ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 is based on Benedict Anderson’s idea of the imagined community. It deals with the close links between language and identity and the construction of nations in particular.
People identify with particular languages and they use them to cement communities. The linkage between language and identity can be understood in the context of nationalism and the construction of nations or, as Anderson calls them, ‘imagined communities’.
Humans tell stories to make sense of the world, and language plays a crucial part in them. An ideology can be defined as a narrative shared by a particular group in a society. The ideology of French Rationalism is based on the supremacy of French as the ‘universal language’, while German Romanticism essentializes the links between language and ethnic identity, and Anglo-Saxon Pragmatism is aversive of linguistic engineering.
Communities are imagined not only from within, but also from outside, which may lead to serious conflicts, as the name of North Macedonia revealed. For many ethnic minority languages, official recognition came too late. In this age of superdiversity, existing imagined communities are being challenged and new imagined communities are emerging, based on gender, race, accent, and language.
