The scale of an empire determined whether a single administrative language was feasible
Evidence
Not merely in the obvious sense. Because, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Holland had, for all intents and purposes, only one colony, and a huge, profitable one at that, it was quite practical to train its functionaries in a (single) non-European diensttaal. Over time, special schools and faculties grew up in the metropole to prepare future functionaries linguistically. For multi-continental empires like the British, no single locally-based diensttaal would have sufficed. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 528
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Tongue of Power: When Language Becomes the Battlefield of Empire”