Conclusion

Primordialism, or at least linguistic primordialism, despite its problematicity for anthropologists and other analysts as an analytical concept, seems to be still alive in the world today, and shows no signs of dying out, or being replaced by more `modern' constructs. Linguistic primordialism is as important to people in as highly-industrialized a country as Japan as it is to speakers of smaller, less technologically-developed linguistic cultures. Just as it seemed to be at one point an essentially premodern phenomenon, it now seems also (or still) to be a post-modern one. The dissolution of the large economic empires and multinational states created in this century, often as a result of the aftermath of world wars, or as the product of new economic systems, has seen the rebirth of primordialism of various sorts, including the linguistic, and far from being a nineteenth-century phenomenon, now seems destined to continue unabated into the twenty-first.