State-language absorption of competing vernaculars was largely unplanned initially

Evidence

Meantime, vernacular languages-of-state assumed ever greater power and status in a process which, at least at the start, was largely unplanned. Thus English elbowed Gaelic out of most of Ireland, French pushed Breton to the wall, and Castilian reduced Catalan to marginality. In those realms, such as Britain and France, where, for quite extraneous reasons, there happened to be, by mid-century, a relatively high coincidence of language-of-state and language of the population, the general interpenetration alluded to above did not have dramatic political effects. (These cases are closest to those of the Americas.) In many other realms, of which Austro-Hungary is probably the polar example, the consequences were inevitably explosive. In its huge, ramshackle, polyglot, but increasingly literate, domain the replacement of Latin by any vernacular, in the mid nineteenth century, promised enormous advantages to those of its subjects who already used that print-language, and appeared correspondingly menacing to those who did not. I emphasize the word any, since, as we shall be discussing in greater detail below, German’s nineteenth century elevation by the Habsburg court, German as some might think it, had nothing whatever to do with German nationalism. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 308

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘language-of-state’ concept and its distinction from nationalism-driven language choice, exemplified by the Habsburg court elevating German for administrative rather than nationalist reasons.
• XREF: connects to: Shared experience, not formal machinery, kept state laws from diverging into separate languages — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2373; the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”