Dominant world languages rise and fall with the power of their imperial states

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Language extinction is driven by power’s consensus between profits and controls — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 501; Post-colonial state expansion deepened rather than reversed colonial language structures — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 117; The scale of an empire determined whether a single administrative language was feasible — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 528 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism #complicates (0.82) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 667