TL;DR - Could "normal" nationalism in a "modern" world be multilingual?
OTL bias makes certain countries look a bit weird.
Iran, for example. When I was in my early years getting into history, I came across a linguistic map of the place, and became awfully confused. The place is extraordinarily diverse to a modern American eye. It didn't make sense. Of course the same was true of southern China, Andean Peru, and peripheral India, but "naturally" both had overwhelming majority or official languages to hold things together (oversimplifying here, obviously). Granted most of Africa, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia had "too many" languages, but those countries were obviously failing because of these weaknesses (early teens! forgive me!). But I couldn't quite rationalize my heuristics with the reality of modern Iran.
A lot of those heuristics are the default ones for the modern world. The whole nationalism-was-inevitable discussion we rehash six or eight times a year. But my questions are more specific:
What would nationalism look like if the early practitioners were less like France and Britain?
What would the modern world look like in which countries like Canada, Iran, Switzerland, India, or Spain were considered more the norm for powerful, successful states?
Where linguistic homogeneity was more associated with cute little exceptions-that-prove-the-rule like Norway, Cuba, or Latvia....or with failures/aberrations like North Korea, Somalia, or Serbia?
Linguistic homogenization happened remarkably late in our TL, even in prototypical assimilationist countries like the US and France. I suspect the inevitability of the trend is highly overrated. I'll go down some more specific rabbit holes with this later, but....
Thoughts? Ideas? Unsupported, unhelpful 2-3 sentence declarations that X or Y aspect of OTL couldn't realistically change, sorry?
OTL bias makes certain countries look a bit weird.
Iran, for example. When I was in my early years getting into history, I came across a linguistic map of the place, and became awfully confused. The place is extraordinarily diverse to a modern American eye. It didn't make sense. Of course the same was true of southern China, Andean Peru, and peripheral India, but "naturally" both had overwhelming majority or official languages to hold things together (oversimplifying here, obviously). Granted most of Africa, Afghanistan, and Southeast Asia had "too many" languages, but those countries were obviously failing because of these weaknesses (early teens! forgive me!). But I couldn't quite rationalize my heuristics with the reality of modern Iran.
A lot of those heuristics are the default ones for the modern world. The whole nationalism-was-inevitable discussion we rehash six or eight times a year. But my questions are more specific:
What would nationalism look like if the early practitioners were less like France and Britain?
What would the modern world look like in which countries like Canada, Iran, Switzerland, India, or Spain were considered more the norm for powerful, successful states?
Where linguistic homogeneity was more associated with cute little exceptions-that-prove-the-rule like Norway, Cuba, or Latvia....or with failures/aberrations like North Korea, Somalia, or Serbia?
Linguistic homogenization happened remarkably late in our TL, even in prototypical assimilationist countries like the US and France. I suspect the inevitability of the trend is highly overrated. I'll go down some more specific rabbit holes with this later, but....
Thoughts? Ideas? Unsupported, unhelpful 2-3 sentence declarations that X or Y aspect of OTL couldn't realistically change, sorry?
