A colonial script meant to sever ties became the medium of national solidarity

Evidence

This policy shift had two complementary results. On the one hand, government publication of hundreds of thousands of quc ng primers significantly accelerated the spread of this European-invented script, unintentionally helping to turn it, between 1920 and 1945, into the popular medium for the expression of Vietnamese cultural (and national) solidarity. For even if only 10 per cent of the Vietnamese-speaking population was literate by the late 1930s, this was a proportion unprecedented in the history of this people. Moreover, these literates were, unlike the Confucian literati, deeply committed to a rapid increase in their own numbers. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 470

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels print-capitalism arguments from earlier in Imagined Communities: literacy, even thin, creates the reading public that imagines the nation. — connects to: Colonial script policies unexpectedly produced a unified anti-colonial national language. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 516; Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 667; Colonial infrastructure and language bans functioned as claims to permanent occupation — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 619 (+4 more)

Related

• Colonial script policies unexpectedly produced a unified anti-colonial national language. (similarity 0.91)
• Colonial powers replaced native scripts to sever colonies from their heritage and elite. (similarity 0.85)
• Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism (similarity 0.81)
• Bilingualism gave colonial intelligentsias access to modular models of nationalism (similarity 0.80)
• Print-languages made mutually unintelligible dialects into unified national communities (similarity 0.80)
• National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism #corroborates (0.97) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 667
• Colonial script policies unexpectedly produced a unified anti-colonial national language. #corroborates (0.95) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 516
• Colonial language can be repurposed into a new anticolonial literary language #corroborates (0.90) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 284
• Colonial powers replaced native scripts to sever colonies from their heritage and elite. #qualifies (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 511
• Empire-created bilingual elites became the vanguard of colonial nationalism #corroborates (0.80)
• Colonial infrastructure and language bans functioned as claims to permanent occupation #complicates (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 619