Live 8 vs eBay
Out of context: Reply #116
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If we turn to Asia, we find an enormous variety of attempts at linguistic nationalism which are very valuable for comparative study. The variety itself underlines the difficulty of arguing for a single Asian form of nationalism. The Meiji rulers followed the example of Paris, imposing the speech of Tokyo on the rest of the country, and reducing all other forms to the marginal status of dialects—at a time when the spoken language of Kyushu was unintelligible in Honshu, and even more so the language of the Ryukyus. We are familiar with the process whereby Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, and so on, which are clearly languages in their own right—and as loosely connected as Romanian, Italian and Spanish—were reduced to dialects under the new national language of Mandarin. In Thailand, Bangkok Thai came to dominate what it called the dialects of the North, Northeast and South of the country—which Bangkokians usually do not understand.