Vernacular and History

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson covers so many various points of interest that it is extremely difficult for me to chose something worthy of discussion on this blog, but for my sanity and the sake of those who read this, I will focus in on a couple of ideas that I jotted down while reading. I am very interested in Anderson's view of language and its relationship to nation-ness and how language and the establishment of vernaculars aided in the creation of more distinct and individual nation identities. It seems that Anderson describes a very delicate balance between language's defining role in nationalism and its over-accreditation in the creation of national identity. In the first chapters of the book, Anderson clearly states that the creation of specific vernaculars from mother languages and their proliferation in print-capitalism helps to create firm nationalist identities in many of the nation-states, often identifying their establishment in print-media as the defining turning point of an imagined identity. But in the latter chapters of the book, Anderson seems to downplay his belief that language plays the leading role in establishing these imagined communities, and accredits various temporal simultaneities with establishing nation-ness (such as the educational and administrative systems established in colonial governments, and daily rituals and traditions- such as reading the newspaper).

Personally, although I found the beginning chapters much more interesting and compelling, I identified much more with Anderson's ideas that strayed away from giving language and vernacular the leading role in the creation of nationalism. My mom is trilingual and my dad is bilingual, so from an early age I was introduced to many different languages, often experiencing multiple in the course of a single sentence. From the day I was born, language was a very fluid concept, uttering my first words in german, transitioning to spanish, and finally resting at fluency in the english language. Language was more of a progression for me with a final resting place, rather than a sea of vernaculars swirling and mixing constantly in my head (I unfortunately didn't retain the first language of my youth, and had to recover the lost portions of the second through the educational system). However, my national identity has always laid firmly in the bosom of the US. Is this because I have established english as my own internal "official language-of-state" or is it because that is the language that I have chosen for my "print-capitalism"? These are questions (of an undoubted swarm of hundreds) that I found myself asking as I read Anderson this week, and they continue to go unanswered.

I would also like to pose another, potentially unconnected question- can we control the path of future vernaculars through print? meaning can a group of authors choose to bombard the masses with a series of texts that adopt a new and less widely accepted vernacular, such as ebonics or phonetic southern dialects, thus making them seep into the threads of the official language-of-state?