National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry

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 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

The lexicographic revolution in Europe, however, created, and gradually spread, the conviction that languages (in Europe at least) were, so to speak, the personal property of quite specific groups – their daily speakers and readers – and moreover that these groups, imagined as communities, were entitled to their autonomous place in a fraternity of equals. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 345 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Modern philology emerged by secularizing language from divine to human origins; True philology makes a hospitable place in the mind for the foreign Other; Language and culture cannot confer national belonging without shared experience — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 572 (+23 more)

Related

• Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism (similarity 0.87)
• The nation is conceived in language, not in blood (similarity 0.80)
• Languages came to be seen as the property of specific national communities (similarity 0.80)
• Early American nationalisms did not depend on language difference (similarity 0.79)
• Print-languages made mutually unintelligible dialects into unified national communities (similarity 0.79)
• A colonial script meant to sever ties became the medium of national solidarity (similarity 0.79)
• National consciousness formed through literary and philological revival in Eastern Europe (similarity 0.79)
• Bilingualism gave colonial intelligentsias access to modular models of nationalism (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Peoples without states fell back on language and ethnicity as national identity #exemplifies (0.82)
• Languages came to be seen as the property of specific national communities #expands (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 345
• Language enables meanings rather than passively carrying them #corroborates (0.80)
• Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism #exemplifies (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 667
• National consciousness developed before mass literacy and print capitalism #contradicts (0.78) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 217
• Language and culture cannot confer national belonging without shared experience #qualifies (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 572
• Language creates consciousness of self as separate from the environment. #expands (0.72)
• Language is socially constructed and speaks through individuals #corroborates (0.72)