Benedict Anderson/ Imagined Communities/ Nationalism

IrishMark

I've recently read Imagined Communities and love it. I do, however, have a scruple. Anderson suggests that "from the start the nation was conceived in language and one could be 'invited into' the imagined community".

Is Anderson here suggesting that a (national) language is ubiquitous with nationality?

Such a suggestion might be supported by thinking of Ireland: those who have so much as a smattering of the Irish language generally think of themselves as being Irish.

Despite this, such a suggestion is also incredibly, incredibly problematic: those second-generation immigrants to London who have no English, yet were born in, and lived their whole lives in, London are, nevertheless, English, albeit some hyphenated form thereof. I cannot imagine Anderson making such a mistake, so perhaps I picked him up incorrectly.

Anybody got any thoughts?

Manach

While I've not read Mr. Anderson's book, it has been positively referenced a lot in some courses I'd done. Language does seem to be a building block of nationalities. From a simple sense an example would be that person speaks the same tongue as I, hence a connection exists. There are some genuninely stable multilingual countries, such as Switzerland. But diverse language issues have prove major barriers to larger metropoles, for instance that of Austo-Hungary.