It means the general diffusion of a school-mediated, academy supervised idiom, codified for the requirements of a reasonably precise bureaucratic and technological communication.
[5] For Gellner, nationalism was a sociological condition[5] and a likely but not guaranteed (he noted exceptions in multilingual states like Switzerland, Belgium and Canada[2]) result of modernisation, the transition from agrarian to industrial society.
[1] In particular, he focused on the unifying and culturally homogenising roles of the educational systems, national labour markets and improved communication and mobility in the context of urbanisation.
[1] He thus argued that nationalism was highly compatible with industrialisation and served the purpose of replacing the ideological void left by both the disappearance of the prior agrarian society culture and the political and economical system of feudalism, which it legitimised.
[2] Gellner criticised a number of other theoretical explanations of nationalism, including the "naturality theory", which states that it is "natural, self-evident and self-generating" and a basic quality of human being, and a neutral or a positive quality; its dark version, the "Dark Gods theory", which sees nationalism as an inevitable expression of basic human atavistic, irrational passions; and Elie Kedourie's idealist argument that it was an accidental development, an intellectual error of disseminating unhelpful ideas, and not related to industrialisation and the Marxist theory in which nations appropriated the leading role of social classes.