Print created unified language-fields where unrelated speakers understood each other

Evidence

These print-languages laid the bases for national consciousnesses in three distinct ways. First and foremost, they created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 187

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘visible invisibility’ of fellow-readers is the mechanism by which an abstract collectivity (the nation, later the excluded Other) becomes subjectively real — directly scaffolding Islamophobia readings on how exclusionary publics are constituted. — connects to: Shared script enabled mass literacy despite mutually unintelligible spoken dialects — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 371; Generalized meaning freed from context enables technicalization through language; Certain dialects lost status by failing to secure their own print form — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 189
• DEFINE: Explains how a ‘nationally imagined community’ concretely forms via shared print readership.

Related

• Print-languages made mutually unintelligible dialects into unified national communities (similarity 0.91)
• Shared script enabled mass literacy despite mutually unintelligible spoken dialects (similarity 0.85)
• Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity (similarity 0.84)
• The bourgeoisie was the first class to achieve solidarity on an imagined, print-based basis (similarity 0.80)
• Nationalism emerged from printed shared narratives, not shared acquaintance (similarity 0.79)
• The local resists globalization from within, with no fixed political content (similarity 0.79)
• Novels and newspapers supplied the technical means to imagine the nation (similarity 0.79)
• Print’s fixity of language produced the image of deep national antiquity (similarity 0.79)
• Technological and print-capitalism advances enabled imagining parallel lives across oceans (similarity 0.78)
• Imagined communities emerge from capitalism, print, and linguistic diversity (similarity 0.78)
• Capitalism’s search for monoglot mass markets drove print vernacularization (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Shared script enabled mass literacy despite mutually unintelligible spoken dialects #exemplifies (0.95) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 371
• Generalized meaning freed from context enables technicalization through language #expands (0.72)