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. 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. 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. 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.Īnderson first looks at how people define themselves and their political communities through their languages: belonging to the nation can mean speaking a specific language. He shows how the spread of common languages allowed people to see their shared interests and, eventually, organize revolutions. 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.
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