Shared script enabled mass literacy despite mutually unintelligible spoken dialects

Evidence

While the Japanese spoken in Kysh was largely incomprehensible in Honsh, and even Edo-Tokyo and Kyoto-saka found verbal communication problematic, the half-Sinified ideographic reading-system was long in place throughout the islands, and thus the development of mass literacy through schools and print was easy and uncontroversial. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 371

Categorization

• DEFINE: I’ll set this as definitional; the mechanism isolates written script as the carrier of imagined community, distinct from spoken mutual intelligibility.
• XREF: connects to: Sacred-language communities absorbed outsiders through script mastery — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 61; Print created unified language-fields where unrelated speakers understood each other — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 187

Related

• Print created unified language-fields where unrelated speakers understood each other (similarity 0.85)
• Print-languages made mutually unintelligible dialects into unified national communities (similarity 0.83)
• Japan’s official nationalism succeeded because a written script unified a linguistically fractured nation (similarity 0.81)
• Sacred-language communities absorbed outsiders through script mastery (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Sacred-language communities absorbed outsiders through script mastery #exemplifies (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 61