Abstract
AbstractScholars have generally taken a “diffusionist” view of the rise of national standard languages—the state pushes for the wider adoption of such languages, and other forces (principally economic modernization) facilitate its diffusion. But such a view is too mechanistic and Eurocentric, and an examination of other, less-familiar cases lends itself to a revised interpretation. Amid Western imperialism and the rise of nationalism in East Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a massive shift in language practices took place between about 1870 and 1950, as regional hegemony shifted from China to Japan. Bound for two millennia by their common use of Classical Chinese, elite literati in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam all moved away from that abstruselingua francaand turned to the creation of new national vernaculars. I argue for a more “integrationist” perspective: language nationalization was a state-led and top-down process directed at remaking society.
Highlights
Scholars have generally taken a “diffusionist” view of the rise of national standard languages—the state pushes for the wider adoption of such languages, and other forces facilitate its diffusion
AMIDWESTERNIMPERIALISM and the rise of nationalism in East Asia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, perhaps the most significant change that occurred was the massive shift in language practices that took place between about 1870 and 1950, as regional hegemony shifted from China to Japan
Each country has a distinct national standard language written in its own script, which in Japan consists of a combination of Chinese characters and kana; in Korea, a script with an indigenously developed alphabet; and in Vietnam, a Latin-alphabet script
Summary
The unit of analysis is the nation-state, which exists in a world of other nation-states. Linguistic modernity comes about through the diffusion of a standard language from a geographical and class center—the Parisian bourgeoisie, in the French case. The spread of this language is facilitated by a variety of forces. For Benedict Anderson [1991], who leans heavily on the Annales-school historians Lucien Febvre and HenriJean Martin [1976], the main force is print-capitalism. While this diffusionist model at first glance seems plausible, its reliance on European examples limits its usefulness in helping us understand the process elsewhere. The diffusionist model’s geographical and conceptual narrowness leads us to such errors as Anderson’s, when he says that Japan, unlike the national states of Europe, was possessed of a “relatively high degree of... ethnocultural homogeneity”—it was not [Lie 2001]—and that its “halfSinified ideographic reading-system was long in place throughout the islands, and the development of mass literacy through schools and print was easy and uncontroversial”—a mistake, as I will show, based on a misunderstanding of the “reading” (writing?) system [Anderson 1991: 95-96]
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