Capitalism’s search for monoglot mass markets drove print vernacularization

Evidence

The initial market was literate Europe, a wide but thin stratum of Latin-readers. Saturation of this market took about a hundred and fifty years. The determinative fact about Latin – aside from its sacrality – was that it was a language of bilinguals. Relatively few were born to speak it and even fewer, one imagines, dreamed in it. In the sixteenth century the proportion of bilinguals within the total population of Europe was quite small; very likely no larger than the proportion in the world’s population today, and – proletarian internationalism notwithstanding – in the centuries to come. Then and now the bulk of mankind is monoglot. The logic of capitalism thus meant that once the elite Latin market was saturated, the potentially huge markets represented by the monoglot masses would beckon. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 175

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the defining fact that Latin was a bilinguals’ language and the bulk of mankind is monoglot — a key scaffolding concept for understanding why print chose vernaculars.
• XREF: The monoglot/bilingual distinction and capitalism-driven audience expansion anticipates how Islamophobia discourse constructs the ‘Other’ as outside the community of shared language and print-culture. — connects to: Colonial administrative languages emerged unplanned from pre-existing lingua francas before print capitalism spread them — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 476; Late print-capitalism made Swiss multilingualism persist through a bilingual ruling class — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 484; Print-capitalism and maps changed Thai political vocabulary from sacred centers to bounded territory. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 658 (+14 more)

Related

• Latin lost its printing hegemony within a century of 1500 (similarity 0.88)
• Print alone is not revolutionary; capitalism is the decisive factor. (similarity 0.86)
• Print’s fixity of language produced the image of deep national antiquity (similarity 0.86)
• Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity (similarity 0.83)
• Print-capitalism, not colonial administration, made nations imaginable (similarity 0.82)
• Print capitalism’s sacral-vernacular split enabled nationalist imagination (similarity 0.81)
• Print-languages made mutually unintelligible dialects into unified national communities (similarity 0.81)
• Protestantism outflanked the Counter-Reformation by exploiting vernacular print markets (similarity 0.81)
• Print-capitalism enabled the Reformation to outspeed Rome’s communications (similarity 0.81)
• Late print-capitalism made Swiss multilingualism persist through a bilingual ruling class (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial administrative languages emerged unplanned from pre-existing lingua francas before print capitalism spread them (similarity 0.80)
• Print-capitalism emerged to re-link fraternity, power and time after cosmology split from history (similarity 0.80)
• Printing emphasized vernacular languages and divided the European intellectual mind (similarity 0.80)
• Technological and print-capitalism advances enabled imagining parallel lives across oceans (similarity 0.78)
• Print created unified language-fields where unrelated speakers understood each other (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity #corroborates (0.90) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 184
• National consciousness developed before mass literacy and print capitalism #contradicts (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 217
• Protestantism outflanked the Counter-Reformation by exploiting vernacular print markets #exemplifies (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 178
• Print-capitalism, not colonial administration, made nations imaginable #corroborates (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 233
• Printing emphasized vernacular languages and divided the European intellectual mind #expands (0.80) — Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, 804