Nationality and language
Right now, it's possible for me to imagine the nation of America. I can do this not only because I know about America's geographic boundaries, but also because I've read publications in my native language that assume American nationalism and the existence of comparable “American” institutions (schools, newspapers, hospitals). I'm comfortable with all this American-ness, even though a lot of it is imaginary.
According to today's Times, it's impossible to count the number of languages spoken in China:
. . . China's Han [is] the ethnic group that makes up more than 90 percent of the population. The Han speak as many 1,500 dialects, with the bulk of those concentrated in the southern half of the country.
1500 dialects — that's a lot. And they're not even close cousin kinds of dialects, apparently.
The encounter at the Datian market began when the dumpling seller approached the foreigner with a phrase that sounded like “goodbye” in the Wu dialect. Knowing it must mean something else, the foreigner guessed she was asking his name, and provided it, producing a laugh from the woman who explained, switching to Mandarin, that she had asked if he had eaten lately.
And it's not just foreigners who have this problem.
To drive a few miles down the road from one village to another [in Datian County, Fujian Province] is indeed to plunge into a new linguistic universe. Things can be as confusing for someone from the next town as they are for the total outsider. In one village near the county seat, where an old Daoist shrine sits high above the roadside, a man who said he spoke southern Min, one of Fujian's most widely spoken dialects, tried to exchange words with some boys who said they also spoke southern Min. A few words from each side, however, sufficed to show they were mutually unintelligible.
China is worried about the consequences of all this linguistic variety, according to The Times. No one is saying that local languages have to go, of course, but China wants to have people understand Mandarin, so that its national identity will be coherent.
[This is beginning to sound like an “English first” post, but it's not — stay with me.]
The application of this to the online world is worth thinking about. I can imagine that at this very moment there are millions of other English readers and writers commenting on a million different things. I can imagine that there are bloggers out there writing ironically for their readers, knowing that the readers will understand. I can imagine that many of these readers make pilgrimages to the English version of Google (we used to make pilgrimates to AltaVista) and to whatever Glenn Reynolds writes. I'm confident that all this talk and creativity is going to go on even when no one is watching, and that it will have a character of its own that's different (a different voice and affect) from what happens in the offline world.
In other words, I can imagine a kind of online “nation.” Without geographic boundaries.