Languages and Nation Building

Abstract

In this chapter, I analyze the ideologies behind the rationale that implies that citizens of a specific country should speak specific languages. In other words, I examine the relationship between the ideological construction of citizens and languages. I first explore notions of ideological construction explained by Weberian (1904/2002), Marxist (1872), and Geertz (1973) to provide a seminal understanding of the creation of a “collective we” embedded in nation-states. I then refer to some common academic research frameworks to analyze the ideological construction of citizenship within a nation state to differing degrees of acceptance of (Gramsci, 1948) and resistance to (Anzaldúa, 1987) the promotion of national languages and the oppression of those living in marginalized spaces due to rigid notions of national identity and language that has lead to the post-structural concept of translanguaging. I exemplify the relevance of citizenship construction and language by referring to the Mexican case, starting from the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1521 to recent changes in the linguistic landscape due to the current return of Mexican populations from the United States. To this end, I introduce the ideological construct of the Cosmic Race (Vasconcelos, 1926)—the unification of multicultural nations into one—which has impacted the national and linguistic identities of Mexican (trans)nationals since then. I conclude by problematizing the ideological tenets that coexist in current nations and suggest that the relationship between language and nation building is reconfiguring, as this artificial construct does not solely depend on the influence of (one) state