- Imagined speech communities: A new perspective on language and nationalism
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Abstract:
- Language has a central role both in the practice and study of nationalism. Supposed linguistic homogeneity has served as the justification for many nationalist projects, whereas for key modernist theorists of the nation, such as Anderson and Gellner, it is a crucial tool and outcome of nation-building processes. Nevertheless, nationalism scholars have not yet come to terms with the fact that national languages, like nations, are not objectively existing phenomena, but intersubjectively ‘imagined’. This essay proposes an approach to language and nationalism that overcomes this shortcoming by bracketing the notion of ‘a language’. In sociolinguistics, the concept of the speech community has served a similar role allowing researchers to approach people’s communicative practices without any preconceived notion of ‘language’. This concept, I propose, can be adapted to use by nationalism scholars by conceiving of nations as imagined speech communities. In order to highlight the usefulness of a speech community approach to language and nationalism, I show how it can be applied to highlight how ideas about nation and language intersect with gender, race and class – issues that have been largely unexplored by scholars of nationalism and language so far. Seeing the nation as an imagined speech community can serve as a theoretical lens that enables us to analyse the relationship between language and nation without reifying either and further makes visible normative issues that will enrich debates about linguistic justice.
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