Language, Publishing, and Identity Theme Analysis

As he traces the rise of the nation-state throughout history, Anderson continually returns to language, literacy, and publishing technology as key factors that allowed people to imagine themselves as members of communities and then claim political identities and rights based on those communities. He shows how the spread of common languages allowed people to see their shared interests and, eventually, organize revolutions. And he concludes that, because dialect can stand in for identity and publishing can connect people who will never meet face-to-face, language is a crucial—but by no means the only—medium for people to imagine and create national communities.

Anderson first looks at how people define themselves and their political communities through their languages: belonging to the nation can mean speaking a specific language. Anderson starts with the spread and rising prestige of vernacular languages after the Middle Ages, when sacred languages like Latin, Classical Arabic, and formal Chinese lost their power because people stopped believing they offered unique paths to the divine. Vernacular languages began to take their place, first in literature and religion, which helped shift power in these domains from the traditional scholarly elite to the people. This process foreshadowed and enabled the later shift in political power effected by republican nationalism: in short, when the people’s language became the language of government, the people began to govern. This illustrates how language tends to imply or even define community. In 19th-century Europe, language became a very important way for people to conceive of their national identities, to the point where people simply assumed that a nation meant a language group. This contributed to the fragmentation of multilingual empires like Austria-Hungary. Again, this shows that language was in many ways synonymous with national identity in many early nationalist contexts. And, recognizing language’s power to unify, empires used their languages as tools of official nationalism: Russia, England, and France forced their respective national languages onto their colonies’ populations. This example shows that language’s consolidating force is separate from ethnicity, class, or history, and can be used to stymie as much as to support independence movements (although the second is much more common).

According to Anderson, the spread of literacy and modern publishing helped language achieve its potential to create political identities. It spurred revolutions across the world by giving large groups of people the resources to imagine themselves as members of national communities. Seeking higher profits and larger markets, publishing companies started printing in the vernacular, both elevating and standardizing it by choosing a dialect that everybody could understand (or easily learn). Through these two simultaneous processes, the vernacular became the medium by which a readership could imagine itself as a community. Anderson studies early nationalist novels—in one, the narrator depicted a united national territory, and in another, the author explicitly spoke on behalf of a community of citizens. Similarly, Anderson argues that newspapers painted their readers as witnesses to a set of simultaneous, newsworthy events across the globe, inside and outside their own spheres of interest—or potential nations. So novels and newspapers both imagined the people as a collective with shared interests, creating a precedent for the concept of citizenship and helping the reading classes develop identities opposed to the colonial powers or monarchs that ruled them. It becomes clear that these processes of “print-capitalism” allowed readers to begin imagining national communities and republican governments. Concretely, Anderson notes, the circulation of newspapers made planning revolutions possible: the bourgeoisie began seeing its shared interests as a monied class, and pamphleteers could use the printing press to spread news of revolutionary plans and import ideas and philosophies from overseas. This was especially important in the Americas, where printed materials became the basis for revolutions. In short, Anderson’s examination of written texts shows that the rise of nationalist sentiment and revolutions relied not only on the sense of identity offered by a common language’s promise that any two citizens could potentially communicate, but also on the linguistically and politically united community depicted in literature and assumed by newspapers as their readership.

While language is a crucial factor binding people together, however, Anderson makes it clear that it is not always necessary for the formation of a nation. He illustrates this through the contrasting examples of Indonesia, where language was essential to the unification of a diverse territory, and Switzerland, where such unification took place despite the lack of a common language. The Dutch ruled the whole territory of what is now Indonesia, but very few Indonesians learned Dutch. However, many spoke Malay, which was already a common language in the area. Indonesians began using Malay in their fight for independence, and today it remains the archipelago’s principal, national, and “national(-ist)” language (bahasa Indonesia). Without the language’s spread, Anderson implies, the creation of a unified nation would have been very unlikely, and so Indonesia offers an example of how a language can be absolutely crucial to a nation’s existence. But in contrast, Switzerland shows that linguistic unity is not necessary for the formation of a nation. Split among French, Italian, and German speakers, Switzerland made the three languages equal in order to respect its larger neighbors. It remains a united nation, even making this linguistic diversity a central symbol of its national identity. The example puts a caveat on Anderson’s argument, reminding the reader that nothing is necessary or fated, least of all nationalism—rather, particular situations depend on the different contexts and forces that operate in each.

On a broad historical level, then, the standardization of languages and spread of literacy and print-capitalism were essential for the nation-state to become thinkable and for many nation-states to actually form, but Anderson does not mean to argue that every nation must be unified by language, or that speaking the same language or reading the same publication actually makes two people more alike or gives them some interest in common.