A conquering official language never fully displaces vernacular mother-tongues.
Evidence
The language question was simplified at one level in the nineteenth century, when literary Italian finally defeated Latin as the language of learning, and when it was adopted as the language of the new Italian national state. But it persists in the existence of dialects as the “mother-tongue” in many Italian regions even today, despite the development of the mass media and universal education in this century. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2086
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Speaks to the imagined-community mechanism of nation-building—standardized language as national glue, relevant to Anderson’s arguments in the reader’s toolkit.
Related
- State language unification fails to erase regional mother tongues (similarity 0.88)
- Language choice serves intellectual hegemony, not mere communication (similarity 0.79)