Print-languages made mutually unintelligible dialects into unified national communities

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, 188

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: No metadiscourse can unify or totalize language games — Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on…, 286; the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”

Related

• Print created unified language-fields where unrelated speakers understood each other (similarity 0.91)
• Shared script enabled mass literacy despite mutually unintelligible spoken dialects (similarity 0.83)
• Languages came to be seen as the property of specific national communities (similarity 0.83)
• Print’s fixity of language produced the image of deep national antiquity (similarity 0.82)
• Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity (similarity 0.82)
• Certain dialects lost status by failing to secure their own print form (similarity 0.81)
• The local resists globalization from within, with no fixed political content (similarity 0.81)
• Capitalism’s search for monoglot mass markets drove print vernacularization (similarity 0.81)
• Print capitalism’s sacral-vernacular split enabled nationalist imagination (similarity 0.80)
• Imagined communities emerge from capitalism, print, and linguistic diversity (similarity 0.80)
• A colonial script meant to sever ties became the medium of national solidarity (similarity 0.80)
• National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry (similarity 0.79)
• Nationalism emerged from printed shared narratives, not shared acquaintance (similarity 0.79)
• National communities bore no determined relation to existing political borders (similarity 0.79)
• Dictionaries made languages’ equality visible within their covers regardless of political reality. (similarity 0.79)