3 ms·

>India's definition of what is and what is not a language is highly politicized and highly idiosyncratic. To some extent this is true of all languages, and it'

>India's definition of what is and what is not a language is highly politicized and highly idiosyncratic. To some extent this is true of all languages, and it's a big part of nation building to draw the lines in whatever ways are convenient. Like, who decided Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian are all separate languages but Swiss, Quebecois, Alsatian, West African, and French versions of French are all the same? Where are we drawing lines if not at political boundaries? According to Hobsbawn, the original sources of developing national identity came from newspapers. Once the printing press became a thing, over time, whatever language a region read its news in slowly became the way for natural cultural divisions to form. The presence of news and a common literary canon created an imagined community around it. India didn't have nationalism form this way since British administrative districts cut across linguistic/cultural lines. They muddied the natural process of nation-formation by having everyone speak English as a lingua franca and relegating the native languages to private life. But the Islam/Hindu cleavage was still there, so that's where the division came in at independence. (Among other cleavages that the early government of India managed to keep under control).

umanwizard 7y ago
> To some extent this is true of all languages... Very true. An even clearer example is Catalan and Occitan, which are just the two most famous/prestigious/standardized poles in a still clearly-existing dialect continuum. Or Scots and English: polls suggest that people's answers to the questions "is Scots a separate language, or a dialect of English?" and "should Scotland be an independent country?" are strongly correlated. On the surface, it seems that the former is a scientific question and the latter is a political one, so they shouldn't be correlated at all, but in reality they are both political questions. Other examples include the various Chinese varieties (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien, etc. etc.), which are often considered one language for political reasons, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian, which are nearly identical but often considered different languages for political reasons (imagine if we considered US American to be a different language from Canadian), Romanian and Moldovan to which the same description applies, and so on. There are examples practically everywhere you look.

umanwizard 7y ago

> To some extent this is true of all languages... Very true. An even clearer example is Catalan and Occitan, which are just the two most famous/prestigious/standardized poles in a still clearly-existing dialect continuum. Or Scots and English: polls suggest that people's answers to the questions "is Scots a separate language, or a dialect of English?" and "should Scotland be an independent country?" are strongly correlated. On the surface, it seems that the former is a scientific question and the latter is a political one, so they shouldn't be correlated at all, but in reality they are both political questions. Other examples include the various Chinese varieties (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien, etc. etc.), which are often considered one language for political reasons, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian, which are nearly identical but often considered different languages for political reasons (imagine if we considered US American to be a different language from Canadian), Romanian and Moldovan to which the same description applies, and so on. There are examples practically everywhere you look.