Live 8 vs eBay
Out of context: Reply #118
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Both India and the Philippines have failed—if that is the right word—to create a generally accepted national language. The colonial language—English and American—remains the effective language of the state and of the national elite. A vigorous English-language—and nationalist—literary culture exists in both places, and has accommodated itself to no less vigorous Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Tagalog and Cebuano cultures. Old Pakistan broke into two separate nations partly because of Karachi’s suppression of the Bengali language, which then became the motor for a linguistic nationalism in Bangladesh that looks very similar to earlier linguistic nationalisms in Greece, Norway and Old Czechoslovakia. The newest nation-state in Asia, East Timor, which, in spite of its small size, contains over twenty ethnolinguistic groups, has opted for Portuguese as its language of state, and a simple lingua franca (Tetun) as the lang­uage of national unity