Creating differences

Still, as we know, standardizing language in particular was a powerful way of making nation-states, given the way it combines both centralizing and uniformizing possibilities, and simultaneously allows for the masking of the privilege and power inherent in making decisions about what counts as a (proper) language, and what does not; it is possible to argue that language is learnable, and hence perfectly democratic
(Higonnet 1980; Bauman and Briggs 2003).