What do we mean when we talk of "imperial languages"?

The article discusses the concept of “empire” and its derivates, and focuses on “imperial languages” and “language empires”. Traditional empires were not states in the modern sense of the word and were not based upon sovereignty – a rather recent European invention of the late Middle Ages. More importantly for our concerns, the article draws from the history of Aramaic and Arabic and of classical Latin and Greek in order to show how traditional empires did not have an explicit language policy, because language uniformity was not quintessential to their definition and could not be their goal, as most often is the case of the nation-states. Their universalistic ideology ensured often the persistence in time – and quite often the development and diffusion – of un-official, local languages; language shift toward the language of the dominating group typically occurred over long stretches of time. The rapid and catastrophic collapse of local languages and cultures is rather a hallmark of the modern nationstates. The article proposes three conditions for a language being “imperial”, or rather imperialistic” in the modern sense of the word.