Bilingualism

While Anderson notes that print capitalism, and the vernaculars used by these widely distributed texts are key to the formation of nation, the question of bilingualism has yet to be probed. Can bilinguals double identify, and feel themselves people of two nations? Or does a second, third or fourth language cause a slippage, a marginalization of the speaker. You are too _____ to be ______.

Anderson writes that in the age of 'the great religious pilgrimages' it was 'a small segment of literate bilingual adepts drawn from each vernacular community [which] performed the unifying rites' (54). When Anderson shifts his gaze from the sacral journeys to those of colonists, the role of language seems much the same. "Bilingualism meant access, through European language-of-state, to modern Western culture in the broadest sense, and, in particular, to the models of nationalism, nation-ness, and nation-state produced elsewhere in the course of the nineteenth century" (116). It seems, then, that bilingualism is a great unifying force. It allows the spread of knowledge through flows of foreign information translated and passed along by bilingual intellectuals.

Yet "Almost everywhere economic power was either monopolized by the colonialists themselves, or unevenly shared with a politically impotent class of pariah (non-native) businessmen" (116). So the unifying force does not cause a neutral transition into centralized nation. It is rather marked by systems of power and control. Anderson's text does not seem to acknowledge that bilingualism could easy be a way to target and exclude the 'outsider'.

Consider the businessmen he points to. The term he uses to designate them--pariah--has come into common use as meaning an outsider. We can see through this progression that to some extent, at least, bilingualism could mark the foreign, that which is to be excluded. While this formation may not be necessary for Anderson's argument (as he focuses on the forces which bring people together) it nonetheless presents an interesting problem to examine.