Language Glory and Language Domains

I wanted to respond to your attempt to divide up the glorification of language, Jo. It seems that you put Languages A, B and C into different domains, (literary, political, media, etc.) but that you thought this would all be very problematic unless the languages were mutually intelligible. Blommaert actually comments upon the concept of linguistic domains in the case of Tanzania. Politics was the domain in which Swahili was dominant, and “for other domains people continued to use local languages or other newly emerged forms of communication” (248-249). This was a failure of Tanzanian policy that envisioned one national identity and thus the ideology of an ideal citizen who is a monoglot, a speaker of the national language Swahili. Thus, as Blommaert asserts if this (monoglot nationalism) is your aim then language glory cannot be divided. Your model of different domains, Jo, is most certainly not the single-identity asserted by most nationalist movements. Perhaps there could be a model of nationalism that promotes a “repertoire of (domain-bound) identities” (Blommaert 249). The different languages for each domain might not even have to be mutually intelligible as long as children are taught them all at an early age through the education system. However, once again the danger lies if one domain is perceived as more dominant than the other. The political, literary and other domains would have to be perceived as equal. Therefore I don’t see the problem to be which languages are used and whether they are mutually intelligible, but the beliefs people have about different domains and their inherent prestige.