Language and National Identity

We tend to think language neatly corresponds to one's national identity and sometimes even tend to romanticise the aesthetics of a language, such as French, Mandarin, etc. But when we think of the nation as a "imagined community" (in Benedict Anderson's terms) and language as a didactic tool for uniting a community, this may often not be the case. A classmate presented his research project at a seminar and shared this wonderful quote with us:

"...language can be a very effective power base as the nationalistic movements in Europe in the last century bear witness to. Language loyalty was so often romanticized during these movements, that one does well to remember that there is nothing inherently 'natural' about group language loyalty, but rather that it is a deliberately chosen strategy for survival."

---Christina Bratt Paulston (1985), "Ethnic and national mobilization: Linguistic outcomes"