Colonial administrative languages emerged unplanned from pre-existing lingua francas before print capitalism spread them
Evidence
What happened instead was that by a slow, largely unplanned process, a strange language-of-state evolved on the basis of an ancient inter-insular lingua franca. Called dienstmaleisch (perhaps ‘service-Malay’ or ‘administrative-Malay’), it belonged typologically with ‘Ottoman’ and that ‘fiscal German’ which emerged from the polyglot barracks of the Habsburg empire. By the early nineteenth century it was solidly in place inside officialdom. When print capitalism arrived on the scene in a sizeable way after mid-century, the language moved out into the marketplace and the media. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 476
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces dienstmaleisch / ‘service-Malay’ — an administrative language-of-state, a usable concept for how colonial states generated vernaculars.
- QUESTION: The typological family of ‘Ottoman’ and ‘fiscal German’ — worth chasing for how colonial/imperial lingua francas form from barracks situations.
- XREF: connects to: Capitalism’s search for monoglot mass markets drove print vernacularization — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 175; Colonial conquests powered the scientific comparative study of languages. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 289; Colonial English persists as an instrument of bourgeois state centralization. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 293 (+3 more)
Related
- Capitalism’s search for monoglot mass markets drove print vernacularization (similarity 0.80)
- Colonial English persists as an instrument of bourgeois state centralization. (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Capitalism’s search for monoglot mass markets drove print vernacularization
#expands(0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 175 - Colonial conquests powered the scientific comparative study of languages.
#complicates(0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 289