Language is a stratified multiplicity reflecting historico-social differences, not a unitary thing

Evidence

It seems that one can say that “language” 422 is essentially a collective term which does not presuppose any single thing existing in time and space. Language also means culture and philosophy (if only at the level of common sense) and therefore the fact of “language” is in reality a multiplicity of facts more or less organically coherent and co-ordinated. At the limit it could be said that every speaking being has a personal language of his own, that is his own particular way of thinking and feeling. Culture, at its various levels, unifies in a series of strata, to the extent that they come into contact with each other, a greater or lesser number of individuals who understand each other’s mode of expression in differing degrees, etc. It is these historico-social distinctions and differences which are reflected in common language and produce those “obstacles” and “sources of error” which the pragmatists have talked about. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1250

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines language as collective and stratified, collapsing language-culture-philosophy into one complex of social differentiation.
• XREF: Connects directly to Islamophobia field’s concern with how racialized discourse about Muslims is carried in everyday language; also echoes Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. — connects to: Total linguistic multiplicity, not selective loyalty, justifies defending all languages — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 503; English in India is stratified as a class boundary, not a neutral world vehicle — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 893