Nationalism and Language
Without a national
Language no nation
can come into being
(Gandhi, in Brock, 44).
Emergence of Nation-state
•
French revolution (1789-94) and industrial
revolution: (end of eighteenth hundreds)
1. Expansion of European ideology
2. Dismantling of kinship ties and village
A shift in the nature of political
communication (Tonnes, 1955)
• Gemeinschaft “community” to Gesellschaft
“association”
• Gemeinschaft: likeness, share property of kinship:
village
---Geertz: “primordial attachments”
• Gesellschaft: willed, free chosen acts of
association: Nation-state
Imagined Communities (Benedict
Anderson, 1983)
• Imagining oneself and the rest of the
population of a nation as a bounded
community
• Willed association
• Rights and duties
Basis of association in a NationState
• Diffusion of national ideologies
--Media
• Development of standard language
--exclusion of other languages
• Institutionalization of a national
language
-- literacy, education of citizens
National language and national
ideology (Gellner)
• A Yimas village (Gemeinschaft
community)
produces a competent Yimas
Papua New Guinean nation-state
(Gesellschaft community)
produces an effective Papua New
Guinean
Forces that produce a national
language
• Political
--political elite’s reflection
--USA Example: AAVE versus SAE
--attitudes towards multilingualism
• Economic
--corporations, influence, wealth
Multilingualism and nation-state
• Problems: Multilingual entities
--fractionalization of interests: Czechoslovakia
--Tribal, ethnic problems: Rwanda and Yugoslavia
--Regional fractionalism: Somalia
Example Indonesia: One nation, one people, one
language
Geertz’s concept of “primordial
attachments”
• Failure to go beyond citizen;s kinship and
village ties
• National language replaces primordial
attachments
• The spread of nationalistic messages
--media: written and electronic, educational
systems
State and nation
• State: any region governed under a central
administration, with its own legal and
political institutions
• Nation: any community of people who see
themselves as an ethnic and culturally
(linguistically) unit, in contrast to other
groups of people surrounding them
Summary
• The rise of the nation-state correlated with
the development of standard languages
• Replacement of community attachments of
kin and village to willed free associations of
citizens
• Standard and national languages play a role
in promulgating a national ideology