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VERNACULARIZATION IN THEORY
IN THE EARLY CENTURIES OF THE SECOND MILLENNIUM, wide areas of Eurasia, and most dramatically India and Europe, witnessed a transformation in cultural practice, social-identity formation, and political order with far-reaching and enduring consequences. I call this transformation vernacularization, a process of change by which the universalistic orders, formations, and practices of the preceding millennium were supplemented and gradually replaced by localized forms. The local worlds created by vernacularization, which took on ever sharper definition over time, are now giving way under the pressure of another and more powerful universalizing process, one of whose consequences has been to make us more aware of the very historicity of these local worlds.
A key site for understanding vernacularization is literary culture. It is here that we most clearly perceive intentional language change and encounter the most significant representations of a society's self-understanding and a polity's power. In vernacularization local languages are first admitted to literacy (what I sometimes call literization), then accommodated to "literature" as defined by preexisting cosmopolitan models (literarization), and thereby unified and homogenized; eventually they come to be deployed in new projects of territorialization and, in some cases, ethnicization. By this process vernacular literary cultures gradually encompassed and superseded the translocal codes, aesthetic forms, and geocultural spaces that had earlier been prevalent. These changes in literary culture not only correlate with transformations in social identity but appear at times to converge with a shift in the perceived scope of political power. For concurrently with vernacularization a previously dominant aspiration to transregional rule seems to have been supplanted by more limited if not bounded orders of power This contributed crucially in some parts of the world to the formation of national states; elsewhere, other forms of polity, as yet poorly understood, came into being.
To study vernacularization is to study not the emergence into history of primeval and natural communities and cultures, but rather the historical inauguration of their naturalization. For it was during the course of the vernacular millennium that cultures and communities were ideationally and discursively invented, or at least provided with a more self-conscious voice. This naturalization took place by a double process of reduction and differentiation: As unmarked dialect was turned into unified standard, heterogeneous practice into...