Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism

Evidence

This difference owes much to census and map. New Guinea’s remoteness and rugged terrain created over the millennia an extraordinary linguistic fragmentation. When the Dutch left the region in 1963 they estimated that within the 700,000 population there existed well over 200 mostly mutually unintelligible languages. Many of the remoter ‘tribal’ groups were not even aware of one another’s existence. But, especially after 1950, Dutch missionaries and Dutch officials for the first time made serious efforts to ‘unify’ them by taking censuses, expanding communications networks, establishing schools, and erecting supra-‘tribal’ governmental structures. This effort was launched by a colonial state which, as we noted earlier, was unique in that it had governed the Indies, not primarily via a European language, but through ‘administrative Malay.’ Hence West New Guinea was ‘brought up’ in the same language in which Indonesia had earlier been raised (and which became the national language in due course). The irony is that bahasa Indonesia thus became the lingua franca of a burgeoning West New Guinean, West Papuan nationalism. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 667

Categorization

• XREF: This echoes the book’s core thesis that print-capitalism and administrative languages create the shared medium of imagined communities; connects to how the Islamophobia field treats language and colonial governance as nation-building instruments. — connects to: National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry; A language of state becomes a double-edged loyalty when it gains national valence — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 345; Popular nationalism reproduced exclusion by demanding linguistic uniformity — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 386 (+16 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does a colonial administrative language carry the same unifying power as print-capitalism, and does this complicate the print-capitalism thesis for the non-European colonial world?

Related

• National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry (similarity 0.87)
• Colonial script policies unexpectedly produced a unified anti-colonial national language. (similarity 0.83)
• A colonial script meant to sever ties became the medium of national solidarity (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial language legacies still govern which texts circulate. (similarity 0.80)
• Bilingualism gave colonial intelligentsias access to modular models of nationalism (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial intelligentsias are structurally compelled toward the colonizer’s language in public life (similarity 0.78)
• Colonial nationalists copied and adapted European national models (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial language can be repurposed into a new anticolonial literary language #expands (0.95) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 284
• Colonial rule’s native strata produced a renegade nationalist intelligentsia #expands (0.80)
• Empire-created bilingual elites became the vanguard of colonial nationalism #expands (0.75)
• Surrealism served colonized writers as a weapon against colonial language #qualifies (0.70) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 287