modern states formed not only by building armies and bureaucracies, but also by imposing a normative language on their citizens and immigrants.