Passing through the invention of printing press, people in Western Europe came to face more indivualized society and now I want to 'imagine those communities'.
Personally, strong impressions from this imagined communities are 'more uses of vernacular languages' caused by gradual decrease of sacred language, Latin or Arabic and 'simultaneous factors' caused by newspapers and books.
There must've been very difficult to learn sacred languages, so it made limitation of making classical communities, but as there were more uses of vernacular languages, taking time a lot though, people could've had a concept of closer concept of national identity. If we think about the impact of language for national identity, thoses situations make a sense a lot.
Language seems to be a invisible rope to connect the people in a concept of 'nation'. I think , using the language, we can communicate about what/ why/ who/ when/ where/ and how. From the history of what language did for establishing a contry or maintaining it, the power of it seems very huge in the society.
Currently, language doesn't seem to be limited by the geographical boundary of nation. For example, English even make new concept of language community, which is beyond nations.
How many language learning communities are there through both off-line and on-line!
And the power of English moves onto making national identity stronger , not directly connected to every nation using English, though.
Also, 'spontaneous factors by printed media', as Anderson mentioned, gave a strong identity to the nations. Talking about the events which happened in our country today seems to provide strong national identity to the people. Yes, we're getting globalized currently, but at the same time, it's interpretation and experiences are happening with a pretty much national point of view, I think.
joohee
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I agree that language is a very interesting aspect of nationalism. It's true that there are many, many different languages spoken now in the U.S., but there are people who find that very threatening to the idea of national unity. How else can we explain movements to make English the official language of the country, and to ban printing certain official materials in more than one language to force people to learn English?
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