Language choice serves intellectual hegemony, not mere communication

Evidence

For Gramsci’s discussion of the “language question”, see Int. pp. 21 -25 , etc. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church fought against the use of the vernacular and for the preservation of Latin as the “universal” language, since this was a key element in its own intellectual hegemony. Dante, for example, felt compelled to defend his use of (Florentine) Italian in the Divine Comedy. Gramsci describes the emergence of Florentine dialect as a “noble vernacular”. “The flowering of the Communes developed the vernaculars, and the intellectual hegemony of Florence produced a united vernacular, a noble vernacular… . The fall of the Communes and the advent of the Princely regime, the creation of a governing caste detached from the people, crystallised this vernacular in the same way as literary Latin had become crystallised. Italian was once again a written and not a spoken language, a language of scholars rather than a language of the nation” 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. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2086

Categorization

• XREF: Directly seeds the Islamophobia toolkit: how a ‘universal’ language (Latin, or later standard Italian) functions as a hegemonic device separating the governing caste from a nation’s people — parallels how a dominant cultural/religious register can be imposed as universal while actual lived idioms persist as dialect. — connects to: Language works by exchange rules mirroring economic exchange, not by free expression. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1000; Speech is fundamentally agonistic play, not mere communication — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 142; the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire” (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘noble vernacular’ concept and the mechanism by which a governing caste crystallises language into a scholar-only register detached from the populace.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Gramsci’s language-hegemony analysis parallel the relationship between Quranic Arabic and spoken vernaculars in modern Islamophobic discourse about ‘authentic’ versus ‘corrupted’ Islam?