Language offered Sinhalese a unifying identity that overrode internal religious division

Evidence

Clearly linguistic nationalism was the main theme that dominated the 1956 election (Kearney 1967; DeVotta 2004b), but with Sinhala considered the language of Sri Lanka’s Buddhists, it was easy for candidates to fuse language and religion for nationalistic purposes. As noted, not all Sinhalese are Buddhists, and tension had existed between the Sinhalese Christian minority and the Sinhalese Buddhist majority; but the quest to make Sinhala the only official language allowed the Sinhalese to subsume their religious differences and join forces as speakers of a common language. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology, 125

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks directly to the reader’s question about whether solidarity is manufactured around a constructed marker — here language substitutes for and overrides primordial religious boundaries among Sinhalese themselves, parallel to how manufactured enemies unite otherwise divided groups. — connects to: Linguistic identity unified Sinhalese across religious lines while dividing them from Tamils — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 241; Language loyalty overrides religious division to unify Sinhalese against Tamils. — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 241; Sinhala language conflates nation, race, and people so deeply that multiethnic polity seems incomprehensible — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist…, 190
• QUESTION: If language could subsume the Sinhalese Buddhist-Christian religious divide, does that suggest constructed unity operates at multiple nested levels, complicating a pure primordialist reading?

Broader Connections

• Linguistic identity unified Sinhalese across religious lines while dividing them from Tamils #expands (0.95) — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology, 241
• Language loyalty overrides religious division to unify Sinhalese against Tamils. #corroborates (0.92) — Neil DeVotta, Sinhalese Buddhist Nationalist Ideology, 241