State language unification fails to erase regional mother tongues
Evidence
But it persists in the existence of dialects as the “mother-tongue” in many Italian regions even today, despite the development of the mass media and universal education in this century. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2086
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the toolkit’s theme of imagined community: national unification projects (single language, single culture) never fully succeed, leaving lived heterogeneity beneath official uniformity — relevant for reading how nation-states construct a unitary ‘we’ that excludes others.