Minae Mizumura - The Fall of Language in the Age of English

Let us follow Anderson’s analysis in a little more detail by thinking about Europe just before Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Nearly all books were sacred or exegetic texts that scribes copied by pen, word by word, onto parchment. And they were virtually all written in what was then the only written language for Europeans, Latin. What exactly is Latin? Anderson says, “The determinative fact about Latin — aside from its sacrality — was that it was a language of bilinguals.” Latin was hence the language of all those people who spoke in their mother tongue in the streets while reading and writing in this “external language” as they entered the world of books. The number of such bilinguals was naturally quite limited: “Their readers were, after all, tiny literate reefs on top of vast illiterate oceans.” Yet manually copying Latin one word at a time could not produce a sufficient number of books even for such a small pool of bilinguals. Then came Gutenberg. With his invention, the first printed edition of the Latin Bible, the Gutenberg Bible, was published and circulated in the market as “the first modern-style mass-produced industrial commodity.” Taking on the idea first put forward by Marshall McLuhan, to call the Gutenberg Bible a “mass-produced industrial commodity” is Anderson’s rhetorical device to highlight the role capitalism played in the process. The book was actually an exquisitely designed volume, a work of art. It was initially less expensive to have books copied by scribes than to have them printed by this precious machine. Even then, the Bible’s becoming a market commodity meant that there was already a sufficient number of people capable of buying such a luxury item — a sufficient number of consumers. In terms of laws of the market, there was sufficient demand to meet the supply.

According to Anderson, the “vernacular revolution”—which later enabled the emergence of national language — took place as the next inevitable stage, complying with the same laws of the market. The Gutenberg Bible was followed by the publication of various books in Latin. However, those who could read Latin were limited to “a wide but thin stratum” of society, and the market was soon saturated. To create a new market, the laws of the market dictated that books written in the language of the street must come into circulation: “The logic of capitalism thus meant that once the elite Latin market was saturated, the potentially huge markets represented by the monoglot masses would beckon.” Thus came “the vernacular revolution.” One by one, various spoken languages in Europe were transformed into written languages, printed, and published. In Anderson’s terminology, various “vernaculars” became “print languages.” First to appear in these new print languages were translations of Latin, soon followed by books written directly in the print languages. In its social status, a print language ranked below Latin but above the vernacular, which was basically a spoken language.

Countless vernaculars existed in Europe, unique to each locality and class, akin to countless dialects coexisting in a region. In contrast, there could be only so many print languages, for in order for a book to make a profit as a “mass-produced industrial commodity,” it needed to be published on a certain scale, which necessarily limited the number of print languages. Thus, following the vernacular revolution, countless vernaculars all over Europe were eventually subsumed into several important print languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Russian, Polish, and so forth. And these print languages came to be shared by millions of people in each region.

The development from the vernacular revolution to the creation of the languages of nation-states did not progress at a uniform pace in Europe: some European languages emerged as the language of a nation-state as early as the sixteenth or seventeenth century; others, as late as the twentieth century. Nonetheless, with the combination of the invention of print technology, the development of capitalism, and what Anderson calls “the fatality of human linguistic diversity,” this progression was perhaps inevitable, and the process, largely unself-conscious. And once these print languages began circulating as the languages of emerging nation-states, they gave birth to a strong conviction among their populations that those who shared the same language belonged to the same community — the “imagined community.” Whence arose nationalism, which these emerging states soon deliberately exploited. Europe’s path since then was one in which states consciously manipulated nationalism as they went through conflicts over colonial territories, wars of independence, and border disputes. Furthermore, the nation-states that emerged in Europe provided a “module” for other regions that spread all over the world, along with nationalism.

Anderson writes:

Finally, [the nation] is imagined as a community , because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. (Emphasis in original)

Contributing to the growth of nationalism was the spread of print media such as newspapers and, yes, national literature. National literature made it possible for an individual living in a nation-state to imagine fellow subjects inhabiting the same space at the same moment and to feel a sense of camaraderie with them. National language, the medium of national literature, was embraced as the essential expression of national character shared by all countrymen.

A good illustration of this sentiment is quoted in Imagined Communities from the late-eighteenth-century German philosopher and literary critic Johann Gottfried von Herder. Anderson cites the original German: “Denn jedes Volk ist Volk; es hat seine National Bildung wie seine Sprache” (emphasis in original). In other words, for every people is a People; it has its own national character expressed through its own language.

Now that I look back with these words in mind, all of us IWP writers in Iowa who were writing in our own language, shutting ourselves up every night in our hotel rooms, had a great task weighing on our shoulders: representing the “Volk.”

In the thirty years since the first publication of Imagined Communities in 1983, the world has changed considerably. For one thing, the fall of the Soviet Union rendered obsolete Anderson’s critiques of Marxist internationalism while further demonstrating how right he was in emphasizing the importance of nationalism in modernity. Imagined Communities continues to be essential reading for scholars and students. And yet, as a nonnative speaker of English, I cannot help sensing a strange lacuna in the book — a lacuna that, as more time passes, begins to seem like a selective blindness: there is no discussion anywhere of English turning into a formidable universal language above and beyond all others. English is treated as merely one of many national languages; it may be the most powerful, but only primus inter pares , first among equals. Anderson completely ignores the reality that English is becoming a language that functions on a different level from all other languages. Why does he fail to mention this? Could it be because thirty years ago there was not yet widespread recognition of English dominance? Or is it perhaps because the new technology that further accelerates the circulation of English — the Internet — was not yet widely available? As it turns out, these factors apparently had very little to do with Anderson’s omission.