The Politics of English

as a World Language
[

New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies

C|
ross Readings in the Post / Colonial
ultures Literatures in English

65
Series Editors

Gordon Collier Hena Maes–Jelinek Geoffrey Davis

(Giessen) (Liège) (Aachen)

A S N E L Papers appear under the auspices of the

Gesellschaft für die Neuen Englischsprachigen Literaturen e.V. (G N E L )
Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English (A S N E L )
Heinz Antor, President
(English Seminar, University of Cologne,
Albertus-Magnus-Platz, D-50923 Cologne)

Formatting and layout: Gordon Collier

 The Politics of English
as a World Language
[

New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies

Edited by
Christian Mair

ASNEL Papers 7

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
"ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence".

ISBN: 90-420-0876-8 (Bound)

©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003
Printed in The Netherlands
Contents

Linguistics, Literature and the Postcolonial Englishes: An Introduction

C HRISTIAN M AIR ix

RESISTING (IN) ENGLISH:

GLOBALIZATION AND ITS COUNTER-DISCOURSES

Beyond Homogeny and Heterogeny: English as a Global

and Worldly Language
A LASTAIR P ENNYCOOK 3

English for the Globe, or Only for Globe-Trotters?

The world of the EU
R OBERT P HILLIPSON 19

Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: The Threat

from Killer Languages
T OVE S KUTNABB –K ANGAS 31

English as the Supranational Language of Human Rights?

M ICHAEL T OOLAN 53

English as an Exotic Language

P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER 67

G.lobal L.anguages O.ppress B.ut A.re L.iberating, Too:

The Dialectics of English
R ICHARD J. A LEXANDER 87
Proregression and Dynamic Stasis: The Ambivalent Impact
of English as Reflected in Postcolonial Writing
P HOTIS L YSANDROU AND Y VONNE L YSANDROU 97

Towards Global Diglossia? English in the Sciences and the Humanities

S USANNE M ÜHLEISEN 107

The Recording of Vocabulary from the Major Varieties of English in

the Oxford English Dictionary
J ENNIE P RICE 119

English as a Lingua Franca and the Politics of Property

B ARBARA S EIDLHOFER AND J ENNIFER J ENKINS 139

THE CARIBBEAN AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

IN NORTH AMERICA AND BRITAIN

Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia

in the ‘Anglophone’ Caribbean
H UBERT D EVONISH 157

Decolonizing English: The Caribbean Counter-Thrust

H AZEL S IMMONS –M C D ONALD 179

Re-Reading the Religious Bodies of Postcolonial Literature

F IONA D ARROCH 203

An African’s Trouble with His Masters’ Voices

M ICHAEL M EYER 209

Home, Hybridity and (Post)colonial Discourse in Caryl Phillips’s

A State of Independence
P ETRA T OURNAY 219

ENGLISH AND ENGLISH-LANGUAGE WRITING IN AFRICA

When 2+9=1: English and the Politics of Language Planning

in a Multilingual Society: South Africa
N KONKO M. K AMWANGAMALU 235
The Democratization of Language Policy: A Cultural-Linguistic
Analysis of the Status of English in Kenya
K EMBO –S URE 247

Postcolonial Language Planning in Tanzania: What Are the Difficulties

and What is the Way Out?
S AFARI T.A. M AFU 267

“Hear from my own lips”: The Language of Women’s Autobiographies

E LEONORA C HIAVETTA 279

Linguistic and Literary Development of Nigerian Pidgin:

The Contribution of Radio Drama
D AGMAR D EUBER AND P ATRICK O LOKO 289

“That’s all out of shape”: Language and Racism in South African Drama
H AIKE F RANK 305

Beyond the Domain of Literacy: The Illiterate Other in The Heart

of the Matter, Things Fall Apart and Waiting for the Barbarians
H ELGA R AMSEY –K URZ 315

“The nuisance one learns to put up with”: English as a Linguistic

Compromise in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Fiction
R ICHARD S AMIN 325

THE POLITICS OF ENGLISH ON THE ASIAN SUBCONTINENT

The Interface of Language, Literature and Politics in Sri Lanka:

A Paradigm for Ex-Colonies of Britain
D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE 337

The Master’s Language and its Indian Uses

P REMILA P AUL 359

Bringing Back the Bathwater: New Initiatives in English

Policy in Sri Lanka
R AJIVA W IJESINHA 367
Cross-Cultural Encounters in Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag
and Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies
V ERA A LEXANDER 375

Imperial Pretensions and The Pleasures of Conquest

Y VETTE T AN 385

“Language is the skin of my thought”: Language Relations

in Ancient Promises and The God of Small Things
C HRISTINE V OGT –W ILLIAM 393

NEW ZEALAND, CANADA, THE PHILIPPINES:

ENGLISH IN MULTILINGUAL CONSTELLATIONS
AROUND THE PACIFIC RIM

From “carefully modulated murmur” to “not a place for sooks”:

New Zealand Ways of Writing English
P ETER H. M ARSDEN 407

Maori or English? The Politics of Language in

Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes
M ICHELLE K EOWN 419

Language, Humour and Ethnic Identity Marking

in New Zealand English
J ANET H OLMES , M ARIA S TUBBE AND M EREDITH M ARRA 431

Métissage and Memory: The Politics of Literacy Education in

Canadian Curriculum and Classrooms
E RIKA H ASEBE –L UDT 457

“Joseph you know him he don trus dah Anglais” Or: English as
Postcolonial Language in Canadian Indigenous Films
K ERSTIN K NOPF 467

“When I was a child I spake as a child”: Reflecting on the Limits

of a Nationalist Language Policy
D ANILO M ANARPAAC 479

C ONTRIBUTORS 493
 Linguistics, Literature and
the Postcolonial Englishes
An Introduction

Christian Mair
Freiburg

T
H E P R E S E N T V O L U M E offers a selection of papers read at the
joint G N E L &M A V E N conference which took place from 6 to 9
June 2001 in Freiburg. The motto of the conference was “The Cul-
tural Politics of English as a World Language,” an obvious allusion to the
similarly titled pioneering study by Alastair Pennycook (1994). The motto
was intended to define the concerns about the role of English in the post-
colonial world likely to be shared by descriptive linguists, (critical) discourse
analysts and literary scholars. G N E L , the ‘Gesellschaft für Neue Englisch-
sprachige Literaturen’ [Society for the Study of the New English Literatures],
certainly was the senior partner, and I am therefore particularly grateful that
its executive agreed to open its 24th annual conference to the participants of
the third M A V E N meeting. M A V E N is an acronym hiding a most politically
incorrect label, ‘MAjor Varieties of ENglish.’ The question of what consti-
tutes a major variety of English was provisionally answered by the conveners
of the first M A V E N meeting in Växjö in Sweden in 1997, but not surpris-
ingly, the focus of this conference on British, American /Canadian, Australian
and New Zealand English was challenged even then, and a widening of the
perspective was in evidence at the second M A V E N meeting in Lincoln (U K )
in 1999. This wider perspective was evident both in the number of additional
varieties included for discussion, and in a greater readiness to address the
language-political, historical and cultural assumptions underlying any general
answer to the question of what might constitute a major variety of English.
x C HRISTIAN M AIR

In addition to the practical benefits that a conference organizer derives

from staging one integrated event rather than two separate consecutive confer-
ences, there are also several good substantial reasons for bringing together
scholars working on the new literatures in English and linguists dealing with
varieties of English in the postcolonial context.
To start with linguistics, the ordinary business of English as a World Lan-
guage studies has clearly been to produce ever more, and ever more fine-
grained descriptive accounts of varieties of English around the world. Brows-
ing the pages of English World-Wide, one of the defining publications of the
field, one is awed by how many varieties have been treated over the years and
how comprehensively they have sometimes been covered, but in spite of their
obvious centrality to the matter, issues of language politics, culture and iden-
tity have not usually loomed large in the pages of this journal. World Eng-
lishes, the other leading journal in the field, has on the whole been somewhat
more welcoming to a discussion of these issues, but the general order of
priorities has been similar to that evident in English World-Wide. However, it
would not be an exaggeration to say that especially in recent years the trend
towards a more inclusive definition of the subject of English as a World
Language which has been in evidence at successive M A V E N meetings has
been representative for the field as a whole, so that a joint conference with a
group of literary scholars focussing on postcolonial writing in English was
indeed overdue.
Postcolonial literary studies, in its turn, has always been a field in which
people have been aware of the central importance of language to their con-
cerns. Most of the field’s major theorists have been profoundly influenced by
the linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy and in recent social and
cultural theory, while practitioners are confronted with the multifarious com-
plexities of language politics in the postcolonial societies emerging in the
wake of Empire. Last but not least, there are the writers and artists them-
selves, whose presence in large numbers has always been a welcome distinc-
tion of G N E L meetings in the German academic landscape. Many of them
hold strong views on the link between language, culture and identity – be-
tween the Metropolitan English standard and the colonial condition, on the
one hand, and between the new Englishes, creoles and local vernaculars and
liberation and authenticity, on the other. However, it is precisely this knee-
jerk acceptance of the link between language and culture and an almost
automatic and unreserved endorsement of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis which
may make linguists baulk. After all, they have had to learn that in spite of
more than two hundred years of post-Herderian and post-Humboldtian
reasoning on the mutual iconicity of language and thought/culture, there has
been pretty little empirical evidence to prove that such direct links actually
Linguistics, Literature and the Postcolonial Englishes xi

exist. Unlike writers and literary scholars, linguists are therefore more likely
to emphasize linguistic universals and anthropological constants, thereby
coming close to practising the very type of ‘essentialism’ shunned and con-
demned by the mainstream in postcolonial literary theory.
The publication of the conference proceedings would seem to be the
appropriate moment to look back and forward, to see to what extent the two
fields have taken notice of each other’s traditions, terminologies and concerns
and have begun to engage in a productive cross-disciplinary dialogue.
During the conference itself, and on a person-to-person level, I was pleased
to see that integration worked and that no prompts were needed to get con-
versations started across disciplinary boundaries. The present book, though, is
an interdisciplinary venture more in the sense that it juxtaposes the points-of-
view of linguists and literary scholars (and thereby usually shows how the
strengths of one approach correspond to the weaknesses in the other, and the
other way round) than in the sense of offering an integrated synthesis. How-
ever, in the present academic climate of ever-increasing specialization even
such productive juxtaposition is an important first step on a path that will, I
hope, eventually bring two distinct research traditions to coordinate their
efforts for their mutual benefit and for the better understanding of a shared
subject.
Surveying the collection of essays offered here from the editorial perspec-
tive, I felt that answers to two questions were needed to provide signposts for
the reader:
(1) What is the meaning of terms such as ‘language’, or ‘English’, or ‘stan-
dard’ – for linguists and for literary scholars?
(2) Can we achieve a compromise between the apparently conflicting views
held in the two camps about the validity of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
on the interdependence of language, culture and identity?1
As I will show, the answers to these two questions are in fact closely related.
As for the linguists, they still tend to conceive of languages, dialects or vari-
eties of English as decontextualized structural systems which can be described
by listing their phonetic, grammatical and lexical features. This notion is pre-
valent even in much current sociolinguistics. William Labov and his many
followers, for example, have shown that such systems are internally variable
and that the variation observed usually correlates with regional, social, ethnic,
age or gender parameters. However, a method which defines the social
variable as independent and given, and the linguistic variable as dependent
1
The original Whorfian triad is Language, Thought, and Reality. This, at least, is
the title given to a collection of Whorf’s writings by the editor, John B. Carroll (see
Whorf 1956).
xii C HRISTIAN M AIR

and to be accounted for, leaves little room for asking questions such as the
following:
— if the statistical profiles of quantitative-correlational sociolinguistics define
average speaker behaviour, what is the range of variation available to an
individual speaker in a specific situation?
— if quantitative-correlational sociolinguistics focuses on the unreflected and
spontaneous language behaviour of nonstandard speakers, what is the
status of the conscious and considered use of nonstandard forms by intel-
lectuals, politicians and writers?
— what is the role of individual speakers’ and writers’ “acts of identity”2 in
actively creating, enacting or performing social, ethnic and gendered
identities?
Now, it may be that in the relatively stable and simple social framework pro-
vided by medieval feudalism, there were monostylistic speakers of, say, Scots
or Lancashire English, who fairly consistently reproduced the features of
abstract Scots or the abstract Lancashire dialect in their daily communicative
practice. There may even have been a time in early-nineteenth-century
colonial Jamaica when field slaves spoke the pure form of patois, the Jamai-
can creole, and nothing else, and domestic slaves, free blacks and local whites
additionally commanded English prestige forms for formal communication –
quite according to the predictions of the classic Labovian sociolinguistic
model. However, the barest reflection will show that both traditional dialect-
ology and mainstream sociolinguistics do not work for the postcolonial con-
text. Nobody in Jamaica or in the Caribbean diaspora speaks Jamaican creole
today in its consistent pure and basilectal form. By the same token, there are
very few educated Indians or West Africans who, when using English, will

2
Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity is the title
of a classic study by Robert B. LePage and Andrée Tabouret–Keller (1985) which
challenges the assumptions of mainstream quantitative-correlational sociolinguistics.
The authors’ aim is to do full justice to the speaking individual as the locus of lin-
guistic choices before proposing any generalizations about the variability of linguistic
systems. The book has the status of a minor classic in sociolinguistics. It certainly falls
short of providing a fully elaborated theoretical model of its position but is accepted as
fundamentally correct in a very general sense by many sociolinguists working in the
qualitative, interaction-based or discourse-analytical traditions. However, it is
significant that, unlike the pioneering studies by William Labov on language variation
in New York City, on what he called the “Black English Vernacular” and on dialect
change in Martha’s Vineyard, LePage’s and Tabouret–Keller’s investigations into
emerging ethnicities in St. Lucia and Belize have not attracted followers and have thus
not started any linguistic school.
Linguistics, Literature and the Postcolonial Englishes xiii

not widely stray from the norms that are laid down as ‘West African English’
or ‘Indian English’ in the relevant textbooks.
So we might well ask whether, in the study of new varieties of English, it
isn’t time linguists recognized the fact that long before ‘Jamaican creole’,
‘West African English’ or ‘Indian English’ end up as decontextualized con-
structs in linguistic descriptions, they exist as communicative practices avail-
able to real people who pursue their mundane aims in specific communities
and in very specific historical and social contexts. What is needed is, thus, no
more and no less than a discourse-based and dynamic model of varieties of
English, which puts the context, the speaker and his /her intentions, and his-
tory back into the picture – and, even more importantly, also the fact that any
given variety of English in the modern world never exists in isolation but in
close contact with standard English and, in the postcolonial context, most
likely also with numerous indigenous languages and local vernaculars.
Thus, to elaborate on one of our examples, Jamaican English (which is not
the same as Jamaican creole!) is not chiefly a ‘product’, a variety or a range of
varieties on a continuum characterized by phonetic, morphosyntactic and
grammatical properties which need to be listed in a description. Rather, it
needs to be seen as a ‘process’ and approached from the pragmatic level,
through genres, historically evolving traditions of speaking and writing, or –
in other words – as the contextualized, situated appropriation of a language by
a postcolonial community on its own terms and for its own purposes. Genre
conventions, historically evolving styles of speaking and writing and context-
ually situated communicative practices need to be understood before a struc-
tural description can be attempted.
That such a context-sensitive discourse-based approach to variation in
English leads not merely to minor revisions in the existing picture but to a
profound revaluation is shown, for example, by some fascinating recent work
by Jan Blommaert (eg, 1999 and 2001), an Africanist and linguist, which in
its novelty of approach is of equal interest to linguists and literary scholars. In
a number of publications, Blommaert has pointed out that the chief issue in
the use of the European ex-colonial languages in Africa is not the emergence
of new varieties of these languages, not even their gradual indigenization
through language contact but, rather, the fact that they are the medium for
“grassroots literacy.” Blommaert has investigated the French writing of
Julien, or the famous painter Tshibumba’s work on the history of Zaire.
Julien, who has only very limited education, is encouraged to write his auto-
biography by a Belgian novelist, his former employer. His writing, however,
is not just a struggle with the French language, but a physical and intellectual
struggle in a much wider sense – from having to travel for weeks merely to
obtain writing materials to retaining mastery over one’s own version of the
xiv C HRISTIAN M AIR

story when confronted with a novelist looking for exotic raw material for her
fiction. Tshibumba’s world-wide reputation rests on his ‘naïve’ “History of
Zaire” cycle of paintings, which celebrates the martyrdom of Patrice Lumum-
ba. As a historian and intellectual, however, his status is marginal like
Julien’s. What the two also have in common is the fact that they do not just
‘use French’ in the trivial sense that a German professional might be said to
be using English for some purpose. Rather, as Blommaert shows, using
French for these two writers is just one aspect of an excruciatingly painful and
laborious process through which they aim to appropriate discursive power –
be it in order to present their point of view to a European listener (Julien’s
case) or to get a hearing for the local interpretation of the history of Zaire
(Tshibumba’s case).
There are numerous ‘Juliens’ and ‘Tshibumbas’ awaiting reappraisal in
anglophone postcolonial studies, too. Antera Duke, an Efik slave-trading chief
of Old Calabar, wrote his “Diary” probably back in the 1790s. Similar mate-
rial is contained and discussed in Görlach 1994 and Curtis, ed. 1967. These
texts are used as sources for ethnography and history and – in linguistics – as
indirect evidence for the reconstruction of early forms of West African Pidgin
English. That first and foremost they are, in Jan Blommaert’s words, “grass-
roots writing” which is performed “in highly problematic economies of signs
and resources” and might well repay study from a discourse perspective has
largely gone unnoticed.
Still in Nigeria, there is the more recent tradition of Onitsha market
literature. Based around the town of Onitsha, a literary tradition has sprung up
since the 1940s which is a far cry from the postcolonial canon of Nigerian
anglophone writing clustering around the work of Chinua Achebe and Nobel
laureate Wole Soyinka. But while neither Achebe’s nor Soyinka’s works have
suffered critical neglect, Onitsha market literature has hardly ever been taken
seriously in postcolonial criticism. Statistical representation in widely used
databases may be a crude guide, but in the present case the figures speak
volumes. Consulting the M L A bibliography on C D -R O M (on 2 July 2002), I
obtained 681 hits in a keyword search for ‘Soyinka,’ 687 for ‘Achebe,’ and 31
for ‘Onitsha’. Of these 31, many were in fact not about Nigerian writing at all,
but about J.–M. G. LeClézio’s Onitsha, or represented an ethnographic rather
than a literary-critical perspective. Ogali A. Ogali, the foremost representative
of the tradition, is honoured with six entries, most of them being the dedicated
work of one scholar, Reinhard W. Sander.
What might the reasons be for this obvious neglect of an entire West
African writing tradition? I do not want to speculate too comprehensively, but
one reason is certainly that the language of the works strays too far from
metropolitan usage norms and metropolitan norms of what is permissible
Linguistics, Literature and the Postcolonial Englishes xv

exotic-stylistic variation in an African context. The works of the Onitsha

tradition are written in an English characterized by what to a native ear would
appear as a strange mixture of register clashes, exoticisms, errors and flashes
of idiomatic English and addressed to popular audiences spanning a variety of
levels from basic literacy to high-school graduates.
But before anybody outside Nigeria who might be interested in these
works can even start analysing them, publishers need to make them available.
And here the textual history of the works, though extending into the extreme-
ly recent past only, is almost as precarious as that of the Old English Beowulf,
where we know that the sole surviving manuscript was nearly burned in a fire
in 1731. The praiseworthy Heinemann African Writers series did have a
useful anthology of Onitsha market writing, including, of course, some of
Ogali’s work – but the book has long been out of print (Obiechina, ed. 1972).
If it wasn’t for Reinhard Sander’s and Peter K. Ayers’ editorial efforts, the
contemporary Western reader would be able to obtain the works of Ogali A.
Ogali only with great difficulty from Nigeria. Sander’s and Ayers’ omnibus of
Ogali’s works, Veronica my Daughter (1980), weighs in at around 400 pages
and contains a wide array of genres: fiction, such as Caroline the One-Guinea
Girl (1960) or Eddie, the Coal-City Boy (1958); non-fiction, such as History
of Item: Past and Present (1960), written as a school-text in the hope that
students living in Ogali’s native Item might “be mentally free, socially
balanced, and historically emancipated” (326); drama, such as Veronica my
Daughter (1956) or – and here we have a direct grassroots link to ‘franco-
phone’ Zaire – Patrice Lumumba (1958).
Here are some scenes from the last-named play that will give a flavour of
Ogali’s dramaturgy. The first is Lumumba reproaching Kasavubu, who has
just dismissed him from his post of Prime Minister:
Thou traitor! Thou puppet! Thou enemy of Congo, I now dismiss you from
office and you are no more the President of the Republic of Congo! Do thy
worst, thou traitor! (226)
In an interpretation which for a long time would have been contested by some
Western authorities but which has recently been proved to be factually cor-
rect, it is a Belgian officer who shoots Lumumba. Unlike some Western
written historiography, the oral tradition has thus preserved a historically cor-
rect account of the events. In the dramatization of the event, Lumumba pro-
duces the following dying words:
Officer: Now take it, Patrice Lumumba
... Crack!
Lumumba: Africa, Africa, the United Nations has killed us! Africa, Africa,
Africa! (238)
xvi C HRISTIAN M AIR

Let us now turn back from questions of factual correctness to the issue of
literary appreciation. Judged by Western or European standards of literary
criticism, these short pieces which run the gamut from the sensational to a
somewhat simple moral didacticism are bound to fare badly. Analysed by the
light of mainstream work on ‘varieties of English around the world’, they
would probably end up as fairly idiosyncratic specimens of the upper middle
range on the cline of competence and yield up a good many Nigerianisms to
the collector. What work like Blommaert’s has hinted at, however, is a frame-
work in which these texts can be appreciated more fully, and this is a hint
which both linguists and literary scholars working on world English might be
well advised to take. Mastery of the colonial language is achieved through
mastering, adapting or appropriating textual genres and their conventions.
My hope, thus, is that a closer collaboration between linguists and literary
scholars interested in the postcolonial spread of English will sharpen our
awareness of culture-specific and context-specific sociolinguistic styles, com-
municative genres and historically evolving discursive practices. What the
linguists can contribute to the study of literature is the techniques for, and an
appreciation of the importance of, the careful and detailed empirical descrip-
tion of the sociolinguistic economy of signs of a community, which surely
must precede any interpretive generalization, if a critic wishes to avoid the
risk of facilely projecting eurocentric notions on an alien linguistic reality.
Linguists, on the other hand, would be well advised not to see literary works
as bad and unreliable data only, but to appreciate the fact that they are often
important contributions to discourses which reach beyond the literary sphere
and will ultimately help shape the status of English in the life of a community.
Once the different premisses the two disciplines work on are understood,
their apparently contradictory views on the validity of the Sapir–Whorf hypo-
thesis will find an easy explanation. Clearly, the linguists are right in remain-
ing generally sceptical about assuming too close a link between language and
culture, because for them, after all, language is a decontextualized abstraction
– langue, competence, a system of potential meaning – rather than discursive
practice – parole, performance, situated communicative acts. And the ques-
tion of whether English, the colonial language, is an adequate means for post-
colonial writers to express themselves in is a vacuous one at this level. The
English language, when seen as a system of potential meaning, like any other
language is in principle capable of expressing the full range of human
experience. However, literary scholars and writers who insist on the link be-
tween language and culture are right, too – on the level on which they usually
address the question, for after all it was not just English, an abstract linguistic
system, which the colonized societies adopted voluntarily, accepted or had
forced upon them, but specific varieties, from sailor talk to the orotund stan-
Linguistics, Literature and the Postcolonial Englishes xvii

dard accents of higher-level colonial administrators. These types of English

come with a historical and cultural baggage, and with associated discursive
practices which the colonized would have done well to question and critique.
Against this background, it becomes apparent how two apparently irrecon-
cilable strategies advocated by postcolonial writers are in fact both valid ways
of coping with the language politics of the postcolonial situation. Ngugi wa
Thiong’o’s rejection of English as a language for African creative writing re-
presents the superficially safe bet, as it were. Don’t use the language, so as to
escape the influence of the oppressive discursive practices associated with it:
Men at the top will fume in fury at fellow Africans who mispronounce
English but will laugh with pride at their own inability to speak a single
correct sentence in their own African languages. In some government depart-
ments, the ability to speak the Queen’s English, exactly like an upper-class
English gentleman, is the sole criterion for employment and promotion.
(Ngugi 1981: 59)
An African writer should write in a language that will allow him to com-
municate effectively with peasants and workers in Africa – in other words, he
should write in an African language. As far as publishing is concerned, I have
no doubt that writing in an African language is as commercially viable as
writing in any language. Market pressures might even have the added
advantage of forcing those who express themselves in African languages to
strive for local relevance in their writing because no peasant or worker is
going to buy novels, plays, or books of poetry that are totally irrelevant to his
situation. Literature published in African languages will have to be meaning-
ful to the masses and therefore much closer to the realities of their situation.
(Ngugi 1985: 153)
I believe that my writing in Gikuyu language, a Kenyan language, an African
language, is part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and
African peoples. In schools and universities our Kenyan languages – that is
the languages of the many nationalities which make up Kenya – were asso-
ciated with negative qualities of backwardness, underdevelopment, humilia-
tion and punishment. We who went through that school system were meant to
graduate with a hatred of the people and the culture and the values of the
language of our daily humiliation and punishment. I do not want to see
Kenyan children growing up in that imperialist-imposed tradition of contempt
for the tools of communication developed by their communities and their
history. I want them to transcend colonial alienation. (Ngugi 1986: 32)
The forceful rhetoric notwithstanding, what Ngugi probably underestimates is
the risk that the very same oppressive discursive practices might quickly re-
constitute themselves in an indigenous language if the over-all power struc-
ture of the society remains the same, and that – not only in pidgins and creoles
xviii C HRISTIAN M AIR

(which even he accepts as legitimate African languages3) – the English lan-

guage has shown itself able to accommodate African experience.
Chinua Achebe’s espousal of the English language looks like the riskier
course at first. Accept the inevitable, and product of an English-language
education that you are, try to “write back”:
The real question is not whether Africans could write in English but whether
they ought to. Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for
someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling.
But for me there is no other choice. I have been given this language and I
intend to use it. I hope, though, that there always will be men, like the late
Chief Fagunwa, who will choose to write in their native tongue and insure that
our ethnic literature will flourish side by side with the national ones. For those
of us who opt for English, there is much work ahead and much excitement.
Writing in the London Observer recently, James Baldwin said:
My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected none
of my experience. But now I began to see the matter another way.... Perhaps the
language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only
learned to imitate it. If this were so, then it might be made to bear the burden of
my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it, and me, to such a test.
I recognize, of course, that Baldwin’s problem is not exactly mine, but I
feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African
experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with
its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings. (Achebe
1993 [1975]: 434)
In spite of reams of material published both on postcolonial literature in
English and on varieties of English as a world language, we are still a long
way from understanding what precisely the “new English” is which Achebe is
here writing about and which he and other postcolonial writers have been
working to create for at least half a century.
Literary scholars might bring the full inventory of current theory to bear on
the works of Achebe, Ngugi and their colleagues, analyse them as instances of
‘heteroglossia’, as Bakhtinian polyphonies of voices, or palimpsests, or
schizo-texts, and so on. Linguists of a more traditional bent will use these
works as sources from which to cull instances of lexical borrowings from
indigenous African languages, of locally coined idioms and expressions, or of

3
“Wherever the peasantry and the working class were compelled by necessity and
history to adopt the language of the master, they Africanised it without any of the
respect for its ancestry shown by Senghor and Achebe, so totally as to have created
new African languages, like Krio in Sierra Leone or Pidgin in Nigeria, that owed their
identities to the syntax and rhythms of African languages. All these languages were
kept alive in the daily speech, in the ceremonies, in political struggles, above all in the
rich store of orature – proverbs, stories, poems, and riddles” (Ngugi 1986: 23).
Linguistics, Literature and the Postcolonial Englishes xix

the occasional grammatical construction not found in British and American

English. Legitimate as such pursuits may be, it is doubtful whether they cap-
ture the essence of the new Englishes which are emerging in postcolonial
societies and which, no doubt, are one important factor accounting for the
truly astounding literary creativity endemic to them. For underlying both the
‘new variety of English’ abstracted by the linguist and the specific literary text
at the centre of the literary scholar’s attention is a community-specific local
tradition of using English. This tradition usually started with speakers of Eng-
lish from Britain taking their language abroad. Increasingly, however, and
everywhere in the postcolonial world, it has become a tradition of local users
shaping the language to meet their own needs.
If linguists taking part in the G N E L &M A V E N conference left Freiburg
with a greater appreciation of the importance of the socially and culturally
rich contexts of use of the varieties they have made it their object to study,
and if literary scholars came away with a realization that enactment of identity
through discursive practice, or the heteroglot nature of most literary texts, are
phenomena which take a lot of attention to linguistic and sociolinguistic detail
to describe, the meeting has fully served its purpose.
As for the arrangement of the essays in this volume, a degree of arbitrari-
ness was unavoidable. Having two major sections, one including the essays
with a more linguistic orientation and the other those with a literary one,
would have been to defeat the purpose of the meeting in the very proceedings.
Arranging the contributions alphabetically according to authors’ names was
an admittedly tempting default option that I ultimately decided against. The
compromise chosen was to start of with a section on “Resisting (in) English:
globalization and its counter-discourses,” which combines the general and
programmatic position papers by Alastair Pennycook, Robert Phillipson,
Tove Skutnabb–Kangas, Michael Toolan and Peter Mühlhäusler with thema-
tically related contributions by Richard Alexander, Yvonne and Photis Lysan-
drou, Susanne Mühleisen, Jenny Price, and Barbara Seidlhofer and Jennifer
Jenkins. The remaining essays are grouped along broadly regional lines, start-
ing with the Caribbean (including the African diaspora in North America and
Britain), with essays by Hubert Devonish, Hazel Simmons–McDonald, Fiona
Darroch, Michael Meyer, and Petra Tournay. Next is Africa, with the contri-
butions by Kembo–Sure, Nkonko Kamwangamalu, Safari Mafu, Eleonora
Chiavetta, Dagmar Deuber and Patrick Oloko, Haike Frank, Helga Ramsey–
Kurz, and Richard Samin. The Asian subcontinent is represented by the con-
tributions from D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke, Premila Paul, Rajiva Wijesinha, Vera
Alexander, Yvette Tan, and Christine Vogt–William. The remaining six
essays are devoted to the politics of English and English-language writing in
three countries of the Pacific Rim: New Zealand (with three contributions, by
xx C HRISTIAN M AIR

Peter Marsden, Michelle Keown, and Janet Holmes, Maria Stubbe and Mere-
dith Marra), Canada (with Erika Hasebe–Ludt on métissage and Kerstin
Knopf on indigenous film), and the Philippines (Danilo Manarpaac).
It is a pleasant duty in this introduction to mention all those participants
who are not represented in the proceedings but who made important contribu-
tions to the conference. This is, first of all, the writers reading from and dis-
cussing their work with us: Diran Adebayo, Josephine Joyce Benjamin, Bill
Manhire, Uma Parameswaran, Patricia Powell, Sarah Quigley, and Hazel
Simmons–McDonald (who is in the volume in her academic self). Participants
will also remember the talk by documentary photographer Camilo José
Vergara on “Truth, Purity, and Beauty: Urban Expression in Ghetto Neigh-
borhoods in Larger Cities in the U S A ,” which was important both for its con-
tent, because it brought the U S A back into the postcolonial orbit, and for its
method, because it showed that there are aspects of the postcolonial subject
matter which are beyond even the combined powers of linguists and literary
scholars.
In the preparation of this volume, I owe a great debt to the good offices of
Stefanie Rapp, who helped with all aspects of the editing process (except
shortening the contributions, which I felt I had to take full responsibility for
myself), Tamsin Sanderson, attentive proofreader, and Bianca Kossmann,
Silke Scheible and Birgit Waibel, who formatted some of the texts and added
the relevant corrections.

WORKS CITED
Achebe, Chinua (1993 [1975]). “The African writer and the English language,” in
Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays (London: Heinemann Educational &
Garden City NY: Doubleday Anchor): 91–103. Repr. in Colonial Discourse and
Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura Chrisman (Lon-
don: Harvester Wheatsheaf): 428–34.
Blommaert, Jan (1999). ‘Reconstructing the sociolinguistic image of Africa: Grass-
roots writing in Shaba (Congo),’ Text 19: 175–200.
—— (2001). ‘The other side of history: Grassroots literacy and autobiography in
Shaba, Congo,’ General Linguistics 38: 133–55.
Curtin, Philip, ed. (1967). Africa Remembered: Narratives from West Africa from
the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: U of Winsconsin P).
Forde, C. Daryll (1956). Efik Traders of Old Calabar, Containing The diary of
Antera Duke, an Efik slave-trading chief of the eighteenth century, together with
an ethnographic sketch and notes by D. Simmons and an essay of the political
organization of Old Calabar by G.I. Jones (Oxford: International African Insti-
tute/Oxford UP).
Görlach, Manfred (1994). ‘Broken English from Old Calabar, 1842,’ English World-
Wide 15: 249–52.
Linguistics, Literature and the Postcolonial Englishes xxi

LePage, R.B., & Andrée Tabouret–Keller (1985). Acts of Identity: Creole-Based

Approaches to Language and Ethnicity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1981). Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (London: Heine-
mann).
—— (1985). ‘On writing in Gikuyu,’ Research in African Literatures 16: 153.
—— (1986). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Litera-
ture (London: Heinemann & James Currey).
Obiechina, Emmanuel N., ed. (1972). Onitsha Market Literature (African Writers
Series; London: Heinemann).
Ogali, Ogali A. (1980). Veronica My Daughter and other Onitsha plays and stories,
ed. Reinhard W. Sander & Peter K. Ayers (Washington DC: Three Continents).
Pennycook, Alastair (1994). The Cultural Politics of English as an International
Language (London: Longman).
Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1956). Language, Thought, Reality: Selected Writings of
Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. & intro. John B. Carroll (Cambridge MA: MIT Press).

[
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 R ESISTING ( IN ) E NGLISH :
GLOBALIZATION AND ITS COUNTER - DISCOURSES
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Beyond Homogeny and Heterogeny
English as a Global and Worldly Language

Alastair Pennycook
University of Technology, Sydney

ABSTRACT
This essay explores the globalization and worldliness of the spread of
English. Focusing on domains of global popular culture, such as rap and hip-
hop, I shall try to show how, at the same time as such forms are spreading,
they are also being taken up and used for quite diverse alternative purposes.
Rather than the model of language implied by a simple globalization thesis,
the homogeny position, or the view of language suggested by a world-
englishes framework, the heterogeny position, I shall argue for an under-
standing of English within a view of language that allows for a critical ap-
praisal of both the globalizing and worldly forces around English. Drawing
on Walter Mignolo’s (2000) discussion of globalization as a long historical
process of European designs on/for the rest of the world (Christianity,
Civilization, Development, Global Market), and mundialización (here trans-
lated as worldliness), referring to the ways in which global designs are
enacted, resisted, and rearticulated, I will discuss ways in which we can start
to look at the complex interactions between global and local forces, English
and popular culture.

The acute problem of English

as a language of global discommunication

I
N A R E C E N T A R T I C L E in the Barrier Daily Truth (Broken Hill, 5
January 2001) there is the following story under the headline “Doctor
couldn’t spell ‘acute’”: “A Hong Kong doctor left the word ‘acute’ out
of a dying heart patient’s diagnosis because he didn’t know how to spell it
[…].” I assume that this report, which originally appeared in the South China
Morning Post, has been picked up by this rather obscure newspaper from this
4 A LASTAIR P ENNYCOOK

small outback Australian mining town because of its amusing (a doctor who
can’t spell) yet significant (fatal misdiagnosis) details. The story continues:
“The patient was treated for a less-serious condition as a result and died in
hospital hours after going to Dr Chau Chak-lam with chest pains.” The report
goes on to explain that the patient, Chiu Yiu-wah, was admitted only as an
“urgent” case, two steps down from the “critical” case, as a result of the
referral letter.
At the inquest, the doctor admitted that he “should have put the word
‘acute’” on the instructions to the hospital. He “had acute angina pectoris in
mind” but had omitted the word ‘acute’. But here we get to the interesting
point that elevates this story from a sad but – with the benefit of distance –
also faintly amusing story: “I was not sure about the translation,” Dr Chau
explained to the inquest; “I did not know the English spelling.” As the story
explains, “asked by the coroner why he did not use Chinese, Chau said he was
following the common practice in Hong Kong of using English in referral
letters.” Unfortunately, the brief story stops there; we don’t get to hear more
about this practice, its history, its possible link to other deaths. All we have is
two Hong Kong Chinese names – and I’m assuming these are both Cantonese
speaking, as was probably the ambulance driver and the nurses and doctors1 at
the hospital – and an avoidable death. It looks as if highlighting the issue of
the doctor not being able to spell ‘acute’ misses the point: It was more that he
couldn’t think of the English translation. And why indeed should he, as a
Cantonese doctor with a Cantonese patient in a Cantonese city? If we’re
looking for examples of English as a killer language, this might be a good
candidate.
Let me jump to South Africa. Athalie Crawford’s study of communication
between patients, nurses and doctors in Cape Town (RSA) health services
highlights “the problem posed by doctors being linguistically unequipped to
care for Xhosa-speaking patients, whose numbers continue to grow rapidly as
people move to town from the rural areas” (1999: 27). Here we see the
complexities of relations lying behind a ‘language barrier’; at issue here are
questions of language and power within medical contexts as well as within the
whole broader context of South African society. “It is not possible,” suggests
Crawford, “to isolate the patient disempowered in terms of the language
barrier from the whole biomedical discourse in which patients occupy a
disempowered position” (29). Neither is it possible to see issues of language,
interpretation and medical discourse as separate from the class, gendered and
racial relations of South Africa: “The patients are positioned at the bottom,
1
Of course, not all doctors would be Cantonese-speaking, being British, Indian, or
from elsewhere. But, again, it is the language of the few that dictates the usage for the
many.
Beyond Homogeny and Heterogeny 5

largely passive bodies whose own version or narrative of their illness is not
considered central to the processes of diagnosis and formulation of a realistic
treatment strategy. The nurses, often also used as (unpaid) interpreters in
South Africa where a wide gulf of social class, race, language, and gender
frequently separates doctor from patient, occupy a conflicted and ambivalent
position intersecting the space between them” (29).
This gives us, then, a more complex picture than the newspaper sketch of a
patient dying because his doctor couldn’t spell ‘acute’. Here we see more
clearly how language is embedded in social relations and indeed is part of the
system that perpetuates inequality. And, as Crawford argues, change can only
be brought about by addressing questions of language as well as other social,
economic and political concerns: “To fashion a new integrated social order
out of a severely traumatized past, to accept and work with the reality of black
suppression and rage at white domination, requires, among other things, a
sophisticated grasp of the social meaning of the use of a particular language,
and a commitment to overcome the discrimination against and exclusion from
power of those who speak languages other than English” (32). While on the
one hand, then, we may want to acknowledge the usefulness of English as a
language of global communication, we clearly also need to acknowledge it as
the language of global miscommunication, or perhaps ‘dis’communication.
And I do not mean this in any trivial fashion – I am not merely talking here of
misunderstanding, but rather of the role of English as a language that is linked
to inequality, injustice, and the prevention of communication.
For my final example of English and medical discommunication, I would
like to turn to a ‘fictional’ passage from Han Suyin’s 1956 novel And the Rain
my Drink, which draws on her own experiences as a doctor in pre-indepen-
dence Malaya:
Among the doctors few can speak to all the patients, for in Malaya a uni-
versity education, by its very insistence upon excellence in English, hampers a
doctor from acquiring the vernacular languages of this country.
And thus at night, when the patients confide in the darkness and in their
own tongue what they have withheld from physician and nurse, I begin to
understand the terror, the confusion, the essential need to prevaricate of those
who are always at someone else’s mercy, because they cannot communicate
with those who decide their fate, except through an interpreter.
In the process, how many deviations, changes, siftings, warpings, and
twistings; how many opportunities for blackmail and corruption, before, trans-
formed, sometimes unrecognisable, the stories of the poor who do not speak
English reach their rulers, who are hand-picked, among their own peoples, on
the basis of their knowledge of English. (1961 [1956]: 31)
6 A LASTAIR P ENNYCOOK

These brief stories – a newspaper story about a death in Hong Kong, a study
of communication in Cape Town hospitals, a novel set in pre-independence
Malaya – are interestingly inter-connected. All speak to the range of contexts
into which English has penetrated; all speak to the ways in which English
becomes linked to forms of institutionalized power; all speak to the ways in
which English functions as a class-based language; all speak to the dicho-
tomization between local, multiple vernacular languages and the mono-
lingualism of the language of power; all speak to the ways in which English is
as much a language of global discommunication as it is a language of global
communication.

English and globalization

The above examples, drawn from one interconnected domain – language use
in medical contexts – but from diverse contexts, point to the many ways in
which English has become a language (though not the only language) of
global disparity and discommunication. Such a role, of course, needs to be
seen in terms of the complex interplay between the local and the global. It
does matter that the language in the examples is English, as one of the major
players in global relations. It also matters that these contexts are in Hong
Kong, South Africa and Malaya, all places that have felt the insidious effects
of British colonialism and its socially and ethnically divisive policies. It
matters, too, that the domain is medicine, as one that has become based on
very particular formations of knowledge and practice, so that its practitioners
work with forms of supposedly universal or global, rather than locally
derived, knowledge.
There are many domains in which English plays similar roles. The role of
English in business and the economy is one of the most salient. As Elmer
Ordóñez (1999) put it in a discussion of the role of ‘English for Global
Competitiveness’ at a 1995 conference in the Philippines:
English continues to occupy the place of privilege – it being the language of
the ruling system, government, education, business and trade, and diplomacy
[...] Now this conference seeks to reinforce the hegemony of English in this
country by making it globally competitive [...] English for global competi-
tiveness fits into the type of education that would conform to the require-
ments of an export-oriented economy pushed by the IMF-World Bank for the
Philippines. (19)
Ordóñez goes on to suggest that
The role of Philippine education [...] seems to be that of supplying the world
market economy with a docile and cheap labor force who are trained in
English and the vocational and technical skills required by that economy. As
Beyond Homogeny and Heterogeny 7

it is we do have a decided advantage in the export market of domestic helpers

and laborers. Cite their knowledge of English as that advantage. (20)
Again we can see here the continued effects of colonialism (the particular
effects of the U S A after the Spanish), the ways in which English is embedded
in local institutional contexts (an education system that continues to favour
English), and how these local contexts interrelate with broader global con-
cerns such as I M F /World Bank pressures to develop particular types of
economy, and the fact that the continuing poverty of the Philippines means
that it exports its own people as cheap labour with a knowledge of English.
Domestic helpers from the Philippines are popular in Hong Kong and Singa-
pore in part because they can interact with children in English, something
which is seen as a particular advantage in these two former colonies with their
English-dominant language policies and dependence on global trade.
So how do we start to make sense of these interrelationships between Eng-
lish and the local and global? Writers from different ends of the political
spectrum are often united in their agreement that English and globalization go
hand in hand. Where they differ is in terms of the effects of such globaliza-
tion. Thus, reviewing David Crystal’s (1997) book on the global spread of
English, Sir John Hanson, the former Director-General of the British Council,
is able to proclaim: “On it still strides: we can argue about what globalisation
is till the cows come – but that globalisation exists is beyond question, with
English its accompanist. The accompanist is indispensable to the perfor-
mance” (Hanson 1997: 22). Robert Phillipson (1999), by contrast, in his re-
view of the same book, opts for a critical rather than a triumphalist evaluation:
Crystal’s celebration of the growth of English fits squarely into what the
Japanese scholar, Yukio Tsuda, terms the Diffusion of English Paradigm, an
uncritical endorsement of capitalism, its science and technology, a modern-
isation ideology, monolingualism as a norm, ideological globalisation and
internationalisation, transnationalisation, the Americanisation and homo-
genisation of world culture, linguistic, culture and media imperialism. (274)
There is not much point here in considering further the conservative and
liberal positions of Hanson and Crystal, since they have very little of use to
say about globalization and English (though we should not at the same time
be lulled into believing that these popular ideas are insignificant). Clearly
Phillipson’s position on the diffusion of English, or ‘linguistic imperialism’
(1992), is more useful if we want an understanding of globalization as an
economic, social, cultural and political process. This I will call the homogeny
position (an argument that the global spread of English is leading to the
“homogenisation of world culture”). And yet, as I have argued elsewhere (eg,
2001), although Phillipson’s framework crucially adds a critical and political
8 A LASTAIR P ENNYCOOK

framework within which we can understand the global spread of English in

relationship to global forms of inequality, it is also important to understand
what it can and cannot do. As he suggests, the issue for him is “structural
power” (72) rather than local effects; he is interested in “English linguistic
hegemony” which can be understood as “the explicit and implicit beliefs,
purposes, and activities which characterize the E L T profession and which
contribute to the maintenance of English as a dominant language” (73). Thus,
it is the ways in which English is promoted through multiple agencies and to
the exclusion of other languages that is the issue. What this lacks, of course, is
a view of how English is taken up, how people use English, why people
choose to use English. Such a position cannot account for a sense of agency,
resistance, or appropriation. What Phillipson shows, therefore, is how and for
what purposes English is deliberately promoted and spread, with the under-
lying assumption that the language is a crucial part of the homogenizing
process of globalization. What he does not show is the effects of that spread in
terms of what people do with English.
The second position, which I shall call the heterogeny position, is epi-
tomized by Braj Kachru’s notion of world Englishes. Here we get the other
side of the coin, Kachru’s interests being in the “implications of pluricen-
tricity […], the new and emerging norms of performance, and the bilingual’s
creativity as a manifestation of the contextual and formal hybridity of Eng-
lishes” (1997: 66). Thus the world Englishes paradigm has focused on the
ways in which English has become locally adapted and institutionalized to
create different varieties of English (different Englishes) around the world.
But, while the homogeny argument tends to ignore all these local appropria-
tions and adaptations, this heterogeny argument tends to ignore the broader
political context of the spread of English. Indeed, there is a constant insistence
on the neutrality of English, a position that avoids all the crucial concerns
around both the global and local politics of the language. Furthermore, by
focusing on the standardization of local versions of English, the world Eng-
lishes paradigm shifts the locus of control but not its nature, and by so doing
ignores power and struggle in language. As Suresh Canagarajah (1999) points
out, while Kachru’s position is a useful counter to the centrist arguments of
some linguists, his challenge “does not go far enough, since he is not fully
alert to the ideological implications of periphery Englishes. In his attempt to
systematize the periphery variants, he has to standardize the language himself,
leaving out many eccentric, hybrid forms of local Englishes as too unsystema-
tic. In this, the Kachruvian paradigm follows the logic of the prescriptive and
elitist tendencies of the center linguists” (180).
Both the homogeny and heterogeny positions, therefore, miss crucial as-
pects of the global spread of English. The examples I discussed at the begin-
Beyond Homogeny and Heterogeny 9

ning, for example, cannot be easily accounted for in terms of either model.
And while a combination of the two might seem a desirable option, it is not
clear that such a combination would be possible. So, how can we start to
account for the constant reciprocity between globalization and localization?
How can we get beyond the one-way homogenizing model of Phillipson and
the heterogenous dispersion model of Kachru? How can we account, to take
an example from a different domain, for the processes by which beer produc-
tion became centralized in large breweries in many parts of the world, was
then decentralized after beer drinkers protested against homogenized beer,
and has now become part of a globalized process of localization, in which
heterogeneous beer production is being pursued globally? How can we under-
stand ways in which popular culture in North America emerges as a form of
protest against mainstream culture, is coopted by media marketing, is spread
around the world, and is appropriated by local groups who are now globally
doing local forms of the global?

New Way New Life: Naya Zindagi Naya Jeevan2

If we are looking for new Englishes, we could do worse than starting with the
Asian Dub Foundation’s C D Community Music (2000, London Records 90),
even if (or especially since) Jamaican-style rap sung by young British men of
South Asian background is not often deemed to be a standard form of new
English. As they sing in their song “New Way, New Life”:
And now we’re walking down de street
Wid a brand new pride
A spring inna de step
Wid our heads held high
Young Asian brothers an sisters
Moving forward, side by side
Naya Zindagi Naya Jeevan
New Way New Life
The phrase “Naya Zindagi Naya Jeevan” means “new way, new life” in Hindi
and Urdu. It was the title of a B B C programme in the U K in the 1970s aimed
at Indian and Pakistani immigrants. Here these second-generation South
Asians recall how this programme “Kept our parents alive / Gave them the
will to survive / Working inna de factories / Sometimes sweeping de floor”.
But now a new generation has arrived:

2
Bhaskaran Nayar has informed me that it should be “Nayi Zindagi, Naya Jeevan”
(since Zindagi is feminine, it has to take the feminine form of the adjective). I am also
indebted to Bhaskaran for explaining some of the multiple layers of meaning in this
phrase.
10 A LASTAIR P ENNYCOOK

And we’re supposed to be cool

Inna de dance our riddims rule
But we knew it all along
Cos our parents made us strong
Never abandoned our culture
Just been moving it along
Technology our tradition
Innovation inna the song
Now de struggle continues
To reverse every wrong
New heroines an heroes
Inna de battle we belong
When we reach de glass ceiling
We will blow it sky high
Naya Zindagi Naya Jeevan
New Way New Life
What is interesting, it seems to me, is the mixtures and ironies here. While
their parents kept them strong, never abandoning their culture, they have been
moving it along – indeed, not just shifting it along, but rather shifting it into a
quite different space, an African-Caribbean rap celebration of the new life of
second-generation South Asian youths in London, a space that their factory-
working parents who watched Naya Zindagi Naya Jeevan on T V in the 1970s
might find it hard to accept as an extension of the cultures they have main-
tained. This fluid mixture of cultural heritage (a transformed version of South
Asian cultures) and popular culture (an appropriated style of London-Carib-
bean but also global rap), of change and tradition, of border crossing and
ethnic affiliation, of global appropriation and local contextualization, is in
many ways what the new global order is about. This is neither homogeniza-
tion nor heterogenization.
Similar contexts can be found in Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth. As
Millat and Majid, the twin sons of Bengali parents, walk down a street, they
start ‘taxing’ objects as they pass:
Millat and Majid jumped into action. The practice of ‘taxing’ something,
whereby one lays claims, like a newly arrived colonizer, to items in a street
that do not belong to you, was well known and beloved to both of them. ‘Cha,
man! Believe, I don’t want to tax dat crap,’ said Millat with the Jamaican
accent that all kids, whatever their nationality, used to express scorn. (145)
Later, Smith describes Raggastanis who
spoke a strange mix of Jamaican patois, Bengali, Gujarati and English. Their
ethos, their manifesto, if it could be called that, was equally a hybrid thing:
Allah featured, but more as a collective big brother than a supreme being, a
Beyond Homogeny and Heterogeny 11

hard-as-fuck geezer who would fight in their corner if necessary; Kung Fu and
the works of Bruce Lee were also central to the philosophy; added to this was
a smattering of Black Power (as embodied by the album Fear of a Black
Planet, Public Enemy); but mainly their mission was to put the Invincible
back in Indian, the Bad-aaaass back in Bengali, the P-Funk back in Pakistani.
(200)
This echoes the work of Ben Rampton’s extensive study of what he calls
‘crossing’, “the use of language varieties associated with social or ethnic
groups that the speaker does not normally ‘belong’ to” (1995: 14). As he
shows, Jamaican creole, Panjabi, Asian English and standard English (and
note that S E is included here as a resource usable for certain effects) were
used by different speakers for different effects and allegiances: “these lingu-
istic enunciations of group identity traversed the boundaries of biological
descent […] crossing involved the active ongoing construction of a new
inheritance from within multiracial interaction itself” (297). And again, as
Rampton shows, one important site for such verbal interaction was around
popular music.
From a cultural-imperialist framework, the global spread of rap and hip-
hop is clearly orchestrated by the major recording companies, even if the
sentiments of rap music may run counter to larger cultural and political
agendas. A closer look at contexts of its spread and use, however, suggests a
more complex picture. As Bent Preisler points out, although it may have been
true in the past, it is no longer the case in many E F L contexts that English is
learned only through formal, classroom contexts. Rather,
informal use of English – especially in the form of code-switching – has
become an inherent, indeed a defining, aspect of the many Anglo-American-
oriented youth subcultures which directly or indirectly influence the language
and other behavioural patterns of young people generally, in Denmark as well
as in other E F L countries. It is impossible to explain the status of English in,
and impact on, Danish society (as this is reflected, for example, in advertising
and other areas of the Danish media) without understanding the informal
function of the English language, and indeed its sociolinguistic significance, in
the Anglo-American-oriented subculture. (1999: 244)
Preisler goes on to argue that there is far less variation in the forms of ‘Eng-
lish from above’ (“the promotion of English by the hegemonic culture for
purposes of ‘international communication’”) than in ‘English from below’
(“the informal – active or passive – use of English as an expression of sub-
cultural identity and style”) (259), and argues that “the social forces of the
subcultural environment are […], generally speaking, more successful than
the classroom at ensuring the learning of active functional variation in
English” (260).
12 A LASTAIR P ENNYCOOK

As an example, he lists the vocabulary of a group of Danish hip-hop “street

dancers”, which includes techniques and styles of break-dancing (electric
boogie, windmills etc.), rap and DJ (ragamuffin, scratch etc.), graffiti (tag,
bombing etc.) and hip-hop mythology (battle, biting etc.).

Terms used by the Danish hip-hop group ‘Out of Control’

Domains of hip-hop Terminology
Techniques and styles of break-dancing Boogie, windmills, back spin, head spin,
turtle, cracking, waves, isolation,
backspreads, locking, skeets etc
Rap and DJ Ragamuffin, scratch, mixer, cut-backs,
cross-fader, break-beat, etc.
Graffiti Tag, bomb, jams, cipher, burn-off, wild-
style, straight-letters, piece, throw-up,
whole-cars, windows, etc
Hip-hop mythology Battle, biting, wanne-be, dope, pusher,
graffiti-trip, hang-out, low-life, riot, stick-
up, etc
Adapted from Preisler (1999)

Rather strangely, Preisler backs away from the interesting implications of this
by arguing that “the form of English taught in an E F L country should be
determined only by the degree in which it will enable non-native speakers to
cope with the linguistic aspects of internationalisation as it affects their own
lives” (263) and that this should therefore be “Standard English in its two
main regional forms” (264): ie, Standard British or American English. He
goes on to suggest that “If English is learned simply as a lingua franca – ie, if
the teaching of E F L is not firmly rooted in the cultural context of native
speakers – there is a danger that it will become unidiomatic […] With the
evolution of a multiplicity of culturally autonomous Englishes, Standard Eng-
lish maintained as an instrument of cross-cultural communication will only be
effective at the level of communicative competence to the extent that it is
based on shared cultural assumptions” (265).
But all of this seems to miss the point that hip-hop is a form of globalizing
culture that is being appropriated. It is a form of cross-cultural communica-
tion. These Danish kids have mastered a domain of international English that
indeed puts them in touch with other kids around the world. Global rap /hip-
hop language is a form of international English.3 If this is part of a fast-

3
It also occurs in other languages and in quite similar hybrid ways, as in current
French rap with its mixture of French, North African Arabic, and Caribbean creoles.
Beyond Homogeny and Heterogeny 13

globalizing world in relationship to English, then this is what we need to start

to deal with in English classes. If engaging with forms of rap and hip-hop
exposes learners to varieties of English, or “active functional variation”, then
these are probably far more useful pedagogically than more homogeneous
forms of standardized English. Since these are the forms of popular culture in
which young people are investing, then it is these that, as educators, we need
to start engaging with. And as part of this emerging picture of globalization
and English, this is clearly reducible neither to homogenizing effects of
globalization nor to heterogenizing forms of adaptation, but, rather, involves
complex interaction among global forms and intermixed local forms.
Awad Ibrahim’s (1999) research on the ways in which African students
studying in a Franco-Ontarian school in Canada identify with forms of hip-
hop adds another dimension to this picture. As he shows, these students,
entering the racialized world of North America, ‘become Black’ and start to
redefine their identities in terms of the available social and cultural categories
on the new continent. In doing so, they increasingly identify with forms of
black culture and black language, particularly hip-hop and Black English. Rap
and hip-hop, he shows, are “influential sites in African students’ processes of
becoming Black, which in turn affected what and how the students learned”
(364). The choice of these cultural forms and the position on the margins
associated with being black was “simultaneously an act of investment, an
expression of desire, and a deliberate counterhegemonic undertaking”. Rap,
he goes on to suggest, “must be read as an act of resistance” (365–66).
In terms of a pedagogical and curricular response to these observations,
Ibrahim insists that curricula need to engage with rap, hip-hop and other
forms of black popular culture: “In the case of African youths, whose
language and identity are we as T E S O L professionals teaching and assuming
in the classroom if we do not engage rap and hip-hop?” (366). There are two
sides to this: on the one hand, the need to incorporate ‘minority’ linguistic and
cultural forms into the classroom: “To identify rap and hip-hop as curriculum
sites in this context is to legitimise otherwise illegitimate forms of knowl-
edge” (366); on the other, the importance of getting those in dominant cultural
groups (teachers, other students) to “be able to see multiple ways of speaking,
being, and learning” (367). He concludes that “maybe the time has come to
close the split between minority students’ identities and the school curriculum
and between those identities and classroom pedagogies, subjects and
materials” (367).
This, then, takes this argument further: We are dealing once again with the
global reach of rap and hip-hop, but in another configuration. Here we are
seeing popular multiculturalism, the identification with particular cultural
forms as part of a process of changing identities. If we take Ibrahim’s sugges-
14 A LASTAIR P ENNYCOOK

tions seriously, our curricula need to engage with forms of popular culture,
not, as he points out, as an uncritical adoption, but as a process of critical
investigation. And here we also see English intimately tied up with this. As
with Preisler’s street dancers, this isn’t a standard international form of
English, but a mixture of the global and the local, forms of English that are
moving internationally, yet are also taken up as a form of resistance, mixed
with other languages, appropriated. Thus, what we see here is that the ques-
tion is not globalization or localization, homogeneity or heterogeneity, Eng-
lish or mother tongues, but the need to engage with the mixed, hybrid, cultural
codes of the street.
Meanwhile back in Australia, MC Trey (Island Rappers, SBS, 4 June
1999), a Fijian-Australian rapper, explains that
I’m into hip-hop because it has all those elements that you can express
yourself, you know, like in Fiji, they have, you know, their art and their
dancing, and their music, you know, and I feel that hip-hop has that. It’s one
of the only modern art forms where you’ve got, you know, your breaking,
your DJ-ing, graffiti, your MC-ing, you know, your story-telling.
She goes on:
I feel that MC-ing is definitely an extension of oral tradition, like just in the
islands they used to sit around the Kuva Bowl, and their story-telling, you
know, a lot of it was passed down through word of mouth, they didn’t have
much documentation.
It is worth dwelling on the significance of these arguments for a moment.
Here we have hip-hop in English being claimed as akin to a form of cultural
maintenance or revival. This is a form of hip-hop that reflects the oral tradi-
tions of Fiji, the art and carving (via graffiti), the dancing and the music. As
with the Asian Dub Foundation, this pride in a cultural heritage is one that
may be hard for a previous generation to identify with: South Asian cultures
being moved along through Jamaican rap; Fijian cultures being extended
through hip-hop. Once again, there is no space here for either a simple homo-
genizing thesis or a simple heterogenizing thesis. This is a far more complex
space.

Global and worldly Englishes

What framework might help us better understand some of these complexities?
One useful way forward can be found in the work of Walter Mignolo (2000).
Drawing on the distinction (used by the Brazilian sociologist and cultural
critic Renato Ortiz and the Martinican philosopher and writer Edouard Glis-
sant) between globalization and mundialización, Mignolo suggests that the
Beyond Homogeny and Heterogeny 15

first may be seen as a series of overlapping global designs, as a five-hundred-

year history of European designs for the world: the Christian mission to bring
enlightenment to the world, the Civilizing attempt to spread European culture,
the Development model to promote particular political and economic beha-
viours, and the Global Market framework for interdependent trade and com-
munication. It is interesting to note that the globalization of English has long
been mapped onto these phases:
Ours is the language of the arts and sciences, of trade and commerce, of
civilization and religious liberty [...]. It is a store-house of the varied knowl-
edge which brings a nation within the pale of civilization and Christianity [...].
Already it is the language of the Bible [...]. So prevalent is this language
already become, as to betoken that it may soon become the language of
international communication for the world. (Read 1849, quoted in Bailey
1991: 116)
The second term, which I am here translating as worldliness,4 may be seen in
terms of “local histories in which global histories are enacted or where they
have to be adapted, adopted, transformed, and rearticulated” (Mignolo 2000:
278). This, then, is the site of resistance, change, adaptation and reformula-
tion. It is akin to what Canagarajah (1999) describes as a ‘resistance per-
spective’, highlighting the ways in which people in postcolonial contexts
“may find ways to negotiate, alter and oppose political structures, and
reconstruct their languages, cultures and identities to their advantage. The
intention is not to reject English, but to reconstitute it in more inclusive,
ethical, and democratic terms” (2). And this is not merely a process of appro-
priation and hybridization (processes commonly associated with the hetero-
genization position) but rather a “celebration of bi or pluri languaging”, a
focus on “the crack in the global process between local histories and global
designs, between ‘mundialización’ and globalisation, from languages to social
movements” (Mignolo 2000: 250). It is, then, a focus on the constant move-
ment back and forth across languages.
On the one hand, then, we have a way of focusing on the process of
globalization that does not merely reduce it to homogenization. This is a far
more complex version of the spread of English, its institutionalization, and its
role relative to other languages, than some versions of globalization would
suggest. But it is also a version that allows for critique of this process: It does
highlight the politics, the inequalities, the cultural effects of English. On the

4
Mignolo uses the French, Spanish and Portuguese terms. I have chosen to use the
term ‘worldliness’, which I used in earlier attempts (eg, 1994) to deal with these issues,
though I then used it to cover both globalization and worldliness. It may be a more
effective term in the more limited sense I am trying to give it here.
16 A LASTAIR P ENNYCOOK

other hand, we have the worldliness of English, which allows us to understand

critically both the ways in which it may operate in medical settings in South
Africa, Hong Kong and Malaya, and ways in which it may be taken up,
appropriated and changed in the fast, mixing world of popular culture. “How
many deviations, changes, siftings, warpings, and twistings; how many
opportunities for blackmail and corruption, before, transformed, sometimes
unrecognisable, the stories of the poor who do not speak English reach their
rulers, who are hand-picked, among their own peoples, on the basis of their
knowledge of English?” “MC-ing is definitely an extension of oral tradition
[…] Hip hop’s like documentation of your life, what your experiences, what
your thoughts, your philosophies, you know, it’s reality-based […].” “And
now we’re walking down de street / Wid a brand new pride / A spring inna de
step / Wid our heads held high / Young Asian brothers an sisters / Moving
forward, side by side / Naya Zindagi Naya Jeevan / New Way New Life” …

WORKS CITED
Asian Dub Foundation (2000). Community Music (C D ), London: London Records
90.
Bailey, Richard W. (1991). Images of English: a Cultural History of the Language
(Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P).
Canagarajah, A. Suresh (1999). Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teach-
ing (Oxford: Oxford UP).
Crawford, Athalie (1999). ‘ “ We can’t all understand the whites’ language”: An
analysis of monolingual health services in a multilingual society,’ International
Journal of the Sociology of Language 136: 27–45.
Crystal, David (1997). English as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
Han Suyin [Elizabeth Comber] (1961). And the Rain My Drink (1956; Harmonds-
worth: Penguin).
Hanson, John (1997). ‘The mother of all tongues’ [review of David Crystal, English
as a Global Language], Times Higher Education Supplement 1288 (11 July): 22.
Ibrahim, Awad M. (1999). ‘Becoming black: Rap and hip-hop, race, gender,
identity, and the politics of E S L learning,’ T E S O L Quarterly 33: 349–70.
Kachru, Braj B. (1997). ‘World Englishes and English-using communities,’ Annual
Review of Applied Linguistics 17: 66–87.
Mignolo, Walter D. (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern
Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP).
Ordóñez, Elmer A. (1999). ‘English and decolonisation,’ Journal of Asian English
Studies 2.1–2: 17–21.
Pennycook, Alastair (1994). The Cultural Politics of English as an International
Language (London: Longman).
—— (2001). Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction (Mahwah NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).
Beyond Homogeny and Heterogeny 17

Phillipson, Robert (1992). Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP).

—— (1999). ‘Voice in global English: Unheard chords in Crystal loud and clear’
[review of David Crystal, English as a Global Language], Applied Linguistics
20: 265–76.
Preisler, Bent (1999). ‘Functions and forms of English in a European E F L country,’
in Standard English: The Widening Debate, ed. Tony Bex and Richard J. Watt
(London: Routledge): 239–67.
Rampton, Ben (1995). Crossing: Language and Ethnicity Among Adolescents (Lon-
don: Longman).
Smith, Zadie (2000). White Teeth (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

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English for the Globe, or Only for Globe-Trotters?
The World of the EU

Robert Phillipson
Copenhagen Business School

ABSTRACT
There is a case for challenging orthodox presentations of ‘global English’,
and for language policy to be studied more widely. The language dimension
of europeanization involves major language policy challenges. How lan-
guage issues are handled in the E U is exemplified in four vignettes, which
are commented on. They show a clear need for more explicit language
policy formation, so as to challenge language hierarchies and promote equal-
ity. Many of the factors contributing to an increased use of English in con-
tinental Europe are summarized. A plea is made for more effort to be put
into clarifying the criteria that should guide language policy in Europe so
that all languages can thrive.

Introduction

A
CADEMICS WITH ‘ E N G L I S H ’ as part of their professional iden-
tity have to confront the fact that what English is seen as covering
increases constantly, the geographical and cultural range of English
textually and contextually, and permissible approaches to it. But to savour the
hybridity of English, we need to challenge the essentializing mythologies of
English Studies. One such is the racist hierarchization underlying the ranking
of the English language as the genuine article in Britain and the neo-Europes,
different in kind from the upstart, derivative ‘new Englishes’ of former
colonies, and creoles and pidgins. Saliloko Mufwene has shown that these
labelling categories do not hold scientific water (1997). They do, though,
speak volumes on the dubious epistemological paternity of the hierarchies of
20 R OBERT P HILLIPSON

the legitimate and illegitimate offspring of English, to use Mufwene’s brilliant

image.
I would also claim that much discourse on ‘global English’ rests on equally
unstable scholarly foundations: ‘English as a world language’ tends to be used
uncritically, as though English serves all the world’s citizens equally well, as
though its postulated ‘universality’ makes it equally relevant everywhere, as
though it can function independently of contemporary power balances, global
and local (on Crystal 1997 see Phillipson 1999; on English in the new world
order, see Phillipson 2000b).
I shall complexify our English identities by suggesting that language
policy ought to be central to the study of contemporary English, because of
the interlocking of English with the multiple manifestations of globalization.
To put it bluntly, as English is a key dimension of globalization and european-
ization, are English departments merely assisting the work of transnational
corporations if English is studied without a serious focus on international and
national linguistic hierarchies and the forces that determine these? What is
English Studies doing about a world that is increasingly polarized between
English-speaking haves and non-English-speaking have-nots, whether in
America, Asia, Africa or Europe? We academic globe-trotters ought to be in a
better position than our counterparts in the financial, political, military, and
business worlds to analyse how the dominance of English is maintained, and
to contribute to the implementation of policies that ensure rights for speakers
of all languages.
The essay addresses such issues by presenting the overall context of on-
going supra-national language policy in the E U , then exemplifying how E U
language policies are handled. It identifies a number of reasons for the un-
checked contemporary expansion of English, and concludes by stating that
language policy issues urgently need to be addressed at many levels and in
many ways, if democratic communication in the E U is to be ensured.
George Bernard Shaw’s aphorism that “the British and the Americans are
divided by a common language” could perhaps be re-phrased as “Europeans
are being united by a language that they do not have in common.” Alterna-
tively, building on Benedict Anderson’s “the nation is an imagined political
community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”
(1983), “Europe is an imagined political community – and imagined with
inherently limited linguistic competence and a single sovereign language”.
Shaw, born in 1856, was in no doubt about what globalization was all about.
He observed presciently in 1912: “What has been happening in my lifetime
is the Americanization of the world” (cited in Holroyd 1997: 660). English
is central to this.
English for the Globe, or Only For Globe-Trotters? 21

The EU supra-national linguistic mosaic

The European Union is a test case for policies that respect linguistic diversity,
and for principles of equality, both for the individual language user and for a
range of languages (Delanty 1995, Coulmas 1991, Labrie 1993, European
Cultural Foundation 1999, Wright 2000, Loos 2000, Melander 2000, Pym
2000, van Els 2000). In principle the 11 official languages of the 15 member
states have equal rights, but with the exception of certain minimal rights to
translation (an essential service, as documents emanating from Brussels have
the force of law in member states, overriding national legislation) and inter-
pretation (particularly for Members of the European Parliament and senior
politicians), there is unofficial acceptance of a linguistic hierarchy with
French and English at the top. In most other international fora in Europe
(N A T O , scientific writing, commerce, youth culture, media, etc.), English is
the sole dominant language.
Language policy is such a sensitive political issue that serious analysis of
how the present system operates in E U institutions and networking has never
been undertaken, nor do we have a very clear idea as to what its real costs are,
and whether they are a good investment. Nor have efforts been made to work
out how a reformed policy could ensure real equality of communication
between speakers of different languages. Language permeates all fields of E U
colla-boration, and is such an existential identity marker, personally (whether
used as a mother tongue or a foreign language) and nationally, that attitudes to
language matters are subjective and often deeply rooted in myths and igno-
rance. As language, like culture and education, is in principle a matter for the
member states rather than the Union, most supra-national policies remain
implicit and covert. The Nice summit of December 2000 demonstrated that
the interface between national interests and supra-national planning is a slip-
pery and treacherous one. The various E U schemes for promoting language
learning, and student and researcher mobility (L I N G U A , S O C R A T E S , etc.)
probably serve to strengthen English as much as the learning of other national
languages.
The ongoing formation of the E U permeates all societal domains. A novel
postnational structure is in the making, one that German and French political
leaders are articulating. The member states have transferred a fair measure of
sovereignty to the supra-national level, where policies are hammered out in
partnership. All eleven languages are therefore now being used in new inter-
national contexts, hence are expanding their repertoires and contexts of use.
But simultaneously there are hierarchization processes at work that favour the
dominant languages and the modes of thought associated with them. In E U
internal and external relations, English is consolidating the position it has
acquired in many domains and networks world-wide.
22 R OBERT P HILLIPSON

Glimpses of language policy in action (vignettes)

and language policy analysis (comments)
Vignette 1. During the Finnish E U presidency of 1999, there was a clash be-
tween Germany and Finland about the number of working languages at
informal ministerial meetings. The rule of thumb is the host country’s lan-
guage, English and French. The political problem was solved by concessions
to speakers of the language of a country that is important demographically
(German is the mother tongue of a quarter of E U citizens), and economically
(Germany foots a large part of the E U bill), leaving speakers of other ‘big’
languages, Spanish and Italian, in limbo, in the company of the ‘small’
languages.
Comment. Language problems are fixed pragmatically, without issues of
principle, of language rights, or criteria for organizing democratic equality of
communication being explored. This ‘solution’ is likely to widen the gap
between the “big” member states and the rest, and to confirm fears about E U
institutions being undemocratic and unaccountable. Speakers of some
languages have de facto more rights than speakers of other languages. As in
George Orwell’s world, some are more equal than others, and language
plays a decisive role in upholding inequality (see Phillipson 2000b).
Vignette 2. During the 1995 French presidency of the E U , the French govern-
ment proposed a restriction on the number of working languages in E U
institutions, and a language pact to promote trilingualism in education. This
triggered resistance and disagreement, and no action resulted. The French
Presidency of 2000 did not push language policy issues, whereas it continued
its efforts to strengthen European cultural industries.
Comment. Empirical research (Schlossmacher 1996, Quell 1997) and work-
ing groups of the European Parliament have shown that M E P s are reluctant to
see any change in the existing language services, whereas civil servants in the
Commission would favour new regulations. People from different member
states look at language policy issues in widely differing ways. The manage-
ment of supra-national language policy is at present largely being left to the
market forces that reinforce official and unofficial linguistic hierarchies.
However, challenge may come from transnational corporations that would
like the E U to implement an English-only policy. A recent doctoral study in
international law in the U S A (Feld 1998) concludes that French language
protection measures, specifically the Loi Toubon, are in conflict with the
Maastricht Treaty and the principles of a common market with the free
movement of goods, services, labour, and capital. Corporate lawyers may
therefore soon choose to challenge national language legislation on precisely
English for the Globe, or Only For Globe-Trotters? 23

these grounds. Feld recommends a single language to unify the market and
member states. The study reflects the monolingual world-view of america-
nization, subtly marketed as europeanization, under cover of globalization. A
laissez-faire language policy therefore involves major risks for all languages
other than English.
Vignette 3. Countries applying for admission to the E U have not raised the
issue of what rights their languages will have when the E U expands. The
Czechs, Estonians, Hungarians, Poles, etc. are presumably assuming that their
languages will have the same rights as working languages, in speech and
writing, and as official languages as the current eleven. The official position
of the Commission and Joint Interpreting and Conference Service is that all
eleven languages, as well as the languages of any states that join the E U , are
treated equally,1 but, so far as translation goes, this equality refers to “out-
bound” texts, only, as opposed to the in-house languages, which are English
and French, and “inbound” texts, which can be in any of the official lan-
guages.
Comment. The logistics of operating with vastly increased numbers of inter-
pretation pairs make change inevitable. For instance, to expand from eleven to
fifteen languages increases the number of possible combinations from 110 to
210. There will probably therefore be restrictions on the use of newly arrived
languages, especially in oral communication. The relay system (interpretation
in two phases via a linking or pivot language) will limp on, impoverishing the
quality of communication both in production (speakers simplify) and recep-
tion (listeners switch off), unless more drastic solutions (eg, providing inter-
pretation into few languages) are implemented. Changes in the operation of
E U language policy ought to be openly debated, after thorough analysis of
the issues, and identification of the strengths and weaknesses of each possible
change.
Vignette 4. Romano Prodi and Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, the Danish Prime
Minister, will never be as effective in English or French as in their mother
tongues. It is also totally unreasonable to expect them to be so, but hegemonic
hierarchization processes lead to an acceptance of unequal communication
rights.
Comment. The fact that second language users are often unclear reinforces
the need for serious scrutiny of the issues. The British and the French have
always promoted their languages internationally because they know that this

1
See http://scic.cec.eu.int/scicnews/press/2001/guardian19.04.pdf; http://europa.
eu.int/comm/ translation/en/eyl/speech.pdf.
24 R OBERT P HILLIPSON

gives them strategic and commercial advantages. The formation of more egal-
itarian policies presupposes a clarification of principles of equality between
language users (Esperanto being the ideal case, and not merely a utopia but a
reality for its speakers) and mechanisms for their implementation.
These vignettes provide a few snapshots of the complicated interface between
national and supranational language policy. Relatively little empirical docu-
mentation of the problems exists, and the issues are regarded as politically
explosive. Inaction is compounded by the absence of any forum in European
civil society, or in continental political or professional associations, where
language policy is being analysed in depth. More visionary scenarios for
future E U language policies, and the elaboration of practical measures for
their implementation, are therefore urgently needed.

Factors contributing to the increased use of English

A large number of factors are contributing to the vigorous expansion of Eng-
lish in the E U . They can be briefly summarized.
1. The expansion of English is an integral dimension of ongoing global-
ization processes. Both western and eastern Europe are currently experi-
encing linguistic incorporation. The transition from a world of colonial
linguistic imperialism to a postmodern, postnational, neoliberal world has
required only minor modifications in the structural and ideological
legitimation of English as a dominant language. The corporate world,
through the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, O E C D , N A T O ,
et al, is likely to push for acceptance of English throughout the E U
market. There has been some work exploring English as a ‘post-imperial
language’ in the sense that corporate interests have taken over from the
nation state (Fishman, Conrad & Rubal–Lopez, ed. 1996), and of the
interlocking of englishization with globalization (Phillipson & Skutnabb–
Kangas 1999).
2. In the entire post-1945 period, the Americans and British have invested
heavily in promoting their language (Phillipson 1992). The Americans
fought the cultural cold war on a number of ideological fronts (Saunders
1999). As soon as Britain decided to join the E U , funds were made avail-
able so that the British Council could strengthen British involvement in
English teaching in the E U in Brussels and throughout Europe.
3. Nationalism studies demonstrate that across the E U there have for cen-
turies been major differences in the ideologies underpinning the forma-
tion of states, and in the role ascribed to language in these. At one ex-
treme there is jus sanguinis, a Herderian faith in a close bond between
ethnolinguistic group and the state (Germany); at the other jus soli,
English for the Globe, or Only For Globe-Trotters? 25

citizenship, and the language of the republic (France). The legitimation of

most states contains elements from each ideology. Such basic terms as
language and dialect simply mean different things in France, Germany
and the U K (Barbour & Carmichael 2000: 9). These conceptual differ-
ences constitute a major hurdle which any common efforts to elaborate a
supra-national language strategy must respect. They inevitably com-
plicate political and scholarly discourse about language policy. They are
one element in national political socialization that contributes to a lot of
the rhetoric of European unity remaining wishful thinking in the everyday
life of the Commission and Parliament (Abélès in European Cultural
Foundation 1999: 111–18). A further complication is that a vital term like
“multilingualism” is used in imprecise and conflicting ways in E U
rhetoric. The availability of interpretation services permits individuals to
remain monolingual. The obligation to translate documents emanating
from Brussels into the eleven official languages means that states can
continue to function monolingually in their internal affairs, though com-
petence in French and English is necessary for interaction with Brussels.
4. Language awareness ranges widely between and within each E U
country. It tends to be high in cultures which are strong on the rhetoric of
the intrinsic superiority of their language (France), or formerly colonized
countries (Finland, Greece), and lower elsewhere. Such variation affects
attitudes to whether a language is perceived as being threatened and
needing “defence” (in France, yes; in Denmark, no).
5. Responsibility for language policy tends to be shared between ministries
of foreign affairs, education, culture, research, and commerce. In some
states, responsibility may not be explicitly placed anywhere. There is
therefore a lack of infrastructure, or at least a very uneven one, to ensure
co-ordinated, well-informed language policy at the national, sub-national,
and supra-national levels in each member state. Germany’s federal struc-
ture is an additional complicating, or paralysing, factor. This unprepared-
ness is then repeated at the supra-national level. Recent efforts by the
Council of Europe (2000) to strengthen efforts by member states to
develop language policy analysis, and formulate realistic plans for in-
creased multilingualism, are likely to founder for the same reason.
6. There is a poor scholarly infrastructure at European universities and
research institutes for the analysis of language policy, the political socio-
logy of language, bilingual education, and international law in relation to
language and human rights. The area is under-funded, postgraduate train-
ing is scattered and limited. There is a risk that linguists are under-
qualified in the social sciences, and will continue work in a Saussurean
tradition that cuts them off from social reality when they focus on a
26 R OBERT P HILLIPSON

standard language, and ignore the processes of state formation that have
led to “a unified linguistic market, dominated by the official language”
(Bourdieu 1991: 45).
7. The fact that English is widely used (there are now books and journals on
the English languages, and it is referred to by linguists as a poly-centric
language), a language also used extensively by non-native speakers,
means that there is no simple correlation between use of a given language
and the interests of a particular state. This complicates the issue of pin-
ning down whose interests the use of English serves best.
8. There is a popular demand for English. The language is pervasively
visible in many domains, personal and professional. Competence in Eng-
lish is increasingly necessary for employment and higher education, it
accesses the internet and travel, it facilitates communication in many
contexts. Its value, economic and cultural, therefore ensures that com-
petence in English is an attractive goal. The current high instrumental
value of English may obscure the fact that competence in other languages
is also desirable, and that linguistic capital in several languages may soon
be the norm (Grin 2001).
9. Substantial investment in the teaching of English in the education systems
of continental European education systems (teacher training, time-table
space, etc.) represents a response by these states to the need for citizens to
be competent in foreign languages. In recent decades English has been
overwhelmingly learned as the first foreign language, which paves the
way for its utilization in many forms of international contact (Labrie &
Quell 1997).
10. Levels of multilingual competence vary substantially within and across
member states. The foreign language competence of citizens of ‘small’
countries (the Netherlands, Sweden, …) is generally higher than that of
people from countries that have traditionally regarded themselves as
linguistically self-sufficient, like Germany or Spain (Rosen et al. 2000).
States also vary in the status and rights accorded to minority languages.
These factors influence people’s experience of and attitudes to bilingual-
ism and multilingualism in all domains and types of social interaction,
formal and informal. The greater focus on minority rights, devolution,
and regional autonomy of recent years demonstrates that states are con-
stantly being re-negotiated, and change over time (Skutnabb–Kangas
2000). Simultaneously states are having to relinquish territory tradition-
ally occupied by the dominant national language to English. The lingu-
istic marketplace is fluid and dynamic.
English for the Globe, or Only For Globe-Trotters? 27

Concluding comment
The construction of “Europe” involves complex processes of merging
national and supra-national interests and policies. A range of overt and covert
language policies is in place, some of which give some support to multi-
lingualism and cultural diversity. However, pragmatic considerations, market
forces, and a myth of the equality of the official languages ensure that some
languages are more equal than others. This represents a continuation of the
historical hierarchization processes that have privileged a single language
within each state, and languages of conquest and empire internationally.
If language policy is to be put on a surer, more democratic footing, the
points identified in relation to each of the vignettes, and each of the factors
contributing to the expansion of English, need to be addressed. Concentration
on one, and ignoring the rest, is a recipe for failure. We must ensure that
belief that a single measure can solve multiple problems in myriad contexts, a
linguistic ‘quick fix’ (like the marketing of an ‘early start’ to foreign language
learning as a panacea), does not intervene to sidetrack the more fundamental
issues. The paralysis in the E U on language policy is symptomatic of the
uneasy tension between national and supra-national interests, but enlargement
will require policy decisions that will probably restrict the use of official and
working languages. We need imaginative and realistic scenarios that, to adapt
a phrase used initially by Neville Alexander about Afrikaans, when it was a
dominant language, will reduce English to equality.
One practical proposal could be that interpretation should be provided only
into a restricted set of languages, for instance English, Esperanto and French,
this measure ensuring that everyone can speak in their own official language,
but meaning that over a period of time, activities at the supra-national level
will presuppose receptive competence in specific languages (see Council of
Europe 2000: 129–36).
Clarifying whether and in what sense English functions as a lingua franca
is also needed, and if so, whose norms underpin it. If the norms are not
Anglo-American, what standards are in force, and what interests do they serve
best and worst, granted that linguistic hierarchies dovetail with power of
various sorts?
There is an urgent need for a clarification of the criteria that can underpin
the management of linguistic diversity in E U institutions and international
contacts, as a preliminary step towards the elaboration of scenarios and sys-
tems that can ensure equality of communication for speakers of different
languages. Constructive dialogue between policy-makers and scholars in the
field of language policy is a prerequisite for this. Experience in Australia,
South Africa and elsewhere is relevant, combined with research in linguistic
imperialism, language rights, the economics of language, multilingual educa-
28 R OBERT P HILLIPSON

tion, and critical discourse analysis. These can contribute to clarifying the
criteria that can contribute to the formulation of language policies that main-
tain linguistic diversity and promote equitable communication. At present the
risk is that academics are engaged in a linguistic glass bead game which, as in
Hermann Hesse’s contemplative intellectual world, is divorced from political
realities. In Brussels, language policy is more akin to a game of linguistic
poker in which speakers of English, as L1 or L2, increasingly hold all the
good cards. My new book, English-Only Europe? Language Policy Chal-
lenges (2002) attempts to ensure more valid foundations for the analysis of
language policy in Europe.

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30 R OBERT P HILLIPSON

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[
Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity
The Threat From Killer Languages

Tove Skutnabb–Kangas
University of Roskilde, Denmark

ABSTRACT
The essay is structured as follows. First I sum up a few basics about the state
of the world’s languages. Then I discuss one argument for why everybody
should be multilingual. I have chosen one of the less well known arguments,
the relationship between biodiversity and linguistic and cultural diversity.
Next I claim that most indigenous and minority education participates in
committing linguistic genocide according to the United Nations definitions
of genocide, and examine to what extent human rights instruments can be
used to prevent this and to support the maintenance of linguistic diversity. I
tie some of the arguments together in a short discussion of self-determina-
tion, ‘ethnic conflict’ and linguistic human rights, using Subcommandante
Marcos. Finally, I say a few words about one aspect of ecology, namely the
prerequisites for ruining the planet beyond repair (from Jared Diamond),
which I hope my readers can apply to linguistic and cultural ecologies.

The Okanagan word for ‘our place on the land’ and ‘our language’ is the
same. We think of our language as the language of the land. This means
that the land has taught us our language. The way we survived is to speak
the language that the land offered us as its teachings. To know all the
plants, animals, seasons, and geography is to construct language for them.
We also refer to the land and our bodies with the same root syllable.
This means that the flesh that is our body is pieces of the land that came to
us through the things that this land is. The soil, the water, the air, and all
the other life forms contributed parts to be our flesh. We are our land/place.
Not to know and to celebrate this is to be without language and without
land. It is to be dis-placed [...] I know what it feels like to be an endangered
species on my land, to see the land dying with us. It is my body that is
32 T OVE S KUTTNABB –K ANGAS

being torn, deforested, and poisoned by ‘development’. Every fish, plant,

insect, bird, and animal that disappears is part of me dying. I know all their
names, and I touch them with my spirit.1

Introduction: the state of the world’s languages

T
HE EXACT NUMBERS OF LANGUAGES or speakers of lan-
guages are not known (lack of resources for their study) and cannot
be known (the border between languages and other varieties, eg,
dialects, is political, not linguistic). The most useful source on number of
languages, the Ethnologue, edited by Barbara Grimes at the Summer Institute
of Linguistics (a missionary organization) lists almost 6,800 languages in 228
countries.2 But it only mentions 114 Sign languages. Still, there are deaf
people in all societies, and while hearing people have developed spoken, oral
languages, the Deaf have developed Sign languages, full-fledged, complex,
abstract languages (see Branson & Miller 1998, 2000, for brilliant analyses of
the treatment of Sign languages, and Jokinen 2000 for the [lack of] linguistic
human rights of Sign language users). Those who speak about ‘languages’ but
in fact mean oral languages only, participate through invisibilizing sign lan-
guages in killing half the linguistic diversity on earth.
Most of the world’s languages are spoken by relatively few people: the
median number of speakers is probably around 5–6,000 (Posey 1997). Over
95% of the world’s spoken languages have fewer than 1 million native users;
some 5,000 have less than 100,000 speakers and more than 3,000 languages
have fewer than 10,000 speakers. A quarter of the world’s spoken languages
and most of the Sign languages have fewer than 1,000 users, and at least some
500 languages had in 1999 under a hundred speakers (Ethnologue). Some 83–
84% of the world’s languages are endemic: they exist in one country only
(Harmon 1995).
Linguists are today working with the description of the world’s linguistic
diversity in the same way as biologists describe and list the world’s bio-
diversity. There are red books for threatened languages (see Table 2), in the

1
Jeannette Armstrong 1996: 465–66, 470. The relationship between language and
land is seen as sacred. Most non-indigenous people need a lot of guidance to even start
understanding the primacy of land in it. I would like to illustrate this with one example
from Australia. None of the Aboriginal people participating in the reclaiming of the
Awabakal language were descendants of the Awabakal (the last speakers died before
1900) but came from other areas and peoples. Still, they speak about ‘our language’
and ‘our identity’ in connection with Awabakal. In Rob Amery’s words, “the revival
of Awabakal seems to be based primarily on the association of the language with the
land, the language of the place in which a group of Aboriginal people of diverse
origins now live” (1998: 94).
2
See <http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/>
Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: Killer Languages 33

same way as for threatened animals and plants and other species (Table 1). A
language is threatened if it has few users and a weak political status, and,
especially, if children are no longer learning it: ie, when the language is no
longer transmitted to the next generation. There are detailed definitions of the
degree of threat or endangerment:

Table 1. Red lists for threatened animals and plants

<http://www.rbge.org.uk/data/wcmc/plants.by.taxon.html>;
<http://www.wcmc.org.uk/species/plants/plant_redlist.html>;
<http://www. wcmc.org.uk/species/animals/>.
These lists are monitored by World Conservation Monitoring Centre, 219
Huntingdon Road, Cambridge CB3 0DL, UK; email <[email protected]>;
more general web-site <http://www.wcmc.org.uk/species/data/index.html>

Table 2. Red books for threatened languages

Europe: <http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/europe_index.html>
Northeast Asia: <http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/nasia_index.html>
Asia and the Pacific: <http://www.tooyoo.l.u-
tokyo.ac.jp/redbook/asiapacific/asia-index.html>
Africa: <http://www.tooyoo.l.u-tokyo.ac.jp/redbook/africa-index.html>
Databanks for Endangered Finno-Ugric Languages:
<http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/deful.html>; http://www.suri.ee>
Russia: <http://www.eki.ee/books/redbook/>
South America: <http://www.tooyoo.l.u-
tokyo.ac.jp/redbooks/Samerica/index.html>

Habitat destruction – for instance, through logging, spread of agriculture, use

of pesticides, and the poor economic and political situation of the people who
live in the world’s most diverse ecoregions – has been identified as a main
cause of the disappearance of biodiversity. What most people do not know is
that the disappearance of languages may also be or become a very important
cause.
While new trees can be planted and habitats restored, it is much more
difficult to restore languages once they have been murdered. Languages are
today disappearing at a faster pace than ever before in human history. What
happens is linguistic genocide on a massive scale, with formal education and
media as the main concrete culprits but with the world’s political, economic
and military structures as the more basic causal factors. Big languages turn
into killer languages, monsters that gobble up others, when they are learned at
the cost of the smaller ones. Instead, they should and could be learned in
addition to the various mother tongues.
34 T OVE S KUTTNABB –K ANGAS

Even the most ‘optimistic realistic’ linguists now estimate that half of
today’s oral languages may have disappeared or at least not be learned by
children in a 100 years’ time, whereas the ‘pessimistic but realistic’ re-
searchers estimate that we may only have some 10% of today’s oral lan-
guages (or even 5%, some 300 languages) left as vital, non-threatened lan-
guages in the year 2100. 90% may be ‘dead’ or ‘on death row’, ‘moribund’
(negative terms that many, including myself, object to). Languages can, of
course, also be ‘reborn’ or ‘reclaimed’ – there is a handful of examples of
this. Kaurna in Australia is one (see Amery 2000). Those who speak it now
say that it was not dead – even if the last speaker died in the late 1920s – it
was only sleeping. But so far it has happened seldom, and fairly few new lan-
guages arise.
Hearing that languages are disappearing, many people might say: so what?
It might be better for world peace if we all speak a few big languages and
understand each other – only romantic linguists want to preserve the small
ones. Here I present only one of the many counterarguments against linguistic
genocide and for support for the maintenance of linguistic diversity (hereafter
LD): the relationship between linguistic diversity and biodiversity.

The relationship between linguistic diversity and biodiversity

Maintenance of diversities, in the plural, is one end of a continuum where
ecocide and linguistic genocide are at the other end. We start with biodiver-
sity. Monocropping, pesticides, deforestation, genetic engineering and the
wrong use of fertilizers and irrigation have led to an unprecedented decrease
of all kinds of biodiversity, including agrobiodiversity. People consume at
least 7,000 species of plants, but “only 150 species are commercially impor-
tant and about 103 species account for 90 percent of the world’s food crops.
Just three crops – rice, wheat and maize – account for about 60 percent of the
calories and 56 percent of the protein people derive from plants” (Thrupp
1999: 318). The remaining crop diversity (already low) is eroding at 1–2%
and livestock breeds at 5% per annum (Christie & Moonie 1999: 321).
“Almost all farmers’ knowledge of plants and research systems [something
that has been built up during the 12,000 years of agriculture, Thrupp 1999:
318] could become extinct within one or two generations” (Christie &
Moonie 1999: Table 7.5). Likewise, “almost all local knowledge of medicinal
plants and systems as well as the plants themselves could disappear within
one generation” (Table 7.5). “Rainforests are coming down at a rate of 0.9
percent per annum and the pace is picking up. Much of the earth’s remaining
diversity could be gone within one or two generations” (Table 7.5).
Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: Killer Languages 35

Still, linguistic diversity is disappearing relatively much faster than bio-

diversity. Table 3 presents a very simple comparison based on numbers and
extinction rates:

Table 3. Estimates for ‘dead’ or ‘moribund’ species and languages

Percentage ESTIMATES Biological species Languages
estimated to be ‘Optimistic 2% 50%
dead or moribund realistic’
around the year ‘Pessimistic 20% 90%
2100 realistic’

Linguistic and cultural diversity on the one hand and biodiversity on the other
hand are correlated – where one type is high, often the other one is too, and
vice versa. One of the organizations investigating this relationship is Terra-
lingua.3 The conservationist David Harmon is the General Secretary of Terra-
lingua. He has investigated correlations between biological and linguistic
diversity. Harmon has compared endemism of languages and higher verte-
brates (mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians) with the top 25 countries for
each type (1995: 14) (Table 4). I have boldfaced and C A P I T A L I ZE D
those countries which are on both lists. 16 of the 25 countries are on both lists,
a coincidence of 64%. According to Harmon (1995: 6), “it is very unlikely
that this would only be accidental.” Harmon gets the same results with
flowering plants and languages, butterflies and languages, etc. – a high cor-
relation between countries with biological and linguistic megadiversity (see
also Harmon 2002).

Table 4. Endemism in languages and higher vertebrates:

a comparison of the top 25 countries
Endemic languages Number Endemic higher Number
vertebrates
1. PAPUA NEW GUINEA 847 1. AUSTRALIA 1,346

2. INDONESIA 655 2. MEXICO 761

3. Nigeria 376 3. BRAZIL 725

4. INDIA 309 4. INDONESIA 673

5. AUSTRALIA 261 5. Madagascar 537

3
For connections between biodiversity and linguistic and cultural diversity, see
Terralingua’s web-site <http://www.terralingua.org >
36 T OVE S KUTTNABB –K ANGAS

6. MEXICO 230 6. PHILIPPINES 437

7. CAMEROON 201 7. INDIA 373

8. BRAZIL 185 8. PERU 332

9. ZAIRE 158 9. COLOMBIA 330

10. PHILIPPINES 153 10. Ecuador 294

11. USA 143 11. USA 284

12. Vanuatu 105 12. CHINA 256

13. TANZANIA 101 13. PAPUA NEW 203

GUINEA

14. Sudan 97 14. Venezuela 186

15. Malaysia 92 15. Argentina 168

16. ETHIOPIA 90 16. Cuba 152

17. CHINA 77 17. South Africa 146

18. PERU 75 18. ZAIRE 134

19. Chad 74 19. Sri Lanka 126

20. Russia 71 20. New Zealand 120

21. SOLOMON ISLANDS 69 21. TANZANIA 113

22. Nepal 68 22. Japan 112

23. COLOMBIA 55 23. CAMEROON 105

24. Côte d’Ivoire 51 24. SOLOMON 101

ISLANDS

25. Canada 47 25. ETHIOPIA 88

26. Somalia 88

New and exciting research shows mounting evidence for the hypothesis that it
might not only be a correlational relationship. It may also be causal: the two
types of diversities seem to mutually enforce and support each other (see
Maffi 2000). U N E P (United Nations Environmental Program), one of the
organizers of the world summit on biodiversity in Rio de Janeiro in 1992,
published a megavolume called Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity:
A Complementary Contribution to the Global Biodiversity Assessment (Posey,
ed. 1999) summarizing much of this evidence. The strong correlation need not
indicate a direct causal relationship, in the sense that neither type of diversity
Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: Killer Languages 37

should probably be seen directly as an independent variable in relation to the

other. But linguistic and cultural diversity may be decisive mediating vari-
ables in sustaining biodiversity itself, and vice versa, as long as humans are on
the earth. Of course there was no relationship in pre-human times, but as soon
as humans came into existence, they started to influence the rest of nature.
Today it is safe to say that there is no ‘wild’ nature left; all landscapes have
been and are influenced by human action, even those where untrained ob-
servers might not notice it immediately. All landscapes are cultural land-
scapes. Likewise, local nature and people’s detailed knowledge about it and
use of it have influenced the cultures, languages and cosmo-visions of the
people who have been dependent on it for their sustenance. This relationship
between all kinds of diversities is of course what most indigenous peoples
have always known, and they describe their knowledge in several articles in
the Posey volume.
The article on linguistic diversity in it is written by Terralingua’s President,
Luisa Maffi, and myself (Maffi, Skutnabb–Kangas & Andrianarivo 1999; see
also articles in Maffi, ed. 2001). We suggest that if the long-lasting co-
evolution which people have had with their environments from time
immemorial is abruptly disrupted, without nature (and people) getting enough
time to adjust and adapt, we can expect a catastrophe. The adjustment needed
takes hundreds of years, not only decades (see Mühlhäusler 1996). Just to take
one example: nuances in the knowledge about medicinal plants and their use
disappear when indigenous youth in Mexico become bilingual without
teaching in and through the medium of their own languages. The knowledge
is not transferred to Spanish, which does not have the vocabulary for these
nuances (Maffi 1994).
Those of us who discuss these links between biodiversity and linguistic
diversity get attacked by some linguists and others who accuse us of Social
Darwinism. I will use a representative sample of these attacks. One claims
that
relying on biomorphic metaphors implies that dominant languages are fitter
than others and that ‘primitive’ languages, unable to adapt to the modern
world, deserve their fate.4
Many of the accusations have to do with lack of interdisciplinary knowledge.
Most linguists do not know enough about present-day biology to be able to
see what the biological metaphors and the claims of a causal relationship
stand for. Let’s deconstruct the attacking claim a bit, with arguments from

4
I do not want to disclose the identity of the accuser, since this comes from a pri-
vate email exchange, and I respect this person’s general views very much.
38 T OVE S KUTTNABB –K ANGAS

David Harmon, also from e-mail communication (17 January 2001). On this
lack of knowledge, Harmon says:
This [is] the usual misunderstanding of evolution by people in non-biology
disciplines who tend to parrot the ‘received view’ of biological phobia and
cannot or will not distinguish Social Darwinism (which of course has long
since been discredited […] from neo-Darwinism as it is now understood by
evolutionary biologists.
Harmon then goes on to explain this present understanding of ‘fitness’:
Evolutionary ‘fitness’ has nothing whatsoever to do with putting anything
(including species and languages) into a hierarchy, and equally nothing to do
with teleology – which is always the unspoken assumption underlying com-
ments like [this. The comment] implies that evolution (in this misguided view)
‘can’, ‘should’ or ‘could’ produce some kind of prearranged or wished for
result. The current consensus biological understanding is that evolution does
not, cannot, aim to produce anything – and I would add, in my view that goes
for cultural (and, as I would call it, biocultural) evolution too. For example, as
soon as one says, or claims that others say, that cultural evolution ‘should’ or
‘ought’ to produce this or that outcome (such as the ‘triumph’ of dominant
languages, the implied labelling of others as ‘primitive’), at that very moment
it ceases to be evolution: it becomes globalization or some other form of social
planning. Evolution is undirected, and must always remain so if it is to go by
the name of ‘evolution’.
Darwin’s use of the word ‘fitness’ is unfortunate simply because we cannot
shake its mid-Victorian provenience. A biological organism is ‘fit’ simply if it
fits into its ecological community and functions therein. If conditions change
radically, and it no longer fits into the community, it will probably go extinct
(note that there is no hint of ‘should’ or predestination).
Before the weaving together, Harmon has the following to say about ‘primi-
tive’:
You would have to look long and hard to find a biologist of repute who claims
that any one species is more ‘primitive’ than others, other than in the obvious
morphological sense of cellular complexity, and that therefore one species is
worth more than another – which is what [the attacker] wishes to project on
biology when [s/he] (invalidly) mixes the political, value-laden language of
‘dominant’ and ‘primitive’ languages into [his/her] argument. The argument is
really a kind of backdoor anthropocentrism, whether realized or not.
Then comes the summing-up:
Now the crux of the question as [the attacker] applies it in [his/her] quote
above, is: what does it mean to say that ‘primitive’ languages are ‘unable to
adapt to the modern world’? We know that it DOES NOT mean that they
Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: Killer Languages 39

couldn’t adapt linguistically; it is the consensus among linguists, is it not, that

any language has the internal resources to cope with extralinguistic change
and innovation, of whatever scope, IF there were no (extrinsic, non-linguistic)
sociopolitical pressures on it. That condition is perfect ‘fitness’ in the strict
Darwinian sense. [The attacker], like so many others, is not distinguishing be-
tween this un-teleological, evolutionary condition and the radically different,
non-evolutionary, volitional processes of socio-political change that are the
real causes rendering languages ‘unable to adapt to the modern world’. A
giveaway: note the tag phrase ‘deserve their fate’: from fitness we have
segued to a declaration of (1) morality, as in just deserts, and (2) fate, as in
predestination. An impermissible leap, if the two distinct senses are left un-
distinguished.
To summarize my own views on the relationship, I use Colin Baker’s review
of my latest book:
Ecological diversity is essential for long-term planetary survival. All living
organisms, plants, animals, bacteria and humans survive and prosper through a
network of complex and delicate relationships. Damaging one of the elements
in the ecosystem will result in unforeseen consequences for the whole of the
system. Evolution has been aided by genetic diversity, with species genetically
adapting in order to survive in different environments. Diversity contains the
potential for adaptation. Uniformity can endanger a species by providing
inflexibility and unadaptability. Linguistic diversity and biological diversity
are […] inseparable. The range of cross fertilisation becomes less as languages
and cultures die and the testimony of human intellectual achievement is
lessened.
In the language of ecology, the strongest ecosystems are those that are the
most diverse. That is, diversity is directly related to stability; variety is impor-
tant for long-term survival. Our success on this planet has been due to an
ability to adapt to different kinds of environment over thousands of years
(atmospheric as well as cultural). Such ability is born out of diversity. Thus
language and cultural diversity maximizes chances of human success and
adaptability. (Baker 2001: 281)
If, during the next hundred years, we murder 50–90% of the linguistic (and
thereby mostly also the cultural) diversity which is our treasury of historically
developed knowledge, and includes knowledge about how to maintain and
use sustainably some of the most vulnerable and most biologically diverse
environments in the world, we are also seriously undermining our chances of
life on earth.
Killing linguistic diversity is, then, just like the killing of biodiversity,
dangerous reductionism. Monocultures are vulnerable, in agriculture, horti-
culture, animal husbandry, as we see in increasingly more dramatic ways,
when animals, bacteria and crops which are more and more resistant (to
40 T OVE S KUTTNABB –K ANGAS

antibiotics, to roundups, etc), are starting to spread. With genetic manipu-

lations the problems are mounting rapidly.
In terms of the new ways of coping that we are going to need, the potential
for the new lateral thinking that might save us from ourselves in time lies in
having as many and as diverse languages and cultures as possible. We do not
know which ones have the right medicine. For maintaining all of them, multi-
lingualism is necessary. Multilingualism should, of course, then be one of the
most important goals in education.

Most indigenous and minority education

participates in committing linguistic genocide
It is clear from the statistics of number of languages and number of speakers
that indigenous peoples and minorities are the main depository of the LD of
the world. Therefore, it is decisive what happens to their languages. Many of
them have traditionally been multilingual, and they have maintained their own
languages. Today, as formal education reaches more and more people,
schools can kill in one generation languages which, in situations without
Western-type formal schooling, were maintained for hundreds or even
thousands of years or more.
The education of indigenous peoples and minorities in large parts of the
world is today being organized in direct contradiction of our best scientific
knowledge of how it should be organized, and so is the education of both
minorities and numerically large but politically dominated groups in most
African and many Asian countries (see Skutnabb–Kangas 2000 for details on
the claims; see Brock–Utne 1999 and Prah 1995 for Africa). Most of this
education participates in committing linguistic and cultural genocide, accord-
ing to Articles II(e) and (b) of the UN International Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (E793, 1948): Article
II(e), “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”; and
Article II(b), “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the
group”; emphasis added). Likewise, most minority education is guilty of
linguistic genocide according to the 1948 special definition (not part of the
present Convention): Article III(1) “Prohibiting the use of the language of the
group in daily intercourse or in schools, or the printing and circulation of pub-
lications in the language of the group.”
Pirjo Janulf (1998) shows in a longitudinal study that of those Finnish
immigrant minority members in Sweden who had had Swedish-medium edu-
cation, not one spoke any Finnish to their own children. Even if they them-
selves might not have forgotten their Finnish completely, their children were
certainly forcibly transferred to the majority group, at least linguistically. This
is what happens to millions of speakers of threatened languages all over the
Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: Killer Languages 41

world. There are no schools or classes teaching through the medium of the
threatened indigenous or minority languages. The transfer to the majority-
language speaking group is not voluntary: alternatives do not exist, and
parents do not have enough reliable information about the long-term conse-
quences of the various choices. ‘Prohibition’ can be direct or indirect. If there
are no minority teachers in the pre-schools/schools and if the minority lan-
guages are not used as the main media of education, the use of these lan-
guages is indirectly prohibited in daily intercourse /in schools: ie, it is a
question of linguistic genocide.
Assimilationist submersion education where minorities are taught through
the medium of dominant languages causes mental harm and leads to the
students using the dominant language with their own children later on: ie,
over a generation or two the children are linguistically and often in other ways
too forcibly transferred to a dominant group. My latest book, Linguistic
genocide in education – or worldwide diversity and human rights? (2000),
provides hundreds of examples of the prohibition, the harm it causes, and the
forcible transfer (see also, for example, Baugh 2000, Cummins 1996, 2000,
Kouritzin 1999, Lowell & Devlin 1999, Williams 1998, Wong Fillmore
1991). Formal education which is subtractive: ie, which teaches children
something of a dominant language at the cost of their first language, is geno-
cidal. By comparison, learning new languages, including the dominant lan-
guages which most children obviously see it in their best interest to learn,
should happen additively, in addition to their own languages.
Educational linguistic human rights which guarantee additive language
learning are also what is needed for preventing linguistic genocide and for
linguistic diversity to be maintained on earth. And the knowledge about how
to organize education that respects linguistic human rights certainly exists
(see, for example, Huss 1999, Huss et al. 2002, Skutnabb–Kangas, ed. 1995,
just to mention a few).

The human rights system does not prevent

linguistic genocide
Mother tongue medium education should be a basic linguistic human right
(L H R ). But international and European binding Covenants, Conventions and
Charters give very little support to linguistic human rights in education (eg,
Skutnabb–Kangas & Phillipson 1994). Language gets in them a much poorer
treatment than other central human characteristics. Often language disappears
completely in binding educational paragraphs, for instance, in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (1948), where the paragraph on education (26)
does not refer to language at all. Similarly, the International Covenant on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (adopted in 1966 and in force since
42 T OVE S KUTTNABB –K ANGAS

1976), having mentioned language on a par with race, colour, sex, religion,
etc. in its general Article (2.2), does explicitly refer to “racial, ethnic or reli-
gious groups” in its educational Article (13.1). However, here it omits refer-
ence to language or linguistic groups:
education shall enable all persons to participate effectively in a free society,
promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all
racial, ethnic or religious groups [my emphasis].
When language is in educational paragraphs of human rights instruments, the
Articles dealing with education, especially the right to mother tongue medium
education, are more vague and /or contain many more opt-outs and modifica-
tions than any other Articles (see, for example, Kontra et al., ed. 1999; Phillip-
son & Skutnabb–Kangas 1994, 1995, 1996; Skutnabb–Kangas 1996a, 1996b,
1999, 2000; Skutnabb–Kangas & Phillipson 1994, 1997, 1998). I will show
you just one example of how language in education gets a different treatment
from everything else, from the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons
Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities from
1992 (adopted by the General Assembly in December 1992). Most of the
Articles use the obligating formulation ‘shall’ and have few let-out modifica-
tions or alternatives – except where linguistic rights in education are con-
cerned. Compare the unconditional formulation in Article 1 about identity,
with the education Article 4.3:
1.1. States shall protect the existence and the national or ethnic, cultural,
religious and linguistic identity of minorities within their respective territories,
and shall encourage conditions for the promotion of that identity.
1.2. States shall adopt appropriate legislative and other measures to achieve
those ends.
4.3. States should take appropriate measures so that, wherever possible,
persons belonging to minorities have adequate opportunities to learn their
mother tongue or to have instruction in their mother tongue. (my emphases,
‘obligating’ in italics, ‘opt-outs’ in bold).
The same types of formulation as in Art. 4.3 abound even in the latest HRs
instruments. Minority languages and sometimes even their speakers might “as
far as possible”, and “within the framework of [the State’s] education sys-
tems”, get some vaguely defined rights, “appropriate measures”, or “adequate
opportunities”, “if there is sufficient demand” and “substantial numbers” or
“pupils who so wish in a number considered sufficient” or “if the number of
users of a regional or minority language justifies it”. All these examples come
from the Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of
National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Lan-
Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: Killer Languages 43

guages, both in force since 1998. The Articles covering medium of education
are so heavily qualified that the minority is completely at the mercy of the
state. It is clear that the opt-outs and alternatives in the Convention and the
Charter permit a reluctant state to meet the requirements in a minimalist way,
which it can legitimate by claiming that a provision was not ‘possible’ or
‘appropriate’, or that numbers were not ‘sufficient’ or did not ‘justify’ a pro-
vision, or that it ‘allowed’ the minority to organize teaching of their language
as a subject, at their own cost.
Still, the human rights system should protect people in the globalization
process rather than giving market forces free range. Human rights, especially
economic and social rights, are, according to the human-rights lawyer Kata-
rina Tomaševski, to act as correctives to the free market. The first interna-
tional human rights treaty abolished slavery. Prohibiting slavery implied that
people were not supposed to be treated as market commodities. The I L O (The
International Labour Organisation) has added that labour should not be treated
as a commodity. But price-tags are to be removed from other areas too.
Tomaševski claims:
The purpose of international human rights law is [...] to overrule the law of
supply and demand and remove price-tags from people and from necessities
for their survival. (1996: 104)
These necessities for survival include not only basic food and housing (which
would come under economic and social rights), but also basics for the sus-
tenance of a dignified life, including basic civil, political and cultural rights. It
should, therefore, be in accordance with the spirit of human rights to grant
people full linguistic human rights.
There are some recent positive developments but no results are in sight yet,
and there is little reason to be optimistic. There is a proper condemnation of
subtractive submersion education in The Hague Recommendations Regarding
the Education Rights of National Minorities. These Recommendations, pub-
lished in 1996 by the O S C E ’s (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe) High Commissioner on National Minorities, Max van der Stoel,
represent authoritative guidelines for minority education for the fifty-five
member-states (which include Canada and the U S A ). They are an authorita-
tive interpretation and concretization of the minimum in present HRs stan-
dards (see also van der Stoel 1997, Rothenberger 1997). Even if the term used
is ‘national minority’, the guidelines also apply to other groups, for instance
immigrated minorities, and one does not need to be a citizen in order to be
protected by the guidelines (both these observations follow from the U N
Human Rights Committee’s General Comment on Article 27). I would like
44 T OVE S KUTTNABB –K ANGAS

readers to find out to what extent their country lives up to the Hague Recom-
mendations (<http://www.osce.org/hcnm/>) in minority education.
In the section “The spirit of international instruments”, bilingualism is seen
as a right and responsibility for persons belonging to national minorities (Art.
1), and states are reminded not to interpret their obligations in a restrictive
manner (Art. 3). In the section on “Minority education at primary and secon-
dary levels”, mother tongue medium education is recommended at all levels,
also in secondary education. This includes bilingual teachers in the dominant
language as a second language (Articles 11–13). Teacher training is made a
duty on the state (Art. 14).
Finally, the Explanatory Note states that “submersion-type approaches
whereby the curriculum is taught exclusively through the medium of the State
language and minority children are entirely integrated into classes with
children of the majority are not in line with international standards” (5).
Remember that most of the education offered to indigenous and minority
children in Europe and North America is submersion.
But even if some improvements might be on their way, it has to be men-
tioned that having full legally guaranteed L H R s is a necessary but not
sufficient prerequisite for languages to be maintained. Teresa McCarty and
Lucille Watahomigie (1999) discuss the language education of the “nearly
two million American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians [who]
reside in the USA, representing over 500 tribes and 175 distinct languages”
(79). The article starts with a denunciation of subtractive education. One of
the important conclusions is that “language rights have not guaranteed lan-
guage maintenance, which ultimately depends on the home language choices
of Native speakers” (91). What this means is that bottom-up initiatives are
urgent. There must be incentives for people to transmit their own languages to
the next generation, and these incentives need to be both affective and instru-
mental.

Self-determination, ‘ethnic conflict’, and

linguistic human rights
Minorities are up against almost impossible odds when they try to get access
to basic human rights that most dominant language speakers take for granted.
Educational L H R s, especially the right to learn one’s mother tongue fully and
properly, orally – when this is physiologically possible – and in writing, seem
to be among the most important rights that minorities and indigenous peoples
want. Mother tongue medium education is part of the minorities’ important
demands to have the collective right to exist and reproduce themselves as a
distinct collectivity both respected and formally legalized. One can see the
Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: Killer Languages 45

importance of the twin demands of self-determination and mother tongue

medium education in conflict prevention work in central and eastern Europe,
as the O S C E High Commissioner on National Minorities has done (eg, van
der Stoel 1997: 153). It is equally clear in Africa and Asia, where, for in-
stance, “insurgents in Ethiopia have over the years, placed the use of native
languages at the centre of their demands for autonomy and self-determina-
tion” (Prah 1995: 7). Or in Latin America, as we see in Subcommandante
Marcos’s writings.
If a state does not grant basic linguistic human rights (L H R s), including
educational language rights, to minorities and indigenous peoples, this lack of
rights is what often leads to and /or can be used for the mobilization of senti-
ments which can then be labelled ‘ethnic conflicts’, especially in situations
where linguistic and ethnic borders or boundaries coincide with economic
boundaries or other boundaries where linguistically and ethnically defined
groups differ in terms of relative political power. If legitimate demands for
some kind of self-determination are not met, be it demands for cultural
autonomy or for more regional economic or political autonomy, this may
often lead to demands for secession. Thus granting education- and language-
based rights to minorities can and should often be part of conflict prevention.
The whole problematic is beautifully addressed by Subcommandante Marcos
in an interview where, addressing the fear of fragmentation that many states
seem to have, he also draws the connections between collective rights, peace
or ‘ethnic’ conflict, and globalization:
Our aim is to get the Mexican Congress to recognize the identity of indi-
genous people as ‘collective subjects’ by right. Mexico’s constitution doesn’t
recognize Indians. We want the government to accept that Mexico has a
variety of peoples; that our indigenous peoples have their own political, social
and economic forms of organisation, and that they have a strong connection to
the land, to their communities, their roots and their history.
We are not asking for an autonomy that will exclude others. We are not
calling for independence. We don’t want to proclaim the birth of the Maya
nation, or fragment the country into lots of small indigenous countries. We are
just asking for the recognition of the rights of an important part of Mexican
society which has its own forms of organisation that it wants to be legally
recognized.
Our aim is peace. A peace based on a dialogue which is not a sham. A
dialogue that will lay the groundwork for rebuilding Chiapas and make it
possible for the EZNL to enter ordinary political life. Peace can only be had
by recognising the autonomy of indigenous peoples. This recognition is an
important precondition for the EZNL to end its clandestine existence, give up
armed struggle, participate openly in regular politics and also fight the dangers
of globalisation. (from Ramonet 2001: 1)
46 T OVE S KUTTNABB –K ANGAS

Marcos also emphasized the demand for M T M education as one of the impor-
tant motivating forces for and demands during the Zapatista march in
February–March 2001 from Chiapas to Mexico City, together with local self-
determination (reported by Jens Lohmann in Information, 13 March 2001).
One could draw a close parallel with the USA, where the constitution does
not recognize indigenous peoples or minorities as proper collective subjects
either and where minority rights and even indigenous rights are denied in the
name of national unity. While the indigenous peoples in the U S A are well
aware of this, many of the minorities still have a long way to go before they
start in earnest using international law to demand basic human rights, includ-
ing educational L H R s, both individually and as collectives. Even today the
denial of collective rights has to do with the (mostly unfounded) fear of the
disintegration of the state. An imagined unity of the state through forcibly
trying to homogenize the citizens linguistically, culturally and even ethnically
is one of the strong motives behind human rights violations where the elites
controlling the state are the perpetrators. We can see the same trend all over
the world. Just to take a few examples, the homogenizing forces can be seen
in Australia’s ‘one literacy’, a “singular, measurable, narrowly defined,
English-only literacy” (Lo Bianco 2001), in the “homogenising effect of
imposed Hispanization” (Bolivia) or “a deliberate attempt to ‘whiten’ and
‘Chilenise’ Andean populations […] under Pinochet” (Arnold & Yapita
2001), or in the European examples that Peter Trudgill (2000: 58) quotes from
Bulgaria (Videnov), Greece (Angelopoulos), Hungary (Deme) and Britain
(Stein & Quirk). Trudgill calls these writers’ texts “such abject failures of
nerve […] such failures to attempt to defend the rights of linguistic minorities
[…] such sociolinguistic sophistry.” Unless collective rights are considerably
strengthened very soon (but without weakening individual rights), the world’s
linguistic diversity will be lost.
To make the issues still more complex, today states are not the only perpe-
trators of human rights violations, and sometimes they themselves need pro-
tection. First, the worldwide globalization has made it necessary to discuss to
what extent individuals (and even some states) also need protection from
unfettered markets, as part of their H R s proper and how this could be done.
We now need to concentrate more on cultural, social and economic rights.
Market-capitalism-run-wild oppresses a large majority of the world’s popula-
tion in ways where even willing states have difficulty in protecting their
citizens. It does not make things easier that many (maybe most?) states are not
willing – there is an unholy alliance between national and transnational
political elites and transnational market forces. Often there are more represen-
tatives of various transnational companies (agriculture, food, medicine, bio-
technology, etc.) than state representatives sitting around the table when
Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: Killer Languages 47

important international and regional agreements about the environment, con-

sumer protection, T R I P s (World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects
of Intellectual Property Rights agreement), etc. are being negotiated. Ukeje
(2001: 11) catches the essence of this unequal relationship, describing the role
of Shell in the oil fields in the Nigerian Delta: “Today, very few would doubt
that in Nigeria, Shell is the state, and the real State is indeed a shell. ”
Secondly, one might even envisage that states themselves, especially non-
Western states, but also smaller Western states, especially those in eastern and
central Europe, might need protection from the market forces. Otherwise
states cannot take back their decision power over economic issues, which they
have handed over to transnational companies and finance conglomerates. This
is more necessary than ever, also for the implementation of human rights but
more generally for the planet to have a future.
It is difficult, though, to envisage the forms that this protection would take.
If the transnational techno-military complex together with other market forces
were to be made firm duty-holders (they are beneficiaries already, with the
W T O agreements and covert Davos agreements), we would run into the same
problems as with the state being at the same time both perpetrator of human
rights violations and protector of human rights, the situation that we have
today. Still, some new system is urgently needed. No present international
organizations (eg, the U N ) can be envisaged to be strong enough to function
as neutral arbitrators and to guarantee these rights as all of them are in the
joint pocket of states and market forces.

Our responsibility for linguistic and cultural ecologies

Finally, a few words about linguistic and cultural ecologies and our respon-
sibility for ruining or not ruining them. The impact of the recent positive
developments in counteracting linguistic genocide in education and the killing
of linguistic diversity is yet to be seen. We might learn from the history of
killing biodiversity. Jared Diamond (1992) examines in a chapter titled “The
Golden Age that never was”, the evidence for people and cultures before us
having completely ruined the prerequisites for their own life. Many com-
munities have destroyed their habitats and /or exterminated large numbers of
species. This has happened in many places and it makes the “supposed past
Golden Age of environmentalism look increasingly mythical” (Diamond
1992: 335). If we want to learn from it, and not make it happen on a global
basis (this is our obvious risk today), we better heed his advice. Diamond
claims that
small long-established, egalitarian societies tend to evolve conservationist
practices, because they’ve had plenty of time to get to know their local
48 T OVE S KUTTNABB –K ANGAS

environment and to perceive their own self-interest. Instead, damage is likely

to occur [1] when people suddenly colonize an unfamiliar environment (like
the first Maoris and Easter Islanders); or [2] when people advance along a new
frontier (like the first Indians to reach America), so that they can just move
beyond the frontier when they’ve damaged the region behind; or [3] when
people acquire a new technology whose destructive power they haven’t had
time to appreciate (like modern New Guineans, now devastating pigeon
populations with shotguns). Damage is also likely [4] in centralized states that
concentrate wealth in the hands of rulers who are out of touch with their
environment. (1995: 335–36)
As we can see, we have the perfect global prerequisites for ruining our planet
beyond repair:
– long-established small societies are breaking up, and, with urbanization and
migration, people encounter new environments (1);
– new technologies are more destructive than ever and results of biochemical
and other experiments (like genetically modified crops) are taken into use
before we know anything about the long-term effects on nature or people
(3);
– we have growing gaps and alienated elites (4);
– and we do not have new planets to move to when we have damaged this one
(2).
In terms of ruining our linguistic and cultural ecologies, we know already that
similar processes are at work. There are many similar analyses of destructive
paradigms. Some researchers have also started the discussion trying to
identify the devastating languages-related processes which are similar to the
list of factors that Diamond has identified.
Summing up, then, learning new languages should be additive rather than
subtractive. It should add to people’s linguistic repertoires; new languages,
including lingua francas, should not be learned at the cost of the diverse
mother tongues but in addition to them. In this sense, the Killer Languages
(with English the foremost among them) are serious threats to the world’s
linguistic diversity (see Phillipson & Skutnabb–Kangas 1997, 1999). Lin-
guistic human rights are needed more than ever. So far, human-rights instru-
ments and discussions about both these and educational language rights have
not even started addressing these big questions in a coherent way where all
types of ecology would be discussed within an integrated politico-economic
framework. When speakers of small languages learn other, necessary,
languages in addition to their native languages, they become multilingual, and
the maintenance of L D , necessary for the planet, is supported. When
Linguistic Diversity and Biodiversity: Killer Languages 49

dominant languages, like English, are learned subtractively, at the cost of the
mother tongues, they become killer languages.
I would not like to be more dramatic than necessary – but I would still like
to remind ourselves: when our great grandchild asks: “why did you not stop
this craziness? You could have done it!,” the one answer we cannot give is: “I
D I D N O T K N O W .” What are you going to do about this? Secondly, if some
of you may feel provoked, even furious, please don’t shoot the messenger.
Reflect rather on the message. Research into this area is only in its beginning,
but it might prove to be research vital for our future. Luisa Maffi starts her
2001 book with a quotation from Diane Ackerman (1997: xviii–xix) that sums
up the seriousness with which this new area should be taken:
We are among the rarest of the rare not because of our numbers, but because
of the unlikeliness of our being here at all, the pace of our evolution, our
powerful grip on the whole planet, and the precariousness of our future. We
are evolutionary whiz kids who are better able to transform the world than to
understand it. Other animals cannot evolve fast enough to cope with us. It is
possible that we may also become extinct, and if we do, we will not be the
only species that sabotaged itself, merely the only one that could have
prevented it.

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Mander & Edward Goldsmith (San Francisco: Sierra Club): 460–70.
Arnold, Denise Y., & Juan de Dios Yapita with Itesh Sachdev (2001). ‘Re-voicing
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[
English as the Supranational
Language of Human Rights?

Michael Toolan
University of Birmingham

ABSTRACT
Two things are clear about the relations between language and the law: one
is that all law is articulated in one language or another, without escape to a
language-free condition; the other is that countless key terms of any legal
system are profoundly bound up in the language-culture that sponsors it
(consider, in English law and language, key terms such as neighbour,
appropriation, torture, causation, recklessness, provocation, and many
more). Globalization in general, and the international spread of English as
one of globalization’s exemplifications, may be regrettable and undesirable
in many respects. But out of this spreading nettle, global English, we may
pluck a flower, if English becomes (unwittingly, of course) an agent of
reform and fairness. Globalization and the pressures of a rights-oriented
culture may enable English to become the vehicle for articulation and
maintenance of certain worldwide standards of protection.

I
W A N T T O B E G I N with a number of examples, or straws in the
wind; at least they were so until the ship of global society was buf-
feted by storms late in 2001. The first is an extract from the Christ-
mas /New Year circular letter, December 2000, of German friends of ours,
who live close to Tübingen. Writing about their teenage daughters, they
report:
In autumn she and Miriam, together with some school friends, spent a week
on the Expo 2000 helping to stage an American puppet project on global
human rights with enormously big papier-mache puppets. Now they are
54 M ICHAEL T OOLAN

capable of rendering complicated statements about the injustice of the world

in English.
A second comes in an email message sent by a U S -based graduate student on
a discussion list concerning Critical Discourse Analysis:
I think the social role(s) of Arab women, whether in the West or in their
respective Arab countries, is undergoing some major changes. I am confident
that C D A will provide me with the tools necessary to account for those
dramatic changes. In this connection, the English language is playing a major
role as it’s becoming the language of “freedom-seekers”.
In view of recent terrible events in America and Afghanistan, there is some-
thing poignantly premature about that student’s hope, and the optimism that
surfaces elsewhere in my essay, concerning the possibility of pursuing global
justice and security by means of courts, due process and words (even English
words) rather than by means of prejudice, bullets and violence. But, not-
withstanding current divisions, the pressures to converge or harmonize, on a
global scale, will over the long run reassert themselves. And so I continue
with straw no.3. This comes in the May 2001 issue of Scanorama, the in-
flight magazine of S A S airline. In that magazine there is a long supplement
on Helsinki and this includes interviews with two young German journalists,
Julia and Claudius, who have come to live and work there. The local writer
meets Julia at a fashionable café, and in part the text runs as follows:
At the table close by us in Mother’s we can hear English being spoken.
Shalom, is heard from another table further away.
“Helsinki is a very open city. Most people are happy to speak English
when one enters a room. That hardly ever happens in Germany,” says Julia.
What one is to make of Julia’s claim that people in Helsinki, unlike those in
Germany, are “open” because they are happy to speak English, is not at all
clear; but it is the very emphasis on English that is of first interest. Two final
straws, briefly cited: on the noticeboard in Freiburg University’s Law School,
a flier advertises the Cornell–Paris Summer Institute of International &
Comparative Law, advising that
Classes will be held in English in the Sorbonne and Faculté de Droit buildings,
Paris, France.
Or the legal apprentice can take the American Law introductory course at
Kaiserslautern: “A very good command of English is necessary, since stu-
dents will spend five hours a day listening to and participating in classroom
discussing (and reading).”
Finally, if in the summer of 2001 you went to the home page of the British
Council (www.britcoun.org) you found the Council offering a new feature,
English as the Supranational Language of Human Rights? 55

called a Human Rights Network – a highly informative set of pages, described

as “A news, information and networking tool for the global human rights
community.” For such matters are evidently now felt to be very much the
rightful concern of the Council, historically the government’s international
booster /promoter of British culture and, especially, British English.
Consider the following futurist scenario: it is election time in one of the
leading countries of Europe, and the political power groups are stirring up, or
struggling to dampen down, a kind of cultural panic over one issue that really
is of secondary importance relative to more important ones: namely, health
care and education – ones that are more important in the particularizing, short
story sense that they affect the life chances of you and your loved ones. The
cultural panic that is bubbling away during the election, sometimes in the
background, sometimes in the foreground, concerns the English language, or
Global as it now sometimes called. There is a proposal that, for purposes of
facilitating and stabilizing the country’s dealings with all its closest partners,
in matters of business, education, science, medicine, travel, and labour, the
country should adopt Global. Of course, the established languages of the
country, to which some citizens are passionately attached, will remain for all
sorts of everyday domestic purposes. But alongside those languages, which
may come increasingly to feel provincial and even old-fashioned, alongside
them or on top of them will run the writ of Global.
Let me make a different kind of beginning by moving back in time to 1
August 2000, and an article written in the London Times, by Julie Mellor,
Chair of the U K ’s Equality Opportunities Commission. In it she writes in
warm support of a report, by a group of Cambridge University legal experts,
on possible revisions to Britain’s anti-discrimination legislation. These ex-
perts had suggested that Britain’s equality laws, a patchwork of different
measures applying to different standards concerning various kinds of potential
discrimination to do with race, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender, dis-
ability, and so on, were outdated, and increasingly likely to be incompatible
with developing regional or European standards. In short, Britain’s laws
against discrimination (or, to put things in the positive terms now appropriate
to the October 2000 enactment of the Human Rights Act, the state’s public
protection of people’s entitlement to equal treatment) need a thorough over-
haul, simplification, and integration. To quote directly from the Cambridge
lawyers’ executive summary of their report:
The report proposes that there should be a single Equality Act in Britain,
supplemented by regulations and codes of practice, written in plain language.
There should be a Human Rights Commission with responsibility to promote
human rights including equality and a single Equality Commission with
responsibility for the enforcement of equality legislation.
56 M ICHAEL T OOLAN

In relation to the present conference, the desideratum of particular note here is

the requirement that an anti-discriminatory rights-protecting Equality Act for
twenty-first-century Britain should be “written in plain language.” As usual,
these lawyers do not specify any particular language. But it is a safe bet that
they have in mind what is known as standard written English as recorded in
reputable contemporary dictionaries and reference grammars. And perhaps a
further delimitation is implied by the term plain: that the language be com-
prehensible to the educated layperson, thus of a linguistic complexity that
compares with what is found in broadsheet British newspapers.
But how plain and straightforward is statutory language, in practice? By
way of an example of the complexities involved, I will refer to the Race
Relations Act of 1976, which outlaws various kinds of racial discrimination,
in access to schools and jobs particularly. Now, obviously, the Race Relations
Act is not a sword to attack every kind of discrimination: if you are discrimi-
nated against on grounds of your sex or disability, the race-relations act can-
not and will not help you. You have to have been discriminated against on
grounds of your race or racial group. So what is a ‘race’ within the meaning
of the Act? Are Palestinians a race, or Kurds, or people from Birmingham, or
Rastafarians, or Romani gypsies, or Sikhs? What, hopefully “written in plain
language”, does the Act define as a race? The key passage is s.3 (1), which
characterizes ‘racial group’ as follows:
‘racial group’ means a group of persons defined by reference to colour, race,
nationality, or ethnic or national origins, and references to a person’s racial
group refer to any racial group into which he falls.
In practice the most contentious or indeterminate of this cluster of possible
criteria has been the one to do with ethnic origins. A racial group, the statute
says, can be a group of persons defined by reference to ethnic origins. And
over the years, the English courts have struggled to chart a coherent course
through a series of cases where it seemed really borderline whether the group
that the plaintiff claimed had been discriminated against could be said to be
one that was defined by ethnic origins. At first Sikhs were held not to be a
racial group on this basis, but at a House of Lords appeal they were held in
fact to be so, notwithstanding the fact that a person of any race or ethnicity
can convert to Sikhism. Similarly, Romani gypsies have been held to be a
group defined by reference to ethnic origins, hence a racial group within the
meaning of the Act. On the other hand, Irish travellers, sometimes called
‘tinkers’, were held not to be so; and more recently, too, Rastafarians have
been held not to be a racial group, apparently chiefly on the grounds that,
though they might be deemed a racial group to the same extent that Sikhs are,
nevertheless they have not been such a group for ‘long enough’.
English as the Supranational Language of Human Rights? 57

I simply give this as a reminder, perhaps an obvious one, that all law –
common or statutory – is directly or indirectly a matter of language, or
linguistic articulation. (I want to avoid saying simply that all law is encoded
in language, believing this to be a simplifying misrepresentation, as if lan-
guage were merely an inert container.) I also want to reiterate the point that
the law, and the language of the law, is constantly open to revision and
change, as old terms are redefined under pressure from new cases and new
circumstances. Passing a statute in a particular form no more fixes the law for
ever and ever than the labours of the most meticulous lexicographer fixes the
form or meaning of a word for ever and ever. What the statute and the lawyers
and judges do, like the dictionary and the lexicographer, is to propose or
attempt to codify and standardize, to reach after certainty and transparency.
And it is at this point that English, with its entrenched global or inter-
national functions, merits mention. Because all interventions aimed at codi-
fication and standardization, certainty and transparency, in practice are done
in one language or another. Whether we are looking at the U K Human Rights
Act, or the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms, or the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, it seems that all such instruments are stated, encoded, in one
public language or another, such as English, German, or Chinese. It might be
worth pausing briefly, to imagine a statement of fundamental rights that was
not in one of these symbolic languages (in which case the word ‘statement’
might no longer be suitable). In other words (perhaps so as to be yet more
culture-neutral, though that is really an independent issue), what might it be
like to represent fundamental rights in an iconic and graphic representation,
and wouldn’t that be more truly global? Let us not assume too readily that the
task would be impossible. After all, all of us will have noticed, at international
airports and similar places, the emergence over the past twenty-five years of
wordless notifications that direct us to where we may change the baby’s
nappy, where the disabled person’s toilet is, where we can stop the car for five
minutes, but no longer, to drop a departing traveller, and so on.
What about the following, the version of article 10 of the European Con-
vention that appears in the U K Human Rights Act: “Everyone has the right to
freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and
to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public
authority and regardless of frontiers”? Can this be visually depicted, with
something like the clarity and efficiency with which visual depictions show us
where we can park our car if we are disabled? Could you bring such a word-
less notification to court to contest a breach of that right? I would say yes and
no: yes, fundamental rights might be amenable, over time, to clear graphical
representation. But these rights are themselves the source of extensive verbal
58 M ICHAEL T OOLAN

conversations, academic exegesis, lawsuits, and counter-interpretations.

Therefore we cannot get outside or beyond the verbal formulations of these
rights, in one recognized language or another (English, Chinese, etc.); there is
no possibility of recourse to a neutral, historyless, cultureless language, free of
hegemonic or subordinated contaminations. The shortest explanation for all
this is that these rights come down to us, today, in and through these public
languages, so that it is now too late, and inescapably too late, to attempt to
finesse those origins and inheritances out of existence. Unless you want to
deny that our histories shape us.
Another fundamental cluster of issues I cannot address here concerns why
we should care about, or believe in, global human rights at all. In the late
modern world, with the so-called end of ideology, there seem to be plenty of
commentators who are inclined both to note and deplore the global spread of
Western, consumer-oriented culture while questioning whether it is justifiable
to set up global benchmarks concerning individual rights and obligations. The
suspicion is that these might be culture-bound Western liberal biases. I take a
different view, a broadly internationalist one, which sees rights closely inter-
connected with needs, such that certain fundamental human rights and needs
are the entitlement of every world citizen (and not merely every citizen of a
particular nation-state), necessary to their democratic development, in civil,
political, and social terms (for an articulation of this position, see Jary 1999).
At the very least, the internationalist position has to be something like the
following: it may be the case that asserting a right to freedom of expression is
positing a right or a good that is not desirable at all times and in all places but
is contingent and historicized, but it is posited on the assumption that it should
be treated as valid without delimitation of time or place until a contrary case
can be made out.
I should now like to mention the ‘G’ word, Globalization. As Susan Marks
astutely notes (Marks 2000: 76–77), if Raymond Williams had lived to pro-
duce a third edition of his Keywords, between the entries on ‘genius’ and
‘hegemony’ he would surely have added one on ‘globalization’. As we know,
the term covers not merely a global internationalizing of trade and finance and
the emergence, often by merger, of corporations and cartels much more
powerful than individual nation states; it also covers a technological and tele-
communicational intensification of connection (and environmental and cul-
tural dependence) of unprecedented depth and seemingly irresistible scope.
The consequences for the protection of local distinctiveness, not to mention
nation-state sovereignty, are often discussed. Among other things, as Marks
puts it, “globalization also puts into question the assumption that democracy
can be achieved through the democratization of national politics” (Marks
2000: 77) where decisions about our collective life are made in non-national
English as the Supranational Language of Human Rights? 59

settings. We see the truth of this vividly in the Bush administration’s recent
reversal on pledges made on environmental matters at Osaka, as well as in the
conduct and composition of the World Trade Organization, and in many other
instances. In very broad terms, globalization is anti-democratic and has an
anti-democratizing effect: some agency based in Cleveland, or Brussels, or
indeed nowhere in particular at all, makes decisions which affect the quality
of your life – in ways which preclude the individual or even the more orga-
nized lobbying group, such as the international non-governmental organiza-
tions, from having much influence let alone redress (see discussion in Keane
2001). John Markoff argues to similar effect in relation to the European
Union and its institutions: namely, that while the E U supports and requires
democracy within its member states, it remains relatively free of effective
democratic control (1999: 21–47).
In these circumstances, I submit, it will require global agencies which are
empowered to protect democratic principles to contest and curb the anti-
democratizing tendencies inherent in globalization. One can certainly hope for
a reformed and democratized World Trade Organization, and United Nations
Security Council, and at the European level a reduction in the democratic
deficit in such E U institutions as the Parliament and the Commission. But
quite separately one can look to the establishment of an International Criminal
Court and similar courts that might be increasingly vested with powers of
overseeing and enforcing fundamental human rights and needs, without fear
of or favour from any national government. Those developments, as is well
known, are by no means untroubled and inevitable, and one of the most
powerful and rights-friendly nations is often cited as a key source of resis-
tance. Thus it is not possible to make complaints against the U S A to the
Human Rights Committee of the United Nations, since the USA has not
ratified the treaty which would authorize the Committee to receive such com-
plaints. But the present U S administration is more protectionist in these
respects than others of recent years (during the Carter and Clinton presi-
dencies). And at the level of national and international policy there is, as
Susan Wright summarizes, “a growing acceptance of external military inter-
vention in the domestic affairs of the state when it is deemed to be acting
against the norms set by the international community – whether this takes the
form of aggression towards part of its own population or military threat to
outsiders” (Wright 1999: 89).
Of course, there are plenty of voices less upbeat than Wright’s and mine;
here I want to make just one main point about protection of linguistic
diversity. Thus, writing on language death and globalization in the Times on
Thursday, 21 December 2000, Richard Morrison reported that “English has
become a juggernaut” (a nice ironic reversal of nomenclature, since until very
60 M ICHAEL T OOLAN

recently the generic Introduction to Language Studies lecture on exotic bor-

rowings into the English language invariably cited the Hindi word juggernaut
as having barged into English). Morrison then rehearses the global spread and
power of English, citing two books published in 2000 which point out the
“dire consequences” of what Morrison calls “this brutal language cull”:
Daniel Nettler and Suzanne Romaine in Vanishing Languages (OUP) and
David Crystal in Language Death (CUP) both argue that (as Crystal puts it)
“if diversity is a prerequisite for successful humanity, then the preservation of
linguistic diversity is essential, for language lies at the heart of what it means
to be human.”
The difficulty of putting things in that way is that it always seems to reduce
to an appeal to the ‘decency’ and liberal openmindedness of those who,
otherwise, would get along just fine in a non-diverse world, urging those
privileged people to make ‘extra efforts’ to support or protect diversity. But
if that is a fair representation, it implies hope in a scheme in which the
marginalized are to be helped out by the marginalizers. But, clearly, this
expects the latter to do things that run counter to their very defining char-
acteristic, as marginalizers. At any rate, something more compelling than
such negative arguments for diversity is surely needed. Nor will everyone
accept that diversity, for its own sake as it were, is a compelling argument:
would we say that preservation of diversity of religion, in itself, was an
inherent and essential good? What about diversity of videorecorder stan-
dards, or railway gauges, or traffic codes? There has to be a positive
argument for linguistic diversity and indeed there is a quite straightforward
one. The positive arguments must be rooted in principles of self-deter-
mination, and the right to freedom of expression: where the speakers of any
‘vanishing’ or ‘minority’ language continue to declare a wish to live their
lives through that language, it is hard to imagine what compelling con-
siderations or argument from necessity would justify unqualified dismissal
of those declarations. (That is not to say that overriding considerations can
never arise, since they clearly can, from other rights and freedoms that
require protection; nor is this a claim that self-determination and freedom of
expression must be upheld without regard to cost, however unreasonable.
As soon as rights are recognized to be plural, no single right can claim
absolute authority.) But it is important to note that these are positive, rights-
based arguments for so-called minority-language or minority-culture main-
tenance and protection, and have nothing to do with the much more
intangible plea concerning preservation of diversity. The latter principle is a
preference, and certainly open to buffeting from conflicting scientific and
practical arguments – whether the issue is preservation of diversity of lan-
English as the Supranational Language of Human Rights? 61

guages or preservation of biological diversity. But the rights argument

amounts not to a preference but an obligation, only open to qualification
when it is confronted with other conflicting rights and obligations.
When books such as Vanishing Languages and Language Death are taken
up by journalists and passionate advocates, they become the basis of jere-
miads which trade on key terms such as diversity (diversity as essential for
survival, as per plant genetic diversity), and homogeneity. But diversity and
homogeneity (globalized uniformity) are very much in the eye of the
beholder. Take the E U ‘project’: there are plenty of people in Britain, not
least the press, who complain that an increasing ‘binding into’ Europe means
that a ‘one size fits all’ regime, dictated by that well-known despot,
‘Brussels’, is imposed on everyone in Britain as in all the other member states
(a suppressing of difference). On the other hand it is equally arguable that the
everyday lived experience of the average Briton, in the thirty years of our
membership of the E C / E U , has become sensitized to increased diversity and
has become more routinely aware of a larger landscape in which British ways
are just one among many, and not the only game or language or judicial
system or welfare system in town: it is arguable that the average Briton, is
more aware of linguistic diversity (and religious diversity, culinary, ethnic,
and so on) than has been the case in the recent past.
Can English be an instrument in the democratization of global governance?
Yes, just as easily as it is an instrument in the anti-democratization that char-
acterizes much current globalization. I would not go anything like as far as
Susan Wright when, in relation to the development of the E U institutions and
the need for scrutiny/review of their decisions by E U citizens from every
corner, she supports the emergence of English as the union’s de facto lingua
franca by saying “Democracy needs a shared language.” This is only asserted
and never demonstrated, and seems to me no more self-evidently true than the
nineteenth-century realpolitische idea that a distinct nation-state needed a
single and distinct national language. In fairness, Wright addresses this para-
dox (Wright 2000, ch. 6) by noting that a fundamental liberty in a democracy
is the right to use one’s language, but at the same time, genuinely democratic
processes in the plurilingual E U are obstructed by the lack of total debate and
political communication. As is widely recognized, at the heart of these
matters lies our divided loyalty, torn between commitment to the nation-state
and to democracy. Nation-states increasingly need democracy, or its
semblance, to justify their continued if attenuated existence; but democracy
does not need nation-states. On the contrary, some would insist, in an increa-
singly globally connected society, democracy must become nonterritorial;
“the nation-state cannot remain democracy’s container” (Marks 2000: 83).
62 M ICHAEL T OOLAN

Of course, as Nettle and Romaine remind us in Vanishing Languages, we

need to divest ourselves of the traditional equation between language, nation
and state (although different polities – Western in contrast to developing or
recently-independent ones – will be at different stages in this process of dives-
titure and it may not be at all appropriate for one type of polity to preach or
ordain for other types). It is also true that this so-called traditional equation is
as much the exception, applying chiefly but not uncoercively to France,
Germany, Britain and the U S A . At any event it is surely common ground that
the mono-logic of one nation, one language, one state, under one God, has to
go and in many respects has already gone. That is why in the past I have sug-
gested that England is in a rather special historical position. It has a unique
linguistic relation to both the E U and the world community; it is the ancestral
home of a global language increasingly used by citizens of the world who are
not directly affected by the English language / English nation fictional homo-
logy that inevitably subsists in England itself. It light of all this, England is
arguably on the way to becoming the first postnational nation. (Other coun-
tries are reputedly headed in the same direction: see Rowe 2000.)
Political arrangements within the U K already partly suggest this: the other
three nationalities now have a national or regional assembly of some form,
and England alone does not. So a country with a national team for football,
rugby, cricket, and so on, but not for golf, tennis, or Olympic sports, has no
national assembly. At the same time, England and its institutions have no
compelling customary authority over the English language (because of the
presence of both American English on the one hand and the enormous
influence of non-native uses of English globally), and the notional association
of language with ethnicity is here much weakened too. So England is
becoming a place without a proprietorially unique language, soon to be using
a federal European currency, whose highest court is ultimately subject to the
federal European court, and so on. Thus, in a number of respects, no longer a
nation, any more than California is a nation. Of course, unlike California, it
will always carry a history of past nationhood, and I would suggest that, as
anxieties ensue concerning how English people will adjust to a postnational
reality, a crucial matter is just how it chooses to carry that history (eg, how it
cherishes it, without retreating into it).
It may be worth concluding with the theme that however destructive actual
globalization (of trade, media, agriculture, etc.) may be at present, it does not
have to be so, and can in fact be regulated by equally global restraints and
protections. Writing in the Guardian Weekly of 18–24 January 2001, Kevin
Watkins of Oxfam asserts that the wreckers have been at work since the
collapse of the world trade talks in Seattle, 1999. The wreckers, he writes,
English as the Supranational Language of Human Rights? 63

are not from the broadening anti-globalisation, anti-WTO protest movement.

They are the governments of the world’s richest countries, which continue to
use their power to subordinate the WTO to their national interests and to the
pursuit of corporate profit, regardless of the cost to poor countries, public
health and the environment. (23)
And most pertinently of all, for my purposes, after giving a number of
examples of such rich-country wrecking of a genuine level playing field for
global trade – wrecking which particularly operates in relation to food and
agriculture – Watkins makes the following crucial point:
In reality the WTO is being used to ensure that US commercial interests
supersede basic human rights.
I see quite direct parallels between the globalizing spread of English, which
can be an oppressive instrument of richer, native-English-speaking coun-
tries’ hegemony but need not; and the globalizing reach of a World Trade
agreement, which similarly can operate to the partisan benefit of the already
prosperous but need not; and other kinds of globalization, including the in-
creasing internationalized acknowledgement and enforcement of human
rights and fundamental freedoms. These are parallel and distinct develop-
ments (language, trade, law, life expectation); but they are also, at key
points, interconnected developments. To invoke and apply Whorf: we habi-
tually categorize and evaluate the world largely along lines laid down by
our native language. But if new developments in international law transpire,
including the ratified establishment of an international criminal court, and if
these have their guiding instruments and statutes set out in a particular
working language of the court (eg, English) rather than others, then it may
come to pass that, for certain major ‘international’ crimes (eg, against
humanity), the world of criminal justice will begin to be categorized and
evaluated along lines laid down by that particular language, or more
precisely in the legal terms made available by that particular language. Or
consider how George Fletcher (1996: 5–6) has put things (albeit in terms
that I would not subscribe to in their entirety):
Language matters more than most observers realize in shaping the contours of
the law. The common law and the English language have a strong affinity for
each other. The English common law has flourished in countries where
English is the language of legal discourse. Some countries influenced by Eng-
lish law, notably Israel, have endeavoured to translate English terms into the
native lexicon, but there seems to be as much lost in the translation of law as
in the translation of Shakespeare. There is no way to convey the connotations
of ‘due process’, ‘reasonable doubt’, and ‘malice aforethought’ in any lan-
guage except English. The relationship also runs the other way. No anglo-
64 M ICHAEL T OOLAN

phone culture has successfully adopted and nourished any other system of law
[…] Language is hardly a neutral field for legal thought to play itself out […]
The view that language dictates the horizons of thought is clearly wrong, but
there is nonetheless some not-fully-understood connection between language
and legal thought.
And, at the very least, we can say that if globalizing pressures introduce a
kind of convergence of diverse polities with their distinct judicial systems and
legal codes, then it is entirely unsurprising that one such judicial system, at
the highest appellate level, will tend to consider arguments and cases raised in
the highest courts of its closest neighbours. In the case of the English appel-
late courts, those closest neighbours, in terms of language and legal traditions,
include Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the U S A ; and, increasingly
since 1973, the supreme courts of France, Germany and Italy also.
Ultimately everything is connected to everything else. And even as the
widening recognition and submission to human rights law, globally, may
bring protections for less-widely-used languages, at the same time the articu-
lation of those rights, and their enforcement in courts is quite likely to be in
English language law. This will not be English law, but English language law
and not, as it might have been, Hopi language law or Mandarin language law.
The combined globalization and rights-culture pressures are enabling English
to become the vehicle – unwitting and, of course, in no way to the direct
credit of English language speakers – for the articulation and maintenance of
certain worldwide standards of protection.

WORKS CITED
Fletcher, George P. (1996). Basic Concepts of Legal Thought (New York: Oxford
UP).
Jary, David (1999). ‘Citizenship and human rights,’ in Smith & Wright, ed. Whose
Europe?, 207–31.
Keane, John (2001). ‘Who’s in charge here? The need for a rule of law to regulate
the emerging global civil society,’ Times Literary Supplement 5120 (18 May):
13–15.
Markoff, John (1999). ‘Our “common European home” – but who owns the house?’
in Smith & Wright, ed. Whose Europe?, 21–47.
Marks, Susan (2000). The Riddle of All Constitutions: International Law, Demo-
cracy and the Critique of Ideology (Oxford: Oxford UP).
Rowe, John Carlos, ed. (2000). Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: U of
California P).
Smith, Dennis, & Susan Wright, ed. (1999). Whose Europe? The Turn Towards
Democracy (Oxford: Blackwell).
English as the Supranational Language of Human Rights? 65

Wright, Susan (1999). ‘A community that can communicate?’ in Smith & Wright,
ed. Whose Europe?, 79–103.
—— (2000). Community and Communication: The Role of Language in Nation
State Building and European Integration (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters).

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English as an Exotic Language

Peter Mühlhäusler
University of Adelaide

ABSTRACT
There is a remarkable absence of commentators calling English an exotic
language in the literature I have surveyed. Instead, there is a dominant dis-
course of English being somehow destined by nature to be a global medium
of com-munication and that the process we are watching today, in which
English is developing from a foreign language to a second language to a
primary and ultimately the sole language of a growing number of commu-
nities, is a natural one governed by natural laws of the survival of the fittest
and of rational market forces. The view that English is barbarous in the
sense that it is ‘the language of the red-bristled foreign devils’ as the title of
the first Pidgin English phrase book published in China suggests, is like the
meaning ‘barbarous’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, obsolete, and the fact
that it is not acclimatized and hence ill-suited to the needs of others again
remains largely undebated.

1. Introduction and definitions

W H E N W E L O O K U P the meaning of ‘exotic’ in the Oxford Eng-

lish Dictionary we find definitions such as

a) alien, introduced from abroad,

b) foreign, outlandish, barbarous,
c) (of plants and animals) foreign and not acclimatized,
as well as several others. The word has experienced considerable semantic
amelioration in more recent times and we find exotic cars, exotic holiday
destinations and exotic dishes, which suggest adventure, thrill and opulence.
68 P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER

The term exotic is, of course, technically a ‘shifter’: ie, its meaning shifts,
as it directly reflects the perspective of those who utter it; an Alfa Romeo is
not an exotic car in Italy but in Australia it is. By the same token English is
not an exotic language in England, no longer in Wales and Ireland, but it
certainly is in New Britain in the Bismarck Archipelago, where it was intro-
duced after 1914.
In my essay, I shall have little to say about English as an exotic language
in the senses a) and b). Instead, I shall concentrate on the issue of what it
means for a language not to be acclimatized.

2. Ecolinguistics
My approach in this essay is ecolinguistic. We can contrast ecolinguistics
with a number of twentieth-century approaches to language in terms of what it
implies about the relationship between language and the world. I have sum-
marized this as follows:
Linguistic theories and the relationship of language to the world:
- independency hypothesis (Chomsky, Cognitive Linguistics);
- language is constructed by the world (Marr);
- the world is constructed by language (structuralism and poststructuralism);
- language is interconnected with the world – it both constructs and is
constructed by it (Ecolinguistics).
Ecolinguistics is thus based on a number of hypotheses about language:
- Language(s) is (are) not disconnected from the world as the linguistic in-
dependency hypothesis had it, but interlinked with it in numerous complex
ways. Edwin Ardener’s (1983: 154) dictum that “all of our languages are
inescapably contaminated by the world” has a flip-side; all of our worlds
are inescapably contaminated by our language(s).
- I take the ecological view that many interrelationships and inter-depen-
dencies in any ecology are mutually beneficial and that some are exploit-
ative and parasitical. In a healthy balanced ecology about 90% of the
interrelationships are mutually beneficial.
- Another ecological hypothesis is that diversity is needed for the long-term
sustainability of any ecology.
These hypotheses underpin the questions I would like to address here. They
are all variants of the main question: What is the effect of English / global
English on the linguistic / cultural and natural ecologies of our world?
To be true, we have accounts of the unsuitability of English as a medium
of education in a range of former British colonies summarized by Phillipson
English as an Exotic Language 69

(1992: 124ff) but he is concerned mainly with social consequences rather than
the impact of English language imposition on the natural environment. The
same can be said of Grillo’s (1989) insightful monograph on dominant lan-
guages. Honey (1997), in attacking Phillipson, again focuses on social aspects
and is remarkably silent about a concept which he introduces but never devel-
ops: namely, “the dogma of instant adaptability” (17), as well as his comment
that languages are “unequal with regard to specific functions” and that “the
languages of preliterate societies often have much more refined vocabularies
for the description of certain natural phenomena (plants, animals …)” (16).
Without wishing to comment here on Honey’s views on standard language
and power, I feel that the notion of adaptability needs to be examined in
greater detail as it is often implied in the arguments of those advocating global
English that it presents no problem.

3. Pitcairn Island
The world and its problems, as the reader will be well aware, are fairly big
issues and to do them justice in a brief essay would seem to be an impossible
task – I shall therefore resort to a strategy that allows one to arrive at con-
clusions without having to tell you all I know about the world. The beginning
of ecological studies in the seventeenth century took place on small often pre-
viously uninhabited islands such as St. Helena and Mauritius where the
adverse effects of colonization become apparent in a very short period of time
(Grove 1995). The attraction of studies of such islands is that one can ignore a
large number of parameters without sacrificing insights into general ecologi-
cal principles. Given the limited amount of time I have, I have opted to ad-
dress the effects of English on a particularly small island, Pitcairn, a small
speck of 3 by 1.5 km in the Pacific Ocean. The story of the mutiny on the
Bounty is well known. It has been written about in more than 8,000 books and
articles and celebrated in numerous films, novels and plays. At the end of the
eighteenth century, this unoccupied island was settled by nine English sailors,
twelve Tahitian women and six male Tahitian servants who had to survive in
an environment they had never seen or experienced before. That the social
side of the experiment was not a success story is evident: Within ten years all
Tahitian men and all but one non-Tahitian man had been murdered or died of
drink. The sole male survivor, however, converted to fundamentalist Christ-
ianity and set up a deeply religious new society which in subsequent years
proved vulnerable to the machinations of outside religious cranks (such as the
puritan dictator, Hill). In the 1890s the whole island converted to Seventh Day
Adventism. A particularly problematic aspect of the social experiment was its
pervasive racism, the suppression of the Tahitians, their language and most of
their culture. The model for Pitcairn society was an English not a Tahitian
70 P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER

village. One is tempted to argue that in 1790 English was not a language that
provided for a democratic, multicultural form of society but one that encour-
aged discourses of inequality, hierarchical structures and violence and that the
choice of English as the language of Pitcairn contributed to many of its social
problems. My essay whilst written with the social history of Pitcairn in mind
will focus on environmental history. In particular, I want to explore the role of
an exotic language in the treatment of the island’s natural resources.
The specific questions addressed here are:
- Did the knowledge that was found in the Pitcairners’ language enable them
to manage their new environment?
- Was English a suitable tool which could be readily put to the task of
managing this environment?
- Was the disappearance of Tahitian a natural process?
- Were the problems experienced by the settlers the result of the adoption of
English?
The story of Pitcairn Island is only one, though perhaps the canonical case of
an island utopia. The images that have been created and are being perpetuated
are often only loosely based on reality and this includes accounts of language
and language use. Laycock (1987), who reviewed a large body of writings on
Pacific utopias from a linguistic perspective, came to a surprising conclusion,
that the language spoken in the large majority of these utopias was standard
English of the Oxford type. The view that one can create a utopian paradise
with the help of English is echoed in the claims of some advocates of global
English: that a better and more manageable world could be created if every-
body spoke global English. But let us return to Pitcairn Island.

4. The languages of Pitcairn Island

To linguists, Pitcairn Island is best known for its ‘unique’ language,1 called
Pitcairnese (Ross & Moverley 1964), Pitcairn English, and now officially
Pitkern. What the language is remains a mystery (Mühlhäusler 1998). It has
been labelled a Pidgin, a Tahitian-English jargon, a cant (ie, a secret ingroup
language) and a creole. In most recent textbooks (eg, Sebba 1997) it is called
a prototypical/ canonical creole, a new language that developed among the
first generation of children from the union between British sailors and Tahi-
tian women. But the story is far more complex. Acrolectal / Standard English
has always been the dominant language of the island; while there were
families who spoke nothing but English, others followed a diglossic pattern of

1
The term ‘unique’ as a descriptor of the Pitkern/Norfolk language has become
common in travelogues and on websites.
English as an Exotic Language 71

English – Pitkern. No monolingual Pitkern speakers appear ever to have exis-

ted and Pitkern remained a supplementary language relying heavily on the
resources of English.
Pitkern could have been a different language, a nativized or naturalized
English, adapted to the special conditions on the island, but this role was
never fully realized. There was a small window of opportunity for Pitkern,
between 1800 when the period of murder and anarchy had come to an end and
1820 when contact with the outside world was re-established, but whatever
accommodation occurred was reversed in the 1820s when school-teachers
from England took over the education, trained the population in Standard
English and initiated a long period of suppression of what to them was
‘exotic’ in the second sense: ie, a barbarous and anarchic language. The
attitude the education system had towards language can be summarized in the
words of Palmer, who was teacher to the Pitcairners on Norfolk Island in
1915: “I like these people but I hate their language because of its limitations
and for another reason in which my opinion has been lately corroborated by
Professor Adams. He says that a people’s language determines their moral
attributes or words to that effect. If the Norfolk Island dialect could be wiped
out I am convinced that there would be a moral uplift.” It is interesting to
observe that in some households of the descendents of George Hunn Nobbs,
who settled on Pitcairn in 1828, it has been a rule to the present that Pitkern is
not used. The school system set up by outsiders was designed to replace Pit-
kern language and culture with those of the islanders’ ‘Motherland’, to instil
Christian values, tidiness and an appreciation of English literature. No Tahi-
tian was ever taught in these schools and Tahitian knowledge was not discus-
sed. No attempt was made to cultivate the Pitkern language and today the
language is in very serious decline among young people (see Källgård 1998).

5. Environmental management of Pitcairn Island

The first task facing the settlers was to find sustainable food, water and build-
ing supplies. What they found were about a hundred plant species (about 50%
endemic or unique to Pitcairn), a number of bird species and abundant fish
around the island. They recognized a small number of useful plants including
coconut, breadfruit, yam, plantains, pandanus and paper mulberry which
probably stemmed from earlier Polynesian settlements in Pitcairn, and they
brought with them from Tahiti sugar cane, oranges, taro and pumpkin seeds,
which continued to be major food plants (see Göthesson 1997 for details).
That Pitcairn was capable of sustaining a population of several hundred
people is borne out by the fact that a Polynesian community of this size had
lived on Pitcairn for several centuries, long enough to erect stone statues such
as those on Easter Island. Suggs points out:
72 P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER

The original settlers of Pitcairn may have been refugees from Easter Island.
What caused them to abandon the relative safety of Pitcairn and strike out to
sea again is anyone’s guess […] The fate of its (Pitcairn’s) former inhabitants
was one of the great mysteries sealed up in the sea. (1960: 184)
When the mutineers and their entourage settled on Pitcairn, they found ample
food, wood and good soils as well as fresh water.
There are two stories about their environmental management. The first one
is that the knowledge of the Tahitian women enabled the community to feed
itself and indeed live in subsistence affluence (see Christian 1998). What is
not said is that the women who were taken to Pitcairn did not have a great
depth of knowledge beyond the immediate one of identifying and using major
food plants, as Göthesson’s comprehensive book on the flora of Pitcairn
(1997) shows. His comprehensive listing of all of Pitciarn’s plants (endemic
and introduced) demonstrated that (1) only a small number of potentially
useful plants were named, (2) many of the uses that these named plants had in
Tahiti and other parts of Polynesia (particularly medicinal ones) remained
unknown on Pitcairn Island, and (3) a very large proportion of plants were
neither used or named and over time were driven to extinction. More will be
said about this below.
The second environmental history of Pitcairn is one of very considerable
mismanagement: massive erosion, the destruction of windbreaks, overuse of
useful plants, weed invasions and the general absence of management for
sustainability. By the 1840s the island had become dependent on food hand-
outs from the outside and it was felt that the population, in order not to starve,
had to be resettled on another island. In 1856 the entire population was ship-
ped to Norfolk Island; the two families that returned to Pitcairn after four
years continued to deplete the islands’ natural resources. The appendix gives a
number of quotations illustrating the environmental degradation of the island.
The most basic principle of environmental management is that you can
only manage what you know and you can only manage what you can name.
When the mutineers and their entourage set foot on Pitcairn a very small num-
ber of plants were known to and named by the Europeans and whatever
knowledge the Polynesians had was not necessarily passed on to subsequent
generations.
English as an Exotic Language 73

6. Some linguistic evidence

The linguistic evidence can be presented in a number of stages:
1. Only those plants that were recognized as edible or useful for the construc-
tion of houses and other artefacts were named in the initial period. Most
other plants which may have played an important role in the ecology of the
island were never named. For example, the 53 species of lichens and
mosses do not have an English or Pitkern name.
2. Contrary to expectations, Tahitian names for flora are not very numerous:
Only 56 names have been recorded against 190 English-derived Pitkern
names and about a dozen mixed Tahitian-English ones such as bulb-tale,
red fautu or pulau-gras.
3. Many plants that were culturally used in Tahiti were never named or used
on Pitcairn. Let us consider the 26 fern species of the island. Only nine of
them were ever named, three had a Tahitian name, six a Pitkern name such
as rockfern, blackfern, old man fern or creepy fern. One of the unnamed
ferns is used in 36 Tahitian remedies but none in Pitkern, three other un-
named ferns were also used for medicinal purposes in Polynesia, two were
used as a food source but none of them on Pitcairn. Eight of the unnamed
ferns are threatened with extinction.
4. When Pitkern has a word borrowed from Tahitian and where use is made
of a plant, the range of uses tends to be much narrower than in Polynesia.
The tiplant or rauti was used extensively in early years to distil a spirit but
it was not used as fodder, eaten or for medicinal purposes. Again, api or
giant taro was used as food but not as a remedy. Single use on Pitcairn
contrasts with multiple use in Tahiti and elsewhere in Polynesia.
5. A very large number of plants are introduced species. Many of them will
not do well on Pitcairn (eg, avocado (alligator), Norfolk Pine, pinus
radiata) or they have become pest plants.
6. Plants that have no cultural uses are often grouped together under a single
name, for instance:
cockscomb – a name given to a variety of species
dock – name of various fern species
jasmy – a number of plants
wildbean – any one of various weed plants of the pea family
(source: Göthesson 1997).
7. Finally, there are a number of plants that are central to the island’s culture,
particularly the coconut and the banana. Both plants were found by the
mutineers when they settled, although better new varieties have replaced
the earlier ones. About a dozen words refer to parts of the coconut and its
fruit and usable parts; the same is true of the banana.
74 P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER

Such data allow a preliminary conclusion: The English speaking community

that settled on Pitcairn Island lacked the language to talk about their natural
environment, making it difficult for them to manage its vegetation in a sus-
tainable manner.
It would seem unwise, however, to lay the blame for the resulting natural
disasters entirely on lexical inadequacies. After all, some plants which the
Pitcairners cannot name have English names and most of them have Latin
names. What is equally important is to consider the discourses that the Eng-
lish sailors brought with them – discourses that are concerned with the rela-
tionship between the people and the land. These discourses reflect first the
preoccupations of the sailors and subsequently, following John Adams’ con-
version, religious practices and beliefs.
English grammar has a number of properties that distinguishes it from the
majority of languages indigenous to the Pacific area. One such difference is
the grammar of possession and control. The English possessive pronouns such
as my, your etc. are neutral with regard to the following relationships:
a) A ⇒ B
b) B ⇒ A
c) A ⇔ B
The unmarked reading arguably is a) my dog, my car, my children. The lan-
guages of the Pacific typically distinguish two or three possessive pronouns –
particularly important is relationship c) which is used to refer to marriage
partners, the relationship with one’s land etc.
Land ownership in the sense of c) is not provided for in some languages.
On Pitcairn the unmarked reading of the English control possessive my is very
much in evidence.
Christian allocated land by means of a lottery, believing it to be the fairest
method. But there were only nine names in the draw – those of the mutineers.
Those who knew how to cultivate the land – the Polynesian men and women –
had none of their own to work. They could only be employed to dig, weed and
grow for the Europeans.
Over two centuries, these nine plots had been divided and subdivided as
children inherited from their parents. Even if left unused, land was not
forfeited but could be passed on down through absent generations. So some-
one who had left the island fifty years ago could bequeath their land to their
children, who would divide the postage-stamp plots of earth before bequeath-
ing the ever smaller patches to their children, none of whom had even been to
Pitcairn.
Every piece of the island, whether cultivated or not, was owned by
somebody – an ordnance survey of the island would be criss-crossed tightly
with lines – and everyone knew who owned which piece of land. And it
wasn’t only the patches of land that were name-tagged. Each fruit tree –
English as an Exotic Language 75

jackfruit, orange, mango, fi’i – belonged to someone, even if it appeared to be

growing wild, and every Pitcairner knew which they were allowed to chop
down and which they were not. (Birkett 1997: 121)
There is a marked absence of discourse about the mutual obligations between
humans and nature – the only European who could have provided this,
William Brown the assistant botanist, was murdered in 1793, together with
three other European men, within the first five years of settlement.
The dominant discourse of Pitcairn remains that of sin and redemption – or
the conversion of hell into paradise. Alexander Smith, or Reckless Jack, who
had been a key figure in the original mutiny and anarchy on Pitcairn Island,
when he found himself to be the last remaining male in 1800, converted to
fundamentalist Christianity and assumed the name of John Adams. It was he
who invited the first outsiders to settle on Pitcairn and set up an education
system. Pitcairn became the first English-speaking country to have com-
pulsory universal education and literacy, the aim of this being to enable the
population to read the Scriptures and to become a godly people. Part of this
discourse was to sever all links with the ungodly past. The statues erected by
the prehistoric Polynesian occupants of this island were pushed into the sea
and over the years the meaning of the mutiny and the memories of the
Tahitian ancestors were consigned to oblivion. The search for their Poly-
nesian roots is a very recent phenomenon among Pitcairn Islanders and their
Norfolk relatives. At the same time, discourses about a worldly future became
less and less: Birkett comments on “the confusion of tense” and the pre-
dominance of the present tense in Pitcairn discourses:
Dennis was shocked. ‘Dem es fer Elwyn.’
Perhaps the confusion of tenses was no linguistic accident; perhaps there
was no past for Pitcairners. Everything occurred around about now, and every
islander was still here with us. And Dennis could not take the windows
because they belonged to Elwyn, who had died a quarter of a century ago, and
in whose rotting sitting-room we now stood. There was a hint of self-
deception in the Pitcairners’ refusal to demolish the abandoned homes. As
long as they still stood, driving along Main Road was like driving along a real
street, with real homes every fifty or so yards. (1997: 175)
There is the view that God has provided, provides and will provide and one of
its consequences is that the islanders accumulate as much as they can for fear
that this supply would not last. Birkett describes what happens to a bumper
crop of arrowroot:
The piles of arrowroot seemed insurmountable; I could not imagine why we
needed so much. Nola and Reynold had dug ten sacks; although famed for her
orange arrowroot pie, even Nola couldn’t bake that many. Irma told me she
76 P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER

still had some arrowroot flour left from the crop of two years ago, and that, if
properly refined, it could keep up to twenty years as it didn’t attract the bugs
like ordinary flour. Royal said she ends up throwing half of hers away. But
need on Pitcairn was not measured; you could never have an excess of
anything. If there was an opportunity to gather yet more wood for carvings,
barter more frozen foodstuffs from a chief steward, accept another donation of
an electric kettle, then you grasped it, however many you already had or
however large your stocks. (1997: 275)
There is no long-term management plan for the island and with a rapid
depletion of the population the gardens are becoming overgrown with weeds.
At the same time, new technology, in particular video, has reached the island,
bringing with it images of America, New Zealand, Australia and Britain,
together with religious programs of the Seventh Day Adventists.

7. Borrowing and adaptation

On Pitcairn, we can observe a number of processes which reflect general
trends both on other Pacific Islands and in other former English colonies.
First, there is a very clear trend to derogate both local languages and nativized
Englishes (Pidgins, creoles and languages such as Pitkern).
The English language has been praised by many for its syntactic capacity,
its ability to absorb lexical items from the languages of the areas into which it
has been transplanted. On closer inspection, Pitkern has shown that in the
domain of the discourse about nature only a very small proportion of names
were ever borrowed – only a few plant and fish names of Tahiti were found in
Pitkern and many of them have become obsolete.
The fact that English, because its linguistic nature is capable of consider-
able synthesis – unlike other languages as Whinnom (1971) has observed –
does not mean that its speakers will avail themselves of this facility. The per-
vading view of most English speakers has been that the inhabitants of its
colonies were ignorant. A comparison of borrowings from English into the
local languages of the Pacific and Australia, for instance, when compared
with borrowings from local languages into local English reflects a still grow-
ing asymmetry. The information flow has been almost unidirectional – from
English to other languages. Very little environmental knowledge, for instance,
has been borrowed from Maori into New Zealand English and the 250+
indigenous languages of Australia into Australian English or from Tahiti into
Pitcairn English. Borrowing or non-borrowing from local languages thus
follows Sapir’s observation (1985: 90): “The physical environment is reflec-
ted in a language only insofar as it has been influenced by social factors.”
English as an Exotic Language 77

8. Adaptation versus image-making

I have commented in my introduction on a number of theoretical views on the
relationship between language and the world and I would like to relate two of
these positions, the constructivist and the ecological one, to the question of
linguistic development. Halliday, in his study of the acquisition of functions
(1975: 19), observed that language functions like language structures follow a
developmental program, with the instrumental functions (using language to
get something) and the ‘games of pretend’ function preceding the denotation
or cognitive function.
I would like to argue that the presence of late functions implies that of
earlier functions but not vice versa and that it is possible to backslide and
communicate in terms of earlier functions only or predominantly, both at the
level of individuals and in the development of languages generally. Bichak-
jian (1988) has put forward, on the basis of a very large data base on Euro-
pean languages, a theory of paedomorphosis – that language evolution moves
in the direction of ever-earlier acquired features. I would like to suggest that
what goes for structure also goes for function – there is a tendency, promoted
by urbanization and the increase in disconnection between people and nature,
for languages such as English to de-emphasize the informational/cognitive
function and to backslide to playing games of pretend – or image creation.
The adaptation of language to particular ecological conditions commonly is
replaced by language becoming primarily a tool for creating images of the
environment.
The story of Pitcairn can be taken as representative of this process – both
the suppression of a better adapted Tahitian language and the suppression of a
slowly adapting Pitkern by Standard English and the gradual invasion of
images of Christian paradise are part of the same story. As I was preparing
this essay a story hit the world’s newspapers: The Pitcairners have agreed to
the development of a four-star international hotel with airport on nearby
Henderson Island and a helicopter pad on Pitcairn. This no doubt will help
Pitcairn to reach its final destiny as a Pacific theme park where the images of
countless views and books about the island will be made ‘real’ for affluent
visitors.

9. Conclusions
My first conclusion is that English in many places has been an exotic lan-
guage, in the sense of ill-adapted to the new environments to which it was
transported. A second conclusion is that those who argue that English can be
nativized and adapt to new conditions tend to underestimate the time it takes –
and that in the meantime considerable collateral damage can be caused.
78 P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER

In most places where English was introduced it became the language of

power, and local languages found themselves at the bottom of the language
cline, which takes the form English – English-derived creole – local language.
Over time Standard English has come to replace all the other languages, but
that other languages were better adapted makes no difference to those who
control the education system. My essay would seem to suggest that the prin-
ciple of instantaneous adaptation or the view that any language can meet the
needs of its speakers, is clearly not sustainable. Adaptation may take too long
for these needs to be met. The fact that English meets the current wants of
those who speak it does not imply that it meets their long-term needs.
David Crystal’s view (1987: 116) that “English is a language which has
repeatedly found itself in the right place at the right time” needs to be queried.
For many Pacific Islands, including Pitcairn, it was not the right place. As
regards my specific desert island case study of Pitcairn, English did not have
the lexical resources to name the environment, its speakers focussed on a
small range of named useful plants which tended to become overexploited
and mismanaged, making the island dependent on outside resources from the
1830s. With the islanders getting to know more and more names for the pro-
ducts of the global economy – motorbikes, video players, electricity, fridges
etc. – the dependency on the outside world has increased with the island being
increasingly incapable of catering for the wants and needs of its inhabitants.
Note that the point is not whether the islanders have been able to live on Pit-
cairn for 175 years, but whether to do so they had to deplete the natural
capital, thus reducing its ability to remain habitable for future generations.
The naturalization and adaptation of English, its adaptation to its new
environment in the shape of the Pitkern language was slowed down, suppres-
sed and nearly eradicated as a consequence of the constant dominance of
metropolitan language models. What lessons are there to be learnt?
The view that language is a neutral medium of intercommunication is a
problematic one. English is not a language that can cope equally well with all
situations – as an additional language English has clear limitations, as a re-
placement language it brings with it many dangers. The fact that an increasing
number of well-adapted small local languages are being replaced by English
is in all likelihood one of the reasons for global environmental deterioration.
Being a student of contact languages and creoles, I have argued for some
years and would like to make this point again, that new contact languages
should be studied as language adaptation to new situations – as a particularly
important example of the naturalization of a species of language and that such
a study could have important implications. It would help to understand how
lengthy and how difficult the process of an exotic language becoming natural-
ized actually is.
English as an Exotic Language 79

In this essay I have addressed a number of controversial issues and looked

in some depth at one case study; I have looked at similar evidence from
Mauritius, St. Helena and Norfolk and I believe generalizations are possible.
The reader may disagree with my conclusions and may forget many of the
points I have raised. What I hope will remain is the insight that the question of
adaptation is a legitimate one in the context of English becoming a global
language and that it is worth asking what makes English an exotic language
from time to time and place to place and what the cost of being exotic may be.

WORKS CITED
Ardener, Edwin (1983). ‘Social anthropology, language and reality,’ in Harris, ed.
Approaches to Language, 143–56.
Bichakjian, Bernard H. (1988). Evolution in Language (Ann Arbor MI: Karoma).
Birkett, Dea (1997). Serpent in Paradise (London: Pan/Picador).
Christian, Glynn (1999). Fragile Paradise: The Discovery of Fletcher Christian,
Bounty Mutineer (Sydney: Doubleday).
Crystal, David (1997). English as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
Göthesson, Lars–Åke (1997). Plants of the Pitcairn Islands, Including Local Names
and Uses (Sydney: Centre for South Pacific Studies, University of New South
Wales).
Grillo, Ralph D. (1989). Dominant Languages: Language and Hierarchy in Britain
and France (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
Grove, Robert (1995). Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island
Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
Halliday, M . A . K . (1975). Learning How to Mean (London: Edward Arnold).
Harris, Roy, ed. (1983). Approaches to Language (Oxford: Pergamon).
Honey, John (1992). Language Is Power: The Story of Standard English and Its
Enemies (London: Faber & Faber).
Källgård, Anders (1998). ‘A Pitcairn wordlist,’ in Papers in Pidgin and Creole
Linguistics, ed. Peter Mühlhäusler (Canberra: Pacific Linguistics), No. 5 A-71:
101–11.
Kamenka, Eugene, ed. (1987). Utopias: Papers from the Annual Symposium of the
Australian Academy of the Humanities (Melbourne: Oxford UP).
Laycock, Donald C. (1987). ‘The language of Utopia,’ in Kamenka, ed. Utopias,
144–78.
Mühlhäusler, Peter (1996). Linguistic Ecology (London: Routledge).
—— (1998). ‘How creoloid can you get?,’ Journal of Pidgin and Creole Lan-
guages 13: 355–72.
Phillipson, Robert (1992). Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP).
Ross, Alan S . C . , & A . W . Moverley (1964). The Pitcairnese Language (London:
André Deutsch).
80 P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER

Sapir, Edward (1985). ‘Language and environment,’ in Sapir, Selected Writings of

Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, ed. David G. Mandelbaum
(1949; Berkeley: U of California P): 89–104.
Sebba, Mark (1997). Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles (Basingstoke: Mac-
millan).
Suggs, Robert Carl (1960). The Island Civilizations of Polynesia (New York: New
American Library/Mentor).
Whinnom, Keith (1971). ‘Linguistic hybridization and the special case of pidgins
and creoles,’ in Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, ed. Dell Hymes
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP): 91–115.

[
English as an Exotic Language 81

Appendix

Passages on Pitcairn’s ecological decline

Lars-Åke Göthesson (1997), Plants of the Pitcairn Islands

The Englishman Walter Brodie, who, with four other passengers from the
barque Noble, was marooned on Pitcairn for 19 days in 1850, observed that
“the island appears to be covered with wood, but no timber scarcely exceeds
60+cm in diameter. Wood may be had, in case of necessity, at three dollars a
boatload; but the islanders would rather not part with it, they themselves
requiring a large quantity to boil their salt with.” The 16 islanders returning to
Pitcairn in 1859 after spending two years on Norfolk Island noticed that “the
plantations, fallow for more than two years, now yielded crops more abundant
than ever before in the memory of that generation.” However, in the early part
of the 1879s there was an extreme scarcity of water on the island and “the
soil, that had formerly been so productive, seemed now to have lost its
remarkable fertility. The yam crop, which hitherto had yielded so well, and
had been one of the principal food supplies, now failed almost entirely. Nor
did the sweet potato escape the general plague, for the very troublesome
blight would attack the young plantation, completely preventing its growth,
and when the tubers became matured they were often infested by a destructive
worm that worked untold mischief among them,” (R.A. Young, 1894). The
fast-growing, vigorous rose-apple tree (Sysygium jambos), brought from
Norfolk Island during the latter part of the nineteenth century, became one of
the most troublesome pests on the island. The effects of deforestation were
noticed by Rosalind Amelia Young in 1874: “Around the entire island, along
the edge of precipice, where once had flourished a thick growth of stunted
hardy trees, could now be seen bare, barren soil, free to be washed away by
heavy rains.” (8–9)

The earliest reference to the occurrence of weeds on the island seems to be

found in The Pitcairn Island Register Book which in its summary for 1844
reported that “weeds overrun the island.” When the first group of Pitcairners
returning from Norfolk Island landed on Pitcairn in January 1859 they found
their abandoned fields choked with weeds. The only weeds said to occur on
82 P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER

the island at the beginning of this century were Commelina diffusa and
Lantana camara, but in 1934 there were no less than 32 introduced weeds
according to St. John and Fosberg. In an article published in Pitcairn Miscel-
lany 1962, Roy Clark has the following view on the disheartening battle
fought against local weeds:
I recall the days when this island was practically free from noxious weeds and
grasses over at ‘Pulau’, and one could walk anywhere there and pick pandanus
palm-nuts, coconuts, and a lost pocket-knife could easily be found. Look at
the acres of land there today. Look at any other spot on this island and what do
we see – the land overrun with a score or more of unwanted and troublesome
plants. Not knowing their scientific names we have called them Alwyn grass
(Sorghum sudanense), Foxtail (Setaria verticillata), Broomstick (Bidens
pilosa), Cowgrass (Commelina diffusa), Lantana (Lantana camara), Morning
Glory (Ipomoea indica). These and many others are eating up our land.
Intermittent efforts have in the past years been made to rid the island of these
pests, but to no avail because waning enthusiasm has gained the day and the
pests have the laugh on us. And where are we in 1962? Almost smothered out
of house and home because of these pernicious weeds. Our attitude is, that if
our fathers and forefathers got along all right why can’t we? Now where do
we find ourselves? To combat the pests now will take months and months of
hard labour and work to restore Pitcairn to its former beauty. Involved, also so
it seems to me, is a large sum of money for insecticide and what not to beat
back our enemies that are making it doubly hard to earn our daily bread.
The geologist R.M. Carter, who visited the island in 1963, observed that
“Recent introduction of lantana (Lantana camara) and Alwyn grass (Sorghum
halepense) resulted in the rapid spread of these common tropical weeds such
that much of the central part of the island is now inaccessible.” (13)

According to A.W. Moverley, Education Officer on Pitcairn between 1948

and 1951: “Cultivation is by the adze and the hoe. The spade and other tools
seem never used. There is no manuring; in fact there seems a prejudice
against it. This is due to its earlier mental association with animals and the
strong vegetarian bias of the older generation here. Seaweed was used to
some extent in the past (in 1825 according to Beechey), but would hardly be
practicable because its small size in these waters, the difficulty of getting a
supply and the poor access from beach to gardens. Yet continued green
manuring would affect the workability of the soil most beneficially. Shelter is
essential from the strong salt-bearing winds.” Moverley continues: “no
widespread fungoid diseases on plants have been noticed, though the mangoes
are commonly spotted and some oranges seem to be covered with mosaic.
Insect pests, however abound; crickets, hoppers resembling the sand flea but
smaller and darker and existing in swarms, centipedes and millipedes, ear-
English as an Exotic Language 83

wigs, wood lice, caterpillars of all sizes and various colours, wireworms,
beetles of various sizes, fruit flies, aphids and scales. Yellow wasps (Polistes
jadwigae dalla torre) came in from Mangareva, as did small black ants, now
in almost overwhelming numbers ... (rats) attack citrus fruit at all stages; they
eat the seeds both before and during germination, they destroy the blossoms,
and they eat the fruit on the tree before it ripens. Orange trees are unpruned
and grow straight up to a great height in the scrubby jungle, but only a metal
collar around the trunk can discourage the rats. Rotations in the fruit supply
are natural. As soon as one season shows signs of ending, another begins to
get under way. July is the height of the citrus season, but most of the other
fruits are at their best from Christmas to early autumn. Because of the range in
altitude kumaras (sweet potatoes) can be grown all year round. In summer
they are grown ‘up the hill’ in winter down in the settlement” (Moverley
1950). (14)

Captain Waldegrave observed in 1830 that the islanders appeared to be

careless about other fruits or vegetables than yams, sweet potatoes, coconuts,
plantains and bananas. (14)

On the night between April 15–16, 1845, the island was hit by a typhonic
storm accompanied by torrents of rain causing a great landslide at the Hollow
in which “about 300 coconut trees were torn up by the roots and swept into
the sea. So tenacious was the heterogeneous stream that some of the coconut
trees from 40–50 feet in height, after being displaced from their original
situation, remained in an upright position some minutes, and when they fell it
was many yards from the spot in which they had come to maturity” (G.H.
Nobbs). In May 1939 another large-scale landslide with similar consequences
occurred after heavy rain in Deep Valley and Water Valley on the western
side of the island. […] A decline in the island’s growth of coconuts was
noticed already in 1915 by S. Routledge, who reported that the trees were
dying. During a visit in 1937, J. S. Neill observed that the coconut trees were
limited in number and of poor type. Further evidence of the poor condition of
the local coconuts appeared in 1956 and 1962 when, according to Roy Clark,
they were far from healthy and affected by blight. (112)

Although not reported from Pitcairn until 1829, the species was almost cer-
tainly part of the original indigenous forest found on the island when the
Bounty mutineers arrived in 1790. The timber was probably used for canoe
building at Tedside (the north-west coast) by earlier Polynesian population.
Because of its very hard resistant wood, standing exposure to sun, wind and
rain for many years without showing any signs of decay, the tree was
84 P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER

primarily used for house building by the Anglo-Polynesian settlers in the

1790s. After the unfortunate emigration to Tahiti in 1831, a new type of house
construction became popular on Pitcairn: the outside walls of these new, one-
storied long houses were horizontally clapboarded in MIRO and other hard
woods, and left unpainted. The foundation was made of solid MIRO logs,
about 25 x 25cm, placed on large stones. Slabs of the same wood were then
placed between uprights to form the walls, above which were sliding shutters.
A shortage of local wood suitable for house building soon became evident
and is reflected in ‘Law No. 6: Miscellaneous’ of 1838 which stated that any
person who cut more wood that he needed to build a house was to give the
surplus timber to the next person intending to build one. […] “the two most
valuable trees on the island, of which they built their houses, the Tafano or
flower wood and the Aruni or Mero” were scarce. “The latter wood, Mero, is
in principal use; it is very dark, like rose-wood, very durable, standing
exposure to sun, wind, and rain for many years without showing any
symptoms of decay. The first settlers’ houses were made entirely of it, and are
so sound now as the day they were erected, though without paint or covering
of any kind: Indeed, Mr. Nobbs’ house and the school are the only two that
have been painted or whitewashed even in part.” (254)

Dea Birkett (1997) Serpent in Paradise

Pitcairn had been severely deforested by the islanders’ thirst for fuel and
carving material, but on Henderson, an uninhabited island one hundred and
ten nautical miles to the east-north east, there was still a plentiful supply of
tau and the fiery red miro, which the carvers preferred to the grey-grained
miro which was all that was left on Pitcairn. (77)

The fierce weather continued through Sunday and we were trapped inside
with only Royal brave enough to visit us. On Monday, the wind tore a branch
off the big mango tree at the back of the house. Irma’s corn crop was
destroyed. El Niño was causing havoc, slashing away at tiny Pitcairn. […] We
drove through a scene of destruction; the wind had snapped the banana trees
in two as if match sticks, and the severed trunks seeped pungent sap. The rain
had washed down the roads forming deep ridges, making driving easy. All
Dennis had to do was lodge the front wheel of his bike into a ridge and we
rode along like a tram on its lines. We passed abandoned homes, where
branches had fallen against the weathered walls, blocking windows and
bringing down water pipes. We passed Ben’s wild beans, the neat rows in-
discernible, the plants all blown over, and the pods scorched and scattered like
seed by the wind. It struck me how volatile the Pitcairn landscape was, and
how much a victim of the elements. On the day after my arrival, just one
English as an Exotic Language 85

week ago, Pitcairn had been a sultry sub-tropical island, with ordered gardens
and stiff, heavily laden banana trees. Now the storm had gouged the earth and
ravaged the vegetation. The island I was travelling through was blighted land.
(112–13)

Once the islanders, nearly three hundred strong, controlled the vegetation
There were large areas of cleared land, well-defined gardens, sharp-edged
roads, where the red clay met the green vegetation. But now, with the popula-
tion down to under fifty, the vegetation was in control. Leaves, twine, stems
and branches grew over roads, almost obscuring them. Hibiscus and lantana
rapidly claimed buildings not continually shorn; the lower walls of the Court
House were smothered in it.
Rose-apple trees which grew like weeds had dammed Brown’s Water.
Gardens were continually encroached upon, so that corn would lose the light
and beans be choked. If the vegetation wanted something – an islander’s food,
an islander’s home – it could take it. (155)

I crossed a damp, shallow ditch where it seemed water had run just a few days
before, which must be Brown’s Water, the island’s only natural spring. Once
it flowed freely, and it provided the first few generations of Pitcairners with
all the fresh water they needed. But now it was reduced to little more than a
trickle and often dried up altogether, although along its narrow banks the
leaves still shone an even more vibrant green than along the edge of the paths.
One valley was studded with tall plantain trees, heavy with fruit. I wondered
whose they were. (179)

When we went, the lantana had reclaimed part of his path, but it was still easy
to follow. Across a small valley, he had rolled a boulder as a bridge. We had
eaten juicy oranges and Reynold showed me how to peel a twig from a burau
tree, plentiful in Water Valley, scrape the wood underneath, and apply it to a
bleeding would stop the flow. He peeled me a guava, so unpromising outside,
so pink, fleshy and sweet inside. We foraged for candlenuts and found one
that the rats hadn’t hollowed out and eaten. Reynold cracked it, and inside
was a cream-coloured waxy substance. He said that he used the unbroken
ones under his copper to keep it burning well. At Irma’s, we used diesel-
soaked sawdust. No one except Reynold, I imagined, continued to collect
candlenuts. (209)

But need on Pitcairn was not measured; you could never have an excess of
anything. If there was an opportunity to gather yet another donation of an
electric kettle, then you grasped it, however many you already had or however
86 P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER

large your stocks […] The motivation wasn’t greed, it was fear. Whatever you
had now, might have to last forever. There was no guarantee that any supply
line would continue. (275)

A.S.C. Ross and A.W. Moverley (1964), The Pitcairnese Language

After supplying timber for housing, boat-building and firewood for over
hundred and seventy years, the supply of indigenous timbers is almost nil
today. An introduced plant, Eugenia jambos, commonly known as rose-apple,
covers much of the unused parts of the Island and, though generally
considered a pest, it supplies nearly all the Island’s wood; indeed, its presence
is the only guarantee of a sufficient supply of firewood. (28)

The Times, 23 October 1852, based on information from the vessel Portland
Of fruits and edible roots they have at present abundance which they
exchange with the whalers for clothing, oil, medicine, and other necessaries;
but the crops on the tillage ground begin to deteriorate, landslips occur with
each succeeding storm and the declivities of the hills when denuded, are laid
bare by the periodical rains.

J.A. Moerenhout (1837), Travels to the Islands of the Pacific Ocean [reprint,
London: UP of America, 1993]
As for coconut trees, they had considerably increased their number in all parts
of the island. An unusual tree, under whose shade we were sitting and which I
had only encountered at Pitcairn, is the famous fig tree of the Banyans (Ficus
Indica), whose branches fell in festoons down to the earth, where, taking root
at their ends, they enlarge to the point of themselves forming fine trunks from
which new branches come out, which, binding down in turn, plant themselves
in the same way from one point to another, and, joined at their top, all
stemming from one trunk and going off in every direction, form charming
groves, so much the cooler since the sun cannot penetrate; but this tree is not
without inconvenience on a little island like Pitcairn because, very difficult to
destroy, it itself destroys all other vegetation. They showed me the summit of
a mountain entirely covered with a single one of these trees which would end
by covering the entire island if they hadn’t taken the precaution of stopping its
progress.” (26–27)

[
G.lobal L.anguages O.ppress
B.ut A.re L.iberating, Too
The Dialectics of English

Richard J. Alexander
Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien

ABSTRACT
Institutional consequences of ‘englishization’ include threats to bio- and
linguistic diversity. Analysis of the ‘corporatization’ of the international
order must counter the Panglossian exhortation of English as the best of all
possible worlds. Much cash is expended by corporations to underpin this
process. Academic scholarship is seduced to acclaim the self-evident neces-
sity of English or its naive redefinition as just a lingua franca. Englishization
is clearly not one of the proximate causes of global inequality. But its
correlation with real-world socioeconomic processes is undeniable. Take
business and management studies, where language or, rather, English is
centre-stage. International opposition to this state of affairs is hard to
coordinate. Ironically, knowledge of English will play a role in the formu-
lation of alternatives. This is one of the dialectical features of the global
reach English has achieved.

1. Some precautionary, explanatory remarks

T
O BEGIN, WE MIGHT ASK ‘who is oppressing or liberating?’
Obviously, languages do neither. Only speakers of languages op-
press other humans. The connexions between language and oppres-
sion are too vast to enumerate. Ever since homo loquens evolved language,
shibboleths have affected human societies.
The title of this essay might sound bizarre to English teachers from the
former ‘Eastern Bloc’ such as those mentioned by Medgyes (1999: 100).
88 R ICHARD J. A LEXANDER

They listened to Western English-language radio ‘over the jamming’. They

perceived learning English as enlarging their experience and education. As
someone who has ‘employed’ radio to learn foreign languages, the author has
much sympathy with this view.
Nonetheless, the essay addresses ‘objective’ and institutional consequences
of the spread of English as an International Language (E I L ). ‘Englishization’
may well have its instrumental uses, but as concerned practitioners and human
beings fearful of loss of bio- and linguistic diversity we may well feel that it is
time for the cultural overlapping to stop.

2. English: handmaiden or hanger-on of globalization?

Observations of the rocketing demand for English-for-business courses (Alex-
ander 1999a) force a political-economic vantage-point upon one. This high-
lights the phenomenon of corporatization of the world, as embodied in current
globalization processes, specifically the dominance of finance capitalism over
industrial capitalism and the accumulation of wealth at the centre at the
expense of the periphery. No amount of ‘free access’ by the citizens of the
world to the Internet is going to re-balance this one-way accumulation (see
Chomsky 2000a: 98 for Latin American data).
Internet ‘freedoms’ serve as an ideal figleaf for many spokespersons to
assert how ‘liberating’ the dominance of one language is on the net. After all,
how many people use non-English-language-based browsers to access infor-
mation? As a practitioner in the area of English for business and economics,
one’s attention almost invariably is drawn to the close interlocking between
language: that is, the spread of E I L , and current corporatization. Not only is
inequality dramatically increasing. The whole development is also making life
on earth ecologically unsustainable (Alexander 1996, 1999b, 2000 and Mühl-
häusler, this volume).
This essay argues that there is considerable personal, human cost entailed
by English dominating the globe. It is channeling energies away from other
meaning potentials and discourse systems. This is not only true for students.
How do teachers cope with knowing that their teaching of a global language
objectively and patently subordinates learners and users to a global frame-
work of order with which they hold little sympathy (Alexander 1999a)?

3. The ‘new’ international order

Arguably, there are many possible ways of viewing the global nature of Eng-
lish. Any that ignore the current neo-liberal, corporatized Anglo-American
politico-economic set-up are unlikely to gain much credence, however. We do
not merely need to think of organizations like the I M F and the World Bank
The Dialectics of English 89

which were created at Bretton Woods in July 1944, significant though they
are. These represented the culmination of wartime discussions between the
U S A and the U K on the shape of the post-World War II international
economic order. What is called the “corporatization” of the global order
(Chomsky 2000a: 207–14) has had a long history – in its Anglo form perhaps
250 years! Certainly, the connection with language is of major interest to us.
But without some analysis of the socio-economic structure accompanying it
any discussion of global English is destined to be incorporated into the
discourse of the modern-day Dr Panglosses exhorting us all to accept that this
is the best of all possible worlds.
As Chomsky says of ‘power intellectuals’ and politicians generally, they
can be guaranteed to join in the “the chorus of self-adulation” in this con-
nexion (Chomsky 2000a: 60–61). Many such writers have few, if any, prob-
lems with the arrangement which has recently given the world such obscene
concepts and terms as so-called ‘rogue states’, ‘humanitarian intervention’,
‘surgical strikes’, and ‘collateral damage’ (Chomsky 2000a and 2000b). How-
ever, not all intellectuals are ‘power intellectuals’, such as those described by
Herman and Peterson (2001), who can be relied upon to say what the estab-
lishment wants to hear on the civilizing mission of the U S A and the West.
Since the 1960s, Chomsky (1994) himself has radically and analytically ques-
tioned the legitimacy of the Washington consensus and Pentagon system to
structure the world in their image.

4. How to counter-balance Panglossian

and Pollyanna views?
The fact that the corporate community spends immense amounts financing a
P R business to “convince Americans that this is best of all possible worlds”
(McChesney in his introduction to Chomsky 1999a: 15) is worth noting. Yet
the powerful cannot be sure that their hegemony will hold, since corporate
marketing swallows up a sixth of the U S gross domestic product, according to
Chomsky (1999a).
A further voice speaking out against the modern-day Dr Panglosses, the
power intellectuals and their (not so) naive hangers-on is Johan Galtung. He
notes how even ‘academic’ subjects have clear propagandist functions.
Galtung mentions mainstream economics as one of the effective propaganda
instruments used in P R , characterizing it mainly “as cultural violence, con-
cealing and mystifying what happens when people produce, distribute and
consume” (1996: viii).
Comparable mystifications abound in the humanities. Consider the way
English-based communication is talked about in glowing terms, as a contri-
bution to world peace, to cooperation between nations, as a vehicle of educa-
90 R ICHARD J. A LEXANDER

tional resources. This discourse distracts from what happens when national
resources in many countries are diverted towards learning a foreign language
and away from self-development, both linguistic and cultural. A precept
underlying such discourse is the ‘Pollyanna Principle’. One feature of this
rhetorical technique is “that participants in a conversation will prefer pleasant
topics of conversation to unpleasant ones” (Leech 1983: 147). An accom-
panying property is the use of euphemism, masking unpalatable topics by
employing disarming expressions, such as ‘downsizing’ instead of ‘sacking
workers’.
Euphemisms and mystifications are elements in the toolkit of much
academic propaganda passing for ‘education’ and ‘science’ today. English too
has a facilitating role to play. ‘Education’ aims to attune each generation to
those patterns of discourse suitable for survival in the social formations for
which they are being fitted out. English is self-evidently deemed ‘vital’
(Business Week 2001).

5. Englishization and the pseudo-debate on global English

The extent of Anglo-American influence on European languages (‘english-
ization’) is evident (Phillipson & Skutnabb–Kangas 1999). Under the guise of
English as an auxiliary international language to ‘ease’ commerce, trade, and
even academic and educational ‘mobility’, millions of individuals are being
‘channelled’ into the process of ‘englishization’.
For some, English is ‘just’ the informal ‘official’ language of the European
Union (House 2000: 1–3). It smoothes over political, economic, business and
academic language differences. House claims: “English as a lingua franca is
nothing more than a useful tool: it is a ‘language for communication’.” She
sees no need for lingua franca speakers to identify with English. House admits
that sociolinguists may rightly mourn the loss of linguistic diversity. Yet she
claims that the dominance of English in the world “simply reflects unequal
power resulting from differences in social, economic, political or scientific
conditions” (2001: 3).
This perspective may well appeal to the naive. But it demonstrates an
extremely disingenuous standpoint on the ways of the world in general. It also
ignores the manifold facts, not just from the research studies of linguists, but
from a whole range of social-scientific evidence. This shows that English is
not a solution to the unravelling of the “unequal power” relations in the world
but an integral part of the problem. Any discussion of English as global
language and its implications that ignores this will be running round and
round in circles. Naturally, this is precisely what the proponents of the
Washington consensus and the new framework of world order (analysed by
Herman & Peterson 2001 and Chomsky, passim) wish to happen!
The Dialectics of English 91

6. The tendency of the centre to monopolize the periphery

Obviously, the argument of this essay is not that englishization is one of the
proximate causes of global inequality. But a correlation with real-world socio-
economic processes and structures is undeniable.
As Business Week notes: “English is becoming the binding agent of a con-
tinent” (2001). In the educational systems of Europe, as Phillipson & Skut-
nabb–Kangas (1999) and Phillipson (this volume) make clear, there is much
evidence that English is ‘crowding out’ national languages in school curricula
and higher education. This is said to be forced upon ‘countries’ by the needs
of national and international trade.
Arguably this is a confusion of two facets of English. First, we have the
‘merely’ instrumental and utilitarian development of E I L . Secondly, we have
the accompanying epiphenomenal status of American (and British) English as
the cultural and commercial discourse of the post-1989 World Corporate
Order. In this role English is not, and cannot be, a purely ‘neutral’ vehicle of
communication. ‘Countries’ are not responding. Trade interests are shaping
‘their’ countries’ responses.
A common counter-argument from the purely linguistic perspective claims
that the development of new varieties of English demonstrates the opposite.
Hypostasizing language the claim is that the periphery is ‘striking back’. No
group of English speakers has a monopoly of any kind over others, as model
speakers, as native speakers even, as users of a standard norm to which all
others must adhere.
Unfortunately, this position ignores the hegemonic tendencies of more than
language. Language is an epiphenomenon where political and economic
power is concerned. Areas of life beyond language proper are affected. The
centre reduces ‘competing centres’ to part of the periphery. The tendency of
the centre to monopolize the periphery is seen in education, ‘culture’, mass
media, consumer ‘values’, enterprise culture, etc.
The professional field of business and management studies is perhaps a
paradigm case. Here the one-time independent non-English-speaking national
traditions are succumbing to the Anglo-Saxon centre. All around the world
management ‘education’ is being ‘reduced’ to a peripheral status, as copy-cat
M B A s and management training in European business schools ‘ape’ the
North American and British models as “temples and votaries” (Kidron &
Segal 1991: 74–75, 144–45).

7. The role of English in the process of global ‘governance’

92 R ICHARD J. A LEXANDER

What role does English play in the process of global ‘governance’? We could
say it provides the ‘nuts and bolts’ of U S and U K cultural policy. There is
much evidence to support this view. Phillipson (1992: 152) draws attention to
the symbiotic interlocking of foreign cultural policy and foreign policy goals
quoting Chomsky (1982). Further incontrovertible evidence of this link with
British foreign policy since 1945 is provided by Curtis (1995). Phillipson
touches upon the relegation of Britain to a junior partner of the U S A since
World War II, including the legitimization rhetoric that the Americans
employed to justify their policies. Language promotion is a part of the U S
global strategy together with the Fulbright programme. Phillipson details the
role played by the United States Information Agency (U S I A ) in this process
in a parallel role to that of the British Council. The close connection between
U S I A ’s agenda and shifts in targeting of countries following corporate inter-
ests is excellently documented in Snow (1998), documenting the transforma-
tion of the U S I A into a corporate lobby operation.
Snow tellingly quotes Henry Catto, the U S I A Director under Bush (1998:
42–43): “Other government agencies are hard at work drafting the grand
architecture of the New World Order; we’re out there providing the nuts and
bolts. What is private property? What is profit? How do I start a business?
How do I learn English? How can your voice be heard in local affairs? These
are the kinds of questions that ordinary people increasingly are asking around
the world. And increasingly, U S I A is providing the answers.”
Given the explicit role of cultural policy in flanking both foreign and trade
policies of Britain and especially the U S A how can we possibly ignore asking
questions such as the following? Are the sociocultural practices accompany-
ing the spread of English issues which teachers and academic researchers
need to address? Is English today still acting as a potentially colonizing dis-
course? Is the ‘crowding out’ of other, even European, languages in language
planning decisions leading to linguicide in extreme cases and penetration,
marginalization, fragmentation otherwise?

8. Militarization and englishization

Nor is the thrust of English merely ‘commercial’. The military-industrial
complex, the U S Pentagon System, has penetrated many European states.
English is the language of N A T O and now K -F O R in Kosovo. Austrian
policemen wishing to earn higher salaries serving there must have a “good
knowledge of English” before applying, according to the Austrian Broadcast-
ing Service. Policing the world goes hand in hand with policing in the
language of the world.
English is arguably now the International Language of War and Peace
(E I L O W A P ). The British Council is playing a central role in the ‘militariza-
The Dialectics of English 93

tion’ component of English. It provides ‘aid’ to N A T O and Eastern European

countries through government, military, defence ‘assistance’ programmes. At
the 2001 I A T E F L conference in Brighton Mark Crossey of the British Coun-
cil, Poland, reported on “setting standards in testing and teacher development”
in the context of “peace-keeping English projects”.

9. An optimistic conclusion
What are the professional implications for E L T practice? Firstly, can one
fully understand the use of English as an international language without an
awareness of the framework of order that accompanies it? Pennycook (1994:
6) maintains these cultural and political implications of the spread of English
cannot be ignored by rational and self-reflexive E L T specialists. Our educa-
tional and vocational situations do not exist in a vacuum after all. Pennycook
(1998: 68) refers explicitly to the need to comprehend particular material
(economic, political, social) conditions of education. This is a task we must
individually and collectively undertake.
Secondly, how far does the spread of English constitute an unambiguous
‘good’? Certainly this is what the propagandists would have us believe. If the
underlying direction of this essay concerning the welding of personnel to the
international business system by means of English and the creation of a
deferential, neocolonial discourse is, only partially, correct, then the prospects
for the future would appear to be dismal. ‘T I N A ’, there is no alternative, is
the P R -cry. However, there are hopeful signs from outside the élite circles of
Europe and North America that this perception is not shared. ‘Benefits’ from
global corporatization accrue to a narrow band of society. The costs, as
always, are socialized to the majority of the world’s population.
More and more people are dissatisfied with the way things are proceeding.
The recent anti-W T O , G8 and World Bank protests in Seattle, Prague,
Quebec and Genoa are the tip of an iceberg. That the destabilizing effects of
Anglo-American and European financial capitalism in its globalized form are
sustained and supported by the englishization process is obvious. English as
the language of protest banners held up for the world’s media is also no
novelty.
But opposition to the system is hard to orchestrate. Both to find out how
the framework of world order functions and for organizational purposes
knowledge of English plays a role in global resistance. This cannot be denied.
That the formulation of alternatives can and, perhaps in view of the increasing
internationalization of the opposition to global institutions, must proceed in
part through English is one of the ironies, or, if you prefer it, a dialectical
aspect, of the global reach English has achieved.
94 R ICHARD J. A LEXANDER

WORKS CITED
Alexander, Richard J. (1996). ‘Integrating the ecological perspective: Some lingu-
istic self-reflexions,’ in Sprachökologie und Ökolinguistik, ed. Alwin Fill
(Tübingen: Stauffenburg): 131–48.
—— (1999a). ‘Caught in a global English trap, or liberated by a lingua franca?
Unravelling some aims, claims and dilemmas of the English teaching profession,’
in Teaching and Learning English as a Global Language: Native and Non-Native
Perspectives, ed. Claus Gnutzmann (Tübingen: Stauffenburg): 23–39.
—— (1999b). ‘Ecological commitment in business: A computer-corpus-based
critical discourse analysis,’ in Language and Ideology: Selected Papers from the
6th International Pragmatics Conference, ed. Jef Verschueren (Antwerp: Inter-
national Pragmatics Association), vol. 1: 14–24.
—— (2000). ‘The framing of ecology: Some remarks on the relation between lan-
guage and economics,’ in ECOnstructing Language, Nature and Society: The
Ecolinguistic Project Revisited; Essays in Honour of Alwin Fill, ed. Bernhard
Ketteman & Hermine Penz (Tübingen: Stauffenburg): 173–90.
Business Week (2001). ‘The Great English Divide,’ Business Week Online (13
August).
Chomsky, Noam (1982). Towards a New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis
and How We Got There (London: Sinclair Browne).
—— (1994). World Orders, Old and New (London: Pluto).
—— (1999a). Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York:
Seven Stories).
—— (1999b). The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (London: Pluto).
—— (2000a). Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (London: Pluto).
—— (2000b). A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the
Standards of the West (London: Verso).
Curtis, Mark (1995). The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy Since 1945
(London: Zed).
Galtung, Johan (1996). Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development
and Civilization (London: Sage).
Herman, Edward S., & David Peterson (2001). ‘Public versus power intellectuals,
part 1,’ ZNet Commentary (10 May).
House, Juliane (2001). ‘A “stateless” language that Europe should embrace,’
Guardian Weekly (T E F L Supplement “Learning English”, April): 1–3.
Kidron, Michael, & Ronald Segal (1991). The New State of the World Atlas (Lon-
don: Simon & Schuster).
Leech, Geoffrey (1983). Principles of Pragmatics (Harlow: Longman).
Medgyes, Péter (1999). The Non-Native Teacher (1994; Ismaning: Hueber).
Pennycook, Alastair (1994). The Cultural Politics of English as an International
Language (London: Longman).
—— (1998). English and the Discourses of Colonialism (London & New York:
Routledge).
Phillipson, Robert (1992). Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP).
The Dialectics of English 95

——, & Tove Skutnabb–Kangas (1999). ‘Englishisation: One dimension of global-

isation,’ A I L A Review 13 (special issue “English in a changing world,” ed. David
Graddol & U . H . Meinhof): 19–36.
Snow, Nancy (1998). Propaganda Inc.: Selling America’s Culture to the World
(New York: Seven Stories).

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Proregression and Dynamic Stasis
The Ambivalent Impact of English
as Reflected in Postcolonial Writing

Photis Lysandrou and Yvonne Lysandrou

University of North London

ABSTRACT
This essay applies a ‘two-space’ theoretic perspective to shed light on the
impact of English as a general language of communication. It is argued that
while English has a positive role in physical space where it promotes devel-
opment, it has a negative role in price space where it facilitates disposses-
sion. A conjunction of these two roles means that English helps to reinforce
a condition of ‘proregression’, or dynamic stasis, resulting from the simul-
taneous but antithetical processes of progression and regression. The fact
that certain postcolonial literary texts problematizing English language make
extensive use of the ‘circle’ and ‘spiral’ motifs to convey the ambiguity and
sense of confusion arising from this embrace is traced to this underlying
condition of proregression.

1. Introduction

T
H E R E I S A G E N E R A L C O N S E N S U S that the current rush on the
part of communities the world over to embrace the English language
is bound up with the pressures of globalization. Nevertheless, there
is within this accepted framework disagreement as to whether technical con-
siderations (English as a ‘neutral’ language of communication1) or broader
issues of power (English as a non-neutral language of domination2) play the

1
The functionalist view of English is exemplified in the collection of essays Post-
Imperial English, ed. Fishman et al. (1996).
2
The power view of English is put most strongly by Robert Phillipson, notably in
his book Linguistic Imperialism (1992), but also in numerous other publications. An
98 P HOTIS L YSANDROU AND Y VONNE L YSANDROU

more significant part in English language spread, and as to whether, therefore,

this process is a benign or pernicious one.
In presenting our own position on the subject, we should point out that it
did not develop out of any desire to cross swords with language theorists.
Rather, it arose out of a concern to contest prevailing critical interpretations of
postcolonial literary texts that problematize the relation between the English
language and native identity. It is no exaggeration to say that the dominant
tenor of these interpretations is one of optimism, a fact attributable to an
underlying conviction that, whatever the original circumstances behind Eng-
lish-language adoption by a colonized people, the latter can, under the new
postcolonial conditions, successfully commandeer that language and make it
bear the burden of a quite different experience.
Now while some postcolonial texts can be interpreted from this particular
angle without inviting too much controversy, others cannot. In some of these
texts,3 the pessimism is so stark as to suggest no possibility of reconciling the
English language with native interests and priorities. Although some critics do
confront these negative expressions, the tendency is to trace their source to
deficiencies in the temperament or technique of the author rather than to
deficiencies inherent in the postcolonial situation itself. Yet it is this latter
interpretation that would appear to us to make more sense given that the texts
in question invariably portray the failure of making the English language fully
one’s own as occurring despite the exercise of resolve rather than because of
its absence, an outcome that points to the presence of ontologically rooted and
therefore insurmountable constraints on the ability to establish full possession.
It was with the intention of uncovering the nature of those constraints that
we developed a two-space perspective on the world and applied it to an
understanding of the role played by English as a language of international
communication. In the course of that application we found that, contrary to
‘power’ views of English, this can take the form of a neutral language struc-
ture with no direct impact on native identity, but, contrary to ‘functionalist’
views, the neutrality of English is of a more insidious than innocent quality.
Any community embracing English is likely to experience a deep sense of
frustration and anger owing to the futility of a situation where any gains from
that embrace always seem to be offset by the losses. It is, in other words,
likely to experience those feelings that are among the hallmarks of postco-
lonial texts problematizing the English language, and with which critics
appear to have the most difficulty.

alternative version that locates power in ‘discourse’ relations rather than in socio-
economic structures is put by Pennycook (1994).
3
Brian Friel’s Translations and Wole Soyinka’s The Road are two examples we
have in mind.
Proregression and Dynamic Stasis in Postcolonial Writing 99

In the latter part of this essay we shall return to this relation between
English’s ambivalent impact on postcolonial societies and the artistic reflec-
tion of that ambivalence. Our first preoccupation, however, must be to specify
what is meant by a two-space perspective and to show how it generates
certain insights into the role of English in the world today.

2. Two-Space Theory and proregression

We begin with the simple observation that all countries are money-using eco-
nomies based on a developed intra- and inter-national division of labour. This
fact of universal specialization can be interpreted to mean that all agents
engage in two parallel sets of activities: a physical set where they engage in,
or contribute to, the provision of different goods or services, and a price set
where they assign monetary exponents to the realized or expected outcomes
of production, and sanction those exponents, through the functions of money
as measure of value and medium of exchange. By further reworking this latter
premise it can be contended that all agents simultaneously inhabit two social
spaces: a physical space where agents relate to each other in particular loca-
tions and places of work as possessors of particular skills, attributes or
capabilities, and a price space where agents relate to each other as possessors
of commensurate entities, commodities. This distinction between spaces is
given added weight by allowing for the fact that physical space includes a
diverse array of political, social and cultural institutions and practices which
support, overlap with or envelop the economic practices whose outcomes are
mapped into price space. Figure 1 provides a simplified way of illustrating
our two-space perspective on social reality.4
The use of a modern-day political map of the world in Figure 1 to give
schematic representation to physical space can be justified by the fact that the
bulk of the activities of the majority of people are exercised within given
areas separated by state-controlled borders. Where countries in physical space
appear as containers of people, in world price space they appear as containers
of commodities. The rationale behind using two images to depict countries as
commodity agglomerations comes down to the fact that the outcomes of
human activities mapped into price space basically divide into two types,
realized outcomes of past actions, and expected outcomes of future actions.
World G N P data for 1996 are used to show respective country magnitudes in
terms of annualized output flows, or annualized income flows, the realization
of claims on output. World capital market data for 31 December 1996 are
used to show country magnitudes in terms of the total stock of bonds and
shares outstanding at that moment. The superimposition of capital market-

4
Data for the maps are taken from Dermine & Hillion (1999).
100 P HOTIS L YSANDROU AND Y VONNE L YSANDROU

based images of countries on G N P -based images is in line with the circum-

stance that debt and equity securities are really nothing other than second-
order claims, claims on the claims on the real commodity base.

Figure 1
a. Physical Space

b. Price Space: Country size in c. Country size in proportion to G N P

capital market terms

Where physical space can be broadly identified with a process of pro-

gression, a continual if chequered improvement in the position of the majority
of the world’s population, price space can be identified with the opposite pro-
cess of regression, a continual decrease in the relative position of the world’s
majority. A contemporary political map of the world usefully encapsulates the
idea of progression as central to it is the establishment of relations of formal
Proregression and Dynamic Stasis in Postcolonial Writing 101

equality between independent nation states. General progression in physical

space includes economic and technological development insofar as there is a
continual expansion in the quantity and quality of the human and non-human
inputs available for production on one hand, and of the material use-values
available for consumption on the other. World price space, on the other hand,
is synonymous with a regressive process of dispossession and loss insofar as
the majority of the world’s population are increasingly excluded from entitle-
ment to their own output. The degree of exclusion which has now been
reached can be seen by focusing on the ownership of the securities piled on
top of the world’s output/income base. From recent world wealth reports one
can obtain an approximate idea of the extent to which the concentration of
ownership of financial assets has reached phenomenal, not to say horrific,
proportions. The report for 1999, for example, showed that the world’s six
million millionaires had a combined wealth, measured primarily although not
exclusively in terms of ownership of financial assets, of approximately $21.6
trillion.5 Considering that world G N P was then in the region of $24 trillion, it
follows that these six million people, or one-tenth of one per cent of the
world’s population of six billion, concentrated in their hands a volume of
potential claims against output that was almost equal in weight to the aggre-
gate amount of claims generated by the rest of the world’s population over
that year.
The neologism ‘proregression’ has been constructed to capture the simul-
taneity of the antithetical processes of progression and regression experienced
by the world’s majority and, by so doing, to define its inescapable outcome.
Proregression signifies no real change of position as gains on one hand, and
losses on the other, cancel each other out. There is stasis, but it is stasis of a
special type or quality, one that involves action rather than inaction. Put
simply, proregression portends ‘dynamic stasis’ as opposed to ‘static stasis’,
motion that leads nowhere. The frustrating effects of dynamic stasis are
palpable in all corners of the world today, as evidenced by the fact that one
hears everywhere complaints that people are working harder and harder, only
to stand still. There is, nevertheless, a crucial sense in which the proregressive
condition of societies that have gone through colonial subjugation is different
from that of others when evaluating it from a broader historical standpoint.
For these societies, regression in price space over time has effectively coun-
tered progression in physical space not only regarding technological or
scientific development, the advances in human knowledge and prowess in
general, but also with respect to political, social and cultural development, the
5
The World Wealth Report, produced by Merrill Lynch and Gemini Consulting,
was reviewed in the Financial Times (17 May 1999) in an article headed “Richest 6m
in world keep getting richer.”
102 P HOTIS L YSANDROU AND Y VONNE L YSANDROU

advance out of relations of subordination and repression towards national

independence and equality. Thus, if proregression and dynamic stasis are to
be especially identified with former colonized societies, it is because it is in
relation to the latter that these features assume their most intensified, and
therefore purest, form.

3. The English language and proregression

If the heterogeneity of physical space immediately implies a corresponding
diversity of historically shaped languages that house specific identities and
cultures, it also includes the need for language homogeny, insofar as the
development of any extensive linkages across places must presuppose a
medium for mutual understanding. The solution to the requirement for lan-
guage homogeny at the planetary level can in fact take one of two forms: the
‘plural’ form in the sense that a few major languages which are readily inter-
translatable are endowed with the status of world language, or the ‘singular’
form, insofar as one language is differentiated from all others as the common
means of communication. The plural option was clearly the preferred choice
right up to the closing stages of the last century, for although English was
important as an international language it nevertheless shared that role with
several other languages. Today, however, it is the ‘singular’ option that has
clearly prevailed as the range and depth of English language usage has ex-
panded to the point where it now has the powerful advantage of critical mass.
Economic forces are generally acknowledged to be the prime movers
behind English language spread in the current era. This primacy can be seen
most clearly from a price space perspective. In contrast to physical space,
which will always give scope both to language heterogeny and to language
homogeny, price space only has room for the latter. This is because people
only relate to each other in this space as commodity holders, possessors of
things, which means that the only significant issue here are the standards
against which these things are priced and traded. Where pricing standards
merely hold good for a particular community, the language of that community
will suffice for purposes of negotiating prices around those standards. But
when pricing standards extend across communities, a higher level of language
homogeny is required, and certain languages originally belonging to particular
communities have to be deployed by other communities as a medium facili-
tating price formation. There is, of course, a reverse impact in that any expan-
sion in the range of language homogeny is in its turn bound to help promote
the unification of different pricing standards. Globalization of price space,
interpreted in the sense that standards covering the majority of entities traded
have now unified at the world level, presupposes a matching culmination in
the level of language homogeny.
Proregression and Dynamic Stasis in Postcolonial Writing 103

In our view, a critical reason for the recent substitution of the singular form
of language homogeny for the plural form has to do with the seismic shift in
the internal composition of world price space. As long as real commodities,
goods and services, constituted its dominant matter, the need to use English as
a language of commodity transactions was by no means universal in scope.
This is borne out by the fact that during the decades between 1950 and 1980,
high-growth eras for countries like Germany and Japan, one did not witness in
the latter the same binding imperative to adopt English as an additional lan-
guage that one sees today. Obviously, the ability to participate in the G N P -
dominated price space of the time, to the extent of being able to share in the
setting of world standards for the provision of several lines of goods, was not
hampered by the use of indigenous languages. However, as financial commo-
dities, tradable shares and bonds, begin to comprise the predominant matter in
price space from the 1980s onwards – commodities for which pricing stan-
dards are set in the USA in particular – so to that same extent does it become
incumbent on all countries, including those of first rank in G N P terms, to
embrace English to a greater extent than hitherto.6 A reliance on the trans-
latability of English words into German or Japanese no longer suffices as it
did in the era of G N P -dominated world price space: the sheer velocity, as
well as the volume, of transactions in the global financial markets is such that
agents need a command of English to participate effectively in those markets.
The basic point here is that the ascendance of English to a position of absolute
supremacy is really nothing other than a reflection of the emergence of ‘stock-
market’ capitalism as the globally dominant form of capitalism, the form that
is eclipsing ‘welfare’ capitalism in all its regional varieties (‘Rhineland’,
‘Asian’ etc.).
In turning to the subject of the impact of English we need, first, to dis-
tinguish English as a local language of community from English as a global
language of communication and, second, to distinguish the global role of Eng-
lish in physical space from that same role in price space. English in its local
role can be said to be always benign in its impact, insofar as its linguistic
features (rules of grammar, range of vocabulary, pronunciation etc.) can be re-
worked and shaped to fit in with a particular community’s own experience
and priorities. This possibility of control is now possessed not only by those
communities where English is the native language, but also by those that have
come to adopt English either as a substitute local language or as a second lan-

6
Note that, as regards Japan, English only became a compulsory school subject at
secondary-education level in 1996. This policy initiative was certainly linked to the
fact that it was from this period that Japanese higher educational institutions began to
expand finance-related courses (accounting, corporate finance, corporate law), for
which most of the relevant journals are in English.
104 P HOTIS L YSANDROU AND Y VONNE L YSANDROU

guage. On the other hand, English in its global role as a language of commu-
nication may appear to be potentially harmful, given that the format it must
have to fulfil that role is beyond local control. However, since this loss of
control is not confined to any one community but applies equally to all com-
munities – as indeed it must be if the mutual-intelligibility criterion is to be
adequately satisfied on a world scale – there is, in effect, no loss of control.
Control, rather, has been dispersed, universalized; one can even say: demo-
cratized. Going by this logic, it follows that the impact of global English on
those deploying it must be neutral: ie, it can have no positive or negative
effect on a community’s interests and well-being in any immediate sense. The
impact of global English can only be realized in an indirect, roundabout way,
through the contribution it makes to the processes, events and circumstances
that themselves influence or condition the life of a given community.
How this contribution is assessed depends on the perspective on the world
that one adopts. From a purely physical-space perspective, one would have to
accept that the impact of global English, as the chief language of technology
and trade, is benign, insofar as it adds to the ability of different countries to in-
crease outputs of use values. From a two-space perspective, however, the
picture is very different. English is not only a language of trade contributing
to the universalization of production standards, but also the language of the
financial markets contributing to the universalization of governance and dis-
closure standards used for the pricing and sale of securities. If in the former
capacity English facilitates the increase in the flows of goods mapped into
price space, in the latter capacity it facilitates the massive expansion in the
stocks of financial claims piled up against these output flows. What this
means, to take the point a step further, is that while English can certainly
assist communities to register material development, it just as certainly assists
the process of dispossession that takes place co-extensively with and on the
back of that development. The impact of the English language in its global
format and function is, therefore, profoundly ambiguous. It enables but it also
disables; it delivers, but it takes away at the same time as it delivers. It is, in
short, nothing other than the linguistic counterpart to proregression.
Proregression and Dynamic Stasis in Postcolonial Writing 105

4. The literary reflection of proregression

and dynamic stasis
As the postcolonial literary texts portraying the English language /local iden-
tity nexus are products of the creative imagination, works of art rather than
scientific tracts, it has to be explained how any signs of pessimism and des-
pair in the latter can be said to manifest the proregressive condition as defined
above. This we can do by looking at the way these texts deploy the circle and
spiral motifs. Figure 2 helps to clarify the point

Figure 2

Proregression is the unity of the antithetical processes of progression and re-

gression that take place in two distinct social spaces. However, since indivi-
duals are only conscious of inhabiting a single space of interactions, those
who are alert to this predicament are likely to describe it as circular motion,
motion without result. This argument is illustrated in figure 2(a), which posits
both physical and price spaces in the same frame of reference. Assuming the
horizontal lines at the base of the figure to represent the trajectories of pro-
gression and regression that occur in these spaces respectively, the combined
effect of these processes is depicted as a circular pattern described around a
fixed point; for example, a constant move away from point y is countered by
the constant return towards the same point. Where this circle around point y
represents proregression in one period of time, the spiral-like trajectory, con-
sisting of a series of overlapping circles, represents proregression across
different periods of time. With the passage of time there is an accumulation of
106 P HOTIS L YSANDROU AND Y VONNE L YSANDROU

knowledge, which is to say that progression in physical space occurs in an

upward as well as in a forward direction. But as this same increase of knowl-
edge also allows for more sophisticated forms of dispossession and loss,
regression itself shifts onto an ever higher plane. The spiral, therefore, shows
that change over time also brings no change, an idea that comes across more
clearly in Figure 2(b) where spiral development is viewed from a different
angle. Looking down from point x at point y, one senses height, development,
an increase of experience or understanding; but one also senses that there is
no fundamental improvement in position or status. Time appears frozen,
forever trapped in the present with the past as nothing other than ‘present-
minus’ and the future as nothing other than ‘present-plus’.
We believe that if the circle and spiral motifs are central to certain literary
works problematizing English language usage, it is to accentuate this sense of
dynamic stasis, this theme of blocked development and entrapment. What
these works are saying, in our opinion, is that any attempts to fully reconcile
that embrace with local interests and priorities are ultimately futile as the
English language always seems to bring with it as many new constraints and
problems as it does new openings and opportunities. One can keep trying to
separate the good from the bad, the benign from the pernicious, but the more
one tries the greater the ensuing frustration and anguish as one sees no
tangible result.

WORKS CITED
Dermine, Jean, & Pierre Hillion (1999). European Capital Markets with a Single
Currency (Oxford: Oxford UP).
Fishman, Joshua A., Andrew W. Conrad & Alma Rupal–Lopez, ed. (1996). Post-
Imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies
1940–1990 (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter).
Friel, Brian (2000). Translations (1982; London: Faber & Faber).
Pennycook, Alastair (1994). The Cultural Politics of English as an International
Language (Harlow: Longman).
Phillipson, Robert (1992). Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP).
Soyinka, Wole (2000). The Road (1974; Oxford: Oxford UP).

[
Towards Global Diglossia?
English in the Sciences and the Humanities

Susanne Mühleisen
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

ABSTRACT
The rise of English as a global language goes hand in hand with its increas-
ing importance as the language of academic discourse and publishing. This
essay examines different forms of exclusivity in the production and recep-
tion of scientific language: a) register choice, with its specific norms and
strategies, and b) choice of language. With regard to the latter, the essay
considers possible consequences of an almost exclusive use of English in the
sciences and humanities for different types of speech communities. After
discussing examples of the development of scientific language from two
different types of linguistic situations, German and Jamaican creole, this
essay argues for the democratization of access to scientific resources via
translation.

1. Introduction

T
H E G L O B A L I Z A T I O N O F E N G L I S H is a relatively old pheno-
menon which had its beginning in the spread of English through
British colonial expansion some five hundred years ago. The use of
English as the single and foremost language in academia is a comparatively
recent phenomenon, just some fifty years old, as a glance at pre-World War II
academic literature will confirm. The contemporary reader of a German aca-
demic publication such as Norbert Elias’s Über den Prozess der Zivilisation,
written in the 1930s, might notice with some bewilderment the many untrans-
lated quotations in Latin and French. A scholar working in the humanities
then, so the assumption behind the uncommented use of these languages, had
to be familiar with at least Latin and French if not classical Greek, German
108 S USANNE M ÜHLEISEN

and, possibly, also English. In today’s German publications in sociology – or

any other discipline – the use of Latin would be considered eccentric whereas
English is expected to be read and understood by the non-native speaker
across all academic fields.
This example illustrates that language use in the international scientific
community is not ‘given’ but is likely to change over time as it is linked to
political and economic power relationships. Today’s unrivalled status of
English as the academic language is closely connected with the emergence of
the U S A as the political and economic super-power in the twentieth century.
But the example also shows that academic language is and has always been
exclusive. This exclusivity comes in different forms, with different conse-
quences as to who has access to scientific resources and production.
In this essay, I will first discuss the aspect of exclusivity in its different
forms and then move on to the consequences of the politics of English as a
global language in the sciences and the humanities for different types of
speech communities.

2. Forms of linguistic exclusion in academic texts

2.1 Scientific antilanguage
Anyone who wants to participate in a particular scientific discourse commu-
nity has to learn the codes which hold it together, first of all, specialized
vocabulary and technical terms. Many examples can be found in linguistics as
well as in literary studies: as Robert Virchow once famously remarked, it is
“the first mark of a scientist that he knows how to speak the language of
science” (my translation).1 To those outside this discourse community, the
meaning of the codes often remains obscure. This obscurity is achieved by a
number of strategies, for instance partial relexicalization, semantic expansion
of already existing terms or the use of formulaic patterns. It thus in many
ways resembles the strategies of ‘antilanguages’, a term M.A.K. Halliday
(1978: 164ff) first used to describe in-group languages which deliberately try
to exclude others from understanding them such as, for instance, the cant that
was used by criminals in Elizabethan times.
The register of scientific language thus has to be learned, in one’s mother
tongue as well as in a second or third language. Academic texts are likely to
show high lexical density and a preference for nominalizations where verbal
structures would be found in a non-academic text. Thus, successful text pro-
duction in this register depends not only on the choice of vocabulary and the
knowledge of technical terms but goes well into the area of syntactic choices

1
“Ist es nicht das erste Zeichen eines wissenschaftlichen Mannes, daß er die
Sprache der Wissenschaft versteht?” – as quoted in Weinrich 1995: 3.
Towards Global Diglossia? 109

(Kretzenbacher 1991) and strategies which Kretzenbacher (1994) calls “the

ego taboo, the narrative taboo and the metaphor taboo”: ie,
– the avoidance of first and second person – it was found that 90% of all finite
verbs used in written scientific texts are in the 3rd person (Kretzenbacher
1995: 27);
– the avoidance of narrative signals, including “narrative tense forms” other
than the preferred present tense;
– and the avoidance of metaphors as part of a scientific argument.2
Thus, the form may be just as important for the scientific character of a text as
the argument itself, if not more so. Sigmund Freud, for instance, always com-
plained that the narrative character of his case studies made them seem less
scientific, “that the case studies which I write read like novellas and that they
lack, so to speak, the serious character of science.”3 It has to be noted, how-
ever, that the norms of a scientific register are not exactly the same across
languages and disciplines; in fact, differences in conventions may cause mis-
understandings between ‘hard facts sciences’ and the humanities, not least
between the two disciplines engaging in a discourse in this volume: linguistics
and literature.
One example of a deliberate violation of academic register conventions is
the “Concrete” version of Parakrama’s abstract to his work De-Hegemonizing
Language Standards (1995; see next page).
Strategies in the “Concrete” version:
– vocabulary and register: ‘vulgarisms’ – smug-arse, fucked over, shitload;
‘colloquialisms’: cool registers, mixing and jamming;
– non-standard grammatical constructions: I done shown, ain’t, had became,
studied them (post)colonial Englishes;
– information is more often encoded in verbal structures and clauses than in
nominal structures (compare “Abstract” nominalization such as formula-
tion, examination, standardization, reproduction, selectivity, neutrality,
etc.);

2
The “metaphor taboo” is perhaps the least convincing or, at least, the most diffi-
cult one to demonstrate. As Kretzenbacher also admits, scientific language is full of
metaphors which tend to conventionalize very easily (eg, “linguistic genocide”,
“linguistic human rights” are part of the structural metaphor “language, like a human
being, is a fragile organism which needs protection”). Thus, the borderline between a
metaphor used as part of an argument and the use of a conventionalized metaphor is
often blurred.
3
“[...] daß die Krankengeschichten, die ich schreibe, wie Novellen zu lesen sind,
und daß sie sozusagen des ernsten Gepräges der Wissenschaftlichkeit entbehren”
(Freud 1999 [1892–1899]: I, 227); my tr.
110 S USANNE M ÜHLEISEN

– the ‘ego taboo’ (Kretzenbacher 1994, 1995): I done shown, we went, I say, I
be mixing;
– the ‘narrative taboo’ (Kretzenbacher 1994, 1995): use of narrative past
tense, use of (colloquial) narrative markers like ‘say’.
Ex.1. Register choice: Parakrama (1995)
CONCRETE ABSTRACT
I done shown Standard spoken English, as Champions of the so-called Other
standing up only for them smug-arse [or (post)colonial] Englishes have
social elites. And it ain’t really no operated on the basis of the special
different for no written English neither. status of these varieties, thereby
The tired ways in which the standardized justifying the formulation of
languages steady fucked over the users of different criteria for their analysis.
other forms had became clear when we A careful examination of the
went and studied them (post)colonial processes of standardization as they
Englishes. Them ‘other’ Englishes came affect these ‘Others’ (particularly
and made it impossible to buy into sacred ‘South Asian English’) strips the
cows like native speaker authority camouflage from standardization
because there from the getgo there are which can be seen as the hegemony
only habichole users, not natives! of the ‘educated’ elites, hence the
I say why is it that, say ‘She say I is not unquestioned paradigm of the
good people’ and ‘She telling I no good ‘educated standard’. These
fello, no!’ are murder to the ‘educated’ standards are kept in place in ‘first
except in the ghetto of ‘creative’ contexts, world’ contexts by technology of
whereas something like ‘In the conversa- reproduction which dissimulates
tions that have transpired during our this hegemony through the self-
acquaintance, she has intimated to me represented neutrality of prestige
personally that she cannot bring herself to and precedent whose selectivity is a
consider myself to be admirably suitable function of the politics of publica-
with respect to my individual character’ is tion. In these ‘other’ situations, the
only deemed ‘wordy’, but clearly shows a openly conflictual nature of the
‘command’ of the language? The hege- language context makes such
mony of hep standard languages and cool strategy impossible. The non-
registers which hide where they are standard is one of the most
coming from, by a shitload of ‘arbitrary’ accessible means of ‘natural’
rules and ‘other-people-in power- resistance, and, therefore, one of the
require’-isms is read for points by these most sensitive indices of de-
non-standard varieties like and unlike the hegemonization.
ones I be mixing and jamming here.

The author employs this mixture of vulgarisms, colloquial vocabulary, non-

standard grammar with Black American English and South Asian English
features, along with the violation of text norms (‘ego taboo’, ‘narrative
taboo’) to get his point across: the same argument is made in the ‘concrete’
version as in the ‘abstract’ one, yet only one version would be taken seriously
Towards Global Diglossia? 111

as an academic text. A text like Parakrama’s ‘concrete’ is certainly less com-

monly found published by a serious press than the other extreme, academic
texts where the lack of argument is concealed by a wealth of elaborate in-
group jargon, as was infamously demonstrated in the “Sokal Hoax.”4 It is
therefore not surprising that Parakrama’s didactic exercise is restricted to this
initial summary, whereas the main part of the book succumbs to the estab-
lished conventions of academic writing. As the author explains in his preface,
I had wanted to write the whole of this book in form(s) of non-standard Eng-
lish, but it became too difficult because I am very much a product of these
standards I wish to problematize. This task to change the way we have looked
at language, in concrete as opposed to abstract terms, is hard – really hard
because it has much less to do with individual ability than structural and
discursive hegemony. (1995: vi)

2.2 Latter-day Latin?

Access to English in the sciences and the humanities
The above form of exclusion – caused by register choice – should not be con-
fused with that which is caused by choice of language. A specialization of
function between a language used for high-prestige functions (such as aca-
demic writing, so-called “H-varieties”, Ferguson 1959) and one for low-
prestige functions (so-called “L-varieties”) is not new. After all, such a di-
glossia existed in Europe until the national languages began to replace Latin
in this role between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century. Does the present
dominance of English in the academic world then result in a language situa-
tion that resembles the hegemony of Latin in medieval Europe?
The situation is, of course, very different from the hegemony of Latin – not
least because Latin was nobody’s native language (then), leaving medieval
scholars of all tongues at an equal disadvantage or advantage. While the

4
Alan Sokal, a professor in quantum physics, wrote a nonsense article (1996a),
“Transgressing the boundaries: toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum
gravity,” which parodied the style and vocabulary of French criticism and was pub-
lished as a serious text in the spring/summer 1996 issue of the cultural-studies journal
Social Text. In a subsequent statement he explains some of his strategies for imitating
the genre, for example “appeals to authority in lieu of logic; speculative theories
passed off as established science; strained and even absurd analogies; rhetoric that
sounds good but whose meaning is ambiguous; and confusion between the technical
and everyday senses of English words (for example: linear, nonlinear, local, global,
multidimensional, relative, frame of reference, field, anomaly, chaos, catastrophe,
logic, irrational, imaginary, complex, real, equality, choice)” (Sokal 1996b: 338–39). It
should be noted, however, that the idea of unambiguous meaning in language is
equally absurd; the Sokal Hoax may thus be taken as a very good example of divergent
conceptions of ‘scientific language’ in ‘hard-facts science’ and the humanities.
112 S USANNE M ÜHLEISEN

world’s proportion of native speakers of English is on the decline in compari-

son to an increasing number of L2 English speakers, there is no need to worry
that the former are a dying species. Today’s global scientific English meets
with a number of different conditions in different speech communities which
may broadly be characterized as follows:
a) communities where English is the native language of the majority of
speakers (eg, Great Britain, the U S A , Canada, Australia);
b) communities where an English vs. mother tongue diglossia already exists,
often in a postcolonial situation (eg, the anglophone Caribbean);
c) communities where diglossia had existed before with a different H-variety,
eg, Russian or French, which is now gradually being replaced by English
(eg, Russian in Latvia, French in Tunisia); and
d) those where English is gradually replacing the national language in the area
of science (eg, Germany, France, Russia, Spain).
The rise of English as a global scientific language will have the least impact
on the function of mother tongues in diglossic situations. For situations such
as b) in which tertiary education is likely to be in English, the increased inter-
national importance will merely strengthen the position of English against
possible national or regional competitors (eg, Hindi in India) and work against
an elaboration (what Kloss 1952 termed “Ausbau”) of regional languages. For
c) the situation is a similar one with regard to the function of the mother
tongue. The substitution of English for former H-varieties is likely to be age-
graded but will not affect the position of the L-varieties.
For a) and d), the changes will be more drastic: In situations where English
is the mother tongue, the academic is clearly at an advantage both in the
reception and production of scholarly work which is not filtered through a
second language. A number of studies (eg, Schiewe 1995) have shown that
comprehension of complex scientific issues is best achieved in the mother
tongue and in a non-specialized register. The disadvantage is that the English
mother tongue scholar now has far less motivation to learn a second language,
as can be seen in the declining numbers of L2 learners at British and Ameri-
can universities.
Towards Global Diglossia? 113

3. Consequences of global scientific English

3.1 The decline of scientific Babel?
Those speech communities in which English is gradually replacing the
national language as the language of science (situation d)) are the ones where
the steady rise of English has had the greatest impact in the last few decades.
This will therefore be the focus of some more detailed discussion, especially
with regard to German. As Ulrich Ammon (1998) documents in a recent pub-
lication, languages like Russian, Japanese, French and German are steadily on
the decline as languages of publication both in the natural sciences and the
humanities, with a somewhat weaker effect on the humanities than the natural
sciences.
Table 1: Percentage of languages used in natural science
publications, 1980 to 1996 (Ammon 1998: 152)
1980 1984 1988 1992 1996
English 74.6 77.1 80.5 87.2 90.7
Russian 10.8 9.2 6.9 3.9 2.1
Japanese 2.3 2.5 2.1 2.3 1.7
French 3.1 2.4 2.4 1.6 1.3
German 3.5 3.3 2.9 1.6 1.2
Table 2: Percentage of languages used in humanities publications,
1974 to 1990 (Ammon 1998: 167)
1974 1978 1982 1986 1990 1995
English 66.6 69.1 69.9 70.6 71.7 82.5
French 6.8 6.6 5.9 5.9 5.9 5.9
German 8.0 5.2 6.0 5.4 5.7 4.1
Spanish 3.8 3.6 3.6 4.0 3.8 2.2

The drastic impact in the natural sciences is furthermore illustrated in Am-

mon’s elaborate account of particular fields like chemistry, where 12.3% of
all publications were in German at the beginning of the 1960s, which was
reduced to under 2% by 1996 (1998: 148). A field like history, on the other
hand, has experienced a slower decrease in German language publications,
from 9.2% in 1974 to 5.3% in 1995. The dichotomoy between an ‘English-
only’-policy in the natural sciences and an effort to maintain publishing in
one’s native language is also noticed by Phillipson & Skutnabb–Kangas
(1999) in their survey of academic language use in Denmark. One reason for
this dichotomy may lie in a different use of language as part of the argument:
natural sciences often have a meta-language at hand which is unambiguous,
logographic and, in its written form, not tied to an individual language.
Simple examples of such systems are, for instance, numerals; likewise, for
114 S USANNE M ÜHLEISEN

chemistry, chemical formulas: whereas ‘water’ may be Wasser, agua, eau,

vant or maji in different languages, it may be expressed as H2O in chemistry
regardless of the language of the writer /reader. In the humanities, more
emphasis is placed on discussions where subtleties and ambiguities of mean-
ing play a large role. The fact remains, however, that there is an overall de-
crease in scientific use of languages other than English across all disciplines.
What are the possible consequences for these languages?
Just as their “Ausbau”, their elaboration for academic registers in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, resulted in an increase in prestige, their
abandonment will result in a prestige loss. New word creations in the areas of
science, modern technology as well as business are almost exclusively either
phonologically non-integrated borrowings from English or new creations
which sound English but are in fact German coinages. Examples of the latter
type abound, with handy (‘mobile phone’) and – almost macabre – body bag
(a type of rucksack) among the most notable ones. Politicians have long
lamented such use of anglicized vocabulary in Germany, albeit with little
effect. There is no national institution for the preservation of the German lan-
guage5 like the French Académie Française. But even if there were, the lin-
guistic effectiveness of such a prescriptive language policy must be doubted.
Another consequence could be a strengthening of local and regional vari-
eties where they still exist. In a recent article, Jürgen Trabant (2000: 116)
notes with regard to the situation in Switzerland that High German, used for
writing, might be gradually replaced by English, while Swiss German would
continue to be used for oral communication. “This might mean Switzerland’s
departure from the German speech community,” Trabant concludes.6

3.2 Low-prestige languages and modernization

One of the situations least affected by the increased importance of scientific
English, as pointed out above, is that of an already existing diglossia with
English as the H-variety, which can be found in many postcolonial situations.
Despite, or perhaps exactly because of this stability, I would like to explore
5
However, a self-appointed Verein Deutsche Sprache – ‘German Language Asso-
ciation’ – was founded in 1997 to document and denounce the excessive use of English
vocabulary in the media and advertising. Its activities include the annual proclamation
of “language meddler of the year,” a title which the vice-chancellor of the university of
Munich, Prof. Dr. jur. Andreas Heldrich, shares with fashion designer Jil Sander.
6
“Die Standardsprache wird gleichsam zwischen dem Englischen und den
Dialekten aufgerieben. Wenn wir etwa das Varietätengefüge der Schweiz betrachten,
so ist gut denkbar, daß dort, wo die Schweizer jetzt noch das sogenannte Schrift-
deutsch verwenden, Englisch erscheint und der schriftdeutsche Standard einfach ver-
schwindet. Dies wäre der Abschied der Schweiz aus der deutschen Sprachgemein-
schaft” (Trabant 2000: 116); my tr.
Towards Global Diglossia? 115

the chances missed for an elaboration of traditional L-varieties in such a

diglossic situation. It is one of the most persistent myths about languages
which are used in the sciences and the humanities that they are somehow
more “logical” or more “appropriate” for this purpose than others, which, in
turn, are deemed “incapable of expressing the complexities of scientific
thought.” This is precisely what the medieval scholar writing in Latin would
have thought about English or German.
It is clear that every language is capable of being used for academic writ-
ing. However, it will also most certainly require some innovation with regard
to register formation. This can be seen in an example of an academic text
written in Jamaican creole and a standard English version (see Ex. 2, next
page). The language situation in Jamaica has a long history of functional
specialization between standard English and Jamaican creole.7 Writing is
traditionally the sphere where standard English would be used; Jamaican
creole is conventionally used in oral contexts but has also been used in crea-
tive writing (poetry, prose, drama) for a long time. Hubert Devonish, linguist
at the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, Jamaica, has experi-
mented with academic writing in Jamaican creole and is the author of at least
two articles written in Jamaican (1994, 1996).
How does Devonish shape Jamaican creole to work in this type of
academic text? Paradoxically, the task is made especially difficult by the fact
that most of the lexical stock of Jamaican is derived from English. The most
easy way out would therefore be to simply borrow the technical jargon and
the specialized vocabulary from English and give it a slightly different spell-
ing. This strategy, however, would do little to create a genuinely Jamaican
creole academic register. Devonish’s approach, in contrast, tries to create new
word forms by using the spoken Jamaican lexical stock and expressions in
new and more specialized meanings. Essential characteristics of an academic
article, ‘macro-structures’ like the division into different sections (“intro-
duction” – fo staat aaf) are transferred into Jamaican and so establish a pattern
in that variety without reverting to the H-language English as a source.
Some examples of lexical innovation in the article include
– compounds: nyuu taim sapii (1) for ‘technology’, langgwij paat-aaf (3) for
‘diglossia’, langgwij sheed-aaf (7) for ‘continuum’, langgwij stodii piipl
(9) for ‘linguists’;
– semantic extension: neeshan parabl (5) for ‘national motto’, pik-out (8) for
‘selection’;

7
For a detailed discussion of gradual functional changes of creole within and
outside the Caribbean, see Mühleisen (forthcoming).
116 S USANNE M ÜHLEISEN

– circumlocution: wen yu taakin frii insaid (9) for ‘private informal inter-
action’, we dem bilin sentens laik / hou di word-dem yuuz fo bil sentens (9)
for ‘syntax’.

Ex. 2. Jamaican creole: Devonish (1994)

Kyaribiiyan Ruuts Langgwij, Nyuu Taim Caribbean Vernacular Languages,
Sapii an Fiilinz fo Neeshan Technology and National Consciousness

Fo Staat Aaf Introduction

[...] [...]
Hou piipl taak iz wan ting doz prapa mek Shared speech is a very important means of
dem fiil se dem biilaangs togeda. Huu taak creating common identity. The absence of
laik matii doz fiil se dem iz matii. An huu shared speech, on the other hand, serves to
doz doon taak laik dem, no dem matii. Nof exclude those who do not belong within the
taim, wan set a piipl doz mek op dem main common identity. It is very often the case
se hou dem taak speshal. An den, dem doz that a group of people come to regard their
staat biiliiv se a no jos di taak wa speshal speech as in some way special. They begin
bot di piipl wa taakin, to. An az fo huu no to transfer this feeling of specialness from
taak speshal taak, dem no speshal niida. their language to themselves, its speakers.
(Devonish 1994: 1) As for those who are not perceived as shar-
ing the special common speech, they come
to be regarded as the very opposite of
special.
(Devonish 1994: 1–2)

It is notable that many nominalizations, concepts which are expressed in SE

as modified nouns or compound nouns, are often expressed by a clause (hou
piipl taak (1) versus ‘shared speech’, to fiil se dem iz matii (1) versus ‘com-
mon identity’). Many of the formulaic expressions and conjunctions which
make up the conventions of an academic text in Standard English are not
given in the creole text. Where they are given, the creole expressions are
shorter and less formulaic (From wa hii se for ‘according to his analysis’, 4-5,
plos for ‘in addition’, 4–5). Cleft constructions, a typcial syntactic feature of
creole languages, feature prominently in the Jamaican text: Iz main doz mek
wan langgwij (2), An iz di raitin fo Ingglish, di hai-langgwij doz rait dong (6).
The existence of a small number of academic articles certainly does not
turn Jamaican creole into a full-fledged international language of science. The
increased global importance of English, in fact, makes it highly unlikely that
such a step will ever be taken. What this didactic experiment shows, however,
is that the linguistic strategies necessary for the creation of an academic
register are quite transparent.
Towards Global Diglossia? 117

4. Conclusion
The consequences of the Goliath ‘global scientific English’ and some David-
ian forces working against it are difficult to assess. At the moment, there is no
doubt that the development is working in favour of ‘global diglossia’, with
English as the almost exclusive language used in the sciences and the human-
ities. The possible negative effects are drastic and include the loss of ever
more languages as well as the loss of knowledge encoded in those languages.
The possible positive effects sound rather mundane in comparison. They in-
clude an increase in international exchange of ideas: after all, scientific work
has to go public – and not only to further the career of the individual scholar
but because, as a general principle, all science is useless if it is not accessible
to other members of the discipline. This is easier with only one language as a
scientific lingua franca than with a dozen or even hundreds of languages used
by an international scientific community.
Two questions seem to be crucial here: firstly, how can non-mother-tongue
speakers gain equal access to resources dominated by English? Secondly, how
can science continue to be conducted in other languages so that their cognitive
potential and cultural traditions are not lost? The key to both of these ques-
tions, I would argue, lies in translation. Professional translators and editors at
universities and international publishing houses should ensure that non-native
speakers are not at a disadvantage in publishing their scientific work. There-
fore, in the absence of a realistic solution to the desirable goal of a demo-
cratization of languages in international publishing and academic exchange,
my call is a mere pragmatic one, for a democratization of access to the pro-
duction (and reception) of scientific English across all disciplines.

WORKS CITED
Ammon, Ulrich (1998). Ist Deutsch noch internationale Wissenschaftssprache?
Englisch auch für die Lehre an den deutschsprachigen Hochschulen (Berlin &
New York: Walter de Gruyter).
Devonish, Hubert (1994). ‘Kyaribiiyan ruuts langgwij, nyuu taim sapii and fiilinz fo
neeshan / Caribbean vernacular languages, technology and national conscious-
ness’ (paper given at the 10th Biennial Conference of the Society for Caribbean
Linguistics, Guyana).
—— (1996). ‘Kom groun Jamiekan daans haal liricks: Memba se a plie wi a plie /
Contextualizing Jamaican “Dance Hall” music: Jamaican language at play in a
speech event,’ English World Wide 17: 213–37.
Elias, Norbert (1939). Über den Prozess der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und
psycho-genetische Untersuchungen, vol. 1: Wandlungen des Verhaltens in den
weltlichen Oberschichten des Abendlandes (Basel: Verlag Haus zum Falken).
Ferguson, Charles A. (1959). ‘Diglossia,’ Word 15: 325–40.
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Freud, Sigmund (1999). Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1: Werke aus den Jahren 1892–
1899: Studien über Hysterie (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag).
Halliday, M . A . K . (1978). Language as a Social Semiotic (London: Edward
Arnold).
Kloss, Heinz (1952). Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen von
1800–1950 (Munich: Pohl).
Kretzenbacher, Heinz Leonhard (1991). ‘Syntax des wissenschaftlichen Fachtextes,’
Fachsprache 13: 118–37.
—— (1994). ‘Just give us the facts! The connection between the narrative taboo, the
ego taboo and the metaphor taboo in scientific style,’ Lingua e Stile 29: 115–30.
—— (1995). ‘Wie durchsichtig ist die Sprache der Wissenschaften?’ in Kretzen-
bacher & Weinrich, ed. Linguistik der Wissenschaftssprache, 15–39.
——, & Harald Weinrich, ed. (1995). Linguistik der Wissenschaftssprache (Aka-
demie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin: Forschungsbericht 10; Berlin & New York:
Walter de Gruyter).
Mühleisen, Suzanne (forthcoming). Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Forma-
tion and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles (Amsterdam &
Philadelphia PA: John Benjamins).
Parakrama, Arjuna (1995). De-Hegemonizing Language Standards: Learning From
(Post)colonial Englishes About “English” (London: Macmillan).
Phillipson, Robert, & Tove Skutnabb–Kangas (1999). ‘Englishisation: One dimen-
sion of globalisation,’ A I L A Review 13 (special issue “English in a changing
world,” ed. David Graddol & U . H . Meinhof): 19–36.
Schiewe, Jürgen (1995). ‘Sprache des Verstehens – Sprache des Verstandenen: Mar-
tin Wagenscheins Stufenmodell zur Vermittlung der Fachsprache im Physik-
unterricht,’ in Kretzenbacher & Weinrich, ed. Linguistik der Wissenschafts-
sprache, 281–99.
Sokal, Alan D. (1996a). ‘Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative
hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,’ Social Text 46–47: 217–52.
—— (1996b). ‘Transgressing the boundaries: An afterword,’ Philosophy and
Literature 20: 338–46.
Trabant, Jürgen (2000). ‘Umzug ins Englische: Über die Globalisierung des Eng-
lischen in den Wissenschaften,’ Philologie im Netz (www.phin.de) 13: 108–26.
Verein Deutsche Sprache e.V. (2001). ‘Verein Deutsche Sprache e.V. – Oder
sprechen S I E etwa Denglisch?,’ http://www.vds.ev67.de. 1–23.
Weinrich, Harald (1995). ‘Sprache und Wissenschaft,’ in Kretzenbacher & Wein-
rich, ed. Linguistik der Wissenschaftssprache, 3–13.
[
The Recording of Vocabulary from the Major
Varieties of English in the Oxford English Dictionary

Jennie Price
Senior Editor, OED

ABSTRACT
The approach to recording vocabulary from the major varieties of English in
the Oxford English Dictionary is described, from the First Edition (the New
English Dictionary, or N.E.D.) through the Supplements of 1933 and 1972–
86 and the Additions Series, to the latest revisions and additions: the Third
Edition, currently being published in electronic format as O E D Online (New
Edition). The methods used by and sources available to the different edito-
rial teams are discussed, in the context of a developing awareness of the
importance of the regional Englishes to a major historical dictionary of the
language, and the evolution of English into a global lingua franca.

A
S E D M U N D W E I N E R , joint editor of the Second Edition and
Principal Philologist for the Third Edition notes (1986: 263), the
type and extent of the O E D ’s coverage of regional English arose in
an “ad hoc” way; it should not be evaluated as if it had been an articulated
(and arguably flawed) policy from the start. Indeed, the idea of there being, at
the time of the preparation and publication of the N.E.D., regional standard
varieties of English had not really been conceived. Vocabulary from English
overseas was regarded as outside the core of James Murray’s famous ‘circle’1
of English, hovering somewhere between dialect and colloquial use. Murray,
the principal editor of the N.E.D., himself a Scot, was certainly aware of
regional differences, however, as he is reported as replying to the question
‘How many words are there in the language of Englishmen?’ with
1
See Murray’s ‘General Explanations’ in the preface to the N.E.D.
120 J ENNIE P RICE

Of some Englishmen? or of all Englishmen? is it all that all English-men

speak, or some of what some Englishmen speak? Does it include the English
of Scotland and of Ireland, the speech of British Englishmen, and American
Englishmen, of Australian Englishmen, South African Englishmen, and of the
Englishmen in India? (from unpublished papers in the possession of K.M.
Elizabeth Murray, quoted in Murray 1977: 193)
The preparation of the N.E.D. began in earnest in 1859, when the Philological
Society published A proposal for the publication of a New English Dic-
tionary. This text included an appeal to the British and American public for
readers, who were asked to submit quotations from a number of works con-
sidered by the Society as likely to provide a full picture of the development of
the English language. There was no recognition at this time of potential devel-
opments in the language overseas. Twenty years later, however, a second
appeal included the plea:
In order that [the Dictionary’s] progress may be certain, and that it may have
that complete and representative character which has been its aim from the
beginning, and be a lasting monument of our language, the Committee want
help from readers in Great Britain, America, and the British Colonies, to finish
the volunteer work so enthusiastically commenced twenty years ago, by
reading and extracting the books which still remain unexamined [...]
American and Colonial readers we ask, besides sharing the general work, to
read for us those recent books which show the additions made to English in
their respective countries, as received names for physical features, produc-
2
tions, &c.
This was reinforced by a separate appeal made in the American press, in
which readers are informed that:
For American readers American books are left. Hardly any have been touched
[...] Early books of travel, law, or records are to be sought, in which the names
of American objects, acts, habits, relations are likely to have made their first
appearance [...] The Dictionary will be one of the great books of the world, a
standard work for many generations. American authors should be fully repres-
3
ented in it.
The N.E.D. shows that these appeals were not entirely unfruitful. The alpha-
betical range M A R C I A T I O N – M A S S Y M O R E 4 cites a variety of American
2
An Appeal to the English-speaking and English-reading Public to Read Books
and Make Extracts for the Philological Society’s New English Dictionary (Philological
Society, 1879) in Bailey (1986: 218, 219).
3
“An Appeal to American Readers,” The Nation (New York) 4 September 1879 in
Bailey (1986: 232, 235).
4
This is the fourth quarterly batch of entries in the New Edition, published in
December 2000 in O E D Online; therefore a comparison can be made with the latest
Major Varieties of English in the OED 121

sources inclu-ding travel writing, memoirs, and journals, such as the diary
used in illustrating maroon n. 2:
2. Southern U.S. In full maroon frolic, party: A pleasure party, esp. a
hunting or fishing excursion of the nature of a picnic but of longer duration.
1779 I. ANGELL Diary (1899) 59 Lt. Cook..Come from the Meroon frolick
last night. [Editor’s note: A hunting or fishing trip, or excursion, in Southern
United States, to camp out after the manner of the West Indian Maroons.]
Even less ‘literary’ sources were also consulted, such as Browne’s American
Poultry Yard (1849), which illustrates marquee coop; this is despite the fact
that the Delegates to the Oxford University Press, as part of their ongoing
battle to conserve resources and control the Dictionary’s size, had ordered that
“Americanisms were acceptable [for inclusion] only if found in American and
English writers of note.”5 Murray and his fellow editors also made judicious
use of the recently published large American dictionaries, in particular the
Century Dictionary (1889–1901), whose editors offered advice to their
counterparts on the N.E.D. as well as providing definitions and quotations for
a number of American uses such as marshall v. 5 c, ‘to arrange (the cars of a
freight-train) in proper station order’ and the plant marsh tea, Ledum palustre.
The majority of this American6 vocabulary included in the N.E.D. records,
as the Appeal requests, “objects, acts, habits, [and] relations” unfamiliar to
British readers. A new development was to take place with the publication of
the Supplement in 1933. The Preface to this volume states that characteristics
of the vocabulary within it include “the varied development of colloquial
idiom and slang, to which the United States of America have made a large
contribution, but in which the British dominions and dependencies also have a
conspicuous share.” Thus, the M A R C I A T I O N – M A S S Y M O R E range in
the 1933 Supplement includes the new additions a soft or easy mark at mark,
n.1and a new sense of marrow-fat n., both labelled U.S. slang.
Another area in which the Supplement sought to improve on the earlier
volumes of the N.E.D. was in the updating of quotation paragraphs. Particu-
larly, the Preface notes, “account would be taken of earlier evidence for

updates and additions. It was originally published in 1905, as part of the 27th fascicle
of the N.E.D., and is more representative of that work as a whole than some of the
earlier parts of the alphabet, in which the editors’ style had not fully evolved.
5
Delegates Order 27 March 1896 (Murray Papers Doc. viii) in Murray (1977:
277).
6
There is relatively little in the N.E.D. from other regional Englishes. The range
1
M A R C I A T I O N – M A S S Y M O R E contains a couple of Australian uses at martin n.
1 and Mary n. 2 and a sense of marrow-pudding labelled West Indian; the rest of the
non-British entries are from the U S A .
122 J ENNIE P RICE

American uses, which Sir William Craigie was in a position to supply.”7 Not
only earlier but also in many cases later American evidence was supplied by
the Supplement, including American quotations for market-house to comple-
ment the British evidence of the N.E.D., and a later example of maroon, in
the sense previously discussed. The Supplement also gave the range its first
South African example, at market master.
The next major milestone in the O E D ’s history came in 1957, when
Robert Burchfield was appointed to edit the second Supplement, published in
four volumes between 1972 and 1986. Burchfield, himself a New Zealander,
was particularly keen to increase the O E D ’s coverage of what, by that time,
were recognized as distinguishable varieties of English. He instigated a new
Reading Programme, which – among other aims such as increasing the
amount of technical and scientific material read – concentrated on systema-
tically surveying these varieties. Burchfield’s Preface to the first volume of
this Supplement (1972) remarks:
We have made bold forays into the written English of regions outside the
British Isles, particularly that of North America, Australia, New Zealand,
South Africa, India, and Pakistan [...] They have been accorded the kind of
treatment that lexicographers of a former generation might have reserved for
the English of Britain alone.
The range M A R C I A T I O N – M A S S Y M O R E reflects this in including
among its new additions senses of mark (noun and verb) specific to Australian
Rules Football (complementing the N.E.D.’s Rugby Football sense); a sense
of mark (verb) from the lexicon of Australian and New Zealand sheep-
farming; and the Australian slang phrase a good (or bad) mark.
The work of this Supplement, however, could not hope to complete the
picture of English overseas. Its primary purpose was to concentrate on vocab-
ulary which had been added to the language relatively recently; to carry on, as
it were, where the N.E.D. left off. Hence, there were still gaps in the historical
records to be filled. After the publication of the Second Edition of the OED in
1989 (which combined the text of the N.E.D. with that of the 1972–86 Sup-
plement), plans began to be made for a completely updated Third Edition,
with a fully revised text and thousands of new additions. One of the two
“major questions of policy” identified by Weiner as confronting the editors of
the Third Edition was the “coverage of the vocabulary of varieties of English
other than St BrE” (Weiner 1986: 260). This important dimension to the pro-
ject was duly addressed, and the collection of evidence from these varieties

7
Craigie, co-editor of the Supplement, was also working on the historical Dic-
tionary of American English (published 1936–44) and had taken a post as Professor of
English at the University of Chicago.
Major Varieties of English in the OED 123

was made a priority of the Reading Programme. As work progressed, the

O E D Additions Series supplements – three A–Z volumes of 3,000 new entries
each – were published in 1993 and 1997. This series contains examples from
most varieties of English, with many from the major ones, detailing, for ex-
ample, politics (Francization in Quebec), clothing (Ugh boots in Australia
and New Zealand), sport (the American colloquialism peg in baseball), and
slang (the Irish English gobdaw) from around the English-speaking world.
The current editorial team working on the Third Edition is particularly
aware of the importance of regional varieties of English, as the Preface to the
O E D Online (2000) shows:
From its base in Britain, the English language has expanded over the centuries
to become a world language [...] The English of the British Isles now becomes
one (or indeed several) of these varieties, whereas previously standard British
English may have been regarded as the dominant form of English [...] The
dating of terms from these varieties illustrates not only the spread of the
vocabulary but also the social and cultural changes which necessarily precede
or accompany this.
A thorough revision of all existing entries is taking place, and these are pub-
lished online in quarterly batches. An important part of this revision process
has been to ‘internationalize’ the Dictionary itself, which in the past –
inevitably, given its historical context – has been open to charges of ‘Brito-
centrism’. It is inevitable that any major dictionary of the English language
will have some regional bias, whether explicit (“A Dictionary of American
English”) or implicit in its definitions and style. The Third Edition has taken
major steps to eradicate much of that bias. British English is no longer con-
sidered the ‘default’, and terms which appear only, chiefly, or originally in
British English are labelled as such, as they would be if another variety were
concerned. The same is true in specific subject areas: for example British Law
(where appropriate) replaces the simple Law and British History replaces
History. The formerly unqualified label dialect is replaced by British
regional. Editors are careful to replace and not to introduce such potentially
confusing definitions as ‘potato chips’ for French fried potatoes (noted in
Algeo 1990: 147), which has a different meaning in British English from that
which it has in the American variety.
Perhaps the most instantly noticeable change made to the style of the
entries in the Third Edition is the introduction of an American pronunciation
for every entry, which follows the British one. As well as this, entries labelled
as being (chiefly) of another major variety are given the current standard
pronunciation in that variety. ‘Double’ headword forms are provided where
the standard American spelling differs from the standard British (for example
marvellous | marvelous, a., adv., and n.). Formerly, the American variant
124 J ENNIE P RICE

would often (as at neighbour, n.) have been noted only in the list of variant
forms. These practices reflect the importance of American English not only as
spoken in the U S A , but as an international variety of English, used more fre-
quently than British English among learners of English as a second language.
The amount of new quotation evidence collected from the various Reading
Programmes (discussed more fully below), from contributors, and from exter-
nal databases of electronic texts has enabled the editors of the Third Edition to
update substantially the examples illustrating its entries. As well as the
obvious and important antedatings and postdatings, fuller pictures of the
history of each entry can be given. Words once labelled (to give a common
example) U.S. often become ‘originally’ or ‘chiefly U.S.’ in the Third Edi-
tion.8 Conversely, a term might now be labelled as current only in a certain
variety, where previously it was more widespread;9 and one with no label to
distinguish its variety provided with one where appropriate.10 Returning to the
entry for maroon n. 2, this updating process has resulted in a further regional
label (Caribbean) being added along with a later quotation from this variety:
2. Chiefly Southern U.S. and Caribbean. In full maroon party (also maroon
frolic). An extended camping, hunting, or fishing trip in the country. Also
more generally: a picnic, outing, or other communal gathering. Cf.
MAROONING n.
1779 I. ANGELL Diary (1899) 59 Lt. Cook..Come from the Meroon frolick
last night. [Editor’s note: A hunting or fishing trip, or excursion, in Southern
United States, to camp out after the manner of the West Indian Maroons.]
1785 in S. Carolina Hist. & Geneal. Mag. (1912) 13 188 On Monday we form
a maroon party to visit some saw mills. 1838 C. GILMAN Recoll. Southern
Matron xxxii. 223 Feeling the necessity of refreshment, we alighted for a
while beneath a tree by the roadside, for a maroon. 1852 C. W. DAY Five
Years Resid. W. Indies I. 207, I joined a maroon party down to the Carenage,
about seven miles below Port of Spain. 1996 Dict. Caribbean Eng. Usage
372/1 Maroon... (Crcu, Grns) An annual communal village feast with
religious purpose... (Bdos) (Obs) An outing and picnic with friends.
Further examples of the revision process are illustrated in Appendix 1.
As far as new entries are concerned, the methods of selection used by the
current editorial team are designed to increase the coverage of different Eng-
lishes even further. Two of the major tools with which potential new entries
are selected are the Reading Programme and the electronic databases deriving
from it, and the major regional dictionaries of English. The current Reading
Programme is more structured than that of the N.E.D., employing 50 readers

8
See, for example, main line n. 2 (previously 1 b).
9
See, for example, machine n.
10
See, for example, mahogany n. 2 b.
Major Varieties of English in the OED 125

world-wide (not to mention the many volunteer contributors who send quota-
tions to the editors on a regular or occasional basis). Novel reading makes up
a significant part of the readers’ work, and included in the programme is a
comprehensive selection of contemporary literature from around the English-
speaking world, as well as subject-specific works – for example, texts on
world music or regional cuisine. The current North American Reading Pro-
gramme generates approximately 8–10,000 quotations a month, and is aiming
to fill the gaps left by earlier programmes by concentrating for example on
pre-1800 and early twentieth-century sources, and non-literary English such
as film scripts, journals, and song lyrics. Separate reading programmes are
also run by the Australian National Dictionary, the Canadian Oxford Dic-
tionary, and the Dictionary of South African English; the Canadian project,
for example, has been concentrating on Canadian interests such as ice hockey,
logging, and canoeing, as well as Canadian regionalisms. The Oxford team
also runs an ongoing project in which colleagues in many overseas branches
of the Oxford University Press send copies of English-language newspapers
and periodicals published in their home nations, which allows vocabulary
from various new Englishes to be captured, as well as that from the major
varieties spoken as a first language. Recently read examples are: Indiaweekly,
the Monitor (Kampala, Uganda), and Business Day (Cape Town, South
Africa). Quotations deriving from these programmes are placed on an electro-
nic database, which is consulted when selecting potential new entries, and
vocabulary items with a significant number of quotations (usually five or six)
are considered for inclusion. This database is also used to supplement quota-
tions from the dictionaries discussed below, and, as mentioned above, in the
revision of existing entries: for example in postdating, or amending a regional
label.
A number of regional dictionaries are also consulted. These include the
Australian National Dictionary (1988), the Dictionary of New Zealand
English (1997), the Dictionary of American Regional English (1985-), the
Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (1996), and the
Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage (1996). These are invaluable re-
sources for the editors of the Third Edition, which were not available to their
predecessors. Many enable their varieties of English to be surveyed from a
historical perspective, allowing gaps to be filled in the O E D ’s coverage. In
using these to select new entries it is important to take into account the fact
that they are necessarily more inclusive than O E D could hope to be, and to
apply certain criteria to ensure the most important of these vocabulary items
are dealt with. Broadly speaking, editors are guided here by the weight of
quotation evidence given in those dictionaries which provide it, and the exis-
tence of supplementary quotations on in-house and external databases. These
126 J ENNIE P RICE

databases also give a wider picture of how a particular variety was or is

spoken and ensure that editors for whom it may not be their native variety can
be confident of capturing the way in which these words are used, and which
of them might be most worthy of inclusion. Other sources of information used
in selecting new entries include regular and occasional contributions from
members of the public around the world, and numerous Internet sources
including archives of local and national newspapers and databases of litera-
ture. Specialists in each variety are also consulted on matters of inclusion,
pronunciation, definition, and etymology. Etymologies often require a great
deal of specialist work, and provide a historical and cultural picture in them-
selves, with some regional terms being derived from an indigenous language,
some from that of a particular immigrant community, and some displaying a
local adaptation of a Standard English word.
Some examples of regional uses in M A R C I A T I O N – M A S S Y M O R E
new to the Third Edition are: from Australia and New Zealand margin, ‘an
increment or payment made in addition to a basic wage, esp. in recognition of
particular expertise or extra responsibility’; from North America marine
hospital, ‘a hospital established for the use of sailors’; and from Irish English
mass, ‘regard, appreciation’. Further examples can be seen in Appendix 2.

In conclusion, it is clear that the approach to the recording of vocabulary from

the major varieties of English in the Oxford English Dictionary has developed
over time as these Englishes themselves have become more prominent, influ-
ential, and distinct. The number of such items included has increased drama-
tically since N.E.D., but this is balanced by a judicious use of the materials
available and the introduction of various selection criteria. The type of such
vocabulary included is much more varied than it once was; originally being
largely a collection of names for unfamiliar objects, it now encompasses a
wide array of subject areas from occupational terms to sport, as well as pro-
viding a picture of the slang and colloquialisms of particular regions. Care is
taken to give a historical picture of the development of each entry’s use,
showing where it originated, where it spread to, and how long it took to
spread there. In particular, the current practice of providing American head-
word forms and pronunciations acknowledges the influence of American
English on the English taught and learnt as a second language, and helps
ensure that the Oxford English Dictionary documents not only the history of
British English but of its closest cousins, and, ultimately, of English as a lan-
guage of global communication.
Major Varieties of English in the OED 127

WORKS CITED
Algeo, John (1990). ‘The emperor’s new clothes,’ Transactions of the Philological
Society 88: 131–50.
Bailey, Richard W. (1986). ‘Materials for the history of the Oxford English
Dictionary,’ Dictionaries 8: 176–250.
Berg, Donna Lee (1993). A Guide to the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford
UP).
Murray, K . M . Elizabeth (1977). Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and
the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven CT & London: Yale UP).
New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (1884–1928), ed. J . A . H . Murray
et al. (Oxford: Clarendon).
Oxford English Dictionary (Supplement, 1933), ed. J . A . H . Murray & Henry
Bradley (Oxford: Clarendon).
Oxford English Dictionary (Supplement, 1972–86), ed. Robert Burchfield (Oxford:
Clarendon).
Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989), ed. J . A . Simpson & E . S . C . Weiner
(Oxford: Clarendon).
Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series vols. 1 & 2 (1993), ed. J . A . Simpson &
E . S . C . Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon).
Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series vol. 3 (1997), ed. M . J . Proffitt (Oxford:
Clarendon).
Oxford English Dictionary (3rd ed., 2000–), ed. J . A . Simpson (O E D Online. Draft
Mar. 2000–Mar. 2001; Oxford UP <http://dictionary.oed.com/>
Weiner, Edmund S . C . (1986). ‘The New Oxford English Dictionary and World
English,’ English World-Wide 7: 259–66.

[
128 J ENNIE P RICE

Appendix 1

Entry revisions from the Third Edition

The entry for magsman, n. shows an Australian addition from the Burchfield
Supplement to an existing O E D entry. The updated version from the Third
Edition shows antedatings and postdatings, as well as the addition of labelling
to show the history in different varieties of the original sense. The entry for
mate, n.2 1 shows the importance of the quotation paragraph to the entry as a
whole: while neither sense quite merits the label ‘Austral’. or ‘chiefly
Austral.’, people’s perception of the term as a marker of Australian speech is
reflected in the Supplement’s addition of several Australian uses and the aim
of the Third Edition to show that recent usage is not only Australian. (Ideally,
a more recent British example could be added to 1c; an invaluable feature of
the way that O E D Online is published is that it allows editors to make amend-
ments such as this as new material becomes available.) An ‘exclusive’ label is
used at 1c (formerly 1b), to show that the term is current in most varieties of
English apart from those of North America. Regional labelling is added to
sense 1d as further research allows the varieties to be identified with con-
fidence. The entry for mail boat n. shows how the identification of uses
specific to particular varieties of English was instrumental in its upgrading
from an undefined subentry to a headword.
magsman, n. (O E D , Second Edition)
1. A street swindler, ‘confidence man’.
1838 The Town 27 Jan. 276 A magsman must of necessity be a great actor and a
most studious observer of human nature. 1866 DICKENS Reprinted Pieces,
Detective Police (1868) 241 Tally-ho Thompson was a famous horse-stealer, couper,
and magsman. 1897 M. DAVITT in Westm. Gaz. 30 Sept. 2/1 Almost every possible
kind of convict, from the sneak-thief..to professional magsmen.
2. Austral. A story-teller, raconteur.
1944 W. E. HARNEY Taboo (ed. 3) 56 We were discussing dreams... It was the
Doc’s subject and he was..‘giving it hell’. I let him go - with his complexes and
repressions, but I was itching to have my say, for I too am a good ‘magsman’. 1963
–- To Ayers Rock & Beyond v. 45 We would sit around the camp-fire to sing songs
Major Varieties of English in the OED 129

or recite our favourite poems... I am pretty sure that this bush school of oral teaching
was the starting point with many a bush-poet and magsman, such as I, who kept up
the yarning into later days. 1967 Telegraph (Brisbane) 8 Apr. 4/1 Hardy..became the
official yarn-spinning champion of Australia today. He won the magsman’s
championship in Darwin.

magsman, n. (O E D , Third Edition)

1. orig. Brit. (In recent use chiefly Austral. and N.Z. exc. arch.) A street
swindler, a confidence trickster.
1822 Bell’s Life 9 June 119/3 A few - very few, gipsies, jockeys, mace coves,
magsmen, and prigs, to make up the assortment. 1838 Town 27 Jan. 276 A magsman
must of necessity be a great actor and a most studious observer of human nature.
1850 DICKENS Detective Police Party in Househ. Words 27 July 411/1 Tally-ho
Thompson was a famous horse-stealer, couper, and magsman. 1897 M. DAVITT in
Westm. Gaz. 30 Sept. 2/1 Almost every possible kind of convict, from the sneak-
thief..to professional magsmen. 1936 F. CLUNE Roaming round Darling xxii. 219
Andrew Hume, a magsman confidence-man (half-way through a ten-year stretch for
forgery). 1972 N. MARSH Tied up in Tinsel iii. 66 A bunch of smashers and
grabbers or joy-buyers or magsmen or any of that lot. 1990 N. ANNAN Our Age ii.
24 Only Bohemians or the descendants of the Victorian magsmen, macers and
gonophs..rejected the society into which they were born.
2. Austral. A storyteller, a raconteur.
1924 Truth (Sydney) 27 Apr. 6 Magsman, a talkative person. 1935 K. TENNANT
Tiburon 182 He became very anti-strikers when he discovered that the Magsman
was the same Dennis Kelly. 1944 W. E. HARNEY Taboo (ed. 3) 56 We were
discussing dreams... It was the Doc’s subject and he was..‘giving it hell’. I let him
go - with his complexes and repressions, but I was itching to have my say, for I too
am a good ‘magsman’. 1967 Telegraph (Brisbane) 8 Apr. 4/1 Hardy..became the
official yarn-spinning champion of Australia today. He won the magsman’s
championship in Darwin.

mate, n.2 (O E D , Second Edition)

1. a. A habitual companion, an associate, fellow, comrade; a fellow-worker or
partner. Now only colloq. See also MESSMATE, PLAYMATE, SCHOOL-
MATE.
c1380 Sir Ferumb. 1372 Florippe..sayde: ‘Maumecet my mate y-blessed mot thou
be For aled thow hast muche debate to-ward thys barnee’. c1440 Promp. Parv.
329/2 Mate, idem quod Felaw. 1513 DOUGLAS Æneis II. xi. 83 Alkyne sterage
affrayit and causit grow, Baith for my byrding and my litle mait. 1515 BARCLAY
Egloges i. (1570) Aiij, When the good is gone (my mate this is the case) Seldome
the better reentreth in the place. 1521 MS. Acc. St. John’s Hosp., Canterb., To John
Kenet & hys mate, carpenters, for ij dayes. 1568 GRAFTON Chron. II. 633 The
Duke of Yorke and his mates were lodged within the Citie. 1583 Leg. Bp. St.
130 J ENNIE P RICE

Androis 316 He sought ane vther, Ane devill..Exceading Circes in conceattis, For
chaungene of Wlisses meatis. c1614 MURE Dido & Æneas I. 508 Parte at the ports,
as sentinells abide, Vnloade their mat’s and drowsie dron’s do kill. 1655 FULLER
Ch. Hist. I. i. 4 Aristobulus, though no Apostle, yet an Apostles Mate,..by Grecian
Writers made Bishop of Britain. 1725 POPE Odyss. II. 365 Each in jovial mood his
mate addrest. 1821 BYRON Sardan. II. i. 48 The she-king, That less than woman, is
even now upon The waters with his female mates. 1845 C. GRIFFITH Present State
of Port Philip 79 Two [bushworkers] generally travel together, who are called
mates; they are partners, and divide all their earnings. 1866 MRS. GASKELL Wives
& Dau. xxii. (1867) 223 He was inferior in education to those who should have been
his mates. 1878 JEVONS Prim. Pol. Econ. 32 Each man usually takes one part of
the work, and leaves other parts of the work to his mates. 1885 MRS. C. PRAED
Head Station 64 I’ve sent my mate to prospect for a new claim. 1890 ‘R.
BOLDREWOOD’ Miner’s Right 136 We have been firm friends and true mates all
this time. 1901 M. FRANKLIN My Brilliant Career i. 3 Daddy’s little mate isn’t
going to turn Turk like that, is she? 1908 E. J. BANFIELD Confessions of
Beachcomber I. v. 174 With a mate he had been for many months, bêche-de-mer
fishing, their station.. a lonely islet in Whitsunday Passage. 1911 C. E. W. BEAN
‘Dreadnought’ of Darling xxxv. 311 Perhaps the strongest article in the out-back
code is that of loyalty to a mate. 1942 C. BARRETT On Wallaby iv. 75, I told my
mates some of these facts on returning. 1966 Observer 17 Apr. 30/1 A 17-year-old
boy..said, ‘I haven’t got a real mate. That’s what I need.’ 1968 K. WEATHERLY
Roo Shooter 109 Old Sam, born and reared in the bush, a good mate and bushman.
1973 Parade (Melbourne) Sept. 34/1 An obelisk in the Jewish section of the
Melbourne General Cemetery records the names of those who fought for Australia
in the 1914 War. Many of them trained in the Faraday Street School cadets. They
assimilated the lessons of patriotism and were great mates. transf. and fig. 1669
LYBOURN (title) A Platform for Purchasers, a Guide for Builders, and a Mate for
Measurers. 1671 MILTON Samson 173 Thee whose strength, while vertue was her
mate Might have subdu’d the Earth.
b. Used as a form of address by sailors, labourers, etc.
c1450 Pilgr. Sea-Voy. 14 in Stac. Rome 38 ‘What, howe! mate, thow stondyst to ny,
Thy felow may nat hale the by;’ Thus they begyn to crake. 1549 Compl. Scot. vi. 41
The master cryit on the rudir man, mait keip ful and by, a luf. 1582 STANYHURST
Æneis III. (Arb.) 79 My maats skum the sea froth there in oars strong cherelye
dipping. 1610 B. JONSON Alch. II. vi. How now! What mates? What Baiards
ha’wee here? 1637 HEYWOOD Dialogues I. Wks. 1874 VI. 96 My Mate (It is a
word That Sailors interchangeably afford To one another) speake. 1852 R. CECIL
Diary 31 Mar. (1935) 36 When the diggers address a policeman in uniform they
always call him ‘Sir’, but they always address a fellow in a blue shirt with a carbine
as ‘Mate’. ‘Mate’ is the ordinary popular form of allocution in these colonies. 1862
A. POLEHAMPTON Kangaroo Land 99 A man, who greeted me after the fashion
of the Bush, with a ‘Good day, mate’. 1869 Routledge’s Ev. Boy’s Ann. 554 Mates, I
spoke just now. 1880 M. E. BRADDON Just as I am i, ‘Who’s the magistrate
Major Varieties of English in the OED 131

hereabouts, mate?’ 1974 Sydney Morning Herald 14 Feb. 7, I asked a station

attendant (attired in a dirty open-necked shirt and trousers, recognizable only by a
dirty cap) if the train was the North-West Mail. ‘I wouldn’t have a clue, mate,’ was
the reply.
c. A fellow, ‘chap’; often used contemptuously. Obs.
a1380 St. Bernard in Horstm. Altengl. Leg. (1878) 56/2 He [sc. the fend] made a
mouwe, that foule mate, And seide [etc.]. 1573 TUSSER Husb. (1878) 113 As for
such mates, as vertue hates. 1577 G. HARVEY Letter-bk. (Camden) 57 Thou art a
merry mate. 1584 R. SCOT Discov. Witchcr. VI. ii. (1886) 91 These witches are but
lieng mates and couseners. 1612 T. JAMES Jesuits’ Downf. 13 These Iesuits are
cogging mates.
d. to go mates with: to be an associate or partner of. Also to be mates with.
1880 SUTHERLAND Tales of Goldfields 59 Brown lost no time in making a
contract to ‘go mates’ with another digger. 1880 H. LAPHAM in D. M. Davin N.Z.
Short Stories (1953) 57 At this time I was mates with a young fellow called Jim
Smith, a good enough lad as a mate, and would do just as big a day’s labour as any
man. 1890 Gd. Words Mar. 211/1, I will accept his proposal to go mates with him.

mate, n.2 (O E D Third Edition)

I. An associate, and related senses.
1. a. Now chiefly colloq. A companion, fellow, comrade, friend; a fellow
worker or business partner. Also fig.
Freq. as the second element in compounds, as bed-, flat-mate, etc. (in which it is
generally less colloq. than when standing alone). For more established compounds
see the first element.
c1380 Sir Firumbras 1372 Maumecet, my mate, y-blessed mot thou be, For aled
thow hast muche debate. 1440 Promp. Parv. (Harl. 221) 329 Mate, idem quod
Felaw. ?1515 A. BARCLAY Egloges I. sig. Cijv, Whan the good is gone, my mate
this is the case Seldom the better reentreth in the place. 1521 MS. Accts. St. John’s
Hosp., Canterb., To John Kenet & hys mate, carpenters, for ij dayes. a1522 G.
DOUGLAS tr. Virgil Æneid (1957) II. xi. 83 Alkyne sterage affrayit and causit
grow, Baith for my byrding and my litle mait. 1569 R. GRAFTON Chron. II. 633
The Duke of Yorke and his mates were lodged within the Citie. 1583 Leg. Bp. St.
Androis 316 He sought ane vther, Ane devill..Exceading Circes in conceattis, For
chaungene of Wlisses meatis. c1614 W. MURE Dido & Æneas I. 508 in Wks.
(1898) I. 78 Parte at the ports, as sentinells abide, Vnloade their mat’s and drowsie
dron’s do kill. 1655 T. FULLER Church-hist. Brit. I. i. 4 Aristobulus, though no
Apostle, yet an Apostles Mate,..by Grecian Writers made Bishop of Britain. 1668
W. LEYBOURN (title) A Platform for Purchasers, a Guide for Builders, and a Mate
for Measurers. 1671 MILTON Samson Agonistes 173 Thee whose strength, while
vertue was her mate, Might have subdu’d the Earth. 1725 W. BROOME in Pope et
al. tr. Homer Odyssey I. II. 365 Each in jovial mood his mate addrest. 1748 Anson’s
Voy. II. ix. 226 One of the sail-makers mates was fishing from the end of the gib-
132 J ENNIE P RICE

boom. 1821 BYRON Sardanapalus II. i. 48 The she-king, That less than woman, is
even now upon The waters with his female mates. 1845 C. GRIFFITH Present State
Port Philip 79 Two [bushworkers] generally travel together, who are called mates;
they are partners, and divide all their earnings. a1865 E. C. GASKELL Wives &
Daughters (1866) I. xxii. 251 He was inferior in education to those who should have
been his mates. 1908 E. J. BANFIELD Confessions of Beachcomber I. v. 174 With a
mate he had been for many months, bêche-de-mer fishing, their station.. a lonely
islet in Whitsunday Passage. 1966 Observer 17 Apr. 30/1 A 17-year-old boy..said, ‘I
haven’t got a real mate. That’s what I need.’ 1988 Patches 1 Apr. 20/1 If he doesn’t
want to be seen with you at discos, why don’t you just go with your mates?
b. Freq. contempt. A fellow, a creature. Obs.
c1390 St. Bernard 915 in C. Horstmann Sammlung Altengl. Legenden (1878) 56 the
fend..made a mouwe, that foule mate. 1573 T. TUSSER Fiue Hundreth Points Good
Husb. (new ed.) (1878) 113 As for such mates, as vertue hates. 1577 G. HARVEY
Letter-bk. (Camden) 57 Thou art a merry mate. 1584 R. SCOT Discouerie Witchcr.
(1886) VI. ii. 91 These witches are but lieng mates and couseners. 1612 T. JAMES
Jesuits Downefall 13 These Iesuits are cogging mates.
c. colloq. Used as a form of address to a person, esp. a man, regarded as an
equal. Not used in N. Amer.
c1500 Pilgrims Sea-voyage 14 in Stations of Rome 37 ‘What, howe! mate, thow
stondyst to ny, Thy felow may nat hale the by;’ Thus they begyn to crake. c1550
Complaynt Scotl. (1979) vi. 32 The master cryit on the rudir man, mait keip ful and
by, a luf. 1582 R. STANYHURST tr. Virgil Æneis (Arb.) III. 79 My maats skum the
sea froth there in oars strong cherelye dipping. 1612 B. JONSON Alchemist II. vi.
How now! What mates? What Baiards ha’wee here? 1637 T. HEYWOOD Dial. I, in
Wks. (1874) VI. 96 My Mate (It is a word That Sailors interchangeably afford To
one another) speake. 1852 R. CECIL Diary 31 Mar. (1935) 36 When the diggers
address a policeman in uniform they always call him ‘Sir’, but they always address a
fellow in a blue shirt with a carbine as ‘Mate’. 1862 A. POLEHAMPTON Kangaroo
Land 99 A man, who greeted me after the fashion of the Bush, with a ‘Good day,
mate’. 1880 M. E. BRADDON Just as I Am i, ‘Who’s the magistrate hereabouts,
mate?’ 1943 D. WELCH Maiden Voy. xxiv. 200 Lighting a cigarette, he ambled
over to me and said, ‘Hullo, mate.’ 1981 P. CAREY Bliss ii. 95 ‘Come and sit here,
old mate.’ She patted the chair beside her.
d. Chiefly Austral. and N.Z. to go (also be) mates: to work as an equal partner
(with someone).
Quot. 1842 is an isolated use in sing. with to.
1842 S. Austral. Mag. (Adelaide) 286, I think I went a shepherding. Oh yes, I went
mate to Donald.., to herd sixteen hundred sheep at Glenelg. 1876 E. THORNE
Queen of Colonies 119 They [sc. the Chinese] appear to have no quarrels among
themselves when working in partnerships, or as the digging phrase is, ‘going mates’.
1880 H. LAPHAM in D. M. Davin N.Z. Short Stories (1953) 57 At this time I was
mates with a young fellow called Jim Smith, a good enough lad as a mate, and
Major Varieties of English in the OED 133

would do just as big a day’s labour as any man. 1890 Good Words Mar. 211/1, I will
accept his proposal to go mates with him. 1940 I. L. IDRIESS Lightning Ridge 188
None of us liked going mates with a man unless we could pay our own way.

mail, n.3 (O E D , Second Edition)

b. (sense 2) simple attrib., eg, in the names of vehicles employed to carry the
mail, as mail boat, carriage, diligence, gig, -hack, packet, -plane, schooner,
ship, steamer, -van, wagon;
1795 in R. Putnam Mem. (1903) 397 It has been suggested to me that the *mail
boats are much too heavy for pushing with the requisite speed. 1855 HYDE
CLARKE Dict., Mail-boat. 1895 A. H. NORWAY P.-O. Packet Service i. 3 The
Post-Office selected Falmouth in 1688 as the point of embarkation..for the..mail
boats. 1933 L. A. G. STRONG Sea Wall 1 He did not even heed the mailboat, as she
glided gracefully in..to the harbour.

mailboat, n. (O E D , Third Edition)

A boat used for the conveyance or transport of mail.
Specialized uses: (a) S. Afr. hist., a weekly passenger ship linking the South
African ports with Southampton, and contracted to the South African
government to carry mail; (b) Caribbean, a boat owned or commissioned by a
government as a mail-carrying ferry, usu. one also serving as a general
passenger and cargo vessel.
1786 R. HUNTER Jrnl. 11 June in Quebec to Carolina (1943) (modernized text)
269 We thought it better to run the risk of hiring a cart to drive there than to wait till
Tuesday morning for the mail boat. 1855 H. CLARKE New Dict. Eng. Lang., Mail-
boat. 1895 A. H. NORWAY P.-O. Packet Service i. 3 The Post-Office selected
Falmouth in 1688 as the point of embarkation..for the..mail boats. 1897 F. R.
STATHAM S. Afr. Life as it Is 8 Late on the evening of..the 18th of April, 1877, the
steamer Caldera, which had been temporarily chartered by the Castle Packets Com-
pany as a mailboat, dropped anchor in Table Bay. 1923 B. RONAN Forty S. Afr.
Years 79, I boarded the mail-boat and disembarked again at East London, then little
more than a waste of sandhills. 1933 L. A. G. STRONG Sea Wall 1 He did not even
heed the mailboat, as she glided gracefully in..to the harbour. 1947 J. J.
REDGRAVE Port Elizabeth in Bygone Days 432 On one occasion the incoming
mail boat made a record voyage for those early days by covering the distance from
England to Table Bay in thirty-one days. 1976 C. A. FRANK Hist. Begos 11 The
main link between St Vincent and the Grenadine dependencies is by the ‘mail boat’
which transports passengers, food supplies, building materials and the ‘mail’ from
the mainland. 1985 R. HUNTFORD Shackleton xiii. 119 On 12 June,..Shackleton
landed in England. He came unremarked by mailboat. 1992 Caribbean Week Apr.
16/1 There are more than twenty government-subsidised mailboats, which leave port
in Nassau every week, and travel the length and breadth of The Bahamas.
134 J ENNIE P RICE

Appendix 2

New entries from the Third Edition

The entry for mampoer, n. is a representative example of an entry deriving

from one of the major historical dictionaries of regional English, in this case
the Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (1996). The
entry has a substantial quotation paragraph with a relatively wide date range
which validates its inclusion in the O E D ; indeed the O E D editors have been
able to postdate the D S A E ’s quotation evidence from a British source. The
existence of compounds also adds weight to the argument for its inclusion.
The Third Edition’s method of illustrating pronunciation as discussed above
can be seen. The entry for matrimonial, a. and n. has an addition from Indian
English and one specific to Canadian English, two varieties not previously
exemplified in this essay. That for Manchester department s.v. Manchester,
n. is of interest as it shows an overseas development of a British use now rare
or obsolete in its ‘native’ variety: compare Manchester cotton, ~ goods, and ~
wares in the same entry.

mampoer Brit. /mam’pə/, U.S. /mæm’pər/, S. Afr. /mΛm’pu:r/, /mΛm’pə/,

n. Forms: 19- mampoer, mapoer. [< Afrikaans mampoer, of uncertain
origin.
Perh. < Mampuru, the name of a Pedi chief (born c1827 and executed for
rebellion in the Transvaal in 1883); there were several chiefs of this name in a
region where an abundance of marulas led to much distilling of spirits.]
I. Simple uses.
1. A raw brandy originating in the former Transvaal and distilled (often illicit-
ly) from fruits such as peaches, karee-berries, and marulas; = WITBLITS n.
1934 Sunday Times (Johannesburg) 13 May (Swart), Mampoer, as this home-
distilled brandy is commonly called, has been very popular. 1947 H. C. BOSMAN
Mafeking Rd. (1969) 122 It was good mampoer, made from karee-berries that were
plucked when they were still green and full of thick sap. 1968 W. KEMPEN in D.J.
Opperman Spirit of Vine 284 Mapoer, fiery brandy illicitly distilled on farms. 1976
Major Varieties of English in the OED 135

S. Afr. Panorama May 24 What is moonshine white, has the kick of a pack of crazed
mules and is in essence liquid folk-lore? Mampoer, my friend, mampoer. 1983 A.
SPARKS in J. Crwys-Williams S. Afr. Despatches (1989) 446 Mampoer, after all, is
a piece of Afrikaner culture. 1998 Economist 23 May 123/1 For a sharper kick, a
spirit called mampoer is recommended. The fruit of the marula tree, from which it is
usually made, is best known for fermenting inside elephants’ stomachs, causing the
great pachyderms to blunder drunkenly into trees.

II. Compounds.
2. mampoerfees Brit. /mam’pυə,fIəs/, U.S. /mæm’pər,fIs/, S. Afr.
/mΛmpu:r,fIəs/, /mΛm’pə,fIəs/ [< Afrikaans mampoerfees < mampoer MAM-
POER n. + fees festival < Dutch feest FEAST n.], a fair at which mampoer is
tasted and prizes awarded for the best distillation. mampoerstoker Brit.
/mam’pə,stəυkə/, U.S. /mæm’p(ə)r,stokər/, S. Afr. /mΛm’pu:r,stəkər/,
/mΛm’pə,stəkə/ [< Afrikaans mampoerstoker < mampoer MAMPOER n. +
stoker < Dutch stoker stoker, distiller (see STOKER n.)], a distiller of
mampoer.
1983 Frontline May 18 Down the road, there is another gate with a small sign
saying ‘*mampoerfees’. 1988 Weekly Mail (Johannesburg) 27 May 3 (caption)
About the only stall at the annual Mampoerfees in Pretoria last week to offer wares
to rival the sharpness of the infamous throat-blistering brew was this selection of
cutlery, perfect for the serious biltong-gnawer. 1988 Sunday Star (Johannesburg) 5
June 2 In the above right picture *mampoerstokers distill their precious brew of
distilled juice and alcohol. 1990 Motorist 1st Quarter 16 There are [sic] a plentiful
supply of mampoer-stokers in our north-western Transvaal, most operate with a
licence, some brew the clear liquid under cover of the bushes in the backyard, all
their booze has the kick of a mule.

matrimonial a. and n.
A adj.
II. Compounds. 4.
matrimonial cake Canad., a rectangular cake or biscuit with a date filling
and a crumble topping.
1944 Canad. Favourites Cook Bk. 192 *Matrimonial Cake... Spread one half the
crumbs in greased shallow pan about 8 × 14 inches... Cover with cooled date filling.
1996 Hamilton (Ontario) Spectator 13 Mar. B9 Most people simply call them date
squares, but I grew up in Saskatchewan where they were called matrimonial cake.
136 J ENNIE P RICE

B n.
I. b.
Chiefly Indian English. Advertisements placed in a newspaper with the aim
of finding a marriageable partner.
1989 Los Angeles Times (Nexis) 2 July 10/1 The Hindustan Times was the first
newspaper in north India to begin carrying matrimonials in the early 1970s. 1999
Statesman (Calcutta) 10 Feb. (Midweek section) 4/3 When I have a job I’ll have to
begin a whole new search for my better half... Back to the newspaper matrimonials
on Sundays.

Manchester n.
I. Compounds.
1. a. attrib. Designating or relating to various cotton goods formerly produced
in Manchester, as Manchester cotton, etc. Now rare.
1552 Act 5 & 6 Edw. VI, c. 6 §1 All and everie Cottonnes called Manchester
Lancashire and Chesshire Cottonnes... And..all Clothes called Manchester Rugges
otherwise named Frices. 1580 R. HITCHCOCK Polit. Plat Fij, At Rone in
Fraunce..be solde our Englishe wares, as Welche and Manchester Cottons [etc.].
1736 S. Carolina Gaz. 7-14 Aug. 3/1 Just imported in the Anna Maria, and to be
sold by John Beswicke in Broad street, viz. Silver and Gold Buttons..white and
colour’d Manchester Tapes. 1759 Newport (Rhode Island) Mercury 22 May 4/1
Superfine Manchester Velvet of different Colours, Cotton and Linen Handkerchiefs,
3-4 and 7-8 Checks, Dimity, London Quality. 1779 G. W. BEEKMAN Let. 26 July
in P. L. White Beekman Mercantile Papers (1956) III. 1331, I Shall Send you 2 1/2
Manchester Valet Olive Coller and 4 Quires Paper if to be had. 1794 W. FELTON
Treat. Carriages I. 41 A strong Manchester tape, called web. 1795 J. AIKIN Descr.
Country round Manchester 183 When the Manchester trade began to extend. 1897
M. KINGSLEY Trav. W. Afr. i. 16 Manchester cottons and shawls. 1899 Daily
News 9 Jan. 2/4 Unlawfully applying a certain false trade description to ‘Manchester
linen’. 1949 C. BULLOCK Rina 70 Most of the stuff I had to present was cheap
kaffir truck - Manchester blankets, lembo and suchlike.
b. Manchester goods, cotton goods of the kind manufactured in Manchester.
Similarly Manchester wares (now hist.).
1705 Orig. Jrnls. House of Commons 27 Jan. 112 526 Linnen and Woollen Cloth’s
and other Goods called Manchester Wares. 1711 Boston News-let. 15-22 Oct. 2/2
(Advt.), These are to give Notice. That the following Merchandize, lately come from
England are to be Sold on reasonable Terms..viz. Broad-Cloths,..Checks, Plush,
Manchester Goods, Pins, Cutlery Ware, Habberdashery [etc.]. 1787 Despatches
from Paris I. 224 No less than twenty-five thousand workmen are depriv’d of
employment by the great importation of Manchester Goods. 1860 ‘F. G.
TRAFFORD’ Too much Alone II. ii. 42 Rag merchant..does not refer to a marine-
Major Varieties of English in the OED 137

store dealer, but simply to a dealer in Manchester goods, who is frequently thus
designated in the city. 1922 S. WEYMAN Ovington’s Bank xvi. 177 Huge wains
laden with Manchester goods and driven by teamsters. 1984 N.Y. Times 26 Aug. VII.
8/1 England, having done well enough in literature and having conquered a large
part of the earth with Birmingham guns in order to make it accept Manchester
goods, needed a great composer.
c. Manchester-man, a dealer in cotton goods of the kind manufactured in
Manchester. Obs.
1755 T. TURNER Diary 2 Oct. (1984) 15 My brother Moses came and called me to
go to Lewes to meet the Manchesterman. 1851 H. MAYHEW London Labour
(1864) I. 419/1 The packmen are sometimes called Manchester-men. These are the
men whom I have described as the sellers of shirtings, sheetings, &c.
d. Manchester warehouse, a warehouse in which cotton goods are stocked
and sold; so Manchester warehouseman.
1788 Morning Herald 21 Feb. 4/3 Manchester Warehousemen, Woollen-drapers,
Linen-drapers, Mercers, &c. Cash to any amount ready for the purchase of Goods in
the above branches…at No. 2, Earl’s Court, Cranbourn-alley, Leicester-fields. 1854
Census 1851 Population Tables. Occupations p. cxxiv/2 Manchester warehouseman.
1858 P. L. SIMMONDS Dict. Trade Products, Manchester and Glasgow Ware-
house, a sale depository for all kinds of cotton goods. 1932 Punch 23 Nov. 561/1 He
spent years trying to sell calico to grey-faced loons in Manchester warehouses. 1988
D. VERNON Tiller’s Girls (BNC) 11 While Mary relegated him to ‘Manchester
Warehouseman’, John preferred the more optimistic ‘Cotton Manufacturer’!
e. Chiefly Austral., N.Z., and S. Afr. Manchester department, a department
(in a shop) where household linen and other cotton goods are sold.
1905 Evening Post (Wellington) 5 Jan. 7 (heading) Manchester Department White,
pure linen Table Damask. Ready made Table Cloths..Unbleached Twill Sheeting.
1907 Anthony Hordern Catal. 1 Manchester Department. So called from the major-
ity of the goods included within its scope being of what is popularly known as
Manchester manufacture. 1924 Anthony Hordern Catal. 60 Household Linen
Department. Also known as the Manchester Department, where will be found every
description of household and family linen. 1983 Bulletin (Sydney) 29 Nov. 90/2
Only Australian shoppers buy their sheets and pillow cases from a manchester
department.

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English as a Lingua Franca
and the Politics of Property

Barbara Seidlhofer and Jennifer Jenkins

University of Vienna and King’s College, London

ABSTRACT
The politics of E W L has, at long last, become a vibrant field of research
with a strong theoretical base. However, most of this research is being con-
ducted on the meta-level alone, and not explicitly addressed to empirical
questions about the nature of E W L itself and what traditional assumptions it
challenges. As a result, there has been little explicit basis for the evaluation
of conflicting claims that have arisen for language pedagogy. So far it has
been left to practitioners to work out for themselves the implications of
current theoretical developments for their daily practices. Unsurprisingly,
therefore, little has changed in the last twenty years or so in the concep-
tualization of the ‘English’ that is taught around the world. In our essay, we
report on the work we have been doing on the phonology (Jenkins) and
lexico-grammar (Seidlhofer) of English as a lingua franca, one important
manifestation of E W L . In both our cases, the theoretical proposals for a con-
ceptual framework of E L F are backed up by empirical data drawn from
E L F settings. Availability and analysis of such data, we believe, is crucial if
calls in principle for ‘resistance’ and ‘transformation’ are to be effectively
put into practice. There is a need to investigate what E L F users actually do
when they communicate with each other – rather than what has traditionally
been assumed they need or (should) do. Otherwise we are as guilty of socio-
cultural imposition as those we accuse.
140 B ARBARA S EIDLHOFER AND J ENNIFER J ENKINS

T
H E 2001 M A V E N C O N F E R E N C E bore testimony to the growth
of interest in E W L 1 over the past few decades. In the years between
the first major academic gathering on this subject, the seminal
conference on cross-cultural communication held at the University of Illinois
in 1978 (subsequently published as Kachru 1992), and M A V E N 2001, much
has been written and spoken about the spread of English around the world, the
diverse ways in which the language has developed in this process, especially
in the Outer Circle,2 and about the wider implications of this unique socio-
linguistic development. Among these implications, the issue of the ownership
of English and its passing from native to non-native speakers has received
considerable comment. Graddol typically points out that “native speakers may
feel the language ‘belongs’ to them, but it will be those who speak English as
a second or foreign language who will determine its world future” (1997: 10).
In this essay, we will pick up some of the ideas which have originated in the
Outer Circle and investigate what their significance may be for the Expanding
Circle of foreign language users – which is, indeed, expanding rapidly.
The global spread of English has provoked a broad spectrum of responses
over the last decade or so. For example, we find the following in a British
Council conference prospectus:
The incredible success of the English language is Britain’s greatest asset. It
enhances Britain’s image as a modern, dynamic country and brings wide-
spread political, economic and cultural advantages, both to Britain and to our
partners. (The British Council, Conference prospectus, ELT conference 1998)
The front page of the Observer newspaper reveals that
This week the Government will announce that the number of people with
English as a second language has overtaken the number who speak it as their
native tongue. […] Insiders say the drive to make English the global lingua
franca comes directly from Tony Blair. (The Observer, 29 October 2000: 1)
In this article, we also learn that [the then British Education and Employment
Secretary] “David Blunkett […] will tell a meeting of business leaders on
Tuesday to capitalize on their advantage as native speakers.” The same native

1
The following widely-used abbreviations are employed here: E W L = English as a
world language; E L T = English language teaching; E F L = English as a foreign
language; E N L = English as a native language; E A P = English for academic purposes;
N S = native speaker; N N S = non-native speaker. The acronym E L F (English as a
Lingua Franca) is much newer, but its use has been spreading steadily in recent years.
2
The terms used throughout this paper for the roles of English in different contexts
are those coined and popularized by Kachru (eg, 1992): Inner Circle (as a first lan-
guage), Outer Circle (as an additional language), and Expanding Circle (as a foreign
language).
English as a Lingua Franca and the Politics of Property 141

speaker “advantage” enables materials based on the Cobuild Bank of English

to “help learners with real English” (front cover of the Collins C O B U I L D
English Dictionary). At the other end of the spectrum, English is accused of
being a “killer language” guilty of “linguistic genocide” (Skutnabb–Kangas
2000, this volume). With regard to language pedagogy, Swales (1997: 373) in
an article entitled ‘English as Tyrannosaurus rex’ asks “whether English has
become too successful” and argues that “resistance to the ‘triumphalism’ of
English is also a responsibility of E A P teachers,” and Canagarajah 1999
details options for “resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching.”
However, the question which is not addressed in all these deliberations is
what exactly the ‘English’ in E W L actually is. In this respect, different
though they are in ideological perspective, the above quotations are all alike
in failing to problematize the notion of the linguistic entity ‘English’. The
difference between the various perspectives is thus only a partial one: it does
not reside in the way English is defined, but only in the way its global spread
is viewed. This can be illustrated in the following way:

CONCEPTUALIZATION OF THE LANGUAGE:

“English is English is English”
RESPONSE TO ITS SPREAD:
“This is wonderful!” “This is appalling!”

British Council Skutnabb–Kangas

COBUILD/ Bank of English Swales
etc. etc.
But inevitably, the politics of English as a World Language will depend very
much on what happens in the top part of the diagram: ie, how ‘English’ is
conceptualized.
Despite all the (necessary and welcome) theorizing, one might be forgiven
for calling the state of the art in this area a “hubbub without a hub,”3 for
curiously little thought has so far gone into what surely must be the very heart
of the matter: the nature of the language itself as an international means of
communication in the Expanding Circle, and in what respects English as a
lingua franca (E L F ) may differ from ‘English as a native language’ (E N L ).
In most Outer Circle contexts, of course, the long and vigorous struggle for
the acknowledgement of their very own sociopolitical identities has been
largely successful (see, for example, Bamgeboe, Banjo & Thomas 1995,

3
With apologies to Gatwick Airport for rewording a slogan used in its North
Terminal: “the hub without the hubbub.”
142 B ARBARA S EIDLHOFER AND J ENNIFER J ENKINS

Kachru 1992, Smith & Forman 1997, and the present volume). The naive
notion of a monolithic, uniform, unadaptable linguistic medium owned by its
original speakers and forever linked to their rule(s) has been recognized as
simply contrary to the facts, and has therefore given way to the realization
that indigenized varieties of English are legitimate Englishes in their own
right, accordingly emancipating themselves vis-à-vis British and American
Standard English. Codification has been recognized as a crucial prerequisite
for the emergence of endonormative standards in indigenized varieties (see
Bamgeboe 1998), and important research programmes are under way in order
to provide language descriptions as a basis for dictionaries and grammars
(notably the International Corpus of English; see Greenbaum 1996). Outer
Circle linguistic independence has, on the whole, been given the linguistic
seal of approval.
In the Expanding Circle, however, a totally different situation presents
itself. Despite the all-pervasive use of English throughout what many like to
term the ‘international community’ and despite countless anecdotes about
emerging varieties such as ‘Euro-English’, professional linguists have so far
shown only limited interest in describing ‘lingua franca’ English as a legiti-
mate language variety. The received wisdom seems to be that only when Eng-
lish is a majority first language or an official additional language does it
warrant description. So, while the Outer Circle has at long last successfully
asserted its right to appropriate the language for the expression of its diverse
cultures and identities, while postcolonial literatures flourish and language use
by writers such as Achebe, Okara, Rushdie, Saro–Wiwa and many others con-
stitutes a prolific area of research, Expanding Circle English is not deemed
worthy of such attention: users of English who have learned the language as a
foreign language are expected to conform to Inner Circle norms, even if using
English constitutes an important part of their lived experience and personal
identity. No right to ‘rotten English’ for them, then. Quite the contrary: for
Expanding Circle consumption, the main effort remains, as it has always
been, to describe English as it is used among its British and American native
speakers and then to “distribute” (Widdowson 1997: 139) the resulting de-
scriptions to those who speak English in non-native contexts around the
world.
This is probably why, when it comes to practicalities, those who have had
so much to say at the theoretical level tend to fall silent. Alastair Pennycook,
for example, in an article entitled “Pedagogical implications of different
frameworks for understanding the global spread of English,” argues as
follows:
Drawing on notions of postcolonialism and resistance, it [the postcolonial
performative response] suggests that English can be appropriated and used for
English as a Lingua Franca and the Politics of Property 143

different ends. But it also suggests that such appropriation is not achieved
without considerable struggle. Thus the postcolonial performative position is
one that sees English language teaching as part of a battle over forms of
culture and knowledge [...] an attempt to challenge central norms of language,
culture and knowledge, and to seek ways of appropriating English to serve
alternative ends. The challenge to develop contextual (i.e. location-specific)
postcolonial pedagogies for English is, to my mind, one of the crucial
challenges facing English language teachers today. (1999: 153; our emphasis)
A language teacher in search of suggestions as to how to “challenge central
norms of language” within his or her classroom practice, however, would be
sorely disappointed. Nothing of a practical nature is suggested in this article,
despite its title and the fact that the challenge is presented in the article as
“crucial.”
In another area of activity, efforts are being made to ‘empower’ non-native
speaker teachers through direct access to large corpora, as the authors of the
B N C Handbook point out:
In language teaching increasing access to corpora may modify the traditional
role of the teacher as authority about the use of the language to be learned, and
reduce the sense of inferiority felt by many non-native speaker teachers. More
generally, there is much to be said about the way in which thinking about
language, particularly the English language, is politicized, and hence about the
political implications of changing the basis on which assessments of
correctness or appropriateness of usage are made. (Aston & Burnard 1998:
43, our emphasis)
But again, the corpora that are being referred to contain only native-speaker
English. The confidence of non-native speaker teachers is expected to be
strengthened by better, more direct, access to the way native speakers use the
language. But an option not on offer so far (and, of course, a task impossible
for a corpus called the British National Corpus) is to give these non-native
speaker teachers access to a corpus capturing the successful use of English
among non-native speakers, as a lingua franca, thus offering supremely rele-
vant models for many learners wishing to use the language for similar pur-
poses. So when Aston and Burnard refer to “the political implications of
changing the basis on which assessments of correctness or appropriateness of
usage are made” what has changed about the “basis” is how it can be
accessed, not how it is defined.
There is also another problem that operates at a deeper and unrecognized
level: the language attitudes of those who, paradoxically, are themselves re-
commending the challenge to native-speaker norms. This is evident in the
contradictory statements made by those such as van Els, who, in the same
essay, claims on the one hand that the ownership of a lingua franca passes to
144 B ARBARA S EIDLHOFER AND J ENNIFER J ENKINS

its non-native speakers and on the other that the Dutch should not be com-
placent about their English because “only very few are able to achieve a level
of proficiency that approximates the native or native-like level” (2000: 29).
Similarly, Hoffman (2000: 19) describes the English of European learners as
spanning “the whole range from non-fluent to native-like,” as though fluency
in English were not a possibility for those whose speech does not mimic that
of a native speaker. In other words, non-native speakers own the English
which they speak, but unless it conforms to native speaker norms, it is un-
acceptable. English as a world language is to be judged as if it were English
as a native language. No change there, then.
The abstract nature of the proposals put forward by Pennycook (above), for
example, has done little to allay the sense of insecurity and unease among
English language teachers about what is for them the most critical issue: that
of the language norm which they teach – the main basis of their professional
qualification, the hub around which their daily practices revolve. Widespread
politically correct rhetoric is no effective antidote for this unsatisfactory situa-
tion, and so the familiar chip-on-the-shoulder syndrome among non-native
teachers of English persists. In a volume which addresses topics of linguistic
as well as literary interest, it seems apposite – though admittedly unconven-
tional – to point out parallels between the writings of two well-known authors
in language teacher education and postcolonial literature:

We suffer from an inferiority The effect of the cultural bomb is to

complex caused by glaring defects annihilate a people’s belief in their names,
in our knowledge of English. We in their languages, in their environment,
are in constant distress as we [...] in their capacities and ultimately in
realize how little we know about themselves. It makes them see their past as
the language we are supposed to one wasteland of non-achievement and it
teach. makes them want to distance themselves
(Medgyes 1999: 40, our em- from that wasteland. It makes them want
phases) to identify with that which is furthest
removed from themselves; for instance,
with other people’s languages rather than
their own.
(Ngugi 1981: 3, our emphases)

In an essay whose main point is the renegotiation of the customary distinction

between the Outer and Expanding Circles, it is interesting to note that
Medgyes comes from the latter and Ngugi from the former. Both, however,
share the assumption of the uniformity of English and seem to deny the
inherent flexibility of the language, its adaptability to change: English is Eng-
lish is English. The distress expressed in Medgyes’ book, whose objective,
English as a Lingua Franca and the Politics of Property 145

after all, is to foreground the particular strengths of non-native language

teachers, indicates that (in Ngugi’s words) these teachers’ “belief […] in
themselves” has been “annihilated”, and we think it is not an exaggeration to
say that the “inferiority complex” ascribed to these teachers on the basis of the
“glaring defects” in their “knowledge of English” causes them to “see their
past as one wasteland of non-achievement.”
We would argue that what is most likely to arrest this negative spiral is not
giving non-native teachers pep-talks about their linguistic human rights, nor
access to ever-larger native-speaker corpora. Rather, what is required is a
reconceptualization and concomitant description of “the language they are
supposed to teach” in terms of what it predominantly is in the world at large,
namely English as a lingua franca, not English as a native language (see
Seidlhofer 2001).
As long as no empirically-based description exists of how English is
actually used as a global lingua franca, the only, hence default, descriptive
reality available when talking about ‘English’ is E N L . In the remainder of
this essay, we will therefore argue that it is necessary and feasible to conduct
a conceptual and empirical enquiry into the actual nature of E L F . We will
summarize relevant work already undertaken, offer suggestions for further
enquiry and point to some socio-psychological and pedagogical implications.
Of course, no empirical investigation starts from scratch; there are always
preconceptions and predecessors. Notions of how characteristics of English as
an international language may be captured and how the language may be
modified or simplified have some history which it would be foolish to ignore.
There are points of reference in the past which will help us in our enquiry:
important work, along conceptual as well as empirical dimensions, directed at
identifying salient features of E L F use has already been achieved.
A first tradition of research started from the early decades of the twentieth
century but is now all but forgotten: notably Ogden’s Basic English (eg,
1930), Palmer & Hornby’s Thousand-Word English (1937) as well as West’s
empirically derived Service List (1953). These anticipate, and offer many
profound insights into, many of the E W L issues that we are confronted with
today.4 In addition, many theoretical and methodological problems discussed
in reference to varieties captured in the I C E corpus are also highly relevant
for the description of E L F (see, for example, Mair 1992).
In recent years, a small number of descriptions and analyses of selected
aspects of E L F use have been conducted, in particular in the area of the
(intercultural) pragmatics of ‘non-native – non-native’ communication in

4
See Seidlhofer (2002) for a discussion of the current relevance of Basic English
for lingua franca communication.
146 B ARBARA S EIDLHOFER AND J ENNIFER J ENKINS

English (eg, Firth 1996, Meierkord 1996, Wagner & Firth 1997, House 1999
and 2002, Lesznyak forthcoming). James (2000) offers a conceptually rich
discussion of the place of English in bi/ multilingualism, making reference to
a project, currently in its pilot phase, entitled “English as a lingua franca in
the Alpine-Adriatic region.” He also outlines hypotheses as to what findings
the future analysis of this use of English by speakers of German, Italian,
Slovene and Friulian might yield.
Last (but not least, we think) is our own work, focusing on E L F phonology
(Jenkins 1998, 2000, 2002) and lexico-grammar (Seidlhofer 2000, 2001a,
2001b, 2001c). The work on phonology, culminating in the ‘Lingua Franca
Core’, takes as its starting-point the need for empirical data drawn from
interactions between L2 speakers of English in order to assess which phono-
logical features are (and which are not) essential for intelligible pronunciation
when English is spoken in lingua franca contexts. This data, then, replaces N S
intuition and data drawn from N S –N S (or N S –N N S ) interactions, both of
which up to now have formed the basis of pedagogic pronunciation decisions
(Benrabah’s 1997 study of word stress is one of very many such studies). If
the concern is with intelligibility among N N S s of English, which is by defini-
tion the case in E L F , however, it makes no sense whatsoever to look to non-
E L F contexts for evidence of such intelligibility.
The data on which the phonological Lingua Franca Core (L F C ) was based
were collected from speakers with a wide range of L1s over several years and
by a number of different means: field observation, in which the focus was on
instances of miscommunication and communication breakdown in mixed-L1
classrooms and social settings; recordings of different-L1 pairs and groups of
students engaged in communication tasks such as information gap activities;
and an investigation into the production and reception of nuclear (tonic) stress
of a group of different-L1 users. In all cases, the speakers were of upper-
intermediate or low-advanced proficiency levels as defined by the University
of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. The analysis of the data was
carried out with the purpose of identifying which pronunciation ‘errors’ led to
intelligibility problems for a different-L1 interlocutor and which did not.
Instances in which missing the target caused such problems were then incor-
porated into the L F C while those in which it did not were considered to be
instances of (L2) regional variation, different from N S production, but not for
that reason ‘wrong’. The core areas thus identified are as follows:
1. The consonant inventory with the exception of the dental fricatives /θ/ and
/ð/, and of dark ‘l’ [ł], none of which caused any intelligibility problems in
the lingua franca data.
2. Additional phonetic requirements: aspiration of word-initial voiceless stops
/p/, /t/, and /k/, which were otherwise frequently heard as their lenis
English as a Lingua Franca and the Politics of Property 147

counterparts /b/, /d/, and /g/; and shortening of vowel sounds before fortis
consonants, and the maintenance of length before lenis consonants, eg, the
shorter /æ/ in the word sat as contrasted with the phonetically longer /æ/ in
the word sad.
3. Consonant clusters: no omission of sounds in word-initial clusters, eg, in
proper and strap; omission of sounds in word-medial and word-final
clusters only permissible according to L1 English rules of syllable structure
so that, for example, the word friendship can become /fren ∫p/ but not
/frendp/ or /fred ∫p/.
4. Vowel sounds: maintenance of the contrast between long and short vowels,
such as the / / and /i:/ in the words live and leave; L2 regional vowel
qualities otherwise intelligible provided they are used consistently, with the
exception of the substitution of the sound /3:/ especially with /a:/.
5. Production and placement of nuclear (tonic) stress, especially when used
contrastively (eg, He came by T R A I N vs. He C A M E by train).
It follows that the features which did not cause intelligibility problems are
designated ‘non-core’. Divergences in these areas from native-speaker reali-
zations according to L F C policy are regarded as instances of acceptable L2
regional variation. Thus, the following features are not crucial for lingua
franca use:
the consonant sounds /θ/ and /ð/, and the allophone dark ‘l’ [ł]
vowel quality
weak forms
other features of connected speech such as assimilation
pitch direction to signal attitude or grammatical meaning
word stress placement
stress-timing
(for full details of both core and non-core features, see Jenkins 2000: ch. 6).
The work on lexico-grammar in E L F interactions is not as far advanced as
Jenkins’ phonology core, though a few initial hypotheses can already be
formulated. The main point to stress, however, is that there is now (to our
knowledge, for the first time) a research initiative which aims at the com-
pilation of a sizeable corpus exclusively dedicated to capturing the use of
English as a lingua franca. The compilation of this corpus is now in progress
at the University of Vienna under Seidlhofer’s direction.5
In the initial phase, the objective is to cast the net very wide, and to this
end, a corpus of spoken E L F is being collected. There are two advantages to

5
This project is currently supported by Oxford University Press, hence the name of
the corpus is the Vienna–Oxford International Corpus of English, V O I C E for short.
148 B ARBARA S EIDLHOFER AND J ENNIFER J ENKINS

this: the language is at one remove from the stabilizing and standardizing
influence of writing, and spoken interactions are overtly reciprocal, allowing
not just production but also reception to be captured, thus facilitating obser-
vations regarding the mutual intelligibility of what interlocutors say. For the
time being, the focus is on unscripted, though partly pre-structured, largely
face-to-face communication among fairly fluent speakers from a wide range
of first language backgrounds whose primary and secondary education and
socialization did not take place in English. The speech events being captured
include private and public dialogues, private and public group discussions and
casual conversations, and one-to-one interviews. The size aimed for at the
first stage is approximately half a million words, transcribed and annotated in
a number of ways.6
It is hoped that this corpus will make it possible to take stock of how the
speakers providing the data actually communicate through E L F , and to
attempt a characterization of how they use, or rather co-construct, ‘English’ to
do so. Essentially, the research questions Kennedy (1998) regards as central
to corpus-based descriptive studies of E N L could also be addressed through
the E L F corpus:
What are the linguistic units, patterns, systems or processes in the language,
genre or text and how often, when, where, why and with whom are they used?
(Kennedy 1998: 276)
As a first research focus, it seems desirable to investigate what, notwithstand-
ing all the diversity, emerge as common features of E L F use, irrespective of
speakers’ first languages and levels of proficiency. Questions investigated
will include the following: What are the most relied-upon and successfully
employed grammatical constructions and lexical choices? Are there aspects
which contribute especially to smooth communication? What are the factors
which tend to lead to problems, misunderstandings or even communication
breakdown? Is the degree of approximation to a variety of L1 English always
proportional to communicative success? Or are there commonly used con-
structions, lexical items and sound patterns which are ungrammatical in
Standard L1 English but generally unproblematic in E L F communication? If
so, can hypotheses be set up and tested concerning simplifications of L1
English which could constitute systematic features of E L F ? The objective
here, then, would be to establish something like an index of communicative

6
The texts are being transcribed orthographically and marked for speaker turns,
pauses and overlaps, and provided with contextual notes and notes about paralinguistic
features such as laughter. A fairly basic system for marking prosody is being worked
out and piloted. It is currently not planned to provide a phonetic transcription of these
texts, but it is hoped that sound files can be made available eventually.
English as a Lingua Franca and the Politics of Property 149

redundancy, in the sense that many of the niceties of social behaviour asso-
ciated with native-speaker models and identities might not be operable and
certain native-speaker norms might be seen to be in suspense. Indeed, it may
well be that mutual accommodation is found to be of greater importance for
communicative effectiveness than approximation to a norm of ‘correctness’
or idiomaticity in E N L terms.7
Of course, it is early days yet and no reliable findings based on quantitative
investigations can be reported at this stage. But even a quick analysis of a few
dialogues suggests some hypotheses. For instance, there seems to be a ten-
dency for particularly idiomatic speech by one participant – a kind of ‘uni-
lateral idiomaticity’ characterized by metaphorical language use, idioms,
phrasal verbs and fixed E N L expressions such as this drink is on the house or
can we give you a hand – to cause misunderstandings. On the other hand, typ-
ical learners’ ‘errors’ which most English teachers would consider in urgent
need of correction and remediation, and which are consequently allotted a
great deal of time and effort in E F L lessons, appear to be generally unprob-
lematic and no obstacle to communicative success. Such ‘errors’ include
‘dropping’ the third-person present-tense –s, ‘confusing’ the relative pronouns
who and which, and ‘omitting’ definite and indefinite articles where they are
obligatory in native speakers’ language use.
In order to make the above observations more concrete, here is an example
from Jenkins’ data, a dialogue between L1 speakers of German and French
respectively, conducted with the purpose of choosing one picture out of
several for a charity campaign. We will use this example to demonstrate char-
acteristic phonological, lexico-grammatical and pragmatic features of this
type of E L F interaction:

Reto (L1 German) & Stephanie (L1 French)

1 R: I think on the front xx on the front page should be a picture

who-which only makes p–
2 people to er spend money, to the charity
3 S: yes
4 R: and I think er yeah maybe
5 S: I think a picture with child
6 R: Yeah, child are always good to

7
Cf Widdowson (1997). Accommodation (in the sense of Giles & Coupland 1991)
seems to play a crucial role in such E L F research as is available to date (see below):
accommodation was found to be an important factor in Jenkins’ (2000) study, and lack
of it may have contributed to the impression of “mutual dis-attention” among E L F
speakers which House (1999: 82) gathered in the analysis of her data.
150 B ARBARA S EIDLHOFER AND J ENNIFER J ENKINS

7 S: Yes
8 R: to trap people spend money
9 S: Yes. I think, erm, let me see, erm ...
10 R: I don’t know ... but maybe we should er choose a picture who gives
the impression that this
11 child needs needs the money or
12 S: So I think, then that’s my, this one, no
13 R: Yeah it’s quite happy
14 S: Yeah, she’s happy er ... Maybe this one
15 R: Yeah.
16 S: He look very sad ... and he has to carry heavier vase
17 R: Mm, that’s right.
18 S: Too heavy for him, or ...
19 R: Hm hm
20 S: But also this one, even if he’s smiling
21 R: Yeah, that’s right ... And maybe this one can show that the that
the chari–er charity can
22 really help
23 S: Uh huh
24 R: and that the charity can–er make a smile on a on a chil –on on a
child’s face
25 S: Yes
26 R: Yeah I think this one would be
27 S: A good one
28 R: It would be good
… = long pause
– = self-correction
-R = continuation
xx = unintelligible

To start on a general pragmatic level, it is obvious that the interactants are

satisfied with their discussion. They agree on their criteria and negotiate a
consensus, so in that sense we can regard this exchange as successful commu-
nication. The conversation also has a constructive, collaborative feel to it.
There is ample evidence of the interactants acting as responsive recipients as
well as initiators, with abundant yes’s and yeah’s functioning as genuine
expressions of agreement. Backchannelling is provided in the form of Hm hm
and Uh huh, and there is even one instance of one speaker completing an
utterance for her interlocutor (lines 26–27).
This communicative success comes about despite the fact that there is
hardly a turn which is ‘correct’ or idiomatic by E N L standards. We find a
large number of idiosyncrasies which traditionally would be called ‘devia-
tions’ from E N L : the unintentionally comical phrase a picture with child in
English as a Lingua Franca and the Politics of Property 151

line 5 (though of course only comical for someone familiar with the ENL
meaning of with child), expressions such as makes people to spend money
(line 2), to trap people spend money (line 8) and make a smile on a child’s
face (line 24) and what would traditionally be called ‘serious grammatical
mistakes’, such as missing third-person -s in He look very sad (line 16),
‘wrong’ relative pronoun in a picture who gives the impression (line 10),
‘missing’ indefinite article and unwarranted comparative in he has to carry
heavier vase (line 16) as well as ‘wrong’ preposition (or ‘wrong’ verb) in to
spend money to the charity (line 2).
As for Reto’s and Stephanie’s pronunciation, a number of non-core phono-
logical ‘errors’ occur but, like the lexico-grammatical features discussed
above, do not impede intelligibility for the listener. The three main areas of
divergence from N S phonological norms or, to put it another way, the emer-
gence of N N S phonological norms, are the consonants /θ/ and /ð/, vowel
quality, and weak forms. Specific instances are represented here:
the consonants /θ/ and /ð/: line 12: sink for think, den for then, dat’s for that’s,
dis for this
vowel quality substitutions: line 1 front pronounced [frnt]; line 21 charity
pronounced [t ∫ er I ti],
weak forms with full vowel quality: line 6 are pronounced [:] line 16 to pro-
nounced [tu:], line 18 for pronounced [f:].
These items are typical of those occurring time and again in the different
types of phonological data collected by Jenkins and they did not affect intelli-
gibility for a N N S listener regardless of the L1s of the interlocutors.
Of course this interaction relies heavily on a shared context, which limits
the potential for misunderstanding and conflict, and in many situations in
which E L F is used such favourable conditions will not apply. But this caveat
does not invalidate the observation that, for the purpose at hand, the kind of
English that is employed works and it serves the participants quite adequately
for doing the job they have to do. The investigations we have carried out so
far have confirmed that a great deal of E L F communication is conducted at
comparable levels of proficiency, and that quite often it is features which are
regarded as ‘the most typically English’, such as third-person -s, tags, phrasal
verbs and idioms, as well as the sounds /θ/ and /ð/ and weak forms, which
turn out to be non-essential for mutual intelligibility.
Given the extent of such occurrences in lingua franca contexts, we might
well ask whether we should not stop regarding them as ‘errors’, but this is a
pedagogical question which cannot be dealt with by reference to linguistic
observations alone, however fascinating they may be.
152 B ARBARA S EIDLHOFER AND J ENNIFER J ENKINS

The point we hope to have made in the present essay is that it is high time
that the legitimacy which has already been accorded to Outer Circle Englishes
should be extended to the Expanding Circle. At a time when English is the de
facto global lingua franca, it is anachronistic to deny that widespread develop-
ments in these contexts of use also constitute legitimate change which needs
to be described and taken into pedagogic account.

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[
T HE C ARIBBEAN AND THE A FRICAN DIASPORA
IN N ORTH A MERICA AND B RITAIN
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Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia
in the ‘Anglophone’ Caribbean

Hubert Devonish
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

ABSTRACT
The linguist in the role of language rights advocate can rarely function
simply as a technician or as a detached and objective expert. Yet, when
invited to participate in discussions about language-related policy by institu-
tions of the state, linguists are being brought in for precisely what is per-
ceived as detached technical expertise. At least, that is usually the official
stated position of those appealing to the linguist’s help. This essay represents
an attempt at retrospective reflection on the two pieces of language advocacy
involving Caribbean English-lexicon creole languages that I have been
involved in. It tries to cover the theoretical perspective that informed the
interventions, the political and social issues at stake and the way in which
the desire for a particular outcome fashioned the nature of these inter-
ventions.

1. The language situation in the ‘anglophone’ Caribbean

1.1 Defining conquest diglossia
D I G L O S S I A is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition to
the primary dialects of the language, […] there is a very divergent, highly
codified […] superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of
written literature, […], which is learned largely by formal education and is
used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any
sector of the community for ordinary conversation. (Ferguson 1959: 336)
158 H UBERT D EVONISH

A
N ESSENTIAL FEATURE of the definition of diglossia offered by
Ferguson is that the two varieties involved are similar enough to
each other that members of the speech community could consider
them forms of the same language.
Ferguson grouped a series of historically rather different types of situation
under the same umbrella term. Of the four defining situations two: ie, Greek
and Arabic, involve classical/ literary varieties of an ‘internal’ language as the
High or H language variety. The other two are German-speaking Switzerland
and Haiti, which are cases where the H language variety is an ‘external’
language, an import from another country. The Swiss German and Haitian
cases are, however, represent two quite distinct sub-types among those di-
glossic situations in which the H is an ‘external’ language. In the former case,
a historically pragmatic decision was taken by the German-speaking Swiss
themselves to employ an external norm, that used in Germany, as the lan-
guage of writing and formal interaction (Walter Haas, personal commu-
nication. By contrast, French in Haiti owes its status and functions to colonial
imposition, a history that French shares with other European languages used
in the Caribbean. Haiti as a defining situation for diglossia is representative of
one of the possible sub-types of the diglossia involving an ‘external’ H. It is
one which I here term ‘conquest diglossia’. This is the form of diglossia that
has typically operated in the Caribbean.
The outcome of the difference in history between a Swiss German type of
diglossia and Caribbean conquest diglossia is seen in the politics of language
as it is played out in the Commonwealth Caribbean and specifically Jamaica.
The ‘conquest’ element of Caribbean diglossia manifests itself in the ongoing
language debate and language conflict across the Caribbean and specifically
within the Jamaica.
In Caribbean countries in which English is the official language, there are
diglossic-type relations between the main language varieties in use. In most of
the countries concerned, what exists may be viewed as straightforwardly di-
glossic. It involves the interaction between English, as the official and public
formal language, and English-lexicon creoles, as languages of private and
informal interaction. In some countries, however, notably St. Lucia and
Dominica, where a French-lexicon creole language is in general use alongside
English as the official language, the situation may not be strictly diglossic in
Ferguson’s terms. These situations would fall under the umbrella of what
Ferguson (1959: 325) refers to as “the analogous situation where two distinct
(related or unrelated) languages are used side by side throughout a speech
community, each with a clearly defined role.”
Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia 159

1.2 Language varieties and their use

Let us consider those countries in which the language varieties used in popu-
lar domains share in large measure a vocabulary with English. Here, we find
an absence of clear lines of demarcation between language varieties. Thus,
there is no clear distinction between those varieties which may be considered
English, on the one hand, and those which might be considered creole on the
other. There is, rather, a gradual shading off from the most English varieties
towards those which are most deviant from English. A considerable amount
of research has taken place into characterizing what has come to be called the
(post-)creole continuum (DeCamp 1971, Bickerton 1975, Rickford 1987).
Against this background, the argument presented by Devonish (1998) is
that the interaction between English and creole is rule-governed. A language
variety can only be proposed to exist at the level of the clause. Beyond the
clause, speakers are free to shift language varieties as their linguistic reper-
toires allow and as social factors require. Within the clause, only a very re-
stricted number of the theoretically possible combinations of creole and
English features are possible. The intermediate varieties, as a consequence,
are restricted in number and very stable. This contrasts with the observations
of Ferguson (1959: 332) that, in classic diglossic situations, the intermediate
varieties are relatively unstable.
Speakers have repertoires that span varying ranges on the continuum.
However, for any speaker, the more formal social situations would be likely
to produce the use of varieties more approximating English, and for informal
situations, those more approximating creole. What I suggest is that this is
simply a manifestation of the kind of linguistic convergence which Ferguson
(1959: 332) notes to occur in diglossic situations. This convergence produces
varieties intermediate between H and L, the H here being English and the L
being creole.

1.3 Problems of postcolonial official language ideology:

the invisible language
English came to the Caribbean as a language of conquest. The conquerors
who brought it came from the British Isles, setting up permanent colonies in
the Caribbean, from the third decade of the seventeenth century onwards. Up
until the latter half of the twentieth century, almost all of the countries that
currently have English as their official language were possessions of English-
speaking colonial powers, in the main Britain. English has had a relatively
long presence in the Caribbean, stretching back some four hundred years. It
has nevertheless survived in a form that is mutually intelligible with British
and North American varieties of English.
160 H UBERT D EVONISH

Until the period of independence beginning in the 1960s, the unquestioned

target for English language usage in the Caribbean were models associated
with Standard British English. Standard Caribbean English, the language of
the new political class about to inherit political power was historically a trap-
ped language variety. This situation has been described as follows:
As home-made, the Caribbean linguistic product has always been shame-
faced, inhibited both by the dour authority of colonial administrators and their
written examinations on the one hand, and by the persistence of the stig-
matised Creole languages of the labouring populace on the other. (Allsopp
1996: xvii)
The struggle to free it began in earnest during the period in which many of the
countries concerned achieved political independence. Between 1962 and
1983, twelve of the political entities in the Commonwealth Caribbean gained
political independence from Britain. In every case, they retained English as
the sole official language. Yet, Allsopp describes them as “twelve indepen-
dent nations […] each with a linguistic entitlement to a national standard lan-
guage […]” (Allsopp 1996: xix). To even suggest that the mass-based
vernacular creole languages were rejected as possible contenders for the role
of national and official language would be a gross overstatement of the facts.
These languages remained invisible in the discourse on the question of
national standard language. They were not even deemed to exist as languages.
In these circumstances, using Caribbean varieties of English to express the
newly developing national identities was the only option thought to be
available.
The Caribbean Lexicography Project (C L P ) was set up in response to the
perceived need for Caribbean varieties of English, as distinct from English-
lexicon creole, to be used in this role. The C L P was established in 1971 in the
aftermath of the first four ‘anglophone’ countries gaining their political
independence. This was a project based at and to a significant extent financed
by the University of the West Indies, an institution owned and funded by all
the territories of the Commonwealth Caribbean with the exception of Guyana.
In addition to university support, the project received direct financial support
from the governments of Guyana, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. This
was as close as one could get to an official transnational enterprise for codi-
fying an officially recognized variety of Caribbean English so that it could
function in the role of official language in the respective countries.
The major objective of the project was to produce the Dictionary of Carib-
bean English Usage (D C E U ) (Allsopp 1996) to function as a reference point
for Standard Caribbean English.
Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia 161

the emergence of the obligatory self-reliance and nationhood of many Eng-

lish-speaking territories made its organized documentation a necessity.
(Allsopp 1996: xvii)
The dictionary had as its main aim to describe Standard Caribbean English
and make prescriptions for it. The expectation was that this Standard Carib-
bean variety of English would function as national language in each of the
twelve independent states of the Commonwealth Caribbean. The dictionary,
however, struggled with a major underlying contradiction. This involved the
features that made Standard Caribbean English distinctive from metropolitan
varieties of Internationally Acceptable English (I A E ). The distinguishing fea-
tures were mostly manifestations of linguistic influences from the creole
languages widely spoken in these countries. The problem was one of how to
codify Standard Caribbean English. This codification had to include a limited
number of creole features for purposes of local ‘colour’ and identification,
while retaining its overall coherence as a form of English that was ‘inter-
nationally acceptable’.
The dictionary approached this problem by claiming to cover all of what it
refers to as ‘Caribbean English’. It establishes a hierarchy of ‘Formalness’
“using four descending levels – Formal, Informal, Anti-formal, Erroneous”
(Allsopp 1996: lvi, italics in original). This was used as a basis for both
describing forms and prescribing how they should be used. The Formal was
defined as that which was “accepted as educated: belonging or assignable to
I A E ; also any regionalism which is not replaceable by any other designation”
(Allsopp 1996: lvi). In the case of the Informal, this was defined as “accepted
as familiar; chosen as part of usually well-structured, casual, relaxed speech,
but sometimes characterized by morphological and syntactic reductions of
English structure and other remainder features of decreolization” (Allsopp
1996: lvi). As for the Anti-Formal, this was “deliberately rejecting Formal-
ness; consciously familiar and intimate, part of a wide range from close and
friendly through jocular to coarse and vulgar; any Creolized or creole form or
structure surviving or conveniently borrowed to suit context or situation”
(Allsopp 1996: lvii). Erroneous was that which was “not permissible as I A E
(Internationally Acceptable English), although evidently considered to be so
by the user” (Allsopp 1996: lvii).
Speech varieties of Caribbean English were divided into three main cate-
gories, the Formal, the Informal and the Anti-formal. The actual identification
of the forms associated with each variety was done by assessing their appro-
priateness in situations involving different levels of intimacy among inter-
locutors. Language forms associated with the Formal were unmarked in the
dictionary. Such forms can be presumed to have been described as part of
Standard Caribbean English and to have been prescribed for it. The linguistic
162 H UBERT D EVONISH

forms associated with the remaining two levels of Formalness were marked as
such in the dictionary and reflect, according to Allsopp’s definition, increas-
ing degrees of creole influence. This suggested the incorporating of increasing
numbers of creole features into what was otherwise Standard Caribbean Eng-
lish allowed the latter to acquire some level of informality. This would sup-
port the conclusion that English features performed H functions in this
diglossic situation and creole features L functions.
The aim of the D C E U was to codify an H variety, Standard Caribbean
English or, in Allsopp’s terms, ‘Caribbean Standard English’, out of that
range of varieties closest to Internationally Acceptable English. But what of
those other language forms variously described in the D C E U as ‘basilectal’
creole, creolized language or just plain creole and treated as outside the pale
of Caribbean English? The D C E U handled these language varieties from a
perspective rooted in Standard Caribbean English. These varieties were
viewed as creole ‘remainder features’ or creole ‘borrowings’ and ‘survivals’.
According to the dictionary, these, when employed in Caribbean English, pro-
duced the less Formal language varieties, with their heaviest presence at the
anti-Formal level. Signalling reduced formality, while on the periphery of the
functions of Standard Caribbean English, is at the core of the functions of
creole.
The above explains why the items regarded as Formal in the dictionary are
left unmarked whilst those regarded as Informal and Anti-formal are marked.
The last two are marked to indicate their inappropriateness for use in situa-
tions requiring the Formal variety. This is consistent with the position of the
editor, Allsopp, that the dictionary is aimed at describing and prescribing for
what he refers to as ‘Caribbean Standard English’: ie, the H language in the
diglossia. The diglossic official ideological framework within which Allsopp
is working is clearly shown when he states, “in omitting the mass of Carib-
bean basilectal vocabulary and idiom in favour of the mesolectal and acro-
lectal, and using a hierarchy of formalness in status-labelling the entries
throughout, the work is being prescriptive. This is in keeping with expressed
needs, and with the mandate agreed and supported by successive regional
resolutions” (Allsopp 1996: xxvi).
This diglossic ideology is further expressed by the Allsopp (1996: vi)
definition of Standard Caribbean English /‘Caribbean Standard English’ as
“the literate English of educated nationals of Caribbean territories and their
spoken English such as is considered natural in formal social contexts.” By
defining it as a written language: ie, ‘literate English’, and one which is
spoken naturally “in formal social contexts,” Allsopp conveys to us the reality
that this language variety has very restricted functions. The other domains,
varying only in relation to their degrees of Formalness, belong to an unnamed
Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia 163

language variety or set of language varieties which he describes elsewhere in

his work as consisting of creole ‘remainder features’, creole ‘borrowings’ or
creole ‘survivals’ (Allsopp 1996: vi-vii). The notion of English-lexicon creole
as a complete and coherent linguistic system is absent from this represen-
tation. We have here the essence of the language ideology prevalent in
diglossic situations in which, as Ferguson (1959: 330) states, “H alone is
regarded as real and L is reported ‘not to exist’.”
English-lexicon creole languages in the Caribbean are present in public
consciousness hidden amongst ‘dialects’ of English. Thus, Louise Bennett,
noted as a pioneer ‘dialect’ poet in Jamaican, writes a poem defending Jamai-
can ‘dialect’, in which she associates Jamaican creole with British regional/
non-standard dialects such as Scots, Yorkshire and Cockney. She asks the
opponents of Jamaican creole, who have vowed to destroy it, whether
Yuh gwine kill all English dialect
Or jus Jamaica one?’
[Are you going to kill all the English dialects
Or just Jamaica’s?] (Bennett 1966: 218)
The dominant language ideology views standard varieties of English, includ-
ing Standard Caribbean English, as clear and distinct entities. This is assisted
by the status and prestige of Internationally Acceptable English along with its
idealizing agents such as dictionaries and grammar books. The prevailing
language ideology simultaneously does two things. It emphasizes the internal
coherence of those language forms in use in the society that are regarded as
closest to Internationally Acceptable English. At the same time, it minimizes
any such coherence in those forms of speech regarded as deviant from Inter-
nationally Acceptable English. This perception shows itself even in the
academic work on these language situations. Thus, DeCamp (1971: 35) criti-
cizes the work of Beryl Bailey (1966) on grounds that it “is an abstract ideal
type, a composite of all non-standard features, a combination which is
actually spoken by few if any Jamaicans.” In the approach of DeCamp
(1971), Jamaican creole has ceased to exist, watered down to increasing
degrees along the ‘post-creole continuum’ by influence from Standard Jamai-
can English. Despite her difference in approach, this is a characterization with
which Bailey (1971: 342) seems to be in agreement when she states that the
“speakers of unadulterated JC [Jamaican creole] are rare indeed.”
The interesting point, however, is that none of these positions takes into
account the fact that Internationally Acceptable English or its local approxi-
mations, Standard Caribbean English or Standard Jamaican English, is also an
abstraction, and is equally a composite, this time of all ‘standard’ features.
Beryl Bailey’s concept of a composite of all non-standard features for an
164 H UBERT D EVONISH

abstract ideal of Jamaican creole is only possible against the background of a

“composite of all standard features”, the abstract ideal of Standard Jamaican
English. Speakers of unadulterated Standard Caribbean English or any of its
localized variants such as Jamaican Standard English are as rare as are
speakers of ‘unadulterated creole’. The ability to use varieties approximating
Standard Caribbean English is, in the main, developed through exposure to
the formal education system. However, even a highly educated speaker
cannot be expected to use Standard Caribbean /Jamaican English to the total
exclusion of creole.
Given the description of the language situation provided in the D C E U , it is
clear that no speaker can be expected to use Standard Caribbean English
consistently in all situations. There are, after all, a series of domains, notably
the Informal and the Anti-formal, in which other language varieties are the
norm. With reference to the Jamaican situation, in the face of two abstrac-
tions, Standard Jamaican English and ‘basilectal’ Jamaican creole, the first is
accepted by Bailey, DeCamp and the society at large as real. The deliberate
normalization efforts of Allsopp’s D C E U aim at making the reality of this
abstraction even more ‘real’. By contrast, the no more abstract language
variety, ‘basilectal’ Jamaican creole, is perceived, by virtue of being an ab-
straction, as unreal.
The benign ignoring of creole makes perfect sense for the educated sectors
of the population. They, by contrast with most of the rest of the society, have
high levels of competence in English, the language used for formal discourse.
Recognizing the abstraction of English increases the value of the language
which they, but not others, control. They also know and are able to use and
understand English-lexicon creole in informal discourse. This, however, is a
language which they share with all other sectors of the society. Recognizing
the abstraction of creole would give no advantage to the educated sectors of
the population. The linguistic status quo and the ideology that accompanies it
give educated bilinguals in these societies the best of all possible linguistic
worlds.

2. Language rights advocacy

2.1 The external consequences of the invisible L
The State Education Department of the State of New York in the U S A has a
directory of languages aimed at “school districts that provide services to
pupils whose native language is other than English. It is intended to assist
districts in identifying the languages spoken by limited English proficient
students in New York State” (University of the State of New York 1997: iii).
The document goes on (fn., iii) to state, with reference to the languages it
Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia 165

covers, that “only those whose speakers number over 250,000 and /or those
that were reported by New York State school districts have been included in
this directory." There are roughly twenty Caribbean English-lexicon creoles
spoken in Caribbean countries where English is the official language, which
could have qualified for mention in the directory on grounds that they are
used by populations in New York State. Of these, there are three which could
have been included on the grounds that they are spoken by more than 250,000
people. As it turns out, only one of these, Jamaican creole, the variety with by
far the largest number of speakers, actually makes it into the directory. Given
language attitudes which exist within the Jamaican creole-speaking commu-
nity, it is likely that Jamaican creole has been included not because persons
living in the state declared it to be their native language but because the
number of its speakers exceeds the minimum at least ten times over.
For every pupil entering its school system for the first time, the State of
New York is required by the Regulations of the New York State Commis-
sioner of Education to arrange diagnostic screening. The purpose of this
screening is to identify pupils who are possibly gifted, who have a possible
handicapping condition and /or who possibly are Limited English Proficient
(Regulations 1999: 117.1). One element of this screening is to make “a deter-
mination that the pupil is of foreign birth or ancestry and comes from a home
where a language other than English is spoken as determined by the results of
a home language questionnaire and an informal interview in English”
(117.3.c.4). The home language questionnaire is administered to the parent or
guardian of the pupil. It takes the form of seven questions which ask, among
other things, about the language(s) spoken in the pupil’s home, the lan-
guage(s) understood by the pupil, and the languages spoken, read and written
by the pupil, and how well the pupil understands, speaks, reads and writes
English (Guidelines 1997: 57).
We need to think back to what we already know about the invisibility of
creole in Caribbean countries in which English as the official language co-
exists with an English-lexicon creole. The only language likely to be declared
as known and used by pupils who are native English-lexicon creole speakers
coming from such countries is the official language, English. The conclusion
an outsider is likely to arrive at based on the answers received, both from the
questionnaire and the informal interview in English, therefore, is that the pupil
is monolingual in English.
The other step in the screening process, “a determination of receptive and
expressive language development, motor development, articulation skills and
cognitive development” (Regulations 1999: 117.3.c.3) would then be taken.
There is provision in the Regulations (117.3.2) for this screening to take place
“in the pupil’s native language if the language of the home is other than
166 H UBERT D EVONISH

English.” The Regulations (152.a.2) require an English language assessment

instrument approved by the New York State Commissioner of Education to
be administered to all pupils new to the school system. Under this same regu-
lation, “pupils with limited English proficiency shall mean pupils who by
reason of foreign birth or ancestry, speak a language other than English, and
[…] score at or below the 40th percentile, or its equivalent as determined by
the commission, on an English language assessment instrument approved by
the commissioner.” Such pupils would become entitled to either (a) a bi-
lingual education programme, inclusive of content subjects taught in both
English and the native language, if there are 20 or more Limited English
Proficient pupils of the same grade level assigned to a building, all of whom
have the same native language or, otherwise (b) a Free-Standing English as a
Second Language Programme (Regulations 1999: 154.2.g.3, 154.4.c).
However, a pupil from English-lexicon creole-speaking countries under
consideration who scores at or below the 40th percentile on such a test would
be ineligible for such a programme. Such pupils would fail to satisfy the
“speak a language other than English” provision. They, in the absence of
establishing that they “speak a language other than English” cannot be treated
as Limited English Proficient. The only category available to screeners in
such a case would be that of a “pupil who may have a handicapping con-
dition” (1999: 117.3.3). Pupils who are thought to fall into this category have
to be referred to the committee on special education. This seems to be the path
by which a disproportionate number of children of Caribbean origin end up in
special education in the New York State school system. Karl Folkes (2000: 3-
4) comments on this state of affairs when he indicates that in the New York
State school system, “it is unfortunate that far too many students from Com-
monwealth Caribbean creole countries are referred to special education
classes, speech, or remedial reading courses.”
Elaborate regulatory, financial and resource provisions exist within the
New York State education system for pupils identified as Limited English
Proficient. Some of these provisions are covered in Part 154 of the Regula-
tions (1999), which is entitled “Apportionment and services for pupils with
limited English proficiency.” To be classified as such, a pupil has to be identi-
fied to “speak a language other than English.” Any appreciation of the
language situation from which they come would indicate that pupils with low
English language scores from the English-lexicon creole-speaking Caribbean
are prime candidates for this provision. Unfortunately, the internal socio-
linguistic set-up of the communities from which these pupils come does not
predispose them or their caregivers to make the relevant home language
declaration which would make them eligible for benefits under Part 154 of the
Regulations (1999).
Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia 167

There are on average 20,000 children a year entering the New York State
school system from countries of the English-lexicon creole-speaking Carib-
bean with English as the official language. The problem, therefore, affects a
significant number of children. In response to agitation from activists within
sections of the Caribbean community, a hearing by the Board of Regents was
arranged to consider this matter. The meeting was formally set up in this letter
by James A. Kadamus, Deputy Commissioner:
At the September Regents meeting, you asked that we provide presenters who
are experts on the education of students from Caribbean countries where
English is the official language in order to provide information on this group
of students. The following have agreed to make presentations on this topic.
(Kadamus 2000: 1)
The letter went on to identify one of the presenters, Hubert Devonish, as a
“recognised expert in the languages of the Caribbean.” It identified the other
presenter as Karl Folkes, a research analyst in the Division of High Schools
and Office of Bilingual Education of the New York City Public Schools.
Folkes also happened to be a linguist and to be of Jamaican origin.
The two ‘experts’ were being invited to make a presentation to the Elemen-
tary, Middle, Secondary and Continuing Education Committee of the Board
on the issue of “students from Caribbean countries where English is the offi-
cial language in order to provide information on this group of students.” The
formulation “Caribbean countries where English is the official language” was
carefully crafted to get around the problem of a term such as ‘English-speak-
ing Caribbean’, which would prejudge the very issue which the ‘experts’ were
being invited to address. Nevertheless, the identity of English as a language
was not questioned. It was mentioned by name, its existence unquestioned by
quotation marks or any other questioning device. Interestingly enough, how-
ever, the other language varieties: ie, English-lexicon creole languages, whose
widespread use made the normal term ‘English-speaking Caribbean’ inap-
propriate, remained unmentioned in this formulation.
Of the five questions these experts were required to answer, one was
central to the entire exercise. It asked:
Are the ‘English Creole languages’ spoken in the Caribbean countries where
English is the official language considered languages other than English?
From a linguistic perspective, what are the criteria used to make such a deter-
mination? (Kadamus 2000: 2)
With reference to the role of English in these societies, a wording was arrived
at which did not to prejudice the question. However, in the case of ‘English
creole languages’, the very use of quotation marks questioned the existence of
these languages. Viewed another way, however, the use of the quotation
168 H UBERT D EVONISH

marks could be seen as the means by which language varieties hitherto

invisible in the Caribbean and in New York could be brought into the dis-
course of the New York State Education Department. The very presence of
the ‘experts’ was to allow for the presentation of information that might
justify dropping the quotation marks for these L language varieties. These
language varieties could then become legitimate objects of official policy.
What was at stake was whether members of this large group of children
within the New York State school system were eligible to be covered under
Part 154 of the Regulations (1999). These regulations opened access to Eng-
lish as a Second Language programmes and, where numbers justified this, to
bilingual education in the home language and English for up to three years
from entry into the New York school system.

2.2 The internal consequences of the invisible L

The invisibility of the L outside the society is, of course, a mere reflection of
the invisibility of L internal to the society. However, the invisibility of Eng-
lish-lexicon Caribbean creoles in Caribbean countries where English is the
sole official language, is an issue which is becoming the subject of some
official discussion. Thus, in Jamaica, during 2001, a Joint Select Committee
of the Jamaican House of Parliament discussed a Draft Charter of Rights for
the Jamaican constitution. This charter is intended to cover the activities of all
agencies of the state and designated public entities. At one meeting of the
committee, Senator Trevor Munroe raised the issue of the Charter guarantee-
ing freedom from discrimination on grounds of language:
I would wish to propose to you that if it does not substantially abuse the time-
table of our Joint Select Committee that we may wish to hear from the
Specialist at the University on this issue, ‘A’ to the extent that research may
have been done on the examples you just asked me for where citizens are in
effect discriminated against because of their monolingual capacity in Jamaican
Creole and their disconnection from English, and ‘B’ whether if it were so,
would not (this) justify a case for inserting language as one area in which we
would wish the constitution to protect persons from discrimination. (Draft
Minutes, Joint Select Committee of the Houses of Parliament, on Charter of
Rights: 15.3.01, 4:05-4:25)
The senator went on, later in the discussion, to make the following statement
with regard to the invisibility of Jamaican as a language:
I am suggesting that were we to recognize the reality of the status of Jamaican
Creole it may well contribute to reducing the extent to which so many of our
people feel that they lack self-worth, that they [are] not real people because
somehow they cannot communicate in the language which is solely recog-
nize[d] as the official means of discourse. (Draft Minutes, Select Committee
Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia 169

of the Houses of Parliament, Jamaica, on Charter of Rights: 15.3.01, 4:25-

4:45)
This has to be understood in a context where the courts have the ultimate re-
sponsibility for enforcing constitutional provisions. Obviously, therefore, for
speakers of Jamaican creole to have constitutional protection from discri-
mination on grounds of language, Jamaican creole would have to be recog-
nized by the courts as a language distinct from the official language, English.
It was this concern which prompted the following intervention from Mrs
Miller, one of the legal advisors to the Select Committee.
It is being suggested that the University experts should be the ones. Because
there has been a lot of talks on this question of language and whether patio
[patois] is a language and some say yes and some say no. (Draft Minutes,
Select Committee of the Houses of Parliament, Jamaica, on Charter of Rights:
15.3.01, 4.05-4.25)
The question posed by Mrs Miller was merely a more loosely worded version
of the question asked in the Kadamus letter to the Board of Regents of the
Education Department, New York State. The Miller quotation did not speci-
fically ask whether ‘patois’, Jamaican or Jamaican creole, was a language
other than English. This, however, was implied. From her perspective, free-
dom from discrimination by organs of the state on grounds of language could
not apply to speakers of a form of English in a society where English was the
sole official language. The justification for the insertion of this provision was
the need to protect the rights of monolingual speakers of Jamaican creole. The
issue of whether it was indeed a language distinct from English became a
relevant one. As in the case of the New York State Education Department, a
Caribbean English-lexicon creole language variety could only become visible
to official discourse if its identity as a language was certified. The certifica-
tion of this identity could lead to a series of rights coming to speakers, rights
which they would not otherwise have access to.
The constitution conferred on independent Jamaica by the outgoing British
colonial power does not grant the individual the right to freedom from discri-
mination on grounds of language. Thirty-nine years after independence, the
provisions of this inherited constitution are being reviewed. The Draft Charter
of Rights to amend the Jamaican constitution, being considered in 2001 by a
Joint Select Committee of the Jamaican Parliament, would create a series of
individual rights which would be enforceable through the courts. Can Parlia-
ment be persuaded, in a diglossic situation such as that of Jamaica, to include
the right to freedom from discrimination on grounds of language, with the
intent to grant language rights to speakers of an English-lexicon creole?
170 H UBERT D EVONISH

This matter is being dealt with against the background of official language
ideology outlined previously and the legal and constitutional traditions within
which countries of the Commonwealth Caribbean have operated. As is nor-
mal in countries of Anglo-Saxon legal traditions, the issue of the role of Eng-
lish as the official language is never stated in law except when there is a clear
challenge from another language. In England, as Heath and Mandabach
(1983: 92) point out, apart from a statute that requires Crown writs and inci-
dental papers to be in English and another requiring sailors on British ships to
have knowledge of English, no statute exists granting official status to Eng-
lish. This contrasts with the situation in Wales, where there has been a great
deal of legislation on the role of English versus that of Welsh in official
domains.
This tradition has extended to the Commonwealth Caribbean. In countries
such as Jamaica, where English coexists with an English-lexicon creole, a
benign inclusiveness allows language differences to be treated as equivalent
to dialect differences in England. English is not perceived to have a competi-
tor in these situations. No statement in the constitution, therefore, is made or
thought necessary on the issue of official language. That which is obvious: ie,
that English is the official language, is left unstated.
This contrasts with the situation in two Commonwealth Caribbean coun-
tries, St. Lucia and Dominica. In Ferguson’s terms, these two countries would
constitute language situations analogous to diglossia. In St. Lucia and Domi-
nica, in addition to English, which is used for official purposes, French-
lexicon creole languages are widely spoken. In the constitutions of these two
countries, explicit statements about the official status of English are made. For
example, there is a requirement that, for someone to be eligible to be elected
to the House of Representatives, they must be “able to speak and […] to read
the English Language with a degree of proficiency sufficient to enable him to
take an active part in the proceedings of the house” (St Lucian Constitution
Order, 1978, ch. III; Commonwealth of Dominica Constitution Order, 1978,
ch. III). The very visibility of the other language, French-lexicon creole,
marks it off for overt discrimination by way of a constitutional statement
about the role of English. No such statement appears in constitutions of coun-
tries such as Jamaica where the relationship between languages corresponds
more closely to orthodox diglossia. The L variety in the latter set of situations
is doubly disadvantaged since its existence is not even recognized to a point
where it can become the object of constitutional discrimination.
It is against this background that a presentation was made to the Joint
Select Committee of the Houses of Parliament of Jamaica on the issue of lan-
guage rights in the Jamaican constitution. The broad outline of the case made
is as follows. The state and other public entities serve their clientele largely
Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia 171

through use of language. In Jamaica, public health services, public infor-

mation, government administrative services, etc. are provided almost exclu-
sively in English, the sole official language. This means that large numbers of
persons with limited English language competence find themselves at a
severe disadvantage. Their ability to access the services is limited by their
lack of competence in the language in which the information is provided. This
is in spite of the fact that the language they do use, Jamaican creole, is not a
minority language but one in general and popular use across the society. It is
also the native language of the vast majority of the population of the country.
Based on the notion that “citizens are in effect discriminated against because
of their monolingual capacity in Jamaican creole” (Draft Minutes: 15.3.01,
4:05–4:25), the proposal is being made to halt this by providing citizens with
constitutional protection from discrimination on grounds of language. This
would have the effect of forcing state agencies and public entities covered by
the constitutional provision to provide services in Jamaican creole as well as
English.
To achieve a favourable outcome, the legislators had to be reassured that
discrimination on grounds of language was relevant to the Jamaican situation.
There was, however, one other crucial point. The legislators had to be brought
around to the view that a society which they had lived in all their lives and
which they had hitherto considered to be a monolingual English-speaking
one, was in fact bilingual.
The standard way in which constitutions guarantee language rights is to
grant these rights not to people but to particular languages. Favoured lan-
guages have official status conferred on them and then equality is guaranteed
for speakers of these languages. Thus, the Canadian Charter of Rights and
Freedoms (1982, Article 16.1) states that “English and French are the official
languages of Canada and have equality of status and equal rights and privi-
leges as to their use in all institutions of the Parliament and government of
Canada.” The South African Constitution follows the same pattern, declaring
particular languages to be official languages and then granting speakers of
these languages equality of status. In spite of these precedents, however, the
parliamentary supporters of the language rights provision in Jamaica feel that,
given the invisibility of L in the society, the jump from denying its existence
to declaring it an official language is too big for the legislature or the country
to make at a single go. The constitutional reform route outlawing discrimina-
tion on grounds of language allows for an intermediate step. This step allows
the previously invisible L language variety to remain unnamed in the legisla-
tion, while yet making it visible in official discourse and concerns. This visi-
bility is produced when practical measures are documented which the state
172 H UBERT D EVONISH

would have to put in to guarantee that it does not discriminate against

speakers of Jamaican creole.

2.3 Loading the dice: selecting the ‘expert’

In academic disciplines, there is seldom unanimity, particularly when it comes
to the implications of academic research for social policy. The ‘experts’,
therefore, have to be selected from a pool containing many experts, each with
their own views on the subject. As an example, my own position as a linguist
is totally opposed to the views of the distinguished Caribbean linguist and
editor of the D C E U , Richard Allsopp, outlined in a previous section.
The Board of Regents of the New York State Board of Education ended up
having chosen for them experts who favoured a particular outcome. This was
probably due to the influence of the Caribbean community activists in New
York who had pressured for the Board to hold the hearing in the first place.
Of the experts selected, one, Karl Folkes, was New York based and known to
have views that favoured recognizing Caribbean English-lexicon creole lan-
guages as languages other than English. The other, myself, based in the Carib-
bean, would have had a reputation for being somewhat of a creole-language
activist. The Board had a wide choice of quite distinguished linguists who had
paid specific attention to language education issues in the Commonwealth
Caribbean. The eventual selection raises the possibility that community acti-
vists pressed for experts whom they considered most likely to deal with the
questions asked in a manner which corresponded to what they perceived to be
in their community’s best interests.
In the case of the Joint Parliamentary Committee, too, the selection of the
expert was not random. I had been in discussion with Senator Prof. Trevor
Munroe for several months on the issue of moving the discussion of the lan-
guage rights issue into the parliament of Jamaica.
The linguist advocate enters both such situations with somewhat of a bur-
den. The kinds of answers expected are clear. The beneficial outcomes if the
‘right’ answers are given are equally clear. Yet, the very value of the linguist
advocate as an expert lies in being able to maintain professional credibility.
This requires a delicate balancing act.

2.4 The linguist advocate’s solution:

switching between ‘expert’ and personal opinion
The two specific documents involving linguistic advocacy which will be dis-
cussed here are (i) “Answers to questions for the New York State Board of
Regents” (Devonish 2000) presented in December 2000, Albany, New York,
and (ii) “Language rights in the Draft Charter of Rights in the Jamaican Con-
stitution: A proposal” (Devonish 2001), presented in May 2001.
Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia 173

The call for the linguist or language expert to proclaim on the language-
hood of Caribbean English-lexicon creole language varieties relative to Eng-
lish is problematic. The persons seeking answers make a commonsense
assumption. They think that the distance between two language varieties and
their relative degree of distinctness would be the basis for a decision on
whether two varieties belong to the same language or to different languages.
The linguist expert, however, knows otherwise. The dialects of Chinese in-
clude varieties that may be as different from each other as English is from
German. By contrast, very similar pairs or groups of language varieties with
relatively high levels of mutual intelligibility, eg, Hindi and Urdu, Spanish
and Portuguese, or the Scandinavian languages, are considered by their
speakers to be separate languages. Of course, the linguist could venture a per-
sonal opinion on whether Jamaican creole is a language distinct from or other
than English. However, the persons asking want a professional and a technical
opinion. For example, the letter which sets up the presentation to the Board of
Regents of the New York State Education Department does not simply seek
the experts’ opinions on whether Caribbean English-lexicon creole varieties
are languages other than English. It goes on to ask: “From a linguistic per-
spective, what are the criteria used to make such a determination?” (Kadamus
2000: 2) The appropriate answer for the linguist functioning as a dispas-
sionate expert is that a language variety is a language, separate and distinct
from any other language, whenever its speakers think it so.
The linguist-expert cannot, based on linguistic criteria, declare that a parti-
cular language variety is a separate language from another. In the New York
State case, my presentation began with the disclaimer presented in the pre-
ceding paragraph, illustrated with references to the Chinese, Hindi–Urdu and
Spanish–Portuguese cases. The presentation could not, however, end there
since a great deal hung on a positive response to the question of whether a
Caribbean English-lexicon creole language was a language separate from
English.
The solution was, having made a professional disclaimer, to appear to
answer in the affirmative. This was done, in the New York case, by, first,
emphasizing how commonplace it is for languages considered by speakers as
distinct to be linked by dialect continua. Reference was made to dialect
continua linking German and Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese, and to the
existence of varying levels of mutual intelligibility between the standard
languages at the extreme ends of these continua. This was by way of ensuring
that, in the minds of the listeners, the existence of linguistic continua between
English-lexicon creoles and English did not present a barrier to the former
being considered as languages distinct from the latter.
174 H UBERT D EVONISH

The next step was to address the issue of linguistic difference, another
issue which might colour the listeners’ judgement about whether these creole
languages were languages other than English. This was done by making an
estimate of the linguistic distance between creole and English in a manner
which related this distance to distances between language varieties which are,
in varying measures, linguistically similar but yet are considered to be distinct
languages. Below is the distance measurement used in both the cases of
language advocacy:
(i) for the lexicon / vocabulary, about the distance between the lexicon of
Spanish and Portuguese,
(ii) for phonology / pronunciation patterns, at least the same distance as that
between the phonology of French and Spanish,
(iii) for morphology / word construction patterns, about the same distance as
between the morphology of English and German,
(iv) for syntax / grammatical structure, depending on the creole in question,
ranging from about the distance between the syntax of French and Spanish
to the distance between the syntax of English and German
(Devonish 2000: 4; 2001: 1).

In the New York case, I then proceeded to assert that, based on these esti-
mates of linguistic distance, I was prepared to utter the magic formula re-
quired for the occasion: ie, that Caribbean English-lexicon creoles are ‘lan-
guages other than English’. However, the ‘I’ here is not, on careful reading,
the ‘expert I’ since the expert had earlier declared that it was not possible, on
linguistic grounds, to assign languagehood to any language variety. The
expert had, in addition, clearly stated that linguistic difference was not the
basis on which forms of speech are assigned to separate languages. In this
context, any ‘I’ which could assert that linguistic distance is indeed the basis
for forms of speech to be treated as belonging to separate languages must be
the personal ‘I’. In the context where officialdom required the utterance of a
magic formula from an expert, the advocate had attempted to preserve the
integrity of the expert while venturing a personal opinion. The advocate
knew, however, that in the context of an expert discourse, such an opinion
would be likely to be interpreted as an ‘expert’ opinion despite previous
‘expert’ disclaimers.
In the Jamaican case, the task was easier. No explicit question had been
asked. The linguist-advocate could, therefore, allow the statement on lingu-
istic differences to be taken as an answer to the implied question of whether
Jamaican creole was a language other than English.
Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia 175

3. Interpreting the will of the people in ‘conquest’ diglossia

I, in the guise of an expert, have presumed to make presentations on language
which potentially have great impact on the lives of large numbers of people.
Yet, the pronouncements I make are not those within my professional com-
petence to make. They are statements about my personal attitudes to the lan-
guages concerned. I consider my actions justified on grounds that I see myself
as interpreting ‘the will of the people’.
What in this context is the ‘will of the people’? To determine this, we need
to return to the original notion of diglossia as it applies to the group of situa-
tions in which the H is an ‘external’ variety. Within this group, there is the
distinction between ‘non-conquest’ diglossia and ‘conquest’ diglossia. If we
take Swiss German as an example of the former, we have a pragmatic com-
munity decision to accept an external norm for H purposes whilst preserving
L for functions of internal identity. The nature of this decision is reflected in
the fact that the distribution of functions of Standard German and Swiss
German in German-speaking Switzerland has remained relatively unchanged
ever since Ferguson (1959) first developed the concept of diglossia and used
the Swiss German case as a defining example.
In the case of ‘conquest’ diglossia, as in the case of ‘non-conquest’
diglossia, the community concerned accepts the fact that the ‘external’ lan-
guage exclusively performs the H functions. This acceptance is, however, not
the outcome of a historical decision by the community but a product of mili-
tary conquest. Changes in the functional distribution of language varieties will
come about as there are changes in the power relations between the contend-
ing social groups. ‘Conquest’ diglossia has, for the dominant groups, the
desired outcome of the external norm invading the private and informal
domains of the local L, replacing it with some locally flavoured version of H.
It has been argued that this is what has happened in an originally diglossic
English vs. English creole-speaking community such as Barbados.
From the perspective of the dominated groups, the desired end point of
‘conquest’ diglossia is the replacement of H by L in all public formal func-
tions. This is what has occurred in one of Ferguson’s defining situations,
Haiti, where since the late 1980s, Haitian creole has had official status along-
side French. The current constitution declares creole and French to be the
official languages of the republic (La Constitution de la République d’Haïti,
Ch. 1, Article 5). Even though many features of the pre-existing diglossia re-
main, it is clear that Haitian creole has invaded many if not all of the domains
previously the preserve of French. As has been seen from the discussion on
language rights in the Jamaican constitution, Jamaica itself may be moving in
the direction of the L invading the domains of the H.
176 H UBERT D EVONISH

The linguist, in making a value judgement such as was required in the two
situations outlined in this essay, did not have access to a historical consensus
position on the issue. What was available was a historically imposed diglossia
in the process of being challenged by practice and the processes of evolution.
The linguist-advocate, in this situation, was free to choose the position which
seemed to accord (i) with justice, (ii) with the direction in which the society or
societies seemed to be moving.

WORKS CITED
Allsopp, Richard, with Jeannette Allsopp (1996). Dictionary of Caribbean English
Usage (Oxford: Oxford UP).
Bailey, Beryl (1966). Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational Approach
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
—— (1971). ‘Jamaican creole: Can dialect boundaries be defined?’ in Hymes, ed.
Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, 341–48.
Bennett, Louise (1966). Jamaica Labrish, intro. Rex Nettleford (Kingston, Jamaica:
Sangster’s).
Bickerton, Derek (1975). Dynamics of a Creole System (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP).
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Constitution Act (1982).
http://www.ocol-clo.gc.ca/charter.htm.
Cassidy, F.G. (1961). Jamaica Talk: Three Hundred Years of the English Language
in Jamaica (London: Macmillan).
——, & Robert B. Le Page (1967, 21980). Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP).
Cobarrubias, Juan (1983). ‘Ethical issues in language planning,’ in Cobarrubias &
Fishman, ed. Progress in Language Planning, 41–86.
——, & Joshua Fishman, ed. (1983). Progress in Language Planning: International
Perspectives (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter).
Commonwealth of Dominica Constitution Order, 1978, ch. III.
Constitution de la République d’Haïti (undated). http://www.haiti.org/francais/
titre01.htm.
DeCamp, David (1971). ‘Toward a generative analysis of a post-creole speech con-
tinuum,’ in Hymes, ed. Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, 349–70.
Devonish, Hubert (1998). ‘On the existence of autonomous varieties in “creole
continuum situations”,’ in Studies in Caribbean language II, ed. P. Christie et al.
(Society for Caribbean Linguistics, Trinidad): 1–12.
—— (2000). ‘Answers to questions for the New York State Board of Regents,’
mimeo.
—— (2001). ‘Language rights in the Draft Charter of Rights in the Jamaican Con-
stitution: A proposal,’ mimeo.
Draft Minutes, Select Committee of the Joint Houses of Parliament, Jamaica, on the
Charter of Rights, 15 March 2001.
Language Advocacy and ‘Conquest’ Diglossia 177

Ferguson, Charles A. (1959). ‘Diglossia,’ Word 15: 325–40.

Folkes, Karl (2000). ‘Commonwealth Caribbean creole students: A position paper,’
mimeo.
Guidelines for the Education of Limited English Proficient Caribbean Creole
Speaking Students in New York State (1997). State Education Department, Uni-
versity of the State of New York, Albany.
Heath, Shirley Brice, & Frederick Mandabach (1983). ‘Language status decisions
and the law in the United States,’ in Cobarrubias & Fishman, ed. Progress in
Language Planning, 87–105.
Hymes, Dell, ed. (1971). Pidginization and Creolization of Languages (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP).
Kadamus, James (2000). ‘Presentation on students from Caribbean countries where
English is the official language,’ letter to Board of Regents, the State Education
Dept., the University of the State of New York, Albany.
Mackey, William F. (1983). ‘U.S. language status policy and the Canadian experi-
ence,’ in Cobarrubias & Fishman, ed. Progress in Language Planning, 173–206.
Office of the Commissioner of Official Languages, Basic Facts, http://www.ocol-
clo.gic.ca, Ottawa.
Regulations of the Commissioner of Education (1999). State Education Department,
University of the State of New York, Albany.
Smalling, Deborah (1983). ‘An investigation into the intelligibility of radio news
broadcasts in Jamaica’ (unpublished undergraduate Caribbean Studies thesis,
University of the West Indies, Mona).
South African Constitution, http://www.polity.org.za/govdocs/constitution/saconst
01.html
University of the State of New York (1997). Directory of Languages, State Edu-
cation Dept., Office of Bilingual Education, Albany.

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Decolonizing English
The Caribbean Counter-Thrust

Hazel Simmons–McDonald
University of the West Indies at Cave Hill

ABSTRACT
Starting from the observation that English is the language in which dominant
discourses are formulated in most parts of the world today, the essay ex-
plores which implications this may have for the Caribbean, a region in which
several varieties of English coexist and in which there are political and
educational debates about the place of these varieties and their functions in
the development of Caribbean peoples. Using both literary and socio-
linguistic evidence, changing attitudes to varieties of English are explored,
and perspectives for a critical language pedagogy for the region are
developed.

1. Introduction

I
T A K E A S A P O I N T O F D E P A R T U R E Alastair Pennycook’s asser-
tion that one of the chief roles of English teachers is to help the
formulation of counter-discourses in English. He threw out the
following challenge to applied linguists and teachers:
As applied linguists and English language teachers we should become poli-
tical actors engaged in a critical pedagogical project to use English to oppose
the dominant discourses of the West and to help the articulation of counter
discourses in English [...] At the very least, intimately involved as we are with
the spread of English, we should be acutely aware of the implications of this
spread for the reproduction and production of global inequalities. (2001: 87)
180 H AZEL S IMMONS –M C D ONALD

I was intrigued by this call, particularly because it raised several issues with
which applied linguists and teachers in the Caribbean are concerned. As an
applied linguist and teacher I propose to take up the challenge partly, by
giving some preliminary consideration to these issues in this essay.
First I want to discuss the notion of English as the language in which
dominant discourses are formulated in most parts of the world and the impli-
cation this has for the Caribbean, a region with a complex sociolinguistic
situation in which several varieties of English coexist and in which there are
political and educational debates about the place of these varieties and their
functions in the development of Caribbean peoples. This issue is related to the
sociohistorical realities of colonization and the expansion of English as a
dominant language in multilingual contexts such as the Caribbean.
The second point, which is directly related to the first, has to do with a con-
sideration of what variety of English we are referring to for the formulation of
counter-discourses. The assertion that “English” should be used to oppose the
dominant discourses of the West seems to overlook the reality that English is
itself one of the dominant discourses. In making the suggestion that teachers
use “English” to create counter-discourses in English, Pennycook was not
specific about the variety of English he was referring to. I am therefore
assuming that he meant any variety of Standard English. However, it is useful
to clarify some of the distinctions that are used with reference to English.
Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin (1989: 8) makes a distinction between “standard”
British English inherited from the empire and the “english” “which the
language has become in post-colonial countries.” They use a lower-case e for
the latter and appear to include in this category the Standard varieties of Eng-
lish in countries other than Britain. They argue:
Though British imperialism resulted in the spread of a language, English,
across the globe, the english of Jamaicans is not the english of Canadians,
Maoris, or Kenyans. We need to distinguish between what is proposed as a
standard code, English (the language of the erstwhile imperial centre), and the
linguistic code, english, which has been transformed and subverted into
several distinctive varieties throughout the world. (1998: 8)
While we can accept this, it is nevertheless necessary to make a further dis-
tinction between standard varieties of English on the one hand, and other
varieties (referred to in some sources as “other” Englishes or “new” Eng-
lishes). The standard varieties would include those mutually intelligible
varieties that are used across the globe such as Canadian English, Caribbean
Standard English and Australian English. I understand these standard varieties
to be the ones referred to when we speak of acquiring English or developing
proficiency in school language. I will use the term ‘creoles’ to refer speci-
fically to the varieties that have emerged as a result of contact between Euro-
Decolonizing English: The Caribbean Counter-Thrust 181

peans, the colonizers and the slaves who came to the Caribbean speaking
African languages, and I will use the term ‘alternative [English] varieties’ to
refer to those varieties of “English” that have emerged in the postcolonial
period. An example would be vernaculars such as St. Lucian English verna-
cular which emerged under pressure from English, the official language, in a
situation where a French-lexicon creole had been the dominant popular
language.
I would include in the ‘alternative varieties’ of English those vernacular
varieties that have emerged more recently as a result of casual contact be-
tween speakers of English and creole speakers or by learners who were
attempting to learn English as a second language or dialect. I propose to dis-
cuss specifically the ways in which these varieties have been used by writers
to formulate counter discourses. This relates to the notion of decolonizing
English in the title of this essay. It is in this respect that I am likely to incur
the wrath of the group that Stalker refers to as “the death of language writers”:
namely, those who, according to Stalker, “express the opinion that the English
language is dying” (1985: 65). However, I will argue that the emergence and
spread of varieties within the Caribbean have less to do with Newman’s
explanation (1974, cited in Stalker 1985) that the decline in language stems
from the fact that minorities have won “a greater voice” in determining the
course of society than with the processes that are set in motion naturally when
languages come into contact.
The third issue I will consider relates to two points mentioned by Penny-
cook – the notion of teachers becoming political actors engaged in a critical
pedagogical project to use English for counter-discourses, and the awareness
that the spread of English leads to the “reproduction and production of global
inequalities” (2001: 87). I will also consider the social inequalities that are
manifested intra-nationally when English, the standard variety, is ascribed a
higher status and is given greater prestige than local varieties. This point is
central to the issue of the development of a people, an issue to which I refer-
red earlier and which is also relevant to the wider context of global inequality
to which Pennycook refers.
Finally, there is the related consideration of what might constitute a
“critical pedagogical project” within the Caribbean context. In this regard I
will present some preliminary thoughts from an applied linguistics perspec-
tive of the kind of pedagogy that is needed within the Caribbean to level the
playing field and reduce the margins of inequality while at the same time
providing the framework for the use of a wider range of varieties in the articu-
lation of counter discourses.
182 H AZEL S IMMONS –M C D ONALD

2. Colonization and language in the Caribbean

Linguistic diversity in the Caribbean is an outcome of colonization which
began around the end of the sixteenth century and which continued for more
than three hundred years (Leith 1996: 181). The slave trade, which provided
the scaffolding for the success of colonization, influenced the course of lan-
guage development in the region. Leith (1996: 206) comments: “It [the slave
trade] gave rise not only to Black English in the U S A and the Caribbean,
which has been an important influence on the speech of young English
speakers world wide, but also provided the extraordinary context of language
contact which led to the formation of English pidgins and Creoles.” In those
territories in which the creole derived its lexicon from English and coexisted
with a standard form of English there was progressive decreolization which
resulted in the formation of a post-creole continuum with a range of varieties
between the creole and the standard. Jamaica and Guyana exemplify this
course of development. In these territories many speakers exhibit linguistic
multi-competence in the sense that they know several lects or varieties along
the continuum and can switch codes with ease as the communicative context
demands. I want to refer to St. Lucia as a special case, since it has had a
different course of development from Anglophone territories like Jamaica and
the contact situation there has given rise to a very interesting sociolinguistic
situation.
Although it is now considered an anglophone territory, St. Lucia’s lan-
guage development differed from some of the other English-speaking terri-
tories. The island was only ceded to the British during the first decade of the
nineteenth century and prior to that it had been colonized by the French, who
engaged in fourteen fierce battles with the British for ownership of the island.
The original contact situation was between the Africans who had been
brought as slaves in the Trade and French colonists. The language variety that
developed out of that contact was a French-lexicon creole now commonly
called Kwéyòl. The imposition of a monolingual English policy for purposes
of conducting affairs in public institutions and for education resulted in the
creation of a bilingual society in which there has been a gradual decrease in
the number of exclusive Kwéyòl or English speakers and a significant in-
crease in the number of bilinguals. The census figures for 1911–46 are pres-
ented here (Table 1 below), since more recent census data exclude specific
information about language use.
Decolonizing English: The Caribbean Counter-Thrust 183

Table 1: Census figures for St. Lucia between 1911 and 1946
Year Exclusive Exclusive Other Bilingual (N)
Kwéyòl % English % language % English/
Kwéyòl %
1911 58.58 5.4 5.04% 30.91% 48,637
1921 56.53 4.09 5.94 33.45 51,505
1946 43.32 0.22 0.24 54.16 70,113
[% calculated from the figures presented in Carrington 1984]
Surveys conducted for language studies in more recent times have indicated
that the situation has shifted in favour of English. Frank (1993) reported a
gradual decrease in the number of exclusive Kwéyòl speakers and an increase
in the number of bilinguals and exclusive English speakers. If one can accept
the figures for school enrollment as a rough indication of the situation that
exists in the wider society then, based on a survey of language distribution
among schoolchildren carried out in 1984 (Simmons–McDonald), the figures
for English speakers far exceed those for Kwéyòl. Only 2% and 3% exclusive
Kwéyòl speakers were recorded in urban and rural settings respectively com-
pared with 20% and 12% English speakers in these same settings. The trend
of a higher concentration of Kwéyòl speakers in rural than urban settings was
still evident in the 1984 survey.
The interesting phenomenon in the St. Lucian situation is that the con-
tinued contact between the French creole and English has resulted in the
emergence of a ‘new’ English which Alleyne (1961) calls a vernacular and to
which I will refer as St. Lucian Vernacular (S L V ). This variety is widely
spoken in both urban and rural settings but more so in the urban areas and it is
now being acquired by children as their first language. Le Page and Tabouret–
Keller (1985: 147) report that S L V has features that are common to other
English-lexicon creoles in the Caribbean. Alleyne (1961: 5–6) describes it as
being “strongly influenced by Creole phonetic, semantic and syntactic pat-
terns.” I refer briefly to the discussion in the literature about the origins of this
variety since this gives some insight into how a “new english” may come into
being. Le Page and Tabouret–Keller (1985: 155) suggest that it might have
arisen from the attempts of Kwéyòl speakers to learn English in school. They
describe the situation as representing “a gradual shift of a population from a
French-Patois like vernacular to a creolized English as their native language,
via an intermediate stage of standard English as a second language in the
classroom.” Another explanation which has been given for the emergence of
S L V is that it developed from the attempts of native speakers of Kwéyòl to
communicate with English speakers in casual situations (Garrett, in press).
184 H AZEL S IMMONS –M C D ONALD

Although this explanation is plausible, an examination of the develop-

mental trends supports the hypothesis of emergence originating partially in
the school setting. Simmons–McDonald (in press) suggests that if one con-
siders the language distribution patterns in the 1940s when there were no
records of S L V , and when one also considers that roughly 43% of the popu-
lation were exclusive Kwéyòl speakers and that there was some social
distance between speakers of English and Kwéyòl, it is hardly likely that the
vernacular would have developed and spread primarily through casual con-
tact. She offers as a more likely explanation that language learning attempts in
the formal setting “acted as a catalyst for its emergence and that further
contact in the community by those who had learned it led to its more wide-
spread use.” I will discuss this “new english” variety in the section dealing
with a critical pedagogy subsequently. I now turn to consider briefly the status
of the varieties and the attitudes towards them.

3. Attitudes to language in the Caribbean

In most contexts in which the creole coexists with a standard variety, the
creole is usually ascribed a lower status than the standard language and the
view of it is one of self-deprecation. In the past, colonials expressed negative
views of creoles in the strongest disparaging terms. For example, in a 1966
article Leo Spitzer quotes a comment made by one Leopold who was an
educator in Sierra Leone during the early 1900s. He is reported to have made
the following remarks about the creole:
The Sierra Leone patois is a kind of invertebrate omnium gatherum of all
sorts, a veritable ola podrida collected from many different languages without
regard to harmony or precision: it is largely defective and sadly wanting in
many of the essentials and details that make up and dignify a language. It is a
standing menace and a disgrace hindering not only educational development
but also the growth of civilization in the colony. (1966: 41)
H.H. Breen made similar remarks about the French creole in St. Lucia. The
following is probably the most often quoted remark about that variety:
It is a jargon formed from the French, and composed of words, or rather
sounds, adapted to the organs of speech in the black population. [...] It is, in
short, the French language, stripped of its manly and dignified ornaments, and
travestied for the accommodation of children and toothless old women. (1844:
185)
Creole speakers themselves have been known to be ambivalent about the lan-
guage. While acknowledging preference for using it for personal communica-
tion, for telling jokes and stories, they reject the notion that the language can
Decolonizing English: The Caribbean Counter-Thrust 185

be of any use in education and express a preference for English as the medium
of instruction.
Such a reaction is understandable when one considers that in colonial times
and even today, for that matter, English was the language which opened doors
to opportunities in education, which was one of the ways by which colonized
people in the territories could achieve economic advancement and upward
social mobility. And many of the descendants did achieve economic and
social success through mastery of English as a second language. However,
education was considered a privilege in those days and the number who could
aspire to advanced education was limited.
Emancipation brought freedom to the slaves and their descendants, but the
period of colonization extended into the 1960s for many territories. The quest
for freedom from a colonial mentality would continue well into the post-
colonial era. Chamberlin describes a major objective of colonization as
follows:
In the West Indies after emancipation, colonial experience and imperial ambi-
tion converged in a determination to turn blacks into whites, or Africans into
Europeans. To many European listeners, the absence of articulate language –
or more precisely the pressure of what was construed as the inarticulate babble
of African languages (with the transfer of some of their intonations into West
Indian speech) – was inevitably associated with the absence of coherent
thought and civilized feeling. Even enlightened nineteenth-century reformers
believed that racial and political equality would only come about when blacks
started behaving like whites. (1993: 73)
Ironically, many blacks in the colonial period also espoused this view. Olive
Senior captures those nuances in the story “The Two Grandmothers” in pres-
enting the attitudes of one grandmother who lives in rural Jamaica and those
of another, who is a socialite from Kingston. The grandmothers are seen
through the eyes of their granddaughter.
Mummy, you know Grandma Elaine is so funny she says I’m not to call her
Grandma any more, I’m to call her Towser like everybody else for I’m grow-
ing so fast nobody would believe that she could have such a big young lady
for a granddaughter [...] I said to her, “Grandmother, I mean Towser,
Grandma Del introduces me to everyone as her granddaughter she calls me
her ‘little gran’.” And Grandma Elaine says “Darling, the way your grand-
mother Del looks and conducts herself she couldn’t be anything but a grand-
mother and honey she and I are of entirely different generations.” [...] She’s
really mad that you allow me to spend time with Grandma Del. She says
“Honey, I really don’t know what your mother thinks she is doing making you
spend so much time down there in deepest darkest country. I really must take
you in hand. It’s embarrassing to hear some of the things you come out with
186 H AZEL S IMMONS –M C D ONALD

sometimes. Your mother would be better advised to send you to Charm school
next summer you are never too young to start [...] Mummy, what does she
have against my hair? And my skin? She always seems angry about it and
Joyce says Grandma is sorry I came out dark because she is almost a white
lady and I am really dark. But mummy, what is wrong with that? (Senior
1989: 65–67)
This excerpt suggests several of the conflicts that exist within the psychology
of the colonized – conflicts that manifest themselves as dichotomies in the
work of Caribbean writers. Let us highlight three dominant ones. First there is
the black /white dichotomy, the racial divide that has as one of its manifes-
tations the kind of schizophrenia embodied in Towser. Second, there is the
dichotomy between cultural values, those of Europe symbolized by the Charm
schools, gyms and spas to which Towser refers and the traditional values of
Del, the Grandmother who lives in rural Jamaica and for whom castor oil in
the hair, church on Sundays in proper dresses and making pimento liqueur
and jams from guava and other fruits are the essence of what it means to be
Jamaican. Third there is the language dichotomy, standard English as spoken
by Towser and the language Towser thinks Del speaks and passes on to her
granddaughter, presumably, the creole. “It is embarrassing to hear the things
you come out with sometimes.” The granddaughter herself makes specific
reference to this later in the text. She imitates the speech of the people in
Del’s village. “ ‘ WAT – A – WAY –YU – GROW ’ and ‘HOW– IS – YU –
DAADIE ?’ and ‘HOW – IS – YU – MAAMIE ?’ Till I was tired. Mummy,
that is the way they talk, you know, just like Richie and the gardener next
door. ‘WAT – A – WAY – YU – GROW .’ They don’t speak properly the
way we do, you know.” These tensions have been, and are constantly being,
explored in the work of Caribbean writers, as when Derek Walcott writes, in
“A Far Cry From Africa”:
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? (Walcott 1962: 17–18)
Chamberlin suggests that the “most radical division for West Indian poets is
that which separates their African and European inheritances.” He explains:
“One inheritance, the European language and its literary tradition, is an inheri-
tance of power. And it is held responsible for the powerlessness, which,
during slavery and since, has impaired the other inheritance of local imagina-
tive expression in a local language” (1993: 124–25).
Although some Caribbean writers began to use English-lexicon creole and
vernacular in their work during the colonial period, Standard (Caribbean)
Decolonizing English: The Caribbean Counter-Thrust 187

English was the variety more frequently used in most of the work then. It was
as though success as a writer would be determined by the mastery of standard
English and the English literary form. Even at the secular level there was an
expectation that if one had been educated or had traveled to a foreign country
for even the briefest of visits this mastery should be reflected in the language
or the “twang” as Louise Bennett calls it in her humorous poem on this
subject. She writes, in Jamaican creole:
Me glad de se’s you come back bwoy,
But lawd yuh let me dung,
Me shame o’ yuh soh till all o’
Me proudness drop a grung.

Yuh mean yuh goh dah ‘Merica

An spen six whole mont’ deh,
An come back not a piece betta
Dan how yuh did goh wey

Bwoy yuh noh shame? Is soh you come?

Afta yuh tan soh lang!
Not even licke language bwoy?
Not even little twang?
[...]
Noh back-ansa me bwoy yuh talk
Too bad; shet up yuh mout,
Ah doan know how yuh an yuh puppa
Gwine to meck it out.
Ef yuh want please him meck him tink
Yuh bring back something new.
You always call him “Pa” dis evenin’
Wen him come sey “Poo”. (‘Noh lickle twang,’ Bennett 1966: 209)
In a sense, pieces such as this constitute the beginning of a counter-discourse
in English creole. Bennet ridicules the then prevailing belief and expectation
that a “new” English (a twang which could be simply accent) could be
adopted after a short visit to a foreign country. Through the use of the
mother’s voice and the expression of her dismay, Bennett satirizes the notion
that the enhancement of language comes easily and superficially. In the next
section I examine the ways in which different language varieties in the Carib-
bean can articulate counter discourses.
188 H AZEL S IMMONS –M C D ONALD

4. Decolonization and the validation of alternative varieties

Decolonization is defined simply in Collins Dictionary and Thesaurus (1986
edition) as “the granting of independence to a former colony.” The signing of
the Independence documents was symbolic of freedom from a relationship
which had imposed linguistic and cultural dominance on people of African
descent in the Caribbean. The actual process of decolonization, however, is a
much longer process involving psychological liberation from external judge-
ments or perceptions about the colonized peoples themselves and their lan-
guages. These perceptions are primarily that the languages of the former
colonies are in a power relationship with the standard language and that
greater currency is given to the language of the former colonizers. Maryse
Condé (1998: 102) observes that this relationship has imposed a burden on
African and Caribbean writers. She comments that the writers understand that
“the control of language is one of the primary aspects of colonial oppression –
the dependency of the periphery upon the centre”. She elaborates this view
with the comment that “Language is a site of power: who names controls. The
politically and economically alienated colonized are first colonized linguis-
tically. In their attempt to gain freedom and self-determination the colonized
must put an end to the pre-eminence of the colonial language.”
Putting an end to the pre-eminence of the colonial language means – for
many writers in the Caribbean – including creole as one of the languages of
narration as well as asserting the idea of creolization or creolité as it is
referred to in the francophone territories. Ernest Pépin and Raphaël Confiant
(1998: 97) explain this process of creolization as “a matter of reclaiming and
decolonizing our imaginary; and of assuming our rich bilingual heritage.”
Assuming a rich linguistic heritage in the context of the Caribbean would
mean an adoption of “an identity of co-existence” but this would first require
liberation from the notion that one language is superior and the only medium
through which African and Caribbean writers can express the imaginary. A
comment by Sartre addresses this notion:
Black writers have no language common to them all; to incite the oppressed
to unite they must have recourse to the words of the oppressor. [...] Like the
scholars of the 16th century who understood each other only in Latin, the
blacks rediscover themselves only on the terrain full of traps which white
men have set for them. (quoted in Chamberlin 1993: 51)
The idea of being trapped or made powerless is taken up later by Chamberlin:
One inheritance, the European language and its literary tradition, is an inheri-
tance of power. And it is held responsible for the powerlessness which,
during slavery and since, has impaired the other inheritance of local imagi-
Decolonizing English: The Caribbean Counter-Thrust 189

native expression in a local language. Prestige and power belong on one side,
in this scheme; the other seems powerless or picturesque or pathetic.
I would like to examine two of the issues emerging from these comments.
The first is the idea in the Sartre statement that Black (writers) can rediscover
themselves only on a terrain of traps that the white men have set for them, that
terrain being, in the case of the anglophone Caribbean, English. The second
issue has to do with the notion of the inheritance of English as one of power
and the suggestion that it has impaired the inheritance of the local language.
The first comment speaks directly to the issue of liberation, which is more
a political than a linguistic issue. The political aspect is that one language, in
this case English, is the best or most appropriate vehicle for expressing a
message or articulating the complexity of African or Caribbean imaginary. As
long as the colonized continue to buy into this perspective, Sartre’s “traps”
can exert their effects and the powerlessness of which Chamberlin writes sets
in. The process of decolonization has to initiate the process of psychological
and linguistic liberation – a setting free of the imaginary. Liberation can then
only come from a shift in perspective from a focus on language to a focus on
message. In this perspective, the linguistic perspective, the message is pre-
eminent and any language can convey it. For African and Caribbean writers
this would mean, in the words of Chinua Achebe, finding “a possible alter-
native to the European cultural tradition which has been imposed on us and
which we have more or less absorbed, for obvious historical reasons, as the
only way of doing our business.”
The African writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o sees the mission of education and
that of the writer as extending beyond the limitations of “reproducing and
preserving a national literature.” He thinks that a choice has to be made
between two opposing aesthetics, “the aesthetic of oppression and exploita-
tion and acquiescence with imperialism”; and the “aesthetic of liberation,”
which, one infers, would require the use of ways of expression alternative to
English, which is associated with oppression and exploitation (1981: 83).
Graddol suggests that English has two main functions in the world:
It provides a vehicular language for international communication and it forms
the basis for constructing cultural identities. The former function requires
mutual intelligibility and common standards. The latter encourages the
development of local forms and hybrid varieties. (2001: 27)
It is not just that English forms the basis for constructing cultural identities
because these identities already existed and were expressed via indigenous
varieties. The contact of English with these varieties does, in fact, create
hybrid varieties, but this involves a reconstruction of English forms within a
framework of existing linguistic competences that generate alternative lects
190 H AZEL S IMMONS –M C D ONALD

which are themselves creative media of expression. In short, they are media
for constructing counter discourses.
This is essentially the concept expressed by Ashcroft et al. (1989): namely,
of the empire writing back, of inverting the relationships between centre
(represented by English) and periphery (represented by creole) so that the
periphery becomes the locus of an interesting enterprise. In Brathwaite’s
terms (1971), this creolization involves the “interaction between diverse cul-
tural manifestations and languages.” The centre depends on these manifes-
tations to clarify its own reality. Pennycook (2001: 84) cites Kachru’s refer-
ence (1986) to Achebe’s argument (1975) that he does not think it “necessary
nor desirable for an African writer to be able to use English like a native
speaker.” Achebe asserts that “English will be able to carry the weight of (his)
African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in communion
with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African surroundings.”
Pennycook asks the question: “What do we mean when we talk about a new
English?” He goes on to suggest that the question is more complex than “ a
case of new words, new syntax or new phonology” and that Achebe “is
concerned not so much with the structural diversity of English as with the
cultural politics of new meanings, the struggle to claim and to create
meanings in the political arenas of language and discourse” (84). Here we
return to the notion of the pre-eminence of message, the message that asserts
the cultural identities of the former colonized. Is it a “new” English that
Achebe has suggested? It may simply be a morsel of English that is recon-
structed to become an alternative variety, another tentacle lopped off from the
octopus that is English at the Centre and surviving in its own right.
Caribbean writers have explored – even during the period of colonization –
alternative ways of “doing their business” and have succeeded in reaching
audiences internationally as these alternative ways of expression have been
exported in the literature and the lyrics of reggae and calypso. The vehicles
for doing so have been primarily the creoles and the vernaculars that have
become stable within Caribbean societies and which have been used to ex-
press the cultural realities of the people so that they have become more prized
by their speakers than they once were.
Louise Bennett expresses such a sentiment in “Bans o’ Killing”
So yuh a de man, her hear bout!
Ah yuh dem sey dah-teck
Whole heap o’ English oat sey dat
Yuh gwine kill dialect!

Meck me get it straight Mass Charlie

For me noh quite undastan,
Decolonizing English: The Caribbean Counter-Thrust 191

Yuh gwine kill all English dialect

Or jus Jamaica one?

Ef yuh dah-equal up wid English

Language, den wha meck
Yuh gwine go feel inferior, wen
It come to dialect?
[...]
Dah language wen yuh proud o’,
Weh yuh honour and respeck,
Po’ Mass Charlie! Yuh noh know sey
Dat it spring from dialect!

Dat dem start fe try tun language,

From de fourteen century,
Five hundred years gwan an dem got
More dialect dan we!

Yuh wi haffe kill de Lancashire

De Yorkshire, de Cockney
De broad Scotch and de Irish brogue
Before yuh start kill me!

Yuh we haffe get de Oxford book

O’ English verse, an tear
Out Chaucer, Burns, Lady Grizelle
An plenty o’ Shakespeare!

Wen yuh done kill “wit” an “humour”

Wen yuh kill “Variety”
Yuh wi haffe fine a way fe kill
Originality!
(Bennett 1966: 218)
So who is the “you”, “de man” in Bennett’s poem? It is the Centre and it is
also all the naysayers on the periphery who reject the dialect as language.
Bennett makes the point forcefully; that to try to kill the dialect is to kill
originality. Notice the repetition of “kill” in the poem. The overt notion of
violence perpetrated against language and by extension against its speakers.
This same notion is even more graphically conveyed by John Agard in a
poem, “Listen Mr Oxford Don,” which uses yet another alternative variety:
Me not no Oxford don
me a simple immigrant
192 H AZEL S IMMONS –M C D ONALD

from Clapham Common

I didn’t graduate
I immigrate
[…]
I ent have no gun
I ent have no knife
but mugging de Queen’s English
is the story of my life

I dont need no axe

to split/ up yu syntax
I dont need no hammer
to mash up yu grammar
[…]
Dem accuse me of assault
on de Oxford dictionary/
imagin a concise peaceful man like me/
dem want me serve time
for inciting rhyme to riot
but I tekking it quiet
down here in Clapham Common

I’m not a violent man Mr Oxford don

I only armed wit mih human breath
but human breath
is a dangerous weapon

So mek dem send one big word after me

I ent serving no jail sentence
I slashing suffix in self-defence
I bashing future wit present tense
and if necessary

I making de Queen’s English accessory/to my offence

(Brown et al. 1989: 109–10)
This poem picks up a theme originally explored in Bennett’s poem “Colonisa-
tion in reverse.” Bennett’s poem suggests that by migrating to England,
Jamaicans will “populate de seat o’ Empire” and in effect “tun history upside
dung!” (Bennett 1966: 179–80). Agard’s poem examines what happens to the
“Queen’s English” in this process of reverse colonization. The irony here is
that the periphery exports a language variety (which is itself the product of a
Decolonizing English: The Caribbean Counter-Thrust 193

colonizing experience) to the Centre and sets in motion there a process which
carries the possibility of creating a “new english”. So the empire writes back
in a rich body of literature that constitutes a counter-discourse, which uses, in
addition to English, alternative “english” varieties to articulate the reality of
the liberation of decolonization.
Ashcroft et al. invoke the creole-continuum theory to present a powerful
argument for the independent nature of creoles. It is worth presenting their
comment in full.
The theory of the Creole continuum, undermining, as it does, the static models
of language formation, overturns ‘concentric’ notions of language which
regard ‘Standard’ English as a ‘core’. Creole need no longer be seen as a
peripheral variation of English. Those rules which develop as approximations
of English rules are by no means random or unprincipled, and the concept of
what actually constitutes ‘English’ consequently opens itself to the possibility
of radical transformation. It is indisputable that english literature extends itself
to include all texts written in language communicable to an english-speaker.
Elements of a very wide range of different lects contribute to this, and the only
criterion for their membership of english literature is whether they are used or
not. (1989: 47)
If creole could be viewed by its native speakers and by those who denigrate it
not as an inferior variety of English but as a dynamic, independent rule-
governed system which has the potential power for “transforming” the struc-
tures which generated it, then it can be given broader scope to be used as an
authentic vehicle which can help its users to realize the liberation promised by
decolonization.
Richard Terdiman (1985), who discusses the dichotomy of discourse /
counter-discourse in a text of the same name, presents this explanation of
counter-discourse:
Counter-discourses function in their form. Their object is to represent the
world differently. But their projection of difference goes beyond simply
contradicting the dominant, beyond simply negating its assertions. The power
of a dominant discourse lies in the codes by which it regulates understanding
of the social world. Counter-discourses seek to detect and map such natural-
ized protocols and to project their subversion. (1985: 149)
Ashcroft et al. (1989) distinguish between the types of linguistic groups that
exist within postcolonial discourse. They identify “monoglossic, diglossic and
polyglossic” groups. Monoglossic groups are described as “single-language
societies”, diglossic are bilingual and polyglossic are “polydialectal” such as
exist within the Caribbean and where “the world language called english is a
continuum of ‘intersections’ in which the speaking habits in various commu-
194 H AZEL S IMMONS –M C D ONALD

nities have intervened to reconstruct the language” (39). The authors go on to

explain that the reconstruction occurs in two ways:
On the one hand, regional english varieties may introduce words which
become familiar to all english-speakers, and on the other, the varieties,
themselves produce national and regional peculiarities which distinguish
them from other forms of english. (40)
Their identification simply presents the different types of post-colonial
linguistic groups but it does not explain how the linguistic codes of the groups
are constructed as counter-discourses. I will attempt an explanation.
There are those codes which use the actual words and meaning constructs
of Centre language “English” as a means of subverting what Terdiman refers
to as “the codes and naturalized protocols of the dominant discourse.” This
type is exemplified by the example used in Pennycook (2001: 85) that is
supposed to represent what Ali Mazrui (1975, quoted in Pennycook) calls the
“anti-commonwealth tendencies” which are part of the English language.
Pennycook narrates an anecdote about the Kenyan political leader Tom
Mboya, who recited Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” before a vast crowd on the
eve of an election in Nairobi. He asks the question: “What are we to make of
the use of a poem by one of the great apologists of imperialism in a political
speech by a vehement opponent of imperialism and colonialism?” He gives
Mazrui’s explanation, which is as follows:
The cultural penetration of the English language was manifesting its compre-
hensiveness. That was in part a form of colonization of the African mind. But
when Rudyard Kipling is being called upon to serve the purposes of the
Africans themselves, the phenomenon we are witnessing may also amount to
a decolonizing of Rudyard Kipling. (quoted in Pennycook 2001: 85)
The message that Mazrui may have intended to convey in the first two sen-
tences of his statement is that the cultural penetration which was essential to
the colonization of the African (and Caribbean) mind was the ability to recite
a wide and varied selection of literature from the Centre with expression and
“by heart” as we say in the Caribbean, which simply means to memorize it in
its entirety. Mboya’s recitation of “If” therefore serves as both an assertion of
that ability of the colonized to absorb and regurgitate the messages and, as
Mazrui suggests, using that message to “serve the purposes of the Africans.”
But the point must be stressed that using the language of Centre to “write
back” constitutes just one type of counter-discourse and here the selection of
the piece for content and the context of its use becomes an important factor
with respect to the message that is intended. So while it is interesting to
consider Mboya’s recitation as an instance of decolonizing Kipling, it would
be critical to examine the content of the poem for its message. “If” is such an
Decolonizing English: The Caribbean Counter-Thrust 195

interesting example in this regard that the deconstruction of its meaning

would require another essay. However, such deconstruction would necessarily
involve the counter-thrust of creating alternative constructions of the seman-
tics of decolonization itself.
A second type is exemplified by the use of one of the heritage codes which
emerged from an early contact situation. In this category I would also
consider the English-lexicon creoles, pidgins such as Tok Pisin and Hawaiian.
Louise Bennett’s poem “Bans o’ Killing” is an excellent example of the use
of creole to address directly the dichotomous attitudes towards the differences
between varieties. The persona takes issue with the idea that one can ‘kill’ a
dialect on the basis of judgements about its value as a language. The content
of the message and its medium merge to create a powerful counter discourse.
Within this category the types of counter-discourses would include a range of
text types, including the lyrics of reggae protest tunes and so on. They con-
stitute a set of genres that contextualize and explore the meanings and experi-
ences of the self in relation to the ‘Other’ and also assert the independence of
the self.
The third type would include those so-called “new englishes” or what I
prefer to call alternative English varieties that have emerged out of more
recent and ongoing contact situations. These would include varieties that are
closer to the acrolect on a post-creole continuum and would represent further
stages of decreolization (in the linguistic sense). What I refer to as the St.
Lucian vernacular may well fall into this category but I would like to reserve
judgement on this until closer analysis of this variety has been undertaken.
John Agard’s “Listen Mr Oxford Don” constitutes an example of a variety
that can be included in this category.
The use of the various lects by Caribbean writers asserts the cultural
realities of the region while contributing to the liberation and transformation
of a colonized mentality. Ashcroft et al. (1989: 38) use the terms “abrogation”
and “appropriation” for the processes by which postcolonial writing can
define itself as a “medium of power”. They suggest that this can be done by
“seizing the language of the Centre and re-placing it in a discourse fully
adapted to the colonized place.” Abrogation is defined as being the “denial of
the privilege of English” which involves a “rejection of the metropolitan
power over the means of communication.” The second process involves the
“appropriation and reconstitution of the language of the Centre.” The process
of “capturing and remoulding the language to new usages marks a separation
from the site of colonial privilege.”
The creation of successful counter-discourses stems from the expert mani-
pulation of the range of varieties which results from multidialectal (/ multi-
lingual) competence. This competence also involves the communicative
196 H AZEL S IMMONS –M C D ONALD

dimension of an understanding of the cultural contexts or place in which these

varieties are used.
In the following section I turn to the issue of the type of critical pedagogy
that is likely to diminish the inequalities that exist in the Caribbean context.

5. Creating a critical pedagogy for liberation

It may be worth mentioning the obvious: namely, that unless the inequalities
that exist intra-nationally are diminished there can be no reduction of global
inequalities particularly as these relate to language differences. In the Carib-
bean, some children who speak a creole or alternative variety as a first lan-
guage have difficulty acquiring English as a second language in school. This
is not the result of the effects of the first language as is too often mistakenly
believed, but it stems more from the lack of an effective pedagogy that can
help learners to develop proficiency in the varieties that are available in their
communities and to use them appropriately for a range of purposes. The
creation of critical pedagogies at the national level is necessary so that
speakers of alternative lects can be empowered through language and not be
hampered because of the lack of competence in a particular variety.
The question is, what kind of critical pedagogy can realize this? First,
pedagogies should be tailored for different situations and contexts, but there
must be an understanding of what the objectives of these pedagogies are.
Quirk (1990, cited in Swann 1989) argues against the notion that what he
refers to as non-native Englishes can be used as models for teaching and
learning. Swann (1989) summarizes these arguments and refers to the views
of Kachru (1992), who expresses the opinion that English must function as an
international language and that those who “make policy decisions about
English language teaching need to take account of the ‘realities’ of how
English is used and how its speakers feel about it” (27). He also points out
that the intentions of non-native speakers will “be linked to the particular
social and cultural contexts in which the language is used.” It is important to
add that the purposes for which people want to use English must also be
considered.
The examples that Quirk presents in his lecture reflect a learning situation
of English as a foreign language in which the teacher queries the necessity of
correcting expressions like “several informations” and “catched a cold”. From
an applied linguistics perspective these are errors that students may make in
the process of learning English as a second or foreign language. Quirk reports
that the teacher who gave these examples “claimed that he could not bring
himself to correct a Spanish pupil for using a form that had currency in an
English dialect – any English dialect.” The point is this; if English language
teachers, particularly those who teach English as a second language, adopt the
Decolonizing English: The Caribbean Counter-Thrust 197

attitude of this teacher, then what is called English will eventually remain
within the competence of a few who know the idiom of the language. Can one
be said to have acquired a language or a lect, any language or any lect, if one
is unfamiliar with its idiom? I think not. It is the responsibility of English
language teachers to find ways of helping learners to use the language for the
purposes for which they need it. The idiomatic expressions are difficult to
learn because there are no fixed rules to guide one in figuring out the mean-
ings. The words in idiomatic expressions are not usually used for their denota-
tive meanings. The question is, does someone who is learning English for the
purpose of being able to understand technical documents need to know the
full range of idiomatic expressions in English?
If the idiosyncratic expressions that emerge during the learning process
become fossilized and if these fossilizations are realized in the speech of a
large enough number so that they use it for communication, then one can
concede that an alternative variety has possibly been created and that it has
some currency for that group of speakers. However, this should not affect the
goal of English language teaching, which would be to teach a standard
variety. The mistake would be to teach an alternative variety ostensibly for a
standard variety. This would subvert the goal and process of English language
teaching.
What, then, do we make of situations in the Caribbean in which there are
heated debates over what to teach and how to teach? A newspaper in
Barbados recently reported on the ongoing debate in Jamaica about the use-
fulness of using Jamaican creole in education. The paper reported that since
many Jamaicans have difficulty understanding English it is shameful to
conduct the business of official Jamaica, like Parliament, in a foreign tongue.
In St. Lucia a similar argument led to the introduction of the French creole in
Parliament. The extension of the function of the creole in this way has given it
wider currency and is an official acknowledgement of the bilingual nature of
the country. The discussion gets heated in relation to education. Hubert
Devonish has made a case for using creole in education. He is quoted in the
article as saying “What good is it to teach a child an alphabet for a language
he doesn’t speak, that his teacher probably doesn’t speak and then make him
read books in that foreign language?” His proposal is to use patois to teach
English.
The scepticism of others regarding such a proposition is that the children
may end up learning just patois. A mother is quoted as saying “These kids are
going to end up learning only Patois. Then what? My kids are going to apply
to school in America and write their application essays in Patois?” Because of
the emphasis placed on English in the Anglophone Caribbean territories and
because of its importance for school purposes, teachers are faced with a real
198 H AZEL S IMMONS –M C D ONALD

challenge as they attempt to teach English to creole speakers. The approaches

that have been used in the past have not worked well. In most instances an
immersion approach has been used but this has not worked partly because of
the lack of the proper scaffolding which the approach requires. Research
reports have shown subtractive bilingualism to be prevalent – at least in the
St. Lucian case – and the functional illiteracy rate is higher than is acceptable
or good for the country. When approaches continue to fail and nothing is done
to address the causes of failure, the education system becomes directly
responsible for perpetrating inequalities. It is therefore important that we be
clear about what is required in such contexts.
The need in the Caribbean is for the development of proficiency in the
school language, English, for the purposes of writing examinations using the
technology to access information, and for getting information from other sub-
jects and so on. This language for school purposes is different from the
language that we use for interpersonal communication. Cummins makes a dis-
tinction between Basic Interpersonal Skills (B I C S ) and Cognitive Academic
Language Proficiency (C A L P ). The latter requires the English that is needed
for successful functioning in academic work. While B I C S in English or alter-
native varieties will do reasonably well for casual communication, it is not
appropriate for academic purposes. C A L P therefore has to be a primary pur-
pose for teaching English for academic purposes.
Studies have shown that learners approach “native like levels of conver-
sational skills within two years of exposure to English, whereas they require a
period of five to seven years of school exposure for them to achieve as well as
native speakers in academic aspects of English” (Cummins 1994: 39). In most
Caribbean contexts even that number of years of schooling is not sufficient.
One important research finding that has not received attention in the Carib-
bean is that “the better developed children’s first language conceptual founda-
tion, the more likely they are to develop similarly high levels of conceptual
abilities in their second language” (Cummins 1994: 38). In the Caribbean, this
means the use of the alternative variety in a way that will be beneficial to
learners. Cummins makes the additional point that “the positive results of
programs that continue to promote literacy in L1 throughout elementary
school can be attributed to the combined efforts of reinforcing students’ cul-
tural identity and their conceptual growth” (1994: 39). The results of an on-
going study being conducted in St. Lucia with French creole speakers support
these findings (Simmons–McDonald, in press). However, there are com-
plexities that have to be considered in the case of creoles with the same
lexical base as the standard language. The work currently being done with
African American Vernacular English (A A V E ) speakers by Rickford as well
as with S L V speakers in St. Lucia (Simmons–McDonald) also shows that
Decolonizing English: The Caribbean Counter-Thrust 199

development of proficiency in C A L P in English is vastly improved when

attention is given to the conceptual development of the first language (in this
case, the alternative variety). The use of literature that makes use of alterna-
tive varieties is useful for that very purpose. It heightens learner awareness of
the contrasts between English and “English”, and results in multi-literacy and
higher levels of proficiency in the English that is needed for success in school.
A critical pedagogy, therefore, is one that is tailored in specific ways to
realize the objectives of multidialectalism and multi-literacy, which is pre-
cisely what speakers of alternative varieties need in order to break the cycle of
inequality. One way of doing this is to include the first language in the
learning process. How this can be done will involve a lengthy discussion that
cannot be taken up in this essay. It suffices to say that serious consideration of
alternative ways of instruction that take into account the cultural realities of
the learners and different ways of learning is necessary if the process of
decolonization is to be taken to its ultimate conclusion, namely, the complete
intellectual liberation of the people of the Caribbean region and their em-
powerment through utilization as counter-discourses of the range of lects that
are available within their communities.

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Re-Reading the Religious Bodies
of Postcolonial Literature

Fiona Darroch
University of Stirling

ABSTRACT
English, as the dominant world language, defines the Western construction
of the term ‘religion’. Realizing the assumptions being carried by the West-
ern, English-speaking imagination – ie, that religion or, more specifically,
religious bodies, are devoid of power – how can characters such as Ella out
of Erna Brodber’s novel Myal (1988) or Beloved from Toni Morrison’s
novel Beloved (1987) be understood and read? I will propose a redefinition
of the category religion using a postcolonial agenda. This agenda embraces
religious bodies as powerful, albeit filled with an ambiguous power, which
can be understood more successfully through heteronymous readings that
transcend Western doctrine and ideology.

B
E I N G I N V O L V E D I N I N T E R - D I S C I P L I N A R Y S T U D I E S across
English and Religious Studies led me to an interesting area of
research within postcolonial theory. A debate currently circulating
in religious studies is the problematic of the term ‘religion’ itself. As a
genealogically Western, or specifically English spoken category, ‘religion’
needs to be challenged. It has been constructed and dominated by the ‘Eng-
lish’ narratives of Christianity,1 which have restricted the diverse religious
1
I am here, and throughout the essay, referring to the English translations of the
Bible, which have often been used to perpetuate colonial violence. It is these Christian
narratives, and the impact the European division between church and state had on
social and academic perceptions, that has dominated the English-imagined assump-
tions of what religion is.
204 F IONA D ARROCH

identities of the world, and is therefore contradictory to the motivations of

postcolonial theory. However, I will show that it is still an important category
that can transcend the English spoken and imagined assumptions of what
religion is.
‘Religion’ in the sense it is discussed here is a Western construction and
therefore loaded with Western assumptions. These assumptions strip the reli-
gious body of power and construct religion as primitive, superstitious and
irrational. By using the term ‘religion’ to describe and explain the actions,
behaviour and beliefs of millions of people world-wide, these Western
assumptions are being used to understand the actions of the ‘other’. This
therefore becomes an essential area for the postcolonial theorist to address. I
will firstly examine the genealogy of the term ‘religion’ and how it became so
distorted. I will then address several questions: Should we discard the term
altogether, as some suggest? How can characters such as Ella out of Erna
Brodber’s novel Myal (1988), and Beloved from Toni Morrison’s novel
Beloved (1987) be understood if we either discard the category or use the
English-speaking imagination to understand them? They won’t be understood.
My argument is to propose a re-reading of the category ‘religion’ using a
postcolonial agenda while confronting the postcolonialist’s fear of using such
a term. This agenda embraces religious bodies as powerful, albeit filled with
an ambiguous power, which can be understood more successfully through
heteronomous readings that transcend Western doctrine and ideology.
For a very brief genealogy of the category religion we should start with the
etymology of the word. It goes back to Latin religio, ‘bond’ or ‘reverence’,
and is therefore rooted in Western semiotics. In the third century the term
became ‘christianized’. Those who worshipped the ‘one true God’, the God of
Christianity, were religious.
The Enlightenment is also an essential period in the development of West-
ern conceptions of ‘religion’. The Enlightenment, which took place within the
eighteenth-century, had a major impact on Western intellectual thought. As it
spread across Europe, church and state divided; rationality and reason
emerged as the new faith. Religion was increasingly labelled as irrational and
set up in opposition to intellect and science. And, as Richard King states,
We should be aware, therefore, that the central explanatory category of reli-
gious studies, namely the notion of ‘religion’ itself, is a Christian theological
category. Like the terms ‘mystical’ and ‘mysticism’, ‘religion’ is a culturally
specific social construction with a particular genealogy of its own. In applying
this category to the study of non-Western cultures, one should therefore be
aware of the theological origins of the term. (1999: 40)
It has been established that ‘religion’ is a Western term, rooted in Western
history and developed in conjunction with the English language. Religion is a
Re-Reading the Religious Bodies of Postcolonial Literature 205

part of the politics of the English language. Where do we go from here? How
do we approach non-Western cultures with a predominantly Western term?
The response by Tim Fitzgerald, which is echoed by many, is to “delete the
word ‘religion’” altogether (2000: 4). As the researcher becomes more aware
of “the theological domination of ‘religion’ the more irrelevant the concept of
religion will become, except as an ideological construct of western and west-
ern-dominated societies” (Fitzgerald 2000: 8). All the term appeals to, as it
stands, is Western imperialism. Do postcolonial theorists therefore have an
obligation to cease using the term ‘religion’ because of the loaded assump-
tions it carries?
If we do this, how do we interpret recurring scenes like the one I am about
to quote from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved?2 Beloved is the story of Sethe,
a woman brought up in slavery. The physical scarring on her back, which is
shaped like a tree, is a daily reminder of the inner torment that scratches the
depths of her soul. To prevent her children having to live through the same
nightmare, Sethe kills her newborn baby. The only word she can afford to put
on the gravestone is Beloved. Sethe becomes an outcast of the community,
taking her other daughter, Denver, with her. But Beloved returns to claim the
affection and love from her mother that she was denied at birth. The point at
which we pick up the story is when Beloved, whose jealous and vicious love
is cutting into Sethe like a knife, has drained Sethe of life.
When the women assembled outside 124, Sethe was breaking a lump of ice
into chunks. She dropped the ice pick into her apron pocket to scoop the
pieces into a basin of water. When the music entered the window she was
wringing a cool cloth to put on Beloved’s forehead […] Both women heard it
at the same time and both lifted their heads […] They saw Denver sitting on
the steps and beyond her, where the yard met the road, they saw the rapt faces
of thirty neighbourhood women […] For Sethe it was as though the Clearing
had come to her with all its heat and simmering leaves, where the voices of
women searched for the right combination, the key, the code, the sound that
broke the back of words. Building voice upon voice until they found it and
when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and
knock the pods off chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and trembled like the
baptized in its wash.
The singing women recognised Sethe at once and surprised themselves by
their absence of fear when they saw what stood next to her. The devil-child
was clever, they thought. And beautiful. It had taken the shape of a pregnant
woman, naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun. Thunderblack and

2
In the oral presentation of the paper, the same scene was shown from the film
adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (Touchstone Home Videos). It is an extremely
powerful and visual clip, and this should be taken into account when reading the
quotation.
206 F IONA D ARROCH

glistening, she stood on long straight legs, her belly big and tight. Vines of her
hair twisted all over her head. Jesus. Her smile was dazzling. (Morrison 1987:
261)
In this scene, and many others in postcolonial literature, ‘religion’ best de-
scribes what is taking place; as, for Sethe, the sound of the singing made one
tremble “like the baptized in its wash” (Morrison 1987: 261). Religion en-
compasses so much more than suggested replacement words such as ‘spiri-
tual’, ‘transcendental’, and ‘ritual’ including its Western and Christian legacy.
In order to historically, politically and sociologically understand and interpret
scenes such as that in Beloved, which expose the fragmented identities caused
by slavery and colonization, it is important to use the word ‘religion’. For
example, the community forgive Sethe and come together as a religious body
to heal her and help her move on from her tragic past. Also, the presence of
the white colonial man (who appears in the next paragraph riding his horse,
and who sends Sethe into a trance of re-living her tragic past) confronts the
Western image of what religion is and how religious bodies should behave. Its
baggage (ie, white Christianity’s colonial legacy and its involvement in
slavery) is part of the process. Instead of hiding away from it, we should con-
front it.
The identity of the African – or any other – diaspora is about living on the
boundaries and relocating, or re-reading borders and territory. Religion is an
essential part of this process as a result of the extent of its involvement in
colonization and slavery. Religion and postcolonialism, as disciplines, meet
on an awkward threshold; one is confronting its own Western ideologies,
while the other is deconstructing Western ideologies. Catherine Albanese dis-
cusses religion as an essential yet slippery category that both takes place on
borders and sets up boundaries.
Religion cannot be defined very easily because it thrives both within and out-
side of boundaries. It crosses and crisscrosses the boundaries that definitions
want to set because paradoxically, it too concerns boundaries. The boundaries
of religion, however, are different from the logical boundaries of good
definitions. In the end, religion is a feature that encompasses all of human life.
It exists in organised and informal versions, among rich and poor, with
thisworldly and otherworldly orientations, and so forth. So it is difficult if not
impossible to define religion. (Albanese 1999: 3)
This poststructuralist interpretation of the category of ‘religion’ allows it to
transcend the strict homogeneous definition that dominates the English-speak-
ing imagination and makes space for a more heteronomous framework that
embraces the powerful religious bodies throughout the diaspora.
Re-Reading the Religious Bodies of Postcolonial Literature 207

A perfect example of an ambiguously powerful religious body in postcolo-

nial literature is Erna Brodber’s character Ella from her novel Myal (1988).
Written in stylized Caribbean dialect, this novel challenges the anglophone
imagination through the very idiom it is written in. It allows no space for
assumptions. It escapes definitions and boundaries. And it is steeped in what
has to be understood as religiosity: It is a hybrid of (non-Western) Christian-
ity, African traditions, Rastafarianism and voodoo. ‘Myal’ is the community’s
reaction to obeah, or spirit-thievery: returning souls to their rightful owners.
This myal team includes a Baptist minister and a Methodist minister’s wife.
Ella herself is neither black nor white; she is an “alabaster baby” (Brodber
1988: 7) and is suspended from the three axes of power: race, class and
gender. After Ella has married the American, Selwyn, who swiftly steals her
spirit to create a “coon show”; she “trips out indeed” and only the community
(and myal) can save her:
– I have been bad from the beginning. I had better pray that the Lord Jesus
enter in and cleanse me. – But she wouldn’t let him enter in the right form and
through the right door. He could only come as the baby Jesus, into her uterus,
fully nine months, curled up fetal fashion and ready to be delivered at any
time.
Only then did she speak to her husband:
– Mammy Mary’s mulatto mule must have maternity wear. – she said it fast:
– MammyMary’smulattomulemusthavematernitywear – she said it slow:
– Mammy Mary’s mulatto mule must have maternity wear. –
She sang it. She said it in paragraphs. She said it forever. Ella had tripped out
indeed. Selwyn was scared stiff. (Brodber 1988: 84)
Is the postcolonial theorist ironically echoing the colonizer, represented in
both the clip from the film adaptation of Beloved and by Selwyn in Myal, by
refusing to discuss characters like Ella as religious, by being “scared stiff” of
postcolonial religious bodies? Is there a fear of exoticizing or othering if the
term ‘religious’ is used? This is a dependency on the Western construction of
religion, from the Enlightenment, which labels it as an irrational, backward
and primitive way of dealing with life. We must abandon these ‘hang-ups’
and re-orientate our approach to an understanding of religion, so that the
power-relations being exchanged through Ella’s, and others’, religious bodies
can be fully appreciated, and the diasporic identity can be understood in its
entirety.
Other postcolonial literature which has powerful religious imagery in-
cludes Wilson Harris’s novel Palace of the Peacock (1960), which takes the
form of a Christian religious journey or pilgrimage that includes a meeting
with Christ as a carpenter, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, and Pauline
Melville’s collection of short stories, Shape Shifter (1990). The list could
208 F IONA D ARROCH

easily be extended. Those works are full of complex yet powerful experiences
that are rooted in hybridity and migration. It is here that we should echo Stuart
Hall and Homi Bhabha, who celebrate heterogeneity and diversity as part of
postcolonial and diasporic identity. Religiosity should be understood as
diverse and changing: its colonial legacy should be confronted so that it can
be understood and applied to the diverse and changing identities of the dia-
spora. As David Chidester says, “the academic study of religion might
actually be well positioned to rise to the challenge of the postcolonial through
sustained attention to the strategic locations and dislocations of the human in
the new contact zones” (Chidester 2000: 435).
If we confront our fears of exoticizing and othering, and use the category
‘religion’, not through the homogeneous English-speaking imagination, but
through the heterogeneous dialects of the diaspora, the creativity and power of
the postcolonial identity is realized.

WORKS CITED
Albanese, Catherine (1999). America: Religions and Religion (Belmont: Wads-
worth).
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture (London: Routledge).
Brodber, Erna (1988). Myal (London & Port of Spain: New Beacon).
Chidester, David (2000). ‘Colonialism,’ in The Guide to the Study of Religion, ed.
Willi Braun & Russell T. McCutcheon (London: Cassell).
Fitzgerald, Tim (2000). The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford UP).
King, Richard (1999). Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and the
“Mystic East” (London & New York: Routledge).
Morrison, Toni (1987). Beloved (London: Pan/Picador).

[
An African’s Trouble with His Masters’ Voices

Michael Meyer
Bamberg University

ABSTRACT
The Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James
Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw appropriates Evangelical discourse in order to
establish Gronniosaw’s moral authority, which is derived from Gronni-
osaw’s submission to God, has to be authenticated by clerical authorities and
allows him to criticize his corrupt masters. Gronniosaw exposes discrepan-
cies between his masters’ religious and economic discourses and practices
less by direct argument than by the negating force of conspicuous silence, by
repetitions of scenes of abuse and abject poverty and by the ironic
emplotment of his life. Being a good Christian alienates him from Western
society and endangers his very survival in a commercial culture, which
undermines the language of the spirit and compares unfavourably to the
African subsistence economy.

W HY HAS THE FLOOD OF CRITICISM of slave narratives

almost bypassed Ukawsaw Gronniosaw’s autobiography of
1770? It seems that his decision to write a spiritual autobiogra-
phy does not allow any space for individuality and African culture, so that the
text does not respond to interests in the emancipation of Africans. Henry
Louis Gates, Jr. asks how an African can make a white text speak with a black
voice (1988: 55). According to Gates, Gronniosaw overcomes the Bible’s
initial silence for the illiterate African by mastering reading and writing,
which enables him to construct a self according to the Western tradition at the
cost of his African culture and identity (1988: 62–63, 65). Gates argues that
the act of writing repudiates the white Great Chain of Being, which places the
210 M ICHAEL M EYER

African at the level of animals, but insists that the black voice is absent in a
language that posits “the irreducible element of cultural difference” (1988:
70) between white and black. Gates suggests, but does not perform, a dialogic
reading of the text. Helen Thomas is much more aware of the dialogic poten-
tial of the slave narrative, which appropriates rather than assimilates Evangel-
ical discourse, in which the dispossessed are empowered by the spirit and give
voice to protest like Dissenters (2000: 167, 183, 188). Gronniosaw’s narrative
neither excludes a black perspective according to Gates nor “articulates an
uninterrupted continuum of preslavery cultural identity and [...] ancestral
spirits” according to Thomas (2000: 197). Instead, the black voice is not
simply absent but asserted as a negative and negating presence that presents
assimilation as alienation from African and Anglo-American cultures.
I would like to put forward three arguments concerning Gronniosaw’s
position in and between English discourses:
(1) Gronniosaw reveals discrepancies between the voice of God and the
voices of his masters. Foucault maintains that a discursive system determines
who is entitled to speak with authority in which ways about what to whom
(1991: 22–30). Authority is a thorny issue in Evangelicalism. Sacvan Berco-
vitch points out that the Bible is the sole authority for the individual Puritan,
who becomes his own exegete, a fact which sparked intrasectarian conflicts
about the correct reading of the text (1975: 28). Authority is subject to nego-
tiation in Gronniosaw’s communication with God and his Christian masters.
(2) None of the critics I am aware of takes full account of Gronniosaw’s
“digression” on African life, which juxtaposes the African subsistence eco-
nomy and the Western capitalist economy.
(3) Gronniosaw exposes discrepancies between his masters’ religious and
economic discourses. His marginal voice negotiates the conflict between reli-
gion and commerce, a core problem of British identity and international
position in the eighteenth century (see Dabydeen 1985: 45).
According to his autobiography, Gronniosaw was a Prince of Borno in
what is today Northern Nigeria. The boy came with an ivory merchant to the
Gold Coast, where he was sold into slavery. He was educated and converted
by one of his masters, a Dutch Minister, in New York, who set him free upon
his death. After doing several odd jobs in the American colonies, he enlisted
with the British army, fought in Martinique and Cuba, and finally arrived in
England in 1762–63. He married a poor English woman, who shared his
struggle for survival. In about 1770, the aged immigrant published the story of
his life. Gronniosaw came to the West at the time of the Great Awakening in
North America in the first half of the eighteenth century (Ferguson 1994: 395)
and the Evangelical Revival in England in the second half (Porter 1990: 308).
An African’s Trouble with His Masters’ Voices 211

These movements share an antagonism towards moral corruption and mater-

ialism in a capitalist society, which threatens to displace God by money.
Nobody seems better qualified to discuss the difficult relationship between
God and Mammon than the Puritan businessman and bankrupt, Daniel Defoe.
In 1707, Defoe praises, albeit with tongue in cheek, the power of money with
allusions to Christ’s miracles:
Well art thou called the god of this world [...] Thou makest homely things
fair, old things young, crooked things straight; thou hast the great remedy of
love, thou can’st give the blind an eye, the lame a leg, the froward a temper,
and the scandalous a character. (1951: 131–32)
Defoe wavers between the definition of money as “the vehicle of Providence”
(1951: 131) and as an agent of its own. He calls money a “necessary evil” that
even its critics strive for – its legal possession, he maintains, “is the true
foundation of order in the world”; money is “the mighty center of human
action, the great rudder the world steers by, the vast hinge the globe turns on”
(1951: 133). Gronniosaw, by contrast, forms a contrast between religion and
money, but has to realize that he can hardly escape the rule of commerce.
In order to understand how Gronniosaw speaks about religion and the eco-
nomy we have to discuss the question of authority and authorization. An
instance of misappropriated authority in the story serves as a mise en abîme
for Gronniosaw’s autobiography. Gronniosaw, like Caliban, first learns to
curse in the other language but contains his swearing after this experience: an
old black slave warns him not to swear or he will be taken by the devil to burn
in hell. Gronniosaw repeats this lesson to his swearing mistress, expressing
his concern for her welfare. The old slave is severely punished and excluded
from the company of the domestic slaves. Gronniosaw is left unharmed but
decides to refrain from swearing in the future; whether from fear of punish-
ment in this world or the next he does not say (2000 [1772]: 12–13). The
black slave is not authorized to employ God’s discourse in a way that gives
him moral superiority over his secular master, but his masters violate Christ-
ian ethics by cursing and by punishing the moral agent. Gronniosaw tries not
to antagonize his masters. He learns his lesson and refrains from commenting
on his masters’ behaviour, but the acute reader will perceive the implied value
judgement on his masters. If Gates complains about Gronniosaw’s accultura-
tion, he ignores the strategic silence we have to pay close attention to. The
scarcity of explicit interpretation draws our attention to repetitions, gaps,
contradictions and arguments by emplotment. Gronniosaw has a penchant for
repetition with a difference. Thus, the scene discussed above is preceded by a
similar situation in which he decides as a young boy to no longer openly ques-
tion his tribe’s faith because his father threatens to beat him. The Christian
212 M ICHAEL M EYER

masters teach the slaves not to turn their discourse against them as his father
teaches him not to question the basic tenets of his culture. Since the impove-
rished African tells his story to a white amanuensis and addresses white
readers who are steeped in Christianity and capitalism, we can hardly expect
explicit criticism of their basic assumptions but have to look for implicit value
judgements. The arbitrary or hostile reactions of masters towards the sub-
altern’s questioning or appropriation of authority demand a reading for multi-
ple meanings, which the authorizing preface attempts to contain.
In the preface to the slave narrative, the Methodist clergyman Walter
Shirley suggests a strictly Evangelical interpretation of the text (see Thomas
2000: 193). Shirley stresses the providential design in Gronniosaw’s life, and
particularly his “saving Heart-Acquaintance and Union with the triune God in
Christ reconciling the World unto himself; and not imputing their Trespasses”
(2000 [1772]: 4). He characterizes the African as a patient Christian, who
does not judge evil but endures it patiently: “he would rather embrace the
Dung-hill, having Christ in his Heart, than give up his spiritual Possessions
and Enjoyment, to fill the Throne of Princes” (4). The Methodist presents
Gronniosaw as an object in a moral economy, in which Gronniosaw was pur-
chased by the cross, is given a good character by “creditable Persons,” and is
therefore entitled to the Christian reader’s “charitable Regard” (4).
The heathen Africans pray to their gods in silence, which suggests that
these gods do not “signify.” The heathen boy, who has an inkling of one
superior Being, is addressed by God in an inarticulate voice of thunder that
paralyses the boy with fear. When Gronniosaw’s first white master reads
prayers from the Bible, he is amazed to see the book talk to the white man,
and is very disappointed that the book does not speak to him when he puts his
ears to it. Instead of attributing the silence to his ignorance of the other lan-
guage, the boy thinks that the book despises his race. The young slave
gradually acquires Dutch and English, improving his understanding of his
white masters and the Bible, but he feels too wicked to follow Christ’s call
(11–16). The silent service under a palm tree in Africa is displaced by Gron-
niosaw’s prayer to God under an oak tree in America. Richard Baxter’s Call
to the Unconverted prepares him for God’s answers to his prayers and his
conversion experience: “I was so drawn out of myself, and so fill’d and awed
by the Presence of God that I saw (or thought I saw) light inexpressible dart
from heaven upon me” (17). The awesome spiritual displacement of the self
by God reminds us of the displacement of the slave’s legal and social person
by the master who possesses him. But Gronniosaw puts himself implicitly
above his worldly masters, echoing Baxter: “I blest God for my poverty, that I
had no worldly riches or grandeur to draw my heart from Him” (18; cf Baxter
1995 [1657]: 14, 104). In accord with Baxter, Gronniosaw would like to turn
An African’s Trouble with His Masters’ Voices 213

away from this world, but secular concerns force him to return to worldly
affairs in order to survive. In spite of his covenant with the ultimate authority,
Gronniosaw is aware of the fact that his illumination “will not gain credit with
many” because the mystical experience “cannot be expressed and only con-
ceived by those who have experienced the like” (17). Gronniosaw qualifies as
a member of the elect but knows that worldly masters have to authorize the
spiritual elevation of the African. After his master’s death and his manu-
mission, Gronniosaw follows his late master’s voice, travels to the Nether-
lands, and is accredited by Dutch Calvinist ministers, to whom he success-
fully relates his experience, being inspired by God’s words: “they were all
very well satisfied, and persuaded I was what I pretended to be” (26). His
credit as a Christian, however, does not bring him worldly credit or money.
On the contrary, Gronniosaw’s appropriation of Baxter’s Puritan discourse
and its deprecation of the pursuit of wealth increases his alienation from
worldly society. It would be wrong, however, merely to relate Gronniosaw’s
attitude towards money to his assimilation into Puritanism because it goes
back to the subsistence economy of his home country.
In Africa, the author maintains, the palm tree provides food, drink and
clothing to the people (6). John Locke would have compared these Africans to
early human beings, who “contented themselves with what un-assisted Nature
offered to their Necessities” (1988 [1690]: 299); everyone had a right to take
as much as he could use (298). Locke distinguishes the truly useful but perish-
able things men need for the support of their lives from gold, which “has its
value only from the consent of Men” (301). The difference between the
African subsistence economy and the Western capitalist economy is crucial to
an understanding of Gronniosaw’s attitude towards money and Western
slavery. His path into slavery is quite unusual. The boy leaves home on a
spiritual quest prompted by his discontent with the heathen faith in order to
become acquainted with white people. The king of the Gold Coast mistakes
him for a spy, sentences him to death, but then pardons him on condition that
he be sold into slavery. Gronniosaw becomes desperate to exchange his social
death as a slave for his real death because nobody wants to buy the boy who is
too small. It is not his value as a slave that makes a Dutch captain buy him
“for two yards of check” (2000 [1772]: 11). He appeals in his own language to
a Dutch captain, “father, save me” (11), which, of course, the Dutchman can-
not understand but God must have heard. Gronniosaw takes recourse to God’s
intervention to explain the bargain in one line, but explains in seven lines how
“large [a] quantity of gold” (11) he had in rings and chains, which he gladly
parted with. Henry Louis Gates maintains that Gronniosaw betrays his Afri-
can heritage by willingly exchanging his chain of gold for a set of Western
clothes (1988: 61). But Gronniosaw symbolically exchanges the gold, which
214 M ICHAEL M EYER

was of no use to him, for his life, which seems to have been of no use to the
trader. By expressing his disregard for the gold, which enriched the slaver, he
points out the difference between the heathen and the “serious” (11) Christian,
who profits from the slave trade. In view of the narrator’s Puritan aversion to
wealth, the adjective “serious” for the Christian takes on an ironic hue. If the
value of gold or money, according to Locke, depends upon the consent of
men, Gronniosaw clearly refuses to acknowledge its value. Gold had been the
fundamental value of the Anglo-American economies since the mercantile
nations used it to guarantee their currency and based the estimate of their
power on bullion. We can read Gronniosaw’s belittlement of gold as an impli-
cit subversion of what Defoe calls “the true foundation of order in the world”
(1951: 133). However, the scene shows that Gronniosaw cannot have access
to Christianity without being submitted to the rules of commerce. As a slave,
Gronniosaw suffers from spiritual setbacks, but as a free man, he tends to
suffer from worldly needs. But Gronniosaw insists how important freedom is
to him: he repeats three times in four lines that his master left him his freedom
on his deathbed (18). His silence on the evils of slavery and his interpretation
of his abuse and mistreatment as a free African as divine tribulations must not
be misunderstood as a plea for benevolent patriarchal slavery but should be
seen as a concession to his former masters and to Christian readers. The em-
plotment of his story suggests an ironic reversal of situations: Africa is
marked by spiritual poverty and economic welfare; North America and Eng-
land are rich but driven by spiritual and economic “warfare.” Gronniosaw is
well-off but discontented in Africa, poor and full of spiritual doubts in
America, and destitute but firm in faith in England.
Disappointed with the spiritual wilderness in North America, Gronniosaw
embarks for England in order to be among Christians and escape “cruelty or
ingratitude” (22). However, his chosen land turns out to be the dung-hill men-
tioned in the preface, a place of sin that is “worse than Sodom (considering the
great advantages they have)” (23). His life in England becomes an alternating
series of destitution and relief reaching him through Evangelical worthies,
thanks to God’s intervention.
The African and his family are threatened with eviction, and are forced to
pawn their clothes and sell their bed for want of money to buy food. Gronni-
osaw dwells extensively on a situation where the starving family was glad to
survive upon one raw carrot (29) a day. Their lack of shelter, clothing and
food is explained as a test of his faith, but also compares unfavourably with
the ease of natural subsistence in Africa. Gronniosaw does not need to tell us
explicitly that the misery he suffers gives the lie to the superiority of a capital-
ist economy over a subsistence economy. Gronniosaw and his wife appear to
be willing and able to work hard, but nevertheless are victims of unemploy-
An African’s Trouble with His Masters’ Voices 215

ment and cutthroat competition among workers. However, Gronniosaw re-

frains from joining the labourers in their struggle for higher wages because he
leaves justice up to God and does not belong to the English. Time and again,
the family depends on the private charity of Christians, because Gronniosaw
as an immigrant is not entitled to charity from a parish. The moral economy
of charity makes up for the deficiency of the moneyed economy. The English
moral economy, however, not only complements capitalism but is based upon
capitalism, which generates profits that to some extent are redistributed by
charity and maintains the worldly hierarchy between haves and have-nots.
Gronniosaw himself donates all the money he does not need for his bare
survival to those in need. Again, he does not act according to capitalist rules
or even those of prudence, but follows Baxter’s strict appeal not to pursue
worldly wealth as well as the rules of subsistence economy. Giving alms
without regard to himself, Gronniosaw time and again is in need of charity
himself and never rises above others: his Christian selflessness leads to finan-
cial ruin, which in turn forces him to pay more attention to worldly concerns
in order to survive.
Nevertheless, he seems to be content with his lot: “I am willing, and even
desirous to be counted as nothing, a stranger in the world, and a pilgrim here”
(25–26). He became a non-person as a slave and was treated as a nobody in
England and America due to his race and his poverty: he is nothing and he has
“nothing” (33). The Christian nothing, however, is completed by God. Gron-
niosaw hopes, in agreement with Baxter, that his worldly losses will be made
up by God: “I am not without hope that they [the trials and troubles] have
been all sanctified to me” (26): ie, rendered spiritually profitable to him. The
writer follows Baxter in his credit of God’s word instead of credit in this
world (Baxter 1995 [1657]: 60, 140). He hopes for a good return on his in-
vestment and the maximum profit of eternal salvation for temporal humilia-
tion. Barely able to survive in England, the African immigrant desires his
release from the diaspora:
As Pilgrims, and very poor Pilgrims, we are travelling through many diffi-
culties towards our H E A V E N L Y H O M E , and waiting patiently for his
gracious call, when the Lord shall deliver us out of the evils of this present
world and bring us to the E V E R L A S T I N G G L O R I E S of the world to
come. (2000 [1772]: 33–34)
If we consider that he came to England as his chosen land, this final sentence
of his autobiography expresses his utter disillusionment with the country.
Gronniosaw would be a prime example of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic
culture as an everlasting journey in diaspora.
216 M ICHAEL M EYER

In the end, the moral and the monetary economies meet: Gronniosaw’s
ethics pay in this world, because he can sell his autobiography. The spiritual
autobiography can be read as an investment that pays moral interest by edify-
ing readers, or as paper-credit in a moral economy in which, for once, morals
raise money, and the donors may pay for their ‘credit’ in the world beyond.
The fact that Gronniosaw sells best as “nothing” recalls Defoe’s glorification
of credit as a “substantial non-entity” that transforms nothing into something,
paper into money (1951: 116–18). In an economic era that depended heavily
on growing credit transactions and in which “all forms of credit-worthy paper
– even lottery tickets – tended to become negotiable and pass into circulation”
(Porter 1990: 188), a creditable spiritual autobiography was a “good” invest-
ment.
Gronniosaw’s deprecation of wealth and his charitable dispensation of sur-
plus can be traced back to Puritanism as well as to an African subsistence
economy. Gronniosaw is doubly inscribed as nothing, because he yields his
self in Christian terms and owns nothing in economic terms. By embracing
nothing as his identity, the African refuses to follow the rules of Western soci-
ety and capitalism and is entitled to charity, an exchange of something for
nothing. The politics of Puritan discourse makes him trust in divine rather
than worldly justice and enable him to raise his voice in protest against wealth
and capitalism. Thus, the African is not simply absent from his text, as Gates
maintains, but voices his conspicuous silent protest by gaps, contradictions
and emplotment against hypocritical Christian capitalists who retrieve gold
and slaves from the colonies in the service of Mammon. Gronniosaw’s dis-
course of negation prefigures Friday’s more radical resistance to interaction
and involvement with the English in Coetzee’s Foe. At the end of the novel,
Friday, who seems to be autistic, puts on Foe’s robe and wig and writes “rows
and rows of the letter o” (1986: 152).

WORKS CITED
Baxter, Richard (1995). A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live (1657), digital
edition, ed. Clyde C. Price (Christian Digital Library Foundation).
Bercovitch, Sacvan (1975). The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven
CT & London: Yale UP).
Coetzee, J . M . (1986). Foe (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Dabydeen, David (1985). ‘Eighteenth-century English literature on commerce and
slavery,’ in Dabydeen, The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester:
Manchester UP): 50–67.
Defoe, Daniel (1951). ‘ “ Money, money, money”; Review Vol. IV, No. 106 (Thurs-
day, October 16, 1707),’ in The Best of Defoe’s Review: An Anthology, ed. W . L .
Payne (New York: Columbia UP): 131–33.
An African’s Trouble with His Masters’ Voices 217

Ferguson, Robert A. (1994). ‘The American enlightenment, 1750–1820,’ in The

Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 1: 1590–1820, ed. Sacvan
Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge UP): 345–538.
Foucault, Michel (1991). Die Ordnung des Diskurses, tr. W. Seiter, intro. R. Koners-
mann (extended ed.; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer).
Gates Jr., Henry Louis (1988). ‘James Gronniosaw and the trope of the talking
book,’ in Studies in Autobiography, ed. James Olney (New York & Oxford:
Oxford UP): 51–72.
Gilroy, Paul (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge MA: Harvard UP).
Gronniosaw, Ukawsaw James Albert (2000). ‘A narrative of the most remarkable
particulars in the life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince,
as related by himself. 1772,’ in Slave Narratives, ed. W.L. Andrews and Henry
Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America): 1–34.
Locke, John (1988). Two Treatises of Government (1690), ed. Peter Laslett (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge UP).
Porter, Roy (1990). English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Penguin Social
History of Britain, rev. ed.; Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Thomas, Helen (2000). Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testi-
monies (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 38; Cambridge: Cambridge UP).

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Home, Hybridity and (Post)colonial Discourse in
Caryl Phillips’s A State of Independence

Petra Tournay
Cyprus College, Nicosia, Cyprus

ABSTRACT
Homi Bhabha defines the concept of hybridity as that moment when colonial
discourse exhibits traces of the language of the Other, thus enabling the
critic to trace complex movements of disarming alterity in the colonial text. I
will argue that the same process applies the other way round: the post-
colonial text exhibits traces of the language of the Other, that is traces of
colonial rhetorical strategies. As a direct consequence of ‘psychological’ οr
‘cultural’ colonization, this interaction of discourses seems to be most
notoriously foregrounded in the so-called narratives of return. Building on
various theories surrounding the notions of ‘home’ and ‘hybridity’ this essay
will explore the particular discursive strategies employed in an exemplary
narrative of return. Caryl Phillips’s novel A State of Independence (1986) is
presented from the perspective of an African-Caribbean homecomer – equip-
ped with ‘imperial eyes’ (Pratt) – whose nostalgic dream of home reifies into
an extremely problematic experience. In my essay I will attempt to show that
the particular narrative and discursive strategies employed in the text are
prime indicators of the hybrid nature both of the migrant or diasporic subject
and his discourse.

How far he had traveled both in miles and time

(A State of Independence)

H
O M I B H A B H A D E F I N E S the concept of hybridity as that moment
when colonial discourse exhibits traces of the language of the
Other, thus enabling the critic to trace complex movements of
220 P ETRA T OURNAY

disarming alterity in the colonial text (Young 1995: 22). I would like to argue
that the same process applies the other way round: the postcolonial text exhi-
bits traces of the language of the Other – traces of colonial rhetorical strate-
gies. As a direct consequence of what I would term ‘psychological’ or ‘cul-
tural’ colonization, this interaction of discourses seems to be most notoriously
foregrounded in narratives of return. In this sense, the narrative discussed in
this essay constitutes a representative example of these particular discursive
strategies.1
Caryl Phillips’s novel A State of Independence (1986) presents the return
of an African-Caribbean homecomer whose nostalgic dream of home reifies
into an extremely problematic experience. As a returned exile from England –
the former colonial power – the main character, Bertram Francis, comes home
equipped with imperial eyes, to quote the title of Mary Louise Pratt’s influ-
ential study.
In this essay, I will show that the specific discourse of homecoming is nur-
tured by the interplay of belonging and difference and gives expression to
what Stuart Hall refers to as a “process of identification and otherness” (1996:
445). This “doubling” (445) – as Hall also calls this process – operates within
the exiled individual resulting in his split or hybrid identity, which determines
his perception and representation of the people and the place he returns to or
explores. In this context the American anthropologist Jeannette Mageo’s idea
of “competing systems of self” (1995: 283) may be useful in describing the
returnee’s experience. According to Mageo, part of this experience is that “the
self can be the site for the play of discourses” (291). From this it follows that
a person may possess distinct discourses to manoeuvre his patchwork self.
The returnee could consequently be described as bilingual, not in the sense of
speaking two different languages, but in possessing two frequently conflicting
cultural discourses. In other words, repatriates could be said to have that
‘Other’ – the lingual Other – within the self.
It is precisely manifestations of this discursive Otherness within the self
that I will discuss with reference to A State of Independence as a representa-
tive narrative of return. As I will argue, this alternative discursive Other mani-
fests itself in traces of rhetorical conventions commonly associated with colo-
nial discourse as an immediate result of the homecomer’s ‘positioning’ in-
between cultures. As Stuart Hall reminds us, the return to the homeland is
therefore never a “simple ‘return’ to the past which is not re-experienced
through the categories of the present” (1996: 448). There is no simple ‘reco-

1
The discursive similarities between returnee literature and colonial literature also
stem from the fact that narratives of return may be viewed as a sub-genre of travel and
exploration writing and thus almost inevitably follow conventional discursive modes
typical of the genre.
Caryl Phillips: Home, Hybridity and (Post)colonial Discourse 221

very’ that is not “transformed by the identit[y] of the present” (1996: 448).
Bertram and other returnees thus fall into the category of those individuals
whom David Spurr, in his discussion of Michel Leiris’ famous essay on
ethnography and colonialism, calls “the most culturally compromised mem-
bers of [post]colonial society, the native-born but European-educated
evolués” (1993: 139; my insertion).
At this stage it should be clarified that in this study the term colonial dis-
course is used in the widest sense of the word and is not limited to a specific
historical period. In her extensive study on travel writing, Mary Louise Pratt
points out that certain standard colonial tropes “get repeated in contemporary
travel accounts written deep in the post-colonial era of ‘underdevelopment’
and decolonization” (1992: 217).2 Following David Spurr, I will more speci-
fically treat colonial discourse as a series of rhetorical principles which
“survive beyond the classic colonial era and which continue to color percep-
tions of the non-Western world” (1993: 8).
Apart from the meta-historical nature of colonial discourse and its rele-
vance beyond a circumscribed historical time and space, the idea of investi-
gating instances of colonial discourse in narratives of return was suggested by
an additional recurrent theme in these texts. The returnee’s experience of dis-
orientation is frequently complicated by rejection by the natives. Swift
Dickinson has aptly summarized the predicament of the homecomer as
follows: “The exile-intruder is dis-placed into a colonialist by the local, who
recognizes [in him] a shadow of the oppressor” (1993: 121). For the purpose
of my essay and following from all of the above, I therefore propose to under-
stand this shadow as the shadow of the colonial within the homecomer that
has manifest repercussions on the discursive practices in returnee literature.
Other critics have not failed to notice the split in Bertram’s character.
Referring to the standard insider /outsider division, Jesús Varela Zapata, for
example, describes him as an “ambivalent character […] whose vision [is] at
the same time that of the insider and of the foreigner” (1999: 397). This critic
even makes reference to Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes and travel
accounts of the so-called Third World, without, however, further pursuing this
train of thought by applying Pratt’s model to the novel. In this study I will,
therefore, take a systematic look at any evidence of colonial discourse, basing
my analysis in particular on the categories provided in Imperial Eyes (1992)
and Spurr’s The Rhetoric of Empire (1993).

2
Pratt distinguishes the accounts by early colonial writers from those of European
postcolonial metropolitan writers in that the former were still driven by engaging in a
civilizing mission whereas the latter “condemn what they see, trivialize it and dis-
associate themselves utterly from it” (1992: 217).
222 P ETRA T OURNAY

Throughout A State of Independence we encounter renderings of one of the

standard tropes in colonial writing: the depiction of the ‘other’ surroundings –
landscape and people – as motionless, lethargic and static. Bertram observes
children “standing impassively” (17)3 outside their houses; cane-cutters are
compared to “dusty statues” and “When they moved it was like watching the
birth of stone” (122).
Upon his arrival on his native island, the first person Bertram meets is an
immigration officer who “seemed uninterested in anything […] the young
man’s face [was] seemingly vacant and uncluttered with thought.” This leads
Bertram to wonder if the officer was “the victim of some form of lethargy-
inducing sickness” (12). Not only is the immigration officer perceived as
slow-witted, possibly retarded, he is even diagnosed as suffering from an
illness. When the immigration officer doesn’t catch on to Bertram’s attempt at
irony: “You planning on working here to support yourself?” / “I look like a
millionaire?”, he is described as staring “blankly” at Bertram, “who now
realized he would have to elaborate” (12). At first glance this passage evokes
laughter, but it is precisely the benevolent humour and the obvious irony that
reveal the arrogant stance adopted by the Westerner passing judgement from a
position of superiority so frequently found in colonial writing. A similar por-
trayal of the customs officer follows: “like his colleague at immigration he too
seemed tired and indifferent. He enquired half-heartedly whether Bertram had
something to declare” (13).4 Not only humans but also the landscape appear
phlegmatic to Bertram – for example: “On the near side of the road the slack
sea, the waves too sluggish to break” (17; my emphasis).
These perceptions of a general lethargy may be contrasted with a recollec-
tion of Bertram’s past: “Bertram remembered that one of the things he had
found most appealing about Patsy was her tranquillity. People had always
stared at her because she walked so slowly, so calmly, even in the teeming
rain” (90). Bertram remembers that there is a different interpretation of slow-
ness that can indeed be very appealing. It comes as no surprise that it is
through the woman he once loved (still loves?) that this realization occurs,
promising the possibility of excavating a part of Bertram’s hidden ‘other’ self.

3
The page numbers of all further references to the novel are given in the text.
4
The cultural gap between Bertram and the locals is furthermore clearly captured
in the contrast of the quick Western pace of life with the slower pace of the Caribbean.
In answer to his impatient question “Well, you going to stand there all day?” Bertram
receives the taxi-driver’s retort that “we don’t rush things here” (16). The man further
reminds him that it is not the locals who “must adjust to [the homecomer’s] pace” but,
rather, the returnees who “must remember just who it is they dealing with” (17). See
also Swift Dickinson’s discussion of this passage (1993: 121).
Caryl Phillips: Home, Hybridity and (Post)colonial Discourse 223

According to David Spurr, colonial discourse bears a “constant uncer-

tainty” and shows an “inherent confusion of identity and difference” (1993:
7). As Ulla Rahbek has pointed out, this state of uncertainty and confusion in
Bertram is conveyed “through the overuse […] of expressions such as: ‘don’t
know’, ‘seemed’, ‘maybe’, wondered’, ‘no idea’, ‘uncertain’, ‘confused’, ‘un-
sure’, ‘assumed’, ‘supposed’, ‘unclear’, ‘mystified’, ‘think’” (2000: 3). In
some passages, however, this vocabulary of uncertainty is contrasted with
claims of utter certainty – for example: “He knew full well” (10) or “I know
who it is I’m dealing with” (17). This discursive ambivalence is indicative of
the returnee’s confusion in trying hard to negotiate a state of uncertainty and
insecurity with the need for security and self-affirmation.
The rhetorical gesture of describing a scene from a higher vantage point is
a further recurrent feature of much travel and exploration writing. Although a
convention in nineteenth-century fiction, in travel accounts ‘promontory de-
scriptions’ affirm the power of the colonial or imperial gaze. Mary Louise
Pratt calls this trope the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene (1992: 201) as it
emphasizes the writer’s privileged point of view based on the visual authority
of his panoramic vista.5 This commanding view – as David Spurr calls the
gesture – “conveys a sense of mastery over the unknown and over what is
often perceived by the Western writer as strange and bizarre” (1993: 15).
Both Pratt (1992: 216) and Spurr (1993: 18) give examples of how the con-
trolling view has survived in descriptions of the postcolonial world, still re-
flecting the superior viewpoint of the observer, with the difference that he
now frequently expresses his disappointment and disillusionment with the
scene he gazes upon.
In A State of Independence, Bertram is taken up a hill by Livingstone – his
illegitimate son, as the reader later comes to realize – and two of his work-
mates at the Royal Hotel (note the imperial implications of the name) for
Bertram to “see everything” (126). The following passage of the arduous
‘ascent to the mount’ features standard terminology frequently found in pro-
montory descriptions, such as “aerial view”, “view”, “from this height”, “gaze
down”, “vantage point” (127). When Livingstone tells Bertram that the boys
sometimes take tourists up to the hill-top – thus likening him to a tourist – he
at the same time stresses Bertram’s privileged position: “Not many people get
this vantage point” (127). From the summit Bertram surveys the following
scene:

5
Similarly, James Clifford talks about the “cavalier’s perspective […] a distance
both aesthetic and political from which to engage the other” (1994: 153).
224 P ETRA T OURNAY

Bertram gazed down at the hotel, which from this height looked like a large
greenhouse surrounded by the two blue squares of the pools, and the six green
squares of the tennis-court complex. (127)
Bertram’s description, however reduced and rudimentary, is nevertheless an
example of the conventional promontory scene. Directly before climbing up
the hill, Bertram had paid a visit to the hotel, a “tropical Hilton” (124) in
which only American currency is accepted and he and the staff had been the
only black people in the place. He had furthermore remembered how, in his
childhood, the grounds had lain deeply hidden in the bush and had been
virtually inaccessible (124). Keeping in mind his experience during the visit,
he is now able to assess, quantify, name and thus deal with the scene he wit-
nesses because of his newly distanced and privileged vantage point. From his
newly acquired position of power the hotel is comfortably reduced to a green-
house. The pools and the tennis courts are neatly summarized in blue and
green squares. Bertram’s evaluation therefore closely follows David Spurr’s
definition of the commanding prospect: “An analytic arrangement of space
from a position of visual advantage […], an organization and classification of
things takes place” (1993: 16). Bertram’s assessment of the hotel as a green-
house suggests furthermore the notion of a cultivated, artificial versus a
natural state. Despite the latent parody involved and an accompanying sense
of empowerment, the passage nevertheless conveys a strong impression of
loss, as much in the sense of lamenting a pure paradise lost as in the sense of
an irreversible intrusion of a space entirely out-of-place.
The entire opening section of A State of Independence with Bertram’s
arrival by airplane – like a modern God descending from the heavens – reads
like another instance of the monarch-of-all-I-survey gesture:
Below him lay the dense carpet of green forest […] and in the distance,
beyond the village, Bertram saw the capital. He knew full well that from this
height what appeared to be a neat and tropical Versailles would seem little
more than a sprawling mess when on the ground. (10; my emphasis)
The observation’s bird’s-eye view focuses on the anticipated disappointment
at the squalor to be found in the capital once on the ground. In keeping with
another standard convention of colonial stylistics which explicitly links the
panorama taken in to the viewer’s home culture – “sprinkling it with little bits
of England” (Pratt 1992: 204) – a key material referent can be identified in the
passage. With the comparison to a “neat and tropical Versailles”, an imagi-
nary ideal against the expected “sprawling mess,” the narrator takes recourse
to a prime element of colonial discourse in that he relies on an analogy fami-
liar to the Western imagination, only to increase the distancing effect when
anticipating the reality “on the ground.” Similarly, Bertram later notices the
Caryl Phillips: Home, Hybridity and (Post)colonial Discourse 225

following discrepancy: “The road was called Whitehall, but a thoroughfare

less like London’s Whitehall would be hard to imagine” (20). In another twist
to the trope of connecting the unfamiliar surroundings to the observer’s home
culture, scenes of poverty are frequently compared unfavourably to familiar
images of squalor in Western society. This occurs when Bertram first enters
his mother’s plot and the kitchen in the yard reminds him of an “English
toolshed” (24).6
Another component of colonial rhetoric is the depiction of an unfamiliar
and potentially absurd reality in theatrical terms. Indeed, according to David
Spurr, much reporting on revolutions or political events in the Third World is
viewed in histrionic terms (1993: 55). With reference to Pierre Bourdieu,
Spurr reminds us that “this point of view is generally available only to persons
of privilege, from whose position the social world at large appears as a repres-
entation […] in the sense offered by […] a theatrical performance” (1993:
26). In A State of Independence this trope appears in an even more exag-
gerated fashion in the representation of the independence celebrations. Not
only does the new design of the flags look “absurd” (130) and “comically
colorful” (130) to Bertram, but he captures the entire atmosphere of the cele-
brations in carnivalistic terms: He was “absorbed by the carnival atmosphere”
(104; my emphasis) and we even learn that “the only other time the makeshift
village was functional was at carnival” (58). With the identification of an
important political event with the carnival, an assessment takes place accord-
ing to the observer’s own system of values assuming interpretative authority
from a position of superiority which denies any serious consideration of the
events. The inherent irony can ultimately be seen as an attempt at under-
mining the reality of one’s surroundings.
Bakhtin describes the essence of the carnivalistic world-view as one of
change and transformation representing the relativity of any established order,
and further defines the carnival as an incomplete transitional period and a time
of crisis (1996: 70). In view of these notions, the employment of the carnival
metaphor adequately captures both the uncertainty of the political changes ac-
companying independence and the uncertainty – even crisis – in Bertram. At
the same time, “the carnival is the celebration of an all-destroying and all-
regenerating time” (Bakhtin 1996: 50; my translation) and thus offers in this
ambivalence a glimmer of hope for couching political and personal renewal or
metamorphosis.
Apart from the practice of treating political events in theatrical terms, there
is a marked tendency in colonial tropology to convey a general sense of chaos

6
See also the passage in which Bertram, shortly after his arrival, compares the
status of a Ford Corsair in England to that on the island (15).
226 P ETRA T OURNAY

and disorder in the presentation of the surroundings that is indicative of the

observer’s own disorientation or indeed of a process in which “the writer’s
subjective disintegration is projected onto the outer scene” (Spurr 1993: 155).
In this vein, a description of the slums of Baytown features images such as
“there existed a hellish and labyrinth-like entanglement of slums”; the build-
ings were “broken down” under their “rusty iron roofs”; the streets were
“loosely-defined” and followed each other “at random”; “Awkward boys
played cricket with no discipline” (58; my emphases). Finally, the entire
scene is summed up as follows: “This area, which resembled the country in its
poverty, had always impressed Bertram as the unassembled, peopled,
animaled heart of Baytown” (58; my emphasis). In addition to invoking con-
ventional, almost archetypal (European) metaphors of threat and uncanniness
in the images of hell and the labyrinth, the passage closes with one of the
prime colonial clichés when summarizing the entire scene in animalistic terms
to reveal the essentially animal nature of the surroundings.
In another passage, images of darkness and threat figure even more in-
tensely: “it was dark outside, a night of hidden eyes and strange noises” (86);
“a firefly […] was cruelly swallowed up for ever by the blackness of the
night” (87; my emphasis). Such images impressively capture the primordial
fear of the unknown lurking ‘out there’ in the unfamiliar environment so
typical of exploration writing.
Among the most common tropes in colonial writing is the debasing of the
Other through representation in zoological terms. As early as 1965, Frantz
Fanon drew attention to the constant references to the bestiary in colonial
writing and described their use as an attempt at dehumanizing the native
(1990: 32). Both David Spurr and Mary Louise Pratt relate this practice to the
rhetorical mode of naturalization. In Spurr’s view, “the concept of nature and
its relation to ‘less developed’ peoples is so deeply imbedded in our language
that it transcends ideology and is […] pervasive in the system of repres-
entations” (1993: 157). Underlying this principle is the assumption that
primitive or native peoples form a part of nature and are thus placed in op-
position to culture.
We can locate two further uses of the trope. On his way to his former girl-
friend Patsy, Bertram encounters “raw-boned children who ran wildly up and
down […] screaming like their parents’ poultry” (89; my emphases) and later,
during the independence celebrations, he meets a man whom he describes as
“mongrel-faced” (116). Significantly, both times Bertram finds himself in a
disorientating environment suggesting disorder, uncontrolled noise and de-
generation.
In many instances, Bertram painfully experiences his estrangement when
he detects in himself traces of his English self or when he is identified by the
Caryl Phillips: Home, Hybridity and (Post)colonial Discourse 227

locals as a foreigner or a tourist. In an influential essay, Stuart Hall talks about

the “shock of ‘doubleness’ of similarity and difference” (1994: 396). In other
words: a displacement occurs in which, as James Clifford writes, “the self has
become exotic […] It is the opening of a fissure in the subject […] a passage
in time” (1994: 161). It is precisely this rupture or displacement caused by the
passage of time that most accurately reflects the hybrid identity and thus the
predicament of the homecomer: he is indeed being exiled a second time, this
time involuntarily by his former countrymen, friends and relatives. We see
Bertram struggling with his own realization of having adopted English char-
acter traits when he is wondering if “he was suffering from those same
feelings of liberal guilt that he had always despised in some English people”
(19). Before meeting Patsy he muses that “too much had happened between
the two of them for him to get English on her now” (89) and is afraid of
annoying the neighbours with his “imported manners” (89). Bertram is in fact
desperately trying to reconcile two different sets of cultural practices when, at
a later stage, in the truly indignant attitude of the metropolitan European
(Englishman), he is “outraged by [the] lack of courtesy” (105) he finds in the
guard at Government House, lamenting nothing other than the lack of one of
colonialism’s fundamental values: Western or British civility. According to
Spurr, “insistence on European standards of civility becomes an act of self-
preservation” (1993: 80). Bertram’s insecurity in negotiating different sets of
behaviour becomes most apparent in his first meeting with Lonnie, the bar-
keeper. In the course of the conversation Bertram admits twice that he is
“unsure as to how to respond” (61, 63) and once “assumed he was supposed
to laugh” (61).
When Bertram is mistaken for a foreigner, the speakers frequently resort to
the ‘us /you’ dichotomy, emphasizing the distance between them and dis-
placing Bertram even further. In an inversion of its use in imperial writing, the
standard distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is here employed from the per-
spective of the natives. This reversal can be viewed as a marker of em-
powerment, with the formerly oppressed appropriating the same rhetorical
mode of the master-narrative in a kind of reversed rhetoric. At the same time,
this trope has always served as a sign of the fear of a hidden threat and ex-
presses a strong need for self-affirmation. David Spurr has noted that the
distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is part of a rhetoric that affirms the dis-
tinction between “a collective subject united by a shared ideology and those
who threaten the institutions of order and unity” (1993: 122). It is therefore
not surprising that it is especially Bertram’s former childhood friend Jackson
Clayton, who in the new country has acquired a high ministerial post, who
takes frequent recourse to the ‘us /you’ binarism. He identifies Bertram with
the former colonial rulers and assigns himself the role of speaking for the
228 P ETRA T OURNAY

whole people of the island. When he explains to Bertram that people are
living “State-side now” (112), he says that Miami is the closest major city, not
“your precious London” (112; my emphasis) and goes on to accuse Bertram
of the damages inflicted by colonial rule: “Your England never do us a damn
thing except take, take, take” (112; my emphases). The final stigmatization of
Bertram as an intruder occurs when Clayton tells him that “you should go
back where you come from […] England is where you belong now” (136; my
emphases).
This underscoring of Bertram’s ‘difference’ rests as much on cultural dif-
ference – Clayton states accusingly that “the Englishman fuck up your head”
(136) – as on linguistic difference. The young barkeeper Lonnie immediately
recognizes the Englishman and makes fun of his accent, “mimicking his
voice” (132). The English accent, once a sign of education and high culture,
has now become a source of mirth. In this instance, however, we witness yet
another reversal of the ‘us /you’ dichotomy in Bertram’s strong rejection of
his identification with the English:
‘You think I sound English, then?’
‘Rather, old chap. Isn’t that what you say?’
‘That’s what they say’ (132; my emphases).
Even though Bertram is trying to liberate himself from the ‘shadow of the
oppressor’, he still appears as a tragic figure who has lost his power and has
been decentred from a position of previous authority. Nowhere can this be
seen more clearly than in the derision that his rather vague wish to establish ‘a
business’ provokes in his interlocutors: “I don’t know as yet what kind of
business, but something that don’t make me dependent upon the white man”
(50). When his mother laughs at him, Bertram, in an immediate act of self-
defence, arrogantly belittles this laughter as “the cackle of ignorance”; in a
truly superior gesture, “he felt obliged to educate her” (151). Patsy humours
him and in fact exposes and deconstructs “every expat’s dream” (141), while
Jackson Clayton cruelly reminds Bertram of his long absence and his ensuing
total misconception of and alienation from the place he has returned to: “you
wanting to invest in the place you remember, not the place that is” (112).
It is, however, not only Bertram’s vague ideas about his business that make
others mock him but yet again the ‘shadow of the oppressor’ they recognize
in him. One should bear in mind that the wish to dominate through commer-
cial influence – in other words, to take possession – was always at the heart of
the colonizing mission. Even though it is not so much the “industrial reverie”
of the early colonists that Mary Louise Pratt refers to (1992: 150) as the
“mercantile or business reverie” of the postcolonial Westerner, this intention
is nevertheless driven by the same urge to engage in a civilizing mission.
Caryl Phillips: Home, Hybridity and (Post)colonial Discourse 229

Bertram’s business aspirations conjure up the spectre of the colonial’s con-

struction of an uncivilized space whose backwardness legitimates the eco-
nomic intervention of the rational European (Pratt 1992: 152). Bertram,
indeed, naively repeats what Edward Said has termed the “advanced /
backwards binarism” (1995: 207) advocated by colonial powers when he
declares: “I must seize the opportunity to help the new nation” (50). His insis-
tence on running his business independently of the white man adds extra
piquancy, as he is paradoxically reproducing the white man’s imperial ges-
ture. Ultimately, it is this repetition of the relationship of power and domi-
nance that is not only resisted but even ridiculed, a fact that is simultaneously
indicative of the loss of power of the former colonial rulers and of the newly
acquired confidence of the locals.7
Adverse weather, especially the oppressive heat that had to be endured, has
always been a topic in colonial exploration writing as well as in more recent
postcolonial travel accounts. In A State of Independence, the sun and the heat
emanating from it acquire the function of a leitmotif. Descriptions encoding
the sun as violent and unbearable, highlighting the vulnerability of the obser-
ver, abound.8 The unaccustomed heat and its unpleasant effects on Bertram
are captured in references to perspiration and smell.9 Right from the begin-
ning, Bertram suffers from the “claustrophobia of the heat” (11), which also
metaphorically alludes to psychological claustrophobia and the anxieties
regarding his return. He sweats profusely (11; 87) and notices his own bodily
odours with embarrassment (82). Apart from underwriting his unfamiliarity
with the tropical climate, for the Westerner sweat and smell are clear markers
of impurity, lack of hygiene and ultimately absence of civilization, which
have to be eliminated. This defilement of the self’s clean body is abhorrent to
the Westerner and constitutes a transgression of a crucial boundary between
inside and out. It may thus be understood as an invasion, even a penetration,
that must be fought. Bertram therefore complains: “he could not bear the
thought of enduring another day in damp discomfort. His deodorant was use-
less […] he decided to carry with him a small bottle of aftershave to kill off
any bad odours” (88; my emphasis). Equipped with the modern Western
traveller’s chemical weapons – deodorant and aftershave – Bertram goes on a
7
In Bertram’s mother, however, one can observe an additional element of sarcastic
resignation when she adduces the example of the local barkeeper Leslie Carter, who
even without interference from the white man hasn’t made any progress (51).
8
Consider, for example: “the sun burned its way through a cloud” (104) or the sun
had the “task of scorching the dry earth a sandy brown” (122) or “as the sun began to
slide down the back of the sky the reflected light […] hurt his eyes” (98).
9
Notice also how Livingstone recommends that Bertram cover his head and identi-
fies him with an Englishman: “I once see an English fellar catch sunstroke and it don’t
be no pretty sight” (102).
230 P ETRA T OURNAY

virtual crusade to “kill off” his bad smell. However, the imported devices of
Western civilization fail him in his new surroundings and thus only serve as a
further sign of his foreignness and powerlessness.
Worth noting is also the semiosis of architecture in the novel. Bertram fre-
quently describes decayed and crumbling buildings10 and even talks about
“architectural death” (105) with reference to an old wooden colonial building.
The collapse of the Empire is symbolically captured in the literal collapse of
its architectural legacy. At other points Bertram regrets that the former colo-
nial architecture has been abandoned and replaced by modern, neocolonial
concrete constructions,11 a regret that attests to his nostalgia for the colonial
past as he remembers it. There is an additional element of snobbery in this
assessment, as he clearly mocks the efforts of the new postcolonial nation at
shedding its colonial heritage in favour of clumsy and poorly executed
attempts at imitating the modern West: “The courtyard was dominated by an
ornamental pool […] open to the sky so that if it rained too much it would
inevitably flood the ground-floor offices” (107). Significantly, however, the
following observation is made almost at the end of the novel: “Bertram
rambled past these historical ruins, and then he pressed on purposefully”
(157; my emphasis), expressing Bertram’s determination to leave the past
behind and move on with his life on his home island.
In a recent review of Caryl Phillips’s latest book The Atlantic Sound –
which is largely a travel narrative – in the New York Review of Books, the
critic Pankaj Mishra goes so far as to apply the following statement by Derek
Walcott about the colonial’s predicament to Caryl Phillips himself: “he lapses
into the ‘postures of metropolitan cynicism [that] must be assumed by the
colonial in exile if he is not to feel lost’ ” (2001: 51). Written some fourteen
years prior to the Atlantic Sound, A State of Independence seems already to
contain in fictional form what Caryl Phillips has described, according to
Mishra, “inadvertently, without [his] own quickening self-awareness” (51) in
his own personal narrative of return.
In conclusion, the question remains how deliberately a writer takes re-
course to the conventions of colonial discourse. In answer to this question,
one might want to agree with David Spurr, who maintains that “there is
nothing conscious in their use; they are part of the landscape in which rela-
tions of power manifest themselves” (1993: 6). However, the fact that Caryl
Phillips has very deliberately re-written and contested colonial master-narra-

10
See, for example: “And in a clearing he saw the crumbling stones […] of a dis-
tant sugar mill and broken down Great House” (10).
11
Compare: “He climbed the open concrete staircase and wondered why the engi-
neers and architects of the Caribbean had abandoned the cooler wooden buildings of
his youth” (107).
Caryl Phillips: Home, Hybridity and (Post)colonial Discourse 231

tives (the personal journal and an official account) in the novel Cambridge (as
I have shown elsewhere12) gives reason to doubt David Spurr’s contention.
This hesitation is even more justified if one takes into account the fact that the
protagonist’s first name is Bertram, which intertextually evokes the character
of Sir Thomas Bertram – the owner of large colonial possessions in Antigua –
from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.13 This intertextual relation may be
viewed as additional evidence that Caryl Phillips has consciously integrated
elements of colonial discourse into the text precisely to capture the returnee’s
contaminated identity and the associated complexities of the notions of home,
hybridity and (post)colonial discourse.

WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. (1996). Literatur und Karneval: Zur Romantheorie und Lach-
kultur (Munich & Vienna: Fischer).
Clifford, James (1994). The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethno-
graphy, Literature, and Art (1988; Cambridge MA: Harvard UP).
Dickinson, Swift (1993). ‘The stigma of arrival: Exile’s return in John Okada’s No-
No Boy and Caryl Phillips’s A State of Independence,’ in Cultural Conflicts in
Contemporary Literature: Seventeen Essays and a Discussion, ed. & intro.
Roberta Orlandini, Magda Graniela & Loreina Santos (Mayaguéz: University of
Puerto Rico): 116–35.
Fanon, Frantz (1990). The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington, intro.
Jean–Paul Sartre (1965; Harmondsworth & New York: Penguin).
Hall, Stuart (1994). ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’ (1990), in Colonial Discourse
and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. & intro. Patrick Williams & Laura
Chrisman (London & New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf): 392–403.
—— (1996). ‘New ethnicities,’ in Hall, Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed.
David Morley & Kuan-Hsing Chen (London & New York: Routledge. 441–49.
Mageo, Jeannette Marie (1995). ‘The reconfiguring self,’ American Anthropologist
97: 282–96.
Mishra, Pankaj (2001). ‘The Atlantic Sound by Caryl Phillips,’ New York Review of
Books 48.7 (26 April): 49–51.
Phillips, Caryl (1986). A State of Independence (London: Faber & Faber).
Pratt, Mary Louise (1992). Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(London & New York: Routledge).
Rahbek, Ulla (2000). ‘A State of Independence: Character, country, conflict,’ Quoted
from the manuscript with kind permission from the author. Paper presented at the
A S N E L conference Aachen / Liège, 2000.

12
For a more detailed analysis, see my forthcoming “Re-telling the Past: Meta-
fiction in Caryl Phillips’s Diasporic Narratives” (University of Liège).
13
For this observation I am indebted to Bénédicte Ledent.
232 P ETRA T OURNAY

Said, Edward W. (1995). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Har-

mondsworth & New York: Penguin).
Spurr, David (1993). The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism,
Travel Writing and Imperial Administration (Durham NC & London: Duke UP).
Varela Zapata, Jesús (1999). ‘Translating one’s own culture: Coming back from the
metropolis in Caryl Phillips’s A State of Independence,’ in Translating Cultures,
ed. Isabel Carrera Suárez, Aurora García Fernández & M.S. Suárez Lafuente
(Oviedo & Hebden Bridge: K R K / Dangaroo): 397–406.
Young, Robert J.C. (1995). Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race
(London & New York: Routledge).

[
E NGLISH AND E NGLISH - LANGUAGE
WRITING IN A FRICA
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When 2+9=1: English and the Politics of
Language Planning in a Multilingual Society
South Africa

Nkonko M. Kamwangamalu
University of Natal

ABSTRACT
This essay reflects on South Africa’s new language policy and efforts cur-
rently being made to implement it. It notes that there is a mismatch between
the language policy and the language practices in most of the country’s
institutions. The policy promotes additive multilingualism; but the practices
show a steady trend towards unilingualism in English at the expense of the
other official languages including Afrikaans and nine African languages.
The essay argues that this mismatch derives from a number of factors, some
of them internal and others external to the policy, which interact in complex
ways to impede policy implementation. The essay discusses some of these
factors, with a focus on the ambivalent language-related clauses in the policy
on the one hand, and the legacy of apartheid-based Bantu education on the
other. As a way forward, it is suggested that, for the new language policy to
achieve its primary goal to promote the status of the official indigenous
languages, the whole enterprise of language policy and planning should be
viewed as a marketing problem, one that can only be solved if the ‘product’
to be marketed, language, is “backed by the right promotion and put in the
right place at the right price” (Cooper 1989: 72).

1. Introduction

L
A N G U A G E H A S P L A Y E D A C E N T R A L R O L E in South Africa’s
transition from colonialism to apartheid to democracy. In 1994
South Africa adopted a new language policy giving official recog-
nition to eleven languages including English and Afrikaans, formerly the only
two official languages of the state, and nine African languages; Zulu, Xhosa,
236 N KONKO M. K AMWANGAMALU

Pedi, Tsonga, Venda, Sotho, Ndebele, Swati and Tswana, all of them new-
comers on South Africa’s official language map. One of the main objectives
of the new language policy has been to promote the status of the nine African
languages by, among other things, using them as media of learning. Seven
years after the policy was enshrined in the country’s constitution, it seems that
not much progress has been made yet in attempts to implement the policy.
Rather, and as I will show in this essay, there is a clear mismatch between the
new language policy and language practices in most of the country’s institu-
tions, such as the media, education, government and administration. This
essay attempts to explain this state of affairs. It argues that a number of
factors interact in complex ways to impede policy implementation. Chief
among these, and which will be the focus of this essay, are the legacy of
apartheid Bantu education on the one hand, and the loopholes within the new
language policy on the other. The discussion of these factors and attending
language practices will be organized as follows. Section 2 presents past
language-in-education policies in South Africa to provide the background
against which current language practices can be understood better. Section 3
examines the new language policy and its impli-cations for current language
practices in some of the country’s institutions, especially the media, the
administration and education. Section 4 offers the way forward for the new
language policy, drawing on theories of the economics of language planning
(eg, Coulmas 1992, Cooper 1989, Bourdieu 1991) as well as on recent studies
of language shift from African languages into English especially in African
urban communities. The main argument of the essay is that if the new lan-
guage policy is to achieve its intended goal to promote African languages,
language-policy makers must, on the one hand, view the whole language-
planning enterprise as a marketing problem. That is, they must associate Afri-
can languages with at least some of the prerequisites that are currently
associated with English and Afrikaans. This, I argue, will counter the stigma
that African languages have been carrying as a result of the legacy of dis-
criminatory apartheid language policies. Second, and most important, policy-
makers must raise people’s awareness about the process of language shift that
is currently in progress in urban African communities, where English is
increasingly becoming the language of the family; a domain traditionally
reserved for indigenous African languages. Raising people’s awareness about
language shift from African languages to English will bring to the fore the
threat of linguistic genocide that African languages are facing. Such an aware-
ness, I argue, might spur the communities to initiate or become more involved
in language maintenance activities intended to counter the threat of linguistic
genocide.
Multilingual Planning in South Africa 237

2. South Africa’s past language policies

Kaplan & Baldauf (1997: 3) define language planning as a body of ideas,
laws and regulations (language policy), change, rules, beliefs and practices
intended to achieve a planned change (or to stop change from happening) in
language use in one or more communities. It is, in the words of Fishman
(1987: 49), the authoritative allocation of resources to the attainment of lan-
guage status and language corpus goals, whether in connection with new
functions that are aspired to, or in connection with old functions that need to
be discharged more adequately. In South Africa language planning has
historically been what Tollefson (1991: 13) calls an arena for struggle, where
the white segment of the country’s population has sought to exercise power
over other ethnic groups through control of language. It has been more so
because, as Terence Wiley observes (1996: 104), decisions about language
often lead to benefits for some and loss of privilege, status and rights for
others.
Not much is known about language policy and planning in South Africa
prior to the arrival in the Cape in 1652 of white settlers led by the Dutch
colonist Jan van Riebeeck to erect a half-way resupply station for the ships of
the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company) which,
at the time, plied the trade route between Europe and Southeast Asia. From
this time onwards the history of language policy and planning in South Africa
can be described in terms of the following four important eras: dutchification
(1652–1795, 1803–1806), anglicization (1806–1948), afrikanerization (1948–
94) and language democratization (1994–present). Dutchification refers to the
official promotion and use of the Dutch language in all the higher domains
such as administration, education and trade by the Dutch officials of the
Dutch East India Company who settled in South Africa from 1652. During the
almost one and a half centuries (1652–1795) of the Dutch occupation of the
Cape, only knowledge of Dutch served as a catalyst for access to resources
and employment in the civil service. Anyone who wanted to do business with
the Dutch authority had to display knowledge of Dutch. The Dutchification of
the Cape came to an end in 1795, when Britain first took control of the then
Cape of Good Hope (now Cape Town) to prevent the territory from falling
into the hands of the French, who had already laid claim to Holland during the
Napoleonic wars (Watermeyer 1996: 101). The British returned the Cape to
the Dutch in 1803 but took control of the territory again in 1806. It is at this
point that the seeds for the policy of anglicization were planted, with English
gradually replacing Dutch as the language of rule in the Cape Colony. Ac-
cordingly, access to resources and employment in the civil service became
associated with the knowledge of English rather than of Dutch. By 1814
English was firmly established as the official language of the Cape Colony
238 N KONKO M. K AMWANGAMALU

(Lanham 1978). Dutch and later its offspring, Afrikaans, were suppressed by
the British government for ideological reasons. The Afrikaans-speaking
whites, the Afrikaners, resented anglicization, for they saw it as a threat to
their language, culture and identity. Also, it was felt in some sections of the
Afrikaans-speaking white community that Afrikaans was a gift from God to
its white speakers, and that God had not allowed them (the Afrikaners) to
become anglicized (Watermeyer 1996). The policy of anglicization lasted, in
theory, until 1910, when the Union of South Africa was formed, thus giving
English and Dutch equal status as the co-official languages of the Union. In
practice, however, the British never accepted parity/equality between Dutch
and English (Malherbe 1977, Hartshorne 1992, Lanham 1996). Thus, English
remained more hegemonic than Afrikaans until 1948, when the Afrikaner
elite took the reins of government.
With the power now in their hands, the Afrikaners expectedly replaced
anglicization with afrikanerization. The Afrikaans language took centre-stage
in the administration of the state and the use and power of Afrikaans in-
creased dramatically. Knowledge of Afrikaans became a requirement for
entry into the civil service. The state invested heavily both politically and
financially in the development of Afrikaans. Efforts to promote Afrikaans led
the apartheid government to enact drastic policies, such as the Bantu Educa-
tion Act. Briefly, at the heart of this legislation was the dire determination by
the apartheid government (a) to promote Afrikaans and to reduce the influ-
ence of English in black schools; (b) to impose in these schools the use of
both Afrikaans and English on an equal basis as media of instruction; and (c)
to extend mother tongue education from grade 4 to grade 8. The Bantu Educa-
tion Act had serious implications for languages of learning and teaching in
black schools. Black children had to receive education through three lan-
guages, Afrikaans, English and the mother tongue; while for their White,
Colored and Indian counterparts education was dispensed exclusively in Afri-
kaans or in English depending on whether one was Afrikaans- or English-
speaking.
The black pupils resisted mother tongue education, which the Bantu Edu-
cation Act promoted, because they recognized it for what it was: one of the
strategies used by the apartheid government to deny the blacks access to
higher education and thus restrict their social and economic mobility (Kam-
wangamalu 1997: 243). The black pupils saw education in their own mother
tongue as a dead-end, a barrier to more advanced learning, a lure to self-
destruction and a trap designed by the apartheid government to ensure that the
black pupils did not acquire sufficient command of the high-status languages
(English and Afrikaans) for them to be able to compete with their white
counterparts for well-paying jobs and prestigious career options (Alexander
Multilingual Planning in South Africa 239

1997: 84). The resistance to mother tongue education was a resistance to Ver-
woerdian instruments of repression, of limiting access to the mainstream of
political and economic life (Nomvete 1994). The resistance to Afrikaans was
a symbolic resistance to what was perceived as a language of oppression, as
well as a desire for greater access to English. The black pupils’ resistance to
the Bantu Education Act and the apartheid government’s determination to
impose it led to the bloody Soweto uprisings of 16 June 1976, in which
several pupils lost their lives. These uprisings had the following outcomes: (a)
they put an end to the use of Afrikaans as medium of learning and teaching in
black schools; (b) they boosted the status of an already powerful language,
English, over both Afrikaans and African languages in black schools and in
black communities at large; (c) they led the Africans to equate education in
their own language, hence mother tongue education, with inferior education
and this literally made the indigenous languages valueless instrumentally.
With the events of June 1976 mother tongue education became stigmatized in
South Africa, and that stigma lingers on to this day. It is against this back-
ground that, when apartheid died and a new South Africa was born in 1994,
the new government wasted no time in adopting a new language policy aimed
at promoting the status of the indigenous languages. It is to this new policy
that I now turn.

3. South Africa’s new, multilingual, language policy

The new language policy accords official status to eleven languages including
English and Afrikaans and nine African languages. The policy itself is stipu-
lated as follows in South Africa’s 1996 Constitution:
The official languages of the Republic [of South Africa] are Sepedi, Sesotho,
Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga, Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele,
isiXhosa and isiZulu. (The Constitution, 1996, Chapter 1, Section 6(1))
One of the main objectives of the new, multilingual, language policy has been
to promote the status of the nine official African languages against the back-
drop of past discriminatory language policies. In this respect, the Constitution
states that
recognizing the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous
languages of our people, the state must take practical and positive measures to
elevate the status and advance the use of these languages. (The Constitution,
1996, Chapter 1, section 6 (2))
One area in which the government has sought to promote the indigenous lan-
guages is education. Concerning language use in this area, the new Consti-
tution stipulates that
240 N KONKO M. K AMWANGAMALU

matters such as the medium in which a pupil’s instruction takes place and the
number of languages that are to be compulsory school subjects may not
conflict with the language clause in the Constitution (Section 3) nor with
Section 32, which provides that every person shall be entitled to instruction in
the language of his or her choice where this is reasonably practicable. (The
Constitution, 1996, Section 32(c))
The Constitution also makes provision for the establishment of a Pan South
African Language Board (P A N S A L B ) with the responsibility to, inter alia,
“promote and create conditions for the development and use of these [Afri-
can] and other languages” (The Constitution, 1996, Chapter 1, section 6 (5a)).
Other language-related constitutional principles include the following:
all official languages must enjoy parity of esteem and must be treated
equitably. (The Constitution, 1996, Section 6(2))
Thus far these constitutional principles do not seem to have made any pro-
gress towards promoting the status of the African languages. This is not at all
surprising, especially if one considers ambivalent language-related clauses in
the country’s Constitution. For instance, in chapter 1, section (3), the Consti-
tution (1996) stipulates that
the national government and provincial governments may use any particular
official languages for the purposes of government, taking into account usage,
practicality, expense, regional circumstances and the balance of the needs and
preferences of the population as a whole or in the province concerned; but the
national government and each provincial government must use at least two
official languages [my emphases].
Since the Constitution does not specify which official languages should be
used in which province or by the national government, both provincial and
national governments have tacitly opted for the status quo and use English
and Afrikaans as the languages of administration, much as was the case in the
apartheid era. Below I provide examples of language practices in some of the
country’s institutions, with a focus on the government and administration, the
media and education.
In education, English and Afrikaans remain the chief media of teaching
and learning. African languages are used as media of learning only in black
schools for the first four years of primary education, much as was the case
before and after the Soweto uprisings of June 1976 against the imposition of
Afrikaans. Thereafter English takes over as the medium of instruction. Afri-
kaans-medium schools and universities are increasingly becoming dual-
medium institutions, offering tuition not only in Afrikaans but also in English
to accommodate black students who, because of the country’s past language-
in-education policies, prefer English over Afrikaans as the medium of instruc-
Multilingual Planning in South Africa 241

tion. The demand for English-medium education, and not for education in an
African language (or what is often called mother tongue education), has to be
understood against the background of the socio-economic power and inter-
national status of English on the one hand, and of the legacy of the policy of
Bantu education on the other. The legacy of this policy has rendered African
languages instrumentally valueless. Education in an African language is
viewed by speakers of these languages as a lure to self-destruction and an
attempt by policy makers to deny them access to English. Consequently,
parents who can afford it send their children to former white or Indian schools
to ensure that they have early exposure to English. Also, in South Africa there
is no sustained demand for multilingual skills for sociocultural, academic and
administrative purposes. Consequently, as Verhoef (1998) remarks, for Afri-
can pupils there is no alternative to English-medium education. The demand
for English-medium education is exacerbated by the fact that black pupils are
only too well aware of the power of English to ask for education in any other
language, and of the fact that their own languages have no economic cachet
either locally or internationally.
As far as the communications media are concerned, English has the lion’s
share of airtime on South African television. In a survey of language use on
South African television, Kamwangamalu (1998) notes that all the eleven
official languages had 378 hours to share per week. The survey shows that
English took up 348 hours or 91% of the total airtime, followed by Afrikaans
with 21 hours or 5.66%, and all the nine African languages with only nine
hours, or an average of one hour per language per week. In a more recent
survey conducted for the months of April and May 2001, Kamwangamalu
(2001) has found that some of the African languages, especially the smaller
ones such as siSwati, Tsonga and Venda, are no longer allotted a specific time
slot on South African Television. As far as English is concerned, not only
does the language have an entire TV channel to itself but it also takes the
lion’s share of the airtime on the other state TV channels. For April 2001,
English has a total air time of 88%, followed by Afrikaans with 6.58%, and
all the nine African languages with 6.2%, or an average of 0.69% per
language.
In parliament, language practices are not any different. English reigns sup-
reme over other official languages including Afrikaans, and this is despite the
fact that the majority of members of parliament are Africans and so are
proficient in at least two African languages. In spite of this, Pandor (1995)
reports that in 1994, for instance, 87% of the speeches made in Parliament
were in English, less than 5% were in Afrikaans and of the rest, 8% were in
the nine African languages, that is, less than 1% in each of the languages.
Besides being prevalent in the majority of the speeches made in Parliament,
242 N KONKO M. K AMWANGAMALU

English has become the sole language of Hansard, the Parliament’s historical
record of proceedings, formerly published in both English and Afrikaans.
This, it has been explained, was to cut down on the prohibitive cost of pro-
ducing Hansard in all the 11 languages.
These practices flout the principle of language equity enshrined in the Con-
stitution. They support the Language Task Group (L A N G T A G )’s research
findings that “despite the constitutional commitment to multilingualism, [...]
there seems to be a drift towards unilingualism (in English) in public services
(including education)” (L A N G T A G 1996:31); and that “all other languages
are being marginalized” (L A N G T A G 1996: 47). It is against this background
that this essay is titled “when 2+9=1” to highlight the current trend towards
unplanned unilingualism in the country.

4. Language policy and planning: the way forward

It is clear from the language practices in various state institutions that English
is economically more viable than any of the other official languages, espe-
cially the indigenous languages. Besides the status of English as international
language, the economic viability of English needs to be understood from the
perspective of the theories of the economics of language planning (eg, Cooper
1989, Strauss 1996, Coulmas 1992). In the main, these theories say that lingu-
istic products, and this includes language, are goods or commodities to which
the market assigns a value. On a given linguistic market, some products are
valued more highly than others. The market value of a linguistic product such
as the mother tongue is determined in relation to other languages in the
planetary economy (Coulmas 1992: 77–85). It is, as Gideon Strauss notes
(1996: 9), an index of the functional appreciation of the language by the rele-
vant community. In this regard, African communities find former colonial
languages, particularly English (and to some extent Afrikaans), materially
more appealing than the indigenous languages because of the value with
which the former are associated in the linguistic market place. Assigning an
economic value to the mother tongue in the linguistic market place means
vesting it with some of the privileges and power associated with English or
Afrikaans. The underlying assumption here is that the mother tongue is a
commodity and as such, the consumers especially in African communities
will buy this commodity depending on its value in the linguistic market place.
In this essay I argue that, for status planning for the African languages to
succeed, it must be treated as a marketing problem. Viewing status planning
as a marketing problem entails, as Cooper puts it, “developing the right
product backed by the right promotion and put in the right place at the right
price” (1989: 72).
Multilingual Planning in South Africa 243

With regard to the product, Cooper says that language planners must
recognize, identify, or design products which the potential consumer will find
attractive. These products are to be defined and audiences targeted on the
basis of (empirically determined) consumer needs. Promotion of a commu-
nicative innovation such as a new official language refers to efforts to induce
potential users to adopt it, whether adoption is viewed as awareness, positive
evaluation, proficiency, or usage (1989: 74). Place refers to the provision of
adequate channels of distribution and response. That is, a person motivated to
buy a product must know where to find it (1989: 78). And the price of a con-
sumer product is viewed as the key to determining the product’s appeal to the
consumers (1989: 79). This approach is proposed against the background of
established parameters in language policy and language planning: language
planning is future-oriented; it involves complex decision-making, assessing
and committing valuable resources both human and material, assigning func-
tions to different languages or varieties of a language in a community (Ward-
haugh 1987), and regulating the power relationship between languages and
their respective speakers in the linguistic market place (Bourdieu 1991).

5. Concluding remarks
In conclusion, let me reiterate that mother tongue education – or its denial – is
as important as any other aspects, political and economic planning among
them, which at the moment appear to be the main concerns of the state. A
commitment to linguistic pluralism (Cobarrubias 1983: 46) and thus to
linguistic democracy means that the use of the mother tongue in education
(and other higher domains) is, as many linguists have pointed out, a funda-
mental human right (eg, Skutnabb–Kangas 1988, Tollefson 1991, Phillipson
1992). Therefore, there is an urgent need for South Africa to take a hard look
at its language-in-education policies, with a view to revitalizing mother-
tongue education as a means by which to empower the masses. Revalorizing
the indigenous does not mean saying farewell to English and Afrikaans.
Rather, it means bringing these languages to equality with indigenous lan-
guages as required in the constitution. It entails, as Webb (1995: 103) cor-
rectly points out, “making the indigenous languages desirable and effective
[tools] for educational development, economic opportunity, political partici-
pation, social mobility, and cultural practice”. Like any language-planning
exercise, revitalizing the mother tongues will come at a price: agencies must
be established to encourage use; curriculum materials must be developed and
teachers trained; researchers must be encouraged to study them; official bless-
ing of some kind must be given; and money must be spent. But, as Tollefson
(1991) aptly observes, only when the language achieves a full range of func-
tions and no stigma is attached to its use has it arrived. For the indigenous
244 N KONKO M. K AMWANGAMALU

languages ‘to arrive’, the masses need to know what an education in these
languages would do for them in terms of upward social mobility. Would such
an education, for instance, be as rewarding as, say, English- or Afrikaans-
medium education? African masses would not support or strive to acquire
mother-tongue education, even if it were made available, unless this education
was given a real cachet in the broader political and economic context.
Whether African languages are used in education or not, speakers of these
languages must be made aware of the threat that the languages are facing
from English. Recent studies (eg, De Klerk 2000, Bowerman 2000) of lan-
guage practices in urban African communities show that English is increa-
singly becoming the language of the home in these communities, especially
for interaction among the younger generation. Unless communities them-
selves take the initiative to maintain their languages, the languages are likely
to face the fate that the Koesan and Indian languages did: attrition and
eventual death.

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[
The Democratization of Language Policy
A Cultural-Linguistic Analysis
of the Status of English in Kenya

Kembo–Sure
Moi University, Eldoret, Kenya

ABSTRACT
Attitudes towards English in Kenya tend to cluster around two extreme posi-
tions – largely unquestioned acceptance of the dominant position of English
among the mass of the population, on the one hand, and strong opposition to
the continuing use of the imposed colonial language among sections of the
educated elite, on the other. The essay traces the origin of the high status of
English from the colonial period to the present and suggests an alternative
language policy that would bridge the chasm between the two extreme
views.

1. Introduction

T
HE DEBATE ABOUT THE STATUS of English in Kenya is as
emotional as it is in most of the former British colonies and there is
no reason to believe that it is going to end soon. For many Kenyans
the position of English in their environment is taken for granted, for it is the
language their children have to learn at school. To this group it is simply the
language children must learn in order that they may get ahead in life and other
questions may not be warranted. They do not find any point in debating
whether Kenya needs no English or more of it. Among these people, and
probably the majority, are those who do not speak a word of it. Those who do
not speak English at all or just have a smattering of it would like their children
to grow up speaking it, even at the risk of forgetting their native languages.
For them English represents a gateway to prosperity and cultural refinement.
248 K EMBO –S URE

On the other extreme there are Kenyans, mainly the educated elite, who
link English to their country’s inglorious past of political and cultural sub-
jugation. This group is opposed to the status of English as an official lan-
guage, the language that dominates the public life of many Kenyans. The link
with the ignoble past causes this group to assert that Kenya will not be fully
free from neo-colonialism until it divests itself of the language of slavery and
oppression. The suggestion is to have Kiswahili developed, adapted and
adopted for the roles played by English today. After all, they argue, Kiswahili
has performed very well in that capacity in Tanzania. However, this group is
regarded with a lot of suspicion by the other group and is being accused of
‘inverted snobbery’; that is, now that they have acquired sufficient English
and are occupying plum positions in the public and private sectors, they can
afford to crusade against English. They are like the generals who burn the
bridge after crossing over.
This accusation is not altogether misplaced; but it must also be remember-
ed that challenging the position of English in the world today is a cultural and
political act that involves a certain level of sociopolitical sophistication, which
can be found only in the educated elite. It is therefore not surprising that the
educated can dare to question the usefulness of English when its benefits
seem so obvious to, possibly, undiscerning eyes.
The naivety of the first view is catered for by suggesting effective learning
of English to all children while at the same time placating the no-English
group by allowing more teaching of native languages and providing them
with more functions in order to enhance their prestige. The essay is proposing
a language policy that ensures survival of the minority languages and con-
serves the cultural richness supported by the languages, while at the same
time recommending the strengthening and expansion of the teaching of Eng-
lish as a second language.

2. Cultural stereotyping
The discussion of the status of and attitude to English in Kenya today only
begins to make sense when it takes into account the socio-historical context in
which the language arrived at the shores of the Eastern Africa coast in the
nineteenth century and the subsequent colonizing enterprise of the British
Empire. Colonial discourse is a product and source of racial and cultural
stereotypes, and it is the stereotypes that define identities as groups continu-
ally see themselves as reflecting the antitheses of the ‘Others’. The colonized
people perceived themselves as opposites of the technologically and culturally
superior West, hence as a group that had to strive to draw level with its
nemesis at some future date. The stereotype of a Kenyan native was captured
forcefully in the following words of Lady Eleanor Cole, a representative of
The Democratization of Language Policy in Kenya 249

the East African Women’s League in her presentation to the Joint Committee
on Closer Union in East Africa on 6 October 1931:
Women settlers are living in close contact with native life. They see his most
barbarous side. They know that the Native carries out a dying sufferer from
his hut to be often eaten by wild beasts before he is dead, rather than that he
should pollute the hut by dying in it. They know natives will leave a baby to
burn because it is believed to be unlucky to pull it out of the fire. They see and
hear often of the circumcision of the women. They see the Native regarding
his woman as part of his chattels, in no way his equal [...]
To anyone living in Kenya today it is evident that the white race must be
the governing race whatever doctrinaire theories may be laid down to the
contrary. If political equality is preached to the Native we women feel sure
that trouble will come of it. (1931: 125, my emphasis)
This is elaborately quoted because of two reasons: First, because of its wild
and false generalizations about the ‘Native’ cultural practices and second,
because of the strength of her political assertions. The vivid picture of the
Native is that of an irrational and worthless being incapable of managing the
political affairs of his modern society. He is given to the white race as a
servant by Providence and therefore has no business thinking of self-
determination. The claim that Africans throw the sick out in order to be eaten
by wild animals is outrageous. It is true that at the point of death some com-
munities took the sick to a shelter outside the home but always with an
attendant to monitor his progress. The sick were never abandoned or fed to
the beasts.
The radical view of the Native held by the Settler Community has always
been considered by historians to be extremist and not reflecting the view of
the British Empire as a whole. But it is certainly representative of the
Victorian image of Africa throughout the West. And so the benevolent side of
the white stereotype reads as follows:
It is quite evident that as European civilization spreads among the natives and
his standard of comfort is raised he will desire more and more to associate
himself with the language and literature of the race whose civilization he
adopts. (Denham 1928: 15)
This is the British government position represented by the Colonial Secretary,
Edward Denham, in his report on Native Progress in 1927. It is just a matter
of semantics since the underlying message here is that Africa is not on the
same rung as Europe on the evolutionary ladder; it has to work hard to catch
up with Europe and one way of doing that is by learning European languages
and literature. This view was stressed even more strongly as recently as 1960
by Karen Blixen when she bluntly declared:
250 K EMBO –S URE

The dark nations of Africa, strikingly precocious as young children, seemed to

come to a standstill in their mental growth at different ages. The Kikuyu,
Kavirondo and Wakamba, the people who worked for me on the farm, in early
childhood were far ahead of white children of the same age, but they stopped
quite suddenly at a stage corresponding to that of a European child of nine.
(quoted in Ngugi 1993: 134)
According to Ngugi, we must take Blixen seriously because in the West “she
is a saint, a literary saint, and she has been canonized as such. She embodies
the great racist myth at the heart of the Western bourgeois civilization”
(Ngugi 1993: 135). But Blixen is not the only one in the honest racist crusade;
she merely continues the long tradition of the Hegelian stereotype of
‘historyless’ Africa. Joseph Conrad also takes a journey to the heart of dark-
ness where he meets beings he finds difficult to characterize as human:
the men were – No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the
worst of it – this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly
to one. They howled and leaped and spun, and made horrid faces; but what
thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity - like yours - the thought of
your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. (in Achebe 1978: 4)
According to Achebe, Conrad “projects the image of Africa as the ‘other
world’, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization” (Achebe 1978:
3). The humanness of these black creatures is being measured by contrasting
it to that of the European and since there are only some elements or aspects of
similarity the black man must be the lesser human being, if he is one at all.
Colonial discourse implies cultural contact between divergent cultural
groups and this contact is mediated by and consummated through language.
The asymmetric inter-cultural relationship is also reflected in and reproduced
by the linguistic choices that have to be made. Whose language is going to be
used to transact business between the colonized and his master? The language
of the powerful will be the language of power and privilege as well. In Kenya
the ‘Natives’ realized very soon after they were forcefully subdued by the
imperial might of the British that English was a powerful ingredient in the
power game they were henceforth going to be engaged in. So in 1928, the
Colonial Secretary recognized this when he said in a memorandum:
It is quite impossible to keep in touch with the requirements and any estab-
lishment which is opened for teaching English to Africans can obtain
hundreds of pupils. The native is also very anxious to be able to read the
newspaper and to be able to write a letter to a friend. It is becoming common
for natives to congregate round any person who can read aloud an English
newspaper to them. (Denham 1928: 20)
The Democratization of Language Policy in Kenya 251

An enormous demand for English has been created and it is this anxiety and
enthusiasm to acquire English that the white man had to manipulate to his
advantage in the ensuing discourse with the African. English education was
given to a select few, mostly to the sons (not daughters) of the colonial chiefs
and the sole objective was to use them as a link between the white admini-
stration and the natives. This was how the British perfected their principle of
indirect rule in their colonies; and the reverberations of that policy are still felt
as the second generation of those chosen few are controlling the politics and
economy of Kenya today. The interpretation of this demand is varied. Some
regard this as a demand to learn English so that they would be like the white
men, while others interpret this to mean the instrumental desire to use English
to gain muscle to fight back the colonial intrusion into their cultural and
political space. There are also others who see this as evidence of the linguistic
superiority of English over the local languages.
The undeniable fact is that English was a direct challenge to the cultural
stability of the native, an affront to his medium of effective communication
by the members of a new ‘out-group’. This is painfully illustrated by a popu-
lar story in Kenya that a colonial African Chief after a visit to England came
back home to tell his people that ‘those people are so civilized that even their
children do not speak Kiembu; they speak only English.’
The contextual realities in which English was introduced to the African left
the poor Chief with no other way of perceiving English than as the mark of
human civilization. English was more than just a medium of transferring
thought, ideas, information and customs; it was the ultimate proof of ‘human-
ness’. The chief was stereotyping the white man’s existence and thereby
defining his own group existence. Unfortunately, this stereotype is not restric-
ted to the untutored African Chief, as there is evidence of this even from
among linguists. Writing about English, Otto Jespersen says:
Nevertheless, there is one expression that continually comes to my mind
whenever I think of the English language and compare it with others; it seems
to me positively and expressly masculine, it is the language of a grown-up
man and has very little childish or feminine about it. (1990 [1938]: 2)
Jespersen looks at data from a language of Hawaii and concludes:
Can any one be in doubt that even if such a language sound pleasantly and be
full of music and harmony the total impression is childlike and effeminate?
You do not expect much vigour or energy in a people speaking such a
language; it seems adapted only to inhabitants of sunny regions where the soil
requires scarcely any labour on the part of man to yield him everything he
wants, and where life therefore does not bear the stamp of a hard struggle
against nature and against fellow-creatures. (1990 [1938]: 3; my emphasis)
252 K EMBO –S URE

Jespersen, himself not a native of England, completes the picture of the races
who inhabit “sunny regions” and who, not coincidentally, are the people who
were colonized. He puts English on a pedestal where no other language fits
and the best that is left for speakers of other languages is to strive to learn the
language of civilization, the language of men, the language of reason, the
language of power and opportunity.

3. The present status of English in Kenya

English is the official language and therefore the medium of instruction, the
language of government administration and the language of the law courts. It
shares this official status with Kiswahili but only in so far as Kiswahili is co-
official language in Parliament and that one requires proficiency in Kiswahili
to be a naturalized citizen of Kenya. The other native languages have no
official status to speak of, apart from being media of instruction for the first
three years of education. English therefore enjoys much greater functional
space than the other languages.
The policy as it stands today is basically assimilationist in character –
giving official and legal support to English to dominate the lives of the Ken-
yan people. It is a continuation of the colonial arrangement since the result is
the promotion of English at the expense of the other languages. In the present
state of sociolinguistic research and knowledge available to us, a good lan-
guage policy must take into consideration the following concerns:
– human rights implications for minorities
– economic utility of each language
– national integration and government efficiency
– group identity as a well as personal identity
– aesthetic expression.
The assimilationist approach ignores most of the above concerns of a good
language policy and the obvious outcomes of the policy include: poor educa-
tional performance blamed on inadequate mastery of English, the denial of
justice at the law courts which use a language foreign to most accused people,
stratification of the country into the English-speaking elite and non-English
speakers, denial of access to vital information in the media and suppression of
creative expression through mother tongues. This has led to a total distortion
of the native cultural values and created a crisis which requires an urgent
solution through deliberate intervention by the state.
For example, a survey by the Media Institute conducted in Kenya in 1998
to determine the public’s preferred sources of information revealed that
54.9% preferred the English Daily Nation as their primary source and this was
followed by 15% who preferred the Kiswahili daily Taifa Leo. In the electro-
The Democratization of Language Policy in Kenya 253

nic media 44% said they preferred Kiswahili news on the Kenya Broadcasting
Corporation and K B C television. Kiswahili news was preferred by 19% of
the respondents. The K B C English channel was preferred by only 11% .
The survey also revealed that the majority of those who prefer the English
daily and the English broadcasts are those with secondary education or above
whereas those with lower education go for the Kiswahili papers and Kiswahili
T V and radio broadcasts. The vernacular radio was preferred by those who
indicated they had no education and this accounted for only 3.9%. The results
can be interpreted to mean that the more influential section of the population
seeks information in English and therefore more information will be produced
in English and not in the other languages. The claim that English is a neutral
language that can be used to unify Kenyans therefore falls flat since there is
every evidence that the policy helps to stratify society by denying one section
critical information that is made available to the other.
There are equally depressing stories about English in the judiciary and
other institutions but for now we shall move on to some of the suggested
solutions to the present chaos. We shall begin by looking at the views of two
extreme groups which I shall call the Ngugiists and the Anglicists for lack of
better terms and then suggest a third alternative.

4. The Ngugiists
In his essay entitled “Imperialism of Language” Ngugi argues that educated
Africans are “equipped with the linguistic means of escape from the dark
Tower of Babel, and [...] had their minds systematically removed from the
world and the history carried by their original languages” (Ngugi 1993: 32).
In his Whorfian belief about language, Ngugi vowed that he would never
write again in English since “foreign languages, no matter how highly devel-
oped, will never be Kenyan languages” (Ngugi 1981: 194).
Ngugi’s position is that for Kenya to achieve real cultural liberation it must
abandon the current policy which guarantees English an elevated position as
the medium of expression of Kenyan nationalism and cultural identity. As
Sapir said:
We see and hear very largely as we do because the language habits of our
community predisposes certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir 1949: 162)
The Whorfian view poses the question whether a foreign language can be
used to express native emotions, feelings and aspirations effectively. How
creatively can Kenyan children use English in a science classroom? How
effectively can Kenyan children express their inner feelings in poetry and
prose through the English medium? If, as Hodge and Kress (1979: 63) assert,
“language becomes a second reality, the taken-for-granted basis of individual
254 K EMBO –S URE

messages and thoughts,” can Kenyans truly express these “messages and
thoughts” in a language other than their native languages?
One might argue that a foreign language well mastered can be as effective
a medium as a native language for developing literary as well as scientific
skills. However, a commoditized, standardized foreign language is often not
evenly distributed with the obvious consequence that some sections of the
population receive less of it in quantity and quality. This means that the pre-
cious commodity will be accessible to a select few, hence become a criterion
for selecting the bad from the good, the weak from the strong. In other words,
English becomes the basis for stratifying Kenyan society.
Ngugi and his disciples have vigorously campaigned for replacement of
English with Kiswahili as the major language of national discourse but it is
yet to be seen whether this is what Kenyans want. Surveys among Kenyan
students suggest that English is still the most preferred language in most of
the important domains like education, the mass media and governance,
although for purposes of cultural identification they prefer Kiswahili (Kembo-
Sure 1992: 1).
The point in Ngugi’s position is purely politico-historical and disregards
the current pragmatic considerations which are both societal and personal. For
example, Kenyans realize the practical benefits of using English in education
both for individual families and for the country as a whole. However, Ngugi’s
position is important in language planning discourse, in that it reminds us of
the historical and political context of the assumed importance of English.
Some of the evolving cultural and social realities in Kenya will be discussed
in the latter parts of the essay.

5. The Anglicists
In his book Song Of Ocol, Okot p’Bitek gives us Ocol as a caricature of a de-
culturated African man who wishes to see the demolition of all that is African
and ‘move on’. He tells Lawino:
I see an Old Homestead
In the Valley below
Huts, granaries ...
All in ruins;
I see a large pumpkin
Rotting
A thousand beetles in it;
We will plough up
All the Valley
Make compost of the Pumpkins
And the other native vegetables,
The Democratization of Language Policy in Kenya 255

The fence dividing

Family holdings
Will be torn down
We will uproot
The tree demarcating
The land of clan from clan
We will obliterate
Tribal boundaries
And throttle native tongues
The 6umb death
This is the antithesis of Ngugi’s position that Kenyans should get rid of Eng-
lish in order to realize full independence and, in fact, full development. The
pumpkin, tribal boundaries, native tongues and the homestead are all images
of the useless old past which must be discarded and be replaced by Western
ways. The crusade here is about establishing the new ways without due regard
for the values of the established traditional order that had guided the commu-
nity from time immemorial. As Lawino, Ocol’s wife, answers him, it appears
he is turning to Western ways because he cannot master the ways of his
people in his confused state of mind:
Ignorance and shame provoke you
To turn to foreign things!
Perhaps you are covering up
Your bony hips and chest
And the large scar on your thigh
And scabies on your buttocks
However, Anglicists do not stop at the adoption of English as the medium of
communication in most of the domains; they go further to prescribe the
standard, which is normally the native-speaker standard. In the 27 May 2001
edition of the Sunday Nation, the paper with the highest circulation in the
country, a top columnist, Philip Ochieng’, had the following to say to his
readers who complained about his use of too many unfamiliar words:
If I were Philip Okundi, Kenya’s English would be top of the list of industrial
items to be banned by my Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS). For language
is the most important of industrial products. There can be no oral commu-
nication except through a complex orchestration of human hands, brains and
vocal organs. (Ochieng’ 2001)
Ochieng’ is calling for a Kenya English Academy to screen the kind of Eng-
lish produced and to monitor the use of English in order to protect people
from impure, adulterated language. He makes his point even more strongly
256 K EMBO –S URE

when he sees language as reflecting the moral and intellectual status of its
users:
That the English spoken and written even by our Ph.Ds. is so poor is vitally
linked to the fact that their socio-moral consciousness is equally narrow. But
there is no short cut. You can gain such a consciousness only through
intellectual travail. Only through ceaseless study I have acquired whatever I
know and the language in which I impart it. (Ochieng’ 2001)
For those familiar with literature on purism and standards, Ochieng’s position
is not a novel one. For example, in his book Paradigm Lost John Simon also
equates ungrammatical language with bad social habits and subhumanness.
Bad grammar is rather like bad manners; some one who picks his nose at a
party will still be recognized as a minimal human being and not a literal four-
footed pig; but there are cases where the minimal is not enough. (Simon 1980:
20)
As I mentioned earlier, the distribution of an official standard language is
always uneven and this means that the Philip Ochiengs and John Simons who
master the language through “intellectual travail” are a tiny elitist minority.
This uneven distribution was carefully crafted by the colonial education sys-
tem and, in the Marxist sense, the imbalance prepared the ground for language
as a site for a class struggle in the cultural symbolic system, chiefly language
and the creative arts.
To illustrate the tragedy of learning through a foreign language, the text in
Appendix One may be useful. This is an abstract from a third-year university
student wishing to prepare a conference paper on the problem of AIDS in
Kenya. The text is full of deviations, some of which distract the reader from
the topic. However, there is evidence that the author has a true and serious
view about the tragic situation he is trying to describe. This is a Kenyan who
has had exposure to English, at least in school, for fifteen years, but does not
meet the standards of ‘socio-moral consciousness’ that the purists set.
If the adoption of English as a compulsory subject and medium of instruc-
tion was meant to standardize its provision to all, does the outcome across
schools and regions reflect any equity? The fact is that, with universalization
of primary education and subsequent dramatic expansion of secondary educa-
tion, the mythical ‘standard’ can no longer be dreamed of. Besides, even the
select few during the colonial period did not reach the native-speaker levels
that purists demand. The standards must be established from local varieties
and not imported ones; the American variety came about by first rejecting the
British standards and it did not come easy. Serious work must start towards
establishing a realistic national standard.
The Democratization of Language Policy in Kenya 257

6. The emergence of alternative forms

The international standards in spoken and written English will remain as
elusive as the national or regional standards. There may be no consensus on
what attributes constitute a national standard, but we know we can be identi-
fied and identify ourselves with certain speech forms: ie, grammatical and
idiomatic forms that have a regional distribution. Without trying to argue for a
Kenyan standard, I would wish to look at examples from an emerging lan-
guage ‘mix’ in Appendix Three. This is what is popularly known as Sheng, a
mixture of English, Kiswahili and other local languages. This had its epi-
centre in Nairobi but has now spread out to other towns and rural settlements.
The genesis of the code is the strong desire to build solidarity within a
group using language as a symbol of that solidarity. The Kenyan youth want a
symbolic system outside Kiswahili and English, which they can use to set
themselves apart from others and to enable them to express their world in a
unique idiom that represents only their world. For example:
1. That jamaa feels so hot and he’s bila doze.
[That chap feels so hot, but he has nothing interesting to say.]
2. I found akina Suzie just maxing.
[I found Suzie and the rest just relaxing.]
In code-switching literature, the analysis of this would claim an imposition of
lexical items from Kiswahili and other languages on an English syntax but
there are also items from sources very difficult to identify. There are also neo-
logisms which are completely undecipherable to the uninitiated and these are
what makes the code exclusive to the in-group members. The expressions,
however, respect either the English word-formation rules or the morpho-
logical rules of one of the Kenyan languages – in the following Sheng sen-
tences, for example:
3. Beshti ya mine alinishow tuishie ocha 1
[my friend asked me to go to his home area with him.]
4. Our neighbours have hamad 2
[our neighbours have moved.]
The use of Sheng is an attempt by the youth to construct a new identity, a new
world and a new reality in which a communicative code defines membership

1
Beshti is a corruption of the English word “best” and turned into a noun to mean
“my best friend”; ya = of; alinshow: a (third-person singular) – li (past) – ni (first-
person singular object) – show (the English verb being used here to mean “request”);
tuishie ocha: tu (first- person plural) – ishie (go) – ocha (home rural).
2
Hama is a Kiswahili word meaning “move house”. The suffix -d has been added
to make the verb past in the same way we use the English past morphmeme -ed.
258 K EMBO –S URE

of the in-group and isolates members of the out-group. This the youth will
often do by switching to the jargon in the presence of their elders and to this
extent English has provided a resource for manipulating the existing reality to
construct a novel verbal reality.
The Sheng phenomenon was initially dismissed as an anti-social or a pro-
test code akin to other known underworld argots, but its common appearance
in homes and offices among the initiated does not support this theory. It
evokes different reactions from members of the out-group, with some con-
demning it as corrupting the youth while others think it is an expression of
their group rights in the shared communicative space, where adults always
claim dominant control. This is but natural, since language attitudes are func-
tions of interpersonal and intergroup interactions. The youth have to contend
with social sanctions requiring them to take it all from the elders and conform
to what is posited as right by adults, including speech forms. That is the
source of struggle which gave birth to Sheng and keeps sustaining it. We shall
now look at another strategy used by local languages to accommodate English
in their language ecology.

7. Borrowing
Even those Kenyans who have not had the rare opportunity to go to school
and learn English and learn it well, have the privilege of using borrowed items
from the rich English lexicon. The list in Appendix Two demonstrates how
Kenyan languages have creatively indigenized some English words to the
extent that monolingual native speakers of the languages do not recognize the
words as borrowed. The cultural contact with the English is clearly demon-
strated by the subsequent language change witnessed in the Kenyan lan-
guages. Although borrowing has been largely unidirectional (from English),
reflecting the power relations of the speech communities, English has also
borrowed a few words, eg, safari, panga, duka. Purists would argue that bor-
rowing is a sign of language degeneration, but the fact is that in situations of
language contact there is bound to be some influence by one language on the
other and for various reasons, not only perceived cultural superiority.
Borrowing reflects the internal development of the Kenyan languages and
if language is symbolic of the cultural identity and the social reality, then con-
tact with English has engendered a new socio-cultural identity. As early as
1928, only eight years after Kenya was officially declared a colony of the
British Empire, a colonial officer recorded some 40 English words borrowed
by the Agikuyu. Borrowing in this case is regarded as a strategy speakers of a
language adopt to cope with new concepts and items introduced into the cul-
tural space through contact. The British intrusion into the African space re-
quired more than just hostile military repulsion; it also required the penetra-
The Democratization of Language Policy in Kenya 259

tion of the British mind. That is why Ezeulu, the Chief Priest, sends his son to
the mission school not to turn into an Englishman and Christian, but to learn
the ways of the white man and come back to give his secrets to the Umuaro
people (Achebe 1965). Linguistic borrowing, like learning a new language,
was a way of engaging in an evolving colonial discourse.

8. Conclusion
We have discussed the encounter between English and the Kenyan languages
as representing the meeting of diametrically opposed cultures, and strategies
that each group employed to survive the crisis. The Kenyan ‘Natives’ accep-
ted the English language, and actually demanded that it be taught to their
children, but that in no way meant that they accepted wholesale the cultural
and political domination which followed.
The British responded to this demand by dispensing English education to a
small elite group which they could manipulate to serve their imperial ambi-
tions. The English language was cunningly turned into a tool for the subjuga-
tion of the local population with the cooperation of the educated elite. The
educated elite have actually continued to collude with the centre to ensure the
domination of the linguistic scene by English, long after independence.
We have seen that independence does not change language use dramati-
cally since English has maintained its dominant role in education, the mass
media, industry, law and governance. The extreme views discussed are either
to replace English altogether and have Kiswahili take its place or to dismantle
all the local idioms and foster an all English-policy. Neither view can solve
the complex problem at hand; some third alternative must be found.
After discussing the several strategies local populations are adopting to
cope with the complex linguistic situation, I would venture to say that the
only prudent way to go is plurilingualism. As the world is opening up for
pluralism in politics, education, trade etc., we must regard acceptance and
development of all languages as the option. This is not to say that all lan-
guages must perform all functions at all levels and at all times. Every country,
every society will give fair treatment to all its languages so speakers of every
language have a choice of which language to use at what time for what
purpose. As contained in the O A U Language Plan of Action for Africa, all
members must ensure that all languages within their boundaries “are recog-
nized and accepted as a resource of mutual enrichment.”

WORKS CITED
Achebe, Chinua (1965). Arrow of God (Ibadan: Heinemann).
—— (1978). ‘An image of Africa,’ Research in African Literature 9.1: 1–15.
260 K EMBO –S URE

Cole, E. (1931). Report of Joint Committee on Closer Union in East Africa

(London).
Denham, Edward (1928). Report on Native Progress (London).
Hodge, Robert, & Gunther Kress (1979). Language As Ideology (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul).
Jespersen, Otto (1990). Growth and Structure of the English Language (1905; 9th
ed. 1938, repr. Oxford: Blackwell).
Kembo–Sure (1991). ‘Language functions and language attitudes: A case of diglos-
sia in Kenya,’ English World-Wide 12: 245–60.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1981). Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (Nairobi: Heine-
mann).
—— (1993). Moving the Centre (Nairobi: East African Education Publishers).
Ochieng’, Philip (2001). ‘Why it’s futile to spoon-feed my customers,’ The Sunday
Nation (27 May).
p’Bitek, Okot (1966). Song of Lawino (Nairobi: East African Publishing House).
—— (1967). Song of Ocol (Nairobi: East African Publishing House).
Sapir, Edward (1949). Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New
York: Harcourt, Brace & World).
Simon, John (1980). Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline (New
York: Clarkson Potter).
Waithera, Charles (1999). ‘Sheng as a form of code-switching among young people
in Nairobi’ (M.Phil. proposal, Moi University).
Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1956). Language, Thought, Reality: Selected Writings of
Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. & intro. John B. Carroll (Cambridge MA: MIT Press).

[
The Democratization of Language Policy in Kenya 261

Appendix 1

Student writing on the AIDS crisis

It has affected each one of us,

Parents have lost their beloved daughters,
Dads with their beloved sons,
Husbands cannot forget their suffering wives.
Our sisters and brothers depreciate in our sights.
Students have lost their teachers
Teachers have lost their students.
Employers cannot explain it.
Employees left with no employers.
Kenya has lost its old men
And young men alike.

Our hearts get startled when we hear such words mentioned around us.
We can no longer bear the pain of what has happened to our beloved
ones. The enemy A I D S seems to have attacked us and rendered us help-
less. N O cure the provocative formula to the rich and poor.
The thought of our immediate neighbours suffering from the disease
arouses our human concern. We cannot any more eat to our fill. The suf-
fering is great.
I would have liked to start with a high note to discuss this but i feel
discouraged when i see my fellow friends, brothers, sisters even my
parents continue befriending with A I D S help it to spread. How long will
they take to be convinced that A I D S kill and not a friend to human kind.
262 K EMBO –S URE

Appendix 2

English loans in Nandi

NANDI ENGLISH
kiait gear
kiplelipul bloody fool
kotit coat
leepol level
lokeshen location
lorit lorry
matam madam
matkatit mudguard
menecha manager
paipol bible
pastaiyat pastor
pengi bank
selpet sulphate
silingit shilling
sinema cinema
takisit taxi
taransipaa transfer
temit damn it
The Democratization of Language Policy in Kenya 263

Appendix 3

Sheng (source: Waithera 1999)

Oti: Wassup!
(What’s up?)
Jamo: It’s coolo.
(I’m fine)
Oti: What is the plot today?
(What’s the plan today?)
Jamo: I’m bustin’ voo today with shorty.
(I am going to Carnivore today with my girlfriend.)
Oti: You must be staked.
(You must have a lot of money.)
Jamo: Bila. Just kiasi. Do you have a gaff?
(No, just enough. Do you have a cigarette?)
Njogu: Will you guys fika (come to) my bash (party) kesho (tomorrow)?
Charlo: Yeah, we’ll fika. (come) But you know me, I’ll be busy so I’ll fika
(arrive) late, maybe around ... yaani (I mean) late. I’ll fika (arrive)
late. Like twelve hivi (or so).
Njogu: Sawa sawa (OK), you just fika (come) at any time.
Odhis: What time is it starting?
Njogu: At around seven.
Sally: The bash (party) is for?
Njogu: Ah. Just a bash (party).
Odhis: There’s some quoro (quorum) there, ama (isn’t there)?
Njogu: Yeah. Obvious bana (man).
Odhis: Will there be barley (alcoholic drinks)?
Njogu: Kawa (as usual) bana (man).
Odhis: Aah. Basi (in that case) we’re set. Kwanza (first of all) it’s a
Friday.
Julie: Si you organize for us a rack (car)?
Charlo: That’s simple.
264 K EMBO –S URE

Julie: Then us guys will chill (wait) for you then you don’t turn up. What
cuts (happens)?
Charlo: Too bad.
Sally: You know the way you guys like tupa-ring (disappointing) chicks
(ladies).
Njogu: So the thing is set. You’re fika-ring (coming) tomorrow?
Charlo: Yeah.
Njogu: Sawa sawa (OK).
Sally: You guys don’t play (con) us. Sawa (OK)? You sikia (hear)? You
guys play (con) us you are in shit.
The Democratization of Language Policy in Kenya 265

Appendix 4

Further examples of Sheng (from Waithera 1999):

1. Mazee yule manzi ni supu.

[Man, that girl is beautiful]
2. I badly need stake for clad.
[I badly need money for clothes]
3. It seems you guys are kularing vibe.
[It seems you guys are just talking]
4. Ngafu mngola.
[from funga mlango – close the door]

[
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Postcolonial Language Planning in Tanzania
What Are the Difficulties and What is the Way Out?

Safari T.A. Mafu

Aston University, UK

ABSTRACT
The essay discusses the language policy of Tanzania and shows how the
ideals of the immediate postcolonial period have been eclipsed by the aspira-
tions of the socially dominant groups, whose desire to protect their interests
brings them into conflict with the government’s ‘swahilization’ policy.
Instead of a forced choice between Kiswahili and English, the essay advo-
cates a third way, of not rejecting English, but of reconstituting it in a more
inclusive, ethical and democratic way so as to bring about economic and
social harmony in society. In this way, it is hoped that all young learners
from different social and economic strata currently in the education system
will be empowered for their future productive role in society.

1. Introduction: genesis of the politics of English

as the medium of education in Tanzania

T
1
ANZANIA was first a German colony (1885–1914) and then a
British Trustee Territory (1919–61) while Zanzibar was under the
Oman Arab Sultanate (1652–1964). Language policy in Tanzania
was and still is partly determined by this historical background. During the
German era, Kiswahili was the vehicular language. It was the language used

1
The name Tanzania was coined in 1964 after Tanganyika and Zanzibar united on
26 April to form the United Republic of Tanzania – in short, Tanzania.
268 S AFARI T.A. M AFU

to rule the colony. It was also the medium of formal Western education2 for
those members of the indigenous population who received it.
During British rule, however, English was introduced into the education
system. Before progressing further, we should perhaps mention that a tri-
partite system existed with separate schools for the European population, the
Indian population, and the African population.3 In the schools for the Afri-
cans, English was at first taught as a school subject with the aim of using it as
the medium of education in the higher classes. There were, therefore, clearly
spelled out language policies to achieve these ends. For example, as early as
the 1920s the British colonial office in London took an interest in the educa-
tion of the indigenous peoples of its colonies in Africa.4 Other missions
followed the earlier visits of the 1920s. Of particular interest, with regard to
educational policy and practice in general, and language policy in particular,
is the African Education Study of 1951–52, which visited all British colonies
in Africa. The study team was divided into two groups: the Eastern and
Central African group and the Western African group. Among several recom-
mendations made by the East and Central African group regarding language
policy the following are of interest to this essay:
Recommendation 16: Use of certain vernaculars in primary education [...]
Recommendation 18: A policy should be followed which leads to the eventual
elimination of Swahili from all schools where it is taught as a lingua
franca. (In Kenya, a policy of gradual elimination over the whole territory
could be followed. In Tanganyika a more piecemeal policy would be wiser.
At first one or two ‘vernacular areas’ could be detached from the main

2
Formal Western education during the German colonial period typically consisted
of up to four years of primary schooling, while during the early years of British rule
and until the mid-1950s, it was six years of primary education.
3
The tripartite system was abolished on 1 Jan 1962 just after Tanganyika gained its
independence. The new language policy in education was that Kiswahili became the
medium of instruction from Std. I – IV (ie, lower primary school). English was
introduced as a subject in Std. III and was the medium of instruction from Std. V –
VIII (ie, middle school) and in secondary school. At that time there was no university
in the country. Tanganyikans who qualified for higher education were sent to Makerere
College in Uganda or to Britain. Makerere College catered for the East African British
territories of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and Zanzibar during the colonial days.
4
The Phelp–Stoke Commission on education in the colonies visited, among other
countries, the East African British colonies of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. And
among other things, the question of medium of education was central. In Kenya,
Kiswahili was associated with islamization and was therefore considered unsuitable as
the medium of education. In Uganda there were at least 15 major ethnic groups. In
Tanganyika and Zanzibar, Kiswahili was more widespread and was already in use as
the medium of education for lower classes and as a vehicular language of administra-
tion.
Postcolonial Language Planning in Tanzania 269

Swahili-teaching bloc and in them a more vigorous vernacular plus English

policy pursued).
Recommendation 19: As soon as competent teachers are available, the teach-
ing of English should be introduced in the second year of school life with
the aim of giving in three years of study a reading ability sufficient to en-
sure permanent literacy given adequate follow-up. English should be used
as the medium of instruction in the fourth year as an extension of the direct
method of teaching.
Recommendation 22: English should be taught in primary schools to produce
good reading ability, speaking ability be given in middle and secondary
schools with a mandatory oral examination as part of the School Certificate
examination.
Recommendation 23: English should be strengthened in Teacher Training
Colleges (T T C s) as part of the general education of the students and part
of the language policy, which gives a quite new importance and weight to
English (and selected vernaculars).
It was on the basis of the above recommendations that English found its way
into all levels of the education system in Tanzania as part of the language
policy in education pursued by the British colonial government. It is these
roots which Phillipson (1992) and Pennycook (1994) argue to be the forma-
tive discourses and practices in E L T today. It is important to point out here
that many top government officials who are currently in power obtained their
education during this time or during the period just after independence. After
independence and until 1967 the curricular and language policy in education
remained that practised during the British colonial days. Significant changes
in education and language policy began in 1967.

2. Kiswahili: the language of nation-building

in the newly independent Tanganyika
In Tanzania, the struggle for independence began in earnest in 1954 after the
founding of T A N U (Tanganyika African National Union) by Julius Nyerere.
T A N U adopted Kiswahili as the language for this struggle.5 It united more
than one hundred and thirty tribes in the country during the struggle for inde-
pendence and became the most appropriate national language for the indepen-
dence struggle. To give it its due weight, the first president of Tanganyika,

5
There are two main reasons why Kiswahili was adopted during the struggle for
independence. First, English was seen as the language of the enemy. Second, not many
Tanzanians had acquired it because it was learned in schools. Thus the majority of the
Tanzanians who were wholeheartedly involved in this struggle did not speak or
understand the English language.
270 S AFARI T.A. M AFU

Julius K. Nyerere, used it to address the first independent national assembly.

This gave Kiswahili the impetus required to make it the official and national
language from the onset of independence. Thus, after the country had gained
independence, the new leaders found Kiswahili to be the most appropriate
language for nation building. It was therefore easily adopted and widely
accepted as the national/official language to unite the nation and to ensure
that no single tribal group would dominate linguistically.6 Later policies and
ideologies of T A N U , the ruling party, such as the Ujamaa ideology, adult
literacy campaigns of the 1970s and the implementation of universal primary
education (U P E ) depended greatly on Kiswahili as the medium of transmit-
ting the message. Other economic and social development plans such as the
fifteen-year development plan (1965–80) greatly depended on transmission of
the messages in an accessible medium – and Kiswahili was the rational and
patriotic choice.
The early days of independence were followed by the union between
Tanganyika and Zanzibar in April 1964, which also had a significant impact.
For example, in Zanzibar, Kiswahili was made the official language and
Arabic and English were banned in the Isles by a government decree. This
reinforced the earlier T A N U efforts to make Kiswahili the official and the
national language of mainland Tanganyika.

3. Kiswahili vs. English as the medium

of Tanzania’s education system
As pointed out earlier, the major move to make Kiswahili the medium of edu-
cation in the Tanzanian education system began in 1967 after the announce-
ment of the Arusha Declaration and the subsequent Education for Self-
Reliance policy. According to this policy, Kiswahili was made the medium of
primary education.7 It was argued at that time that this policy of swahilizing
the medium of primary education was a step towards swahilizing the medium
of secondary and higher education in subsequent years.
However, since these first attempts to swahilize the medium of the coun-
try’s education system in the mid-1960s, the Tanzanian government has made
very little progress.

6
Tanzania has one hundred and thirty ethnolinguistic groups – the largest, the
Wasukuma, has about 5 million speakers and the smallest tribes have a few thousand
speakers.
7
Before this policy, the medium of instruction in lower primary schools (Std. I –
IV) was Kiswahili and the medium of the middle school (upper primary school) (Std.
V – VIII) was English.
Postcolonial Language Planning in Tanzania 271

3.1 National Development Plan 1964–80

On attaining independence, Tanzania, like most former colonies, inherited the
following: a very weak economy, very few trained middle- and high-level
skilled workers in all sectors, and a very low life-expectancy. The immediate
aims of the newly independent governments were therefore to raise the in-
come per capita, to attain self-sufficiency in trained and middle- and high-
level skilled manpower and to raise the life expectancy through developing
medical infrastructure. To achieve these objectives, education was seen as one
of the important catalysts for development. In the case of Tanzania, it was
argued that the best option would be to make primary education universal: ie,
compulsory, for all school-aged children. It was also argued that secondary
and higher education be reserved for the few who would later serve the major-
ity, and, in Nyerere’s terms, “those few who received the privilege of getting
secondary education had a duty to repay the sacrifice which others had
made.” It was therefore argued that to make secondary and higher education
relevant to Tanzanian needs, it had to be offered in the medium of Kiswahili.
The main reasons for this view were as follows: first, education should not
alienate those who received it from their society. Secondly, it was expected
that those who received higher education would use their knowledge and
skills to bring about the rapid economic and social development of Tanzanian
society. These aims were stated in the Education for Self-Reliance policy
document of 1967 and in the second Five Year Development Plan Document
(1969–74). In line with these developments, the Ministry of Education and
Culture issued a directive to all heads of secondary schools in 1969 that the
O-level examinations would be conducted in Kiswahili with effect from
1971.8

3.2 Recommendations of local vs. foreign experts

A shift in the official/national policy from English to Kiswahili after indepen-
dence (and the subsequent Cultural Revolution which swept most independent
nations) led to a decline in the use of English, and subsequently, a decline in
the standard of English language proficiency. This decline was further reinfor-
ced by the change in the medium of primary education mentioned earlier.
This state of affairs led the government and learning institutions to carry out
several studies of the language situation in Tanzania. For example, in 1975
the National Kiswahili Council of Tanzania (B A K I T A ) commissioned
Materu and Mlama to undertake a study on the viability of using Kiswahili as
the medium of education in secondary schools. Similarly, in 1979 the

8
The only paper which had been in Kiswahili before that was Siasa (Political
Education), which has now been renamed Uraia (Civics).
272 S AFARI T.A. M AFU

Presidential Commission (popularly known as the Makwetta Commission)

was appointed to undertake a study on the general educational policy and
practice of the post-Arusha declaration era. Other local educationalists and
sociolinguists also undertook similar studies in the country – mainly as part of
educational research for their Master’s degree studies. At the institutional
level, the University of Dar es Salaam administered English language
screening tests to their prospective undergraduates to establish their needs and
deficits in academic situations.
The findings of all these local experts and of the English language-screen-
ing tests pointed out that English was something of a barrier to the acquisition
of knowledge and skills in secondary schools and higher education. The local
experts subsequently recommended a shift to Kiswahili as the medium of edu-
cation as an extension of the language of instruction policy pursued in
primary education. Based on the results of the screening tests, however,
U D S M established a communication skills unit to offer intensive English
courses and study skills tuition as a short-term measure for the period in
which English was to remain the medium of higher education in Tanzania.
Let us turn to the views of these local and external experts.

3.3 The Makwetta Report and its recommendations

The Makwetta Commission undertook a fact-finding mission regarding edu-
cational reforms in the country. It visited almost all regions in Tanzania,
inspected institutions of learning and interviewed people from all sectors of
society. It also toured other countries for the purposes of comparison. The
Commission strongly recommended a shift to Kiswahili in the entire educa-
tion system and set targets to ‘swahilize’ the medium of instruction in secon-
dary education by 1985 and in higher education by 1992. The government,
however, stalled these recommendations and instead invited an outside view –
the Criper and Dodd Commission.

3.4 Criper and Dodd’s report and their recommendations

As pointed out above, instead of heeding the recommendation of the local
experts mentioned above, the government invited foreign experts with assis-
tance from the British Council in 1985 – the Criper and Dodd Commission.
The Commission conducted a thorough survey of the language situation in
secondary schools and in the institutions of higher education.
The interesting and significant point of difference between the local and
foreign experts in their study on the medium of instruction is their findings.
They both pointed out that English had ceased to be a viable medium of edu-
cation in Tanzania for various practical and ideological reasons. However,
Postcolonial Language Planning in Tanzania 273

while the local experts advocated a shift to Kiswahili, the international experts
recommended strengthening the English language in the country’s education
system. The government heeded this recommendation. This resulted in a ten-
year English Language Teaching Support Project (E L T S P 1986–96). The
main reason for this favourable official attitude towards English probably was
the package attached to the recommendations of the foreign experts – espe-
cially textbooks, which formed part of the support from the British Govern-
ment. The materials were mainly designed for use in the U K . For example,
the stories, pictures, etc. were designed for a British cultural context.9 Further-
more, audiotapes or videotapes accompanied some of the textbooks. But not
all schools in Tanzania have the necessary equipment or suitable language
laboratories for such materials. In fact, not all schools have a reliable supply
of electricity.10
In a nutshell, we can see from this experience that language teaching /
learning materials, curricula and language teaching pedagogies offered as part
of the E L T support from donor countries such as Britain or the U S A 11 raise a
number of questions about their relevance and appropriateness to the Third-
World recipients.

3.5 Other government documents

In the case of Tanzania, the question of the appropriate medium of instruction
in secondary and higher education dominated the education and training poli-
cies of 1993 and 1995. In these documents, the problem of English as the
medium of instruction is acknowledged, but the government kept on sticking
to English. This was mainly due to the conditionality of the E L T S P – that
English must remain the medium of secondary and higher education in
Tanzania.
A significant language policy document is the Tanzania Cultural Policy,
which states that Kiswahili shall soon be the medium of the entire education
system. The Government has already set a target – that by 2010 Kiswahili
shall be the medium of instruction in secondary and higher education.
Whether this target will be met is as yet an open question, as even now there
are conflicting views among the Ministry’s officials on the implementation
date.12

9
See Canagarajah (1999) for similar experiences in Jaffna, Sri Lanka.
10
Only between eight and ten percent of Tanzanians have access to electricity,
mainly in major towns.
11
Tanzania receives education at aid from the USA in the form of personnel (Peace
Corps) and teaching/learning materials.
12
For example, the new Minister for Education and Culture, J. Mungai, declared in
an interview with the BBC that “we haven’t reached that stage, we don’t even have
274 S AFARI T.A. M AFU

3.6 The dominant group and the politics of

English-medium education in Tanzania
While the stated language political goal is to swahilize Tanzania’s entire edu-
cation system, in practice, the dominant elite group is thwarting the Govern-
ment’s efforts. Prior to the liberalization of the mid-1980s (the Ruksa period),
English-medium primary schools were for the children of the expatriates
working in Tanzania. All Tanzanian children went to public primary schools
where the medium of instruction is Kiswahili.13 After abandoning the ideo-
logies and policies of the Arusha Declaration and the subsequent liberal-
ization of the economy, English-medium kindergarten /primary schools began
to mushroom in Tanzania. These institutions are very expensive for ordinary
working people and peasants and are found in major towns only. They are
thus meant for the rich. In the case of Tanzania, this is mainly the admini-
strative elite who occupy key positions in the government’s machinery. They
are the people with the power to implement or not to implement the govern-
ment language policy as stipulated in the 1997 Cultural Policy document,
which is regarded as the main language policy document for implementation
of swahilization.
In my recent study of the elite’s knowledge of the government language
policy, their attitude towards government efforts to swahilize the medium of
education and their behaviour towards this process (Mafu 2001), the follow-
ing was established:
– that the elite are aware of the government language policy in general: ie,
they are aware that Kiswahili is the national and official language in
Tanzania;
– that they are aware of the problems associated with English as the medium
of education but are not ready to change to Kiswahili. For example, they
recognize student difficulties caused by code switching and code mixing
between English and Kiswahili in their lectures. They claim that they do so
because they know from experience that not all students can follow
lectures conducted entirely in English. They base this claim on the way
their students answer essay questions in the examinations and classroom
assignments. On the other hand, when they visit rural people to conduct
research or on outreach activities, they code mix between English and

Biology, Chemistry books written in Kiswahili” (Tanzanian Guardian, 14 April 2001:

8). This is clearly a U-turn on the earlier Government stance announced by the Vice
President in March 2000 at the International Kiswahili workshop, where the Vice
President stated that the Tanzanian Government was committed to swahilization.
13
Only a very few rich parents sent their children to neighbouring countries where
the medium was English.
Postcolonial Language Planning in Tanzania 275

Kiswahili even though they are aware that peasants in Tanzania do not
understand English and that the official language policy requires them to
use Kiswahili. Almost all their research findings are written in English –
hence not easily accessible to the peasants;
– that they are not serious about promoting swahilization. Instead they send
their own children to English-medium kindergarten /primary schools or to
neighbouring countries where the medium of primary education is English.
The expectations and aspirations of their children are those expressed in
the teaching materials imported from the West. Their children are made to
study English so as to give them the sort of life depicted in the teaching
and learning materials.

3.7 Anglicization and globalization

Today the world is moving towards a single capitalist world economy domi-
nated by multinational corporations, which for the most part have promoted
English as the lingua franca of international capitalism (Pennycook 1994).
The capitalist system has become global in part through technological ad-
vances. This is particularly true in the case of information technology, tele-
communication and audiovisual media, which are of growing importance, as
is succinctly explained by Wright (2000), who argues that “there is now an
ever-growing internationalism, an increasing acceptance of intervention in the
internal affairs of the state, economic globalisation and continuous techno-
logical advancement and a perception of cultural convergence, which have
denationalised many aspects of national life. Globalization seems to constitute
Global Anglicisation” (79).
Tanzania is part of this “global village”. It participates in international
affairs. For example, it plays a significant regional role in the Great Lakes
States of Africa, which are currently involved in internal feuds and wars. It
accepts refugees from these states and it has now sent a peacekeeping force to
the Democratic Republic of Congo. Tanzania also participates in other inter-
national forums such as the O A U , the U N and its associate bodies. It has an
urgent need to succeed in economic terms. This global participation seems to
force Tanzania to expand English for the foreseeable future.

4. Analysis and conclusion:

the role of English in postmodern Tanzania
Currently there is a complex triglossic situation developing in Tanzania. Eng-
lish is the medium of secondary and higher education and the medium of
international communication. Kiswahili, on the other hand, is the official and
the national language. It is also the medium of primary education. Local and
276 S AFARI T.A. M AFU

family languages are numerous. It is important to stress here that Tanzania is

a developing nation. It needs to educate its population appropriately from the
grassroots level up. It needs English for negotiating successfully in the inter-
national arena.
In this essay, it has been shown that English has continued to be the
medium of secondary and higher education in Tanzania despite the negative
consequences this has had on learners. It has also been shown that the elites
send their children to English-medium schools so that they can have a head
start when they proceed to secondary and higher education, where the medi-
um of instruction is English. It is therefore imperative to reconcile the needs
and desires of different groups in the society: the well-educated elites will not
abandon their educational advantage and the larger numbers of peasant
farming families need to have greater social mobility. At first sight these are
incompatible goals. Moreover, all this must be achieved within a situation of
scarce resources both financial (to purchase appropriate teaching and learning
materials) and manpower (to hire or train experts in the field of E L T ).
If secondary education is to swahilize, there may be an even greater ten-
dency for the children of the elites to be educated outside the state system. As
there is a pressing need for bilinguals (Kiswahili/English) in all sectors of the
state economy and government, those educated to be bilingual would be at an
advantage. Although the Swahilization of the education system would make
the next level of education available to the great majority, they would still be
barred effectively from full social mobility since they would be unlikely to
become competent Kiswahili/ English bilinguals.
I therefore recommend a type of bilingual education in secondary and
higher education in Tanzania which can overcome the above-mentioned
problems if and when the education system is swahilized. Tanzania should
consider bilingualism as additive. That is, students should be able to use
Kiswahili skills, which they have already acquired during their primary edu-
cation, in learning English when they join secondary and higher education. In
order to put such a strategy into practice, thorough research and needs
analysis is called for to ensure a smooth implementation of the bilingual
education policy. The politics of English in the Tanzanian education system
continues.

WORKS CITED
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of East and Central African study group,’ in African Education: A Study of Edu-
cational Policy and Practice in British Tropical Africa, ed. Nuffield Foundation
& The Colonial Office (Oxford: Oxford UP): 58–41.
Postcolonial Language Planning in Tanzania 277

Bradley, Kenneth (1950). The Colonial Service as a Career (London: Her Majesty’s
Stationery Office).
Bourdieu, Pierre, & Jean–Claude Passeron (1997). Reproduction in Education,
Society and Culture, tr. Richard Nice, foreword by Tom Bottomore (La Repro-
duction, 1977; London: Sage).
Canagarajah, A. Suresh (1999). Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teach-
ing (Oxford: Oxford UP).
Chandley, J. (1966). Report of the Institute of Education Conference on the Aca-
demic English Syllabus for Grade A Teacher Training and Primary English
Methods (Dar es Salaam: Institute of Education).
Gorman, Thomas P., ed. (1970). Language in Education in East Africa: Papers from
the First Eastern Africa Conference on Language and Linguistics (Nairobi:
Oxford UP).
Kachru, Braj (1986). The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions and Models of
Non-Native Englishes (Oxford: Pergamon).
Mafu, Safari T . A . (2001). ‘The role of the English language in the context of
National Development Vision 2025 with specific reference to agriculture in
Tanzania’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Aston University).
Mulokozi, Mugyabuso M., & D . P . D . Massamba, ed. (1984). Kiswahili Vol. 51/1&
2 (Dar es Salaam: T U K I , U D S M ).
Nyerere, Julius K. (1961). The Constitution of Tanganyika (Dar es Salaam: Govern-
ment Printers).
—— (1967). The Arusha Declaration and TANU’s Policy on Socialism and Self-
Reliance (Dar es Salaam: Government Printers).
—— (1967). Education for Self-Reliance (Dar es Salaam: Government Printers).
—— (1967). Socialism and Rural Development (Dar es Salaam: Government
Printers).
Pennycook, Alastair (1994). The Cultural Politics of English as an International
Language (London: Longman).
Phillipson, Robert (1992). Linguistic Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford UP).
Roy–Campbell, Zaline Makini, & Martha A.S. Qorro (1997). Language Crisis in
Tanzania: The Myth of English vs Education (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota).
Tumbo–Masabo, Zubeida, & E.F.K. Chiduo, ed. (1999). Kiswahili katika Elimu ya
Juu (Dar es Salaam: T U K I Press, U D S M ).
Uganda Government Printer (1961). Report of the Commonwealth Conference on
the Teaching of English as a Second Language (Entebbe: Uganda Government
Printer).
United Republic of Tanzania (1964). Tanganyika Five-Year Plan for Economic and
Social Development (Dar es Salaam: Government Printers).
—— (1965). Hotuba ya mheshimiwa waziri wa fedha ya makadirio ya mapato na
matumizi ya mwaka 1965/66 (Dar es Salaam: Government Printers).
—— (1966). Annual Report of the Ministry of Education (Dar es Salaam: National
Printing Co.).
—— (1995). Tanzania Education and Training Policy (Dar es Salaam: Adult
Education Press).
278 S AFARI T.A. M AFU

—— (1997). Tanzania Cultural Policy (Dar es Salaam: Adult Education Press).

Wright, Sue (2000). Language Policy and Language Issues in the Successor States
of the Former U S S R (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters).

[
“Hear from my own lips”
The Language of Women’s Autobiographies

Eleonora Chiavetta
Università di Palermo

ABSTRACT
The aim of this essay is to focus on the relationship between identity,
culture and the use of language in women’s autobiographical writings
in English. The essay mainly analyses Buchi Emecheta’s autobiogra-
phy Head above Water (1986) and Sindiwe Magona’s autobiogra-
phical texts To My Children’s Children (1990) and Forced to Grow
(1992). The three works are interesting examples of the plurality and
non-homogeneity of autobiographical female voices. Emphasis is
given to the relationship between oral and written literature, the use of
figurative language exploited by the two writers, the rhetorical devices
they employ and the impact of Western literary models upon their own
writing.

I
N T H E I N T I M A T E E M P I R E : Reading Women’s Autobiography
(2000), Gillian Whitlock analyses a wide range of colonial and post-
colonial women’s autobiographies, from the History of Mary Prince
(1831) to the most recent autobiographical texts. She suggests that despite,
and within, such a multifaceted selection it is still possible to observe “how
the subject negotiates a space to speak” (Whitlock 2000: 2). She stresses the
complexities of the genre and admits that “rather than constructing an identity
of history of women” she is more interested in “difference and intimacy” (3).
By the term ‘intimacy’ she means “how deeply personally embedded colo-
280 E LEONORA C HIAVETTI

nization and resistance are in thinking and writing about the self – a small
pink map at the heart of things” (7).
An analysis of Buchi Emecheta’s Head above Water (1986) and Sindiwe
Magona’s To My Children’s Children (1990) and Forced to Grow (1992)
shows how appropriate Whitlock’s statements are, as all these three texts are
good examples of how varied the goals, styles, narrative techniques of
women’s autobiography may be. These two authors differ in social back-
ground, upbringing and education. Emecheta is an Igbo woman writer living
in London, Magona is a South African teacher of the Xhosa ethnic group: the
first author mainly draws upon her experiences as an expatriate, trying to find
her own space as a woman and a writer in a foreign environment, while the
second chronicles the difficulties of her life in a society ruled by patriarchy
and apartheid. The main feature that can be said to unite their voices is the
fact that they both follow the well-established pattern of a chronological
order: from childhood, through school days, to life as an adult, including im-
portant events such as marriage and motherhood. Emecheta’s narrative ends
with the publication of The Joys of Motherhood in 1979, while the first part of
Magona’s autobiography covers her first twenty-three years and the second
part ends with Magona’s departure for New York in 1984.
Similarities may be noticed between the lives of the two women authors –
for example, in their being abandoned by their husbands, and struggling, as
single mothers, to survive and make ends meet. The maternal trope has been,
in fact, considered particularly relevant to Magona’s two-part autobiography
as she “projects an individual’s attempt to create a space for herself by
manoeuvering through two competing yet converging maternal discourses,
one Western, the other African” (Koyana 2001: 63). However, the way the
two writers see themselves as subjects, how they approach and develop the
genre and their attitudes towards the reader, are elements that reveal great dif-
ferences between them. Their aim in writing their autobiographies, and there-
fore the value they assign to the genre, is dissimilar, as it is based on a
divergent way of looking at one’s identity and, therefore, of representing
oneself. Such a differentiation is made explicit not only by the content of their
narration, but, above all, by the linguistic, rhetorical and textual strategies
employed by the two authors.
Sindiwe Magona’s first autobiographical text, To My Children’s Children,
is introduced by a preface ‘From a Xhosa Grandmother’ built on a series of
questions directly addressed to a great-granddaughter (Magona 1994: vii).
This preface is followed by a dedicatory allocution, presumably aimed at the
same addressee, titled “A Child of the Child of My Child”. Both the preface
and this introductory appeal stress the intimate nature of her narration, which
is meant to be confined to a family sphere (even if Magona is writing for a
The Language of Women’s Autobiographies 281

public of unknown readers). The very title of the autobiography reinforces

this idea. Magona underlines her need to share her past with the descendants
of her family and considers herself as the living memory of a yesteryear that
belongs not only to her, but to her clan. In this way the recollections of her
own life are considered both as an instrument to analyse and state her own
identity, and as a help for future generations to understand themselves and
their own history. While narrating her own story, she narrates a common past:
the life experiences, difficulties, sorrows and struggles shared by her own
people. A personal story becomes, then, part of the history of a whole people.
The individual, though maintaining its central position both as subject – as the
one who had an extraordinary life – and as narrator – as the one who chooses
what to narrate – takes its place within a world of which it is only a piece. The
individual still plays a role as a model, as the recipient of an exemplary life,
but the narrative focus shifts from the individual who is narrating to the
individual(s) to whom the narration is addressed. Magona’s autobiography is,
therefore, a link between the private and public. The personal becomes
political. The Western criteria of autobiography are challenged by such a per-
spective: identity as an autonomous self-hood grows from one’s identity
within the group and leads to an attempt at collective self-determination. In an
interview, Magona confirms that her “writing is, therefore, an attempt to put
on record some of that collective consciousness [...] or, at least, a slice
thereof” (Koyana & Gray 2001: 81). This attitude on the part of the writer is
confirmed by the final words of her first volume where Magona addresses her
great-granddaughter again (Magona 1994: 167).
The fact that Magona considers herself and her life events as part of a story
that involves her whole clan, and the fact that she talks of herself within her
group, is made evident by her repeated use of the first-person-plural pro-
nouns, both nominative and accusative. She resorts to the first person plural
not only when referring to herself and her mates during her childhood days
(Magona 1994: 5, 9), but also when narrating about herself as an adult, for
example when writing about school colleagues (Magona 1997: 67, 69), about
the group of Church Women Concerned she joins (Magona 1997: 122), the
Women’s Movement (Magona 1997: 166) and, generally, any time she de-
nounces apartheid restrictions (Magona 1994: 66) or aims at stressing her ad-
herence to rituals, customs and beliefs of her ethnic group (Magona 1994: 95).
Magona certainly makes use of the first-person-singular pronoun in her text
when writing of her feelings, emotions, fears and expectations, but she pres-
ents a well-balanced mixture of ‘I’ sentences stressing her individuality and
‘we’ sentences stressing her bond with others. This also highlights her poli-
tical involvement and her critical attitude, which become more and more
evident in Forced to Grow.
282 E LEONORA C HIAVETTI

Emecheta’s autobiography, on the other hand, is dedicated to the memory

of Chiedu, the writer’s eldest daughter, who died in 1984. The text, then,
might be considered as a tribute to the author’s dead child. However, there are
no further references to the family as addressee of the text in the introduction
to the book. While it is quite obvious that Magona considers her recollections
as a heritage to be transmitted to her own family descendants, thus claiming a
social and political role, Emecheta’s autobiography is less bound to her clan.
Emecheta starts her work as a biographer of herself when she is already a
well-established and famous writer. By 1986 she had already published most
of her novels, some children’s books and she had already been awarded
various prizes, from the Daughter of Mark Twain Award to the Best British
Writer’s Award (this last one for the Joys of Motherhood, 1979). Her auto-
biography seems to derive mainly from her need to provide the background to
her literary career (Emecheta 1986: 2).
Head above Water addresses a public of general readers and critics, rather
than her family, therefore losing the intimate flavour of Magona’s autobio-
graphy. There is no kinship relationship between her public and herself. She is
really addressing her own readers, the ones who have already read her other
works, and, as she underlines, may even be already familiar with some of the
episodes she is going to describe. Thus, if expressions such as “my child” ap-
pear now and then in Magona’s text, to reinforce the ‘family’ image, in
Emecheta’s we will find such formulas as “my reader” (Emecheta 1986: 2).
Emecheta’s text has the more usual and Western character of an autobio-
graphical work dealing mainly with one person’s thoughts and emotions. It is
significant, though, that the first-person-plural pronouns, both nominative and
accusative, appear when she describes herself as a child together with the
children of her age group while listening to the stories told by her father’s
elder sister in the compound (Emecheta 1986: 7). Her bond with her own
group appears to have been stronger during her early life, while her London
years seem to increase her distance from her origins, as is emphasized by the
use of the first-person-singular pronoun. It may be noted, however, that
Emecheta resorts to first-person-plural pronouns whenever she is reminded in
London of her past life in Lagos (Emecheta 1986: 135). The use of first-
person-singular pronouns does not indicate a more selfish attitude on the part
of the writer, but a different way of looking at the objectives of the genre and
also a different attitude towards oneself. If an autobiography expresses the
need to consolidate one’s identity, readers might conclude that Magona’s
identity lies within the group and is bound to it, while Emecheta is more self-
centred, at least in this stage of her life, and tries to find her own identity
outside her group.
The Language of Women’s Autobiographies 283

Because of her previous writing experience Emecheta describes her new

task in her introduction as a relatively easy one to carry out (Emecheta 1986:
1). The fact that Emecheta inserts this work of hers within the list of her other
published works underlines how her approach to her autobiography is not
different from her approach to her works of fiction – which, anyway, were
closely based on her own life and had a deeply autobiographic flavour. Her
wish to become a writer and to tell her own stories is the thread that unifies
the text. What makes her different from other Igbo, immigrant women, is her
success as a writer. The self she wants to enhance in her autobiography is the
writing self – all the other roles she fulfills as daughter, wife, mother, student
and social assistant are less relevant. Readers will soon be told that the model
of her writing is deeply rooted in her tradition, as she considers oral culture as
the source of her information.
For Magona, by contrast, this is the first attempt at writing. Towards the
end of her first book she admits that “we are not a writing people, culturally.
And this cultural trait is very strong in my family” (Magona 1994: 142). In
Forced to Grow she affirms that “writing was no less of a myth to me than
Icarus and his attempts to reach the sun” (Magona 1998: 184). Maybe because
of this lack of confidence in her writing skill, soon after her invocation at the
beginning of To My Children’s Children, Magona underlines the link between
the text which she is going to construct and the oral tradition of the people she
belongs to: “As ours is an oral tradition I would like you to hear from my own
lips what it was like living in the 1940s onwards. What it was like in the times
of your great-grandmother, me” (Magona 1994: 1). Words such as ‘hear’ and
‘lips’ are associated with orality and not with a written text. She is addressing
listeners and not readers like Emecheta. The contradiction implicit in the very
act of writing is that Magona is not really telling her story by word of mouth
but in writing, by word of pen or computer.
From the beginning of their texts, while describing their childhoods, both
writers stress their ties with the traditional figure of the storyteller. Both of
them stress how the art of story telling was mostly in the hands of women.
Magona refers to the figure of her grandmother telling iintsomi, the fairy tales
of amaXhosa (Magona 1994: 5), thus giving her readers the key to under-
standing her own role as a grandmother and a storyteller (Magona 1994: 5, 6).
In the first book of her autobiography, Magona also introduces the character
of an aunt, an urban story teller, who relates family events to her. Later on,
Magona also quotes other examples of women story tellers in a different
context. She is a young woman, already burdened with a family, who, despite
her education and her being a qualified teacher, is obliged to work as a maid
servant to earn her living and support her children. The storytellers, then, are
the other poor women like herself whom she meets going to work and coming
284 E LEONORA C HIAVETTI

back. The stories they tell are as funny or dramatic as the stories told by her
aunts when she was a child: however, they speak of a dreary life and ways of
coping with an unjust society. The roles of such township storytellers is
political, as their stories are meant as examples of resistance, refusal and
rebellion in African women’s everyday battles. This type of story telling
forms the pattern of Magona’s famous first fictional work, the collection of
short stories Living, Loving, and Lying Awake at Night (1991).
Emecheta, on the other hand, devotes many pages to the figure of her
father’s elder sister, Nwakwaluzo Ogbueyin, her big mother, who told child-
ren stories. Emecheta also underlines how she physically resembles this aunt
of hers (Emecheta 1986: 242). In these utterances Emecheta’s inspiration is
connected to the tradition of Ifo, the Igbo oral genre. As Susan Arndt explains,
Ifo are only remotely an equivalent for the English term of folk tale because
their social function has very little in common with modern “bedtime tales” in
the UK and other European countries. Moreover, the fact that Ifo are
improvised and dramatized in the course of the performance distances Ifo
from folk tales, which are nowadays nearly always in writing and therefore
fixed. (Arndt 1996: 51)
Emecheta therefore refers to an oral tradition to fulfill her role and transfers
oral narration to the written text. It has been noted that she
igboizes the novel genre by negotiating devices going back to the Igbo narra-
tive tradition, such as irony, repetition, dialogues and integrating of genres of
Igbo oral literature into her narratives. (Arndt 1996: 28)
The same may be said of her autobiographical text, especially in the frequent
use of dialogue, which appear to be one of her favourite tools. In resorting to
dialogue, she adopts the oral-aural nature of narration, thus temporarily trans-
forming the readers into listeners. However, along with the Igbo narrative
tradition, Emecheta is also shaped by Western written tradition. Her double
cultural background heavily influences her whole writing career and therefore
also her written autobiography.
The two writers have, of course, their own favourite rhetorical devices.
Emecheta’s autobiography offers a combination of narrative and descriptive
modes, but also has a dramatic quality, as the Nigerian writer re-creates vivid
everyday scenes before the readers /public whenever she reproduces a dia-
logue. She transfers into writing something that she has been told, and she
transcribes it quoting the direct speech she remembers. She transcribes the
voice of her big mother telling stories, asking questions of the children who
are listening to her, the voices of the women at the compound, of the girls at
the college, of her teacher (Emecheta 1986: 24), of her chi (Emecheta 1986:
24, 78, 80, 84). She reproduces long dialogues between the social worker and
The Language of Women’s Autobiographies 285

herself (Emecheta 1986: 49), her husband and herself (Emecheta 1986: 91)
and her children and herself (Emecheta 1986: 83, 84, 85).
The directness and orality of Emecheta’s text is evident in the many ques-
tions and answers which fill her pages. These may be real questions people
ask her, or the questions she imagines her readers would ask her (Emecheta
1986: 109) or rhetorical questions she would ask herself (Emecheta 1986: 68,
197). Her rhetorical questions create a bond between herself and her public
(of readers? of listeners?) and can be found scattered everywhere, giving the
sense of a conversation between her and the reader, as in the defiant question:
“So what was there for a woman to do, enh?” (Emecheta 1986: 37)
Magona’s use of dialogues is different. Hers are less frequent and shorter.
Moreover, they fulfill a different role, since, by reporting the dialogues, she
lets her people be heard. It is, in fact, quite obvious that Magona often literally
translates these dialogues from her native language into English, as in the dia-
logue ‘performed’ when somebody comes to announce the death of a relative
(Magona 1994: 55). They are often long monologues, rather than dialogues,
reproduction of speeches such as the one uttered on her coming of age
(Magona 1994: 64). Magona’s use of dialogues reinforces, then, the chorality
of her autobiography and the importance she gives to the traditions, embodied
by relatives, who are the reliable figures of her life.
Owing to both the strong bond between Magona and her clan and her role
as a storyteller, her text is rich in traditional songs (Magona 1994: 38; 1998:
26), riddles (Magona 1994: 12, 13) and tongue-twisters (Magona 1994: 32),
which are given in Xhosa and accompanied by an English translation. She
also introduces more idiomatic expressions and more proverbs than Eme-
cheta. The idiomatic expressions quoted by Magona reveal a language which
stresses physicality and matter-of-factness, as in the following examples: “In
our location a professional person was rarer than a hen’s tooth” (Magona
1994: 58); “They cooked father’s child” (59); “buttocks are stingy” (Magona
1998: 4). Also, the proverbs are linked to a substantial realism, as in “It is on a
stormy day that the hen’s tail is revealed” (8); “A hand washes that which
washes it” (38); “only the wearer of the shoe can feel the pinch” (69). It is
quite clear that these proverbs are translated from Xhosa into English, and
sometimes they are accompanied or preceded by the Xhosa source.
By contrast, the influence of Emecheta’s westernized education may be
seen in her continuous references to the Bible and quotes from anglophone
authors. Emecheta has a deeper knowledge of the Scriptures than Magona,
who admits she is not an expert on the Holy Texts. Emecheta quotes lavishly
from the King James Version. However, her religious references often have
an ironic twist and are used to contrast her reality with a far off ‘mythical’
world, as can be seen in the following examples: “I don’t want to be another
286 E LEONORA C HIAVETTI

Lot’s wife” (Emecheta 1986: 2); “The walls of these ‘posh nosh’ flats were as
thick and solid as those of Jericho!” (44); “One would have thought that but
for the disturbance I was causing they would have gone straight up the
imaginary Jacob’s Ladder in their desire to be the pilgrims whom Bunyan had
idealized in The Pilgrim’s Progress [...]” (20), where there is a combination
of literary and religious references.
Emecheta quite often cites Bunyan also in her fiction. In other parts of her
autobiography she quotes Rupert Brooke, Keats (Emecheta 1986: 18), Byron
(19), Shakespeare (18, 20), Coleridge (23), Chaucer (45) and Somerset
Maugham (157). She also refers to well-known European fairy tales and folk
stories such as Hansel and Gretel, Snow White (22) and The Pied Piper of
Hamelin (45). Emecheta’s mixing of traditional Igbo orality and Western
culture stresses her dual cultural heritage, while Magona, in the rare instances
that she quotes a classic, only cites a novel of Xhosa literature, The Wrath of
the Ancestors, by A.C. Jordan. This will remind readers of her declared love
for Xhosa language and literature (Magona 1998: 108).
Consistent with the value she places on her origins and her people, Magona
makes frequent use of code-switching, that is the combination of language
items belonging to her two linguistic codes, English and Xhosa. Despite the
political message of her writing, Magona does not resort to political code-
switching,1 where no translation into English is given, but usually has an
organic form of code-switching where the translation into English of the word
or sentence always follows the Xhosa words as in “[...] and yielded umfimo,
wild spinach, to our mothers” (Magona 1994: 9); “ootikoloshe, the little
people, and izithunzela, the zombies” (9); “Kwathi ke kaloku ngantsomi”, the
Xhosa ‘Once Upon a Time’” (12); “‘ugqobhoko olululo asinto ixelma
ngomlomo. Lubonwa nqezenzo’ – which loosely translates: True faith is not
something announced by words. It is seen through actions” (Magona 1997:
31); “‘Baqatshulwe! Baqatshulwe!’ (‘They have been given incisions!’)”
(Magona 1994: 54); “‘Sindiwe Buya’ (‘Sindiwe return.’)” (99); “‘Ngubani na
lo?’ (‘And who may this be ?’” (141). The use of organic code-switching can
be also found in Forced to Grow, as in the following examples:
“Umabuy’ekwendeni – a returnee from wifehood” (Magona 1998: 1); “Sell
dagga [marijuana]?” (6); “Makhulu! Makhulu! Please come and listen!”
(30); “‘Umama wakho uza kuzal’ amawele afileyo – Your mother will give
birth to dead twins’” (67); “‘Whuwow! Ngathi ndiyazibona ndiptheth’iinc
wadi! Ndakugqib’ukuba nabantwana! Yhu ’ (Wow! I can just see myself
carrying books. After I have children! Gee!)” (80); “Her lament -‘Ukuba

1
I here refer to the distinction between extrinsic, organic, and political kinds of
code-switching drawn in Gordon 1998: 75–96.
The Language of Women’s Autobiographies 287

bendisemtsha! Ngeli lenu ixesha! – Were I still young. In these times of

yours’ – speaks volumes” (196). Very rarely, Magona’s code-switching in-
volves Afrikaans – a language she admits she knows only poorly – and Eng-
lish as in “‘Here God, die vroumens is kaal!’ (Good God, this woman is
naked!)” (Magona 1994: 27) and in “‘Geld wat stom is, maak reg wat krom
is’ – ‘Money which is dumb makes right that which is crooked’” (Magona
1998: 34), which is also an example of her passion for proverbs.
The conspicuous presence of code-switching in Magona’s texts stresses the
implicit political message of the author, whose objective is to enhance the
culture of her own group, while writing about her own life. This underlines
once again the different meaning Emecheta and Magona attribute to autobio-
graphy as a literary genre, where the main divergence lies in considering
autobiography mainly as a tool to talk about oneself, in a quite traditional,
confessional mode, as in Emecheta’s case, or as a means of offering a picture
of a wider slice of a social context where the individual is seen only as a part,
as in Magona’s case. Such a dissimilarity, despite the analogies which may be
drawn between the two women writers, supports, then, the ideas suggested by
Whitlock about the pluralism and non-homogeneity of autobiographical
female voices. These texts testify not only to two different personalities, but
also to two different ways of perceiving and shaping cultural memory through
one’s autobiography.

WORKS CITED
Arndt, Susan (1996). ‘Buchi Emecheta and the tradition of Ifo: Continuation and
writing back,’ in Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta, ed. Marie Umeh
(Trenton NJ: Africa World Press): 27–56.
Emecheta, Buchi (1986). Head Above Water: An Autobiography (London: Collins/
Fontana).
Gordon, Elizabeth (1998). ‘Raids on the articulate: Code-switching, style-shifting
and post-colonial writing,’ Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33: 75–96.
Koyana, Siphokazi (2001). ‘“Why are you carrying books? Don’t you have child-
ren?” Sindiwe Magona’s autobiographies,’ Commonwealth: Essays and Studies
23: 63–76.
——, & Rosemary Gray (2001). ‘An electronic interview with Sindiwe Magona,’
Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 23: 77–81.
Magona, Sindiwe (1994). To My Children’s Children (New York: Interlink).
—— (1998). Forced to Grow (New York: Interlink).
Whitlock, Gillian (2000). The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography
(London & New York: Cassell).

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Linguistic and Literary Development
of Nigerian Pidgin
The Contribution of Radio Drama

Dagmar Deuber and Patrick Oloko

University of Freiburg; University of Lagos

ABSTRACT
Drama serials aimed at public enlightenment have in recent years become an
important feature on Nigerian radio. Many of them employ Pidgin as the
main or only language. Although linguists have suggested that most of the
writers who use this language in artistic texts lack the necessary competence
and produce deviant forms of it, some radio drama texts received high
ratings in a survey of the linguistic appropriateness of a large number of
Pidgin texts conducted by the authors of the study. The authors supplement
their report of these survey results with analyses of extracts from one drama
serial, Rainbow City, and show how, in this serial, successful handling of
linguistic codes and literary aspects combine to make it possible for the
writer to drive home serious messages in a language that has long been
associated with ridicule.

1. Introduction

T
HE LANGUAGE that is the subject of this essay is known by the
name of ‘Nigerian Pidgin’ (or ‘Nigerian Pidgin English’), popularly
also ‘Broken’. These terms suggest some kind of trade jargon, and
this was indeed how it started off in the eighteenth century (Agheyisi 1984:
211–12). However, the status of Nigerian Pidgin (henceforth N P ) has
changed dramatically since then. Today, it functions as a lingua franca in a
wide range of contexts (Agheyisi 1984: 212), and it has been described as
“the most widely spoken language in the country” (Faraclas 1996: 2). The less
educated are usually thought of as the typical speakers (Agheyisi 1988: 230),
290 D AGMAR D EUBER AND P ATRICK O LOKO

but N P is also used among the educated in informal situations (Agheyisi

1984: 212). In addition, it has acquired a number of functions beyond private
informal communication (Agheyisi 1984: 212–13; Jibril 1995: 233–34). The
most notable among these new functions of N P is perhaps that of a medium
for radio broadcasting. For example, in Lagos, where the research on which
this essay is based was conducted, several local stations have programmes in
the language. One of them, Radio Nigeria 3, even has five hours daily on its
programme schedule; besides music and entertainment programmes, the
station’s broadcasts in N P include news and some public enlightenment talks.
Public enlightenment is also the aim of certain drama serials wholly or partly
in N P which are aired by a number of stations. It is these drama serials that
this essay is primarily concerned with.
We decided to include texts from two serials in our research. One of these,
entitled Rainbow City, deals with various social issues, in particular citizens’
rights and duties in a democratic society. The other, One Thing at a Time, is
about problems surrounding reproductive health, especially A I D S .1 Such
topics obviously require the introduction of many concepts for which N P may
not have a term, and the question therefore arises whether the scriptwriter will
be able to avoid excessive borrowing from English. Similar problems have
been investigated by Augusta Omamor in regard to N P in literature and some
media texts (see Omamor 1997; also Elugbe & Omamor 1991: 61–72). She
comes to the conclusion that many of the writers produce a heavily anglicized
form of the language which she describes as “pseudopidgin” (1997: 221).
However, most of her examples are from written sources, and, as in fact in the
whole literature on N P , radio language receives scant attention.2 This is, we
believe, a serious omission, especially since many of these broadcasts are
directed first and foremost at an audience with less formal education and

1
Rainbow City is written by Tunde Aiyegbusi and produced by the African Radio
Drama Association. One Thing at a Time is written and produced by Kola Ogunjobi
with support from the Society for Family Health and funding from the Department for
International Development. We are grateful to the producers for making scripts and
tape recordings available to us.
2
While Agheyisi (1984: 227–28) and Jibril (1995: 236, 239–42) are among the few
authors who make reference to N P on the radio, Omamor (1997) does not include any
radio texts. Elugbe/Omamor (1991) contains, besides a transcription of a news
broadcast that appears virtually without comment (168-70), an analysis of the speech
of Zebrudaya, the hero of the radio and television comedy serial Masquerade (61–66).
The authors conclude that Zebrudaya’s speech “represents an unfortunate attempt to
speak Standard English by an ill-informed person” (63). This serves their aim of
showing that there are forms of non-standard English distinct from N P , but it should
be pointed out that Zebrudaya’s speech is apparently intended as precisely such a form,
and not as N P ; this becomes clear in the context of the drama, where Zebrudaya’s
broken English contrasts sharply with the N P of his wife, for example.
Nigerian Pidgin and the Contribution of Radio Drama 291

consequently less knowledge of English than the reading public, so that a high
degree of anglicization would be much more problematic in this context than
it is in written texts.

2. The corpus study

In view of the issues outlined above, we decided to make radio language an
important part of a research project on English influence on N P for which we
did fieldwork during a six-month period in 2000.3 As a first step, we compiled
a corpus of spoken N P , the composition of which can be seen in Table 1.

Table 1. The corpus

Text categories Number of texts
Radio broadcasts 20:
News 5
Advice 5
Drama 10
(Rainbow City / One (5 / 5)
Thing at a Time)
Non-broadcast speech 20:
Interviews 5
Discussions 5
Conversations 10

There are, in total, forty texts of approximately 2000 words. Half of these are
from the radio, with ‘News’, ‘Advice’ (public enlightenment talks) and
‘Drama’ as subcategories and in the latter section, five texts from each of the
two serials. The other twenty texts are samples of various types of sponta-
neous, non-broadcast speech from fluent speakers with at least a secondary
education, the minimum educational level that one would also expect of
broadcasters. This corpus was subdivided into 320 shorter extracts (eight per
text), which were distributed among twenty-two competent informants4 along
with a linguistic questionnaire where he /she was asked, first, to assess the fre-
3
We would like to acknowledge the financial support of the German Academic
Exchange Service (D A A D ) in the form of a doctoral research grant (H S P III) to
Dagmar Deuber during the period mentioned.
4
Most of the informants were advanced students or lecturers in English and other
language-related disciplines at the University of Lagos. All claimed a good knowledge
of N P , to which most had been exposed from childhood. L1 competence, though
claimed by some, was not made a prerequisite for participation in the study, since N P
is still mostly spoken as L2 and good L2 knowledge is considered sufficient for most
practical purposes, including broadcast production (Smart Esi, Head of the Pidgin
Section at Radio Nigeria 3, p.c.).
292 D AGMAR D EUBER AND P ATRICK O LOKO

quency of what he /she considered English lexical and, separately, grammati-

cal elements in the extract in question on a four-point scale ranging from
‘very frequently’ to ‘not at all’, and, if applicable, to provide examples of such
elements; then, in a second section of the questionnaire, he /she was asked to
give an overall assessment of the language of the extract – also on a four-
point scale – with regard to two criteria, which will be explained below. The
results for the whole corpus (with the four possible answers to each question
collapsed into two categories each) are as follows:

Figure 1. Use of English elements

100
90 83
80
Corpus extracts (%)

70 60
60
50 40
40
30
17
20
10
0
Frequently Infrequently/ not Frequently Infrequently/ not
(very/fairly) at all (very/fairly) at all

Lexis Grammar

English influence, as Figure 1 shows, was found to be more pronounced in the

area of lexis than in grammar, although in both areas the informants judged in
the majority of cases that English elements were used only infrequently or not
at all. The fact that most of the extracts seem to conform more or less to what
the informants regard as N P at least grammatically may explain in part why
the results of the overall assessment (Figure 2) were remarkably positive
(another possible explanation being that some anglicisms have attained a high
degree of acceptability):
Nigerian Pidgin and the Contribution of Radio Drama 293

Figure 2. Overall assessment

96
100 92
90
80
Corpus extracts (%)

70
60
50
40
30
20
8
10 4
0
Satisfactory Unsatisfactory Intelligible Unintelligible
(fully/fairly) (largely/totally) (fully/fairly) (largely/totally)

Personal assessment Intelligibility to uneducated speaker

The language of over 90% of the extracts was rated as a fully or fairly satis-
factory form of N P for the informant personally as an educated speaker, and
was also thought to be fully or fairly intelligible to an N P speaker with little
or no formal education.
Furthermore, we compared responses across categories, applying the chi-
square test for statistical significance. Summarizing the results as presented in
the appendix, we can say that the radio sample as a whole shows, according to
the questionnaires, significantly less use of English (in lexis as well as in
grammar) than non-broadcast speech, and also received better overall ratings,
although, since almost all of the extracts in all text categories were rated as
satisfactory and intelligible, the difference is only apparent if full satisfac-
toriness and intelligibility are taken as the criterion. Among the radio sub-
categories, ‘Advice’ and ‘Drama’ were found by the informants to be less
influenced by English in lexis (there is no significant difference in grammar)
and were given better ratings than ‘News’. There are also significant differ-
ences between the two drama serials. The informants found fewer English
lexical items in the Rainbow City text group, which also has better overall
ratings. The texts in the corpus which, in the view of the informants, are least
influenced by English and most satisfactory and intelligible are therefore
those in the category ‘Advice’ and the Rainbow City drama texts.
The corpus study thus shows that there is a general tendency among edu-
cated speakers to insert English elements, especially lexical items, into their
N P , but also that radio scriptwriters and broadcasters try with varying degrees
294 D AGMAR D EUBER AND P ATRICK O LOKO

of success to adapt their language to the less well-educated target audience.

Still, English elements are far from absent from the broadcasts. This even
applies to Rainbow City, which was rated so highly in the study. However, the
use of English expressions does not necessarily mean the serial is written in
‘seudopidgin’ as analysis of some extracts in the following section will show.

3. The language of Rainbow City

The first extract that we present here is from a scene where a character called
“Chairman” (he is the chairman of a taxi drivers’ union) is giving another
character, Madam Asabe, some advice on her newly formed traders’ union.

Extract 1 (from Rainbow City, Episode 7)5

Text in NPa English translation
Asabe: Last week one member Asabe: Last week a member reported
run come tell me say dat woman that the woman we had entrusted our
wey we go give money keep na money to is a fraud. That she has
jibiti woman. That di woman don started spending the money. Please help
dey borrow small small from di me. What can we do now?
money. […] Abeg help me.
Wetin we fit do now?
Chairman: Uhm, anyway, na Chairman: It’s a simple matter. Have
simple matter. Una don register you registered your union?
una union?
Asabe: No, we never register am. Asabe: No, we haven’t.
Chairman: Ah-ah. Chairman: Are you serious?
Asabe: Dem say we no go fit Asabe: We were told that the union
register if we no get proper can’t be registered unless we have duly
officers wey we choose for elected officers.
election.
Chairman: Na true. Dat one na Chairman: Yes, that’s right. So you
true. So make you people make should hold elections.
your elections.
Asabe: Mhm. Asabe: Mhm.
Chairman: When you don Chairman: Once the union is
register, una go take all your registered, you’ll take all your money to
union money go bank. the bank.
a
English elements in italics; only the first occurrence is marked.

5
The script of Rainbow City is written in adapted English orthography; the spelling
of some words has been modified in the corpus for the sake of consistency.
Nigerian Pidgin and the Contribution of Radio Drama 295

Apart from the subordinator that, which Madam Asabe uses in one instance
(l. 3) instead of N P say (cf. also “tell me say” in l. 1/2), and you (people)/
your, which alternate in the extract with the N P second person plural personal
and possessive pronoun una, the elements that could be classified as English
in this extract are lexical items without N P equivalents that are crucial to the
topic under discussion. Their use is probably deliberate and seems justified in
a public enlightenment programme as long as they are not too numerous and
their meaning becomes clear in context.
Extract 2 is taken from a scene where one of the characters, Adolphus, is
quarrelling with his daughter Vero, who he intends to marry off to a rich old
man instead of allowing her to take her secondary-school examination once
more (she has already failed three times).
Extract 2 (from Rainbow City, Episode 4)
Text in NPb English translation
Adolphus: […] which kind rubbish Adolphus: What nonsense are you
you dey talk for my ear? telling me?
Vero: But papa, mama told me she
has given you the money.
Adolphus: I no send anybody Adolphus: I didn’t ask anybody for
message o. Eh? Dat money instead help. Rather than waste the money on
make we throway for your WAEC, your exam, I’ll use it to feed your
I go take am feed your broder and brothers and sisters.
sister.
Vero: Papa, you no get right to Vero: Dad, you don’t have the right
force me to do what I don’t want to …
do.
Adolphus: Eh? Na me you dey talk Adolphus: Are you talking to me,
to, Vero? Me, N.K., eh, me, your Vero? Me, N.K., me, your father?
papa?
Vero: Papa, I tell you make you no Vero: Dad, I warned you not to make
make me vex with you. Now you me angry with you. Now you’re
come dey do and talk as if I no get acting and talking as if I don’t have
any right over what I want to do …
with my life.
Adolphus: Oh oh. I know who dey Adolphus: Oh oh. I know who’s
behind all dis katakata. Eh. I know behind all this trouble. Yes. I know
say na dat boy Chris. it’s that boy, Chris.
b
English elements in italics; only the first occurrence is marked.

The insertion of the highlighted English sentence and sentence fragments can
be interpreted as code-switching which serves a specific purpose: Vero in-
vokes the connotations of English – power and knowledge – in an attempt to
296 D AGMAR D EUBER AND P ATRICK O LOKO

assert herself over her father and to prove her intellectual abilities. Of course,
Adolphus may rightly suspect that she picked up some of the phrases from her
well-educated boyfriend, Chris. Code-switching is also found in the non-
broadcast part of the corpus, and some additional recordings of less educated
speakers that we made show that in an urban environment – and this is after
all where Rainbow City is set – even speakers with little formal education
often intersperse their N P with English words and phrases they have picked
up informally.
All in all, the language of Rainbow City may not be perfect N P , but the
writer succeeds in drawing on English to fill lexical gaps and reflect typical
urban speech patterns without a major loss in authenticity and intelligibility.

4. The question of ‘authenticity’

The linguistic authenticity of literary N P is an important issue, but, as the dis-
cussion above has shown, one should beware of overstating the case. Indeed,
the efforts of concerned linguists to point out instances of “pseudopidgin” and
contrast them with authentic or “regular” N P (Omamor 1997), commendable
though they may be in principle, sometimes promote a variety of the language
which one may describe as ‘academic N P ’. The phenomenon can be obser-
ved, for example, in the phonemic spelling system used in attempts to pidgin-
ize what are considered deficient representations of the language. N P lacks
orthographic as well as any other kind of standardization, and a phonemic
spelling system has so far been employed only by linguists. Therefore, trans-
lations into ‘regular’ N P of this type would not always be easy for the N P
speaker who is not a linguist to interpret if they did not appear side by side
with the ‘deficient’ version in modified English orthography. This points to a
gap between well thought-out academic arguments for phonemic spelling
systems and the realities of everyday language use which Görlach in his
discussion of pidgin /creole dictionaries has aptly formulated thus:
In spite of the linguistic advantages of phonemic spellings, language planners
ought to reconsider whether it is not wise to choose a convention that is closer
to English: readers of pidgin texts can be expected to be bilingual, and more
fluent as readers in the prestige language English, so why not accept in spell-
ing a state of affairs that is likely to happen in pronunciation, too, with the
increasing impact of English? (1998: 195)
The quotation also hints at another problem: what the conservative linguist
regards as ‘regular’ N P in terms of phonology, but also lexis and grammar
often fails to take account of the new, partially anglicized varieties of the lan-
guage developing in a multilingual context where N P coexists with English.
A detailed discussion of the features of these varieties and the degree to which
Nigerian Pidgin and the Contribution of Radio Drama 297

elements newly borrowed from English have become established in N P is,

however, beyond the scope of the present study and requires further analysis
of the corpus.6

5. NP in literature
Like the authenticity of literary N P , the use and functions of the language in
literature have been the subject of much discussion.7 For now, creative
activity in N P is centred on drama and on poetry, where collections written
exclusively in the language have been published. No full-length novel has
been written in N P .8 Rather, there are occasional instances of direct speech by
characters who are shown to be poorly versed in the use of English. This is in
line with a general tendency in the use of N P in literature: besides being
associated with humour, N P is often put into the mouths of characters of low
social status. In addition, these characters may also be portrayed as being of
low moral standing; it is telling that the “first full-fledged ‘Pidgin persona-
lity’” (Zabus 1992: 122) in a novel, namely the title character of Cyprian
Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana (1963), is a prostitute.
Serious discussion of N P literature has largely been limited to these written
works. Oral forms such as radio drama have hardly been mentioned, perhaps
because they cannot be classified as literature without some qualifications.
But in this neglect, the present status of N P as an essentially oral language,
and the capacity of an oral medium such as the radio to function as a base for
the development of an N P literature, are also overlooked. In addition, as
mentioned above, written literature has often promoted the view of N P as the
language of a permanent underclass. But a convincing argument can now be
made for the language having transcended that role. And if the expression of
profound thoughts in accessible idiom is a major quality of literary language,
we sometimes need to turn to a medium like radio to discern the evolving
capacity of N P in that connection (it has to be said, though, that the stereo-
typical use of N P observed in much of the written literature is also found in
radio texts). Again, Rainbow City is a good example.

6
For a perceptive though of necessity limited description of English-influenced N P
as spoken by fluent speakers (which must be distinguished from “interlanguage” N P
[Agheyisi 1984: 222 ff.]), see Agheyisi 1984: 217–22.
7
As this is not the place for a detailed survey of literary uses of N P and criticism
thereof, the interested reader is referred to the literary works cited in Jibril (1995),
Elugbe & Omamor (1991), Omamor (1997) and critical studies like Obilade (1978),
Zabus (1992), or Ezenwa–Ohaeto (1994).
8
One may wish to make an exception here for Ken Saro–Wiwa’s Sozaboy (1985),
which, however, is written in a mixture of N P and English (standard and non-standard)
which the author has chosen to call “rotten English” in the “Author’s Note” (1985: np).
298 D AGMAR D EUBER AND P ATRICK O LOKO

6. Literary dimensions of Rainbow City

Rainbow City may have the limitations of a popular serial, but it does show
that N P can move beyond its stereotypical role. The characters in the drama
are engaging and its conflicts are significant enough to reveal human nature in
its manifold shades. The themes are legion; they include unemployment,
corruption, gender stereotypes and all the consequences which such problems
can have. The sustained use of N P to highlight these issues in a style that is at
times comic but at times also sobering runs counter to negative attitudes about
the ability of the language to handle serious issues and about the role and
status of N P speakers vis-à-vis speakers of English.
To illustrate this, we have chosen an extract from a scene that was ex-
cluded from the corpus project because it is one of a few scenes where one
character uses English consistently. This demonstrates another aspect of the
Nigerian linguistic reality in which sometimes speakers of English and N P
interact and understand each other quite well. The context of extract 3 is that
Duma, the owner of a betting office, has ordered Adolphus to pay the money
that he owes him but is faced with Adolphus’ outright refusal.
Extract 3 (from Rainbow City, episode 7)
Text English translation
Duma: You should be ashamed of
yourself, Adolphus.
Adolphus: Because I owe you? Adolphus: Because I owe you? How
Eh? How much I owe you self? much do I owe you in the first place?
Eh? You too you no dey borrow Don’t you also borrow money from
money from people wey dey come your customers?
stake uh for coupon here? […]
Duma: Look, you are a wreck and
a wretch, that’s what you are,
Adolphus. Only a wretch like you
can do what you are doing to your
poor daughter! Pressing the
helpless girl’s favours on Mr.
Johnson, that notorious he-goat!
Adolphus: Heh, Duma, eeeh, I see Adolphus: Duma, I can see that it’s
say noto jackpot pool office you not only the business of pool betting
come run for Endurance Villa. that you want to concern yourself
with in Endurance Villa.
Duma: Deny it if you can.
Shameless man!
Adolphus: Eh?
Duma: Deny it!
Nigerian Pidgin and the Contribution of Radio Drama 299

Adolphus: Me shameless man?

Duma: Yes!
Adolphus: I gree. But wetin we go Adolphus: I accept. But what do you
call man wey dey make corner call a man who’s engaged in an illicit
corner love with one buka madam? affair with a food seller?
Duma: Eh?
Adolphus: Hm.
Duma: Adolphus, what did you
say just now?
Adolphus: I talk say e no go tay Adolphus: I said that very soon, the
wey wind go blow and e go scatter wind will blow and reveal the hidden
feader for fowl nyash. anus of the chicken.

The two characters exemplify the opposing social categories between which a
barrier is often erected in literary contexts. But contrary to the stereotypical
pattern, the English speaker, Duma, fails miserably in his attempt to claim a
superior status. The N P speaker, Adolphus, acknowledges that he is a debtor
but then counter-attacks by bringing up Duma’s adulterous affair with his
neighbour’s wife. A controversy is thus raised about what constitutes a
“shameless” act. The listener is implicitly called upon to resolve the moral
question by weighing what could be regarded as an act of survival on the part
of Adolphus against Duma’s socially abhorrent behaviour. When, after his
‘real self’ has been revealed, Duma recoils in a sensitive self-recognition
reminiscent of the guilty-secret convention of the nineteenth century English
novel, it becomes clear that the moral ground on which he stands in making
his accusation against Adolphus is not so secure. Adolphus’ successful resis-
tance is, one might say, symbolic of the new status of N P and its speakers in
literature and points to a future in which the subservient role of both will have
become part of literary history.

7. Conclusion
In the absence of any official language policy in support of N P , we have to
agree with Agheyisi’s statement that “the success of the standardization of
N P E [Nigerian Pidgin English] will have to depend on the individual efforts
of interested users of the language” (1988: 240). Radio drama – if, like Rain-
bow City, it is of linguistic and literary merit – can make a significant contri-
bution in this regard.
300 D AGMAR D EUBER AND P ATRICK O LOKO

WORKS CITED
Agheyisi, Rebecca N. (1984). ‘Linguistic implications of the changing role of
Nigerian Pidgin English,’ English World-Wide 5: 211–33.
—— (1988). ‘The standardization of Nigerian Pidgin English,’ English World-Wide
9: 227–41.
Ekwensi, Cyprian (1963). Jagua Nana (1961; London: Granada).
Elugbe, Ben O., & Augusta P. Omamor (1991). Nigerian Pidgin: Background and
Prospects (Ibadan: Heinemann).
Ezenwa–Ohaeto (1994). ‘Pidgin literature, criticism and communication,’ in Critical
Theory and African Literature Today, ed. Eldred Durosimi Jones (African
Literature Today 19; London: James Currey): 44–52.
Faraclas, Nicholas G. (1996). Nigerian Pidgin (London: Routledge).
Görlach, Manfred (1998). ‘The typology of dictionaries of English-based pidgins
and creoles,’ in Görlach, Even More Englishes: Studies 1996–1997 (Varieties of
English Around the World G22; Amsterdam & Philadelphia PA: John
Benjamins): 187–203.
Jibril, Munzali (1995). ‘The elaboration of the functions of Nigerian Pidgin,’ in New
Englishes: A West African Perspective, ed. Ayo Bamgbose, Ayo Banjo &
Andrew Thomas (Ibadan: Mosuro and the British Council): 232–47.
Obilade, Tony (1978). ‘The stylistic function of Pidgin English in African literature:
Achebe and Soyinka,’ Research in African Literatures 9: 433–44.
Omamor, Augusta P. (1997). ‘New wine in old bottles? A case study of Enpi in
relation to the use currently made of it in literature,’ Arbeiten aus Anglistik und
Amerikanistik 22: 219–33.
Saro–Wiwa, Ken (1985). Sozaboy (Port Harcourt: Saros).
Zabus, Chantal (1992). ‘Mending the schizo-text: Pidgin in the Nigerian novel,’
Kunapipi 14: 119–27.

[
Nigerian Pidgin and the Contribution of Radio Drama 301

Appendix

Table A.1. Corpus study/comparison of major text categories

Question, answers Number of corpus extracts
(% in brackets)9
Radio broadcasts Non-broadcast speech
total n. = 160 total n. = 160
1.1. Use of English lexical
words/expressions:
Very frequently 16 (10%) 14 (9%)
Fairly frequently 36 (23%) 62 (39%)
Infrequently 84 (53%) 74 (46%)
Not at all 24 (15%) 10 (6%)
1.2. Use of English
grammatical
words/constructions:
Very frequently 4 (3%) 8 (5%)
Fairly frequently 13 (8%) 28 (18%)
Infrequently 84 (53%) 76 (48%)
Not at all 59 (37%) 48 (30%)
2.1. Personal assessment:
Fully satisfactory 100 (63%) 69 (43%)
Fairly satisfactory 49 (31%) 76 (48%)
Largely unsatisfactory 11 (7%) 14 (9%)
Totally unsatisfactory 0 (0%) 1 (1%)
2.2. Intelligibility to
uneducated speaker:
Fully intelligible 90 (56%) 68 (43%)
Fairly intelligible 66 (41%) 83 (52%)
Largely unintelligible 4 (3%) 9 (6%)
Totally unintelligible 0 (0%) 0 (0%)

Significance levels:
1.1. (radio broadcasts vs. non-broadcast speech; very/fairly frequently vs.
infrequently/ not at all): p 0.01
1.2. (radio broadcasts vs. non-broadcast speech; very/fairly frequently vs.
infrequently/ not at all): p 0.01

9
Percentages in this as well as the following tables may not add up to 100 due to
rounding.
302 D AGMAR D EUBER AND P ATRICK O LOKO

2.1. (radio broadcasts vs. non-broadcast speech; fully satisfactory vs. all other
answers): p 0.01
2.2. (radio broadcasts vs. non-broadcast speech; fully intelligible vs. all other
answers): p 0.05

Table A.2. Corpus study/comparison of radio subcategories

Question, answers Number of corpus extracts (% in

brackets)
News Advice Drama
total n. = total n. = total n. =
40 40 80
1.1. Use of English lexical
words/expressions:
Very frequently 9 (23%) 0 (0%) 7 (9%)
Fairly frequently 13 (33%) 7 (18%) 16 (20%)
Infrequently 14 (35%) 26 (65%) 44 (55%)
Not at all 4 (10%) 7 (18%) 13 (16%)
1.2. Use of English
grammatical
words/constructions:
Very frequently 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 4 (5%)
Fairly frequently 2 (5%) 4 (10%) 7 (9%)
Infrequently 25 (63%) 17 (43%) 42 (53%)
Not at all 13 (33%) 19 (48%) 27 (34%)
2.1. Personal assessment:
Fully satisfactory 14 (35%) 32 (80%) 54 (68%)
Fairly satisfactory 20 (50%) 7 (18%) 22 (28%)
Largely unsatisfactory 6 (15%) 1 (3%) 4 (5%)
Totally unsatisfactory 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%)
2.2. Intelligibility to
uneducated speaker:
Fully intelligible 11 (28%) 30 (75%) 49 (61%)
Fairly intelligible 28 (70%) 9 (23%) 29 (36%)
Largely unintelligible 1 (3%) 1 (3%) 2 (3%)
Totally unintelligible 0 (0%) 0 (0%) 0 (0%)

Significance levels:
1.1. (news vs. advice/drama; very/fairly frequently vs. infrequently/ not at
all): p 0.01
1.2. –
2.1. (news vs. advice/drama; fully satisfactory vs. all other answers): p 0.01
2.2. (news vs. advice/drama; fully intelligible vs. all other answers): p 0.01
Nigerian Pidgin and the Contribution of Radio Drama 303

Table A.3. Corpus study/comparison of drama serials

Question, answers Number of corpus extracts (% in brackets)

Rainbow City One Thing at a
total n = 40 Time
total n = 40
1.1. Use of English lexical
words/expressions:
Very frequently 2 (5%) 5 (13%)
Fairly frequently 3 (8%) 13 (33%)
Infrequently 28 (70%) 16 (40%)
Not at all 7 (18%) 6 (15%)
1.2. Use of English
grammatical
words/constructions:
Very frequently 3 (8%) 1 (3%)
Fairly frequently 0 (0%) 7 (18%)
Infrequently 23 (58%) 19 (48%)
Not at all 14 (35%) 13 (33%)
2.1. Personal assessment:
Fully satisfactory 33 (83%) 21 (53%)
Fairly satisfactory 5 (13%) 17 (43%)
Largely unsatisfactory 2 (5%) 2 (5%)
Totally unsatisfactory 0 (0%) 0 (0%)
2.2. Intelligibility to
uneducated speaker:
Fully intelligible 30 (75%) 19 (48%)
Fairly intelligible 9 (23%) 20 (50%)
Largely unintelligible 1 (3%) 1 (3%)
Totally unintelligible 0 (0%) 0 (0%)

Significance levels:
1.1. (Rainbow City vs. One Thing at a Time; very/fairly frequently vs.
infrequently/ not at all): p 0.01
1.2. –
2.1. (Rainbow City vs. One Thing at a Time; fully satisfactory vs. all other
answers): p 0.01
2.2. (Rainbow City vs. One Thing at a Time; fully intelligible vs. all other
answers): p 0.05

[
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“That’s all out of shape”
Language and Racism in South African Drama1

Haike Frank
University of Freiburg

ABSTRACT
This essay examines discussions about language in plays by South African
dramatists Athol Fugard (Blood Knot and ‘Master Harold’ ... and the boys)
and Susan Pam–Grant (Curl up and Dye) and analyses forms of language
use and word play by characters from various racial backgrounds. Language
competence proves to be an important element in the oppressed group’s
increasing conscientization. By contrasting racist and condescending lan-
guage use with the honest language of oppressed individuals, these plays
suggest that a creative, multilingual dialogue in opposition to the monolithic
and monolingual discourse of apartheid is a powerful medium for anti-
apartheid agency.

J ACQUES D E R R I D A , in his essay “Racism’s Last Word,” makes us

aware of the power of language when he comments on the term and
concept of ‘apartheid’. He asserts that the word ‘apartheid’ isolates
‘being apart’ in a kind of essence or hypothesis and connotes “quasi-onto-
logical segregation” (1985: 292). Thus, he argues that segregation is defined
as natural and that the term ‘apartheid’ itself is inclined towards racism.
Derrida concludes:
there’s no racism without a language. The point is not that acts of racial
violence are only words but rather that they have to have a word. Even though
it offers the excuse of blood, color, birth – or, rather, because it uses this
naturalist and sometimes creationist discourse – racism always betrays the
perversion of a man, the ‘talking animal’. It institutes, declares, writes,

1
A line spoken by the character Zachariah in Blood Knot (Fugard 1987: 74).
306 H AIKE F RANK

inscribes, prescribes. [...] It does not discern, it discriminates. (1985: 292;

emphasis in original)
We must not forget that racial segregation long preceded the coinage of the
term ‘apartheid’. In fact, it was not until after World War II, a time when the
National Party campaigned for the separate development of the different
racial groups in their assigned geographic zones, that the word ‘apartheid’
was introduced into the political code of South Africa (cf Derrida 1985: 291–
92). Yet, with the implementation of apartheid in 1948, the power of apart-
heid discourse and rhetoric grew and apartheid became the “national institu-
tion[...] of racism” (Tiffin & Lawson 1994: 8).
Race thinking, like colonialism, is motivated by the impetus to draw binary
distinctions between the civilized and the primitive. This is reflected by the
racist language of apartheid, the medium through which the concept that
‘white’ equals ‘good, human, and civilized’ and ‘non-white’ equals ‘bad, in-
human, and savage’ is perpetuated (cf also Ashcroft et al. 1989: 7–8).2
By analogy with Peter Hulme’s definition of colonialist discourse as an
“ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified by their common deploy-
ment in the management of colonial relationships” (quoted in Collits 1994:
64), apartheid discourse can be understood as the sum of linguistically-based
practices aimed at maintaining apartheid’s racist hierarchy. Contemporary
theory recognizes the importance of language for the existence and function-
ing of apartheid. As Terry Collits maintains, racism is not “examined as a
thing-in-itself, but as a dense system of ideological practices over time inter-
twined with history, language, gender and class relations, and problems of
representation and interpretation” (1994: 64; my emphasis).
According to apartheid discourse, the voice of the oppressed population
cannot be heard since it is accorded neither place nor agency in the linguistic
practice of society. Furthermore, anti-apartheid protest cannot occur since it is
defined as a form of communication unavailable to non-whites. Apartheid
discourse becomes a system built around language closure and can again be
compared to colonial discourse in that, as Tiffin & Lawson assert, both aim to
appropriate, distort and erase native cultures and subjects, yet must simul-
taneously contain them in order to exercise control (1994: 6). Thus, negation
automatically implies existence. And interaction between whites and non-
whites has not been as unilateral and monolingual as colonial discourse has
presented it to be. As we know from the postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha,
2
The group of non-whites was further subdivided into South African Indians,
coloureds, and black Africans. All the groups were considered to be part of low, sub-
human species. Nonetheless, a sub-hierarchy was created by apartheid: the Indians
were considered superior to the coloureds who were defined as superior to the Afri-
cans, the lowest of the low.
Language and Racism in South African Drama 307

strategies such as mimicry and hybridity can be exercised in the face of a

powerful system of oppression. For the assumptions that accompany the
binary opposition of colonizer and colonized are merely constructed limita-
tions that define the colonized in partial terms only. These oppositions as well
as their correlative power structures are inevitably ambivalent and can be dis-
mantled and overcome by the subaltern (see Bhabha 1994).
This essay aims to investigate the way South African dramatists incor-
porate the topic of language and racism into their work.3 Three plays by Athol
Fugard and Susan Pam–Grant will be used to show how, according to the
playwright, racist discourse and apartheid rhetoric pervade life under apart-
heid and how this situation is countered in the non-white characters’ reflec-
tions on language.
[
In Athol Fugard’s 1961 play The Blood Knot (first performed at Dorkay
House, Johannesburg, revised as Blood Knot in 19854), the poor, illiterate,
coloured (ie, of mixed-racial descent) character Zach wishes to express his
feelings of constant degradation and maltreatment in apartheid society. He
asks his more educated brother: “They call a man a boy. You got a word for
that, Morrie?” and goes on to describe this word as being “squashed, like it
didn’t fit the mouth.” Morrie offers the lexemes “prejudice” and “injustice”.
As the pronunciation of these words gives Zach trouble, he concludes that
they are “all out of shape” (all BK 74). His comment on the production of
sound becomes a metaphor for apartheid-ridden South African society.
Furthermore, Zach tells Morrie of how he was rudely dismissed when he
asked his white boss if he could switch from his position of gate-keeper back
to cleaning pots in order to relieve the strain on his aching feet. The boss
simply replied: “Go to the gate or go to hell ... Boy!” (BK 74). With Morrie’s
help, Zach is now able to classify and evaluate this racist reply: “Prejudice
and inhumanity in one sentence!” (BK 75).

3
This essay is not concerned with the topic of multilingual theatre, which
thematizes contact and interaction across apartheid’s constructed race barriers by
reflecting South Africa’s polyglot language situation. The birth of multilingual theatre
can, according to Temple Hauptfleisch, be traced back to the 1970s when the fabric of
traditional South African society was being questioned, challenged and radically
altered. The increasing use of various South African languages as well as local lan-
guage varieties points to the rich but hitherto unexploited cultural mix in polyglot
communities (cf 1990). Essays by Annette Louise Combrink (1990) and Yvonne
Banning (1990) also discuss this topic.
4
All quotations from the play are from the revised version Blood Knot (Fugard
1987) and are flagged as BK followed by page number.
308 H AIKE F RANK

This exchange between Zach and Morrie illustrates the use and abuse of
language under apartheid. Zach will only be heard by whites if his words
signal his compliance with apartheid rules. According to apartheid’s racist
discourse, any requests, complaints or other expressions of ideas, feelings and
opinions by coloureds and blacks carry no meaning outside of what this dis-
course allows. As cheap labour, non-whites are an essential building block of
apartheid’s economy, but they are placed in the roles of the silent and prefer-
ably invisible subjects.5 Thus, from the perspective of apartheid discourse,
Zach’s request to switch positions is perceived as a dissident’s attempt to
challenge the regime’s superiority, not as the wish of a physically tired sub-
ject. Furthermore, this example shows clearly that whites like to address non-
whites with orders and insults. ‘Normal’ mutual conversation between the
white and non-white group does not exist. Apartheid rhetoric makes it impos-
sible to describe reality outside of its discursively imposed frame, and
language becomes subjected to manipulation.
However, the scene from Blood Knot also suggests that, in the long run,
apartheid will not be successful in manipulating language, driving language
towards closure and thus defining reality as fixed and unchanging. Zach’s
increasing desire and ability to name his abuse implies that he is becoming
conscious of the prevailing racial, and also social and economic, discrimina-
tion. It also shows that he is subjected to various forms of oppression, and that
each of these methods, from covert to overt, is equally condescending. The
accumulation of insults and injustices seems to allow the power of the whites
over him to become more threatening. However, since his degradation
follows the same pattern every time, it is easier for him to identify and analyse
it. Appropriating strategies such as labelling, categorization, and rational ana-
lysis, he is able to understand his predicament and, through Bhabhaesque
mimicry and repetition (1994: 85), begin to destabilize the locus of white
power. Although he does not actively resist apartheid to ameliorate his situa-
tion, but instead embraces his coloured identity and his position in society at
the end of the play, his story suggests that consciousness-raising and educa-
tion are possible strategies of self-help with which the oppressed could learn
to improve their own situation.
[

5
This is suggested in Blood Knot’s ‘park scene’. Zach and Morrie engage in a role-
playing game in which dark-skinned Zach attempts to teach his light-skinned brother
Morrie how to act white. Zach plays the black park keeper/garbage collector, whose
presence troubles and threatens Morrie in his ‘white’ manhood: “What did you mean
crawling around like that? Spoiling the view, spoiling my chances! [...] I hate you, do
you hear? Hate!” (BK 120).
Language and Racism in South African Drama 309

In Fugard’s play ‘Master Harold’ ... and the boys (which premiered at Yale
Repertory Theatre in 1982), the seventeen-year-old white boy Hally is caught
between the attitudes fostered by apartheid and his relationship with the two
black adult servants of the family, Sam and Willie. The servants’ humanity
and dignity allow them to offer Hally support, love and friendship, despite
apartheid’s threatening and clear-cut barriers and rules. Compared to the
verbal encounter with his boss that Zach relates in Blood Knot, Hally and
Sam’s conversations are much more friendly. Yet the power of apartheid dis-
course makes itself felt when Hally claims the right to define concepts. Sam
describes his and Willie’s hobby, competitive ball-room dancing, as “beauti-
ful” and as “art”6 while Hally, who has never seen a real dance, claims the
right to impose his connotations on it: “There’s a limit, Sam. Don’t confuse
art and entertainment. [...] I’m sure the word you mean to use is entertaining.”
(MH 32). With this comment, Hally proves to be prejudiced, repeating clichés
and revealing his ignorance. He looks down on Sam, his linguistic skills and
his hobby. For the boy, dancing adds up to “prancing around” and having a
“so-called good time” (MH 32), something that he denies can be defined intel-
lectually as a real “occasion” (MH 33). Yet when he decides to write his essay
for school on an “annual event of cultural or historical significance” about the
township’s upcoming dance championship, it suddenly becomes a “significant
event” (MH 34) in his vocabulary. Hally knows that his teacher is expecting
an essay on topics such as the “commemoration of the 1820 Settlers” (MH
28). The pupil classifies this exercise as one that intends to promote the inter-
nalization of national myths and stabilize state discourse. Afraid of his
teacher’s authority and power, Hally must justify his unusual choice with
words that will mollify him. He explains to Sam and Willie:
[...] my English teacher [...] doesn’t like natives. But I’ll point out to him that
in strict anthropological terms the culture of a primitive black society includes
its dancing and singing. To put my thesis in a nutshell: The war-dance has
been replaced by the waltz. But it still amounts to the same thing: the release
of primitive emotions through the movement. (MH 34)
Hally’s speech is shockingly racist and propagandistic. His arguments sound
pre-fabricated and are in direct keeping with the tenets of imperialist cultural
anthropology (Gainor 1995: 133) which have influenced apartheid’s racist
discourse. Thus, his topic choice for his essay in no way displays racial open-
mindedness. As he fails to realize that his own words are discriminatory, we
must conclude that he has been successfully indoctrinated by apartheid dis-
course. Although Hally declares his short speech to be a strategy to pacify his

6
All quotations from ‘Master Harold’ ... and the boys are taken from Fugard 1987
and flagged MH followed by the page number on which they appear. Here: MH 31.
310 H AIKE F RANK

teacher, it is revealing that he never apologizes to Sam and Willie for his
remarks, leading us to believe that he, too, is infested with racism.7 Thus,
Hally emerges as an immature prankster who, despite writing on the black
ballroom-dancing competition, ends up subscribing to apartheid discourse and
parroting contemporary propaganda. In this light, Albert Wertheim points out
that Hally becomes a “caricature and replication of the classroom teacher he
so much dislikes” (2000: 143). This example, then, shows that language can
manipulate its users effectively. Hally fails to use his intellectual abilities to
overcome his arrogance and linguistically displayed pretentiousness (see
Gainor 1995: 133; Jordan 1993: 466) and understand what is unjust about the
society he lives in.
By contrast, Fugard characterizes Sam as an intelligent and emotionally
mature man whose life experience and suffering have made him understand
the machinations of apartheid as well as its psychological foundations: irra-
tional fear, ignorance and prejudice by whites lead to the condescension dis-
played towards blacks in order to confirm white power. Sam is much more
critical of reality than Blood Knot’s Zach and can objectively observe, analyse
and react to his environment. As Sam knows, the driving force behind racist
behaviour is the desire for self-respect. In the case of Hally, his need for
human respect and love is not satisfied by his family. The shame of having to
deal with a crippled and drunken father is more than the boy can bear, driving
him to verbally and physically take out his self-destructive anger on his friend
and surrogate father Sam. Sam, however, overlooks Hally’s rudeness and
gives him a second chance, choosing to restore the friendship between them
by calling him “Hally” instead of “Master Harold,” thus freeing himself of
what critics have called the “burden of ideologically determined inferiority”
(Olivier 1982: 11) or the “socio-political patterns of mastery and servitude”
(Durbach 1987: 506). Although Sam is less educated than Hally, his humble
and sincere language of humanity and dignity challenges apartheid’s false
hypocritical rhetoric which in the end fails to accord whites the power they
believe it gives them.

7
As Gainor remarks, this “notable moment in the drama certainly leaves room for
the audience to question the views expressed by Hally” (1995: 133). Furthermore, it is
questionable if Vandenbroucke’s remark that “Hally savours the taste of words, some-
times pretentiously, but always sincerely” (1985: 188) adequately reflects his beha-
viour in this scene.
Language and Racism in South African Drama 311

Susan Pam–Grant’s Curl up and Dye (which premiered at the Black Sun
nightclub and Market Theatre, Johannesburg, in 1989) is set in the last years
of apartheid. It examines the social, economic and cultural problems that
accompany the transition of South Africa from an apartheid nation to a young
democracy. It portrays transitional Johannesburg through the interaction of
five women at a hairdresser’s salon in Joubert Park, a slowly decaying, hither-
to Afrikaner working-class neighbourhood that has now become a “grey-area”
(Schwartz 1989: 27).8
I wish to focus on a short dialogue which can easily be dismissed as a
comic and minor scene, yet can also be read as indicative of the social and
racial issues addressed in the play as a whole. Rolene, the white working-class
manager of the salon, is doing a crossword puzzle and reads the clues out loud
to her loyal but underpaid helper Miriam from Soweto:
ROLENE. [...]‘Anyone who sees a school performance of Hamlet will feel
[...] virtuous that he can claim he sat or saw it without wishing he were
somewhere else.’ Now we got to choose the right word – you know,
the word that sounds better.
MIRIAM. But I don’t know what a hamlet is? [H]ow am I supposed to learn
these high class words if you don’t teach me.
ROLENE. All right then, what do you think it means?
MIRIAM. A hamlet? I know a helmet.
ROLENE. Sometimes you can be real stupid. A Hamlet is a . . . a small piece
of ham – simple.
MIRIAM. Aah – a piglet?
ROLENE. Yes. So what do we put – sat or saw?
MIRIAM. Saw – put saw.
ROLENE. Why saw?
MIRIAM. You can see mos it’s clear, Rolene. You can’t sat a pig – but you
can saw a pig ...9
Miriam is eager to do crossword puzzles with Rolene because she sees it as
her opportunity to learn. This scene suggests that, despite her low level of
education, she is intellectually flexible and can use language creatively.
She asks about the meaning of the word Hamlet and thus shows that she
wants to understand the words before analysing the signification of the sen-
tence as a whole. In the light of Rolene’s similarly poor level of education
where knowledge about Shakespeare is simply not relevant, Miriam is left to
her own devices. Her attempts to decipher the meaning of Hamlet reveal that

8
For a discussion of Curl up and Dye, see Kruger (1999: 193–94).
9
All quotations from Curl up and Dye are taken from Pam–Grant, 1993 and
flagged CD followed by the page number on which they appear. Here: CD 101.
312 H AIKE F RANK

she can analyse and work on different linguistic levels. She plays with pho-
nemes (hamlet /helmet) and can identify morphemes (pig-let); semantically
speaking, she shows that she knows that ham is made of pork (ham-let/ pig-
let); and she can analyse verb structures grammatically (sat/ saw a pig).
In this conversation, Miriam emerges as a smart character with an open
mind. She shows genuine interest in learning and passes the value and impor-
tance of education on to her children. She even goes to see the school prin-
cipal to explain why she is late in paying the school fees and thus risks
arriving late for work. Her behaviour shows that she has understood that edu-
cation is the sine qua non for climbing the social ladder. It is indicative of her
outlook that words she does not know qualify as “high-class” (CD 100). The
idea that better education will bring about positive social development or
upward movement had already been explored by George Bernard Shaw in
Pygmalion (1913). Miriam seeks a better future for her children through edu-
cation just as Eliza uses her education to move beyond her mentor Higgins to
a state of independence.10
Thus, it is not surprising that Miriam actively demands to be taught. She
defines Rolene’s role as that of teacher and places herself in the role of the
student. On the one hand, seen from the perspective of colonial discourse, she
is re-asserting the binary opposition of the supposedly educated, civilized
white versus the uneducated, savage black, the prevailing attitude in the
neighbourhood (CD 86). Yet, as the spectator realizes, mimicry quickly turns
to mockery. Miriam is subconsciously subverting the rigid imperialist hier-
archy. Her language represents one form of what Helen Gilbert and Joanne
Tompkins call the “languages of resistance” (1996: 164).11 Miriam’s way of
speaking highlights her potential for acquiring social and racial conscious-
ness. She does not question South African society’s structure from a racial
point of view; she feels that she belongs in Soweto and expresses no desire to
move to a neighbourhood like Joubert Park. Yet, she clearly believes that edu-
cation – acquired through the mastery of language – is the key to social and
economic or class12 improvement and will improve one’s quality of life.
Seen from Rolene’s perspective, Miriam represents a threat to her social
position. Miriam’s iron will to educate herself could eventually allow her, or

10
I am indebted to John Douthwaite for emphasizing this similarity in the discus-
sion following my paper.
11
Gilbert and Tompkins define the “languages of resistance” as all linguistic forms
of resistance against imperialism that help to imbue the colonized peoples and their
own systems of communication with a sense of power (cf 164–202, especially 164–
66).
12
For comments on Curl up and Dye as a play about class struggle, see Thamm
(1989). Loots (1996) reads the play in terms of class and gender.
Language and Racism in South African Drama 313

at least her children, to become more socially mobile in the transitional

society. Instead of learning from her helper, Rolene feels threatened and must
assert her superiority. Thus, she falls back on apartheid discourse. Her lan-
guage is again characterized by closure as becomes clear in her racist excla-
mation: “I’m not picking up people’s dead hair, sis – I’m a hairdresser, not a
bladdy sweeping girl” (CD 87). By defining Miriam as a “sweeping girl”, she
reduces her to an untrained and immature servant, echoing the experience of
Blood Knot’s Zach. Rolene knows that she clearly lacks Miriam’s inner drive
to ameliorate her position and to come to a clear understanding of the world
around her. Just as she refuses to admit to Miriam that she does not know the
meaning of the word “Hamlet,” she fails to confront her abusive husband.
Thus, mastery of language becomes a metaphor for the mastery of life.
[
To conclude, the three plays presented here all treat the issue of language at a
meta-level. Blood Knot introduces the idea that daily oppression can be identi-
fied and understood more easily if its concepts and words are known. ‘Master
Harold’ ... and the Boys contrasts pre-fabricated, manipulative apartheid lan-
guage and racist discourse with the honest language of a true human being.
And, finally, Curl up and Dye foregrounds that education, here symbolized by
language learning, is the key to improving one’s social and economic status.
Thus, these plays suggest that apartheid discourse and rhetoric can be
countered by using language consciously and creatively, presenting language
as a powerful medium for anti-apartheid and postcolonial agency.

WORKS CITED
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (1989). The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Rout-
ledge.
Banning, Yvonne (1990). ‘Language in the theatre: Mediating realities in an audi-
ence,’ South African Theatre Journal 4.1: 12–37.
Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture (London & New York: Rout-
edge).
Collits, Terry (1994). ‘Theorizing racism,’ in De-scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism
and Textuality, ed. Tiffin & Lawson (London & New York: Routledge): 61–69.
Combrink, Annette Louise (1990). ‘Language as barrier and bridge: Aspects of the
language used by selected South African dramatists,’ in Proceedings of the XIIth
Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, vol. 4: Space
and Boundaries of Literature, ed. Roger Bauser et al. (Munich: Iudicum): 63–68.
Derrida, Jacques (1985). ‘Racism’s Last Word,’ Critical Inquiry 12: 290–99.
314 H AIKE F RANK

Durbach, Errol (1987). ‘‘Master Harold’ ... and the Boys: Athol Fugard and the
psychopathology of apartheid,’ Modern Drama 30: 505–13.
Fugard, Athol (1987). Selected Plays, ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: Oxford UP).
Gainor, J. Ellen (1995). ‘“A world without collision”: Ballroom dance in Athol
Fugard’s Master Harold ... and the boys,’ in Bodies of the Text: Dance as
Theory, Literature as Dance, ed. Ellen W. Goellner & Jacqueline Shea Murphy
(New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers UP): 125–38.
Gilbert, Helen, & Joanne Tompkins (1996). Post-Colonial Drama: Theory, Practice,
Politics (London & New York: Routledge).
Hauptfleisch, Temple (1990). ‘Multilingual theatre and apartheid society (1970–
1987),’ in Proceedings of the XIIth Congress of the International Comparative
Literature Association, vol. 4: Space and Boundaries of Literature, ed. Roger
Bauser et al. (Munich: Iudicum): 103–109.
Jenkins, Carolyn, & Lynne Thomas (2000). The Changing Nature of Inequality in
South Africa (Working Papers No. 203, October 2000; Helsinki: UNU World
Institute for Development Economics Research).
Jordan, John O. (1993). ‘Life in the theatre: Autobiography, politics, and romance in
‘Master Harold’ ... and the Boys,’ Twentieth-Century Literature 39.4: 461–72.
Kruger, Loren (1999). The Drama of South Africa: Plays, Pageants and Politics
Since 1910 (London & New York: Routledge).
Loots, Liliane (1996). ‘ “ The personal is political” – Gender in the context of
apartheid South Africa: a look at two women playwrights,’ South African Theatre
Journal 10.1: 63–70.
MacLiam, Garalt (1989). ‘This play will open your eyes (wide!) about SA,’ The Star
Tonight (26 June): 14.
Olivier, Gerrit (1982). ‘Notes on Fugard’s ‘Master Harold’ . . . and the boys at the
Yale Rep.’ Standpunte 162: 9–14.
Pam–Grant, Susan (1993). Curl up and Dye. in South Africa Plays, ed. Stephen Gray
(London: Nick Hern): 81–140.
Schwartz, Pat (1989). ‘Grey – it comes out in the wash,’ Weekly Mail (23 June): 27.
Tiffin, Chris, & Alan Lawson (1994). ‘Introduction: The textuality of Empire,’ in
De-scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, ed. Tiffin & Lawson
(London & New York: Routledge): 1–11.
Thamm, Marianne (1989). ‘Comic, ultimately sad tale of class struggle,’ Cape
Times (16 September): 22.
Vandenbroucke, Russell (1985). Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol
Fugard (New York: Theatre Communications Group).
Wertheim, Albert (2000). The Dramatic Art of Athol Fugard: From South Africa to
the World (Bloomington: Indiana UP).

[
Beyond the Domain of Literacy
The Illiterate Other in The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall
Apart and Waiting for the Barbarians1

Helga Ramsey–Kurz
University of Innsbruck

ABSTRACT
The controversies of critics and writers over the suitability of English as a
vehicle of African identity, Abdul JanMohamed warns, erroneously suggest
a linguistic choice which, in actuality, most Africans have never had. Far
from being an alternative language, so JanMohamed, English represents a
profoundly alien phenomenology for sub-Saharan indigenous communities,
who possess no chirographic traditions of their own. The idea of the most
foreign aspect of English for an African being its writtenness is absolutely
central to the novels The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart and Waiting
for the Barbarians. While comparing the different ways in which Graham
Greene, Chinua Achebe and J.M. Coetzee portray the encroachment of
anglophone literacy on African life as an assertion of colonial power, the
essay will also show how all three authors discover in the illiteracy of the
African native a focal point for their own legitimization of literary inscrip-
tions of African orality.

C
H I N E S E T O B E C O M E W E B L A N G U A G E Number 1 by 2007.”
These words have recently been heading the advertisements of the
technology consulting firm Accenture.2 The announcement chal-
lenges Western professionals to imagine themselves as part of a scenario in
1
This essay has been supported by the Austrian Science Fund through a Charlotte
Bühler Habilitation-grant for the project “Without Script: Representations of Illiteracy
in the Anglophone Novel.”
2
For example, the New York Times (Tuesday, 3 April 2001).
316 H ELGA R AMSEY –K URZ

which they are stripped of both the ability to speak the world’s first lingua
franca, and, even worse, to use the world’s main script. Predictably, the adver-
tisement goes on to assure that with Accenture’s expert guidance it is per-
fectly feasible to obtain the necessary command over a language and script
even as exotic as Chinese. One of the reasons why the strategic exploitation of
the notorious difficulty of Chinese is guaranteed to have the desired effect of
alarming conventionally educated Westerners is their tendency to take the
global hegemony of alphabetic literacy for granted and to assign the idea that
other writing systems might come to be used to the same extent as the alpha-
bet in international communication to the domain of fantasy.
Arguably, it is for similar reasons that linguistic studies into aspects of
English as a world language rarely distinguish expressly between speakers of
English who are literate in the language and speakers who are not. Nor do
such studies often display a special interest in the existence of different levels
of literacy. Rather they seem content with assuming that all native speakers of
English possess, and all non-native speakers aspire to, largely the same read-
ing and writing competence. Literary criticism succumbs to the same inaccu-
racy as it fails to question whether the world-wide spread of English has
indeed produced those homogenously literalized readerships it tends to posit
(at least implicitly) in its discussions of the new anglophone literatures. This
omission seems particularly surprising in studies of Third-World literatures
and especially of literature written in and about Africa.
As Abdul JanMohamed (1984) has pointed out, it is because of the lack of
literate traditions in Subsaharan indigenous cultures that the presence of Euro-
pean chirographic phenomenologies has always posed greater problems in
Africa than anywhere else in the former European colonies. According to
JanMohamed, twentieth-century writers and critics of African literature have
mistakenly been trying to resolve these problems in arguments about the
suitability of English as a vehicle for African cultural identity. Instead they
should have asked whether the medium of writing can at all do justice to the
orality of African cultures. “Doing justice” to the orality of African cultures,
to JanMohamed, seems to mean first of all representing them “authentically”:
ie, not from a eurocentric and, hence, specifically literate angle, but as
experienced and used by oral cultures and communities. “Doing justice” to
African cultures, it seems necessary to add, includes another equally complex
task: namely, that of rendering not only African orality but also European lite-
racy from ‘outside’, of conveying the foreignness that still pertains to origi-
nally European literate traditions in Africa. The following comparative
analysis will show how three novels set in Africa and written in English
establish this foreignness by comparing different literate European and non-
literate African consciousnesses.
The Illiterate Other in Greene, Achebe and Coetzee 317

The first novel, The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, centres on a
Catholic police officer from England whose strictly pragmatic attitude to
writing distinguishes him from the other members of the colonial establish-
ment portrayed in the novel. They all seem devoted to setting up an enclave of
British culture in West Africa, which typically involves engaging in all sorts
of literate practices, both mundane ones such as writing letters, telegrams,
diaries and reports and more sophisticated ones such as reading and compos-
ing poetry, going to the theatre, and discussing works of English fiction at
meetings of the local library club.
For the protagonist, Major Scobie, the more literate (or literary) of these
practices serve a rather dubious form of escapism which he attributes to a pro-
found reluctance on the part of his expatriates to experience Africa as what it
really is rather than as a conglomerate of European colonies. He is convinced
that, to people like his wife, “literary Louise,” and her admirer, the would-be
poet Wilson, “truth has never been of any real value” (208). He winces at the
banality of their sentimental poetic language, feels lost in the tangle of lies
into which they force him and believes that sincerity, while “the sound of
English spoken in England,” is absent from the English spoken in Africa.
“Here intonations change […] in the course of a few months,” he reflects,
“[become] high-pitched and insincere, or flat and guarded.” (41–42)
Thus alienated, Scobie turns towards the Syrian tradesman Yusef, who in-
sistently claims to suffer the same isolation as Scobie because he is illiterate.
Yusef’s repeated assertions of his cultural inferiority stand in odd contrast to
his familiarity with Shakespeare, his knowledge of the Bible and his fluency
in English, which all suggest that, in reality, Yusef has assimilated, even
perfected the colonist’s art of deception. This suspicion is corroborated by the
figure of Scobie’s boy Ali, who, in contrast to Yusef, has never appropriated
the foreign culture but retained a marked aloofness from it, which is under-
scored by his broken English, his indifference to the Westerners’ intellectual
pursuits and an illiteracy totally unlike Yusef’s, an illiteracy to which Ali
seems perfectly reconciled as part of his rootedness in African oral culture.
Typically, Greene does not expand on the orality of either Ali or Yusef, but
relegates the two characters to the very background of the novel. This has fre-
quently earned him the charge of eurocentric prejudice. To pronounce this
charge is to ignore that Greene’s novel does reflect on its own limitations:,
namely, in that it foregrounds the practical impossibility for any literate
person to ever fully comprehend an Other who is not literate. Arguably, it is
upon the recognition of this impossibility, along with a growing awareness of
his own entrapment within literate traditions and a literate mode of thinking,
that Scobie decides to kill himself. Arguably, too, it is as a last desperate
attempt to free himself from his own dogged belief in the written word that
318 H ELGA R AMSEY –K URZ

Scobie starts to prepare his own exit (from life as much as from the text). The
final part of the novel describes in detail which precautions he takes to stage
his death as the consequence of a fatal illness. To this end he also manipulates
his up to then scrupulously truthful records. In other words, he ends up after
all using writing as the other British do in the novel – as a means of distorting
reality.
In relating the transformation of Scobie (significantly nicknamed “Scobie
the Just” by the other British in the novel) into a liar, the novel finally dis-
sociates itself from its protagonist and at the same time rescues its own
authority as a kind of literary psychogramme which, unlike its suicidal pro-
tagonist, does not venture outside the secure domain of literate epistemology
in the apparently ‘mad’ expectation of comprehing the non-literate African
Other. Still, this does not mean, as Schaffer (1991: 590) suggests, that Greene
ultimately subscribes to the literacy represented by Lousie Scobie or Wilson.
Rather, he has his novel end as an ironic comment on the implication of these
characters in Scobie’s destruction as well as on their presumptuous faith in
their own hermeneutic abilities, which typically fails them as they attempt to
grasp the truth of Scobie’s death.
In the second novel under discussion, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
pursues the very opposite goal. Critics agree that he successfully transcends
European literary conventions and convincingly captures the complexity of
oral Ibo culture in the English language (cf, for example, Innes 1992: 32–35,
JanMohamed 1984: 37, Klooss 1986: 41) They tend to omit, however, that, as
part of this project, his novel implicitly also reflects on the African native’s
non-literacy as an aspect of his /her Otherness vis-à-vis British civilization.
As in The Heart of the Matter, in Things Fall Apart the Other (here the
British in Africa) is constructed as an absence by way of carefully omitting
any reference to a literate world outside oral Ibo culture in the main part of the
novel. Only occasional textual gaps remind the reader of his /her own literacy
and of the text’s writtenness. Although plain omissions, these gaps are highly
functional. One such gap marks the episode which describes how the first
white man arrives in the village of Abame and, after a brief and futile ex-
change with the locals, who do not understand his language, is killed by them.
The people of Abame think nothing of it when some time later more whites
appear and discover the unconcealed evidence of the murder. The reader, in
turn, is filled with a sense of foreboding at the Africans’ apparent naivety.
Aware of the whites’ legal possibilities of redressing the injury, he /she is led
to question whether this naivety is really only a harmless sign of innocence or
not also one of irresponsibility. At any rate, the final outcome of the episode:
ie, the complete destruction of Abame, elicits a far more differentiated inter-
The Illiterate Other in Greene, Achebe and Coetzee 319

pretation from the reader than the Ibo men recounting the episode in dialogue
are able to give.
A similar interpretative input is required of the reader when the narrative
shifts from Okonkwo to his son Nwoye, who, deeply disturbed by his father’s
participation in the ritual killing of his stepbrother Ikemefuma, leaves his
tribe, joins a Christian mission, and learns to read and write. At first sight it
seems perfectly plausible in the light of earlier characterizations of Okonkwo
as an embittered victim of the changes brought about by the British that he
should condemn his son’s disloyalty as an “abomination” (108) and refuse to
consider him one of his kin. On another level, though, Okonkwo’s unfor-
giving attitude also establishes a structural parallelism between the first part
of the novel, which tells the story of Okonkwo’s father Unoka, and the part
leading up to Okonkwo’s suicide; a parallelism, which encourages the reader,
who is aware of the novel’s textuality, to compare Achebe’s protagonist to his
late parent and to interpret him more critically as yet another father figure
who obstinately adheres to his own principles even at the risk of completely
alienating his son.
The role literacy (the reader’s literacy) is thus assigned implicitly in Things
Fall Apart as a means of more dispassionately judging African traditions is
specified further by Achebe’s introduction of the District Commissioner at the
end of the novel. Contemplating Okonkwo’s dead body, the commissioner
considers that Okonkwo’s story could make interesting enough reading to
include in the book he intends to write on African primitives. “One could
almost write a whole chapter on him,” he ponders. “Perhaps not a whole
chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate.” (147–48). The irony of this
passage is obvious. What merits special emphasis, though, is that the novel as
a whole may be read as a direct negative response to it. After all, Achebe
devotes not just a paragraph but the entire novel to the story of Okonkwo and
thus precludes that his narrator should be someone like the District Com-
missioner. To deconstruct the District Commissioner’s authority on African
primitives even further, he has him identify Ibo orality as a most infuriating
“love for superfluous words” (146). “One must be firm to cut out details”
(148), he asserts at the end of the novel, clearly unable to conceive of himself
as part of a literary text reducing the presence of Western civilization in
Africa a mere detail almost worth leaving out altogether.
Chinua Achebe’s deconstruction of colonialist notions of writing and
literate culture through his ironical reduction of the District Commissioner to
a mere detail, is radicalized by J . M. Coetzee in Waiting for the Barbarians.
Like Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, the protagonist of this novel is an
official representative of a colonialist regime, a magistrate stationed at a tiny
frontier settlement. Like Scobie, he finds himself in the role of a mediator
320 H ELGA R AMSEY –K URZ

between Africans and Europeans, and gradually is drawn to the side of the
Africans as he realizes that Western culture, once transplanted into an African
context, reduces its agents to savage torturers of the by contrast surprisingly
humane and civilized natives. In the course of the events the magistrate also
observes how the English language adapts to the atrocities which the speakers
of that language commit and how the African natives, as the victims of these
atrocities, are captured in the ensuing discourse. Symptomatically, as long as
the barbarians are prisoners at the settlement and as such entrapped in the
colonial narrative of subjection, they are described as “strange animals” with
“vast appetites” and “volatile tempers” (18), as “ugly people” (24) allowing
themselves to be “herded” (24) in the corner of a yard where they silently
endure the humiliation and pain inflicted upon them.
Doubting the efficacy of such modes of linguistic subordination, the
magistrate begins to suspect that the true nature of the native will always
remain beyond his comprehension. Accordingly he comes to confess that he
knows what to do with the female barbarian whom he keeps as his mistress
“no more than a cloud in the sky knows what to do with another” (34). He
therefore resolves to return her to her people. Yet, even after their parting, he
continues “to swoop and circle around the irreducible figure of the girl,
casting one net of meaning after another over her” (81). His inability to let go
of the girl is not much different from the other settlers’ obsessive preoccu-
pation with the barbarians whom they suspect to be lurking outside their
settlement and in whose absence they keep inventing forever more unlikely
scenarios for their attack.
The dreaded onslaught never happens. The barbarians never materialize in
the form in which they are imagined, namely as aggressors. Still, the settlers
continue to arm themselves against the expected disaster. “W E S T A Y ,” they
write on the walls of their houses (130), not as a message to the barbarians,
who cannot read, but to support each other morally against their common
imaginary enemy. What they fail to see is that, rather than the imminence of
their attack, it is the barbarians’ failure (or stubborn refusal) to attack that
challenges their own presence at the imperial outpost and deconstructs the
story of their waiting, the only story which they enact. With the evident futi-
lity of this waiting, Coetzee establishes the probably most obvious parallel
between Waiting for the Barbarians and Waiting for Godot as this futility
ultimately subordinates the settlers discursively to the barbarians, just as
Vladimir and Estragon are subordinated to the forever absent but, because of
his absence, dominant Godot.
Thus Coetzee moves from using the African native’s otherness at first like
Greene as a cipher of intangibility to interpreting it provocatively as an aspect
of the African native’s empowerment. Such an interpretation opens up
The Illiterate Other in Greene, Achebe and Coetzee 321

remarkable possibilities for the African writer to undermine European literary

traditions; possibilities, again, quite different from those exemplified by
Things Fall Apart; possibilities which Coetzee has the narrator protagonist
explore in his translation of the poplar slips. Although he himself does not
know what to make of these ominous pieces of writing he discovered on one
of his archaeological investigations, he resolves to ascribe their authorship to
the barbarians and supply his adversaries with the sort of reading expected of
someone like him whom they believe to be an ally of the barbarians. In a
superbly ironic scene, he informs Major Joll that the slips represent a full
record of the abominations committed during his regime. For a moment,
Coetzee’s narrator enjoys the horror in Joll’s face at the mere idea that some-
one might have used a foreign writing system, of which he himself has no
command, only to produce a counter-version to the history he has been trying
to construct by systematically occluding certain less advantageous details of
his rule over the settlement.
The possibility that he himself might have insight into an epistemology
beyond his adversaries’ grasp seems to hold fantastic opportunities for
revenge for the tormented hero and narrator, in which he can indulge only
briefly, however. Only too soon does Joll realize that the knowledge his oppo-
nent feigns of the contents of the poplar slips is as much a product of Western
imagination as is his conspiracy with the barbarians for which he has been
imprisoned. However much Joll would like to charge him with treason, he
cannot because this would entail acknowledging the validity of a truth he is
even more unwilling to concede than to grant the magistrate his freedom. On
a metafictional level, however, this resolution of the antagonism between Joll
and the magistrate reconstitutes only a relative freedom for the narrator of the
novel, while it is the barbarians who are ultimately assigned exclusive author-
ity on the question whether there is indeed another story of Africa’s coloniza-
tion apart from that recorded in alphabetic writing is awaiting its discovery in
a cultural climate less ignorant and dismissive of non-alphabetic scripts.
A comparison of The Heart of the Matter, Things Fall Apart and Waiting
for the Barbarians shows that to understand the image of the Other in anglo-
phone fiction about Africa, it does not suffice to register strategies of
demonization or romantic idealization as employed in the portraits of Yusef
and Ali, of temporary ironical focalization as used in the description of the
District Commissioner or of metafictional de- and reconstruction as applied to
the treatment of the barbarians. These strategies demand to be seen in relation
to the literacy posited as the text’s epistemological basis. Only thus is it
possible to appreciate how, in spite of their dissimilarities, all three of these
novels suggest that whether literary English in Africa will ever transcend its
own limitations as an originally European means of expression is above all a
322 H ELGA R AMSEY –K URZ

matter of who its agents are in Africa. Sadly, the development implicitly
anticipated as the most inevitable for Africa by all three novels is the opposite
of what is happening in Africa at present. Since the 1990s, access to the
literacy we Europeans tend to take most for granted has been regressing from
a recognized human right to a privilege in Africa.3 In consequence a majority
of Africans might not necessarily rejoice with us at the relatively easy avail-
ability of anglophone literacy elsewhere in the world and its global predomi-
nance. Rather, English as a world language might well constitute a far more
immediate and serious existential threat for them than the possibility that
Chinese might one day be the world’s first web language does for us.

WORKS CITED
Achebe, Chinua (1958). Things Fall Apart (African Writers Series; London: Heine-
mann, 1962).
Coetzee, J . M . (1980). Waiting for the Barbarians (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Greene, Graham (1948). The Heart of the Matter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962).
Innes, C . L . (1992). Chinua Achebe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
JanMohamed, Abdul (1984). ‘Sophisticated primitivism: The syncretism of oral and
literate modes in Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart”,’ A R I E L : A Review of Interna-
tional English Literature 15: 19–39.

3
The assessment of literacy rates is, admittedly, an extremely difficult affair, which
is why scholars such as Scribner & Cole (1981) and Street (1995) warn of too much
theoretical concern with the definition of “literacy” or the categorization of different
literacies because such attempts would only divert attention from the actual problem.
What is needed instead, according to them, is an understanding of both literacy and
illiteracy as ‘plural activities’ and a more differentiated view of the social realities
generating literacies and illiteracies. This, so Mace (1998: 13–14), would also help to
disprove such popular equations as that of schooling and literacy and reveal that people
may acquire literacy even independent of school systems. However, in Third World
contexts and especially in Africa, where, due also to the particular orality of the popu-
lation, alternative ‘literacy events’ are certainly rarer than in other parts of the world,
the availability of schooling and school attendance still seems to provide the most
conclusive information about the educational standards of the different communities.
The following facts, therefore, do merit special mention: In 1999, more children in
sub-Saharan Africa were out of school than in 1990. Forty million African children are
not attending primary school. According to current estimates, by 2015, fifty-seven
million children of primary school age will not be in school in Africa. In other words,
three out of four of all the school-age children in the world not attending school will be
African, when the continent has only twelve per cent of the world’s children. In the
1990s, thirteen African countries cut their education budgets under IMF programmes.
In Mali, Zambia, Burkina Faso and Chad education budgets fell to one per cent or less
of gross domestic product. (http://www.newafrica.com/education/ articles /afr_
illiteracy.htm, 1 June 2001.)
The Illiterate Other in Greene, Achebe and Coetzee 323

Klooss, Wolfgang (1986). ‘Chinua Achebe: A chronicler of historical change in

Africa,’ in Essays on Contemporary Post-Colonial Fiction, ed. Hedwig Bock &
Albert Wertheim (Munich: Max Hueber): 23–45.
Mace, Jane (1998). Playing With Time: Mothers and the Meaning of Literacy (Lon-
don: U C L ).
Schaffer, Elizabeth (1991). ‘Shakespeare in Greeneland: A note on The Heart of the
Matter,’ Journal of Modern Literature 17: 590.
Scribner, Sylvia, & Michael Cole (1981). The Psychology of Literacy (Boston MA:
Harvard UP).
Street, Brian V. (1995). Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Devel-
opment, Ethnography and Education (New York: Longman).

[
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“The nuisance one learns to put up with”
English as a Linguistic Compromise
in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Fiction

Richard Samin
University of Nancy 2, France

ABSTRACT
Es’kia Mphahlele’s commitment to and pronouncements on the use of
English as a creative medium in black South African literature situate him
squarely within a postcolonial problematic of abrogation and appropriation
whose ambivalence is implicitly predicated in the statement which serves as
a title for this essay: “English, the nuisance we have to put with,” taken from
an article written in the U S (Mphahlele 1973: 37) after almost twenty years
of exile. In numerous articles and essays, Mphahlele has repeatedly justified
his choice of English as a medium for creation in a colonial context and
carefully analysed how a colonial language can be used to convey African
experience and as an instrument of self-discovery and social mobility. In this
essay I want to show how Mphahlele’s ambivalent stance towards English
can be accounted for in terms of a tension between abrogation and appro-
priation (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 39) and results in a form of writing which is
both a cultural act and a literary creation.

1. Mphahlele’s approach to English

M
P H A H L E L E ’ S P O S I T I O N on the use of English and of African
languages has always been consistent. At the outset of his writing
career he felt no qualms about using English in his literary and
critical writings but at the same time he strongly encouraged budding African
writers to use African languages in their works and academics to teach Afri-
can literatures in African languages, as he did at the Accra Conference in
1962.
326 R ICHARD S AMIN

His choice of English was a purely pragmatic one. It was bound up with
the circumstances of his upbringing in Marabastad, one of the African slums
of Pretoria. One cannot dismiss the fact that English was generally considered
the necessary gateway to knowledge and qualification in South Africa but, in
the case of Mphahlele, as he frequently recalls, there was also a clearly per-
sonal commitment, probably related to the fact that he became literate through
the medium of English:
I was pretty poor in English, which was the medium of instruction. I read and
read, and read till it hurt. But I also got a good deal of pleasure out of it. And I
felt proud because I was overcoming my awkwardness. (Mphahlele 1957: 51)
He has frequently harked back to this initial experience of being able to read
English, stressing how this experience stimulated his imagination as a child:
From that day when at the age of seven, you began the printed alphabet in
words and sentence formations, and later when words leapt in front of you and
spoke to you of many things, of far-away lands, of misty horizons, of the
adventure of living, of man’s conquest – from that day onwards, something
was going to drive you from one exhilarating discovery to another. But these
things came to you in English. Which meant you were simultaneously
absorbing English ways of thinking, which were to modify or condition some
of your own indigenous ways of thinking. (1974: 29)
In order to better appreciate Mphahlele’s stance on the use of English it is
helpful to place it within the debate over the question of languages in South
Africa, which has been going on for decades. The final report of the Language
Plan Task Group (L A N G T A G ), presented to the then Minister of Arts, Cul-
ture, Science and Technology, Dr Ben Ngubane, on 8 August 1996 evokes the
context of the debate in the following terms:
Colonial and apartheid language policy, in concert with socio-economic and
socio-political policy, gave rise to a hierarchy of unequal languages which
reflected the structures of racial and class inequality that characterise South
African society. The dominance of English – and later Afrikaans – was sus-
tained systematically in order to reinforce other structures of domination […]
The task that has to be accomplished is […] no less than challenging the
hegemony of English – and to a lesser extent of Afrikaans – circumscribing
their gatekeeping functions in our society. (L A N G T A G 1996: 12-13)
The debate over the hegemony of English as a medium of communication and
instruction has turned on the question of Standard English or, in other words,
on the question of appropriation and abrogation. While for some – mostly
African writers and educators – English would have to be modified so as to
reflect the impact of African cultures in its everyday use, for others – English-
speaking South Africans – Standard English should be preserved. Thus, in
English as a Linguistic Compromise in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Fiction 327

1993, the English Academy of Southern Africa justified the maintenance of

Standard English on the grounds that it is “the only language that can serve
South Africa in certain unique functions, […] that English is a main inter-
national language with 300 million native speakers” and that “the deviations
from the standard are more likely to be individual mistakes than to be the
beginnings of a codifiable new English” (English Academy of South Africa
1993: 10).
Njabulo Ndebele, on the other hand, in a keynote address delivered at the
Jubilee Conference of the English Academy in 1986, declared that “English is
not an innocent language” because, he added, “language is a carrier of a range
of social perceptions, attitudes and goals” (Ndebele 1986: 112) and, in his
view, it still remains a vehicle of the corporate world. Therefore, he conclu-
ded, English as used in South Africa by Africans “must be open to the possi-
bility of becoming a new language” (Ndebele 1986: 114).
Another writer, Sipho Sepamla, claims that for most of the people Standard
English is irrelevant:
We are using English but we’ve stopped to be embarrassed by our mistakes in
English because we have decided to merge the English taught with that which
we have acquired through usage. A user aims at being intelligible regardless
of the number of broken rules in the process. (quoted in Alexander 1989: 59)
The empirical stance which underpins Sepamla’s position is one Mphahlele
would not have disagreed with, although it must be noted that Mphahlele’s
interest does not lie so much in the communicative aspect of the language as
in its creative potential. As he has repeatedly pointed out, when he wants to
communicate with his people or address certain gatherings he resorts to his
mother-tongue, SeSotho (Mphahlele 1986: 32). What Mphahlele has always
been striving for is the shaping of a literary language that would be the site of
cross-cultural meanings or resonances, so that the colonizer’s language might
be appropriated and forced to acknowledge and validate the presence of an
African culture.

2. Writing African culture

Mphahlele’s experimenting with English has resulted in the creation of a
literary medium freed from the shackles of the linguistic norms that had been
imposed by missionaries and teachers. His overall intention was to anchor his
use of English to an urban African cultural background. His strategy evokes
Roland Barthes’s definition of writing as an act of social solidarity, fulfilling a
function which links creativity and society. It implies “the choice of a social
arena within which the writer decides to locate the nature of his language”
(Barthes 1953: 18).
328 R ICHARD S AMIN

Mphahlele has always considered his adoption of English as a compro-

mise, similar to other compromises he had to negotiate in his life. As he puts
it, “life for an oppressed person is one long, protracted, agonizing compro-
mise” (Mphahlele 1982: 71). When he started to write, his major concern was
to reconcile his choice of a European language with his cultural background
in a meaningful way:
At the time I started writing, around 1945, we hadn’t been exposed to African
writers in the African languages, and so our single models were those which
we read at school. And so English became a more natural thing for me to write
in, although I communicate at other levels with my own mother tongue.
(Mphahlele 1986: 32)
Mphahlele’s pragmatic approach to English is that of a man who has been
exposed to a long tradition of mission-school education in South Africa and
who has been using the language for many years as a student, teacher, jour-
nalist and writer. However, he is not ready to accept the indiscriminate im-
position of Standard English when dealing with the reality of African cultures.
Thus he strongly criticized Francis H. Dutton’s translation of Thomas
Mofolo’s Chaka, published in 1931, on the grounds that Dutton was con-
fident that the biblical style of the Authorised Version would adequately
render the epic diction of Mofolo. In other words, he takes exception to the
high-handed appropriation of an African text and an African culture by
means of an idiom which is deemed appropriate to reflect the tonality of an
African epic. He therefore insists on the necessity of reshaping the language
to make sure “the English language can speak in a way it has never done
before among us” (Mphahlele 1976: 7), that it is the black man writing to
the black man “talking a language that would be understood by his own
people” (Manganyi 1981: 24).
The general principle upon which Mphahlele’s strategy is based consists of
instilling into English the flavour of African languages as they are spoken in
everyday life, mingling the communal voice of people with the personal voice
of the narrator (Mphahlele 1976: 8). These voices are rooted in the shared
experience of the contradictions of South Africa so that they can be under-
stood by all. In his short stories (apart from his first collection Man Must Live
published in 1946) – In Corner B (1967), The Unbroken Song (191) – and in
his autobiography and novels – Down Second Avenue (1959), The Wanderers
(1971), Chirundu (1979), Father Come Home (1984) – he has constantly ex-
perimented with a plurality of voices echoing different cultural backgrounds
in urban or rural contexts.
Mphahlele has also expounded his conception of appropriation in various
essays and in two booklets which he published for the benefit of young
English as a Linguistic Compromise in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Fiction 329

authors who attended the writing workshops he organized in Kenya and South
Africa: A Guide to Creative Writing (1966) and Let’s Write a Novel (1981). In
the former he recommends that a writer listen closely to his people’s speech,
that he translate a character’s thoughts that go on in his mother tongue into
English, along with images so as to “capture the mood, atmosphere and word
pictures or images of what a character is saying or doing in his own language”
(Mphahlele 1966: 24–25). In the latter he hones his previous recommenda-
tions to convey the sense of what he later calls “a multiplicity of languages
and discourses to express ‘multi-cultural’ being” (Mphahlele 1997). If charac-
ters speak ‘broken English’ it should be recorded in their speeches. If they
speak an African language or Afrikaans, this is expected to shine through also
in the “English” literary rendering.
This basic principle has been applied to his fiction through different
devices which generally operate within a framework of code-switching. The
narrator uses standard English while the characters use a popular medium
conveying the echo of an African language. Glossing, untranslated words,
translated proverbs, metaphors or comparisons, interjections (“God’s
people!”, “Jo-nna-jo!”, “the ancestors are my witnesses!”), forms of greetings
and word images are among the most commonly used devices. Word-images
translated into English offer an insight into the rich expressiveness of African
languages: “A man is a man because of other men”, “A cow will give birth to
a pig if that cousin of his doesn’t end up in a mental hospital” (Mphahlele
1989: 138, 141); “child of my brother has been vomited by sleep” meaning
that the child’s sleep has been disturbed by a nightmare, “do not come into
my mouth” meaning do not interrupt me, “I’ll come out of the grave and
breathe maggots into your life” meaning I will come to haunt you (Mphahlele
1984: 3, 47, 78). The English is occasionally moulded on the syntax and
idiom of an African language to convey the immediacy of dialogue: “‘Yes,’
he says, he says ‘My mind stretches back to Sedibeng’”, “‘I say to him, I say,
‘You went to Fort Victoria’” (Mphahlele 1984: 93). In this way, Mphahlele
gives the impression that English “bears the burden” of his culture, replacing
the metaphors of the dominant language by those of African languages,
inscribing Otherness in the colonizer’s language while using the authority of
its hegemonic position to validate African experiences.
The gap which is thus inscribed within the language produces what
Mphahlele calls resonance, that is the capacity of language to resound with
other voices which metonymically recall a history, a culture and myths which
encompass the present of enunciation:
You may inherit the culture that comes with the language but if you’re using it
as a tool to write out of your own cultural experience you are then adding
another dimension to what you are doing […] You’re using the language in
330 R ICHARD S AMIN

quite a different way from other people will use it who live in England […]
I’m sure your African tradition feeds into the language and the thought that
goes into it turns it into a different thing, very often, from the way it’s been
used elsewhere. (“South African Writers Talking” 1979: 9)
The literary text is thus, according to Ashcroft, “written out of the tension
between the abrogation of the received English which speaks from the centre,
and the act of appropriation which brings it under the influence of a ver-
nacular language” (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 39) in order to redefine cultural iden-
tity in a colonial context. He further points out that “the most interesting
feature of its [English] use in post-colonial literature may be the way in which
it also constructs difference, separation and absence from the metropolitan
norm” (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 43–44).
With Mphahlele, this cultural difference is defined as “the ironic meeting
point between protest and acceptance, not resignation in the face of oppres-
sion or deprivation, but an artistic readiness to confront and work out the
reality which surrounds the author” (Gaylard 1995: 88). In his own way,
Mphahlele inscribes his writing within a form of liminality which he defines
in the following terms:
a kind of tug-of-war between this acceptance and rejection; and we are
unconsciously trying to reconcile the two. I think […] we have to a large
extent come to a point of equilibrium […] where we know exactly what it is
we don’t want from those fellows there, and what it is that we need to
consolidate in ourselves. (Mphahlele 1987: 138)

3. Writing in the liminal zone

Writing in the liminal zone, defined as “a transcultural space in which strate-
gies for personal or communal self-hood may be elaborated, a region in which
there is a continual process of movement and interchange between different
states” (Ashcroft et al. 2000: 131), corresponds to Mphahlele’s decision to
adapt his use of English to the functions he ascribes to his writing as a social
act. His perception of that function has changed over the years. Whereas in
the period immediately before and after his exile his writing was largely
determined by the aesthetics of realism, his return to South Africa led him to
the conviction that he could only “recover the texture of things” through what
he calls “prose poetry” (Mphahlele 1987: 141).
The first category corresponds to a predominantly urban setting. He writes
from the perspective of the ordinary members of society, which justifies
Mphahlele’s qualification of this type of writing as “proletarian” literature.
Nowhere is the ironic and unstable meeting point between protest and
acceptance so brilliantly illustrated as in his short stories and particularly in
English as a Linguistic Compromise in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Fiction 331

“Mrs Plum” (Mphahlele 1967). The first person narrator, who is a black
maid-servant called Karabo, relates her experiences and reveals the contra-
dictions and less palatable aspects of her madam, Mrs Plum, who is a typical
white liberal, a member of a white women’s opposition group, the Black
Sash. Karabo’s testimony is told in confidence, as though directly addressed
to an anonymous listener. This form of orality accounts for the fluidity and
spontaneity of her English, which, incidentally, she takes great pains to learn.
However, the African words and idioms and the syntax which occasionally
copies the syntax of her mother tongue never allow the listener /reader to
forget her cultural background.
The strength of her voice lies precisely in the constant tension maintained
between her growing mastery of English, which accords with her discovery of
the white world, and the hovering presence of her African cultural back-
ground conveyed by African linguistic intrusions into her adopted tongue.
Karabo stands for both acceptance insofar as she adopts some of the norms
and values of a Western way of life, and for protest in her refusal to be over-
exploited and to comply passively with her employer’s arbitrary authority.
“Mrs Plum” thus displays a form of writing which is perfectly coherent since
first it inscribes the agency of the subject in the mastery of the English she
uses, and second it constructs textuality as a personal and adequate rendering
of the narrator’s urban experiences.
Mphahlele, despite his involvement and interest in urban modernity, never
rejected his African identity but it was not until he went into exile in Nigeria
that he fully came to embrace it: “Nigeria restored something to me which I
thought I had lost – the sense of being African, and the feeling also that
although we had knocked about here, in a white-settled country, we hadn’t
lost what we had started off with, in the matter of traditions and customs”
(Mphahlele 1987: 135). The rediscovery of being an African through exile led
him to reflect upon the kind of writing he wanted to produce.
After his return to South Africa Mphahlele sought to add another dimen-
sion to his writing through the development of what he calls “prose poetry”
(Mphahlele 1987: 140). His aim was to use English in such a way that it could
convey the numinous presence which envelops the lives of Africans, espe-
cially in rural areas, and capture his personal experience of homecoming as a
spiritual celebration. He now wanted his English to relate meaningfully to the
history and culture of African peasants, villagers and migrant workers. His
method consists in imitating and weaving together different voices – that is
different varieties of English and different sociolects – so as to reflect the
plurality of social experiences and the persistence of African cultural modes.
His prose thus partakes of the epic and the elegy. While his handling of Eng-
lish syntax is basically the same as in his urban stories, he does not so much
332 R ICHARD S AMIN

seek to capture the tang of a vibrant urban idiom as to let it resound in unison
with the voices of an age-long culture so as to create deeper resonances. More
care is attached to translating into understandable forms the thoughts and
language of his African characters to suggest the influence of orature. Inter-
polated texts drawn from the traditions of heroic and praise poetry, word
images, colloquial expressions and proverbs, glossed or untranslated words
are used to reinforce the African cultural bias while his dialogues encompass
the variegated spoken forms which also make up the discourse of rural
people, that is broken English spoken by migrant workers or by children
learning to speak the language. Thus, “the untranslated words, the sounds and
the textures of the language can be held to have the power and presence of the
culture they signify – to be metaphoric in their ‘inference of identity and
totality’” (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 51–52).
This metaphoric capacity implies a semantic dislocation of English as illus-
trated by one character in Father Come Home, a retired and disabled miner
who endlessly delights in repeating the same word “tintinnabulation” merely
for the quality of its sound, since he has almost entirely forgotten what it
means:
Maleka […] came across the word ‘tintinnabulation’ and fell in love with the
sound of it. A younger man looked it up in the dictionary. But to him the
meaning was never as important as its sound, especially when he broke it up
into syllables – tin-tin-na-bu, lay, shun! He remembered vaguely that the word
had something to do with the ringing of a bell […]. (Mphahlele 1984: 31)
This innocent dallying with one word in fact points to how English can be
appropriated in a meaningful way. The idea which finally underpins Mphah-
lele’s handling of English boils down to a re-motivation of the language
whereby its material form or signifier is disconnected from its European
norms and values and linked to an African cultural content in order to achieve
a form of writing “moulded by its social finality” (Barthes 1953: 17).

4. Conclusion
Es’kia Mphahlele is a writer who through his reflections on and practice of
English is certainly one of the best authorities on how English can be cultu-
rally appropriated by Africans. As he says, “South African writing in English
by blacks has emerged both in spite of racism and because of it.” English is
for him “a political and economic weapon for a proletariat” (Mphahlele 1973:
35). Beyond the question of English as a medium of communication and in-
struction, Mphahlele has sought to shape forms of writing in English that can
meaningfully relate to the colonial history and multiculturalism of South
Africa and inscribe in it the cultural specifics of the African community at
English as a Linguistic Compromise in Es’kia Mphahlele’s Fiction 333

large. In other words Mphahlele ascribes to this African English a unitary

cultural function which he defines as a way “to bridge the rural/urban gap
amongst ourselves and create a sense of unity, a sense of cultural unity so that
the urban man can be in one way or another reinforced by a knowledge of
where he comes from, where he is going, and what has happened to him so
far” (Manganyi 1981: 39).

WORKS CITED
Alexander, Neville (1989). Language Policy and National Unity in South
Africa/Azania (Cape Town: Buchu).
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (1989). The Empire Strikes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London & New York: Rout-
ledge).
—— (2000). Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts (London & New York:
Routledge).
Barthes, Roland (1953). Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (Paris: Gonthier).
English Academy of Southern Africa (1993). ‘The Standard English debate: a
discussion paper’ (unpublished).
Gaylard, Rob (1995). ‘ “ A man is a man because of other men”: the “Lesane” stories
of Es’kia Mphahlele,’ English in Africa 22.1: 72–90.
L A N G T A G (Language Plan Task Group) (1996). Towards a National Language
Plan for South Africa: Summary of the Final Report of the Language Plan Task
Group (Pretoria: Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology).
Manganyi, N. Chabani (1981). Looking Through the Keyhole: Dissenting Essays on
the Black Experience (Johannesburg: Ravan).
Mphahlele, Ezekiel [Es’kia] (1956, 1957). ‘Lesane,’ in The Drum Decade: Stories
from the 1950s, ed. Michael Chapman (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal
Press, 1989. 132–61.
—— (1957). Down Second Avenue (London: Faber & Faber).
—— (1966). A Guide to Creative Writing (Nairobi: East African Literature
Bureau).
—— (1967). In Corner B (Nairobi: East African Publishing House): 164–208.
—— (1973). ‘Why I teach my discipline,’ Denver Quarterly 8.1: 32–43.
—— (21974). The African Image (London: Faber & Faber).
—— (1976). ‘The impact of African literature,’ Translation 3: 5–14.
—— (1982). ‘The tyranny of place,’ The Classic 1.1: 69–84.
—— (1984). Father Come Home (Johannesburg: Ravan).
—— (1986). ‘Remarks on Chirundu,’ English in Africa 13.2: 21–37.
—— (1987). ‘Looking in: Interviews with Es’kia Mphahlele,’ English Academy
Review 4: 115–41.
—— (1997). ‘Living writers, living culture,’ <http://www.unisa.ac.za/ dept/press/
scrutiny/eskia.html> (25 October 2000).
334 R ICHARD S AMIN

Ndebele, Njabulo (1986). Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African

Literature and Culture (Johannesburg: COSAW).
‘South African writers talking: Nadine Gordimer, Es’kia Mphahlele, André Brink’
(1978), English in Africa 6.2: 1–23.

[
 T HE POLITICS OF E NGLISH
ON THE A SIAN SUBCONTINENT
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The Interface of Language, Literature
and Politics in Sri Lanka
A Paradigm for Ex-Colonies of Britain

D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke
University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT
During colonial times. the English language occupied a dominant position,
but the colonial educational system was not a mass or egalitarian system.
The presence of the colonial masters had a suffocating effect on the creative
energies of the local inhabitants and literature in English emerges para-
doxically from the growth of nationalist currents. In its early phase, this
literature can be termed mimicry. The potential insurgency of mimicry is
evident in an adoption of an indigenous identity at times. When writers
began to feel nationalist currents keenly, their central problem was reconcil-
ing their own sensibility, indigenous traditions and realities, on the one hand,
and Western literary and other traditions and influences, on the other. Once
this clash of cultures phase was over, the poets wrote out of their personal
situations. For some writers, the choice or adoption of English was a major
problem, while it was not so for others. But both groups had to adapt English
to express realities alien to it and convey their own indigenous spirit. We
have now moved beyond the ‘Prospero–Caliban syndrome’.

English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of
choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption – well, yes, there was
adoption, but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language.
– Joseph Conrad, ‘Author’s Note’ (1919), A Personal Record

I
N I T S C O N T I N U I N G A N D G R O W I N G V I T A L I T Y over the last three
decades, Sri Lankan literature in English seems to be disproving the
pessimistic views expressed periodically with regard to it. For instance,
338 D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE

in 1981, it was asserted: “For the most part, the prognosis for creative writing
in English in Sri Lanka is gloomy. [...] creative writing in English is unlikely
to have the chance for survival that its counterpart in India has” (Obeyesekere
1981: 17). Actually, “its counterpart in India” has had similar views expressed
in regard to it. For instance, in 1963, it was Buddhadeva Bose’s considered
opinion: “As late as 1937, Yeats reminded Indian writers that ‘no man can
think or write with music or vigour except in his mother tongue’; to the great
majority of Indians this admonition was unnecessary, but the intrepid few
who left it unheeded do not yet realize that ‘Indo-Anglian’ poetry is a blind
alley, lined with curio shops, leading nowhere” (Bose 1982 [1963]: 150).
During colonial times, the English language, the language of the colonial
masters, occupied a dominant position. The vernacular languages were down-
graded in the classroom. When Ediriwira Sarachchandra (1914–96), who
lived to see himself acclaimed as the doyen of Sinhala letters as well as the
leading novelist in English, was employed in the early 1940s as a Sinhala
teacher at St Thomas’s College, still the leading private school in Sri Lanka,
the young Westernized students nicknamed him “Tagore.” Sarachchandra
considered this a compliment, but to the students this was an expression of the
fact that they found him amusing. R.K Narayan’s account of the situation in
India is corroborative:
In the classroom neither of these two languages [Sanskrit, the classical
language of India, and Tamil, his mother tongue] was given any importance;
they were assigned to the poorest and the most helpless among the teachers,
the pundits who were treated as a joke by the boys, since they taught only the
‘second language’, the first being English as ordained by Lord Macaulay
when he introduced English education in India. English was important and
was taught by the best teacher in the school, if not by the ruling star of the
institution, the headmaster himself. (Narayan 1982 [1964]: 138)
The teaching of English itself was conducted in the carrot-and-the-stick ap-
proach, and English was the passport to a bright future. When Sarachchandra
was a boy, a child could be fined five cents for speaking a word of Sinhala or
Tamil in school (Sarachchandra n.d.: 692). Five cents was a significant sum in
those days. At Royal College, the premier government male school founded
by the British in 1835 as the Colombo Academy, the top prizes were the
Governor-General’s Prize for Western Classics, the Stubbs’ Prize for Latin
Prose (Stubbs was a British Governor), the Shakespeare Prize and the Prize
for English Essay. There were no special prizes for Sinhala and Tamil. This
system at Royal College (the name itself significant) continued even after
Independence (1948). Ngugi wa Thiong’o records the same kind of situation
as prevailing in Kenya (in a harsher form):
The Interface of Language, Literature and Politics in Sri Lanka 339

English became more than a language; it was the language, and all the others
had to bow before it in deference.
Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking
Gikuyu in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal
punishment – three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks – or was made
to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I A M
S T U P I D or I A M A D O N K E Y . Sometimes the culprits were fined money
they could hardly afford. And how did the teachers catch the culprits? A
button was initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over to
whoever was caught speaking his mother tongue. Whoever had the button at
the end of the day would sing who had given it to him and the ensuing process
would bring out all the culprits of the day. Thus children were turned into
witch-hunters and in the process were being taught the lucrative value of being
a traitor to one’s immediate community.
The attitude to English was the exact opposite: any achievement in spoken
or written English was highly rewarded; prizes, prestige, applause; the ticket
to higher realms. English became the measure of intelligence and ability in the
arts, the sciences, and all the other branches of learning. English became the
main determinant of a child’s progress up the ladder of formal education.
(Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1986: 438)
Reggie Siriwardena’s “Colonial Cameo” (1989) creatively depicts this kind of
linguistic situation in the home, the English school and society in Sri Lanka:
My father used to make me read aloud
in the evening from Macaulay or Abbots’ Napoleon (he was short,
and Napoleon his hero; I, his hope for the future).
My mother, born in a village, had never been taught
that superior tongue. When I was six, we were moving
house; she called at school to take me away.
She spoke to the teacher in Sinhala. I sensed the shock
of the class, hearing the servants’ language; in dismay
followed her out, as she said, ‘Gihing ennang’ .
I was glad it was my last day there. But then the bell
pealed; a gang of boys rushed out, sniggering,
and shouted in chorus, ‘Gihing vareng!’ as my farewell.
My mother pretended not to hear the insult.
The snobbish little bastards! But how can I blame
them? That day I was deeply ashamed of my mother.
Now, whenever I remember, I am ashamed of my shame.
The contrast between the phrases “Gihing ennang” [I will go and come
(again)] and “Gihing vareng!” [Go and come!] depends on a feature of di-
glossia. In many speech communities, two or more varieties of the same lan-
guage are used by the same speakers under different conditions. A striking
340 D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE

feature of diglossia is the existence of many paired items, one high, one low.
“Gihing ennang” is a polite, customary form of salutation in Sinhala on
leaving and is used between equals; “vareng” is an impolite, imperative form
and is used to those considered social inferiors (for instance, servants). Siri-
wardena refers to Sinhala as “the servants’ language” because English had
become the language upstairs (as in England even as late as the fourteenth
century, the French even of Stratford atte Bowe was more genteel than Eng-
lish, and in Russia where, with no political pressures involved, Russian was
relegated to a position inferior to French). The poem points to other hard
social facts: it is implied that the father feels that English is the key to his
child’s prospects and that the students and the upper class have been brain-
washed. The poem is written in postcolonial times and concludes with the
poet-persona’s postcolonial revision of his colonial attitude. This kind of
change, conceding the importance and dignity of the mother tongue, is now
found among the English-educated Sri Lankan intelligentsia.
Though English did enjoy a privileged position in Sri Lanka in colonial
times, it would be a mistake to imagine that English education was imple-
mented widely and satisfactorily. The colonial educational system was neither
a mass system of education nor was it egalitarian; it was meant to provide the
colonial masters with native personnel to man the intermediate rungs in the
ladder of employment both in government and in private enterprises under-
taken by Europeans, the superior posts being reserved for the ruling race.
In the colonial era, English was taught only in ‘English schools’ which were
attended by only a tiny minority of school children. Thus, in 1914, at the
height of the colonial era, only 37,500 pupils attended English schools, while
347,500 were registered in ‘vernacular schools’. In 1931, when universal
franchise came in, there were 84,000 pupils in English schools while 476,000
went to vernacular schools. On the eve of independence, some 180,000 pupils
were found in English schools, while 720,000 attended vernacular schools.
(Souza 1969: 6)
In later colonial times, the teaching of English was expanded, but never more
than modestly, to cater to selected higher echelons in the administration and
professions. In his well-known minute on education (1835), which launched
English education in India, Thomas Babington Macaulay stated:
It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body
of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be
interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern. (Macaulay 1982
[1835]: 55)
Leonard Woolf’s account of education in Africa confirms the typicality of this
colonial situation:
The Interface of Language, Literature and Politics in Sri Lanka 341

It is no exaggeration to say that no European government in Africa had made

a serious attempt to begin the education of the native so that eventually he
might be capable of taking his place as a free man in the new economic and
political society, which Europeans have introduced into Africa. Out of an
estimated revenue of nearly two million pounds in 1924, the Kenya
Government allotted pounds 44,000 to be spent on prisons and pounds 37,000
on education. I deny that any European Government in the twentieth century
can claim to be civilised if it spends 20 % more on providing penal servitude
and hard labour for its subjects than it does on providing them with education.
The population of Kenya includes nearly 2,500,000 Africans, 36,000 Asiatics
and 10,000 Europeans. The Government spends pounds 37,000 on the
education of the 2,500,000 Africans and pounds 25,000 on the education of
10,000 Europeans. (Woolf 1928: 29)
It is important to pay attention to Woolf’s observation of “the new economic
and political society which Europeans have introduced” as well as to the
failure of the European powers to meet the admitted “obligation to education”
(Woolf 1928: 88), indicating that imperialism brought about social change
and that self-interested economic and political motives were the main forces
behind imperialism.
As commonly in the ex-colonies, in Sri Lanka the presence of the colonial
masters had a suffocating effect on the creative energies of the local inhabi-
tants. English literature in Sri Lanka emerges from the growth of nationalist
currents. Its counterpart in India came of age earlier because the nationalist
movement on the subcontinent developed, and assumed the character of a
mass struggle, earlier. The Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 and
Gandhi launched the non-violent, non-cooperation movement in the 1920s;
understandably, the Big Three of the Indian novel in English (before Salman
Rushdie arrived on the scene), Mulk Raj Anand, R.K . Narayan and Raja Rao
could write significant novels and mature in the 1930s. (Of course, the origins
of the Indian novel in English predate the nationalist struggle. The first Indian
novel in English, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s Rajmohan’s Wife, was
published in 1864.) On the other hand, a national consciousness was born in
Nigeria later, in 1938, with the return of Nnamdi Azikwe and H.O. Davies
after their education and experience in the West. Cyprian Ekwensi published
his first novella, When Love Whispers, in 1948, but the phenomenal growth of
the West African novel came after Chinua Achebe, widely regarded as the
patriarch of the modern African novel, published Things Fall Apart in 1958,
the first African novel to enjoy a wide international readership. Nigeria won
independence in 1961, whereas India did so in 1947.
Mainly as a consequence of the freedom struggle in India, Sri Lanka was
granted independence by Britain a year later. Because its independence was
acquired more easily – in fact, too easily – Sri Lankans did not forge as strong
342 D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE

a national consciousness as the Indians. After independence, the ruling and

social elites in Sri Lanka were formed by the ‘brown sahib’ class, whom
Macaulay categorized as ‘interpreters’. He described them as “a class of per-
sons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals
and in intellect” (Macaulay 1982 [1835]: 56). One could substitute ‘Sri Lan-
kans’ (or ‘Africans’) for ‘Indian’. So a Macaulay-style English education had
put wealth and power in Sri Lanka into the hands of the English-speaking
alone.
In 1956, Mr S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike harnessed the grievance /envy and
aspirations of the Sinhala-speaking (that is, the lower middle class and those
of still lower social status), the Pancha Maha Balavegaya, the five great
forces – Sangha (the Buddhist clergy), Veda (the practitioners of indigenous
medicine), Guru (the teachers in the vernacular), Govi (the farmers) and Kam-
karu (the working classes), forces which represented the true majority of the
people, and dislodged the United National Party which had ushered in
Independence and remained in power since then. Elected Prime Minister in
that year, Mr Bandaranaike had released not only populist but also nationalist
currents, which had been stimulated earlier by Anagarika Dharmapala. Ban-
daranaike restored the Sinhala language, the language of more than 73 per
cent of the population, to its position of authority in the country, in education
and the administration. Sinhala became both the national and official lan-
guage. Thus, English was displaced from its preeminent position as the offi-
cial language and medium of instruction in schools and universities. English
had to be relegated to the status of a second language after Independence,
sooner or later, despite the regrets of the English-educated classes, but it was
not properly treated as such. It was neglected for two decades and even
reviled. The English-educated, however, remain(ed) the decision-makers. But
faced with the change in the power-structure at several levels and a significant
diminution in their status and privileges, they became more aware of them-
selves and the social, cultural and literary context in which they lived. Their
response to the changes of 1956 was negative rather than positive, yet it led to
fruitful results in the field of creative writing.
This historical explanation is not the complete story. The Department of
English in our single university in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s made a
positive impact. The influence of its critical work and standards spread be-
yond the portals of the University. The University Dramatic Society (Dram
Soc), under the guidance of the then Professor of English, E.F.C. Ludowyk,
was the leading theatre group in the country and set the standards in the pro-
duction and choice of plays. At that time, young graduates founded journals
such as Harvest, Symposium, Community and Points of View, which gave
expression to their critical and creative preoccupations and maintained
The Interface of Language, Literature and Politics in Sri Lanka 343

credible standards. Their counterparts in the media dealt with literary matters
on the same high level. All this created a climate for writing and the begin-
nings of a literary tradition. Naturally, the imaginative writing itself, as it later
turned out, came from those who had been to university (such as Patrick
Fernando, Yasmine Gooneratne and Chitra Fernando) as well as from those
who had not (such as Punyakante Wijenaike, James Goonewardene and Lak-
dasa Wikkremasinha).
The Department of English also produced a negative impact. It was rare-
fied, and colonial influences made its perspective eurocentric. The function of
university drama seemed to be essentially intellectual, to interpret distin-
guished Western drama – an academic ‘trip’ to the West. Ludowyk defended
his position in later life in these terms:
Perhaps there was some snobbery, some arrogance and some narcissism
involved, but I still think that it is worth while keeping the lines open for
internationalism. After all, that is, by definition, one of the functions of a
university, and we were a University society. (Ludowyk 1971: 7)
Nevertheless, he did admit in the same article:
I remember Nicholl Cadell telling me, as we talked on the lawns of King
George’s Hall [of the University College] after a performance of Lady
Precious Stream, that he’d have been better pleased at seeing something
written by a contemporary playwright in Ceylon. He was right. [...] I think this
was something the Dram Soc should have tried to do. It has, I think, to be put
down to the debit side. (Ludowyk 1971: 6)
Thus, the Department of English had an inhibiting effect on creative writing –
of plays as well as other forms of literature. It produced only one significant
writer, Patrick Fernando, during the whole period; he produced only one
volume, The Return of Ulysses, and that, too, as late as 1955.
Fernando was a Roman Catholic and he read Western Classics at the Uni-
versity of Ceylon in Colombo; these constitute the background for his poetry.
He was English-educated and belonged to the middle class. Language (Eng-
lish) and class in that period served to insulate him from the world around
him; even the momentous changes of 1956 were not important in his case.
The framework for his poetry is not Sri Lankan as such. His is an alienated
sensibility but, uncommonly, an acute one. Early in his career, he wrote
classical poems, which captured the spirit of the originals and also possessed a
contemporary interest, such as “The Lament of Paris”:
In the quiet arbour of your high-walled soul, Love
Shall gently pluck the hidden strings and sing
Of him who distilled blood of heroes just to paint
Red, the rosy toenails of his runaway Grecian girl.
344 D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE

In these poems, Fernando is basically writing of such permanent themes as

the enduring power and tragic destiny of love as in this instance. His later
satirical poems are his best efforts. In “Chorus on Marriage,” he contemplates
the decline of feelings in a human relationship in terms of an allegorical
framework of the vicissitudes in a kingdom resulting from the deaths of
successive rulers:
Swiftly their love sickened, and patiently,
Without one murmur, in a year or two,
Departed. The grave was dug in memory.
A faint awareness stood as monument.
No epitaph except the world’s wild guess:
The wise observed a searing of the will,
The pious blamed a lack of timely grace,
While cynics certified love mortal. Still,
How magnificent love’s coronation –
The virtues all attending, all princes present,
And roads dizzy with dancing!
So limited a reign forecast by none.
The couple are not particularized and this facilitates a general application of
the poet’s theme. The incongruity between the elevatedness of the allegorical
framework, the imagery, and the ordinariness of the human realities generates
a satirical tone and reveals the satirical standpoint of the poet which both
controls and inhibits the feelings of pathos. The poem descends briefly from
fantasy to the real world in the last stanza:
He scans the share list, chuckling now and then,
And she is knitting socks for charities,
Both dreaming of a girl known long ago.
The scene is conventionally Western rather than Sri Lankan, and conveys the
poet’s view here, that marriage finally deteriorates into mere convention with-
out love.
Fernando’s poetic world is often non-specific. His language is polished and
minted, approximating to Standard British English as closely as a Sri Lankan
could do so. His forms are well-crafted and orthodox. His poetry is written to
British specifications, and he met the stringent Leavisian poetic standards. He
published his volume in London. Thereby, he made his mark as a poet. He
illustrates on the literary plane the process which Homi Bhabha has termed
‘mimicry’, whereby the colonized subject is reproduced as “almost the same
but not quite,” as having an identity “almost the same but not white” (Bhabha
1994: 86, 89). The flaw in the colonial mimesis, whereby “to be Anglicized is
emphatically not to be English” (Bhabha 1994: 87), and the potential insur-
The Interface of Language, Literature and Politics in Sri Lanka 345

gency of mimicry are revealed in his genre pictures of Negombo fisherfolk.

Here Fernando ruptures his Anglicization and comes closest to being
identifiably Sri Lankan. In “The Fisherman Mourned by his Wife,” he is
external to the fisherfolk, but in “Sun and Rain on the West Coast,” he seems
to be virtually amidst them:
‘Your father was different – dew or no he used to go.’
‘That’s why he was drowned; and who drove him to it?’
‘Jesu Maria! Manuel, Manuel, stop sinning so.’
‘Don’t cry, I only asked a question, mother.’
‘Cecilia, bring your brother his tea, girl.’
‘Hurry up, but mind the ants in the sugar.’
Fernando’s dialogue captures the sharp interchange between son and mother;
their characters, individualistic and conventional, respectively; their styles of
speaking, the son laconic, the mother tending to garrulity; the last line seem-
ingly a resolution to the altercation, yet not quite that because “the ants in the
sugar” is literal as well as a metaphor for their kind of life and life in general,
its serious implications radiating beyond the immediate scene. The insurgency
latent in mimicry was carried further by Yasmine Gooneratne, who was
stimulated by Fernando into becoming a poet both like and unlike him, and
still further by Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, who, in turn, was encouraged by
Gooneratne and was more radical than both.
Yasmine Gooneratne is sensitive to the English language in relation to the
sociopolitical situation; her poetic world is specific. Her first volume of
poetry, Word Bird Motif, was published in 1971, the year of the insurgency
launched by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (J V P or the People’s Liberation
Front), which mobilized the Sinhala-educated rural youth with no prospect of
employment and no faith in the existing order of things. The volume contains
no reference to it, yet the poem “Peradeniya Landscape” is surely significant,
pointing forward to the insurgency:
[...] though one knows quite well the future dawns
Less brightly for them, and a muttering
Protest hushes birdsong on these well-kept lawns.
“Them” refers to the undergraduates with a Sinhala background of the beauti-
ful university campus at Peradeniya – cut off from jobs by lack of English as
well as by being monolinguals with no prestigious connections. In “Post
Office Queue,” Gooneratne’s feelings are more ambivalent as she confronts a
Sinhala speaker:
Let me say quickly, before you criticize
Me, that it isn’t really my fault
For all my shortcomings I humbly apologize,
346 D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE

That your life lacks salt

[...]
But to ask in English for a stamp is not yet a mortal sin
Your insular virtue need not make me dirt.
[my emphasis]
Gooneratne is aware of her upper class, cosmopolitan and English affiliations
and of the Sinhala speaker as being deprived but belonging more to the island.
Her defensiveness is part of an ambiguous, complex and unresolved attitude.
The insurgency itself and the sociopolitical situation which engendered it,
appear strongly in her long poem The Lizard’s Cry, published in 1972. In a
section depicting a journey, there is a scene on a train when a compartment is
invaded, the mother passing biscuits to her daughters:
[...] Feeding them, maternal sparrow drab and intent
she stares at a newspaper’s erected tent
opposite, seeing without seeing them the headlines, elegant
tall English fences that she cannot see beyond.
Or get behind as the paper’s owner has done
determined she shall not look into his eyes, none
of her belongings touch his, breathe his breath, con his page
in the intimacy of what is now her carriage.
These lines (my emphasis) dramatize the class divide between the world of
the monolinguals and those whose first language is English. Class appears as
bad as caste – a virtual ‘untouchability’ comes into play. An earlier section
deals directly with the insurgency:
Now in this dark, forgotten legends move
upon the leaf: your fiery youth embrace
Death till it seems the Princess ‘fair of face
and amorous’ courts again her taloned love.
See as the grace and vigour of your race
sport in a gun’s eye, her soft fingers rove
deliberately the honey-coloured flank [...]
to slay their shaggy sire as a new breed
of beast-begotten heroes, man-hood’s seed
proven by parricide, brazenness the tester
of female faith, set up murderous deed
Once more for target [...]
Rumour probably fuelled by verbal propaganda deliberately distorting the
rebel’s policy towards reactionaries was current especially in remote villages,
though not actually believed, that the guerrillas intended killing everybody
over the age of forty. Gooneratne connects this with the legend of the origins
of the Sinhala race as related in the Mahavamsa, a chronicle written in the
The Interface of Language, Literature and Politics in Sri Lanka 347

fourth century A D , and elsewhere. According to the story, Suppa Devi, the
daughter of the king of Vanga, present-day Bangladesh, joined a caravan
“desiring the joy of independent life”, to quote Geiger’s translation (Geiger
1960: 51); however, a lion attacked the caravan in the forest; all fled save the
princess who stroked the lion who grew amorous and carried her to his den;
there she lived and bore him a daughter and a son. When impatient of con-
finement, the son broke out and led the women back to civilization where a
king wedded Suppa Devi. The lion returned and discovered their absence.
Crazed with grief, he ravaged the kingdom and none could stand against him
until his son Sinhabahu slew him, won the offered reward, wedded his sister
and founded a kingdom named Lata. His grandson Vijaya, literally Victor, led
the Sinhala or lion’s blood people to Sri Lanka. Gooneratne sees the J V P , in
whose ranks women in blue trousers fought alongside their male comrades,
prefigured by the lion’s offspring.
Much later in the day, Sumathy Sivamohan in her poem “In a Foreign
Tongue” (1997) is able to catch the same kind of linguistic /sociopolitical
complex in a wider net, in a manner less rich and more direct:
My teacher
talked of a
Sri Lankan English

Where is this
thing?
Tons of Shakespeare, Shelley and Shaw
Press upon me
how to clean rice in English?

Unfound it in the
parched land planted with paddy
Strewn with shots of
Justice protest hate revenge
the ending is not coming.
Sivamohan suggests that the decision-makers who speak (and most often,
think) in English do not base their policies on the needs of the cultivators in a
predominantly agricultural country. They find alien ideas closer to their Euro-
centric thinking than the realities faced by their non-Colombo countrymen.
English does not penetrate these areas, nor does it help the villagers. This
mismatch, it is intimated, leads to revolution – a sense of ‘(in)justice protest
hate revenge’ fired the J V P insurgencies of 1971 and 1988–89.
Sivamohan’s reference to her teacher who “talked of a Sri Lankan English”
is of interest. Since Professor H.A. Passé made a case for ‘Ceylon English’ as
348 D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE

a dialect in his doctoral dissertation titled “The English Language in Ceylon”,

presented to the University of London in 1948, and taught this to students at
the University of Peradeniya in the 1950s and early 1960s, younger linguists
have spent considerable energy in developing Passé’s thesis, arguing, for
instance, that Sri Lankan English is an “independent, distinctive and fully-
formed linguistic system adequate for the communicative and expressive
needs of its users” (Kandiah 1981: 102). This kind of postcolonial subversion
of British English as the absolute Standard is found in India, Africa, Australia,
Canada, Singapore, indeed in all the ex-colonies of Britain, starting with the
USA.
Far more intractable and fearful than the J V P insurgencies has been the
current so-called ‘ethnic’ problem. Unlike the J V P , the Liberation Tigers of
Tamil Eelam (L T T E ) receives foreign support and has its own well-organized
international network, though it has been categorized as a terrorist group by
the U S State Department, by Britain, Australia and India. It has now been
clearly identified that Sri Lanka is being plagued by a problem that is not
ethnic but purely terrorist. Jean Arasanayagam has been preoccupied with this
problem. She is a Burgher, of mixed descent (Dutch, Tamil and Sinhala), and
is married to a Tamil Hindu. She has been concerned with how this problem
affects identity, as in her poem “Murals” (1994):
We walk through barriers
Seeing our new identities at checkpoints
[...]
rapid scripts form in our minds, a stammer of
dialogue or silence that make us snail retract
Into the shell we knew to be so brittle
[...]
Somewhat carelessly looking into the barrels of
guns and noticing off-handedly that the lips
of the young soldier are chiselled finely like the
statue of David or Apollo in some Roman square.
[my emphasis]
The poet is this year (2002) probably around 68 years of age and is very
accustomed to the earlier period when there were no communal divisions that
really affected any individual. Though the violence, except for occasional
suicide bombers and other L T T E cadres slaughtering civilians in Colombo, is
localized in the North and East of the island, security measures such as
“checkpoints” reflect it in other parts of the country and keep it in the fore-
front of our minds. Sri Lankan English poetry has consistently reflected the
interface of language, literature and politics.
Yasmine Gooneratne confessed in “The Second Chance”:
The Interface of Language, Literature and Politics in Sri Lanka 349

A man may travel very far

In body or in mind
And never be unfaithful to
The land he leaves behind.

But poetry, the way I went,

Gave me a better view
I learned to see, and love at last
A land I never knew.
[my emphasis]
The poet’s honesty is striking. Gooneratne has discovered her inheritance
through art. But the sensibilities of several English writers remain remote
from Sri Lankan realities and remain Western. The anglicized Punyakante
Wijenaike, James Goonewardene and Romesh Gunasekera in Reef see the
villagers as not like their sensitive, educated selves, but as much the Other (in-
articulate, violent, irrational, sex-ridden, cunning yet mindless) as the natives
were to the sahibs and the bwanas.
When Sri Lankan writers began to feel nationalist currents keenly after
1956, whatever their reaction to them, their central problem was that which
faced all writers in ex-colonies at the same stage of literary development –
that of reconciling their own sensibility, indigenous traditions and realities, on
the one hand, and Western literary and other traditions and influences, on the
other. The problem can be extremely difficult and lead to cultural dislocation.
In his poem “Stanley meets Mutesa,” David Rubadiri clearly wishes to sug-
gest that the meeting of the two men represents a penetration of his own cul-
ture by the West, but the poem verges closely on the stereotyped Western
account of the coming of the white man. But Gabriel Okara, in his poem
“Piano and Drums,” is able to present the conflict of cultures more effectively
from an African point of view:
And I lost in the morning mist
of an age at a riverside keep
wandering in the mystic rhythm
of jungle drums and concerto.
The two central symbols of the poem – the piano as a symbol of Western
ways and the drums of African ways – are used in this climactic final stanza
to convey how both the poet and his society are lost in this cultural conflict
central to both.
In Sri Lanka, Lakdasa Wikkramasinha’s poem “To My Friend Aldred”
reveals, at an subconscious level, the split in the personalities of our poets
caused by their attempt to reconcile their Eastern and Western legacies. The
poem is written in a vein of high-spirited fun:
350 D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE

My dear Chap,
In this Kandyan weather there is
no shame in having in your bed
a servant maid –
the same passion moved others too, famous in time –
when there were servant maids about:

Achilles for one – who gave his heart to

Briseis, a milky slave,
& Tecmessa: enemy blood, as Horace has it;
and Agamemnon fired Troy and burnt his heart to a
cinder, hot for a virgin there.
Although the poet had a penchant for dwelling on his lineage, Ezra Pound is
one of the ancestors Wikkramasinha never acknowledged and his poem leans
on “Homage to Sextus Propertius: X I I ”:
Who, who will be the next man to entrust his girl to
a friend?
Love interferes with fidelities;
The gods have brought shame on their relatives;
Each man wants the pomegranate for himself;
Amiable and harmonious people are pushed incontinent
into duels,
A Trojan and adulterous person came to Menelaus
under the rites of hospitium,
And there was a case in Colchis, Jason and that woman
in Colchis;
And besides, Lynceus,
you were drunk.
– in its ironic tone, in its blend of classical allusion and colloquial idiom.
Wikkramasinha’s use of local imagery and references1 – he describes the
woman thus:
Breasts like gourds, and ripe and Oh
nodding like geese. Thighs
like plantain trunks –
is in a style of self-conscious comedy, whereas the classical metaphor and
allusions, as in the opening of the poem quoted above, are employed with

1
Sinhala poetry, drawing on Sanskrit conventions as well as sight, conventionally
compares breasts to ‘hansa’ (swan or goose) and thighs to plantain trunks, rounded,
smooth and silky to touch (“vata-mata silutu-vatora” – rounded, sleek thighs – the
Kuveni asna).
The Interface of Language, Literature and Politics in Sri Lanka 351

relaxed grace, showing that he is more at home in the Western part of his
inheritance, which is more integral to his personality.
Given this kind of conditioning, it came naturally to a poet in the 1960s,
Gamini Seneviratne, to write of his personal predicament in this vein in “Two
Songs of Myself”:
Am a lone wolf
In the winter forest gnawing
the ice
If I should see a man
Stamping into warmth on covered thighs
I’d pull him down
And tear at him [...]
It is not illegitimate for a poet to use culturally alien (in this instance, ex-
tended) imagery. The poet has the right to exploit every area of experience
and every resource of language, alien or not, and this kind of Western
experience and language may even be regarded as having become interna-
tional through common knowledge and currency. In a way, the crucial ques-
tion is whether the poet communicates his meaning and, in this case,
Seneviratne certainly does so at his own rather adolescent level. But all this is
a less than complete justification and how well he conveys his meaning is an
important question: That Seneviratne should write in this manner is evidence
of his deracination and his style is thereby less immediate.
It has been widely accepted that postcolonial literatures “emerged in their
present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by
foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their
differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre” (Ashcroft et al. 1989:
2). It thus became a commonplace in literary criticism to adopt the position
that “the most characteristic problem of the Commonwealth poet is that of
being caught between old and new, between inherited and acquired” (Halpe &
de Silva 1972: 4). It is stated as if this problem is everywhere and always true
of postcolonial poetry. Actually, this is only partly true and the problem
ceased to be central or important a decade or two after independence from
colonial rule. With the clash of cultures phase now over and behind them, the
poets in the Commonwealth such as Jean Arasanayagam in Sri Lanka, write
as do their counterparts in Britain or America – out of their personal situa-
tions.
Another commonplace of literary criticism concerns what is regarded as a
major problem for the postcolonial writer, the choice or adoption of language,
English. In the words of David Carroll (referring to African writers): “We are
faced with the paradox of a people describing and identifying themselves by
means of a foreign language which embodies the values and categories from
352 D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE

which they are seeking to free themselves” (Carroll 1986: 2). In Sri Lanka,
Lakdasa Wikkramasinha, in a “Note” to his first book of poems, Lustre
(1965), wrote:
I have come to realize that I am using the language of the most despicable and
loathsome people on earth; I have no wish to extend its life and range, enrich
its tonality.
To write in English is a form of cultural treason. I have had for the future
to think of a way of circumventing this treason; I propose to do this by making
my writing entirely immoralist and destructive. (Wikkramasinha 1965: 51)
Wikkramasinha was twenty-four years old at this time, still immature, and
there is an element of attitudinizing in his ideology, but his radical spirit
remained with him to the end. He was ‘immoralist’ in the sense of reacting
against the colonial morality of the English-educated. This could lead to
powerful mature poetry:
Don’t talk to me about Matisse, don’t talk to me
about Gauguin, or even
the earless painter Van Gogh,
& the woman reclining on a blood-spread
[...]
the aboriginal shot by the white hunter Matisse.
The coinage “blood-spread” (substituted for the predictable “bed-spread”);
“the aboriginal,” an artistic as well as colonial stereotype; the ambiguity of
words that follow it; all serve to suggest imperialist exploitation in the guise
of art, poetry more rich and strong than mere pro-Third World, anti-imperial-
ist propaganda. Here Wikkramasinha’s poetic skill is destructively directed.
On the other hand, he appears to have attached positive values to native tradi-
tion, partly perhaps due to the wound of alienation apparent in his flamboyant
declaration of anti-British feeling, partly due to vague, half-formed impres-
sions and memories which prompted him to cherish his aristocratic Sri Lan-
kan ancestry (there is no irony when he praises the feudal lady in ‘From the
life of the Folk-poet Ysinno’). He tries to be a cultural nationalist, to find a
positive sense of connection, if not identification, with the life of his country.
On the other hand, Yasmine Gooneratne’s attitude to the controversial
question of writing in the English language is different from Lakdasa Wikkra-
masinha’s – not ‘cultural treason’. It is stated most explicitly in her poem
‘This Language, This Woman: A Lover’s Reply’. She discloses that it “was
written out of irritation at the continual denigration of English by Sinhala
writers who had no conception of its range (and very little competence in it)
that was a feature of the literary milieu in Sri Lanka during the 1960s and
1970s” (Gooneratne 1979: 24). It was during this period that the term kaduwa,
The Interface of Language, Literature and Politics in Sri Lanka 353

the Sinhala for ‘sword’, to refer to the English language, was coined and
gained a currency which continues till today. Sinhala-speakers perceive(d)
English as a weapon to cut them down, to intimidate and control them.
Gooneratne’s voice in her poem is that of someone highly literate in English.
If you should try to take her from me
I’d launch no thousand ships to bring her back
the braggadocio of the imperial theme
that shielded her being now a derelict wreck.
[...]
now the distorting old connection’s done
fit her to be your Mistress, and my Muse.
She dissociates the English language from Sri Lanka’s colonial past and ap-
proaches it as a lover. The spiritedness of her defence makes an impact
through the deflationary use of classical metaphor and Marlowean allusion
and the dual meaning of “Mistress”. She has a counterpart in India in V.K.
Gokak, who espoused English in the midst of the language debate there in his
poem ‘English Words’ (1947):
Speech that came like leech-craft
And killed us almost, bleeding us white!
You bleached our souls soiled with impurities.
You bathed our hearts amid tempestuous seas
Of a purer, dearer, delight.
[...]
Fathomless words, with Indo-Aryan blood
Tingling in your veins,
The spoils of ages, global merchandise
Mingling in your strains!
It is Indian souls that are “soiled with impurities”; English comes as a cleans-
ing agent. English has “Indo-Aryan blood”, a brother to Indian languages. It is
recognized by Gokak early in the day as “global merchandise.”
Raja Rao wrote: “One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own
the spirit that is one’s own” (Rao 1938: 5). R.K. Narayan’s position is essen-
tially the same: “We are still experimentalists. [...] We are not attempting to
write Anglo-Saxon English. The English language, through sheer resilience
and mobility, is now undergoing a process of Indianization. […] it has served
my purpose admirably [...]” (Narayan 1982 [1964]: 140-1). Similarly, Chinua
Achebe stated: “I feel that the English language will be able to carry the
weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in
full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit its new African sur-
354 D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE

roundings” (Achebe 1993 [1975]: 434). Es’kia Mphalele’s position is consis-

tently close to Achebe’s.
On the other hand, Ngugi adopted a radical stance in regard to language
and saw English as a “means of spiritual subjugation” and imperial domina-
tion (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1986: 435–55). He stopped writing in English and
took to writing in his mother tongue, Gikuyu, though he makes a concession
to English as a pan-African and world language by providing translations of
his works in English. Really, few writers have a choice in regard to the lan-
guage of their creative work or are good bilinguals. Achebe admits that he had
“no other choice” (Achebe 1993 [1975]: 434). Lakdasa Wikkramasinha wrote
in Sinhala, but his Sinhala verse is laboured and awkward, often padded with
idiosyncratic coinages not rooted in the language; it is far inferior to his Eng-
lish poetry. In Sri Lanka, among the hundreds of postcolonial writers, there
seem to me only three true bilinguals – Ediriwira Sarachchandra, Tissa Abey-
sekere and Sita Kulatunga. In India, Arun Kolatkar writes poetry in both Eng-
lish and Marathi and often translates from one language to the other. Kamala
Das writes poetry in English and fiction both in English and Malayalam, her
mother tongue. But she has remarked, “it’s my poems that are my life and not
my prose” (Kamala Das n.d.: 332). Nissim Ezekiel expresses the position
common among writers in English in India: “I cannot write in any Indian lan-
guage” (Ezekiel 1982 [1969]: 153).
The diverse responses of creative writers to English and their tendency to
make the language of literature an issue, especially during the earlier stages
(that is, immediately after Independence) of postcolonial literature are valid,
but not the arbitrary and simplistic demands of critics. It is the generally
accepted view of twentieth-century poets and critics that the language of
poetry is most effective, if not only effective, when it reflects the idiom of
everyday speech. T. S. Eliot argued that “poetry has primarily to do with the
expression of feeling and emotion; [...] Emotion and feeling are best expres-
sed in the common language of the people – that is, in the language common
to all classes; the structure, the rhythm, the sound, the idiom of a language,
express the personality of the people which speaks it [...] a poet must take as
his material his own language as it is actually spoken around him” (Eliot
1945: 19, 22). W .B. Yeats thought: “In literature, partly from the lack of that
spoken word which knits us to normal man, we have lost in personality, in our
delight in the whole man – blood, imagination, intellect, running together”
(Yeats 1901: 266), and he sets out to make good this supposed loss in his own
later poetry. F . R. Leavis, perhaps the most influential critic of the twentieth
century and the counterpart of Johnson, Coleridge and Matthew Arnold in
their day, consistently lauds the poets who employ the “utterance, movement
The Interface of Language, Literature and Politics in Sri Lanka 355

and intonation [...] of the talking voice” (Leavis 1953: 11) (Donne, Hopkins,
T .S. Eliot, for instance).
But it seems to me that this point of view is vulnerable. It ignores key
questions, though it is true that modern poets made a contribution to literature
by re-introducing conversational tones after these had been virtually banished
for a long time in Romantic rhetoric and musicality (during the Victorian
period). Modern linguistics has sharpened our awareness of the varieties of
speech and dialects, of regional, class, group and individual variations in
speech of the same language within single countries. From which kind of
speech should the language of poetry draw sustenance? Can there be univer-
sally applicable touchstones? How much does it account for the achievements
of modern poetry itself? Despite Yeats’ declared view and although F .R.
Leavis praised Yeats’ later poetry for employing “the idiom and movement of
modern speech” (Leavis 1942: 42), the language of Yeats’ great poems such
as “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Among School Children,” though incor-
porating elements of polite educated speech, is basically and in an overall way
stylized. Really, what matters is whether poetry works as poetry, whatever the
kind of language that is employed.
Sri Lankan critics have adapted the position in the West in regard to the
language of poetry. It is argued that the language of the Sri Lankan writer
should reflect “in an ideal form the actual rhythms and idiom of living Ceylon
English speech” (Kandiah 1971: 92) and even further that the language of the
Sri Lankan writer in English gains vitality if “derived from Sinhala”, from the
vernacular (Kandiah 1971: 91). The argument is also put in a crude and
dogmatic form: “No Lankan poet, seeking to evolve through his work a
Lankan identity, can hope to do so without an equal commitment to the
Lankan language” (Ismail 1984: 24). My criticism of Western writers and
critics applies to their Sri Lankan counterparts. Moreover, to be so conscious
of language and pay it special attention is to separate language from content
and experience whereas, in the case of a truly creative writer, his experience
will find the language that comes naturally to it: this will determine its com-
ponents, whether Sri Lankan or British or whatever mix. Lakdasa Wikkra-
masknha is often eulogized for employing Sri Lankan English in his poetry,
yet his use of language is not a simple matter of doing so but is original,
incorporating expressions derived from a variety of sources. Moreover, as
Wole Soyinka said in an interview, “we are now beyond the ‘Prospero–
Caliban’ syndrome of the complexities which attend the adoption of a lan-
guage of colonial imposition”; “the ‘Prospero-Caliban’ syndrome is dead”
(Soyinka 1984: 1730, 1731). Soyinka went on to amplify his point of view:
English of course continues to be my medium of expression as it is the
medium of expression for millions of people in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone,
356 D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE

Gambia, Kenya, who I want to talk to, if possible. And I want to talk also to
our black brothers in the United States, in the West Indies. I want to talk also
even to Europeans, if they are interested in listening. But they are at the very
periphery of my concerns. I do know that I enjoy works of literature from the
European world, I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t. And I also enjoy literary works
from the Asian world, Chinese literature, Japanese literature. I teach Japanese
drama. I’ve taught Chinese poetry, when I was in the literature department. I
always interjected the translations of poetry from the Asiatic world because I
wanted to open up that vast area. I enjoy the works of Tolstoy, Turgenev,
Gogol, etc. So, I find no contradiction, no sense of guilt in the fact that I write
and communicate in English. (Soyinka 1984: 1731)
In our own region, Kamala Das, in her poem “An Introduction,” expresses the
right spirit in regard to these matters:
Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone.
Creative writers in ex-colonies of Britain have reached a stage where the use
of English in creative work has ceased to be an issue, and critics have now to
think beyond the parameters to which they have been long accustomed.
English has become a naturalized language in a great many countries. It has
come to stay, is spreading, and literature in English is set to proliferate in
every conceivable direction. Indeed, the world language will, in time, gene-
rate a world literature.
The Interface of Language, Literature and Politics in Sri Lanka 357

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Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London & New York: Rout-
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discourse,’ in Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge): 85–92.
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Carroll, David (1986). Chinua Achebe (London: Macmillan).
De Souza, Dinesh (1969). ‘Standards not based on fact,’ Ceylon Observer (18
April): 6.
Eliot, T . S . (1945). ‘The social function of poetry,’ in Eliot, On Poetry and Poets
(London: Faber & Faber, 1971): 15–25.
Ezekiel, Nissim (1982 [1969]). ‘Indian poetry in English: Some questions and some
answers,’ in Grundlagen zur Literatur in Englischer Sprache: Indien, ed.
Gerhard Stilz (Munich: Wilhelm Fink): 151–56.
Geiger, Wilhelm, tr. (1960). The Mahavamsa or The Great Chronicle of Ceylon
(Colombo: Ceylon Government Information Department).
Gooneratne, Yasmine (1979). ‘Cultural interaction in modern Sri Lankan poetry
written in English,’ paper presented at the Workshop on the Interaction of
Cultures in Modern Poetry. Honolulu, Hawaii: East–West Culture Learning
Institute, 10 January–24 February 1979. 1–43.
Halpe, Ashley, & D . M . de Silva (1972). ‘Introduction’ to Selections of English
poetry for G.C.E. (A/L) 1973–74, ed. Halpe & de Silva (Colombo: Educational
Publications Department): i–vii.
Ismail, Q. (1984). ‘Wanted: An offensive poetry,’ Lanka Guardian 7.6: 24–26.
Kandiah, Thirn (1971). ‘New Ceylon English,’ New Ceylon Writing 2: 90–94.
—— (1981). ‘Disinherited Englishes: The case of Lankan English,’ Navasilu 4: 92–
113.
Kohli, Devindra (1994). ‘Kamala Das,’ in Encyclopaedia of Post-Colonial Litera-
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332–33.
Leavis, F . R . (1942). New Bearings in English Poetry (London: Chatto & Windus).
—— (1953). Revaluation (London: Chatto & Windus).
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West Africa (27 August): 1730–31.
Wikkramasinha, Lakdasa (1965). Lustre: Poems (Kandy: Ariya).
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Macmillan, 1961): 261–69.

[
The Master’s Language and Its Indian Uses

Premila Paul
The American College, Madurai

ABSTRACT
Most contemporary educated Indians have absorbed English from their early
schooling onward, and have internalized it with ease. However, there are some
who have also internalized the history behind the use of English. Some
politically motivated Indians have made a forced attempt to find Indian equiva-
lents to replace the internalized English vocabulary – a parochial exercise
which, arguably, disrupts communication and may result in comical effects.
Contemporary Indian English fiction flourishes in this sociopolitical context.
In some writers we see a deliberate attempt to revive and sustain the old colo-
nial relationship with English. Other writers refuse to be controlled by such a
memory. But both kinds of Indian writers are aware that English has come to
stay. I intend to show how these two kinds of relationship with English condi-
tion and control Indian fiction writers, using for illustration selected novels of
the pre-Independence 1930s and from the recent 1990s.

M
U L T I L I N G U A L I N D I A has the second largest number of
English speakers in the whole world, though this amounts to just
about two percent of its population. Some Indians find it hard to
see English as a language distinct from their colonial past. But the present
generation of educated Indians perceives it and even owns it as their language
– Indian or otherwise – absorbed from their early Indian schooling onward.
They are not constrained by narrow notions of national identity and loyalty.
English is very much a part of themselves and their daily lives. It is
inseparable from their everyday concerns and from the different forms of their
learning experiences: it is not merely a means of learning marketable subjects
like business administration and computer science. Most educated Indians are
360 P REMILA P AUL

bilingual. Their emotions, feelings, ideas, and knowledge are all as much in
the English language as in their mother tongue. They cannot put English
outside their consciousness as a tool to be used only when needed.
A forced attempt by the purists of Indian culture and languages at finding
Indian equivalents to replace the already internalized English vocabulary
seems a ridiculous exercise. It puts an undesirable distance between people’s
knowledge and understanding.1 People find most of the newly coined and
unearthed Indian vocabulary disruptive of both their thinking process and
communicative process. This whole parochial exercise of finding local equi-
valents produces comical effects even though it yields political benefits for
some (if we understand political benefit as narrow personal gain). These poli-
tically motivated Indians consider English as a tool of the Indian elite, used to
widen the gap between the privileged and the underprivileged. They see the
widespread use of English and its popularity as an urban phenomenon, the
result of westernization and an unmistakable form of neocolonialism. These
facts show that in contemporary Indian society some Indians have internalized
English with ease, while others have internalized the history behind the use of
English. Some even promote the politics that such a colonial history has left
behind.
Contemporary Indian English fiction thrives and flourishes because of and
despite this sociopolitical context. In some Indian novelists we see a delibe-
rate attempt to revive and sustain the memory of the old colonial relationship.
Others refuse to be controlled by such a memory. But both kinds of Indian
writers are aware that English has come to stay, so that these two attitudes run
parallel rather than counter to each other. They are seen in the way the Indian
novelists manipulate the English language for creative purposes. The two
kinds of relationship with the English language condition and control Indian
fiction writers.
There are differences in the way literary artists use history. Some have a
light-hearted attitude to it, some fictionalize it and even feel free to recreate it.
Some of the early Indian novelists who were exposed directly to the traumatic
political events of the land have an entirely different attitude to history. They
published novels both before and after Independence. Their immediate close-
ness to the colonial situation conditioned their perception of the British and
their attitude to the use of English. Novelists like Raja Rao and Mulk Raj
Anand engaged history seriously, took an overt political stand and their
novels reveal a definite commitment to a cause.

1
There are numerous words like shirt, photo, electricity, cinema, loudspeaker and
bicycle for which there are equivalents in Indian languages but which are seldom used
and rarely understood by the common man. He does not need the translation because
he himself has been translated.
The Master’s Language and Its Indian Uses 361

Modern Indian writers also use history but with a difference. The past can
be a sustaining force or a negative obsession. The recent novelist Arundhati
Roy is interested in the effects of colonialism on people rather than in colo-
nialism as such. In that sense, she engages the past seriously and artistically
but refuses to be controlled by it. This is evident in her use of the English
language, too. Awareness and examination of the past leads to introspection.
It in turn liberates one from an obsession with the self and the perception of
the self as an eternal victim. Because of the distance from direct colonial rule,
many of the post-Independence novelists are able to create an alternate reality
as a response to and not necessarily in opposition to the accepted version of
the historical reality. In the earlier Indian novels we can see a certain amount
of colonial consciousness in the choice of themes and treatment of them and
even in the use of the English language. Their writing is informed by the
British presence in their own consciousness even after the physical exit of the
British. But modern Indian novelists are mentally freer and are very un-self-
conscious about the use of the English language.
The Big Three among the Indian novelists in English – Anand, Rao,
Narayan – and other early writers were repeatedly questioned by the critics
about the choice of their medium of expression –though this choice was per-
sonal, it had political implications. When most of them explained in full-
length essays their position regarding the choice of language, it took a daring
Kamala Das to react vehemently in her poem “An Introduction”:
I am Indian, very brown, born in
Malabar, I speak three languages, write in
Two, dream in one. Don’t write in English, they said,
English is not your mother-tongue. Why not leave
Me alone, critics, friends, visiting cousins,
Every one of you? Why not let me speak in
Any language I like? The language I speak
Becomes mine, its distortions, its queernesses
All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half
Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest,
It is as human as I am human, don’t
You see? It voices my joys, my longings, my
Hopes, and it is useful to me as cawing
Is to crows or roaring to the lions, it
Is human speech, the speech of the mind that is
Here and not there, a mind that sees and hears and
Is aware.
Raja Rao used a sanskritized English in his metaphysical novel Serpent and
the Rope and captured the Kannada rhythm in English in his Kanthapura
362 P REMILA P AUL

when he focused on a small village and its involvement in the freedom move-
ment. R.K . Narayan created his own Indian small town, Malgudi, but kept
aloof from daring deviations and violations of the so-called standard English.
But Mulk Raj Anand’s aim was not merely to give a Punjabi flavour to his
English. His novels were born out of his ultra-sensitivity to the concerns of
the untouchables, coolies and waifs. While presenting the life of the un-
lettered, he had to use a kind of English that could reflect their despicable
situation and state of degradation. Anand experimented with the English lan-
guage to capture the Indian ethos without necessarily violating the basic rules
of English. It was a challenge, an experiment that was frowned upon by
conservative, uninitiated readers.
But as far as Anand was concerned, the subject and the medium were not a
matter of his choice, but they chose themselves. He knew he would not have
taken to fiction writing if he had not been burdened and traumatized by the
life of the untouchables and his inability to make a significant difference in
their lives. He would not have written at all if he did not have the tool of Eng-
lish. His priority was to do justice to themes rather than to the felicity of
expression. He was more a humanist than a stylist. He preferred to use the
master’s language for an Indian cause, the cause of the downtrodden, a human
cause. He manipulated it in such a way that he could awaken the slumbering
conscience of the people – Indian and British. So the experimentation done is
with a purpose, for a cause, a very conscious exercise. He knew that the
Indian reality was being filtered through a language that is Indian because of
accident, a stroke of history.
It is interesting to note that G.V. Desani experimented much like Anand in
All About H. Hatterr. Desani’s novel was accepted as a classic, a landmark in
Indian English fiction and a significant influence on future writers. But as a
classic, the novel was left alone: often alluded to, but seldom read.
The literary theorists are right when they say that no action is free of
politics. Politics is too much with us: there is no escape from it. There is
hardly any area in life that is not directly or indirectly touched by it. Even in
the choice of the medium, the writer makes a public statement. An interaction
with the audience becomes a discourse and in this case, an Indian novel in
English is a call for interaction with a particular kind of audience with eyes set
on an overseas market. Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things was
praised all over the world for its innovative quality. But it also raises ques-
tions – innovative for whom? Appealing for whom? Would it have received
the same acclaim if written in Malayalam, even if a highly skilled translator
had made it accessible to the world and the educated people of the other states
in India?
The Master’s Language and Its Indian Uses 363

The moment an author chooses English as a medium for literary creation

and thereby fixes the target of readership, the consumerist nature of writing is
determined. English becomes a political world language, and creative writing
in English becomes much more than an aesthetic act; it becomes a commo-
dity. Success is often understood in terms of advances, royalties, American
rights, British rights, film rights.
The novelists of Anand’s generation also depended on the recognition and
approval of the liberals among the colonial masters. Narayan shot to promi-
nence when Graham Greene endorsed his merit. Anand became a celebrity,
after twenty rejections of his novel Untouchable, because of E.M. Forster’s
intervention. But compared to the days of dependence and subservience some
of the newer novelists have even gained bargaining power. There is depen-
dence on Western readership on one hand, but the Indian English writers are
also positioned comfortably now to command respect and even dictate terms.
The next political issue in Indian English literature is the assumption that
there is an India that needs many interpretations. This is the age-old notion
proposed by the Indologists, Orientalists and promoted by the creative writers
and translators. This assumed role of being an interpreter of India creates in
the writer an anxiety to be authentic. The writers are aware that their raw
material is Indian, they are Indian but their readers are not necessarily so.
When the topic is the Dalits, the writer is conscious that the readers are not
Dalits. This again has political implications and imposes certain unconscious
checks on the writer. A writer often tends to become unduly conscious of his
national and regional identity when he addresses a global audience and also
when he responds to issues related to his homeland. There is no escaping the
anxiety to present a picture that appeals. An average writer becomes defensive
and even unduly patriotic.
But most of the liberated new generation of novelists interrogate and
negotiate reality while fictionalizing it. In this respect, Salman Rushdie’s con-
tribution is phenomenal. In his Midnight’s Children, he threw away the
burden of being Indian by being truly Indian. That has certainly infused
courage into his generation of novelists. His chutnification of English is not
an attempt to negotiate with the medium. It is the language of someone who
has grown up in a multicultural, multilingual Bombay. The post-Indepen-
dence novelists writing in English are basically a bilingual generation that is
more comfortable with English, a kind of lingo that is unselfconsciously
Indian and English at the same time. It has evolved because of the inadequacy
of standard English or standard Malayalam or Hindi to express the culture,
subculture and multiculture of India. Now we have a host of new writers
liberated by Rushdie, and they have rejuvenated English and reinvented
modern Indian fiction.
364 P REMILA P AUL

The experimentation done with English by Anand involves deliberation, a

definite self-consciousness. A writer like Arundhati Roy, on the other hand, is
not worried about the ideological question of using the language of the
colonial masters for creative needs. There is no deliberate or artificial attempt
to indianize English either as her English is already indianized. Anand had to
negotiate between the pressures of standardization and the pressures of local-
ization, but Roy has no standard English against which she has to measure her
English. She does not have to imitate the British to perfect her language. In
that sense the authority is absent and her concern is readership and communi-
cation. What G.V . Desani did as an artistic endeavour comes naturally to
Roy. While Anand had to labour and experiment, Roy could play with
English. Her writing is an excellent example of using the master’s tool and
excelling the master but not being conscious of it.
Readers both in India and abroad also have come a long way in their rela-
tionship with English. There is growth towards maturity in this relationship. A
practitioner of English is no longer dubbed a traitor to the Indian cause. Roy’s
novel has shown that the basic difference between the culture of the writer
and the culture of the reader is no barrier to communication. It is the shedding
of the overt anxiety to interpret India that makes the Indian writers assume a
commanding position in today’s world. In this regard it is noticeable that the
recent Indian novels carry no glossary of Indian words which the earlier
novelists carefully prepared and appended to their novels. Even those who
attack Roy’s innovations as language gimmicks cannot ignore the serious
concerns of the book – casteism in Christianity, self-interest and sexism in
Marxism, the dilemma between family and self, passion and restraint in the
modern world. Most of the adverse criticism levelled against Roy’s novel is
rooted in resentment and envy of her fame and monetary gain.
Another political issue that emerges within India because of the use of
English is the tension between the stand adopted by the regional-language
writers and the Indian English writers. The regional-language writers argue
that they are worried about the threat posed by an acquired culture submerg-
ing the indigenous culture. When the Indian English writers are assured of
recognition, the regional writers have to be content with limited circulation,
paltry royalties, and feeble hope of newer editions. Very few of the transla-
tions of their books into English make their way into the global market or
academia. This certainly contributes to the envy and tension between the two
kinds of writers within India.
Both kinds of writers deal with the same raw material of Indian experience.
Users of both the mediums have the right to their Indian sensibility. But the
regional literature seems to have a better claim to authenticity. There is no
denying that the Indian English writers are an intellectual product of the
The Master’s Language and Its Indian Uses 365

colonial situation. They get the maximum benefit out of the process of de-
colonization but they bear no responsibility to the society they write about.
Indian English literature is blamed for being export quality literature, out of
touch with the masses and real India. It is argued that English is the language
of the elite who remain marginal by choice, because of the power that their
marginality gives them.
But the language that the contemporary Indian novelists use tilts neither
towards British nor American English. It is a vibrant language enriched by
Indian experience. It is also enriched by popular culture: electronic media,
pop music and the information technology boom. Linguistic changes happen
in response to cultural change. A dynamic society like India shows rapid
linguistic change. The recent writers are in touch with contemporary reality,
the living language, and this contributes to the vibrancy of their creative
medium. They have no hesitation to invent new words, and revise current
idioms and phrases to suit the needs of a fast changing society. Literature is
only one of the contexts for language use. Language is a product of culture
and literature is a part of culture. Language can be examined only within the
social context of the community that uses it. Ignoring the social contexts
would mean only a partial understanding of the process of literary creation.
Thus recent Indian English fiction has retained a distinct Indian identity,
and at the same time has absorbed aspects of globalization dictated by the
realities of the modern world. It is in a position to play a mediatory role of
interpreting India to the rest of the world, just as it makes literatures in differ-
ent Indian regional languages available to the rest of India. When English
plays a role of such significance within India and outside, political reverbera-
tions are bound to exist.

WORKS CITED
Anand, Mulk Raj (1935). Untouchable, preface by E.M. Forster (London: Bodley
Head).
Das, Kamala (1973). The Old Playhouse and other poems (Bombay: Orient Longman).
Desani, G . V . (1948). All About H. Hatterr (London: Francis Aldor).
Rao, Raja (1938). Kanthapura (London: George Allen & Unwin).
—— (1960). The Serpent and the Rope (London: John Murray).
Roy, Arundhati (1997). The God of Small Things (New York: Random House).
Rushdie, Salman (1981). Midnight’s Children (London: Jonathan Cape).

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Bringing Back the Bathwater
New Initiatives in English Policy in Sri Lanka

Rajiva Wijesinha
Sabaragamuwa University of Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT
This essay examines current changes in attitudes to English in the Sri
Lankan education system. At independence from Britain fifty years ago
standards were high but nationalists soon rejected English as a medium of
instruction. Unfortunately, this also downgraded English, even as a second
language. Though it was compulsory, failure to ensure good teachers meant
that few students now can use the language satisfactorily. This has damaged
higher education, since students cannot read books, while few are published
in vernacular languages. Present remedial policies face entrenched attitudes,
including a generation that saw English as the ‘kaduwa’, the sword cutting
down aspirants to social advancement. Conversely some still believe English
should conform to British standards, and that English courses at university
should resemble British ones. This limits these to an elite that cannot help
with teaching the majority of students now requiring basic language com-
petence for educational and social advancement.

T
HE LAST FEW YEARS have seen several new initiatives in the
field of English education in Sri Lanka. English from the first year in
school and new texts at secondary school are amongst these. In this
essay, however, I will deal mainly with developments at the top end of the
school curriculum. At the same time a change now happening at universities,
where new departments of English avoid traditional English Literature syl-
labuses, may also be relevant.
In 1999 English was made compulsory for students at the Advanced Level
final school examination, on the strength of which students are admitted to
368 R AJIVA W IJESINHA

university. Two years later it was decided to permit English medium for
students in the Science stream at this exam.
The mention of permission indicates that, before, English medium instruc-
tion was not allowed, which was the case for the preceding twenty years.
Shortly after Independence in 1948, a policy was introduced that brought edu-
cation firmly under the control of the state. An argument which all might
accept, that government has a responsibility to provide education for all child-
ren, was transformed into the dogma that government make all decisions
about education. It was also, with a few significant exceptions, to be its sole
provider.
One of the most far-reaching effects of this bureaucratic centralization
occurred in the 1950s, with the decision to move to education in the vernacu-
lars. It is strange now to think that government in those days could regulate in
what language parents could have their children educated. It is even stranger
to think that the regulations still remain in force, so that freedom of choice in
this regard is not even a matter of contention here.
There was, it should be noted, an interesting feature about the regulation
when it was first introduced. Though it straitjacketed Sinhala and Tamil
students in their own languages, it allowed not only Burghers1 but also Mus-
lims to be educated in English. It may be relevant that the Minister of Educa-
tion at the time happened to be not only Muslim, but also a former school
principal who understood very well the value of this concession.
This privilege was not available widely, and Muslim children in rural areas
suffered as much as the rest. Indeed, by being confined mainly to Muslim
schools, they were generally restricted to Tamil, which was even worse as far
as job opportunities were concerned in what was in those days an expanding
public sector.2 It was urban children who benefited from the Minister’s sleight
of hand. And I would claim it was that divide, the disparity between opportu-
nities available to urban and rural sectors, that allowed politicians to be so
destructive towards the latter. Their own children, after all, cocooned in Col-
ombo, would continue to have a command of English whatever the medium
in which they were instructed.

1
Burghers are descendants of the Dutch and Portuguese who had often inter-
married with locals but still saw themselves as distinct. They prided themselves on the
English they had learnt from the British, and thought it natural to use it. As a result, in
general they resisted the transition to the vernacular languages.
2
In theory, the provision that Sinhalese and Tamil children should be educated in
their separate mother tongues was fair, and any imposition of Sinhalese on Tamil
children would have been resisted. However, a practical consequence when speakers
of the main language naturally got priority for jobs was that Tamils were at a dis-
advantage. Muslim students, whose mother tongue was Tamil, but who had no particu-
lar nationalistic bent towards it, also shared in this disadvantage.
New Initiatives in English Policy in Sri Lanka 369

And they could read books. One of the astonishing aspects of the insistence
on vernacular education is the fact that it was not accompanied by a coherent
book development policy. Though the country has a National Library Ser-
vices Board, the idea of liasing with the Ministry of Education or trying to fill
in gaps that national education policies had created was for a long time not on
its agenda. Recently there has been an attempt to develop school libraries, but
with no clear guidelines as to how this is to be done. Yet this is not surprising,
since for years the principle of the Ministry was that just one standard govern-
ment textbook per course and class was enough.
English then ceased to be a medium of instruction in national schools, for
Arts students in the 1950s, for Science students in the 1960s, for Burghers and
Muslims by the early 1980s. Not, I suppose, coincidentally, it was the very
year in which the English medium stopped completely in schools that the
phenomenon of International Schools began.
International Schools are those in which children are educated in the Eng-
lish medium. The first of these was founded in 1982, when the drawing-
rooms of Colombo woke up to the fact that their children would otherwise
suffer. To rescue them there appeared a new St. George to attack the dragon
of ignorance, a Tibetan who had originally come to Sri Lanka to set up a fast-
food restaurant. It was his wife, an English Oxford graduate, who became
Principal of the Colombo International School that some businessmen set up,
but the entrepreneurial skills of the fast-food expert cannot be underestimated.
Between them, when they fell out with their sponsors, they convinced the
Secretary to the Prime Minister to have the school taken over. The Prime
Minister’s children went to that school, and it became a Government Owned
Business Undertaking, under the Ministry of Housing and Construction.
This was just as well, for the Minister of Education was on the warpath and
sent the papers to the Attorney General’s Department so he could prosecute
the school. But, whether it was because of political influence or the recog-
nition that the legislation would not stand up in the courts, there was no pro-
secution. The Colombo International School still flourishes, and counts the
current President’s children, now at English universities, amongst its alumni.
Other politicians in turn helped to set up other International Schools, and there
are now several all over the country. They all charge fees, some quite a lot,
which means they cater essentially to the richest in our society.
So much for the rich. What about the rest? They continue to be educated in
Sinhala or Tamil, with English merely a compulsory Second Language. It is
compulsory in the strange Sri Lankan sense of the word, in which there are no
sanctions if it is not acquired. So there is no requirement to pass English at
Ordinary Level, not even to get into University. The result, as the statistics tell
you, is that fewer than a third of students pass in English, while many do not
370 R AJIVA W IJESINHA

even take the exam since the subject is neglected in the majority of schools,
the textbooks are incomprehensible to most students, and the teaching is in-
adequate. And if you look at the paper, you will see that even a Distinction in
such a paper is no evidence of competence.
How did this situation arise? If we look first at attitudes, it would seem
that, with the nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s, there came into positions of
authority a generation that thought English unimportant, when it did not
resent it. Many school principals now are not competent in English, and until
recently the majority felt there was no reason for their students to be any
better. Given the need to do well in other subjects to go to university, they
stressed those and used English periods for extra work in what seemed
essential. Even those who felt English should be taught did not know how to
monitor this, so all they required was completion of the textbook.
This indeed was an equally serious problem, for the manner in which
syllabuses and textbooks were prepared over the last forty years was bizarre.
The books in fact gave no indication what the syllabus was. It was claimed,
when the question was raised, that the syllabus was implicit in the Teacher’s
Guide. This was not readily available, and in any case was written in such
complicated language that few teachers could understand it.
The books themselves belong to the days when English was considered an
International Language, that is one needed for communication with foreign-
ers. So the main character in the secondary texts was an English girl called
Anne and, though she was visiting Sri Lanka, there were lessons about her
charming cottage in the English countryside. The series began with her being
met at the airport. It clearly never occurred to the writers, who were super-
vised by a British Council expert, that for most children the function of
greeting would have been better taught in terms of an experience they were
likely to share, for instance meeting a relation at the bus stand.3
How did all this happen? It is worth remembering that, in the period after
independence, teaching became a profession with little appeal to those fluent
in English. Many good teachers found jobs abroad. Of those left, it was rarely
the best who became administrators. So decisions for the whole country were
sometimes made without informed consideration, often at the suggestion of
experts from elsewhere, frequently after brief visits or training programmes in
other countries, trips sometimes seen as the high points of tedious and thank-
less careers.

3
It should be noted that the textbooks have at last been revised and seem now to be
more suitable for Sri Lankan children. However they still do not incorporate a clear
syllabus, or define the level of skills expected from students. Also there has been no
concerted attempt to encourage further reading, through development of the sub-skills
of reading as well as through production and distribution of supplementary readers.
New Initiatives in English Policy in Sri Lanka 371

So in the 1960s we had structuralist descriptive linguistics, which – when

applied to teaching – discouraged correction and promoted a climate of per-
missiveness. This was understandable in America, where the method was
invented, since students were exposed to the correct version of their language
all the time. In Sri Lanka, while teachers exulted at not having to correct
work, errors got entrenched. Later, the Communicative Approach became
gospel among language teachers. Unfortunately, teachers trained under Struc-
turalism became purveyors of this too. Many of them thought grammar
should not be taught,4 that simple tenses were taboo, with continuous forms
being preferable, and that role play meant repetition of the dialogues in the
book.
How could they have done otherwise? The methods by which English
teachers were recruited became more and more absurd over the years. A
Credit in English at Ordinary Level continued to be a sacrosanct qualification,
even as the examination itself became worthless. At some time in the 1970s it
was recognized that the teachers being recruited knew nothing, and greater
stress was laid on training, with all sorts of courses being devised. But these
emphasized what was termed methodology,5 and little attempt was made to
improve language capacity. This changed in the 1980s, when District English
Language Improvement Centres (D E L I C s) were set up round the country, to
help potential teachers with the language. But, though these did a reasonably
good job, as the base from which they had to build up declined, the final
levels achieved were still inadequate. Few teachers now, even trained ones,
can write a paragraph free of any errors.6
Meanwhile there was an attempt to establish pre-service Colleges of Edu-
cation, and in the late 1980s the Ministry decreed that no more untrained
teachers would be recruited. But then there came a Minister who, having sent
his own child to an International School, changed the policy completely. He
recruited volunteers, some of whom could barely speak English, and of course
they were confirmed in time, as political support was required.

4
I recall once suggesting that grammar should be taught to teachers at least. I was
told that Quirk’s University Grammar of English had been prescribed for students at
the pre-service Training College. I suspect this came after a recommendation from a
foreign expert in linguistics. The book is, of course, a work of grammar analysis that
even first-language speakers at university would find challenging.
5
Which continued to be woefully old-fashioned. As recently as the 1980s, Pera-
deniya Training College, for instance, considered the best, still demonstrated question
machines on the lines of the old bioscope.
6
The National Coordinator for English had a marvelous response when asked why
more candidates did not fail the language test set at Training College. This was that
government would not be happy with failures, after a couple of years in which it had
paid for the course as well as the teachers’ salaries.
372 R AJIVA W IJESINHA

In such a context, implementation of the new plans will be difficult. Fortu-

nately, there has been some preparation, in that a few universities have begun
English programmes on a larger scale than before. These were a long time
coming, largely because even in the aftermath of independence it was a
colonial mind-set that dominated existing English Departments. Though they
were well-funded,7 in part so that they would produce the teachers of English
the nation so badly needed, they did nothing to fulfil this requirement. They
continued with traditional literature courses, adding a dash of linguistics in-
stead of the language component that might have been useful. Their boast was
that their products could go on to postgraduate work at Cambridge.8 Teaching
English to Sri Lankan students in rural schools just did not come into it.
As numbers declined, with very few students following Special Courses in
each of three universities, and rarely more than single figures for English as
part of the General Degree,9 they began recruiting teachers who had passed
the First University exam externally. But typical of the thinking was the new
Combined Degree created for them at one university. The rationale it seems
was that they were not good enough to do a Special, but since they had come
in on this privileged intake, they should do more English than the two papers
a year allowed for the General Degree. The third paper then devised was on
Literary Theory, and involved study of Coleridge and Richards and Eliot.
How this would help secondary-school pupils, in particular those in rural
areas, was never explained. It was probably not considered.
In the early 1990s, however, with a dynamic new Chairman at the Univer-
sity Grants Commission, an attempt was made to broaden the scope of Eng-
lish at tertiary level. A Diploma Course was begun at Affiliated University
Colleges, which took in students without Advanced Level English (essentially
a Literature course then) and tried primarily to improve their language. They
also had courses in language learning and language teaching, in addition to
some literature. Many went on to complete a degree when the A U C s were
converted into universities.10 Meanwhile, the University of Sri Jayawardene-

7
The Peradeniya Department, for example, had, according to recent UGC statistics,
the highest ratio of staff to students of all university departments in the whole country.
8
This, at any rate, was the reason offered by one Head a decade back, in explaining
why the traditional syllabus could not be changed. It should be noted, however, that,
with the advent of younger staff in the early 1990s, radical changes were made –
though the degree programme is still targeted at sophisticated users of the language
such as only a few urban schools can furnish.
9
A course in which three subjects are studied at very general levels.
10
Though the English of the first batch to complete the course (in 1998) still left
much to be desired, the next group was better, and were snapped up as English
teachers when the new Advanced Level English Language programme was begun.
New Initiatives in English Policy in Sri Lanka 373

pura, which had initially supervised these programmes, devised a new syl-
labus with two English subjects for the General Degree: namely, language
and literature. That Department now has about forty students a year, most of
them with only Ordinary Level English. A similar programme began at the
Southeastern University, and even Peradeniya, the most traditional of our
universities, was thinking of making English at degree level available to those
who had not done Literature at Advanced Level.
Perhaps even more importantly, U S J P began an External Degree targeted
at teachers and demanding language competence as well as sustained reading.
This now attracts many candidates previously confined to the literary ap-
proach that the Peradeniya and Kelaniya external syllabuses had promoted. It
is notable too that, in the marking of the papers of these candidates, great
stress is laid on language ability. Regrettably, sometimes at other examina-
tions, while syllabus content indicated a determination to abide by what were
termed high standards, the tendency had developed to condone errors of lan-
guage if understanding of the texts was apparent. This had the potential of
leading to the sort of situation that developed in Training Colleges, where
students who cannot write grammatical English are still allowed to qualify.
So, too, the new Advanced Level English course concentrates primarily on
language. When such a course was mooted some years back, the initial
response of the Ministry was that it existed already. They had to be convinced
that what they had was an English Literature course, with Shakespeare and
suchlike, that could be understood only by a few students from urban schools.
What was needed was English, a language course following on from the
Ordinary Level which, as noted, very few students pass.
This was finally agreed, and the first students taking the course sat their
Advanced Level in August 2001. The Ministry, however, got cold feet, and
declared that it would not be compulsory to pass it to get into university.
Nevertheless, students have taken to the course quite avidly, which suggests a
new perception in the new generation about the language. No longer is it seen
as a ‘kaduwa’, a weapon to keep in subjugation those not of the elite. Rather,
it is simply a tool for advancement, essential for the increasingly ubiquitous
computer as well as for books.
The change of attitude was perhaps helped by a course book devised by
some of the younger staff at the universities. They were given a syllabus full
of pietistic content rather than actual language competence. Fortunately, the
course material ignores the syllabus and the interests of students were taken
into account, so that the text has proved very popular.

Responses from students have been satisfactory, naturally since these teachers are
more competent in the language than many who previously served in such rural areas.
374 R AJIVA W IJESINHA

Encouraged perhaps by this positive response, and the insistence on Eng-

lish among employers, the Ministry considered this year of experimenting
with the English medium. However, given that the number of teachers is
limited, it was decided to allow this option only to Science Advanced Level
classes. The number of schools that decided to take up the challenge is rela-
tively small, but it seems that there is at least one school in most districts, so
students who wish to work in English will be allowed to transfer to such
schools.
The policy represents a start, but it is unfortunate that it has not gone hand
in hand with changes designed to extend the opportunity much more widely
in subsequent years. At a recent meeting at the Ministry, several principals
asked that they be allowed to begin English medium lower down, but it was
felt this might be too contentious. One way of promoting equity would be to
begin at least one English medium school in each zone, which is an option
now being considered.
Such a policy would also help with producing enough teachers from each
area to extend the possibility to all schools later. After all, given the central-
ized system of teacher recruitment, those who are drawn from the prosperous
areas of the country where English is better known get themselves transferred
back to their home regions as soon as possible. Zonal recruitment would help,
but needs language training, which clearly English-medium schools could
provide.
What is essential, then, at this stage is the will to take initiatives further, to
resist the idea that English is the language of the privileged, and instead to
make it clear that the government will make it a priority to provide it to those
areas deprived of it in the past. Accepting the argument that, because it cannot
be given everywhere, it would be unfair to allow its use anywhere, is to accept
that change is impossible. To make a start now, however, a start that is
focused on the underprivileged, will ensure that in time there will be enough
teachers to supply all schools. That would certainly be a step towards the
social equity that all governments proclaim but which few are willing to pur-
sue if it means temporary unpopularity.

[
Cross-Cultural Encounters in Amit Chaudhuri’s
Afternoon Raag and Yasmine Gooneratne’s
A Change of Skies
Vera Alexander
Universität des Saarlandes

ABSTRACT
This essay describes the role of the English language in two South Asian
novels in English from the 1990s. Both texts contain self-reflexive and
highly innovative strategies for reconsidering the hegemonic structures
imbedded in the use of English in a postcolonial context. The two novels
depict the experiences of South Asian scholars who visit universities in
anglophone countries. Close reading of the encounters with diverse Eng-
lishes in both novels reveals that both cite colonial stereotypes only to dis-
mantle the authority of the vestigial hegemonic structures represented by the
English language. By comparing the two novels, this interpretation stresses
common patterns of replacing binary concepts of the use of English with
individual, creative hybridizations.

I
N THIS ESSAY I shall discuss the role of the English language(s) in the
cross-cultural encounters depicted in two recent novels by writers from
the Indian subcontinent. The texts describe multiculturalism in different
academic settings: Amit Chaudhuri’s Afternoon Raag (1993) deals with the
experiences of an Indian PhD student of English literature at the university of
Oxford. Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies (1991) focuses on the
adjustment struggles of a Sri Lankan academic and his wife who go to Austra-
lia on a visiting professorship. The English language constitutes a shared
element between the South Asian protagonists and their host societies; it maps
out a contact zone where cultural diversity and change are negotiated. Even
376 V ERA A LEXANDER

though the protagonists in both novels come from westernized, anglophone

backgrounds, they are confronted with cultural and linguistic differences in
their new surroundings, and their attempts to ‘come to terms’ with this diver-
sity reflect ambiguous attitudes toward English. The novels stress the fact that
these different Englishes are related to colonial history and that they are in a
dynamic interaction with each other in which multi-layered hegemonic struc-
tures come into play.
Postcolonial literature in English is rich in strategies for coming to terms
with the contradictory politics of English as the language of creative writing.
Many attempts have been made to overcome the binarisms of East/West,
colonized/colonizer, etc, and to deal with the power implications inscribed in
them. The novels discussed below constitute two examples of humorous stra-
tegies. In both texts, the hegemony of the English standard is rivalled by other
Englishes, and the very claim to hegemony is ironically undermined as power
relationships undergo multiple inversions.
Novels about South Asians going to a Western university for their educa-
tion or academic careers carry many interesting postcolonial implications as
they re-create some of the power structures inscribed in the history of colo-
nialism. Education was among the most effective tools of cultural imperial-
ism, the ambivalent effects of which are alive in intercultural encounters of
east and west to this day. While colonial education introduced its recipients to
attractive fields of knowledge, admission to these was bought at the price of
endorsing aspects of colonial rule. Not only is an awareness of these conflict-
ing relations firmly inscribed in the education system on the Indian sub-
continent (Rajan 1992: 7–28), but the history of colonial education is even
explicitly referred to in several novels (eg, Meena Alexander’s Nampally
Road, Adib Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments, Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the
Rope and Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy). The continued existence of anglo-
phone education on the subcontinent, the pan-subcontinental use of English as
the lingua franca of intellectual exchange and recurring debates on alterna-
tives to English (eg, Hindi) show that there is an ongoing negotiation of the
ambiguities of endorsement and resistance with regard to the cultural hege-
mony of English.
The topic of cross-cultural encounters in academic settings features in
many South Asian novels written in English. One reason for this is that many
writers are both novelists and scholars. This is the case with the two novelists
discussed in this essay: Amit Chaudhuri was born in Calcutta in 1962 and
read English at the universities of London and Oxford besides writing four
novels, for which he has won numerous prizes, as well as poetry, fiction and
criticism which are published in various periodicals and magazines (Hussein
2000: 1). Yasmine Gooneratne was born in Sri Lanka in 1935 and studied
Cross-Cultural Encounters in Chaudhuri and Gooneratne 377

English at the universities of Colombo and Cambridge. She taught in Ceylon

and Australia and wrote several volumes of poetry before emigrating to
Australia in 1972. Founding director of the Post-Colonial Literatures and Lan-
guages Research Centre, she is now emeritus professor of English at Mac-
quarie University. She is the author of sixteen books to date, which include
critical studies, poetry, fiction, essays and accounts of literary and historical
figures.
But apart from biographical reasons, universities constitute settings which
lend themselves to an analysis of how postcolonial novels criticize the author-
ity of standards, be they linguistic or more general. Universities are educa-
tional institutions representative of authority, and they conserve personal hier-
archies. The constellation of teacher and student, for instance, mirrors the
juxtaposition of colonizer and colonized, especially since one of the strategies
for legitimizing colonial rule cast the colonizers in the role of paternalistic
instructors helping to further civilization, “informed by the sense that colo-
nialism is really a ‘developmental’ project” (Gandhi 1998: 32) while the colo-
nized was conceived of as “half-child” (Nandy 1983: xii, 7). Universities are
sites on which temporary expatriates from different cultural backgrounds con-
verge: internationalism and multicultural co-operation are fundamental to
their structures. At the same time, even though the universities portrayed in
the novels present a smooth surface of multicultural amity, they are also areas
over which overt and covert competitions are fought.
The first novel to be examined with regard to the role of the English lan-
guage(s) quietly dismantles a large range of hierarchies as well as crossing
various borders. Amit Chaudhuri’s novel Afternoon Raag is remarkable for its
re-creation of an overseas student’s states of mind during his three-year
sojourn at Oxford University in the 1980s. The first-person narrator-protago-
nist remains unnamed, his anonymity underlining an element of indetermi-
nacy in his life. The novel is an example of a migrant author’s transcultural
innovation. Its form is taken from a poetic programme indicated by the title: a
raag is a piece of classical Indian music which seeks to evoke a specific
atmosphere or mood. Tied to a particular time of the day or season, it is rea-
lized through improvisations around a set scale of notes or intervals (Chau-
dhuri 1993: 29; Daniélou 1975: 58; Seth 1993: 426). Afternoon Raag thus
constitutes a formal experiment of an intermedial kind as it translates the
qualities of raag music into the medium of a written text in order to illustrate
the in-betweenness of an overseas student’s situation.
Afternoon Raag presents us with a very selective view of Oxford. None of
the fellow students the narrator names are English, and he focuses on no
foreigners other than those of (South) Asian origin. The few English students
the protagonist comes across remain an unfathomed mystery to him, and the
378 V ERA A LEXANDER

lack of understanding between him and them is highlighted by linguistic ob-

servations: for instance, when he comments on overhearing a group of British
girls, “speaking in a rapid language that I hardly followed” (Chaudhuri 1993:
69). For the protagonist, English people form a somewhat strange minority
whose alterity is confirmed by their accents. Off campus the narrator notes
that the town ‘belongs to’ other South Asians besides students: bus drivers
and shopkeepers. The only English characters mentioned very briefly are
working-class people referred to as “the aboriginal community that led an
island-life, its daily routines and struggles, and scarcely heard of Empire or
took part in governance” (92), otherwise described as “white men leading
black lives” (93).
This constitutes an ironic inversion which applies fragments of the colonial
world-view to present-day England, only with different agents. However, the
‘conquest’ of Oxford by South Asian immigrants is not a triumph; it is em-
bedded in a narrative characterized by an overall sense of dislocation. The
protagonist’s fellow-expatriates are an accidental cast of alienated migrants
whose presence underlines the distance between England and the Indian sub-
continent rather than removing it. The novel’s general sense of bewilderment
robs the otherwise amusing role switch of its potential edge.
As a consequence, the novel’s main cross-cultural encounters take place
between South Asians of different backgrounds. The protagonist, a western-
ized cosmopolitan, befriends his housemate Sharma, a fellow postgraduate
whom he “might never have met in India” (25) as “he was from a village in
North India, and it was miraculous that he should be here in Oxford among
other Indians of a different class” (129). Their friendship is an unequal one as
the boys’ command of English marks a class distinction between them:
Towards the beginning of our friendship, he [Sharma] had told me very
seriously that I was to help him improve his English. He was writing a thesis
on Indian philosophy, but he longed to be a stylist. I would, thus, recommend
to him a book whose language had given me pleasure, and he would read
aloud passages from Mandelstam or Updike or Lawrence to me, either in the
morning or at midnight, times when I was sleepy […] (9)
Sharma’s mimicry refers to a colonial constellation in which Indians studied
the English language through literary models set by the colonizers (see Vis-
wanathan 1989). The social inequality of the two students is reflected in their
interaction: Sharma more or less keeps house for the protagonist, who in turn
takes the role of the Brahmin poet-cum-scholar, sings and teaches Sharma
English. The relationship of the two boys thus constitutes an anachronistic
master–menial constellation in which several models are reflected: Oxford
University’s scout tradition, the colonial social constellation (except that now
both the position of the European colonizer and the Indian colonial are occu-
Cross-Cultural Encounters in Chaudhuri and Gooneratne 379

pied by Indians of different backgrounds), and the protagonist’s Indian home,

where the family are waited on by servants whose lives they monitor. How-
ever, an inversion of roles takes place, because it is Sharma who during their
phonetic exercises ends up teaching the protagonist something about the Eng-
lish language:
His English had a strong, pure North Indian accent, so that he pronounced
“joy” a little bit like the French “joie”, and “toilet” like “twailit”. Yet this
accent, I soon learnt, was never to be silenced completely; it was himself, and
however he trained himself to imitate the sounds of English speech, “toilet”,
when he pronounced it, would always have the faint but unmistakable and
intimate and fortunate hint of “twailit”. (9)
Far from encouraging Sharma to expunge his Indianisms, the protagonist dis-
covers that they have a function in beautifying the English language. By
focusing on his friend’s linguistic ‘problems’, the protagonist ascribes to
Indian English qualities similar to those of his music or poetry. As they stress
the foreignness of the speaker, they have the power to make everyday life into
something special and meaningful.
In describing the interaction of these South Asian characters, Chaudhuri
plays with various neo- and postcolonial constellations, using references to
the English language as a subject of study in order to evoke old binarisms and
hierarchies and tracing their development in playful hybridizations. In the
aesthetically-oriented and relatively carefree universe of timeless Oxford, the
language of poetry vanquishes the politics of English.
It is a long journey from Chaudhuri’s Oxford of migrants to the cross-
cultural encounters described in Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies.
Here, the majority culture, which is quietly deposed in Afternoon Raag, plays
a major role in the linguistic and personal struggles confronted by the novel’s
protagonists as different cultures clash in an overt and complex comedy of
manners. A Change of Skies deals with the young Sri Lankan linguist Bharat
Mangala–Davasinha and his wife Navaranjini, a trained librarian, who move
in the 1960s to Sydney, where Bharat is offered a visiting professorship. The
protagonists are uneasily aware of being among the lucky few privileged for-
eigners. Evidence of xenophobia towards immigrants, not least produced by
prominent Australian academics, and racist prejudices against other minor-
ities, such as the Aborigines, make them feel self-conscious about their situa-
tion. Their critical comments on Australian society and their own role in it are
transposed onto the plane of language in a number of key scenes.
Like the westernized protagonist of Afternoon Raag, Gooneratne’s charac-
ters learn that there is a wide gap between growing up in an anglophone envi-
ronment on the Indian subcontinent and speaking the English language in a
country where it is the first language. Despite their mixed feelings about Aus-
380 V ERA A LEXANDER

tralian society (which they initially experience as semi-barbaric and related to

Western culture only via the English language), their first strategy for coping
with this situation is to assimilate. Like Sharma, Navaranjini tries to learn the
standard language, but she discovers that there is no institutional help:
It occurred to me that he [her husband] might be a good deal happier living in
this foreign country if we both learned to speak the language. That very week,
I went to the School of Languages at Southern Cross University, and asked if I
could be enrolled as a student of Australian. But it didn’t work out. There
were rows of Japanese students queuing up to learn English, and rows of
Australian students queuing up to learn Japanese. Nobody seemed interested
in teaching, or studying Australian. (Gooneratne 1991: 120)
Left to her own devices, Navaranjini starts to take notes while listening to the
radio, setting down every unfamiliar term as Australian vocabulary. Of
course, Navaranjini with her upper class background speaks ‘perfect’ English.
As a consequence, the unknown expressions that make it into her list tend to
be non-standard expressions, slang and swearwords: “Like this very ancient
Australian word which begins with a ‘b’ and rhymes with ‘custard’, which I
first heard used – at a party! – by one of my husband’s colleagues [...]. I con-
sulted our host who told me to my surprise that Australians use this word as a
term of affection” (121). The ironic destandardization of Australia is part of a
tongue-in-cheek campaign to comically subvert Australia’s role as a represen-
tative of civilization. It is important to note that Gooneratne’s novel demo-
cratically extends this comedy to Navaranjini and Bharat themselves, as well
as to their friends in Sydney’s Sri Lankan diaspora: racism and stereotyping
are emphatically not reserved for white Australians (82, 87, 119; see also
Bredella 2001: 374).
The novel’s title goes back to a quotation from Horace, which the novel
translates as “He who crosses the ocean may change the skies above him, but
not the colour of his soul” (167). This dictum is ironically inverted in A
Change of Skies, as the protagonists undergo decisive changes subsequent to
their emigration. The context of Horace’s letter adds to the irony. He argues
that personal happiness is independent of one’s place of living, which is
proved wrong since Australia provides Barry and Jean with challenges and
opportunities which allow them to reinvent themselves in multiple ways and
to find fulfilment in professions which would have been closed to them in
their Sri Lankan peer group.
Gooneratne’s novel developed from a short story entitled “How Barry
Changed His Image” (Gooneratne 1989), which indicates that change and
adaptation are among its central themes. The novel contains a chapter of that
title which deals with the protagonists’ most decisive step in assimilation to
Australian society. Hampered by his long name, which is the only crucial fact
Cross-Cultural Encounters in Chaudhuri and Gooneratne 381

about himself which he is able to alter, Bharat changes his name to Barry
Mundy, and Navaranjini calls herself Jean. The name change signals an ambi-
guous reaction to the hegemony of Australian culture. On the one hand, the
protagonists give in to the majority; on the other hand, this move indicates a
loss in status (Gooneratne 1991: 122–23). Their new name carries an echo of
mundus, thus embracing the entire world, but also the pejorative connotations
of ‘mundane’.
The Mundys seemingly simplify their identities for the benefit of their
Australian friends. However, their name change is embedded in the novel’s
play with telling names. Barry’s Western colleagues are all named after sea-
food, sporting a hierarchy which ranges from crabs to dory (and in which
the Mundys occupy quite a high position). Of course, by becoming one of
these “fishy people”, Barry assimilates to his surroundings. He renders him-
self edible or digestible for Australian tastes. However, the critic Dorothy
Bramston has also pointed out that mundy has a Sinhalese meaning which
contains a warning that immigrants may go to the top but they may also
“end up as the dregs of the new society” (Bramston 1996: 30). As Goone-
ratne herself explains in an end-note, the device of using a specific name
code echoes a practice of colonial rulers to attach derogatory names of
animals or even vegetables to their subjects whose long Sri Lankan names
they refused to learn: it served as a gesture of appropriation and degradation
(Gooneratne 1991: 327–29).
The playful treatment of a topic full of such aggressive undercurrents cul-
minates in Jean’s dramatic encounter with Professor Ronald Blackstone. At a
university party, Jean is introduced to the sociologist whose racist and xeno-
phobic radio broadcasts first led her husband to change, and she addresses the
sum of her accumulated Australianisms to the baffled academic in a scene full
of multiple contextual ironies directed in equal measure to the ‘Australian’
language and to the university as an institution of narrow-minded prejudice
and arrogance. Jean then proceeds to explain the implications of her hus-
band’s name change:
“Barry. Do you know what ‘Barry’ means in Sinhala? Let me tell you, Profes-
sor Blackstone. In Sinhala, the word bari means ‘incapable’. It means
‘impotent’. And it was you who made my husband trade in Bharat for a name
like Barry.” [...] “You are a yahoo and a wrinkly, Professor Blackstone, [...] a
shithead and a stinker.” (128)
Even though Jean’s collected Australianisms elicit from Blackstone some-
thing like an apology, the actual process of changing the Australians is rather
more complex and drawn-out. As this scene shows, Jean, the faithful appen-
dix to her prospering husband, is in the process of jettisoning her background
382 V ERA A LEXANDER

position. After a few years in Australia, the protagonists undergo further sub-
stantial changes, and again, comments on the English language accentuate
their developments. Barry becomes so jaded with the snobbery of his Austra-
lian university colleagues that he quits his university post in order to set up
language classes for Far Eastern refugees. His wife meanwhile makes a career
for herself by publishing a best-selling cookery book that consists of recipes
combining Eastern and Western cuisine. Though radical, this change consti-
tutes a mere variation of their former activities. Jean the housewife and cook
opens twin highway restaurants, and Barry, who helps out (specializing in
seafood dishes!), divides his time between teaching, cooking and writing a
guidebook for immigrants. The restaurant displaces the university, even
though both share the same mission, as we learn from a newspaper article
about the Mundys’ establishments:
“Good cooks, say Barry and Jean, are like good writers, they create works of
art. Feasting the senses, firing the imagination, exercising the intellect, civilis-
ing the mind, fine food – like fine books – can admit us to spiritual experi-
ences, transports of joy.” (294)
By turning their attention to the production of food, the protagonists confirm a
cliché about what South Asians can do to make a success of going to the
West: open a restaurant (Khan 1998: 77). The migrants’ process of nego-
tiating individual change in foreign surroundings is unresolved in A Change
of Skies. As the narrative is pieced together by multiple narrators (Barry and
Jean, Barry’s grandfather, various Australian neighbours and friends, and,
after their sudden death, Barry and Jean’s daughter Edwina /Veena), the novel
reads as a series of fragments, each of which illustrates a possible immigrant
reaction to living in a new country: the exaggerated care for one’s cultural
roots as practised in a diasporic group, attempts to blend in with the dominant
culture, protest against this domination and making the precarious balance of
these negotiations into one’s life’s work. The novel’s fragmentary form as
well as its comic and parodic elements thus challenge readers, who are denied
a comfortable solution, to regard multicultural encounters as an open case and
an ongoing interaction.
Despite their differences in tone and style, both novels share the strategy of
defusing the crisis of alienation through a move beyond the standard culture
or language, represented by the universities, and towards syncretic forms of
multiculturalism, represented by artistic and culinary skills respectively. The
migrants depicted in the novels challenge inflexible standards and uncover
stereotypes. The settings of England and Australia mapped by the two novels
suggest the global application of syncretic innovations. The domination of the
standard language and majority culture is overcome as the novels play with it,
Cross-Cultural Encounters in Chaudhuri and Gooneratne 383

exploiting the poetic license that foreign speakers may enjoy. Humour is
among the novels’ most important devices for overcoming the dichotomy of
East and West and replacing it with a creative dynamic of mutual exchange.
Rigid institutions are dismissed as meaningless settings (Afternoon Raag) or
left behind (A Change of Skies) as the novels’ emphases on idiosyncrasy
favour individual and transcultural modes of expression, thereby celebrating
the versatility of the English language(s) in coping with diversity and change.

WORKS CITED
Alexander, Meena (1991). Nampally Road (San Francisco: Mercury House).
Bramston, Dorothy (1996). ‘A Sri Lankan writer in Australia: Yasmine Gooneratne’s
A Change of Skies,’ New Literatures Review 31: 19–32.
Bredella, Lothar (2001). ‘Interpreting cultures: Yasmine Gooneratne’s novel A Change
of Skies,’ in Critical Interfaces: Contributions on Philosophy, Literature and
Culture in Honour of Herbert Grabes, ed. Gordon Collier, Klaus Schwank & Franz
Wieselhuber (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier): 371–82.
Chaudhuri, Amit (1993). Afternoon Raag (London: Heinemann).
Daniélou, Alain (1975). Einführung in die indische Musik, tr. Wilfried Sczepan
(Wilhelmshaven: Heinrichshofen).
Gandhi, Leela (1998). Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (New York:
Columbia UP).
Gooneratne, Yasmine (1989). ‘How Barry changed his image,’ Meanjin 48.1: 109–15.
—— (1991). A Change of Skies (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Hussein, Aamer (2000). ‘A strange and sublime address,’ The Independent Online, 10
June 2000. http://www.independent.co.uk/enjoyment/Books/Interviews/ chaudhuri
100600.shtm.
Khan, Adib (1994). Seasonal Adjustments (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin).
Nandy, Ashis (1983). The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colo-
nialism (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1983).
Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder, ed. (1992). The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in
India (Delhi: Oxford UP).
Rao, Raja (1960). The Serpent and the Rope (Delhi: Hind Pocket Books).
Seth, Vikram (1993). A Suitable Boy (London: Phoenix).
Viswanathan, Gauri (1989). Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in
India (New York: Columbia UP).

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Imperial Pretensions and The Pleasures of Conquest

Yvette Tan
University of Adelaide

ABSTRACT
Yasmine Gooneratne’s Pleasures of Conquest is set in “Amnesia” (post-
colonial Sri Lanka in disguise). Potent overtones of cultural and economic
hegemony are manifest in the novel. This is clearly illustrated in the
“Mallinson Project,” named after its patron, the American pulp-romance
novelist Stella Mallinson. Like the other satirical characters in the novel,
Stella “demonstrates a familiar pattern of fallibility, based on illusions of
grandeur and ill-conceived notions of philanthropic responsibility” (Khan
1986: 359). With the support of the Amnesian Government, she aspires to
translate into English a series of Amnesia love stories. The “Mallinson
Project,” however, can be seen as “an act of imperialism, a misappropriation
of Amnesia culture as transgressive as the physical invasion by the British”
(Shaw 1996: 49). My essay will seek to explore the cultural ramifications of
imperialism in Gooneratne’s fiction. I will also examine Gooneratne’s deft
use of irony and comedy as a way of ‘writing back’.

A
D I B K H A N , in his review of The Pleasures of Conquest, notes that
comedy is seen as a comparatively recent and very necessary devel-
opment among Third-World émigré writers seeking to explore the
consequences of imperialism in fiction (1996: 358). Khan comments on how
Third-World literature has started to take itself less seriously and has even
learned to “chuckle at the flaws in its own indigenous cultures” (359). He says
the use of comedy, and especially the willingness to laugh at the predicaments
created by colonization, suggests that “post-colonial writers are beginning to
accept the conclusion of Saleem Sinai (from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s
Children): “We must live, I’m afraid, with the shadows of imperfection.” It is
386 Y VETTE T AN

an imperfection that embraces all humanity: the colonizer and the colonized,
the sahibs and the natives” (quoted in Khan 1996: 359).
Yasmine Gooneratne continues the trend begun by Rushdie. Without de-
tracting from her seriousness of purpose, her second novel The Pleasures of
Conquest makes us laugh at those crucial moments when the principal charac-
ters are at their most vulnerable. Set mainly in ‘Amnesia’, an idyllic, tropical
island-nation between Australia and Asia (postcolonial Sri Lanka in disguise),
Gooneratne’s novel does not intend to be moralizing as it fictionalizes the
human face of imperialism in its various forms. In this essay, I will seek to
examine the cultural ramifications of imperialism in Yasmine Gooneratne’s
novel. I will also explore how the author uses irony and satire as a form of
resistance and literary subversion.
In The Pleasures of Conquest, the protagonist Stella Mallinson, an Ameri-
can pulp-romance novelist and accidental imperialist, wishes literally to create
her own version of history – Amnesia. She is supremely enthusiastic about
promoting Amnesia’s literary culture and her efforts are ardently supported by
the Amnesian Government. For the Mallinson Project, Stella hand-picks nine
of Amnesia’s “stupendously talented (but sadly, yet unknown writers)” to
contribute chapters to “unique and wonderful piece of creative literary art”
(27). The book, to be entitled Nine Jewel Rice, sees a series of Amnesian love
stories translated into English. In Nine Jewel Rice, the Project seeks to show-
case nine “specially selected ancient Amnesian sites, thus bringing their exis-
tence, their historical importance and their picturesque attributes to the atten-
tion of a hitherto uncaring world and opening them up to tourist development”
(27). The Project can be seen as “an act of imperialism, a misappropriation of
Amnesian culture [which is] as transgressive as the physical invasion by the
British” (Shaw 1996: 49). Gooneratne addresses issues of cultural and eco-
nomic hegemony through Stella, who, like the other satirical characters in the
novel, “demonstrate[s] a familiar pattern of fallibility, based on illusions of
grandeur and ill-conceived notions of philanthropic responsibility” (Khan
1996: 359).
Self-interest and presumptuous virtuosity on both sides are ingeniously
tackled in The Pleasures of Conquest. The illusion of Stella’s altruistic mag-
nanimity is cultivated by the Amnesian politicians. The Minister for Tourism
and Immigration is quick to seize the obvious advantages offered by the
Project (both for the economy and for his career). In his opening speech at the
launch of the Project, he praises Mrs Mallinson for her “social concern and
her compassionate heart.” He goes on to say “it was Amnesia’s good fortune
that she had ranked herself with its defenders against the forces of capitalist
exploitation” (34, my emphasis). Stella relishes her role of sympathetic acti-
vist. In an interview with Topaz Magazine, she tells the reporter:
Imperial Pretensions and The Pleasures of Conquest 387

‘You have some massively talented writers here and no one in the States has
ever heard of them. It’s a shame. It’s an international disgrace. Not your
shame. Not your disgrace. Ours. Because it’s due to the stranglehold the West
has on the international book trade. Particularly, I have to admit it, the USA
– ’ here Stella laughed her light, tinkling laugh, and the reporter laughed with
her. Either he was nervous, or he was aware of her soaring sales figures in
America. (26)
Stella Mallinson’s façade of humble deference is stripped away when the
journalist innocently (or not so innocently) asks Stella where her book is to be
published.
What a question! Stella Mallinson looked at the reporter with barely disguised
irritation.
Where else but in the United States of America, where the mechanics of
marketing and distributing books, like other manufactured goods, are better
understood and more profitably practiced than anywhere else in the civilised
world? (28)
With spontaneous irreverence, Gooneratne brushes away illusions and re-
arranges perspectives. In the scrambling of familiar objects into incongruous
juxtaposition, her irony “allows the real truth to flash through the mildly
coloured cloud of dissimulation” (Highet 1962: 57). Irony’s ability to express
two meanings simultaneously “designates a literary mode in which the text
creates an artistic vision only to destroy it by revealing its own process of
arbitrary manipulation or construction” (Hutcheon 1991: 9).
Central to the novel is the New Imperial Hotel. Thoroughly capitalizing on
“Amnesia’s picturesque past” (245), the hotel is an extravagant celebration of
old colonial ambiance and everything “to flatter the occidental ego with imita-
tions of Western superiority” (not unlike the Raffles Hotel in Singapore)
(Gooneratne, in Khan 1996: 360). According to Khan, it is “a monument to
the exploitative excesses of history” (1996: 359). Erected by an Amnesian
king in 1592, the hotel later became “an emblem of Dutch mercenary suc-
cess.” In 1815, it became the headquarters of the British Resident when the
British conquered the Inner Kingdom. The Resident upon his conversion to
Buddhism then returned it to the Amnesian people. Currently owned by a
multinational chain, the name of the hotel – the New Imperial – is distinc-
tively appropriate as it symbolizes the ‘new’ cultural imperialism thriving in
Amnesia. Located in the heart of the Inner Kingdom, the New Imperial Hotel
is a pivotal point in East-West relations. Narelle Shaw comments that “each
phase of its history reflects an ironic reversal of what had come before”
(1996: 48–49). Khan adds that “[b]y the end of the book it is virtually impos-
sible to distinguish between the conqueror and the conquered. Who is really
being exploited – East or West?” (1996: 359)
388 Y VETTE T AN

The history in Gooneratne’s novel is that of imperialism which is duly per-

petuated throughout the ages. The author charts its uninterrupted course skill-
fully through links between Stella Mallinson, Sir John D’Esterey and Philip
Destry. Nineteenth-century British Resident in Amnesia and later Chief
Translator to the British Crown, Sir John is introduced into the novel through
the discovery of a series of letters by the American academic Philip Destry.
The irony lies in the fact that Philip Destry’s connection to Sir John D’Esterey
“is not a link of blood but by those mystical ties of common understanding
which connect man with man across time and space, creating a kinship of the
mind” (207). Indeed, the “parallels” between both D’Esterey and Destry are
“irresistible” (137). The letters reveal the noble civil servant, John D’Esterey,
as a “master spy” whose treachery and betrayal of the Amnesian king em-
bodies the colonial mentality. Philip Destry’s character is similarly ruthless,
predatory and opportunistic.
Wholly deluded, Philip Destry envisages himself as a monarch in the
“kingdom of the mind” (130). “The construction of an academic career was
an enterprise, he reflected, not unlike the building of an empire” (116). He
smugly admits that “the women in his life” (lovers and research assistants)
were “the brazen wheels that had kept the golden hands of [the Destry] Em-
pire in motion” (116). As Narelle Shaw notes, “[e]xploitation of women is
simply another guise of colonialist mentality” (1996: 49). Destry blatantly in-
corporates his assistant Leila Tan’s research into his own work. Arrogantly
dismissive of her contribution, he relegates her to a mere footnote. Goone-
ratne executes her irony brilliantly. She writes calmly, in restrained terms,
never growing melodramatic or indignant about the injustices of colonization
or the hypocrisy of men. Gooneratne advances the argument that History is
undoubtedly written by the conquerors. What her irony does here is to under-
mine and puncture the grandiose pretensions of the imperial ‘villains’, to
demonstrate what villainy is like when transferred to the postcolonial world.
In Gooneratne’s The Pleasures of Conquest, the author looks at a society in
which two cultures confront each other. Irony allows the presentation of dif-
ferent perspectives without taking sides (Susskind 1991: 39). Gooneratne
openly satirizes hypocrisy and artifice. Satire in the novel serves to prod
people into an awareness of truth and dramatizes and exaggerates objection-
able qualities in people and society (Feinberg 1967: 17). By exaggerating
postcolonial hypocrisy and inconsistency, Gooneratne exposes it to public
view and degrades the perpetrators. For the author, the satirical narrative and
characterization is not the end: it is the means. The Pleasures of Conquest can
be read as an ironic view of “moral stagnation” (Shaw 1996: 361).
Gooneratne maximizes the element of farce in her novel. This is clearly
seen in how a “little mishap” could contribute to Stella Mallinson’s dizzy
Imperial Pretensions and The Pleasures of Conquest 389

ascent to become Amnesia’s latest “national heroine” (33, 45). This is how it
is described or, rather, interpreted by Topaz Magazine:
[Mrs Mallinson] was escorted into the hotel by His Excellency the [Amne-
sian] President, and was handed a bottle of champagne by the U S I S
representative, Mr Robert Bolton, which she smashed with great eclat against
the white marble replica of the crown (a symbol of our pre-Independence
days) that dominates the New Imperial Hotel’s banqueting hall.
It was an original and forceful gesture, entirely unrehearsed and truly
symbolic of the distinguished American author’s deep sympathy for
independent Amnesia’s nationalist aspirations. (33)
But it becomes apparent to the reader that “Stella knew nothing and cared less
about independent Amnesia’s nationalist aspirations. She had, as a matter of
fact, aimed at the pedestal and missed” (33). This misrepresentation however
works to her utmost benefit. As a result of her “lucky miss”, she is now
warmly received and favoured by her detractors who had previously made
“snide comments” about her “projected attacks on the Queen’s English” (34).
It is clear that Stella had no reason to “take a swipe at the crown. Why should
she?” (34). We are told that Stella was rather fond of the British Royals: “Not
only had she been informed by the tabloids that both Princess Diana and
Princess Margaret were fans of her novels, but she had even considered
dedicating one of them to the Prince of Wales” (34).
In The Pleasures of Conquest, language is tied explicitly to the question of
power. The sense of the comic and the ironic in Gooneratne’s novel is trium-
phantly revolutionary. Her irony acknowledges the force of the dominant cul-
ture and yet contests it. Through the use of humour, she seeks to exert pres-
sure on the prevailing ideology. Her criticism of people and society is subtle;
it is a gentle “criticism made entertaining by humour and moving by irony
and invective” (Feinberg 1967: 18). In the novel, “several voices of dissent”
take issue with Stella Mallinson’s plans for Nine Jewel Rice:
‘Who, might one ask, is this Mrs Mallinson, that she should presume to teach
local authors how to write about their own country?’ asked one young fire-
eater, an expert in one of Amnesia’s indigenous languages.
An academic from a local university expressed grave doubts about what he
saw was a subtle form of neo-colonialism. ‘In all seriousness’, he said
gloomily, ‘I urge my country’s literary community to remember the Trojan
Horse.’ (35)
The very potent and potentially contentious point about neocolonialism is
conveniently forgotten as other academics present at the session greedily seize
upon the mention of ‘horse’ to demonstrate their knowledge and showcase
their expertise. The whole discussion thus degenerates into a farcical and
390 Y VETTE T AN

largely irrelevant discussion about whether horses were indigenous to

Amnesia and how and when they arrived on the island.
The politics regarding the use of English versus that of the traditional
Amnesian language is raised. Gooneratne hints at English as the tongue and
tool of the modern imperialist. In the novel, the same expert in local lan-
guages inquires why this local project is “being carried out in a foreign
language, namely English, and not in our country’s own noble and expressive
tongue?” (36). Lou Randolph, Stella’s very able publicist, comes to her rescue
with the deft reply that “the choice of English as the medium for the project
had been based on purely practical and economic considerations.” Lou Ran-
dolph invariably and ironically draws attention to the fact that:
Since most consumers of the finished product were likely to be Americans,
and since not many Americans were known to be practiced readers of the
local languages [...] the [Amnesian] collaborators on the project had been
informed quite early on that they would have to bear with, and work within,
the limitations of English. This was, of course, a heroic sacrifice on their part
[...] but they were willing to make it in the interests of their country. (37)
The decision to write Nine Jewel Rice in English substantiates the “rule of
consent” by American economic power and Amnesian acquiescence (Gandhi
1998: 145). Stella Mallinson, with her retinue of present-day colonizers, en-
deavours to disguise their material investments and economic interests by
presenting the Mallinson Project as a humanist commitment to the literary
advancement of the Amnesians. But it is clear that imperialism is essentially a
parasitical relation. Gooneratne’s irony here is transgressive rather than oppo-
sitional.
Gooneratne deftly uses humour and irony to subvert the ideology of the
centre. It is a way of ‘writing back’, of positing resistance against the canon.
Often wielding irony as a form of double vision, she “implicitly challenges
any claims to universalism or speech in the name of humanity” (Hutcheon
1991: 49). It is a double vision, which informs subversive local practices. The
writer highlights the incongruity contained in the discrimination between
impulse and pretension, between being and seeming, between people as they
are and persons as they aspire to be. For Gooneratne to speak from the mar-
gins, figuratively or literally, is in effect to decentre enthnocentrism.
This essay recognizes that, in practice, “all communicational codes, espe-
cially language are ambiguous, double and even duplicitous” (Hutcheon
1991: 10). By the deliberate and extensive juxtapositioning of Western /Asian
and colonial/postcolonial, the author opens the way for a lucid, continuous
and consistent commentary on the other (Mudrick 1952: 39). Irony has be-
come a powerfully subversive tool in the re-thinking and re-addressing of
history (Hutcheon 1991: 73). It possesses compelling powers that unmask and
Imperial Pretensions and The Pleasures of Conquest 391

debunk. As Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson maintain, imperialism was largely
challenged by a radical and dissenting anticolonial counter-textuality.
Just as fire can be fought with fire, textual control can be fought with text-
uality [...]. The post-colonial is especially and pressingly concerned with the
power that resides in discourse and textuality; its resistance, then, quite
appropriately takes place in – and from – the domain of textuality, in [...]
motivated acts of reading. (Tiffin & Lawson 1994: 10)
In The Pleasures of Conquest, irony is used to expose the incongruities and
discrepancies of power structures, as well as emphasize the importance of the
language–place disjunction in the construction of postcolonial realities
(Ashcroft et al. 1994: 28).

WORKS CITED
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (1994). The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York:
Routledge).
Feinberg, Leonard (1967). Introduction to Satire (Ames: Iowa UP).
Gandhi, Leela (1998). Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (St. Leonards,
NSW: Allen & Unwin).
Gooneratne, Yasmine (1996). The Pleasures of Conquest (Milsons Point, NSW:
Random House).
Highet, Gilbert (1962). The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton NJ: Princeton UP).
Hutcheon, Linda (1991). Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies
(Toronto: Oxford UP).
Khan, Adib (1996). ‘Shadows of imperfection’ [review of Yasmine Gooneratne’s
The Pleasures of Conquest], Meanjin 55.2: 358–61.
Mudrick, Marvin (1952). Jane Austen: Irony as Defense and Discovery (Princeton
NJ: Princeton UP).
Shaw, Narelle (1996). ‘Conquest of Amnesia,’ Australian Book Review 178 (Feb-
ruary–March): 48–49.
Shershow, Scott Cutler (1986). Laughing Matters: The Paradox of Comedy (Am-
herst: U of Massachusetts P).
Susskind, A. (1991). ‘A woman in a sari,’ Sydney Morning Herald (23 July): 39.
Tiffin, Chris, & Alan Lawson (1994). ‘Introduction: The textuality of Empire,’ in
De-scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality, ed. Tiffin & Lawson
(London & New York: Routledge): 1–11.

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“Language is the skin of my thought”
Language Relations in Ancient Promises
and The God of Small Things

Christine Vogt–William
Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe Universität,
Frankfurt am Main

ABSTRACT
In this essay, I will be looking at two novels written in the last decade of this
last century by two Indian women writers: Ancient Promises by Jaishree
Misra; and The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. In my reading of
these works, I propose to look at how the authors demonstrate that their
(female) protagonists have been deprived of their rights through the adroit
use of language on the part of their persecutors, who, sadly enough, are
members of their families. The languages being used and even manipulated
in given key situations in the two novels are English and Malayalam. A
second and pertinent question is whether both Misra and Roy wrote these
novels with a view to catering for a mainly English-educated audience, both
in the East and the West. A connected issue is if they used English as a
matter-of-fact instrument which is accessible to the majority of their readers,
while at the same time operating on the premise that English was so much a
part of the Indian Weltanschauung that it would not offend anyone’s sensi-
bilities as regards the authenticity of the presentation of the diverse socio-
cultural situations depicted in the novels.

Survival was one thing half-way children were good at, hopping effort-
lessly back and forth between their different identities. Never quite belong-
ing anywhere. (Jaishree Misra, Ancient Promises, 178)

There is fiction in the space between

The lines on your page of memories
Write it down but it doesn’t mean
394 C HRISTINE V OGT –W ILLIAMS

You’re not just telling stories

There is fiction in the space between
You and me

Leave the pity and the blame

For the ones who do not speak
You write the words to get respect and compassion
And for posterity
You write the words and make believe
There is truth in the space between.
– Tracy Chapman (1999), Purple Rabbit Music (ASCAP)

1. Introduction

L
A N G U A G E I S O F T E N U S E D as an instrument of power – it can
hurt, exclude and even deprive a person of their rights – the right to
speak, the right to be heard and the right to be one’s self and to have
that self acknowledged by one’s surroundings. Two novels written in the final
decade of the last century by two Indian women writers will be analysed in
this essay. In my reading of these works, I propose to look at how the authors
demonstrate that their protagonists have been deprived of their rights through
the manipulation of language and language attitudes on the part of their per-
secutors, who, sadly enough, are members of their families.
The languages which are being used in given key situations in the two
novels are English and Malayalam. The authors, Jaishree Misra, who wrote
Ancient Promises (2000), and Arundhati Roy, who wrote the by now well-
known The God of Small Things (1997), are of Malayali backgrounds and
have spent a considerable part of their lives in Kerala, where Malayalam is
mainly spoken. However, both writers are no strangers to the English lan-
guage, either. They, like many educated Indians, have had unlimited access to
the English language and its literature, an unmistakable and irrevocable
legacy of the British Raj.
Several impressions come to mind when looking back on the last 50 years
of the Indian novel in English. William Walsh cites the extraordinary versa-
tility of the English language, which proved itself capable of expressing the
strongest feelings of members of a culture extremely remote from Britain.
Walsh however is also of the opinion that if the use of English was due in the
first place to the British Raj, its persistence and its increasing influence (long
after the departure of the British and in spite of a natural national(ist) hostility)
owed everything to the capacities and the resourcefulness of the (English)
language itself (Walsh 1990: 123–24).
When reading Indian-English works of fiction, one does well to remember
that the Indian writer is often inevitably bicultural and lives within a multi-
Language Relations in Ancient Promises and The God of Small Things 395

lingual cultural idiom. She is born with the skill to switch her cultural code
according to the needs of her social situation. And even when she lives in a
native social context, she at once lives with many mainstream cultural tradi-
tions and several substream cultural currents. This suspension, this being
caught between several cultural types creates a split in the writer’s literary
personality. Ganesh Devy observes that by resorting to both Indian and Eng-
lish literary styles, the Indian writer aspires to be both pan-Indian, interna-
tional and yet faithful to local nuances and colour – the styles in Indian-
English literature clearly show this compulsion (Devy 1990: 340–53).
A second pertinent aspect is the question whether both Misra and Roy
wrote their novels with a view to catering for a mainly English-educated audi-
ence, both in the East and the West. Uma Parameswaran has highlighted the
main responses of critics towards Indian authors writing in English, observing
that most Indian critics are adversely critical. Whereas Indian writers who
chose to write in English in earlier decades were reproached for choosing
viewpoints and plots that would appeal exclusively to the English-reading
world (which brought recognition and remuneration), most non-Indian critics
appeared appreciative of these efforts on the part of the Indian authors (Para-
meswaran 2000: 24).
Since India’s strict caste system forbids close communication and social
interaction between people of different caste backgrounds, it is here that lan-
guage becomes the link and deregionalizes the characters in the novel. The
author is able to establish, on the human level, a plausible dialogue between
characters who come from different regions and social backgrounds; a hall-
mark of India’s cultural pluralism. English therefore becomes a unifying
factor; a colonial tongue adapted to local native needs. Uma Parameswaran is
of the opinion that in fiction one deals with particular human beings, human
motivation and actions which are not necessarily rooted in regional or lingu-
istic identities.
Language of the human heart and mind is wordless. Language is a vehicle for
expressing an experience and its simplicity or complexity should be influ-
enced by the simplicity or complexity of the situation or of the total artistic
composition, not by education, vocabulary or dialect of one who experiences
it. (Parameswaran 2000: 48)
Hence she does not question the high level of sophistication of language used
by the authors to express the thought patterns of unsophisticated characters as
well as nuances of verbal idiom. Examples of such unsophisticated characters
who use an unrealistically refined register of speech are Velutha in God of
Small Things as well as Ammuma and Mrs Maraar in Ancient Promises.
396 C HRISTINE V OGT –W ILLIAMS

Velutha, an Untouchable, would not have had access to the kind of English
Roy uses in his speech. Yet Roy reports his thought patterns and lends his
speech a certain dignity by using a more or less standard variety of English.
This of course contributes to the reader’s perception of Velutha not just as an
Untouchable, but rather as a person with rights.
Ammuma, Janu’s grandmother, and Mrs Maraar, Janu’s mother-in-law,
being of an older generation of Keralan women, would not necessarily have
learnt English nor used it in the manner related by Misra. Both these char-
acters, had they been real, more likely than not, would have communicated in
Malayalam and not in English.
Although English has been accepted as one of India’s two national lan-
guages, it does not belong to any specific region of the country and thus does
not have the status of a regional language. Rather English seems to be used as
a language of status, and the fact that English is an international language (the
only one at India’s disposal at present) adds to its position as a status lan-
guage. As Devy has observed,
The English language in India is treated, by a more privileged class of Indian
society as an intrinsically superior language as compared with Indian regional
languages […] The general Indian attitude of not violating the received norms
of the English language comes from the respect it enjoys as an enormously
resourceful language that it has been elsewhere. (Devy 1990: 348)
This attitude to English as a language is clearly presented in both novels in
varying degrees.

2. The God of Small Things

One of the key scenes which trigger the reader’s animosity against Baby
Kochamma, everyone’s favourite arch-villain in Roy’s novel, is her infamous
persecution of the twins Rahel and Esthappen, especially when she hears
them speaking Malayalam, a language with as much value for them as Eng-
lish. The reprehensible anglophile ex-nun imposes punishments on the twins
and forces them to practise their English pronunciation:
Baby Kochamma eavesdropped relentlessly on the twins’ private conversa-
tions, and whenever she caught them speaking Malayalam […] she made
them write lines […] I will always speak English […] A hundred times each
[…] She made them practise an English […] song […] They had to form the
words properly, and be particularly careful with their pronunciation. (Roy
1997: 36)
The persecution of the ‘half-Hindu, hybrid twins’ by their great-aunt is,
however, set in contrast to the twins’ mother, Ammu who “used Kipling to
Language Relations in Ancient Promises and The God of Small Things 397

love her children before putting them to bed: ‘We be of one blood, you and
I’ ” (58).
As the reader notes in the course of the novel, both Malayalam and English
are very much part of the twins’ lives. Roy is extremely conscious of her
protagonists’ hybrid nature – emphasizing their twin heritages of the Malayali
culture of Kerala as well as the colonial British influence. One must note that
nothing of the twins’ Bengali father seems to have had a lasting influence on
them – neither the language nor the culture. The adult Estha does not seem to
have developed any kind of relationship with his father in the years in Madras
when he was Returned.
In his essay “Große Worte, kleine Dinge,” Dirk Wiemann believes that
the Rushdiesque, ‘magical’ use of language in the child’s universe is cor-
related to the twins’ perspective (Wiemann 1998: 4). Estha and Rahel
assume that incomprehensible constructions are secret formulas which
evoke certain sensations:
Cuff+link=cuff-link. This to them rivalled the precision and the logic of
mathematics. Cuff-links gave them an inordinate […] satisfaction, and a real
affection for the English language […] Humbling was a nice word, Rahel
thought […] Twinkle was a word with a crinkled happy edge […] Boot was a
lovely word. Sturdy was a terrible word […] later became a horrible,
menacing goose-bumpy word. (Roy 1997: 51, 54, 145, 153)
When the narrative perspective draws nearer the twins’ viewpoint, the text
contains numerous instances where words and whole phrases have capitals.
This is a signal to the reader that he has gained access to the children’s minds,
making apparent the often incomprehensible and threatening adult world. The
children pick up language partly as used by the adults around them and partly
constructed out of their personal childish myths conveying their own small
private meanings: “a Highly Stupid Impression”, “Anything Can Happen to
Anyone”, “It’s Best to Be Prepared”, “Loved from the Beginning”, “an After-
noon Gnap” etc. The twins are so precocious in their perceptions and use of
language that they resort to reading backwards to form a kind of secret lan-
guage understood only by them – this too being considered symptomatic of
their undesirable, incorrigible hybrid status by members of the family. An-
other capitivating aspect of language in the child-like consciousness is that the
twins do not yet seem capable of distinguishing between the word and the
deed; indeed, Estha is under the impression “That you had to say it to do it”,
while Rahel is convinced that her wishes and hopes have tangible consequen-
ces: “Rahel knew that it happened because she had been hoping that it
wouldn’t. She hadn’t learnt to control her hopes yet. Estha said that it was a
Bad Sign” (58).
398 C HRISTINE V OGT –W ILLIAMS

This perhaps infantile belief in the almighty power of thoughts and words
finds its threatening confirmation in Ammu’s admonition to Rahel for her
thoughtless remarks: “When you hurt people they begin to love you less.
That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.” This
child-like conceptualization of the magical properties of language expands to
include the adults too, as and when Roy wills it, hence the likening of her
style to that of Rushdie’s. The key figures in the novel have their thoughts and
views articulated, using this formula of capitalization. Examples of this
childish frame of reference are to be found when Mammachi legitimates
Chacko’s sexual activities with the female workers as “Men’s Needs” (168);
Chacko speaks in his “Reading Aloud voice” expounding his philosophical
theories on “Love, Sadness, Infinite Joy” (118); Ammu is carried away by her
“Far More Angry than Necessary Feeling” when her children let her down in
the Indo-British Behaviour Competition in that unforgettable family scenario
at Cochin Airport (145); Baby Kochamma indulges in paranoid ritualization
of daily activities: “For a Breath of Fresh Air”, “To Pay for the Milk”, “To
Let out a Trapped Wasp” (28) – all reflections of her self-obsession, gradual
mental deterioration and self-imposed ostracization.

3. Ancient Promises
In contrast to the experiences of the twins in The God of Small Things, the
protagonist of Ancient Promises is made to suffer indignities because she
follows her natural impulse to speak in English. Janaki or Janu, who is forced
into an arranged marriage to the wealthy, traditional Kerala family, the
Maraars, is chided by her mother-in-law and ridiculed by her sisters-in-law
whenever she uses English. Janu was brought up in the Indian metropolis of
Delhi, and thus is used to speaking English and Hindi while resorting to a
hybrid form of conversational Malayalam (ie, mixed with English), to com-
municate with her parents and grandparents:
Non-Kerala families like mine tended to mix up English and Malayalam into
an easy, casual city-speech that had worked reasonably well [...]. Now that I
was here forever, it would look like that brand of Malayalam was going to be
woefully inadequate. Even worse, seen as stylish. (Misra 2000: 80)
Janu is humiliated time and again by the female members of her husband’s
family, who belong to a respectable caste in Kerala, as shown by the family
name, Maraar. It is possible that they are the remnant of the matrilineal social
set-up common to that region, hence the authority of the older female mem-
bers is not questioned. In one telling incident, when Janu’s mother-in-law
asks her if she’d like a cup of tea on her first morning in the Maraar house-
hold as a new bride, the following exchange takes place:
Language Relations in Ancient Promises and The God of Small Things 399

I replied ‘Yes, please.’

‘Look you’re not in Delhi anymore. Like it or not, you now live in Kerala,
so I suggest you drop all these fashionable “Pleases and Thank Yous”. Here
we don’t believe in unnecessary style.’
It tore a tiny little scratch inside me somewhere, and suddenly the many
times that I’d been told off for forgetting a little kindness or gratitude seemed
so falsely, so pretentiously Delhi.
Was her displeasure because I’d spoken English? I cast about frantically
for the Malayalam to use […] remembering vaguely that there were no
equivalent words for a casual Please and Thank you. (80–81)
Due to her multilingual upbringing in Delhi, Janu feels an outsider in her new
home in Kerala because she cannot speak fluent Malayalam; her marginal-
ization is exacerbated by the constant criticism from her in-laws:
It didn’t sound as if anyone in this family had grown up outside Kerala, the
Malayalam flying around me was fast, fluent and elegant. My years of
growing up in Delhi and having to struggle with Hindi in school, had
relegated Malayalam to a very low priority. It was getting clearer by the
minute that my holiday-Malayalam, so comical it sometimes even made my
grandparents giggle, was unlikely to endear me to this family. (81)
It soon becomes apparent in the course of the novel that it is more than just
Janu’s previous cosmopolitan lifestyle and outlook which prompts the
Maraars to criticize her. Her use of English could have been considered a
threat and an affront to the more traditional authority of this family, who pride
themselves on being ‘real’ Malayalis, rather than ‘modern’ multilingual,
cosmopolitan Indians. Janu observes:
[…] speaking English would be misconstrued as attempting to be stylish and
speaking in Malayalam had on occasion been greeted with sarcastic laughter. I
was better off pretending to be the bashful bride. (86)
The fact that Janu’s mother-in-law Mrs. Maraar was vociferous in her objec-
tions to her new daughter-in-law would lead one to suppose that the older
woman felt that she had to establish her own authority as matriarch of the
house, just in case she had entertained any notion of usurping the Maraar
authority as the wife of Mrs. Maraar’s only son. Janu, of course, who was just
looking for love and acceptance, is understandably nonplussed at this constant
show of hostility. Another possibility is that Mrs. Maraar is jealous of her
daughter-in-law’s education.
Tertiary education in Kerala takes place almost exclusively in English. In a
sociolinguistic analysis of “hybrid conversational Malayalam” among Keralan
college students, C.V. Kala discovered a rather interesting attitude towards
400 C HRISTINE V OGT –W ILLIAMS

the use of English among Keralan Malayalis, which could perhaps help to
explain the Maraars’ rather strange behaviour:
In households which have their first generation of college going teenagers, the
latter regard it ornamental to use English too frequently. By contrast
households with a well-educated parental generation try to curb such a trend
among their children, as a matter of a respectable speech discipline. However
the general urge among teenagers is to mix English freely in their speech
when they are in a town or in their college premises. (Kala 1977: 269)
The general attitudes of Malayalis towards English and Malayalam, which
have remained constant even after India gained independence from British
rule, have been more recently characterized by A .P . Andrewskutty:
Although English was an instrument of colonisation, it was the choice for at
least a large section of people. They imbibed it as a pragmatic instrument of
economic competition. Attitudinally, Malayalees keep a well thought-out
balance in properly assessing the pros and cons of learning English and
Malayalam. In this respect they have been practicing a happy but typical
mixture of localisation and globalisation with reference to their mothertongue
and the other tongue, English. They have been resorting to the same game
[…] with Hindi and other languages as well. (Andrewskutty 1996: 30)
One can assume that Janu and her parents were fortunate enough to have
found this “well-thought-out balance” in their use of the three main languages
at their disposal. Thus poor Janu, who was used to juggling all her languages
(English, Malayalam and Hindi) in diverse contexts of her life, finds herself
constrained to use the one language she isn’t proficient in, which effectively
leads to her being silenced; Janu’s sense of herself is completely jeopardized;
she begins loathing herself, for being one of the ‘half-way children’:
I was still too nervous to put up much of a fight and still found my Malayalam
letting me down at moments that cried out for a sharp retort. [...] It didn’t take
long for me to start hating myself for the many different things that give the
Maraars reason to […] laugh […]: for not being able to speak Malayalam
elegantly, for forgetting constantly not to mind my P’s and Q’s; for having
been brought up in Delhi. (Misra 2000: 97, 118)
This is an instance of how language can be manipulated to deny a person her
basic human right of expressing herself as she chooses and thus rendering her
powerless and without any form of personal agency whatsoever. On a per-
sonal note, I sympathize with Janu’s frustration, being a native speaker of
English myself and a Singaporean Malayali who can’t really speak the lan-
guage very well, nor read or write in it. Meena Alexander, another Malayali
author who writes in English, has expressed this rather typical postcolonial
predicament:
Language Relations in Ancient Promises and The God of Small Things 401

I have never learnt to read or write in Malayalam and turned into a truly
postcolonial creature, who had to live in English, though a special sort of
English, I must say, for the version of the languages I am comfortable with
bends and sways to the shores of other territories, other tongues. […] Yet the
price of fluency in many places may well be loss of the sheer intimacy that
one has with one’s own culture, a speech that holds its own sway, untouched
by any other. But perhaps there is a dangerous simplicity here…. (Alexander
1996: 11)

4. A translation of cultures
Of course, the aspect of translation is of significance in this study. A pertinent
question would be if the authors wrote in English with the intention of provid-
ing a translation of cultures, of sorts, so that readers could comprehend the
local contexts as a whole. Translation implies a far-reaching transfer between
cultures and participates in the different forms of contact and contention be-
tween cultures (Bachmann–Medick 1997: xii).
One might ask: which aspects of a culture are actually translated? Foreign
cultures are accessible first and foremost through their representation in
myths, rituals and ceremonies as well as artworks and texts. Thus, the trans-
lation of a foreign culture as done in the two novels depends very much on
alternating interaction which leads to an understanding of that culture outside
the area of simple metaphorics (Bachmann–Medick 1997: 7). This entails
then the translation of different cultural codes and coding methods. On look-
ing at the use of language in the two novels the reader confronts these differ-
ences and learns to recognize the significance of local cultural interests in
Kerala, as presented by Roy and Misra. One significant way how literary texts
make readers experience ‘Otherness’ is through the use of language which is
not completely translated by the authors. In works written in English by
writers from the former colonies, regionalisms and local references are differ-
ently positioned in the spectrum of intelligibility.
In his essay “ ‘ Hahnji’ means ‘Yes Sir’,” David Stouck cites Reed Way
Dasenbrock’s belief that the political significance of a literary work from a
foreign country is to be found in the amount of work the reader has to under-
take in order to comprehend the text (Stouck 1998: 67). It is only by doing
this work and by making the effort to understand a different way of speaking
that we can appreciate cultural difference. Stouck also observes that “if every-
thing is translated into our terms and made readily accessible, then our cul-
tural categories will be reinforced rather than challenged” (67).
The two authors have slightly different ways of embedding Malayalam
words and phrases in their texts. Roy unashamedly braids phrases and whole
sentences of Malayalam into the English tapestry of her narrative and with
402 C HRISTINE V OGT –W ILLIAMS

equal nonchalance either translates them sparingly or leaves them untrans-

lated, confident that her readers will sift the meanings implicit in the general
context of the narrative situation. Misra seems to be a little more self-
conscious – she has lightly peppered her narrative with just a few Malayali
words where ostensibly no other equivalent in English could be found. Both
authors do not do this with the singularly simplistic aim to imbue the novels
with authentic local colour; instead this serves to elucidate the eccentricity of
language and its uses in the postcolonial environment of Kerala, where
Malayalam and English are given equal importance. The range of context-
ualized reflection and work on these texts undertaken by the reader covers the
dimension of the ‘implicit’, the ‘unsaid’, the ‘left out’, which can then be re-
constructed from the elements of the text and the plot, thus enabling a trans-
lation of the cultural ‘deep structure’ of the text, or: “cultural translation was
always a matter of determining the implicit meaning of the speech and action
of the ‘others’” (Hastrup 1990: 55).
Both Roy and Misra do not offer glossaries or lists of explanations at the
end of the novels, leaving quite a few nuances of vernacular idiom un-
explained, hence ‘unsaid’. This contributes to the crucial centre of a literary
work’s meaning in terms of its international audience – one must realize that
the authors are aware of their audience. In her study of Kamala Markandaya’s
works, Uma Parameswaran addresses this very practice (or lack thereof),
justifying that italics, explications and glossaries only distract the reader and
in effect sets up boundaries:
If they explain or explicate Indian customs, they alienate the Indian reader into
concluding that they have only the non-Indian reader in mind; if they write
without explanations, they risk alienating the western reader, for who wants to
read something that requires one to go to anthropological texts or glossaries at
the end of the volume? (Parameswaran 2000: 77)
The untranslated words do not just assert a cultural distinctiveness but also
present a form of resistance to demands that literature conform to either
accepted varieties of American and British English or the diverse regional lan-
guages of India. The hybridity evident in this enmeshing of two separate
discursive strategies can be read as a political act – to claim and preserve that
particular cultural territory for Malayalam speakers who are generally bi-
lingual. Simultaneously the problem of localizing the author, the text and the
reader is addressed; here the use of specifically Malayalam words has a
nostalgic function of re-situating the Malayalam-speaking, Keralan reader as
well as the narrator in a remembered and familiar past. This type of code-
mixing on the part of the authors then serves to de-centre the English reader
temporarily from her own culture by insisting on cultural difference.
Language Relations in Ancient Promises and The God of Small Things 403

Thus the use of foreign, unfamiliar language elements in a largely English

literary text is often an indication of how much an author (consciously or
unconsciously!) expects her readers to cultivate that middle ground where
mainstream and marginalized can meet – it is on this site, this overlapping
interstitial space (the space between), that the engaged reader (Euro-Ameri-
can, Indian or otherwise) must change their way of perceiving the Other. This
insistence on new perception through the incorporation of alien language
elements, which grows ever stronger, is what Mikhail Bakhtin would term
‘dialogic language’; a language engaged in articulating experience, histories
and viewpoints; an exercise which involves readers in building bridges
between specific cultures.
As I mentioned earlier, Roy and Misra, like most other contemporary
Indian-English authors use English as a literary device to transcend regional
barriers and sociocultural differences. As a foil to this benign attitude towards
English in the Indian literary arena, it is also important to consider the case of
Malayalam speakers and their current attitudes to their mother tongue in the
light of the novels discussed here. Andrewskutty observes:
The socio-political changes to which the speech communities have been con-
tinuously subjected in Kerala have enabled the common man and even the
scholarly to rediscover Malayalam as a language useful for education, techno-
logy, mass media and political dialogue. At the same time, an average
Malayalee is aware of its limitations in a number of practical situations in life.
This awareness continues to help him, generally, in not becoming unneces-
sarily biased in its use [...]. The genuine willingness to consider language as a
tool for progress and stability makes a Malayalee a typical representative
competitor for survival in the twenty-first century. (Andrewskutty 1996: 31)
I would like to conclude with a similar observation which reflects the idea that
‘language is a tool’. I once had the privilege of hearing Arundhati Roy read at
the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1997. She was then asked by her interviewer,
Sigrid Löffler, about her “strange, new and creative type of English”. Roy
replied that “having been born and bred in a country where the British ruled
for over three hundred years,” it was quite natural that she should use a
variant of English that is often used in the state of Kerala, in South India. She
went on to emphasize the fact that language was a very personal tool that
could be adapted to the individual’s needs and concluded: “Language is the
skin of my thought.” No doubt many Indian and other non-Euro-American
writers, who are heirs to this legacy left by colonialism, would quite happily
agree.
404 C HRISTINE V OGT –W ILLIAMS

WORKS CITED
Alexander, Meena (1996). ‘Language and shame,’ in Alexander, The Shock of
Arrival (Boston MA: South End): 10–12.
Andrewskutty, A . P . (1996). ‘Globalisation and language: A case study of Malaya-
lam,’ South Asian Language Review 6: 29–36.
Bachmann–Medick, Doris (1997). Übersetzung als Repräsentation fremder Kul-
turen (Berlin: Erich Schmidt).
Devy, Ganesh N. (1990). ‘The multicultural context of Indian literature in English,’
in Crisis and Creativity in the New Literatures in English, ed. Geoffrey Davis &
Hena Maes–Jelinek (Cross/Cultures 1; Amsterdam & Atlanta GA: Rodopi): 345–
53.
Hastrup, Kirsten (1990). ‘The ethnographic presentation: A reinvention,’ Cultural
Anthropology 5: 45–61.
Jain, Jasbir, ed. (2000). Writers of the Indian Diaspora: Theory and Practice.
(Jaipur: Rawat).
Kala, C . V . (1977). ‘Hybrid conversational Malayalam: The role of English in the
Kerala social situation,’ Anthropological Linguistics 19: 265–73.
Misra, Jaishree (2000). Ancient Promises (Delhi: Penguin India).
Parameswaran, Uma (1998). ‘Home is where your feet are, and may your heart be
there too!’ in Jain (2000), 30–39.
—— (2000). ‘Kamala Markandaya,’ in Jain (2000), 31–93.
Roy, Arundhati (1997). The God of Small Things (London: Flamingo).
Stouck, David (1998). ‘“Hahnji” means “Yes, Sir”,’ in Jain (2000), 63–71.
Walsh, William (1990). Indian Literature in English (London & New York: Long-
man).
Wiemann, Dirk (1998). ‘Große Worte, kleine Dinge,’ Hard Times: Deutsch-
englische Zeitschrift 62: 2–5.

[
 N EW Z EALAND , C ANADA ,
THE P HILIPPINES :
E NGLISH IN MULTILINGUAL CONSTELLATIONS
AROUND THE P ACIFIC R IM
This page intentionally left blank
From “carefully modulated murmur”
to “not a place for sooks”
New Zealand Ways of Writing English

Peter H. Marsden
Aachen University of Technology

ABSTRACT
The dynamic of Aotearoa New Zealand’s political and economic re-orienta-
tion away from a geographically remote European ‘Home’ towards an align-
ment with the Pacific Rim may be seen to correlate with a growing cultural
self-confidence, which has among other things a clear sociolinguistic dimen-
sion. In many cases the linguistic changes in New Zealand English moni-
tored over the past decade by two landmark studies – Bell & Holmes (1990)
and Bell & Kuiper (2000) – have also found their expression in literary
works. The trajectory from Mansfield’s sub-Bloomsbury mode to Sargeson’s
Kiwi vernacular was dramatic enough but recent decades have seen the
curve grow even steeper. Against that background the essay attempts to
determine just how linguistically distinctive such ‘national’ voices may be
and to what extent they are instrumental in articulating a sense of cultural
identity.

T
HIS ESSAY TAKES AS ITS BASIC PREMISE the dynamic of
Aotearoa New Zealand’s political and economic re-orientation away
from a geographically remote European ‘Home’ towards an align-
ment with the Pacific Rim. That movement may in turn be seen to correlate
with a growing cultural self-confidence, which has among other things a clear
sociolinguistic dimension. The contention of the essay, reflected in a title
which pays tribute to Allan Bell and Janet Holmes’s pioneering collection of
essays on the subject: New Zealand Ways of Speaking English (1990), is that
408 P ETER H. M ARSDEN

the use of distinctive linguistic forms investigated and documented both in

that volume and in Allan Bell and Koenraad Kuiper’s companion landmark
study published at the end of the same decade: New Zealand English (2000)
can also be monitored in the written language and specifically in literary
texts.1
The “carefully modulated murmur” quoted in the title of this essay was
Frank Swinnerton’s characterization of Katherine Mansfield’s speech, drily
reported here by C. K. Stead:
There is sometimes argument about whether Katherine Mansfield, who spent
almost half of her short life in Europe, can really be called a New Zealand
writer.
There is another, apparently unrelated question: When did a distinct New
Zealand speech establish itself?
In his book The Georgian Literary Scene Frank Swinnerton describes
meeting Katherine Mansfield in 1912. He describes her as “one of the most
enchanting young women I had ever met”, but he mentions that she
“hummed or intoned her words [...] hardly parting her lips”. By this I
conclude that New Zealand English was established by 1912 and that
Katherine Mansfield spoke it.
Any variant of English can be spoken well or badly. Swinnerton was
charmed by Mansfield’s “carefully modulated murmur”. However, if you
don’t move your lips or your jaw much, some of the sound tends to go up into
the nasal cavities, and what happens to it there is seldom pleasant.
If, as I do, you speak New Zealand English, certain kinds of orotund
utterance are not possible without faking. It’s best to aim for clarity and con-
fidence, and hope for a little of Mansfield’s music as well.
(McCrum, Cran & MacNeil 1986: 300–301)2

1
The existence of those two collections of essays itself documents the remarkable
growth of New Zealand as a significant world centre of sociolinguistic work including
detailed research on the distinctiveness of the local variety, therein outstripping the
former dominance of work on what Burridge & Mulder (1998) by neat analogy term
“O Z E ” (Australian English), and frequently extending findings to wider linguistic and
sociolinguistic questions. On this, see, for instance, Bell & Kuiper’s own introductory
chapter: “In the 1990s research on the nature of NZE has attracted considerable
international interest, so that international sociolinguists are now relatively frequent
visitors to a country which is en route to almost nowhere else. It is notable that what
has created this interest is precisely work on the distinctiveness of NZE itself” (2000:
21; cf also 15,18).
2
This is taken from a personal communication sent by Stead to the authors of the
BBC TV series The Story of English. What Stead calls a “variant” might perhaps more
appropriately be termed a “variety” – but then Stead, though an authority on many
things, is not a linguist. His assumption that Swinnerton is characterizing a national
variety of English rather than Mansfield’s idiolect is unsubstantiated. The New Zea-
land novelist Marilyn Duckworth (2000: 275) refers to her fourth husband, John
New Zealand Ways of Writing English 409

The reference here is to the phase during which New Zealand was very much
that ‘other England’, a self-conscious R P -speaking, elocution-lessoned, duti-
ful colonial daughter of the established culture, as opposed to subversive, sub-
cultural Australian English, with its orientation towards Cockney or Irish
English.3 Ironically, though, the imitation was conspicuous enough to be
recognized by the true-born native speakers in the ‘Home’ country as some-
how not quite the genuine English article.4
Nowadays, while the parent country seems increasingly to be adopting E E
(Estuary English) as its prestige variant of choice, the gradual (linguistic as
well as general cultural) emancipation of Aotearoa New Zealand is being
voiced, in the full sense of the word. R P is ceasing to enjoy its long-estab-
lished prestige in New Zealand.5
Whereas Holmes & Bell had in their introduction (1990: 11) quoted Bell
almost a decade earlier raising “the interesting question of whether there is
any realistic hope of New Zealanders developing their own distinctive lin-
guistic identity, or whether a more likely scenario will see them falling both
culturally and linguistically ‘out of the British frying pan into the American
fire’” (1982: 254), Donn Bayard, an American linguist and anthropologist
long resident in, and observant of, New Zealand in general and of N Z E in
particular, concludes Bell & Kuiper’s 2000 volume with his aptly entitled
essay “The cultural cringe revisited: changes through time in Kiwi attitudes
towards accents,” quoting from a recent article in the (NZ) Listener:
Our actors [in 1980] mimicked Cockney or would-be Rada [Royal Academy
of Dramatic Arts] accents on stage, just as our newsreaders mimicked the
B B C , with small betrayals of enunciation that signalled to the careful English
listener that these people came from Somewhere Else, somewhere not quite
England but that wanted to be a pale, South Pacific shadow of it. Now, of
course, things are different. These days, our Pakeha children do not talk of

Batstone, as one who had “learned at drama school to lose his Kiwi vowels and project
his naturally big, deep voice.”
3
Apparently, for Mansfield’s husband – the very English John Middleton Murry –
the precise location and disposition of his “colonial” wife’s actual origins were so
unimportant that he was content to refer to her “hailing” from that “island”, in the
singular.
4
When I played a recording of Fred Dagg (from Donn Bayard: ‘Accents, attitudes
and Americanisms’ [1992]) to the conference audience, an Australian member of the
audience (Syd Harrex) commented that this could well have been an Australian
speaking.
5
According to a personal communication by Elizabeth Gordon (1997) cited in
Burridge & Mulder (1998: 8). In her radio broadcast “R.P. – or that colonial twang”
(1992) Gordon remarks that, on the other hand, the British now seem to be less
snobbish about, and more genuinely interested in, the way visiting New Zealanders
speak.
410 P ETER H. M ARSDEN

England as home; they know who they are and where they belong. (McGee
1997: 34 / Bayard 2000: 297)
Adding his own emphasis to the statement “Now, of course, things are dif-
ferent,” Bayard queries its validity and goes on to remark that:
it seems both definite and inevitable that the cringe toward NAm accents,
vocabulary etc. is here to stay. New Zealand, like the rest of the world, simply
cannot escape the all-pervasive media influence of pax Americana. In short, it
looks as if [the] answer [to Bell’s question] is clearly “yes!” from the stand-
point of attitudes toward accents; as Bell continues, “Perhaps a speech
community as small and homogeneous as New Zealand will regularly look
beyond itself for a prestige speech standard (1982: 255).” (Bayard 2000: 323)
In their contribution to Bell & Holmes, Elizabeth Gordon and Marcia Abell
had still been pretty sanguine:
When we compare present-day attitudes in general with those expressed in the
first part of [the twentieth] century by the school inspectors and other writers
concerned about speech, it would seem that there is now a much greater
acceptance of New Zealand speech. Perhaps this can be related to other
attitudes whereby Britain is no longer regarded by New Zealanders as
‘Home’, and there is a growing confidence in and acceptance of a distinct
New Zealand identity in the world. (1990: 35)
Looking at some of their examples illustrating the old attitudes, one would
have to admit that things have indeed changed since the days of the classic
arbiter elegantiae linguisticae Arnold Wall. Wall, the very English Professor
of English at Canterbury University and a prominent weekly radio broad-
caster on ‘The Queen’s English’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was the
author of New Zealand English: How it should be Spoken (1938). It would
appear remarkable that he did not add “if it should be spoken at all.” Indeed,
he did manage on at least one occasion to sink below his own high standards
and to mobilize unexpected reserves of tolerance: “I remember how, at the
outbreak of war in 1914, seeing that young students whose speech left much
to be desired yet died gloriously at Gallipoli, I told myself that I must never
criticize New Zealand speech unkindly” (quoted in Gordon & Abell 1990:
32). Seldom has the stiff upper lip quivered with more pathos.
On the other hand, though, even the briefest of glances at the Appendix to
Marianne Hundt’s 1998 study is hair-raising. Hundt reprints letters to the
editor of The Dominion documenting an ongoing argument sparked off by an
article by Janet Holmes on the new N Z “vowel shift” that raged for several
months in the autumn and winter of 1994–95. One might, of course, classify
such a virulent recrudescence of prescriptivism as a backlash against the pre-
vailing consensus and therefore indirect evidence of a greater degree of toler-
New Zealand Ways of Writing English 411

ance in the wider society – the newly marginalized with their backs to the
wall fighting a rearguard action against what they perceive as the forces of
political correctness. But it is unexpected all the same.
Mansfield’s New Zealand provenance may well, according to the Swin-
nerton-Stead view of things, have been recognizable on the phonological level
in her actual performance as a speaker, but it is scarcely detectable in her
work. Tony Deverson has pointed out that “It is not difficult to find New Zea-
land literary works which either in their entirety (especially shorter poems) or
for many pages at a stretch are written solely in the common core of inter-
national English, with nothing identifiably or uniquely New Zealand in their
language.” This would certainly be true of Mansfield, who is very sparing in
her local usages, one of the few examples being in “Her First Ball,” where
only the reference to Leila’s “sitting on the veranda listening to the baby owls
crying ‘More pork’ in the moonlight” indicates a New Zealand rather than
European setting (Deverson 1998: 395). As Deverson continues, “Some New
Zealand writers in the past appear to have deliberately eschewed a strong
local flavour in their language, often to avoid alienating the wider readership
implied by overseas publication” (396).6
When it is there, local linguistic flavour generally tends to manifest itself
on the phonological, and, even more, on the lexical plane. In grammatical
terms, divergence from the standard is rare. The accent is hard to render, and
most attempts to reproduce in type non-standard vocalizations of the common
core are feeble and ineffective. This is not so surprising in a world where not
only the authors of folk-linguistic books on dialects but even the compilers of
serious dictionaries sacrifice the accuracy and unequivocality of the I P A for
the supposed ‘reader-friendliness’ of amateur transcription. Whilst observing
that “many of the key features of the N Z accent cannot be conveyed at all by
respelling (the fronted long vowel of farm and last, for example),” Deverson
himself does not deviate from this common practice in his editorship of the
NZ Pocket Oxford.
On the other hand, non-standard (particularly lexical) forms of New Zea-
land English (N Z E ) are becoming increasingly accepted in New Zealand
itself, a country which in Emily Perkins’s (1998) memorable phrase is “not a

6
A section of ‘New Zealand Writers’ Week’, held in Dunedin in March 1993,
which was punningly entitled “Foreign rites: selling ourselves short”, pinpointed the
frequently outrageous, bizarre, unreasonable and simply unfair demands made by pro-
spective U S publishers on New Zealand fiction for settings, speech and cultural allu-
sions to be modified to make them familiar to their own potential home readership.
Such pressures frequently operate on a double standard. Whereas geisha and kimono
are considered part of general knowledge, moko and whakapapa are not.
412 P ETER H. M ARSDEN

place for sooks.”7 The significant context is her review in the British press of
The Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English (1997), edited by the late
Harry Orsman. Typically for discussions of such reference works, of which
there are by now quite a few, Perkins homes in on the slangy, citing such
colourful items as rip, shit or bust. There is, she observes, “a satisfaction in
imagining that a non-New Zealand reader might be sent to the dictionary to
decipher exactly what is meant by” that expression. Such lexicographical
schadenfreude sounds like a case of the Empire getting its linguistic own
back. Being exactly the kind of ignorant reader she envisages, I do not
begrudge Perkins her understandable satisfaction in the slightest, the more so
as what I found – in Elizabeth and Harry Orsman’s somewhat earlier New
Zealand Dictionary: Educational Edition (1994) – amply rewarded the chore
of consultation:
rip, shit and (or) bust
Said of a person or action having no consideration of the consequences or the
quality of the result; often as an exclamation or asseveration indicating a
vigorous (or over-vigorous) approach to a job, problem etc. Variously euphe-
mised as rip, tip or bust, or rip, split or bust, with the latter suggesting a wood-
splitting origin [possibly originating from a folk story: the reference is
probably to a desperate straining at stool for relief].
Who says New Zealanders can’t be orotund?
Perkins quotes Orsman reminding us in his introduction that: “Pioneer
immigrants had to cope with ‘bush’, ‘creek’ and ‘gully’ replacing ‘woods’,
‘brook’ and ‘vale’” and then adds her own comment: “The New Zealand
words sound harsher, wilder.” The chronicling of those harsher, wilder words
in a venerable Oxford tome must surely be seen as one of the more subtle
attempts to reverse the cultural cringe. Ironically enough, though, many pecu-
liarly British dialectal words for rural matters – a classic example being sook
itself, a call-word or pet name for a calf – were ‘transported’ to New Zealand
and preserved there as in aspic, to appear to subsequent generations as unique-
ly endemic New Zealandisms. This would also apply, for instance, to hogget
and to many other terms centering on and reflecting the country’s predomi-
nantly agricultural economy.
Perkins herself is perhaps one of the best exemplars of the way harsher,
wilder linguistic endemisms have found their way into the country’s litera-
ture, proving if nothing else that New Zealand women are not necessarily
sooks either. The following extracts from Not Her Real Name and Other

7
“(also sooky, sookie) col1oq. - n. 1 timid or bashful person; cry-baby; [sissy] 2
hand-reared calf” – definition from Deverson’s New Zealand Pocket Oxford Dic-
tionary (1997): “British dial. suck.”
New Zealand Ways of Writing English 413

Stories (1996) illustrate what the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Litera-
ture terms her “tellingly authentic dialogue” (1998), even though some of the
lexical items are by no means exclusively N Z E but, rather, reflect a fairly uni-
versal (and gender-neutral) current tendency to avoid the deletion of exple-
tives:
Things here are OK. I want to leave school but not allowed. Mum’s spazzing
out because I told her I quit smoking – stupid – then she found a packet in my
room. [...] Julie’s OK but she never wants to wag school to watch Prisoner.
[...]
Yuck Stiff O’Donnell is perving I better go. (13–14)
I’m moving in with my boyfriend, we’re in love you know, he’s asked me to
marry him ... Shit. Shit fuck. (31)
The original development towards making the earthy-tangy-racy colloquial
N Z E idiom more acceptable, if not yet quite respectable, in literature had
already been rung in during the 1930s and 1940s by Frank Sargeson, whose
murmuring, such as it was, was anything but carefully modulated and whose
seminal influence8 came to be seen widely as a viable alternative model to
Mansfield’s Home Counties gentility. The language of Sargeson’s works did
not merely include the Kiwi vernacular; it positively embraced and celebrated
it, albeit not uninfluenced by Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson. As
Deverson puts it,
In the 1930s and 40s the growth of a more realistic, down-to-earth fiction
embodying the voice of the ‘ordinary’, often down-at-heel New Zealander
brought much more of the characteristic Kiwi vocabulary into natural literary
use than previously, with Sargeson’s short stories setting a most influential
example. Sargeson’s colloquialism was still quite decorous, though, and it was
not until the more liberated 1960s and 70s that the writer who wished could
mine the more indelicate layers of NZ slang and vulgarism, now collected in
David McGill’s Dictionary of Kiwi Slang and Dinkum Kiwi Dictionary.
(1998: 397)9

8
This is an influence not just noted by academics and critics but even more
significantly testified to by Sargeson’s fellow-writers, sixteen of whom paid tribute to
him in Landfall (1953) on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday for having demonstrated
by his own example that “our manners and behaviour formed just as good a basis for
enduring literature as those of any other country.”
9
The trend is evidenced by a whole range of joke-linguistic booklets, probably
going back ultimately to Afferbeck Lauder’s classic Let Stalk Strine (1965), that deal
with “New Zealand-speak”, eg, Alex Buzo’s Kiwese: A Guide, a Ductionary, a
Shearing of Unsights (1994). Buzo is actually an Australian, hence doubtless a model
of detached objectivity. There is even a German spin-off on the market produced by
Claudia Daley and Martin Lutterjohann and entitled Kiwi-Slang: das Englisch
414 P ETER H. M ARSDEN

The trajectory from Mansfield’s sub-Bloomsbury mode to Sargeson’s Kiwi

vernacular was dramatic enough, but recent decades, as the case of Emily
Perkins shows, have seen the curve grow even steeper, and the kind of idiom
originally seen as man’s language – too coarse for Mansfield, just right for
Sargeson – has become widespread in literature as in everyday usage:
The New Zealand writer Gordon Slatter conveys some of the flavour of New
Zealand slang in his novel A Gun in My Hand [1959],10 in what he calls “the
jargoning of the working man at rest”: “I was shikkered to beat the band. He’s
a randy old coot always hanging about the cat’s bar. I been carryin ya all
morning. He was full on nines and I was full on jacks. He got on to me about
smoking in the shed. No sense bustin ya guts out. Blow that for a joke. Time
for a coupla draws before the bell goes. An it ran like a hairy goat an I did me
chips.” (McCrum, Cran & MacNeil 1986: 366)
The stringing together of individual instances might suggest a richer mixture
than is actually the case, but nevertheless this book does provide an abun-
dance of source material for students of New Zealand slang, the most promi-
nent among them being Harry Orsman himself. The blurb to the recently pub-
lished new edition of the novel corroborates its status as a linguistic goldmine:
“this story can be seen as a study in itself of the evolution of English language
usage in New Zealand – its slang and clichés, its borrowings and conver-
sions.” Actually, the publisher’s highlighting of the book’s – supposedly
conscious – status as linguistic treasure trove might itself be read as a sign of
the times, further reinforcing the thesis that New Zealand literature has come
to exhibit an increasing preoccupation with language over recent decades.
And Elizabeth Gordon, maintaining that Slatter has “a wonderful ear for the
everyday language of the 1940s and 50s,” substantiates her characterization of
the novel as “an excellent resource for New Zealand vernacular and slang” by
quoting the following passage:
Gone into partnership with old Snow. He’s a hard shot. Hard as the hobs of
hell. There’s money in it, boy. Ya gotta work, though. Yeah tis too. I been
busy as a one-armed paperhanger. Now listen, you jokers ... (Slatter 1959:
147)
The point is generalized by Deverson: “Literary works provide the lexico-
grapher with a wealth of citable evidence for the currency and meanings of
local expressions in all fields and styles. (Sargeson and Slatter are much

Neuseelands (1994). The title would seem to imply that N Z E is, by definition, slang –
a common fallacy.
10
Recently republished (in 1998) under a different title: The Returned Man.
Perhaps the original title was felt to be open to misunderstanding in times when public
attitudes to firearms have changed.
New Zealand Ways of Writing English 415

mined)” (1998: 397–98). And Perkins, referring to Orsman’s Dictionary and

its sources, remarks: “Literary fiction gets a fair suck of the sav. The quota-
tions range from Denis Glover to Robin Hyde, Allen Curnow to Katherine
Mansfield, Keri Hulme to Janet Frame.” Such comments viewing the novel as
a mine of linguistic data can, however, be misleading if one were to visualize
an entire work written in a homogeneous style. It is largely the dialogue of the
novel that reads thus. The first-person, present-tense narrative, on the other
hand, is couched in a fairly ‘neutral’ style, and does indeed incorporate
authorial – including metalinguistic! – comments such as “I don’t like these
new slangs”, by which the narrator in this case means the excessive knee-jerk
use of “hooray” (Slatter 1959: 152).
Still, there is nonetheless, it seems, a significant tendency for changes in
language use, in speech patterns and habits, to find expression in literary
works. But Deverson’s use of the verb ‘to mine’ implies a sort of hermeneutic
circle: linguists search literary works for examples of idiomatic usage, collo-
quialisms and slang; authors of literary works consult compendia of idiomatic
usage, colloquialisms and slang which are themselves repositories (and some-
times shrines) of literary usage. The self-consciousness of this process would
again seem significant and symptomatic of the post-Sargeson phase. Whereas
Mansfield seems to have consciously avoided local colour, many authors in
the wake of Sargeson have consciously sought it out.
Not the least interesting aspect of this phenomenon is that New Zealand
has produced an unusually large number of people interested in, and in
recording, language use, particularly New Zealand language use, whether real
or supposed. In proportion to its size and population, New Zealand has pro-
duced an unusually large number of lexicographers, some of whom have been
so influential at the power centres of English-language recording that they are
not universally known to be, let alone thought of and spoken of as, New
Zealanders. Britain, and England in particular, has quite a knack for absorbing
as her own those who speak the language but come from elsewhere. In litera-
ture, for instance, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw are cases in point.
In the field of lexicography Eric Partridge, for instance, is known as the expert
on slang in English but not many people seem to know that he was not an
Englishman. The former editor of the O E D , Robert Burchfield, is “one of
several distinguished expatriate New Zealand lexicographers”11 and there was
even a “notorious ‘New Zealand mafia’ in the Oxford University Press –

11
Winifred Bauer in the article on “Dictionaries (of English)” in the Oxford
Companion to New Zealand Literature (1998: 139).
416 P ETER H. M ARSDEN

Kenneth Sisam, John Mulgan, Dan Davin, Robert Burchfield, and others less
renowned. Oxford (in Oxford) counted almost as a New Zealand publisher.”12
According to Deverson,
Poets as well as fiction-writers in recent decades have exploited the whole
range of New Zealand expression. Perhaps the most spectacular example of
this was James K. Baxter, whose increasingly uninhibited use of language
often encompassed New Zealand terms, from the botanical to the colloquial
and the indigenous. Baxter’s broad Kiwi style is seen in lines such as “dark as
a dunny the under-runner” (“Never no more”) and “drunk / In Devonport on
Dally plonk” (“Letter to Sam Hunt”), and in references to various “Pig Island”
institutions (“The Plunket nurse ran in / to scissor off my valued foreskin”, in
“Letter to Robert Burns”). In short, New Zealandisms of all kinds, including
place and other proper names, are now part of a reader’s normal expectations
of New Zealand writing, though the words used are rarely more than a tiny
percentage of the writer’s total vocabulary. (1998: 397)
Deverson also goes on to comment on how “the growth of literary writing by
Maori, as one manifestation of the Maori cultural renaissance, has brought
both significantly more native vocabulary into literary use and greater accep-
tance of Maori as an integral part of the language of New Zealand literature”
(1998: 397). Hand in hand with that process has gone an increasing tendency
to use such indigenous terms naturally. It is taken for granted that the reader
can or should be able to understand the words without the crutches of a trans-
lation or glossary. But Maori writing in English now constitutes such a
significant proportion of Aotearoa New Zealand literature that this aspect of
the subject – the use of Maori words, phrases and concepts – demands sepa-
rate treatment in a depth and breadth which are not possible within the scope
of this essay.
All in all, I think it can be claimed that New Zealand writers today, whe-
ther Maori or Pakeha, have developed linguistically distinct “national” voices
which are instrumental in articulating a distinct cultural identity. Coming to a
similar conclusion, Deverson has pointed out that for all the common
elements that New Zealand English shares with other national varieties, there
does remain “a solid core of words with either Australasian or specific New
Zealand reference and use; diversity of places and peoples precludes total
linguistic uniformity, even in a ‘shrinking’ world. The words New Zealanders
use will continue to articulate their own separate national and regional identity
as well as their membership of a worldwide community of English speakers”
(1998: xxviii).

12
Dennis McEldowney in The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in
English (1988: 567). Cf also Bell & Kuiper’s introductory chapter (2000: 14).
New Zealand Ways of Writing English 417

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Wellington: Radio Replay. (Audiocassette: first broadcast May 1992 on
C O N C E R T F M , Radio New Zealand.)
—— (2000). ‘The cultural cringe revisited: Changes through time in Kiwi attitudes
towards accents,’ in Bell & Kuiper (2000). 297–324.
Bell, Allan (1982). ‘This isn’t the B B C : Colonialism in N Z English,’ Applied
Linguistics 3: 246–58.
——, & Janet Holmes, ed. (1990). New Zealand Ways of Speaking English (Well-
ington: Victoria UP).
——, & Koenraad Kuiper, ed. (2000). New Zealand English (Varieties of English
Around the World G25; Amsterdam & Philadelphia PA: John Benjamins).
Burridge, Kate, & Jean Mulder, ed. (1998). English in Australia and New Zealand:
An Introduction to its History, Structure, and Use (Oxford: Oxford UP).
Buzo, Alexander (1994). Kiwese: A Guide, a Ductionary, a Shearing of Unsights
(Port Melbourne, Victoria: Mandarin).
Daley, Claudia, & Martin Lutterjohann (1994). Kiwi-Slang: Das Englisch Neusee-
lands (Kauderwelsch 45; Bielefeld [Brackwede]: Peter Rump).
Deverson, Tony (1994). ‘New Zealand English past and present,’ introduction to
Orsman & Orsman (1994), vi–xxviii.
——, ed. (1997). The New Zealand Pocket Oxford Dictionary: Second Edition
(1986; Auckland: Oxford UP).
—— (1998). ‘New Zealand English (N Z E ),’ in Robinson & Wattie, 395–98.
Duckworth, Marilyn (2000). Camping on the Faultline (Auckland: Vintage).
Gordon, Elizabeth (1992). ‘R.P. – or that colonial twang,’ The Language Net 2.
Wellington: Radio Replay. (Audiocassette: first broadcast April 1992 on
C O N C E R T F M , Radio New Zealand.)
——, & M. Abell (1990). ‘“This objectionable colonial dialect”: Historical and con-
temporary attitudes to New Zealand speech,’ in Bell & Holmes (1990), 21–48.
Hundt, Marianne (1998). New Zealand English Grammar: Fact or Fiction? A
Corpus-Based Study in Morphosyntactic Variation (Varieties of English Around
the World G23; Amsterdam & Philadelphia PA: John Benjamins).
Lauder, Afferbeck (1965). Let Stalk Strine (Sydney: Ure Smith).
McCrum, Robert, William Cran & Robert MacNeil (1986). The Story of English
(London & Boston MA: Faber & Faber/ B B C ).
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Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm (Auck-
land: Oxford UP): 545–600.
McGee, Greg (1997). ‘Small screen, big picture,’ New Zealand Listener (31 May):
34–35.
McGill, David (nd). McGill’s Dictionary of Kiwi Slang, Catchphrases and Kiwi-
osities (Wellington: Silver Owl Press).
418 P ETER H. M ARSDEN

McLauchlan, Gordon (1997). ‘Definitions strictly on the cards’ [interview with

Harry Orsman on the eve of publication of the O D N Z E ], NZ Herald (12 July):
G2.
Mansfield, Katherine (1945). Collected Stories (London: Constable).
Orsman, Harry, ed. (1997). The Oxford Dictionary of New Zealand English
(O D N Z E ) (Auckland: Oxford UP).
——, & Des Hurley, comp. (1992). New Zealand Slang Dictionary (Auckland:
Reed).
Orsman, Elizabeth, & Harry Orsman, ed. (1994). The New Zealand Dictionary,
Educational Edition: A Dictionary of New Zealand Words and Phrases (Auck-
land: New House).
Perkins, Emily (1996). Not Her Real Name and Other Stories (Wellington: Victoria
UP).
—— (1998). ‘Word in a new chum’s ear’ [review of Orsman, ed. 1997],’Guardian
Weekly (27 September): 22.
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Literature (Auckland: Oxford UP).
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Auckland: New House).
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(Auckland: Oxford UP).
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rary; London: Dent).

[
Maori or English? The Politics of Language
in Patricia Grace’s Baby No-Eyes

Michelle Keown
University of Stirling

ABSTRACT
Since the early 1970s, when a landmark language survey revealed that the
Maori language was in serious danger of language death, a concerted effort
has been made by Maori and the New Zealand government to arrest the
decline of the language. Maori writer Patricia Grace has responded to recent
political debates regarding the future of the Maori language in her writing,
and she has also incorporated Maori vocabulary and grammatical patterns
into her fiction as a means by which to inscribe Maori cultural identity and
to challenge the univocal authority of English, the language of the British
colonizers (who annexed Aotearoa New Zealand in 1840). This essay ex-
plores a variety of linguistic strategies in Grace’s recent novel Baby No-Eyes
(1998) with reference to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories on the
subversive potential of bi- and polylingual textual practices.

T
H R O U G H O U T H E R L I T E R A R Y C A R E E R , the New Zealand
Maori writer Patricia Grace has demonstrated an acute awareness of
recent political debates regarding the future of the Maori language.
In the 1970s, when Grace’s early publications first appeared, a landmark lan-
guage survey revealed that Maori was in serious danger of language death,1
and since that period, a concerted effort has been made by Maori and the

1
The survey revealed that while most Maori still spoke their native language in the
early decades of the twentieth century, a huge reduction in speakers had taken place by
the 1970s: most native speakers were over thirty years of age, and only about two per
cent of children were growing up speaking Maori as a first language (McRae 1991: 2).
420 M ICHELLE K EOWN

government in order to arrest the decline of the language. Grace has reflected
on these efforts in some of her more recent fiction in particular,2 but her own
childhood experiences have also informed her literary responses to the
language debate. Born to a Maori father and Pakeha mother in 1937, at a time
when the use of the Maori language was prohibited in school grounds,
Patricia Grace grew up speaking English as her first language.3 During her
childhood in Wellington, New Zealand’s capital, she was the only Maori
student at the schools she attended, and she has discussed the way in which
she was made uncomfortably aware of her racial ‘difference’ from her fellow
students (Grace 1999: 65). Although she did not speak Maori at school or at
home as a rule, Grace did, however, learn some Maori language from her
father’s side of the family, and she points out that from her childhood, she has
incorporated Maori words and phrases into her ‘English sentences’:
My first language is English, and my knowledge of Maori is limited. When
I was a child playing with my cousins and interacting with my father’s
family, we spoke all the time in English, but in our English sentences we
sometimes used Maori words. (Grace 1999: 72)
This practice of code-switching between English and Maori is apparent
through-out Grace’s fiction, and is used as a marker of Maori cultural identity
particularly amongst middle-aged or older characters. In Grace’s earlier work,
Maori words and phrases are usually explicated for the benefit of non-Maori-
speaking readers, with the exception of those Maori words which are familiar
to most New Zealanders.4 In Grace’s first novel Mutuwhenua (1978), and in
her first three short-story collections,5 glossaries are provided at the end of the

2
See, for example, Grace’s 1992 novel Cousins, where one of the central characters
describes her involvement with kohanga reo (Maori language educational programmes
for children); and Baby No-Eyes (1998), where an elderly woman reminisces about the
way in which her cousin was repeatedly beaten and humiliated at school for speaking
Maori and for failing to master the English language.
3
As Ranginui Walker points out, in 1905 the Inspector of Native Schools instructed
teachers to encourage Maori children to speak English in school playgrounds, and this
injunction was rapidly “translated into a general prohibition of the Maori language
within school precincts.” For the next five decades, Walker reveals, the prohibition
“was in some instances enforced by corporal punishment” (Walker 1990: 147). Signi-
ficantly, Grace has pointed out that during her childhood, her Maori relatives – parti-
cularly the older ones – tended not to speak Maori in front of the children because it
was generally believed at the time that it was more advantageous to speak English
(Tausky 1991: 90).
4
These include words such as kai (food), whanau (family) and wharenui (cere-
monial meeting house).
5
These include Waiariki and other stories (1975), The Dream Sleepers and other
stories (1980), and The Electric City and other stories (1987).
The Politics of Language in Patricia Grace’s Baby-No-Eyes 421

text, but code-switching between English and Maori is also often elucidated
within the texts themselves.6
From the publication of Potiki in 1986, however, Grace has made far fewer
concessions to non-Maori-speaking readers. Potiki contains a higher propor-
tion of untranslated Maori than can be found in Grace’s earlier work, and her
decision not to include a glossary at the end of the novel has held for all sub-
sequent publications. Recent statements Grace has made on this subject make
it clear that her decision is a political one, based on the argument that writers
from ‘minority’ cultures should not have to ‘translate’ their cultures for the
benefit of other readers:
[Writers] of small population cultures must have the same freedom as other
writers to be true to what they know and true to who they are. I need to be
free to write in the way that I judge best for the stories I want to tell. I want
my writing to be able to stand with the rest of the writing of the world
without encumbrances such as glossaries, italics, footnotes, asides, sen-
tences in brackets, introductory notes, or explanatory paragraphs disguised
as plot [...] I do not italicize [sic] because the words are not “foreign” to me
or my characters and are indigenous to my country. (Grace 1999: 71, 72)
Grace’s choice of terminology in this excerpt is significant: the commonly
ued phrase ‘minority culture’ is here replaced with ‘small population culture’,
which escapes the marginalizing connotations of the former. Grace avoids
‘othering’ her language and culture by according the Maori language an
authoritative semiotic status within her narratives.
This type of cultural and linguistic reorientation is evident in other ways
within Grace’s work. For example, in addition to incorporating Maori words
and phrases into her writing, Grace also transfers Maori grammatical patterns
across into the spoken English used by her Maori characters. This process
may be interpreted in terms of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories on
the subversive potential of bi- and polylingual textual practices. In Kafka:
Toward a Minor Literature (1986), Deleuze and Guattari describe the liminal
status of the ‘minor’ writer, one who uses the language of a dominant culture
or class but ‘deterritorializes’ that majority language in a politically enabling
and subversive manner. Deleuze and Guattari argue that the ‘minor’ writer,
writing in a ‘major’ language,7 can still ‘make strange’ or defamiliarize that

6
This practice is particularly evident in Grace’s short story “The Dream,” for
example, in which characters constantly switch between Maori and English during
their conversations with one another (Collected Stories, 1994).
7
Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology reproduces the eurocentric assumptions
which Grace eschews in her preference for the phrase ‘small population cultures’ over
‘minority cultures’; throughout this essay I will therefore place the terms ‘major’ and
422 M ICHELLE K EOWN

language by allowing the ‘minor’ language – particularly its grammatical or

conceptual categories – to infiltrate the syntax of the ‘major’ language, allow-
ing ‘one function’ to be ‘played off against the other’ in order that ‘all the
degrees of territoriality and relative deterritorialization’ may be ‘played out’
(26). According to this reasoning, the ‘minority’ language therefore ‘inhabits’
or ‘occupies’ the dominant language, undermining any sense of univocal
authority. This formulation bears some resemblance to Julia Kristeva’s theory
on the ‘irruption’ of the semiotic (a pre-linguistic, somatic form of communi-
cation associated with the mother–child union) into the symbolic (the patri-
archal language-system).8
Deleuze and Guattari argue that in using these disruptive linguistic tech-
niques, the ‘minor’ writer’s objective is to shift the parameters of meaning in
a political act which serves to represent the interests of the writer’s own cul-
ture. They outline three identifying characteristics of ‘minor’ literature which
serve this objective: first, the ‘deterritorialization of language’ as described
above; secondly, ‘the connection of the individual to a political immediacy’;
and thirdly, ‘the collective assemblage of enunciation’ (18).
Such strategies are abundantly evident in Grace’s recent novel Baby No-
Eyes (1998). As I will demonstrate further below, an examination of a sample
of linguistic strategies and effects in the novel reveals a continual process of
linguistic deterritorialization, and Grace’s use of narrative polyphony enacts a
form of collective enunciation, fulfilling the third function which Deleuze and
Guattari identify.
There is also a clear political framework within the novel. The narrative is
structured around a central violent incident, based in fact, which Grace targets
as a locus of cross-cultural conflict. The early sections of the novel unfold
Grace’s fictionalized version of the event, describing a car accident in which a
young Maori man is killed, while his pregnant wife Te Paania survives the
collision but miscarries after being rushed to hospital. As Te Paania lies un-
conscious after her ordeal, her baby is thrown into a waste disposal bin by
staff and retrieved (with reluctance) after Maori relatives come to claim the
body. Hospital staff insist on performing an autopsy while the family waits;
when the body is finally returned, the child’s eyes are missing. The horrified

‘minor’ in inverted commas to indicate that I am using the terms advisedly and with
specific reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments.
8
In Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), Kristeva attributes to certain expressive
art forms the ability to evoke the semiotic by occupying an intermediary space which
challenges the binary, rational significatory structures of the symbolic. As I will
demonstrate further below, the ‘irruption’ of Maori grammatical patterns into the
syntax of Grace’s novel Baby No-Eyes operates in a similar manner, disrupting the
univocal authority of the English language, the dominant medium within the novel.
The Politics of Language in Patricia Grace’s Baby-No-Eyes 423

family members then request that the eyes be restored, and after further delays
the eyes are returned without explanation or apology in a small food jar inside
a supermarket bag. This grisly incident is based on a real event that occurred
at a New Zealand hospital in 1991, and, in her author’s note, Grace draws
attention to the factual basis of her narrative.9
Grace uses the incident as a focus for considering differences between
Maori and Pakeha attitudes to death and the body: the Pakeha hospital staff in
the novel, for example, describe and treat the child’s body with clinical
detachment,10 while the Maori characters are horrified and grieved by the
mutilation, particularly in view of the fact that the head is considered to be
tapu (sacred) in Maori culture.11 Te Paania, her lawyer friend Mahaki and
other family members become convinced that the conduct of the hospital staff
is based upon a racist disregard for Maori people and their culture. The hos-
pital’s failure to understand Maori attitudes to health and the body is repres-
ented as a microcosmic sample of a wider cultural hegemony, and Baby’s
mutilation generates a web of associations which extends through the various
levels of the narrative. Mahaki, for example, associates Baby’s disfigurement
with recent legal cases he has investigated regarding the desecration of
indigenous burial grounds by scientists and archaeologists wishing to study
the remains of grave occupants. He argues that like the tribal remains which
have been plundered by researchers, Baby’s body has been treated as “a free
resource like air and water” (188). Baby’s relatives also suspect that the hos-
pital staff removed the child’s eyes for experimental or profit purposes (84).

9
While Grace chooses not to name the hospital responsible for the incident, she has
freely discussed her feelings of shock and outrage after learning of the event through a
lawyer who was present at the hospital along with the bereaved family members, and
she states that she wrote Baby No-Eyes in order to ‘give that baby a life’. She points
out that in the ‘original occurrence’, the child’s eyes were not placed inside a food jar;
instead, they were ‘put directly’ into a supermarket bag by staff at the hospital (Keown
2000: 55). Grace’s strategy of crafting factual events into her fictional narratives has
been evident throughout her literary career. Three of her most recent novels, Potiki
(1986), Cousins (1992), and Baby No-Eyes (1998), incorporate or allegorize various
prominent land disputes of recent decades, for example, while many of her short
stories are based on personal experiences and observations (Hereniko 1999: 76).
10
The doctor who is sent out to speak to the family, for example, refers to the child
as a “body” and a “corpse”, offering to “arrange disposal” if the family so wishes (71).
11
After receiving the child’s eyes inside the food jar, Kura compares the conduct of
the hospital staff with pre-European cannibalistic ritual where, following violent
clashes between warring tribes, warriors sought to demean the foe “by the eating of a
heart or the swallowing of chiefly eyes, to destroy tapu by the cutting off of sacred
heads, to desecrate by making people into food” (162). Kura argues that Baby, too, has
been transformed “into food,” and reads the incident as a terrible insult to the family.
424 M ICHELLE K EOWN

These polemical claims are not, however, the sole source of political
energy in the novel: as I will argue further below, various narrative and lingu-
istic strategies which Grace deploys within the text also serve a political func-
tion in their challenge to the authority of the English language, which osten-
sibly functions as the ‘major language’ within the novel. There are four narra-
tors in the novel, including Te Paania herself, her second child Tawera, her
mother Kura, and Mahaki. Each narrator gives an account of Baby’s mutila-
tion and its aftermath in his /her own unique idiom, offering different perspec-
tives on the shared trauma of the event.
Other voices are incorporated into the text through the mediating perspec-
tives of these four central narrators, and certain of these voices enact the pro-
cess of linguistic deterritorialization as described above. The speech of
Mahaki’s grandfather, for example, offers a particularly striking example of
the way in which Grace transfers Maori grammatical and conceptual codes
across into the syntax of English, creating hybridized zones in which the two
languages meet and overlap. The old man’s first language is Maori, therefore
his English is ‘occupied’ and to some extent ordered by Maori grammatical
structures. The following speech is representative:
There was this old man Hori who talk to me about Anapuke. Well that hill,
that Anapuke, you don’t hardly talk about. It’s from the far, old times,
when there’s only the Maori [...] You go there it’s trouble – No pathway
and big swampland all around, and it’s far. Far to us childrens. (151)
The apparent grammatical irregularities in this passage may be accounted for
by examining some fundamental rules of Maori grammar. Tense, for ex-
ample, is expressed in Maori not through modification to the verb itself but
rather through the choice of preceding verbal particle. Thus s /he goes is ‘kei
te haere ia’ (particle marking present tense {kei te} + verb {haere} + pronoun
{ia}), while s /he went is ‘i haere ia’ (particle marking past tense {i} + verb
{haere} + pronoun {ia}). This grammatical rule may account for the fact that
verbal inflections for person, number and tense are lost in the old man’s
speech (hence, for example, “who talk” in the first sentence), although it
could also be argued that such ‘errors’ are characteristic of the speech of those
for whom English is a second language, whatever their cultural background.
More specifically, and particularly within the context of Maori oral narra-
tive, verbal particles marking particular tenses are often replaced by the non-
specific verbal particle ‘ka’, which precedes the verb but has no specific tense
value in itself, merely marking the phrase in which it occurs as verbal (Har-
low 1989: 202). Tense is judged from context; therefore if a speaker begins a
story in the past tense (i+ verb), s /he can subsequently mark all subsequent
verbs with ‘ka’ with the tacit understanding that the past tense is being
The Politics of Language in Patricia Grace’s Baby-No-Eyes 425

expressed. This may account for the fact that all the old man’s verbs except
the first “was” are in the present tense in the above extract, although it is clear
from the context that he is speaking of past events.
A further example of grammatical transference occurs in the old man’s
treatment of mass and count nouns, which are not differentiated in Maori. For
example, ‘a book’ and ‘some food’ would be expressed using the same in-
definite article ‘he’ (as in ‘he pukapuka’ and ‘he kai’), although in English
‘book’ is a count noun and ‘food’ is a mass noun. In the novel, the old man
demonstrates this practice when he expresses his suspicion that bio-
prospectors are desecrating a burial site on his ancestral land:
so that they can be known for putting a Maori in a sheep or rising a Maori
up from a dust. (186)
Here the count noun “sheep” and the mass noun “dust” are both preceded by
the indefinite article, indicating the old man’s reversion to Maori grammatical
patterns. Te Paania’s grandfather makes a similar ‘mistake’ as he speaks to Te
Paania about her dreams and fantasies that her dead child is still with her,
‘breathing in [her] ear’ (83). Te Paania’s grandfather’s explanation for Baby’s
posthumous presence is as follows:
She got to hang around for a while so we know she’s a mokopuna, not a
rubbish, not a kai. (83)
The final part of the sentence, which code-switches between English and
Maori, marks the mass noun “rubbish” with the indefinite article, as Mahaki’s
grandfather did with the mass noun “dust”. The last phrase “not a kai”, which
translates literally as ‘not a food’, evinces the same construction.
At times, Mahaki’s grandfather’s speech also mimics the rhythms of Maori
oratory, which, rather like the biblical language of the Old Testament, makes
frequent use of repetition for rhetorical purposes. During an impassioned
speech to Pakeha council workers investigating a land claim, for example, he
switches into this repetitive style:
I come from the ground I tell you. No need to disturb the ancestors to tell
you that. I come from the ground and the heavens. I come from the ground
and the heavens in the most most faraway place. I come from the ground
and the heavens in the longest longest time ago. I come from the ground
and the heavens from the place deep deep felt in my heart, and my tongue
come with me. (156)
As Mahaki points out, the old man’s oration is lost on the council workers;
they “[don’t] have a clue what he [is] going on about” (156). In this exchange,
Grace produces an estrangement effect: the old man’s speech is not intelli-
gible to the council staff, although both parties are speaking the same lan-
426 M ICHELLE K EOWN

guage. Grace creates a distinct expressive mode which blends Maori and
English vocabulary and grammatical patterns, and her use of Maori oral
rhetorical patterns subverts the univocal authority of the English language, the
dominant medium of written expression in the novel.
This intersection between written expression and oral enunciation occurs at
various moments throughout the novel, shifting the narrative mode from what
often appears to be conventional first-person ‘written’ narration into the realm
of oral immediacy. For example, chapter seven forms a section of Kura’s
share of the narrative, and most of the chapter (which recounts her role in the
recovery of Baby’s body) is conveyed through first-person narration. Partway
through the chapter, however, Kura suddenly switches to second person
narration, addressing not the reader, but members of her own family:
I was given this task while the others were occupied with Shane. I kept
watch by Te Paania until you, her family, arrived. When the moment was
right I talked to you about the baby. It was settled. You all agreed it was
my job to see to Baby. I made sure I wasn’t taking any rights away from
anyone. (59-60)
Here it becomes apparent that Kura is narrating for her family, not for the
reader; the immediacy of oral delivery disrupts the rhythms of the first-person
narration and simultaneously estranges the reader. Further, in the next chapter,
it becomes clear that these words are being (or have been) spoken at the joint
funeral ceremony for Baby and her father Shane, again creating a sense of
double – or in this case triple – enunciation. In this chapter, Te Paania reports
and repeats the very words Kura uses (or has used) when describing a Pakeha
doctor’s clinical attitude to Baby’s death, thereby creating a Chinese-box
effect and drawing the reader’s attention back to the previous chapter, where
Kura quoted the doctor’s dehumanizing references to Baby as “body” and
“corpse” (61).
Kura’s narrative seems therefore to exist in three dimensions: first, there
are the words on the page itself (in first person); secondly, there is the imme-
diacy of oral articulation as Kura’s mode of address shifts to second person;
and finally, Te Paania’s repetition ten pages later re-creates a separate arena
of immediate articulation as the words are spoken to the funeral congregation.
In this way the narrative structure of the novel mimetically represents the
Maori ritual of whaikorero, where different orators speak in turn on the
marae.12 The effect is startling and unsettling.

12
The marae is the ceremonial courtyard or space situated in front of the whare
whakairo (carved meeting house), a focal point in the traditional Maori community.
The Politics of Language in Patricia Grace’s Baby-No-Eyes 427

The clue to these strategies, however, is given early in the novel, where
Tawera reveals that the various ‘stories’ in the novel represent a collective
enunciation:
‘All right Mum,’ I said, ‘tell us about yourself and about this sister of mine
who has no eyes. Stolen? How come?’ ‘She died in an accident,’ Mum
said. ‘If we’re going to tell about the accident we’ll have to tell every-
thing.’ ‘We?’ ‘Gran Kura and me, and all of us in our different ways. You
too, you’ll have to do your part. It could take years.’ ‘All right Mum and
Gran Kura and all of us, let’s tell everything. Tell about ourselves, and
about this sister without eyes who’s already four years old. I know there’s
plenty of time but let’s get cracking.’ (19-20)
This passage is a cipher to the text in its entirety, which not only mimics the
tradition of whaikorero but also points towards Maori attitudes to history as a
dynamic process which is articulated and rearticulated from various indivi-
dual and tribal perspectives.13 In Grace’s novel, each speaker transforms
shared knowledge of particular historical details into an individual narrative;
Grace therefore moves beyond Bakhtinian polyphony and towards Deleuze
and Guattari’s theory of a collective enunciation: through its network of
linguistic strategies, the novel becomes a performative and communal enun-
ciative act.14
Grace’s use of multiple narrators therefore releases semiotic reverberations
which militate against any sense of a unitary, centralized form of representa-
tive authority, complementing the disruption of syntactic structures as enacted
by her intermixing of grammatical codes. Kristeva has suggested that this type
of linguistic experimentalism releases revolutionary energies, but she has
argued that the disruptive energies of the semiotic – which invades the syn-
tactic structures of the symbolic – and the practical manifestations of political
activism are almost always mutually exclusive:
The ramification of capitalist society makes it almost impossible for the signi-
fying process to attack material and social obstacles, objective constraints,
oppressive entities, and institutions directly. As a consequence, the signifying

13
The Maori writer Witi Ihimaera, for example, has commented on this pheno-
menon: “[There] is no such thing as History. Rather there are many histories and, even
within the Maori framework, this is acknowledged. Each iwi, each hapu has a
different, or, rather, tribal approach to their histories which are more parallel obser-
vations having parallel facts and parallel perceptions on the same factual events. These
are further informed by the holistic frameworks of the unreal as well as the real”
(Ihimaera 1991: 53–54).
14
Jean–Pierre Durix also discusses the concept of communal enunciation with
specific reference to Potiki (Durix 1997: 284).
428 M ICHELLE K EOWN

process comes to the fore in the matrix of enunciation, and, through it, radiates
toward the other components of the space of production. (Kristeva 1982: 105)
In Grace’s writing, however, the signifying process enacts both a direct and
subtextual attack upon material and social obstacles: in her exploration of
recent political and cultural developments in New Zealand race-relations poli-
tics (including language politics), for example, Grace critiques these obstacles
directly; however, one must look to Grace’s linguistic craft in order to locate
the political fulcrum of her work, as Elisabeth Köster suggests in her evalu-
ation of Potiki:
Silence has become a strategy of social domination, as silence engenders
silence. Rather than echoing the legacy of colonialism through self-negation,
the Maori must assert their ability as creators. [...] Potiki [...] posits that social
change must be stimulated through questioning the authority of colonial
discourse and producing testaments to resistance. (Köster 1993: 93)
Baby-No-Eyes, like Potiki, is a testament to resistance. If silence is compli-
city, Grace seeks to end the silence and to challenge the grammatical and
social structures which have enforced that silence. The interface between the
Maori and English languages in her writing becomes a site of resistance, an
expression of political awareness and anger; Grace subverts the representative
and constitutive power of the dominant English language by challenging, dis-
rupting and transcending its fundamental rules of construction.

WORKS CITED
Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, tr.
Dana Polan (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P).
Durix, Jean–Pierre (1997). ‘The breath of life / stories: Patricia Grace’s Potiki,’ in
The Contact and the Culmination: Essays in Honour of Hena Maes–Jelinek, ed.
Marc Delrez & Bénédicte Lédent (Liège: Université de Liège): 281–92.
Grace, Patricia (1975). Waiariki and other stories (Auckland: Longman Paul.
—— (1978). Mutuwhenua: The Moon Sleeps (Auckland: Longman Paul.
—— (1980). The Dream Sleepers and other stories (Auckland: Longman Paul.
—— (1986). Potiki (Auckland: Penguin.
—— (1987). The Electric City and other stories (Auckland: Penguin.
—— (1992). Cousins (Auckland: Penguin.
—— (1994). Collected Stories (Auckland: Penguin.
—— (1998). Baby No-Eyes (Auckland: Penguin.
—— (1999). ‘Influences on writing,’ in Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics,
and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko & Rob Wilson (Lanham:
Rowman and Littlefield): 65–73.
Harlow, Ray (1989). ‘Ka: The Maori injunctive,’ in V I C A L 1: Oceanic Languages:
Papers from the Fifth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics,
The Politics of Language in Patricia Grace’s Baby-No-Eyes 429

Auckland, New Zealand, 1988, ed. R . B . Harlow & R. Hooper (Auckland: Lin-
guistic Society of New Zealand): 197–210.
Hereniko, Vilsoni (1999). ‘An interview with Patricia Grace,’ in Inside Out: Litera-
ture, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko &
Rob Wilson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield): 75–83.
Ihimaera, Witi (1991). ‘A Maori perspective,’ Journal of New Zealand Literature 9:
53–54.
Keown, Michelle (2000). ‘An interview with Patricia Grace,’ Kunapipi 22.2: 54–63.
Köster, Elisabeth (1993). ‘Oral and literacy patterns in the novels of Patricia Grace,’
Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 10: 87–105.
Kristeva, Julia (1982). Revolution in Poetic Language, tr. Margaret Waller (New
York: Columbia UP).
McRae, Jane (1991). ‘Maori literature: A survey,’ in The Oxford History of New
Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm (Oxford: Oxford UP): 1–24.
Tausky, Thomas E. (1991). ‘Stories that show them who they are: An interview with
Patricia Grace,’ Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 6: 90–102.
Walker, Ranginui (1990). Ka whawhai tonu matou: Struggle Without End (Auck-
land: Penguin).

[
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Language, Humour and Ethnic Identity Marking
in New Zealand English

Janet Holmes, Maria Stubbe and Meredith Marra

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

ABSTRACT
Members of groups who are ‘out of power’ make use of a wide variety of
linguistic and pragmatic strategies to signal and assert their group identity,
and to subvert the pervasive influence of the dominant group. These range
from standard phonological and lexical variables, through to discursive
strategies such as code-mixing, code-switching, narrative and humour. This
essay focuses, first, on three salient linguistic features which systematically
serve to index Maori ethnicity: namely, the distinctive prosodic pattern
usually referred to as a syllable-timed rhythm, the use of the interactional
pragmatic particle eh, and the incorporation of Maori lexical items in pre-
dominantly English discourse. The essay then provides some more detailed
qualitative analyses of instances of a pragmatic strategy which occurred ex-
clusively, in the samples analysed, in interactions among Maori New
Zealanders: namely, the use of humour as a strategy for marking the ethnic
boundary between Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders. The data-base for the
analysis is drawn from the Wellington Spoken Corpus of New Zealand Eng-
lish and the Wellington Language in the Workplace Project Corpus. The
analysis supports the claim that linguistic and discursive strategies for mark-
ing group boundaries are particularly apparent in the interactions of minority
or subordinate groups.
432 J ANET H OLMES , M ARIA S TUBBE AND M EREDITH M ARRA

1. Introduction1

L
ANGUAGE IS AN IMPORTANT MEANS of indexing social
identities such as gender, ethnicity and professional identities. In
any interaction, participants unavoidably signal and dynamically
construct their complex social identities through their talk and behaviour.
Social identities are systematically produced through, and embedded in,
everyday forms of language use, and typically particular linguistic forms
‘index’ certain social meanings, including ethnic and gender identities (Ochs
1993). In other words, in everyday social interaction, speakers draw on parti-
cipants’ knowledge of the social significance of different linguistic forms to
‘construct’ a range of different social identities, and to express different facets
of a particular social identity in particular social contexts (see Holmes 1997a,
1998a).
Using intergroup theory (Tajfel & Turner 1979) as a basis for exploring
this notion, Meyerhoff and Niedzielski (1994) propose that individual identity
may be conceived as a complex of interacting aspects of different group or
social identities. In any interaction, we are continually constructing different
facets of our complex social identities. Hence, while all facets of an indivi-
dual’s social identity are potentially relevant resources, individuals tend to
present or focus on particular aspects of their social identity at different points
in particular interactions, sometimes emphasizing ethnicity (Gallois & Callan
1981), sometimes gender (eg, Meyerhoff 1996), sometimes power, authority
or professional status (eg, Holmes, Stubbe & Vine 1999), and sometimes
organizational or institutional identity (eg, Gioia & Thomas 1996).
Within New Zealand English, speakers’ resources for constructing dif-
ferent and complex social identities, for indexing Maori ethnicity or female
gender, for instance, include linguistic variants – prosodic, phonological and
lexical choices – as well as more pragmatic strategies and discursive re-
sources, such as code-mixing, code-switching, narrative and humour. These
resources can be used to consolidate and reinforce existing identity boun-
daries, locating a speaker as a paradigmatic exemplar of a particular group
(see, for example, Holmes 1997a, 1997b). Alternatively, they can be manipu-
lated to test or stretch the boundaries, and implicitly resist the normative ten-
dencies which such boundaries represent. In this essay, we first identify
salient features of sociolinguistic norms associated with a particular ethnic

1
This research was made possible by grants from the New Zealand Foundation for
Research, Science and Technology. We thank other members of the Language in the
Workplace Project (L W P ) team for assistance and support with transcription. We also
express our appreciation to those who allowed their interactions to be recorded and
analysed as part of the Wellington Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English
(W C S N Z E ) and L W P databases.
Language, Humour and Ethnic Marking in NZ English 433

identity in New Zealand English: namely, New Zealand Maori. The essay
focuses on ways in which Maori New Zealanders make use of sociolinguistic
and sociopragmatic resources to index their distinctive ethnicity, and in some
cases to indicate dissatisfaction with or resistance to the dominant societal
norms. In particular, the essay illustrates the function of humour as a
boundary-marking discourse strategy used especially by groups such as Maori
New Zealanders, who are in many social contexts ‘out of power’, in order to
signal their awareness of salient ethnic boundaries, and in some cases to
explicitly challenge the norms of the dominant group.2
The database for the analysis is drawn from the Wellington Spoken Corpus
of New Zealand English (W C S N Z E ), and the Wellington Language in the
Workplace Project (L W P ) Corpus. The W S C N Z E consists of one million
words of spoken New Zealand English collected in a wide range of social
contexts. The contributors include women and men from a range of age
groups and different social and ethnic backgrounds. (See Holmes, Vine &
Johnson 1998 for a detailed description).3 The L W P Corpus currently consists
of more than 1500 interactions collected from workplaces including govern-
ment departments, commercial organizations, small businesses and factories
(see Holmes 2000 for a detailed description).

2. Signalling ethnic identity in New Zealand English

2.1 Brief overview
Maori people are the indigenous people of New Zealand and constitute ap-
proximately 15% of the total population of 3.7 million (Statistics New Zea-
land 2001). Over the last ten years a considerable body of evidence has
accumulated describing features of a distinct ethnic variety of New Zealand
English, “Maori English”, and distinguishing it from the English of Pakeha
New Zealanders (see Bell 2000, Holmes 1997c, Stubbe 1999, Stubbe &
Holmes 2000).4 Many features which characterize Maori English (henceforth

2
While the main argument of this essay is original, we have drawn for exempli-
fication on material previously published in Holmes 1997c, Holmes & Hay 1997,
Stubbe & Holmes 2000, and Holmes & Marra forthcoming a).
3
The W C S Z E is available on C D - R O M with the Wellington Corpus of Written
New Zealand English from the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies,
Victoria University of Wellington. See http://www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/.
4
The label ‘Maori English’ is used here as a useful shorthand to refer to a con-
tinuum of distinctively Maori registers or styles characterized by a range of features
which vary according to the setting, the social and linguistic background of the parti-
cipants, and the relative importance of signalling one’s Maori identity in a given
speech context (see Benton 1991, Holmes 1997c). The term ‘Pakeha’ refers to New
Zealanders of European origin.
434 J ANET H OLMES , M ARIA S TUBBE AND M EREDITH M ARRA

ME) can be attributed to the influence of the Maori language, or to cultural dif-
ferences in Maori norms of discourse. For instance, there are several phono-
logical, prosodic, and syntactic features which are either distinctive to Maori
speakers, or which occur more frequently in Maori than in Pakeha speech
(Holmes 1997c), and thus acquire social significance as indices of ethnic
identity. Maori people in general also use Maori lexical items more frequently
than Pakeha do, often going well beyond the Maori vocabulary with which
most Pakeha speakers of N Z E are familiar (Benton 1991: 195, Deverson 1996,
Macalister 1999, Kennedy 2001). There are also paralinguistic features, such
as a high pitched giggle strongly associated especially with vernacular varieties
of M E , and exploited to great effect by the late comedian Billy T. James in his
constructions of an immediately recognisable stereotype of a rural Maori
male.5
In the area of discourse norms, there are also a number of features which
may distinguish Maori from Pakeha interaction. For example, Maori conver-
sationalists sometimes seem (from a Pakeha perspective) to leave a great deal
unstated, relying on implicit contextualization to convey their intended mean-
ing. Conversely, there seems to be an assumption that the listener is providing
an adequate response in many contexts by simply attending to what the speaker
is saying, as opposed to providing the explicitly supportive verbal feedback
which is the norm in Pakeha conversation (Stubbe 1998: 276). Finally, in this
brief summary, while ME and Maori discourse strategies are the most obvious
resources available for signalling Maori ethnicity, the Maori language itself
constitutes an additional resource for some. While proficiency in te reo Maori
is relatively limited, and sadly declining,6 those with even limited proficiency
tend to draw on this in appropriate, usually Maori, socio-cultural contexts. Use
of Maori words and phrases in English is therefore another resource for sig-
nalling Maori identity.

2.2 Three salient features of Maori English

In this section, we briefly describe just three features which are widely used
and very salient features of M E , and which serve as important resources for
signalling Maori ethnicity: first, a distinctive prosodic pattern typically labelled

5
The use of an exaggerated stereotype as a source of entertainment is a well-
attested feature of minority group humour (Ziv 1988, Davies 1990).
6
Data from the 1998 language survey conducted by the Maori Language Com-
mission (Ministry of Maori Development 1998) indicated that there are roughly 10,000
to 20,000 fluent speakers of Maori (representing approximately 4% of the total Maori
population over 16 years of age), compared to an estimated 70,000 in the 1970s. On
the five level scale used, the majority of Maori speakers (63.2%) were at the lowest
level of fluency.
Language, Humour and Ethnic Marking in NZ English 435

“syllable-timed” English, secondly the use of the pragmatic particle eh, and
thirdly, the incorporation of Maori vocabulary into predominantly English con-
versational discourse.

2.2.1 Syllable-timed English

One widely recognized and almost stereotypical feature of M E is a distinctive
prosodic pattern, generally described as a more “syllable-timed” rhythm,
which clearly distinguishes the most colloquial varieties of M E from the more
stress-timed Pakeha English (P E ). Using a sample from the W C S N Z E , Helen
Ainsworth and Janet Holmes analysed the speech of ten young Maori and ten
young Pakeha conversationalists (Holmes & Ainsworth 1996).7 The results
showed that all speakers used more reduced vowels than full vowels in un-
stressed syllables, but Maori speakers used considerably more full vowels
than Pakeha speakers overall (31.6% vs 18.6%), a statistically significant dif-
ference. This tendency to pronounce small grammatical words in unstressed
positions with full vowels more often than is customary in stress-timed Eng-
lish contributes to the impression that M E is more syllable-timed than P E .
Moreover, reassuringly, analysing the same data using more sophisticated
instrumental measurement techniques, and a more comprehensive measure of
the prosodies of syllable-timing, Warren (1998) confirmed the reliability of
this finding of prosodic difference in the English of the Maori and Pakeha
speakers.
Like many other features of M E , this feature may reflect the influence of
the Maori language. Maori is mora-timed – a rhythmic pattern which is more
similar to syllable timing than to stress timing.8 Further analysis of the
distribution of this feature suggested that, although it distinguished M E from
P E regardless of whether the Maori people speak te reo Maori, this distinctive
prosody tended to occur more often in the speech of those with proficiency in
Maori. So proficient Maori speakers used even higher levels of syllable-timed
English than those who spoke little or no Maori (39% vs 30% for young
Maori). However, and importantly, the levels of this feature in the speech of
Maori young people who were familiar with Maori, though not proficient in
the language, were significantly higher than in the speech of young Pakeha,
suggesting that it serves as a salient marker of Maori ethnic identity. Hence a

7
As a measure of syllable-timing, we counted the numbers of full for reduced
vowels in function words like of, to, for etc., a strategy suggested by Laurie Bauer (see
1994: 414). But also see Warren (1998) for a discussion and Buchanan (2000) for an
attempt to operationalize more sophisticated measures.
8
In particular, neither a mora-timed language nor a syllable-timed language are
characterized by vowel reduction, while speakers of prototypical stress-timed lan-
guages do reduce vowels in unstressed position.
436 J ANET H OLMES , M ARIA S TUBBE AND M EREDITH M ARRA

syllable-timed rhythm appears to be a sociolinguistically sensitive feature of

M E , varying in frequency according to the background of the speaker, and the
relative importance of signalling one’s Maori identity.9
The sample used in this analysis consisted of middle class well-educated
Maori people. The kind of M E used by such a group must be considered a
relatively standard variety. It seems likely that salient features occur in even
higher frequencies in more vernacular varieties of M E , and in more informal
Maori contexts (eg, in the marae kitchen, at the local pub in some areas,
etc).10 It also seems likely that such features will function more prominently
in contexts where language serves to mark social and ethnic boundaries, a
point we return to below.

2.2.2 The pragmatic tag ‘eh’

A number of recent studies have investigated the social and stylistic distribu-
tion in N Z E of addressee-oriented pragmatic devices such as you know (in
utterances such as she was really kind you know) and eh (in utterances such as
we’ve all gotta go one day eh) (see Bell 2000, Stubbe & Holmes 1995,
Meyerhoff 1994, Stubbe 1999).11 Although these forms have a common dis-
course function of establishing or maintaining solidarity or connection between
speaker and listener, their patterns of use can be shown to systematically index
a range of social categories and contextual factors, including ethnicity (Stubbe
& Holmes 2000: 253–54).
The first systematic investigation of the functions and distribution of eh ana-
lysed 245 instances in data from the Wellington Social Dialect Survey
(Holmes, Bell & Boyce 1991). Meyerhoff (1994) demonstrated significantly
different levels of use of this feature in the speech of Maori vs Pakeha: speci-
fically, in interviews with a person of the same gender and ethnicity, Maori
people (and especially males) used eh significantly more often than Pakeha
New Zealanders (average indices of 34.2 for Maori vs 7.4 for Pakeha).
This pattern has been confirmed by a number of subsequent studies. An
analysis of the distribution of eh in the conversation section of the W C S N Z E

9
This suggestion is supported by Bell’s detailed analysis (2000) of the English of
Duncan, a young man who used a relatively marked variety of vernacular Maori Eng-
lish and who was very aware of his Maori identity.
10
A marae is a traditional meeting area for Maori people which generally includes
a meeting house and a dining hall.
11
In N Z E , eh forms the nucleus of a tone unit, and typically occurs with falling
intonation, features which seem to distinguish it from eh in other English dialects (cf
Bailey 1983).
Language, Humour and Ethnic Marking in NZ English 437

indicated that the frequency index12 for eh for all Maori speakers was almost
three times as high as that for all Pakeha speakers (38 vs 13), while the index
score for the young Maori men in the corpus was 120, a very high rate for such
a perceptually salient variable (Stubbe and Holmes 2000: 254). Analysing a
carefully matched sample of conversational speech from young and middle-
aged contributors, Stubbe (1999) found that eh was nine times as frequent in
the speech of the Maori as the Pakeha speakers (average indices of 36 vs 4).
Again, the Maori males (and especially the young Maori males) used eh
significantly more often than any other group. This pattern was also evident in
Bell and Johnson’s (1997) detailed analysis of the speech of four inter-
viewees.
The prevalence of eh in the speech of Maori people may reflect the fact
that eh functions in English in a way similar to the way the particle ne
functions in Maori (W. Bauer 1997: 426). In other words this may be another
example of a feature whose origins can be traced to the Maori language,
although it is now extensively used by many New Zealanders, both Maori and
Pakeha, who have very varied amounts of contact with the Maori language. It
is, however, strongly associated with M E by many New Zealanders, and, as
Meyerhoff (1994) points out, it clearly functions as a marker of Maori ethnic
identity, especially for Maori men.

2.2.3 Maori lexical items in Maori English

It has been commonly observed that, regardless of proficiency in the Maori
language, Maori people generally use more lexical items from the Maori lan-
guage in English than do Pakeha. Analysis of the material in the Wellington
Corpus of Spoken New Zealand English (W C S N Z E ), for instance, clearly
shows that there is more Maori vocabulary in the Maori interactions than the
Pakeha. Kennedy (2001: 74) reports that “speakers who identified themselves
as having Maori ethnicity used over 17 Maori words per 1000 words when
speaking English, while Pakeha speakers used only two words of Maori
origin per 1000 words.” Moreover, Maori speakers not only use more Maori
word tokens overall, they also have a wider Maori vocabulary which they use
when speaking English. In other words, Pakeha tend to re-use a few Maori
words, whereas Maori people use a wider variety of Maori words in their

12
The total number of tokens of eh for each group was converted into frequency
index scores by calculating the rate of occurrence over 10,000 words, thus allowing
valid whole number comparisons, adjusted for differences in overall sample size. The
conversation section of the W C S N Z E includes 50,000 words from Maori speakers,
and 250,000 words from Pakeha speakers, approximately reflecting the ratio of Maori
to Pakeha in the New Zealand population (Stubbe & Holmes 2000: 278).
438 J ANET H OLMES , M ARIA S TUBBE AND M EREDITH M ARRA

English.13 This is even more true when speakers are using ME in a ‘Maori-
friendly’ context. However, for obvious methodological reasons relating to the
problem of adequate sample sizes and frequencies of occurrence, this is the
area where there has been least systematic study.
In one recent study, Bellett (1995) showed that New Zealanders who
identify as Maori tend to both know and (claim to) use a much higher number
of Maori words in the context of N Z E than those who identify as Pakeha or
European. Analysing written data, Jeanette King (1995) found that 8% of the
words used in newsletters addressed to those involved in Kohanga Reo
(Maori language pre-schools) were Maori lexical items. She also commented,
more anecdotally, that the pattern in the newsletters reflects “the spoken
English employed by whanau members in meetings and in social situations
outside the Kohanga” (1995: 52).14 She suggests that the use of a relatively
high proportion of Maori vocabulary, serves as a solidarity marker among
those with a commitment to the revitalization of Maori language and culture.
Bell & Johnson (1997) similarly report that Maori lexical items often co-
occurred with Maori topics along with clusters of eh in their interviews.
More extended sequences of code switching into Maori from English also
underline shared ethnicity, as well as indicating a supportive attitude towards
the Maori language itself (cf Jeanette King 1995). Obviously, this strategy is
dependent on some degree of proficiency in Maori. The following example
(from Stubbe & Holmes 2000: 255–56) provides a simple illustration of this
point. Two men are establishing common ground by talking about the rural
area where they lived as children (Maori words are in boldface).
Excerpt 1 15
Context:
Two middle-aged Maori male friends chatting in the home of one of them
1. Rew: Tikitiki /well we’re\ across the river from there and
2. Nga: /ae [‘yes’]\
3. Rew: if we wanted to go to Tikitiki we had to go

13
See Kennedy & Yamazaki (2000) for information on the frequency of Maori
words in the Wellington Written Corpus of New Zealand English.
14
‘Whanau’ is a Maori word for an extended family group (Metge 1995: 16), but it
is used here to refer specifically to the socially cohesive group of people involved in
running the Maori pre-school.
15
All names used in examples have been changed to protect informants’ identities.
We have done minor editing of original transcripts in places for ease of reading, eg,
overlapping speech and vocalizations are not indicated where they are not relevant to
the point being made. A series of dots indicates that a section of the interaction has
been omitted. See Appendix for transcription conventions.
Language, Humour and Ethnic Marking in NZ English 439

right round to Ruatoria

4. and back out again
5. Nga: that’s right yeah oh well we actually went
right around to Ruatoria
6. and down we didn’t cross across ++
7. te awa rere haere te- too koutou taniwha i teeraa waa
8. [‘the river flowed over the taniwha
(legendary monster residing in deep water) there’]
9. Rew: in winter eh
10. Nga: mo te wai- tino hohonu te wai
11. [‘because of the water - the water was very deep’]
The use of Maori words and phrases by Ngata (lines 2, 7, 10) when replying to
Rewi’s comments carries very strong positive affect, much more than would
be the case if the same meanings had been expressed in English. Rewi’s use of
eh (line 9) in his response also serves to signal Maori ethnicity, as noted above,
and strengthens the sense of solidarity or connection created by Ngata’s use of
Maori (Stubbe 1998: 279).
Nicknames and kinship-related terms deriving from Maori cultural norms
are additional ways in which Maori ethnic identity may be signalled lexically.
Terms of address such as mate, bro, sis, cuz, nanny, aunty, and uncle are fre-
quent in conversations in relaxed social contexts between Maori family and
friends, and serve to index Maori identity by reflecting Maori language and
cultural norms within N Z E (see Johnston & Robertson 1993: 122).
Studies of M E have established a wide range of features which in com-
bination characterize this variety, and distinguish it from P E in New Zealand.
For the most part the two varieties are distinguished predominantly by the
relative frequency of particular features rather than by distinguishing features
which occur only in one variety or the other. In this section, we have briefly
described three features which are arguably among the most distinctive and
salient features of M E . For Maori who wish to assert their distinctive ethni-
city, these features are obviously particularly important linguistic resources.16
In the next section, we examine the way Maori New Zealanders use socio-
pragmatic resources, and particularly humour, to construct their ethnic iden-
tity as ‘different’ from the majority group, and to indicate areas of resistance
to dominant Pakeha norms.

16
Interestingly, however, these features seem to be precisely those which are most
obviously being ‘colonized’: ie, gradually adopted by Pakeha who mix more fre-
quently with Maori in Maori contexts and subsequently gradually integrated into many
other varieties of Pakeha New Zealand English.
440 J ANET H OLMES , M ARIA S TUBBE AND M EREDITH M ARRA

3. Humour as a strategy for constructing social identity

While researchers typically draw attention to the complexity and fuzziness of
social concepts such as ethnicity and gender (Bayard 1995, Eckert 1989), ana-
lysis of everyday talk indicates that conversationalists frequently draw sharp
social boundaries between groups using criteria which become salient in the
course of a specific interaction. Humour provides a useful means of iden-
tifying such criteria because it functions as a source of insight into cultural
attitudes and values (eg, Chiaro 1992). What is considered amusing is affec-
ted by cultural values; different cultural backgrounds and beliefs influence the
kinds of things perceived as humorous. In the following excerpt two young
Maori men make just this point.
Excerpt 2
Context:
Two young Maori male friends chatting in their workplace over lunch
1. Mike: ’cause the other thing– you’ve ever found
like you talk to a Pakeha
2. and you trying to tell a joke and they don’t get it
3. Kingi: yeah
4. Mike: but when you talk to a Maori /they do\
5. Kingi: /and they get it\ yeah yeah
6. Mike: yeah
7. Kingi: and that- the whole way you tell your jokes as well
8. Mike: YEAH [in a high pitched voice]: it’s how it goes man:
9. and there’s like yeah still a lot of things like that
These young men here signal their awareness that differences in the use of
English by Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders extend beyond linguistic
features such as the use of Maori vocabulary items. They suggest that Maori
humour is fundamentally different from Pakeha, both in content (what the
different groups find amusing or “get”) and style (“the whole way you tell
your jokes”).
Many earlier humour researchers have noted that humour performs impor-
tant cultural functions, such as enforcing social norms and expressing cultural
identity (eg. Limon 1977, O’Quin & Aronoff 1981, Duncan 1985, Pratt
1998). It is a readily available resource which many of the Maori contributors
to our corpora draw on in order to construct themselves as ethnically different
from mainstream Pakeha. One very specific strategy adopted for this purpose
is humour which focusses on, identifies and emphasizes ethnic group boun-
daries. Minority groups are generally much more sensitive to areas of differ-
ence between their norms and those of other groups than are those in power.
Language, Humour and Ethnic Marking in NZ English 441

Powerful groups take their norms for granted; they are ‘given’, assumed, un-
questioned and even unconscious. Members of minority groups are generally
much more attuned to areas of cultural difference between their own patterns
of interaction and those of the majority group. In many areas they move
between different norms on a daily basis, and, although they may not often
consciously reflect on these regular adjustments, they can be brought into
focus by particular circumstances or for particular purposes such as humour.
The use of humour by Maori people to indicate awareness of, and even to
draw attention to, their ethnic distinctiveness was very apparent in our cor-
pora. Three examples will serve to illustrate this point. In the first example
(Excerpt 3), two Maori males are discussing the American film Geronimo,
and wondering why it had a particularly short season in New Zealand. Kingi
points out that there were very few “whities” in the film, and suggests this is
the reason that the New Zealand public had not liked it. The discussion re-
flects the market reality that New Zealanders are numerically and econo-
mically dominant, and thus more influential in determining what gets shown
at the cinema.
Excerpt 3 17
Context:
Conversation between two young Maori male friends in their workplace over
lunch
1. Mike: yeah it’s good I don’t know why they stopped it eh
2. I suppose people just didn’t (like) Geronimo big deal
3. Kingi: well -pparently it didn’t have enough whities in it /[laughs]\
4. Mike: /[laughs]\
5. Kingi: no lead role eh
6. Mike: [laughs] [drawls] yeah
7. Kingi: what can you do
8. Mike: well that’s true
This excerpt clearly draws a boundary between mainstream ‘white’ New Zea-
landers and Maori New Zealanders. The humour emerges gradually in the
form of ironic comments which reflect and emphasize cultural difference, and
reinforce the distance between these Maori men and the whities, as they label
them, a semantic category with a clearly pejorative meaning (cf ‘white
people’ or ‘Europeans’). Speculating on why the film Geronimo was taken off

17
The example is taken from Holmes & Hay (1997: 140), which provides a distri-
butional analysis of humour in Maori and Pakeha conversation, and a fuller discussion
of the cultural context. The more detailed pragmatic analysis is taken from Holmes &
Marra (forthcoming a). See p. 10.
442 J ANET H OLMES , M ARIA S TUBBE AND M EREDITH M ARRA

the circuit so early, Mike suggests (line 2) that people just didn’t like the lead
character Geronimo. While theoretically there are many reasons why a char-
acter might be unlikeable, Kingi provides an explanation in terms of ethnic
group or even race (line 3), forcing a re-interpretation of Mike’s term people
as referring to ‘other’: ie, in this context non-Maori: the people who did not
like the film must be those who considered that their own ethnic group was
inadequately represented. This is a politically charged suggestion, since the
issue of who constitute the people of New Zealand is the subject of ongoing
debate in the country. The irony derives from the fact that in New Zealand it
is Maori who are under-represented in almost every prestigious sphere. Mike
laughs and Kingi pushes the point further, suggesting whities do not like films
where the lead is not a white person (line 5). The irony is maintained with the
nicely ambiguous, mock-despair comment what can you do? (line 7), and the
equally sarcastically expressed ‘polite’ response, well that’s true, utterances
which mimic the kinds of comments whities might make about the infiltration
of dark faces into white domains, whilst also at another level reflecting Maori
exasperation at the short run of a film with which their ethnic group could
identify. Irony serves here as an effective strategy for drawing the boundary
between Maori and Pakeha New Zealanders. It is supported by the skilful use
of distancing devices, such as the choice of the pejorative label whities and
the redefinition of people to mean ‘non-Maori’ in this context, as well as the
sarcastic tone of voice which becomes particularly overt in the final two lines
(7–8). The resistance to marginalization expressed in the content of this
excerpt is reinforced by the use of salient features of vernacular M E , includ-
ing distinctive pronunciation, syllable-timed rhythms, and two instances of
the pragmatic tag eh (lines 1, 5).
The second example of ethnic-identity-marking humour is taken from a
workplace meeting between two Maori men who work for a government
department (Holmes & Marra 2002). The two men are on very good terms, as
indicated by the relaxed and informal style of their interaction. In Excerpt 4,
they laugh at the problems caused for the white dominant bureaucracy be-
cause Vince signs his names in variable form on different occasions.
Excerpt 4
Context:
Meeting of programme assessment review team
1. Vin: I’ve never had a standard signature eh bro
2. and ( ) got into trouble recently [whispers]: fuck:
3. Aid: over your /signature\
4. Vin: /I think it\ was er
5. Aid: cheques and stuff?
Language, Humour and Ethnic Marking in NZ English 443

6. Vin: [laughs]: yeah: [laughs] [laughs]:

7. it’s just on everything: your passports and bullshit like that
8. Aid: well that’s hoohaa [‘useless, pesky’] paperwork eh
Shared Maori identity is asserted in almost every aspect of this short excerpt.
Ethnicity is clearly linguistically signalled in the M E pronunciation of sounds,
the syllable-timed prosody, by the use of the tag eh (lines 1,8) and the address
term bro (line 1), which is much more frequent in the speech of young Maori
than Pakeha New Zealanders. It is most explicit in the choice of the very
Maori term hoohaa (line 8) to express irritation with Pakeha bureaucracy.
End tags are another discourse feature characterizing relaxed colloquial
conversation. The end tag and stuff (line 5) has a dismissive effect: the
speaker indicates that he considers such concerns unimportant. This dero-
gatory tone is picked up and emphasized by Vince in his end tag and bullshit
like that (line 7). The subversive humour constructs a bond of ethnic solidarity
between the two Maori men, while simultaneously undermining the status and
institutional authority of the dominant group. The two men collude in con-
structing a picture of themselves as victims of excessive bureaucracy and
paperwork: they position themselves very clearly on one side of the fence
with Pakeha bureaucrats on the other. Moreover, the excessive demands of
the Pakeha bureaucracy and the attendant paperwork it generates is an on-
going and recurring source of humour in this team; this short excerpt is just
one example of many where this recurring topic constructs team solidarity
and cohesion while clearly indexing Maori ethnic identity.
Excerpt 4 also illustrates how humour may serve to express the tensions
which many Maori feel in “Pakeha” work domains. There are numerous ex-
amples in our corpora of conversations between Maori who work in govern-
ment departments or institutions, expressing frustration at the extent to which
majority group: ie, Pakeha, norms go unquestioned in their workplaces. They
identify a range of problems including incomprehension of what is perceived
as Pakeha bureaucratic jargon and red tape, lack of understanding by Pakeha
authorities of Maori ways of resolving problems and disagreements, and com-
plications caused by Maori using unorthodox means to achieve their objec-
tives – themes which are also evident in excerpts 5 and 6.
The third example of ethnic identity marking through humour nicely illus-
trates the latter point, while also demonstrating again the effectiveness of
humour as a subversive strategy, challenging and undermining out-group
norms and values (cf Coser 1960, Holmes & Marra 2002). In Éxcerpt 5, two
young Maori men are planning a haangi, a traditional Maori method of cook-
ing over hot stones in a pit in the ground for which they need a fire permit
from the city council (Holmes 1998b). Hinemoa is a relative who works for
the council, and this interaction fantasizes an exchange with her which first
444 J ANET H OLMES , M ARIA S TUBBE AND M EREDITH M ARRA

invites her to the meal, and then asks her to provide the fire permit required to
cook the food.
Excerpt 5

Context:
Conversation between two young Maori male friends at the home of one of
them [Earlier in this essay, Matt and Hone are referred to as Mike and Kingi.
Our choice of pseudonyms is consistent with a previous published analysis of
this example – see note 2.]
1. Hone: cos you might have to get a permit eh from the council eh
2. Mat: city council
3. Hone: yeah
4. Mat: /[laughs]\
5. Hone: /hello Hinemoa\
6. Mat: /[funny voice]: hello:\
7. Hone: /knock knock knock\
8. Mat: /[laughs]\
9. Hone: /[laughs]\ /yes we’ve\ just got this haangi [glossed above]
10. Mat: /(yeah)\
11. Hone: you want to come around /to a haangi\
12. Mat: /yeah yeah yeah\
13. Hone: want to come round to a haangi
14. Mat: /(yeah perfect)\
15. Hone: /two\ things [laughs]
16. Mat: [laughs]
17. Hone: and now here’s the application for a fire
18. Mat: yeah
19. Hone: sign here
Kinship or extended family relationships are central to the Maori lifestyle and
patterns of interaction, and Maori people typically place a very high value on
such relationships, and take very seriously the mutual obligations these entail
(Metge 1995). The notion of allowing bureaucratic rules to over-ride social,
and especially kinship, commitments is an alien and distinctively Pakeha one
from this perspective. This is one basis for the humour in this excerpt which
turns on differences between Maori and Pakeha ways of doing things, includ-
ing how food is cooked, and how you can sometimes ‘manage’ or even mani-
pulate the Pakeha system by means of Maori relatives who have infiltrated it.
In fantasizing the duping of their cousin, Hinemoa, these young Maori men
distance themselves from the Pakeha system within which she holds her re-
spectable well-paid position. The example highlights the clear boundary
Language, Humour and Ethnic Marking in NZ English 445

between the behaviours associated with her formal job as a council clerk
within the Pakeha system, and those appropriate to her role as a Maori kins-
woman. It is evident from the previous section of the conversation that Hone
is very fond of his young cousin, and enjoys her company. Hence, she would
undoubtedly be welcome at the haangi regardless of her powers at the council
office. However, it is equally clear that in such a situation she is expected to
recognize an obligation to assist her kinsman if she can. There is undoubtedly
an element of subversion, of sending up ‘respectable’ Pakeha values.
Linguistically, this excerpt is a prime example of vernacular M E (Holmes
1997c). Stereotypical Maori ethnicity is strongly and deliberately indexed in
the distinctively M E pronunciations, the exaggerated syllable-timed prosody
and sing-song intonation, the high pitched laughter, and the repetition (lines
11, 13) – all features associated with the speech of the comic ‘no-hoper’ cari-
catured by the comedian Billy T. James, and reinforced by the tag eh (line 1),
and the Maori lexical item haangi (lines 9, 11, 13). The status of this fanta-
sized exchange as a caricature of a conversation for humorous effect is under-
lined by Hone’s use of the repeated “knock knock knock”, echoing the
formulaic opening to a canned joke.
This joking exchange could also be interpreted as indicating the rather
complex attitude of these young men to their young Maori female relative
who is working in a ‘respectable’ job within the Pakeha system. It has been
argued that female influence, though relatively covert, is nonetheless perva-
sive and highly valued in Maoridom (Metge 1995: 91–98). Nevertheless,
male–female relationships are still very traditional, with males dominating
most overtly authoritative and statusful positions and formal speech events,
while females generally take a less prominent role. In the wider Pakeha-
dominated social context, however, Hinemoa has status deriving from her job.
Thus she can also be regarded as a legitimate target of their subversive
humour.
As a response to sociocultural differences, then, humour can be used to
reinforce group norms and values by expressing in-group solidarity and
making explicit the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. As a response to
Pakeha hegemony, humour is a powerful strategy for subverting norms, derid-
ing ethnocentric attitudes, and sending up ‘proper’ or ‘correct’ procedures. It
is also a means of expressing the tension between roles, alluded to in Excerpt
5, which many Maori experience in some aspects of their work within Pakeha
organizations and institutions. In the following, and final, excerpt (6.1–6.2),
446 J ANET H OLMES , M ARIA S TUBBE AND M EREDITH M ARRA

taken from our workplace database, this potential role conflict gradually
emerges as a focus of discussion.18
Excerpt 6 is from another meeting between the advisory staff of the
government agency illustrated in excerpt 4. While the men are clearly in-
volved in a serious task, they adopt an informal style and humorous tone
which expresses their friendship, as well as indexing and foregrounding the
solidarity associated with their shared ethnicity. Excerpt 6.1 is from an early
phase of the meeting.
Excerpt 6.1
Context:
Two Maori men in their workplace evaluating funding proposals
1. Vin: um all this stuff is in Maori bro
2. Aid: oh yeah I did read it I did read it
3. Vin: [laughs] I’m gonna take /photo\copies of that
4. Aid: /yeah\……….
5. Aid: /you can (rip) them out eh\
6. like for the capability stuff and + recording
7. Vin: you’re a prof bro
8. Aid: yeah
9. Vin: yeah + evidence of application ….
10. + performance test (re ) examination and stuff
11. they even do that I don’t know how they do it +
12. be pretty amazing to actually visit there eh
13. and see how they do stuff eh
The humour in this excerpt revolves around the underlying assumption
(widely held by the majority group in New Zealand society) that Maori are
generally not good at doing their homework or at meeting bureaucratic de-
mands. The relevant stereotype is the lazy happy-go-lucky Maori no-hoper
character mentioned above. Ironically adopting this perspective, Aidan asser-
tively claims to have read the material (line 2) thus challenging the stereotype
(with the fact that the material was in Maori rendering his claim even more
impressive). Pursuing this humorous key further, Vince’s comment you’re a
prof bro is doubly amusing. First, Maori are typically not expected to be
experts in such areas, but, secondly, the advice which elicits this comment is
hardly worth Aidan’s designation as a prof, as the sardonic alignment of the
words prof and bro emphasizes. The humour is based on the Pakeha stereo-

18
This excerpt, and the points discussed in relation to it, are taken from a much
longer interaction which is analysed more thoroughly in Stubbe & Holmes (2000) in
order to exemplify the complexities of Maori interactional patterns of discourse.
Language, Humour and Ethnic Marking in NZ English 447

type of Maori, and emphasizes the fact that the views of these hard-working
men about Maori capabilities are very different (a point further underlined by
the comment I don’t know how they do it, line 11, in relation to the work
produced by those whose proposal they are assessing). The humour exploits
their knowledge of the very different views of Maori capabilities held by
Pakeha and Maori, while subverting and challenging the assumptions which
fuel such views.
These two men also index their ethnicity at other linguistic and discoursal
levels. The use of the colloquial expressions, eg, stuff (lines 1, 6, 10, 13)
rather than the selection of more precise terms, the joking tone and laughter,
the informal discourse markers, eg, like (line 6), and the Maori-indexical
forms eh (lines 5, 12, 13) and bro (line 1), all have the effect of constructing
shared ethnicity, while also ameliorating the ‘technical’ atmosphere, which is
particularly associated with the Pakeha world for many Maori.
Interestingly, at a later point in the interaction, the conflicts and tensions
which are exacerbated by such an atmosphere, and of which many Maori
working within a government institution are highly conscious, emerge as a
topic of discussion. Excerpt 6.2 is one from many possible examples where
the two men explicitly articulate the problems of being positioned as
‘insiders’ in an institution where Pakeha norms and values predominate and
where they are dealing with material submitted by Maori people who are
trying to play the Pakeha game – a strategy they recognize only too well from
their own personal experience.
Excerpt 6.2
1. Aid: the other thing about these guys is that they + write +
2. they’re tuuturu Maaori [‘knowledgeable in things Maori’]
3. but they’re always trying to- /still prepared\ to be Pakeha=
4. Vin: /be Pakeha\
5. Aid: =/so when they\ put their stuff in like this they=
6. Vin: /and I hate it\
7. Aid: =put they try and put it in what we want to read /you know\
8. Vin: /yeah and I\ reckon it’s just bullshit but you know then again
9. /I I can can understand why\
10. Aid: /but you can understand why\
11. Vin: ‘cause I’ve /done\ it myself
12. Aid: /yeah\ ++ yeah
13. Vin: you know but also-
14. Aid: we do it /all the time\
15. Vin: /I was wondering\ whether they try to mask what they can’t
16. [laughs] do er Pakeha fashion? you know
17. like mask it by using all this upbeat language
18. because they haven’t actually worked out how they’re going to do it
448 J ANET H OLMES , M ARIA S TUBBE AND M EREDITH M ARRA

19. or the strategies they’ve got in place or the methods

20. and all that sort of stuff?
Again the rapport of these two men is very evident as they repeat, echo and
closely paraphrase each other’s contributions to the jointly constructed dis-
course. The humour in lines 15–20 is aimed at Maori who adopt what Vince
identifies as typically Pakeha strategies of ‘bullshitting’ (to use a very New
Zealand way of describing the ‘masking’ behaviour Vince describes). Again
the contrast between Maori and Pakeha ways of doing things lies at the heart
of the humour, and Vince lines himself up very clearly on the Maori side of
the divide.
As summarized in Stubbe and Holmes (2000: 268), this perceived conflict
between their professional and Maori identities also provides another reason
for adopting a markedly Maori variety of English and informal speech style in
their work interaction – a counter to their official role as gatekeepers for
government funding. Moreover, because the men are involved in a task which
revolves around specifically Maori concerns, their shared Maori identity is
inevitably very salient. By indexing it both explicitly and implicitly through
their discourse, they temporarily create a uniquely Maori space for themselves
within a wider Pakeha working environment (cf Jeanette King 1999).
One further point is worth emphasizing in relation to the sentiments
expressed by the two men in this last example. The example highlights the
complexities of the dynamic construction of sociocultural identities in
ongoing interaction. As Schiffrin notes, “social identity is locally situated: who
we are is, at least partially, a product of where we are and who we are with”
(1996: 198). As indicated in the introduction, people choose to emphasize or
play down different facets of different socio-cultural identities in different con-
texts and even at different points in the same context. At any particular point
speakers are actively constructing those aspects which are most relevant to
their particular interactional goals at that moment. As a well-known strategy
for handling ambiguity and expressing ambivalent attitudes, humour allows
participants to better express the complexities of conflicting socio-cultural
identities, as indicated in some of the examples in this section (Stubbe &
Holmes 2000: 276).
Parallel examples can be found in our data set for another subordinate
group – namely women – facing the conflict between the exercising of mana-
gerial power and authority on the one hand, and the maintenance of a collegial
and egalitarian spirit of team work on the other. We have identified many
examples where following a difficult decision or the resolution of a tense
issue during which she has asserted authority explicitly, a woman manager
introduces a humorous key into the discussion. In one case a manager joked
that her one “cool competency” was her ability to make good coffee, thus
Language, Humour and Ethnic Marking in NZ English 449

putting herself “one down” after a period when she had been explicitly asser-
tive. In a similar situation, another manager introduced a humorous discussion
of the height of a white board in relation to the length of her skirt and
commented that the board had to be placed centrally rather than high up on
the wall “so I don’t have to lean down and expose my underwear when I write
on it”. In this case the humour serves to emphasize her femininity after a
meeting in which she had been using stereotypically masculine management
strategies. Humour clearly serves, then, as a means for expressing the com-
plexities of competing professional, social and cultural identities, as well as a
dynamic strategy for subverting socio-cultural expectations and norms.
It is interesting that all the examples we have used involve Maori men, an
accurate reflection of the predominance of male humour in this particular
area. The issue of ethnic identity seems to be particularly salient for Maori
men – it is in this area that their subordinate status relative to the majority
group is most apparent. As the previous point suggests, gender seems to be
the equivalently salient issue for women – both Maori and Pakeha (see
Holmes 1998a for a discussion of this issue).
The examples we have discussed in this section illustrate some of the ways
in which Maori conversationalists use humour to construct themselves as
‘other’ and to emphasize their difference from the majority societal group. In
both the content and the style of their humour, they signal their difference,
indexing their ethnicity through the use of linguistically marked features of
ME, expressed through pointedly subversive humour at the expense of
majority group norms.
Finally, it is worth noting that there are no parallel examples in our corpora
where Pakeha draw attention through humour to ethnic boundary lines sepa-
rating Pakeha from Maori people (see Holmes & Hay 1997). Analysts have
long pointed out that ethnicity is typically an issue only for the minority
group. As Joan Metge comments,
What most Maori find particularly upsetting is the unwillingness of many
Pakeha to recognise the existence of cultural difference, their cool assumption
that the Pakeha way of doing something is the only human way. (Metge 1986:
140)
We noticed that one of the features which most clearly distinguished the
Maori from Pakeha conversations in our Corpus was the extent to which
‘being Maori’ seemed always a relevant factor in the Maori interactions. Eth-
nicity, it appears, is omnipresent for Maori conversationalists: it is sometimes
foregrounded, the explicit focus of attention, but even when other issues are
the ostensible focus of discussion, Maori identity is almost always a relevant
background factor contributing to a thorough understanding and in-depth
450 J ANET H OLMES , M ARIA S TUBBE AND M EREDITH M ARRA

interpretation of what is being expressed.19 By contrast, most of the Pakeha

conversations do not indicate awareness of ethnicity as an issue; it does not
appear to be an ever-present part of the Pakeha consciousness, as it is for the
Maori contributors. Being Pakeha is simply experienced as ‘normal’ and un-
marked (see Michael King 1985). The salience of the Maori/Pakeha
boundary for Maori is no doubt one indication of their relative isolation from
avenues of political influence and the corridors of power in New Zealand
society (Fitzgerald 1993). As the analyses in this section have illustrated,
humour is one available avenue for a subordinate group to assert their
difference while expressing frustration and ambivalence at the effects of
marginalization (see also Fine 1984, Pogrebin & Poole 1988).

4. Conclusion
Pakeha norms dominate in New Zealand in most sociocultural contexts.
Maori ways of doing things are often either disregarded completely, or con-
sidered deviations from the norm. This is true for all varieties of M E , but
especially the vernacular variety which is used as the basis of comedians’
caricatures as well as a resource for Maori humour. Three particularly salient
features of M E were described: the use of a distinctive prosody, generally
described as syllable-timed English; the significantly greater use of the inter-
actional pragmatic tag eh, and the more extensive use of Maori vocabulary in
English conversation.
It is equally true that distinctively Maori ways of speaking and rules of
language use are rarely recognized. In this essay, we have illustrated one
specific response to this marginalization. Maori speakers use humour to signal
their awareness of salient ethnic boundaries, and to construct their ‘stance’ or
‘footing’ (Goffman 1979) in relation to the dominant group.
Our data clearly supports the view that the ethnic boundary between Maori
and Pakeha is more salient for Maori speakers than for Pakeha, and that
humour is one strategy used to express Maori people’s awareness of this
boundary. Humour establishes connections and explicitly emphasizes shared
interests, ideas, and values, as well as shared attitudes to the dominant group.
Conversely, by emphasizing boundaries between Maori and Pakeha, and
agreeing implicitly or explicitly through the expression of shared amusement
on the existence and significance of such boundaries, Maori contributors
strengthen connections between each other. Humour is a flexible discourse
strategy which permits Maori people to exploit cultural and linguistic differ-
ences, to emphasize ethnic distinctiveness and highlight cultural boundaries,

19
The discussion in Metge (1995) supports this viewpoint, and it has been con-
firmed by the Maori people whom we have consulted.
Language, Humour and Ethnic Marking in NZ English 451

to resist, challenge and subvert majority group norms, and to explore the com-
plexities of minority group status and the identity conflicts this generates in a
society which pays little regard to Maori attitudes, values, cultural beliefs and
sociolinguistic norms.

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[
Language, Humour and Ethnic Marking in NZ English 455

Appendix

Transcription conventions
All names are pseudonyms.

YES Capitals indicate emphatic stress

[laughs] Paralinguistic features in square brackets,
[drawls]: : (colons indicate start and finish)
+ Pause of up to one second
... /......\ ... Simultaneous speech
= Utterance continues
(hello) Transcriber’s best guess at an unclear utterance
? Rising or question intonation
– Incomplete or cut-off utterance
… Section of transcript omitted

[
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Métissage and Memory
The Politics of Literacy Education
in Canadian Curriculum and Classrooms

Erika Hasebe–Ludt
University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada

ABSTRACT
In this essay I discuss my current research by braiding a métissage of mother
tongue and other tongues that are part of students’ realities in public school
and university classrooms where English has been and remains the main
language of instruction. This research focuses on writing as a way to investi-
gate the researchers’ and their students’ situatedness in between languages
and literatures and the linguistic and cultural ‘mixed blood’ that is part of
their identities. As part of a teacher education program at a western-
Canadian university and against the background of Canadian and interna-
tional cultural, sociopolitical, and linguistic differences, this writing to trans-
gress borders becomes a métissage of local and global languages, identities,
and geographies. Situating ourselves “in the middle of language” (Cixous &
Calle–Gruber 1997), we (re-)create the memories and stories of our ‘lived
curriculum’ in between the mixed strands of others’ stories from different
linguistic and cultural backgrounds with the hope of finding new possibi-
lities for classroom praxis and inter/trans/cross-cultural understanding and
interstanding.
It becomes ruthlessly apparent that unless we are able to speak and write in
many different voices, using a variety of styles and forms, allowing the work
to change and be changed by specific settings, there is no way to converse
across borders, to speak to and with diverse communities. (bell hooks)
language thus speaking (ie, inhabited) relates us, ‘takes us back’ to where we
are, as it relates us to the world in a living body of verbal relations […] putting
the living body of language together means putting the world together, the
world we live in: an act of composition, an act of birthing us, uttered and
outered there in it. (Daphne Marlatt)
458 E RIKA H ASEBE –L UDT

L
IKE H E L È N E C I X O U S , I grew up “in the middle of language”
(Cixous & Calle–Gruber 1997). I remember the place and the sound
and the look and the texture of my mother tongue, that lived body of
language, from the beginning of be(com)ing in /to my world. Like Hélène
Cixous, my aim is to not lock up meaning but to give it/ myself over to the
chance of linguistic and textual crossing, to (re)imagine and to listen to differ-
ent language(s) speak. Thus living in the middle of language becomes a
métissage of mother tongue and other tongues that are part of my own and my
students’ realities in public school and university classrooms where English is
the language of instruction, is at the centre, the dominant discourse (Cham-
bers, Donald & Hasebe–Ludt 2000).
I remember what it felt like to grow up in the middle of language, in a land-
scape littered with Roman ruins and mosaics, in a Germanic language articu-
lated by the Roman alphabet—first language, German / Deutsch, followed by a
Romance language Französisch / French / Français in elementary school, fol-
lowed by another Germanic one, in the same Roman alphabet, Englisch / Eng-
lish/Anglais, in grade six […] the sounds, their pronunciations similar and yet
so different, easy to mix up […] le vent […] der Wind […] the wind […] and
my memory of my mother tongue is like the wind, fleeting, hard to hold on to,
hard to catch, like the trickster, the eternal elf that lives with/in the self […]
My writing, in collaboration with colleagues and graduate students, focuses
on the theme of writing to transgress borders/écrire les frontières/Grenz-
überschreibung (Council of Europe 1999), autobiographical writing that
investigates the role of English in between other languages and memories of
mother tongues, writing that aims at affirming a new hybridity of back-
grounds, a métissage of mother tongue and second and /or other languages
with a view towards reconceptualizing language instruction and curriculum.
As a teacher of language and literacy and a teacher educator, I want to help
(re-)create the memories and stories of my own and my students’ living
with /in languages amidst the mixed strands of narratives that inform them,
from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, with the hope of finding
new possibilities for classroom praxis and inter /trans /cross-cultural under-
standing – of interstanding, in more than one language. Thus this research
focuses on the use of writing as a way to investigate our various situatedness
in between languages and the linguistic and cultural “mixed blood” that is part
of our identities. As part of my own identity as a professor in teacher educa-
tion, English as a second and /or additional language, and intercultural educa-
tion in Western Canada, and against the background of inter-provincial, cross-
Canadian and cosmopolitan cultural, sociopolitical, and linguistic differences,
Literacy Education in Canadian Curriculum and Classrooms 459

this writing to transgress becomes a métissage of languages, identities, geo-

graphies, homes and diasporas.
Métissage, from which the Canadian word Métis is derived, is a site for
writing and surviving in the “interval between different cultures and lan-
guages” (Lionnet 1989: 1); a way of merging and blurring genres, texts and
identities; an active literary and literacy stance, political strategy and peda-
gogical praxis. As Métis has been appropriated from its original and negative
meaning ‘half-breed’, following Lionnet (1989) and Zuss (1997) we can ap-
propriate métissage from its original meaning ‘mixed-blood’, to become an
alternative metaphor for fluidity, and a creative strategy for the braiding of
language, gender, race, and place into auto /biographical texts. Métissage not
only describes experience; it is a strategy for interpreting and critiquing the
experiences reported. At the same time these auto /biographical texts create
apertures for understanding and questioning the multiple conditions and con-
texts which give rise to those experiences; and the particular languages,
memories, stories and places in which these experiences are located and
shaped. Creation stories, for example, traditionally understood, tell about acts
of creation: the origin of the universe, the formation of the earth, the begin-
nings of humankind. While the purpose of creation stories is to explain un-
usual and divine events and give reasons why people perform certain rituals,
they also invite larger, universal questions about living on and in relation to
the earth (Hamilton 1988). These questions provoke a collective wondering, a
dialogue which connects individuals to their collective memory and story.
Literary and literacy métissage offers the possibility for writing and telling
creation stories autobiographically, stories which are rooted in history and
memory, but are also stories of be-coming. These new creation stories are also
sites of learning to live well in relation to each other and with the earth. These
texts generate knowledge about repressed cultural and individual memories,
traditions and mother tongues. We can see literary métissage as a hopeful act
initiating a “genuine dialogue with the dominant discourse(s)” in order to
transform these discourses, thus “favoring exchange rather than provoking
conflict” (Lionnet 1989: 3). Thus, métissage offers the possibility of rap-
prochement between mainstream and alternative curriculum discourses. When
we grow up in the middle and in between language(s), we (re-)create the
memories and stories of our ‘lived curriculum’ in between the mixed strands
of others’ stories from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds.
The problematic of difference and the very real struggle to reach across
differences – linguistic, cultural, racial, sexual, national – or the refusal to try,
often leaves language instruction and curriculum like a battlefield occupied
and divided by intellectual, instructional and political camps. Alternative
avenues such as autobiography, narrative, and critical postcolonial approaches
460 E RIKA H ASEBE –L UDT

and theories remain isolated despite being committed to their causes, while
mainstream discourses and practices continue to dominate. This impasse
offers very little hope for dialogue, peace and freedom. Graduate and under-
graduate seminar rooms and public-school classrooms are faced with similar
dilemmas: How can we speak to each other, learn to live well with each other
and on the earth, and teach our students, our children to do the same, in the
face of the entrenchment of our differences? And yet, many of the younger
generation are already living in the space of métissage: they are bilingual, of
mixed race and part of an immigrant postcolonial diaspora (Gunderson 1999).
If they are not linguistic or racial mixed-bloods, they are at the very least
cultural mulattoes (Sherman 1996). So it is incumbent upon scholars and
teachers to search out metaphoric and metonymic spaces, through mixed lan-
guages and stories which will enable us to create a hybrid curriculum, a
mulatto /Métis curriculum the intent of which is to live, speak and act with
and across the space of difference.
A teacher in a secondary school on the nearby Blackfoot/Blood reserve is
doing métissage and memory work and writing as part of his graduate work
and as a way to express the personal confusion and angst he has felt regarding
his seeming lack of cultural identity, being of mixed cultural heritage – a
Métis father and a Norwegian-Scottish mother. Even though he has a father
who comes from a long line of Métis families, he has often struggled with
feeling culturally unsituated, undefined and nondescript. Rather than being in-
between Native and European cultural extremes, he finds that his family has
lived largely on the fringes of society and been rejected by almost all its
members. He is examining his painful past as a combined father–son auto/
biography, mixed with conversation bits and poetry, which attempts to weave
the writer’s own memory with the memories his father has of his own child-
hood and being raised by his grandmother (Chambers, Donald & Hasebe–
Ludt 2000).
These memories are painful because father and son have just begun the
process of talking about the past, family, hardship, racism and alcoholism.
These family stories have only recently been told to the son by his father,
have remained untold for so long due to the feelings of shame, anger and
emotion which they provoke as well as the decision made by the father to cut
himself and his children off from his own side of the family. Still, the son
chooses to tell these stories as a way to begin the process of overcoming the
feeling of being someone who “looks into a mirror and sees a blur over part of
his own face” (Bruchac 1993: 244). By looking at the past and memories in
this way, notions of the present, of ancestors and ideas of the self can also be
examined and formulated (Momaday 1993). Stories like this express the
fluidity and dynamic nature of identity, and make use of the context of literary
Literacy Education in Canadian Curriculum and Classrooms 461

métissage to deconstruct the writer’s sense of self as a way to resist easy

categorization, stereotyping or finality. In this sense, the stories confront the
writer’s desire to define him/ herself. As writers we wish to occupy and arti-
culate a space of identity, which cannot be categorized, but is still very much
apparent, alive and outside the boundaries of traditional methods of identifica-
tion (Lionnet 1989). Even when writing about personal and sometimes
intimate things – as is often the case in these stories – the writer must work to
remind her /himself that a critical and authentic interpretation of the self is
being expressed and that by making sense of these memories and interpreta-
tions by comparing and creating the memories of the writer through close
examination of the memories of others, a better sense of self will develop.
However, as Derrida (1995) reminds us, each time that “identity proclaims
itself,” a writer must be careful not to be bound by it and its context for there
are ongoing other commitments and responsibilities which must be met to
continue the work of understanding the self personally and pedagogically. bell
hooks’ (1999) urging to converse across borders, in many different voices, is
what we need to challenge ourselves, our students, our world with. And Trinh
Minh-ha (1992), the writer and a filmmaker whose work consistently crosses
borderlines of disciplines and nations, warns of “essentializing a denied iden-
tity” through reactive language that only promotes and perpetuates separatism
and self-enclosure. She also cautions us of framing the search for identity as a
holistic unified process and /or something whole that can be attained at the
end of a struggle. Instead, she sees the complex and often difficult realities of
our mixed, hybrid identities, particularly those of the younger diasporic
generation, as the points of departure for us to transcend academic, cultural,
artistic, linguistic and other borderlines, to actively resist the safeguarding of
boundaries and to realize the need to embrace the different sites of our praxis
and of our identities as places of hybridity that offer hope for generating new
knowledge.
My own writing /research braids the métissage of mother tongue and other
tongues through writing the origins and memories of my situatedness in
between German, French, English, Japanese, and the linguistic and cultural
mixed blood that is now my presence as a daughter, a mother of a Canadian
Japanese ‘hybrid kid’, a language and teacher educator. In particular, I am
exploring the events of my growing up in the border region of Germany and
France and my journeying to (an)other continent(s) and countries through
relationships that cross borders between languages, races, cultures, families,
disciplines. Against the background of European, Canadian and Asian mixed
cultures and political, aesthetic and educational differences, Grenzüber-
schreibung becomes a métissage of my bridging of languages, identities and
geographies. I create the story of my ‘lived curriculum’ in between the mixed
462 E RIKA H ASEBE –L UDT

strands of poetry, myths, fairy tales and other stories, and the storied relation-
ships between myself and my mother and my daughter of mixed Japanese and
German blood. I want to affirm this hybridity of backgrounds, this inter/
national bricolage as a possibility for generating new realities and new lives
beyond borders of language, race and gender, of creating new knowledge out
of situated life experiences and life-writing and their representation with the
hope of creating new possibilities for classroom praxis and inter /trans-
cultural understanding. In this métissage of writing and remembering, in
addition to creation myths from various cultures and languages, I draw on the
work of poets, philosophers, storytellers and artists from different geocultural
locations, such as Adrienne Rich, Hannah Arendt, Thomas King, George
Littlechild, Lee Maracle, Toni Morrison, and Anne Cameron, as well as
postcolonial writers of mixed tongues and identities, such as Trinh Minh-ha,
Hélène Cixous, Homi Bhaba and others. Through “living in the earth-deposits
of our history,” Adrienne Rich (1979) reminds us, by looking at the old words
and the old worlds, through memory, we re-position and condition ourselves
to create new worlds, to dream of a common language – “from all the lost
collections” (Rich 1981/1993: 22).
Here is a memory that starts somewhere in the middle, an un-beginning
that picks up the poetry in the interspace between the generations of grand-
mothers and mothers and their tongues and daughters and their lives among
worlds and words:
I remember my mother reciting poetry she was taught by her mother, in the
days of her childhood and growing years, in German, beloved mother tongue.
This memory, fragile and in danger of being lost, this dream of a mother
and her poetry, learned by heart, evokes the old stories and legends and
landscapes of home in a strange land, on a different continent, in a different
language, a different tongue – mother tongue – ears and eyes of sounds and
images of words, language like the mother’s body, that is larger than the self,
that carries her with it, bears her and births her and sings to her a lullaby.
In my memory, the beginnings of language emerge from a poetic and
inspirited place. There was my mother, reciting lines by the great German
poets: Rilke, Goethe, Schiller, Hesse, and many others. To this day, in her
eighties, my mother still recites them by heart at family gatherings, her
seniors’ group, over trans-continental telephone lines on her daughter’s and
granddaughter’s request. What a remarkable memory my mother has, and I
remember when I asked her how she came to be so good at keeping all these
wonderful verses alive for such a long time, she told me about a memory that
she would never forget: that as a young child she used to practice these poems
at night under her bed covers, with a flashlight, “borrowing” her big sister’s
school texts, which she wasn’t allowed to touch during the day, and which she
was magically attracted to. She never had a chance to go to this same school
Literacy Education in Canadian Curriculum and Classrooms 463

of higher learning for girls, the Mädchengymnasium, herself; a war happened,

her sister died, and most of the poetry books were destroyed. But my mother
kept all those poems in her heart and in her mind until years later when she
could once again renew her acquaintance with books, found the poems in new
collections and started collecting them, carefully and lovingly arranging them
in the big family armoire with the sliding glass doors. That was where I began
my childhood reading journeys, amongst volumes with richly textured spines,
their pages stained and torn at times from use, always inviting me into their
treasures of words, my eyes and ears relishing the textures of the wor(l)ds they
revealed, growing into reading, growing into language.
When moving outside of my comfortable self, crossing the threshold into the
newness of experiences, both personal and pedagogical ones, of constituting
new meanings, my memories inhabit the transgressive spaces in between the
past and the present reality of my life. In my moving and shifting between
different cultural geographies – Germany and Canada, British Columbia and
now Southern Alberta Blackfoot country – and my attempts to refigure my
work in and into a new language, I am reminded of the German word
Entgrenzung (Schwab 1994), referring to
a lifting of boundaries…their transgression, transformation, or expansion [...]
It is a word that calls up such different realms of discourse as geography and
geopolitics, morphology, psychoanalysis and aesthetics. (vii–viii)
Where we are from, where we are now, where we place ourselves in the land-
scapes of cultural, linguistic and pedagogical identities – these shifting loca-
tions are part of a continuous process of connotations and resonances, of map-
ping ourselves in order to make sense of our lives and work. Memory plays
the part of the shifter in this process, the trickster, taking on an ambiguous
syntactic and semantic role of both here and there, this and that, then and
now, not only … but also – a metonymic as well as metaphoric space of par-
tial truths, delightful and painful, light and shadow, movement and stillness at
the same time. Carl Jung (1956/1972) uses the analogy of the carnival in
medieval times with its reversal of the hierarchical order and “contradic-
toriness” to illuminate the trickster as an individual’s shadow figure remind-
ing us of “the memory image of things as they were” (200).
So I return to the images of my mother tongue, and add the layers of new
ones, French, English, Japanese, Spanish, and this intertext refuses to place
English and its Western world-view at the colonial centre of the world, re-
verses its dominant discourse, its desirability as the lingua franca constructed
by the colonizers (Gunderson 1999, Pennycook 1998). My letters and those of
my students and the texts we read speak to its identity crisis as its centre no
longer holds (Gómez–Peña 1996). “No center can move without its fringes,
and as these shift they are bound to make strange encounters [...] If there is no
464 E RIKA H ASEBE –L UDT

movement round the extremities you can count the center as dead” (Young-
man, as cited in Jardine, Clifford & Friesen 1995: 4).
We search for ways to keep languages, English and others, alive together
in decentred ways that encourage new understandings of self to emerge
through reading and composing texts in response to our placement and dis-
placement in new diasporic landscapes of language, culture and teaching
(hooks 1995). Affirming a new hybridity of backgrounds creates possibilities
for living lives beyond borders of language, race and culture, for generating
knowledge out of situated life experiences and life-writing where English has
a place but not the centre space and is not the only language, not replacing
others that exist along with it. Instead, as we are Writing Worlds (Barnes &
Duncan 1992); what is central is the notion of spaces in a landscape. The new
geography of language pedagogy is indeed re-writing earth (geo) – writing
(graphing) that considers seriously the spaces of generative possibilities in
between, amidst languages.

WORKS CITED
Barnes, Trevor J., & James S. Duncan, ed. (1992). Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text,
and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge).
Bruchac, Joseph (1993). ‘Notes of a translator’s son,’ in Growing Up Native
American: An Anthology, ed. Patricia Riley (New York: William Morrow): 237-
246.
Chambers, Cynthia, Dwayne Donald & Erika Hasebe–Ludt (2000). ‘Memory and
métissage: three creation stories,’ paper presented at the Annual Conference of
the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans LA.
Cixous, Hélène, & Mireille Calle–Gruber (1997). Hélène Cixous Rootprints:
Memory and Life Writing (London: Routledge).
Council of Europe (1999). Ecrire les frontières: le point de l’Europe/ Grenzüber-
schreibung: die Europabrücke (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing).
Derrida, Jacques, & François Ewald (1995). ‘A certain “madness” must watch over
thinking,’ Educational Theory 45: 273–91.
Gómez–Peña, Guillermo (1996). The New World Border: Prophecies, Poems, and
Loqueras for the End of the Century (San Francisco: City Lights).
Gunderson, Lee (1999). ‘How will literacy be defined?’ Reading Research Quar-
terly 35: 68–69.
Hamilton, Virginia (1988). In the Beginning: Creation Stories From Around the
World (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch).
hooks, bell (1995). Art On My Mind: Visual Politics (New York: W.W. Norton).
—— (1999). Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (New York: Henry Holt).
Jardine, David, Pat Clifford & Sharon Friesen (1995). ‘Whole language, edgy
literacy and the work of the world,’ Applying Research to the Classroom 13: 4–5.
Literacy Education in Canadian Curriculum and Classrooms 465

Jung, C . G . (1956/1972). ‘On the psychology of the trickster figure,’ in Paul Radin,
The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (New York: Schocken):
195–211.
Lionnet, Françoise (1989). Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender and Self-Por-
traiture (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP).
Minh-ha, Trinh T. (1992). Framer Framed (New York: Routledge).
Momaday, N. Scott (1993). ‘The names: A memoir,’ in Growing up Native Ameri-
can: An Anthology, ed. P. Riley (New York: William Morrow): 215–35.
Pennycook, Alastair (1998). English and the Discourses of Colonialism (London:
Routledge).
Rich, Adrienne (1978). The Dream of a Common Language (London: W.W. Nor-
ton).
——. (1981/1993). A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (London: W.W. Nor-
ton).
Schwab, Gabrielle (1994). Subjects Without Selves: Transitional Texts in Modern
Fiction (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP).
Sherman, T. (1996), ‘The music of democracy: Wynton Marsalis puts jazz in its
place,’ Utne Reader (March–April): 29–36.
Zuss, Mark (1997), ‘Strategies of representation: Autobiographical métissage and
critical pragmatism,’ Educational Theory 47: 163–80.

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“Joseph you know him he don trus dah Anglais”
Or, English as Postcolonial Language
in Canadian Indigenous Films

Kerstin Knopf
Universität Greifswald

ABSTRACT
This essay attempts to outline the conditions of anticolonial filmmaking as
well as different strategies that are employed. Foremost it deals with the
issue of language and shows through two examples how filmmakers strive to
undermine the authority of the colonial language. The Métis filmmaker
Maria Campbell, in The Road Allowance People, employs a Métis verna-
cular interspersed with Mitchif words, constructing a linguistic medium
which does not alienate oral knowledge – the film’s subject – from its cul-
tural context. Often dismissed as substandard English, such vernacular forms
become central in the postcolonial context. The Métis director Gil Cardinal
and Cree producer Doug Cuthand, in Big Bear, apply an inverted linguistic
self/Other dichotomy by having the Cree people speak English and the
soldiers and settlers speak an unintelligible gibberish. Thus, the filmmakers
subvert the conventional filmic tradition of putting indigenous people in an
inferior position through the “other” English they speak.

In the face of Eurocentric historicizing, Third World and minoritarian film-

makers have rewritten their own histories, taken control over their own
images, spoken in their own voices. It is not that their films substitute a
pristine “truth” for European “lies,” but that they propose counter-truths and
counter-narratives informed by an anticolonialist perspective. (Shohat & Stam
1994: 249)
468 K ERSTIN K NOPF

W I T H T H E A B O V E S T A T E M E N T Shohat and Stam summarize

one important aspect of the global process of decolonization –
the emergence of anticolonial media.1 This essay will outline
different strategies of postcolonial2 filmmaking as well as some of its inherent
problems. Central will be the language issue, which is discussed in relation to
the two Canadian films The Road Allowance People and Big Bear.
In order to create anticolonial and self-determined media, postcolonial
filmmakers have to make conscious choices about differences from colonial
media discourses. This decolonizing process works in a twofold manner: first,
as a political struggle by creating self-controlled images and anticolonial his-
tory writing /filming, and second, as an esthetic struggle by rebelling against
established feature film and ethnographic film conventions.3 Both film forms
have a significant history of stereotyping and misrepresenting indigenous
peoples, and thus served to legitimize colonial wars as well as cultural, eco-
nomic, and political oppression.4
Shohat and Stam delineate several strategies for the making of decolo-
nized films, of which those helpful for a description of the works discussed
here will be presented. Naturally, these strategies may overlap. There is, to
begin with, the ‘esthetic of hunger’, created by Brazilian filmmakers who
turned their lack of technical and financial resources and marketing possibili-
ties into a resource and a signifying characteristic of their films. This strategy
is not restricted to Brazil, but also applies to films in other Third- and Fourth-
World countries. The ‘esthetic of hunger’ is recognizable in the often sparse
and low-key lighting,5 basic camera equipment, long takes, a basic audio track
avoiding a lavish musical score, and the use of a hand-held camera because a
tubular track is not available. Often, shots can only be taken once because
film material is expensive. For these reasons these films might radiate an air
of unprofessionalism. Needless to say, most films do not feature star actors
1
The evolution of anticolonial media or the so-called Third-World film is compre-
hensively described by Gabriel 1994.
2
The term ‘postcolonial’ in this essay refers to works by people living in the Third
and Fourth World, whereby ‘Fourth World’ is used for indigenous people in such
settler countries as Canada, the USA, New Zealand, and Australia, who are still
exposed to internal colonization.
3
In the field of postcolonial media, a clear distinction between documentary/ethno-
graphic and fictional films/videos cannot always be made, especially since many film-
makers avail themselves of the form of the docu-drama, which, as the term suggests,
mixes fact and fiction often by re-enacting historical/contemporary events.
4
On the presentation of idigenous people in ethnographic and mainstream feature
films, see, for example, Churchill 1998, Francis 1992, Friar & Friar 1972, Lutz 1990,
Morris 1994, Tobing Rony 1996 and Shohat & Stam 1994.
5
In contrast, commercial cinema usually employs three-point lighting, which
results in high-key lighting.
English as Postcolonial Language in Canadian Indigenous Films 469

but, rather, non-professionals, which may result in contrived dialogue and

acting. The ‘aesthetic of hunger’ is noticeable in The Road Allowance People
and partly in Big Bear, where a careful deployment of sound, long landscape
shots, and long takes is a deliberate choice (Cuthand 1998).
On another level, reflexivity and self-reflexivity subliminally control the
filming, because every postcolonial filmmaker communicates with an estab-
lished body of filmic and printed colonial and postcolonial texts in the form of
quotations, allegories, parodying mimicry, and /or formal references. In this
sense every postcolonial film becomes a piece of filmic reflection and critique
as well as an example of possible decolonizing strategies. Often, in the man-
ner of the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt, filmmakers accentuate the medium
film and its techniques, creating a rupture in the illusion of reality in the film,
and focus on the filmmaking process itself. This alienation effect is achieved
through non-linear narratives, collage-like structures (combination of news-
reel, documentary footage, and /or photographs with fictitious footage), the
extensive use of zooms and pans, inconsistent camera work and characters
looking into the camera, an uneven editing pace, the connection of diegetic
and nondiegetic sounds, and/or burlesquing mainstream filmic texts. This
self-reflexivity in films creates a metanarrative or, better, a metafilm, which
describes methods of resistance to accepted film practices.
Another strategy is the incorporation of traditional orality: first, as a narra-
tive formula in which characters or the plot present (traditional) oral accounts,
myths, legends etc., and second, as a structuring formula in which a non-
linear digressive narrative shapes the form, and the film itself comes to
resemble an oral account. In the latter case, the film form is characterized by
repetitions, pauses, and a slow rhythm, which are characteristic of oral
rhetoric. Here, The Road Allowance People is exemplary in both respects, as
it stages oral storytelling with an audience surrounding a storyteller and listen-
ing to his stories, and the narrative of the film moves in circles: ie, several
subnarratives depart from the main narrative to illustrate the stories being told,
and then return to it.
Last but not least, there is carnivalesque subversion in these films. It may
appear as literal thematization of carnival and masquerade. But more com-
monly, postcolonial filmmakers develop a carnivalesque film style: ie, they
grossly violate established filmmaking conventions. They may purposely
employ jump cuts, a digressive narrative without closure, a reshooting of the
same scene, a jamming camera, and /or have the film running out in the mid-
dle of a shot. At this point the carnivalesque subversion ties in with self-
reflexive cinema, where filmmakers also demonstrate resistance to commer-
cial film conventions. Carnivalesque film style hints at Caribbean and Latin-
American carnival, where the enslaved and oppressed, disguised in costumes,
470 K ERSTIN K NOPF

ridiculed and parodied their masters and oppressors: ie, it parodies colonial
film discourse. Shohat and Stam explain carnivalesque film as follows:
Carnival embraces an anticlassical esthetic that rejects formal harmony and
unity in favor of the asymmetrical, the heterogenous, the oxymoronic, the mis-
cegenated […] In the carnival esthetic, everything is pregnant with its
opposite, within an alternative logic of permanent contradiction and non-
exclusive opposites that transgresses the monologic true-or-false thinking
typical of a certain kind of positivist rationalism. (Shohat & Stam 1994: 302)
In short: carnivalesque film advocates an esthetic of mistakes. Although both
films discussed avoid such film style and largely abide by established film
conventions, in the treaty-making scene the makers of Big Bear visualize a
masquerade – the Indian chiefs are dressed in red British uniforms and take
part in the British anthem ceremony, rising from the ground and taking off
their hats; they wear costumes in which they imitate the Canadian military
leaders. This ridiculous mimicry is visualized by the filmmakers as a feeble
attempt to appease the colonizers. Also, the seriousness with which the Cana-
dians conduct their ritual in the ‘wilderness’ inhabited by ‘savages’ seems
ludicrous. In Britain the rituals and uniforms make perfect sense, but removed
from their original environment and placed into a different ‘wild and savage’
space and different cultural contetxt, their ritual and dress turn into a pathetic
and comical performance as suggested in the film. Still, a few years later the
same ceremony and uniforms became major metaphors of colonial power.
Apart from deciding which different strategies to adopt, postcolonial film-
makers for the most part face three major dilemmas. First, in order to create
decolonized media, they have to utilize colonial means of cultural expression:
film technology, including cameras, film material/video tape, editing boards /
computers, as well as colonial marketing systems: namely, distribution and
broadcasting companies and the internet. Second, there is what Faye Ginsberg
calls the Faustian dilemma: the filmmakers use Western film technologies for
self-assertion and self-expression and at the same time they introduce these
technologies into their communities, which might promote disintegration and
alienation from traditional values (Ginsberg 1991: 96). And finally, there is
the issue of which language is to be employed. The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
claims that there is a close connection between language and culture and that
“the structure of a human being’s language influences the manner in which he
understands reality and behaves with respect to it” (Robins 1976: 99–100).6
Frantz Fanon links the use of the colonial language with cultural alienation.

6
Other filmmakers, writers, and scholars – for example, Marjorie Beaucage (1998),
Umberto Eco (1976: 22), and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1981: 15–16) – also regard lan-
guage and culture as inseparable.
English as Postcolonial Language in Canadian Indigenous Films 471

According to him, colonialism restricts indigenous languages and thus

destroys cultures. He asserts that speaking the colonial language implies the
acceptance of colonial consciousness and colonial values, which creates a gap
between the colonized’s body and consciousness, and the colonized subject
becomes assimilated. To put it in a nutshell: accepting the colonial language
creates alienation from the mother culture (Fanon 1986 [1952]: 17–40).
Such a thesis is plausible in the case of secluded, traditional communities
where the indigenous language is the first language and the colonizing one is
only a marginal presence. But applied to indigenous filmmakers in North
America, whose communities are penetrated by Western influences and often
based in urban areas, it turns out to be essentialist. Many of the filmmakers
grow up using only English,7 many are not able to understand or speak their
traditional languages, nor do they want to. As all cultures are in flux, today’s
indigenous cultures are amalgamations of indigenous and Western habits, reli-
gions, traditions, techniques, media, and languages. In that light, it appears
essentializing to proscribe the use of English and to restrict the production of
cultural expression – in print and film/video – to the traditional languages.
Thus, the development of indigenous forms of expression incorporating the
former colonial language must find approval in the postcolonial context and
should not be seen as a betrayal of culture.
It is in this spirit that Salman Rushdie advises postcolonial writers not to
use English the way the British did but that “it needs remaking for our own
purposes […]. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making
ourselves free” (Rushdie 1992: 17). Gerald Vizenor also sees the colonial lan-
guage as a means of writing resistance:
The English language has been the linear tongue of colonial discoveries, racial
cruelties, invented names [...]; at the same time, this mother tongue of para-
colonialism has been a language of invincible imagination and liberation for
many people of the postindian world [...] [It] has carried some of the best
stories of endurance, the shadows of tribal survivance, and now that same
language of dominance bears the creative literature of distinguished postindian
authors in the cities. (Vizenor 1994: 105–106)
Indigenous filmmakers have a choice between the language of the colonizers
and their indigenous language. Both choices have their advantages and their
drawbacks. On the one hand, films made in English can reach a far greater
audience. On the other hand, if a film is in English, it subjugates the subject
matter to a certain extent to the colonial context and adapts it to mainstream
needs. It cannot transmit contextual meanings of the spoken words and the

7
As the essay deals with indigenous films in the English-speaking part of North
America, references to colonial languages are only made to English.
472 K ERSTIN K NOPF

cultural background they contain. There is, however, the possibility, as Rush-
die suggests, of using vernacularized forms of the colonizers’ language which
have arisen in the communities concerned. Such usage secures a wider audi-
ence and prevents the film as product from surrendering totally to colonial
influence. Using an indigenous language makes possible a higher degree of
self-determination and decolonization in the process of filming and the film as
a product. Still, if a film is made in an indigenous language, a large part of the
prospective audience (including indigenous people themselves) may not be
able to access the content. There is the possibility of adding subtitles or voice-
overs, but this appears to be problematic. Storytellers and characters talking in
the indigenous language create a certain aura, a certain space, time, and
energy, which would be disturbed and /or spoiled through voice-overs and
subtitles (Beaucage 1998). The subtitles distract the viewers’ attention from
the image; a voice-over drowns out the voice of the character or storyteller
and even falsifies it by creating a different aura and energy. In addition, voice-
overs carry the ethnographic film tradition in their wake, in which indigenous
people were objectified and were usually not given a voice; instead, narrative
voice-overs explained for them and described their cultures from outside. The
next problem is that the making of a fictional film in the indigenous language
requires that all actors, the filmmakers, and a substantial part of the crew be
fluent in the language. But it is not to be taken for granted in Native North
America that there will always be enough people who are both suitable for
such jobs and speak their traditional language.8 Thus, filmmakers will have to
weigh the pros and cons regarding language usage with the intended
audience.9
The film The Road Allowance People by the Métis writer and filmmaker
Maria Campbell serves as one example of differentiated language usage in
postcolonial films. Campbell solves the language problem by having her
actors speak in their own dialect of English, which she also used in her printed

8
According to the Canadian census of 1996, 29% of the indigenous population is
able to conduct a conversation in a traditional language, with Cree being the largest
indigenous mother tongue. People older than 55 are most likely to have knowledge of
an indigenous language while only 26% of indigenous youth have this language skill
(http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/ English/980113/d980113.htm#ART1).
9
Feature films made in indigenous languages are for example Yawar Mallku
[Blood of the Condor] (1969) in Quechua and Ukumau (1966) in Aymara, both made
in Bolivia by Jorge Sanjines in collaboration with the indigenous people (Shohat and
Stam 1994: 33). In The Battle of Algiers (1966) by Gillo Pontecorvo, the Algerian
characters speak Arabic with subtitles provided (252) so that they stand out against the
incom-prehensible babble that was assigned to them in European features set in Arabic
countries and at the same time cease to exist only as an exotic background for a
European narrative.
English as Postcolonial Language in Canadian Indigenous Films 473

collection of Métis stories (1995). Throughout the film, the storyteller Alcid
talks in this Métis vernacular:
“You know Jonas” dah Jesus say “Your a damned good fiddle player. Me I
always want to play dah fiddle but I never have a chance. When dah Lucifer
he get kicked out he take all dah fiddles wit him an all we got now is harps
[…]”
Dah General he don like dat very much an he say “Dah charge hees high
treason.” Joseph him he don know what dat word treason he mean. But he say
it sound awful dangerous so he talk real careful jus in case hees got someting
to do wit shooting. Dem soldiers you know dey got guns an he say dey look
like dey wan to use dem. Joseph you know him he don trus dah Anglais. He
never trus dem in hees whole life. (Campbell 1995: 64, 113)
Ashcroft et al. (1989) assign to such language use a potential to create differ-
ence and to construct a counter-discourse. Ashcroft claims that this difference
or “overlap of language” occurs when texture, sound, rhythm, and words from
the mother tongue are introduced into the colonial tongue (1990: 4). However,
at the same time as cultures mingle linguistically, this embodiment of cultural
expression in a colonial language creates a gap and confirms the distance be-
tween cultures. Ashcroft maintains: “The articulation of two quite opposed
possibilities of speaking and therefore of political and cultural identification
outlines a cultural space between them which is left unfilled, and which in-
deed locates the core of the cross-cultural text” (4).
But there remains the risk of devaluation of vernacular forms as colloquial,
or simply wrong, English in the face of ‘correct’ Standard English. Such
devaluation not only creates difference but also sustains the colonial hierarchy
between different languages or different types of English. Although dismissed
as non-standard English, such vernacular forms become central in the post-
colonial context and demand a language theory which treats them not as
marginal varieties of a central language but as forms equal to the latter. Derek
Bickerton calls such a theory a “metatheory which takes linguistic variation as
the substance rather than the periphery of language study” (Ashcroft et al.
1989: 47). This kind of theory also creates the framework for abrogating Stan-
dard English as the language norm for Third- and Fourth-World cultures,
where English is the official language.
Ashcroft challenges the thesis that writers inscribe their culture into an
English text by metonymically introducing syntax and semantics of their
mother tongue into the colonial tongue. The same applies to the situation of
indigenous filmmakers in North America, because English with a modified
syntax and semantics says nothing about the specific culture that informed
this linguistic medium and because the relationship between the untranslated
non-English word and the culture of its origin is absent. This privilege is
474 K ERSTIN K NOPF

reserved for the exclusive usage of the indigenous language. Thus, the gap or
difference created by language variation is a metaphor for cultural difference
and not for culture. Language variation disturbs colonialist culture by
disrupting the linguistic dominance of English in a text but it does not inscribe
culture into the same text. The Métis vernacular in The Road Allowance
People interspersed with Mitchif words is the linguistic continuum in which
contemporary Métis oral tradition operates. By using this vernacular, Camp-
bell constructs a linguistic medium which does not alienate the oral knowl-
edge from its cultural context and avoids pure colonial linguistic expression.
But, as seen above, the linguistic medium does not transport Métis culture.
An inverted linguistic self /Other dichotomy is employed in the four hour
TV-mini series Big Bear by the Cree director Gil Cardinal and the Cree pro-
ducer Doug Cuthand. The film outlines the history of the Cree people in the
era of treaty making in the Canadian Prairies between 1876 and 1888. It
focuses on chief Big Bear, who fiercely resisted the signing of a treaty until
finally he had to yield. In that era negotiations could only be realized through
the help of a translator. The filmmakers employ a linguistic sleight of hand
based on the fact that mainstream films usually assigned English to the non-
Indian characters, defining the Indians as the inferior ‘Others’ through the lan-
guage they spoke, which was either an English interspersed with grammatical
errors, an English consisting of mono-syllables or an English fitted with a
fictitious and /or exotic accent. Cardinal and Cuthand reverse this tradition
and place the Cree at the center of the narrative and the Canadians at the
margin by having the Cree speak English and the Canadians speak an
artificial language created by Rudy Wiebe, co-script author and author of the
novel on which the film is based. An excerpt from the script shows the
different speaking positions:
Sweetgrass (Cont)
When I take your hand and touch your heart, I say, let us all be one. May this
earth never taste a White man’s blood.
Morris smiles regally, and still holding Sweetgrass’ right hand, looks about
the circle slowly. All wait to hear him.
Finally, Morris stares across at Big Bear: He seems a mound thrust up by the
earth into the level light.
Morris
Me humpret glee, grotle klings, du a wilmming depforth. O a scriple laguran-
teum Big Bear, du autom gratualayome …
His voice carries on as Erasmus begins interpreting simultaneously in a high,
carrying voice.
English as Postcolonial Language in Canadian Indigenous Films 475

Erasmus
He says, “My heart is glad for you, great Chiefs, that you have behaved in the
right way. And Big Bear has come, so I can tell him that the Treaty we have
made is for him too, as if he were here –
(Wiebe & Cardinal 1998: 25)
This reversal of linguistic positions has several effects. It puts the audience in
the place of the Cree, inducing them to associate and sympathize with the
Cree, because they are the only people they can understand. Since there are no
subtitles for the gibberish the Canadians speak, the viewers are made to feel
the paranoia of not comprehending the language of intruders who turn out to
be decision makers through military and self-proclaimed political power. Fur-
ther, in contrast to conventional narrative films, the European colonizers are
defined as the ‘others’, the ‘foreigners’, and the ‘outsiders’ by the ‘uncivil’
and ‘savage’ language they speak. Again, one should be aware that the gib-
berish juxtaposed against the Standard English creates difference between
colonizers and colonized and reveals nothing about Cree culture: only the use
of the Cree language could have transmitted the Cree world view. Many Cree
people, including filmmakers, reproach Cardinal and Cuthand for not using
Cree in the film. It would have been possible since Doug Cuthand (producer),
Gordon Tootoosis (Big Bear), and many other actors, extras, and crew mem-
bers, recruited from Regina and nearby reserves (the historical settings of the
filmed events), are able to speak Cree. But the filmmakers aimed at a C B C
audience (the mini-series was screened on C B C ) and also ruled out four hours
of subtitles or voice-overs (Cardinal 1998).
In conclusion, the two filmmakers attempt to resist the uncritical use of the
colonial language in different ways. Campbell employs a culture-specific
dialect of English, and Cardinal and Cuthand reverse the mainstream film
tradition by assigning the superior linguistic position to the indigenous char-
acters. Both films inscribe the concepts of cultural difference and multiplicity
into their texts. It becomes obvious that postcolonial filmmakers who don trus
dah Standard Anglais have a good strategy with which to work for decolo-
nizing the screen.

G L O S S A R Y (from Bordwell & Thompson 1997: 477–82)

diegetic sound:
Any voice, musical passage, or sound effect presented as originating from a
source within the film’s world.
high-key lighting:
Illumination that creates comparatively little contrast between light and dark
areas of the shot. Shadows are fairly transparent and brightened by fill light.
476 K ERSTIN K NOPF

jump cut:
An elliptical cut that appears to be an interruption of a single shot. Either the
figures seem to change instantly against a constant background, or the
background changes instantly while the figures remain constant.
long take:
A shot that continues for an unusually lengthy time before the transition to the
next shot.
low-key lighting:
Illumination that creates strong contrast between light and dark areas of the
shot with deep shadows and little fill light.
nondiegetic sound:
Sound, such as mood music or a narrator’s commentary, represented as
coming from a source outside the space of the narrative.
three-point lighting:
A common arrangement using three directions of light on a scene: from
behind the subjects (backlighting), from one bright source (key light), and
from a less bright source balancing the key light (fill light).

WORKS CITED
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (1989). The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice of Post-Colonial Literatures (London & New York:
Routledge).
Ashcroft, W.D. (1990). ‘Is that the Congo? Language as metonomy in the post-
colonial text,’ World Literature Written in English 29: 3–10.
Beaucage, Marjorie (1998). Personal interview conducted by Kerstin Knopf, Regina,
unpublished.
Bordwell, David, & Kristin Thompson (1997). Film Art: An Introduction (New
York: McGraw–Hill).
Campbell, Maria (1995). Stories of the Road Allowance People (Penticton, B.C.:
Theytus).
Cardinal, Gil (1998). Personal interview conducted by Kerstin Knopf, Regina, un-
published.
Churchill, Ward (1998). Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the
Colonization of American Indians (San Francisco: City Lights).
Cuthand, Doug (1998). Personal interview conducted by Kerstin Knopf, Regina, un-
published.
Eco, Umberto (1976), A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana UP).
Fanon, Frantz (1986 [1952]). Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam Markmann
(1952; London: Pluto).
Francis, Daniel (1992), The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian
Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp).
English as Postcolonial Language in Canadian Indigenous Films 477

Friar, R.E., & N.A. Friar (1972), The Only Good Indian ... The Hollywood Gospel
(New York: Drama Book Specialists).
Gabriel, Teshome H. (1994), ‘Towards a critical theory of Third World films,’ in
Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams & Laura
Chrisman (New York: Columbia UP): 340–58.
Ginsberg, Faye (1991), ‘Indigenous media: Faustian contract or global village?’
Cultural Anthropology 6: 92–112.
Lutz, Hartmut (1990). ‘“Indians” and Native Americans in the movies: A history of
stereotypes, distortions, and displacements,’ Journal of Visual Anthropology 3:
31–48.
Morris, Rosalind C. (1994). New Worlds from Fragments: Film, Ethnography and
the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures (Boulder CO: Westview).
Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1981). Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in
African Literature (London: Heinemann & James Currey).
Robins, Robert H. (1976), ‘The current relevance of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis,’ in
Universalism Versus Relativism in Language and Thought, ed. Rik Pixton (The
Hague: Mouton): 99–107.
Rushdie, Salman (1992), Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991
(London: Granta).
Shohat, Ellen, & Robert Stam (1994). Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism
and the Media (London & New York, Routledge).
Tobing Rony, Fatimah (1996). The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and the Ethnographic
Spectacle (Durham NC & London: Duke UP).
Vizenor, Gerald (1994). Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance
(Hanover NH & London: Wesleyan UP).
Wiebe, Rudy (1973). The Temptations of Big Bear (Toronto: McClelland &
Stewart).
——, & Gil Cardinal (1998). “Big Bear” (unpublished screenplay; Jordan Wheeler).

Filmography
Campbell, Maria, director, producer, screenplay (1988). The Road Allowance People
(Halfbreed Inc.; 48 min.).
Cardinal, Gil, director (1998). Big Bear (Doug Cuthand, producer; Rudy Wiebe &
Gil Cardinal, screenplay; Tele-Action Bear Inc./Big Bear Films; 180 min.)

[
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“When I was a child I spake as a child”1
Reflecting on the Limits
of a Nationalist Language Policy

Danilo Manarpaac
Frankfurt

ABSTRACT
This essay examines the limits of the nationalist language policy in the
Philippines which is aimed at dislodging English from its privileged position
in the controlling linguistic domains. Following the suspect adoption of
Filipino (a.k.a. Tagalog) as national language in the 1987 Constitution, the
Philippines has witnessed a resurgence of nationalist rhetoric in defense of
the privileging of one of the country’s eighty-or-so languages as de jure
lingua franca. To the extent that English in the Philippines has evolved into a
distinct variety, the essay advocates its institution as sole official language of
the country, even as it urges the maintenance of the vernaculars, including
Tagalog, as integral part of the Filipino people’s multicultural heritage.
Unlike Tagalog, which is viewed with skepticism by other ethnolinguistic
groups, Philippine English has established itself as an indispensable medium
of social and intellectual exchange and a legitimate vehicle of the Filipino
people’s vision.

T
HEP H I L I P P I N E S I S A N A R C H I P E L A G O that consists of some
7,100 islands and boasts more than eighty languages. That the
Filipinos need a language in which to communicate with one another
is an imperative recognized by everybody. The first attempt to formulate lin-
guistic policy came at the height of the Philippine war of independence from
Spain, which coincided with the Spanish-American War. The so-called Malo-

1
1 Corinthians 13:11.
480 D ANILO M ANARPAAC

los Constitution of 1898 spelled out a provisory language policy that adopted
Spanish as official language of the country, even as it provided for the
optional use of “languages spoken in the Philippines” (1899 Constitution,
Title X I V , Article 93).2 The Philippines, of course, did not become indepen-
dent in the aftermath of that war but was sold by Spain to the U S A . The new
colonizers, in turn, promptly implemented their own agenda which included
the teaching of English, its use as medium of instruction, and its adoption in
other public domains, particularly in government, commerce, and trade. When
the status of the colony was changed into that of a commonwealth in 1935,
the Philippines drafted a new constitution which provided for the continued
use of English and Spanish as official languages while Congress “[took] steps
toward the development and adoption of a common national language based
on one of the existing native languages” (1935 Constitution, Article X I V ,
Section 3). This marked the birth of the idea of a national language that was
expected to unify Filipinos after they received their independence from the
U S A in 1945.
It is important to note that the original wish of the delegates to the 1934
constitutional convention was to craft a language based on all indigenous lan-
guages (Sibayan 1986: 351–52), an undertaking which was admittedly formi-
dable in nature, but was cognizant of the multilingual character of the soon-to-
be independent republic. But, as history would have it, the nationalist dele-
gates won the upper hand, and three years later, in 1937, President Manuel
Quezon, who had earlier negotiated the date of Philippine independence, pro-
claimed Tagalog, his own mother tongue, as the sole basis of the national lan-
guage. After that, one arbitrary move led to another. In 1940, the Department
of Education decided to start teaching the national language in the senior year
of high school, even before that language could actually develop and become
recognizably distinct from ordinary Tagalog as spoken in the region (Sibayan
1986: 353). In 1946, the still nameless national language became a compul-
sory subject at all levels of primary and secondary education. Finally, in 1959,
Secretary Jose Romero of the Department of Education took the liberty of
naming the national language Pilipino in a desperate attempt to create at least
a nominal difference between the regional language Tagalog and the phantom
national language (Sibayan 1986: 358).
Tagalog suffered a temporary setback in 1973, when a new constitution
reverted to the original 1935 idea of developing a national language based on
all the languages in the Philippines. Ironically, this came as a result of Presi-
dent Ferdinand Marcos’s usurpation of political power and subsequent tam-

2
All references to the constitutions of the Philippines are taken from the Chan
Robles Virtual Law Library. (http://www.chanrobles.com/philsupremelaw.htm).
The Limits of a Nationalist Language Policy in the Philippines 481

pering with the constitution to lend legitimacy to his unlawful regime. The
new constitution gave the national language a new name, Filipino (with an
‘F’), but provided for the continued use of Pilipino (with a ‘P’) and English as
official languages of the country “until otherwise provided by law” (1973
Constitution, Article X V , Section 3). Despite the tacit admission that Pilipino
was really Tagalog, the Department of Education adopted a bilingual policy
of instruction a year later, which provided for the teaching of social science
subjects in Pilipino and the natural sciences and mathematics in English
(Hidalgo 1998: 25–26). Finally, after Marcos fled the Philippines in 1986, the
new constitution that came into force simply assumed that the national lan-
guage Filipino already existed and that the government could now promote its
use as “language of instruction in the educational system” (1987 Constitution,
Article X I V , Section 6). In truth, however, the framers of the 1987 Constitu-
tion simply dissolved the distinction between Pilipino (a.k.a. Tagalog) and the
still to be developed Filipino. Thus, Tagalog was catapulted to the status of
national language, while English is now in danger of losing its official-
language status. With an exasperation that many people in the Philippines
must share, one Filipino scholar has criticized the last language policy pro-
nouncement as “a classic case of creating a language by fiat or gobbledy-
gook” (Hidalgo 1998: 24).
As already alluded to, historical developments have twice forced a foreign
language down the Filipinos’ throats, and the atrocities committed by the
foreign powers that subjugated the country in different periods of its history
have been etched in the Filipinos’ collective psyche. The desire to discard the
linguistic legacies of colonialism and to promote the indigenous languages in
their stead has therefore been part and parcel of the Filipinos’ struggle for
freedom itself. The struggle to free the country from the shackles of colonial
rule has also been a struggle to free the minds of the people from their en-
slavement to foreign languages. As defensible as the intention is, it is not a
license to skirt the issue of ethnolinguistic diversity. In spite of what nation-
alists would want everyone to believe, the Filipinos did not become a nation
when they finally received their independence from the U S A in 1946 (or, for
that matter, when they revolted against Spain in 1896). On Independence
Day, they were, to a large extent, as diverse as the Spanish colonizers had
found them in 1521. Their common experience of exploitation and injustice
under the Spanish, the Americans, and for a brief period the Japanese notwith-
standing, the Filipinos have remained culturally distinct from one another,
speaking a variety of languages, practicing a number of religions, and observ-
ing different customs and traditions. Allegiance to the now independent re-
public demands a high degree of transcendence of ethnolinguistic boundaries,
but not their permanent erasure. The clamor for a national language is there-
482 D ANILO M ANARPAAC

fore nothing more than wishful thinking. Like the Philippine flag, national
anthem, national costume, and so on, the national language is a mere symbol
that begs the question of the existence of a Filipino nation.
Florian Coulmas sees “the quest for a national language in Third World
countries […] as a response to the existence of national languages in Europe
and their symbolic significance for national integrity” (Coulmas 1988: 19).
He is, however, quick to call attention to the quintessential difference between
late-eighteenth-century Europe and postcolonial Asia and sub-Saharan Africa:
Decolonization produced new states, but not necessarily new nations, let alone
new national languages […] Thus, while the nation state in Europe was
largely a product of the nation whose awakening sense of identity called for
the establishment of a politically autonomous organization; in the new polities
of the post-colonial epoch, this has to be produced by the state, which exists as
an institutional structure without a nation that pays loyalty to it. (Coulmas
1988: 13)
Herein lies the crux of the problem in Philippine language policy. The Philip-
pines is a linguistically plural society whose political unity is a result of colo-
nial machinations. Spain determined the extent of its Pacific colony in the
sixteenth century and spelled out its boundaries in the deed of sale that it
signed with the U S A three centuries later. For good or for bad, the boundaries
of the Philippines have not been redrawn since then. Already burdened with
economic difficulties that formed the legacy of some four hundred years of
colonialism, various administrations have tried to safeguard the integrity of
the Philippines through the promotion of a national language. For all the good
intentions, the move owes much to an antiquated European notion and plays
into the hands of a small group of Filipino nationalists.
Thus, Wilfrido Villacorta, who played a key role in the 1987 constitutional
hat trick, regurgitates the arguments of European nationalists in the late eight-
eenth century when he insists on an organic tie between language and
thought:
National pride is best expressed in the national language because the latter
carries with it the sentiments and the thought processes that would otherwise
not be captured when one uses a foreign language. (Villacorta 1991: 34)
As is often the case with nationalist rhetoricians, Villacorta’s obsession with
national unity and cultural autonomy narrows his perspective, so that he be-
gins to propagate a restrictive identity politics that views the adoption of one
indigenous language as prerequisite to Filipino nationhood.
To be sure, most Filipino scholars recognize that Filipino, at most, serves a
symbolic function. Andrew González, for instance, aware of the failure of the
The Limits of a Nationalist Language Policy in the Philippines 483

country’s bilingual education policy, separates the issue of language from

nationalism:
Nationalism assumes many indicators and cannot be stereotyped into prefer-
ence for medium of instruction in school or even competence in the selected
national language. Thus, a linguistic symbol of unity and national identity will
not necessarily entail an eagerness to use the language for education, especi-
ally when there is a competing dominant second language that is still present
to give material incentives and other instrumental reasons for acquisition.
(González 1991: 8)
It is unfortunate, however, that Gonzalez eschews the issue of why Filipinos
need a national language in the first place. But, at least, he is aware that alle-
giance to the state is not manifested in the mastery of the national language
alone. More importantly, he acknowledges the multiplicity of factors that
determine language choice.
The nagging question about the necessity for a national language remains.
If it does not really foster unity among different ethnolinguistic groups, nor
make a significant contribution to the process of learning, what is it for? In the
case of the Philippines, where the question has more or less boiled down to
choosing between Tagalog and English as the sole official language of the
country, nationalists like Villacorta have a ready answer:
The national language [Filipino] also serves as a defense against foreign cul-
tures that employ their own language to smother the growth and independence
of the developing nation. (Villacorta 1991: 33)
Clearly such objection to the continued use of English in the Philippines has
to do with a fear that Filipinos will begin to imbibe Anglo-American values, if
they haven’t done so already. Again, echoing European Romantics, Villacorta
insists that “every language is culture-laden, [and that] English carries with it
the Weltanschauung of its native speakers” (Villacorta 1991: 39). Here is a
clear exemplification of cultural anxiety. The belief that a foreign language
could actually erode local culture and values is, at best, an outmoded para-
digm that had some legitimacy in the early stages of decolonization. Follow-
ing a simplistic causality, it disregards a host of variables that determine
which values a particular society adopts at which point in its history. Worse,
such deterministic view assigns cut and dried roles to the source culture, as all
powerful and pernicious, and the recipient culture, as highly permeable and
passive.
This grand design is elaborated on by Robert Phillipson in his comprehen-
sive work Linguistic Imperialism (1992), which focuses on the dramatic
spread of English especially in the last century. The book sets out to expose
484 D ANILO M ANARPAAC

the ideological underpinnings of English Language Teaching (E L T ) and

examines the roles of the various institutions implicated in a linguistic power
play with clear Manichaean poles. On the one hand, there is the essentialized
“Centre” (suggested by the use of the capital letter), which consists primarily
of the U K and the U S A and institutions that are more or less affiliated with
them, including the U S Information Agency, the British Council, the Peace
Corps, the Rockefeller Foundation, the I M F , the World Bank, Hollywood, the
Internet, etc. The “Centre,” the book argues, advances its own interests
through financial aid and the export of material and human resources. On the
other hand, there is the “Periphery” (also capitalized and singular) which con-
sists mainly of former colonies that are unable to distinguish what is good for
them and what is not. The “Periphery” thus ends up infused with the norms
and values of the “Centre” and languishing in a state of protracted cultural
dependence. This, in turn, is a precondition for the economic exploitation and
domination of the “Periphery” by the “Centre.” To the extent that Phillipson
employs his theoretical framework to describe both the colonial and the neo-
colonial situations, one gets the impression that linguistic imperialism is an
invulnerably closed system that is able to travel through time and across geo-
graphic space unchallenged and, indeed, unchanged. Except that history has
shown time and again that any assertion of dominance is bound to elicit some
form of resistance.
It is in this respect that Phillipson’s paradigm appears to short-change the
peripheries.3 Linguistic imperialism, according to him, works because the
people involved in the promotion of English (including teachers, aid workers,
government officials, policy-makers, language planners, and so on) are, for
the most part, either unaware of their complicity in the evil design of the
“Centre” or are willing pawns in this intricate game of subjugation. Maintain-
ing that the English language, more than a neutral instrument that can be used
to achieve any particular need, actually carries with it the very blueprint of a
hegemonic world order (Phillipson 1992: 287), he describes a complex scena-
rio that has the governments of the peripheries, along with the local intelligen-
tsia, happily delivering their societies to the putative center:
The State not only ensures that certain types of knowledge and skill are
generated and reproduced in school. It also, to an increasing degree, commis-
sions the knowledge it needs from higher education research institutions. […]
Intellectual activities, such as those engaged in by researchers and educational
planners, are divorced from manual work, the process of direct production.

3
The author of the present essay prefers the plural form to foreground the hetero-
geneity of the territories classified under the totalizing label ‘Periphery’ and to
acknowledge their ties to other cultural centers.
The Limits of a Nationalist Language Policy in the Philippines 485

The role of the planners tends to be confined to that of purveyors of techno-

cratic ‘facts’, and ideological legitimation of a particular type of society, and
its forms of production and reproduction. (Phillipson 1992: 69)
At best, one could appreciate Phillipson’s suggestion that the division be-
tween center and peripheries is not as neat as one would have thought. Within
a peripheral country, there may exist a similar exploitative structure that has
the local elite (which includes people in government) imposing on the rest of
society. Except, of course, that this center within the peripheral country is
nothing more than an outpost of the foreign center. In Phillipson’s own words,
“the norms, whether economic, military, or linguistic, are dictated by the
dominant Centre and have been internalized by those in power in the Peri-
phery” (Phillipson 1992: 52).
Wittingly or unwittingly, therefore, Phillipson delivers arguments in favor
of a conspiracy theory which is welcome fodder to nationalists in peripheral
countries like the Philippines. Phillipson’s suggestion that ideas from the
center are transferred to the peripheries through an intricately woven network
of linguistic practitioners confirms the anxiety of detractors of the English
language. Of course, Phillipson insists that his theory “avoid[s] reductionism
by recognizing that what happens in the Periphery is not irrevocably deter-
mined by the Centre” (Phillipson 1992: 63). But his protestation is drowned
by his own uncompromising belief in a Gramscian hegemonic structure that
tricks the peripheries into destroying their own cultural legacies and sup-
planting them with one that permits an all-out exploitation and domination by
a foreign power.
Fortunately, there has never been a dearth of Filipino scholars that have
adopted a more sober view of the persistent popularity of English in the
Philippines. They recognize English as an indispensable medium of local
exchange and appreciate its status as language of wider communication that
enables them to participate in transnational knowledge production as active
agents and not simply as objects of various theorizing. Ma. Lourdes S.
Bautista, for example, documents the development of a Philippine variety of
English as evidence of a successful process of language appropriation:
[…] Philippine English is not English that falls short of the norms of Standard
American English; it is not badly-learned English as a second language; its
distinctive features are not errors committed by users who have not mastered
the American standard. Instead, it is a nativized variety of English that has
features which differentiate it from Standard American English because of the
influence of the first language (especially in pronunciation – although we
should always keep in mind Strevens’s distinction between accent and dialect
– but occasionally in grammar), because of the different culture in which the
486 D ANILO M ANARPAAC

language is embedded (expressed in the lexicon and discourse conventions),

and because of a restructuring of some of the grammar rules (manifested in the
grammar). Philippine English has an informal variety, especially in the spoken
mode, which may include a lot of borrowing and code-mixing, and it has a
formal variety which, when used by educated speakers and found acceptable
in educated Filipino circles, can be called Standard Philippine English.
(Bautista 2000: 21)
In effect, Bautista is arguing that the much feared transfer of norms, values,
and ideology from the center to the peripheries has long ceased to be a reality
in the Philippines. Her insistence on the role of culture and other locally
situated variables belies any efficient manipulation of E L T to advance the
hegemonic agenda of the putative center.
For their part, Bonifacio P. Sibayan and Andrew Gonzalez agree that the
cultures of the peripheries have a way of frustrating the ideological thrust of
the center:
What is fascinating from a linguistic and cultural point of view are the
adaptations of the language as it undergoes inculturation [sic] and the new
ways in which this culturally grafted code is put to use, to thematize entirely
new phenomena, realities, and events. Cultural diffusion is never pure; it
results in mixtures. Whatever is received is received in the manner of the
receiver, to quote an old Medieval Scholastic principle. As the code undergoes
acculturation, it becomes different in many features and if left there longer, it
will soon become a different code from its former source. (Sibayan &
Gonzalez 1996: 165)
Not only is the form of the transplanted language changed, therefore, but the
way it is used is no longer dictated by the source culture. The prevailing con-
ditions in the recipient culture give rise to an altogether different set of
imperatives. The agents of the center can only do so much to implement their
own grand design. In the end, the users of the language in the peripheries
determine what normative features the transplanted language will adopt, for
what purposes that language will be used, and whose ends it will ultimately
serve.
Again, observing how local imperatives have eventually influenced the lot
of post-imperial English in the Philippines, Sibayan and Gonzalez make a
statement in the direction of Phillipson:
In our view, linguistic imperialism (on the use of English) in the Philippines is
a thing of the past: it was a characteristic of the imperial (colonial) period. The
statements on the Philippines quoted by Phillipson [in Linguistic Imperialism]
on the Philippines [sic] are those made by an insignificant, biased minority.
The Limits of a Nationalist Language Policy in the Philippines 487

This is like flogging a dead horse. Today, Filipinos have taken over their own
affairs including what to do with English. The Filipinos today are doing with
English what they want to do and not from any dictation of outsiders
(foreigners). (Sibayan & González 1996: 165)
For his part, Luis H. Francia uses a more combative language to underline the
fact that Filipino writers in the English language are engaged in a counter-
hegemonic resistance to the center’s incursion into the cultures of the peri-
pheries:
In a sense, many of our Filipino writers in English are engaged in the literary
equivalent of guerilla warfare, using the very same weapon that had been
employed to foist another set of foreign values upon a ravished nation, but
now as part of an arsenal meant for conscious self-determination and the
unwieldy process of reclaiming psychic territory from the invader. (Francia
1993: xiv)
Francia is particularly extolling the achievements of Filipino creative writers,
who, in opting to describe their experiences and articulate their artistic vision
in the English language, have wrested control of the signifying practice from
the former colonizer. From the initial imitative attempts at literary writing in
the first quarter of the twentieth century, Filipino writers in English have long
matured and established their own tradition, adapting their chosen language to
the unique demands of life in the Philippines. Although much is left to be
desired in terms of promoting English-language Philippine writing in the
country, especially among the general public, a few excellent exponents of
this branch of Philippine literature have secured a place in most academic
curricula, among them Manuel E. Arguilla, a master of local color, whose
short stories are especially popular in high school literature classes; Nick
Joaquín, whose short stories and novels highlight the deeply rooted Hispanic
traditions in the Philippines that often run into conflict with American and
Asian norms and values; and José García Villa, whose controversial experi-
mentation with language in his poetry neatly satisfies the more sophisticated
requirements of English classes at universities. In short, there are creative
writers, literary critics, publishers, journalists, magazine editors, English
teachers, linguists, and other active agents who mediate knowledge produc-
tion and transfer in the Philippines and disrupt the smooth implementation of
America’s hegemonic designs. Francia’s description of Filipinos as “a people
continually visited by stranger after stranger, each with fixed ideas as to who
we were” (Francia 1993: xxii) was therefore valid only until Filipinos were
able to indigenize English and break free from the clutches of the conspiracy
outlined by Phillipson.
488 D ANILO M ANARPAAC

Describing the roots of Philippine English-language literature, the veteran

writer and critic N.V.M. González observes that “whatever else may have re-
sulted from this American intervention, whether inspired by hegemonic
reasons or otherwise, it is the English language that appears to have made a
most unique contribution to the national culture” (Gonzalez & Campomanes
1997: 66). Gonzáles belongs to the generation of writers that carried on the
pioneering work of Paz Márquez Benítez, Manuel E. Arguilla, Zoilo Galang,
Maximo Kalaw, etc. and established a tradition of English-language writing in
the Philippines. These writers created a branch of Philippine literature that
reaches across different ethnolinguistic groups. By choosing to write in Eng-
lish in the 1940s and 1950s – the formative years of the republic – they helped
define the contours of the emerging ‘national culture’ to include not only its
indigenous roots, as nationalists left to their own devices would have done,
but also the legacies of more than four centuries of colonialism. Thanks to
their commitment and energy, the Philippines now boasts a vibrant literature
in the English language nurtured by a small but increasing number of writers,
critics, and readers.
That Philippine literature in English has failed to develop a sizeable fol-
lowing outside the academe is unfortunate enough. The problem is, however,
aggravated by an improper diagnosis that puts the blame squarely on the
language of choice. When Arnold Molina Azurin remarks that English has
failed to become “the medium for an authentic cultural efflorescence in the
[Philippines]” and that it “has served instead as sort of umbilical cord between
the creative minds [in the Philippines] and Mother America” (Azurín 1995:
167), he is ignoring the accomplishment of generations of Filipino writers
who have claimed the English language as a legitimate vehicle of their own
artistic visions. Coming two decades after Miguel Bernad’s famous castiga-
tion of Philippine English-language literature as “perpetually inchoate”
(Bernad 1961: 100), Azurín’s statement is indeed an anachronism that no
longer reflects the complexity of the present situation. At the core of such
criticism are two fallacious notions: (1) the chosen code, being alien to the
Philippines, will never be able to fully express or depict the prevailing condi-
tions in the country and the aspirations of its people, and (2) should they insist
on using English, Filipinos will have to subscribe to either the American or
British standard.
The first is refuted by various scholarly works on the emergence of a dis-
tinct Philippine variety of English. Again, Bautista reviews previous studies
on the nature and development of Philippine English and highlights the
ground-breaking attempt by Teodoro Llamzon to define “Standard Filipino
English” as early as 1969 (Bautista 2000: 6–7). She also presents examples of
how Filipinos have transcended the limitations of American English – from
The Limits of a Nationalist Language Policy in the Philippines 489

the simple incorporation of vernacular lexical material into the English text
(especially honorific titles such as ate for ‘elder sister’ and manong for ‘an
older man’) and changes in the meaning of certain words (like salvage to
mean ‘kill in cold blood’, a common practice of soldiers and the police during
the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos to eliminate the more vocal members of
the opposition), to the coining of new phrases and idiomatic expressions (like
“dirty kitchen” meaning a second kitchen “where the messy or real cooking is
done, since the other kitchen is for show or for the few times when the owner
of the house does the cooking,” and “watch-your-car boy,” which, according
to her, “needs no explanation in a society where carnapping is not uncom-
mon” (Bautista 2000: 22–23). These linguistic strategies, together with the
more literary ones developed by Filipino writers in English, counteract the
criticisms of people like Isagani Cruz who hypocritically argue that English
“lacks words to express Philippine social realities,” hence is inadequate as a
language of Philippine literary criticism (Cruz 2000: 51). The irony of it is
that Cruz, Azurín, and their lot are only too willing to use English in making
their case.
Having established the existence of standard Philippine English, one
should now be able to dismiss calls to subscribe to the American or British
standard as moot and superfluous. Except that the problem goes beyond a
simple linguistic dilemma. More than half a century after Filipinos claimed
their independence from the U S A , some of them still suffer from a kind of
cultural inferiority complex that prevents them from fully appreciating that
which is locally produced. To be sure, this phenomenon resulted largely from
the American colonial policy which held up American values, ideals, and cul-
ture as superior and worthy of emulation. Philippine criticism, for example,
has had its share of apologists and self-effacing comparativists, from Miguel
Bernad to Leonard Casper (an American critic married to a Filipina writer).
Fortunately, there has never been a shortage of resolute Filipino voices that
try to subvert this colonialist practice. Thus, writer Edith L. Tiempo strictly
rejects “sedulous aping and adoption of foreign models,” even as she ques-
tions the adequacy of an introverted nationalism in dealing with the chal-
lenges of an increasingly globalized world (Tiempo 2000: 64). In this regard,
she echoes the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, whose uncompromising
stance on language appropriation may well serve as an inspiration to Filipino
writers in English:
my answer to the question: Can an African ever learn English well enough to
be able to use it effectively in creative writing? is certainly yes. If on the other
hand you ask: Can he ever learn to use it like a native speaker? I should say, I
hope not. It is neither necessary nor desirable for him to be able to do so. […]
The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his
490 D ANILO M ANARPAAC

message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a
medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning
out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar
experience. (Achebe 1993 [1975]: 433)
The writer José Y. Dalisay, Jr. sums it up for his fellow Filipino writers in a
straightforward manner which is not without its own validity: “language is not
an issue; you use what you know; you use what’s available; you use it well”
(Dalisay 1995: 115).
More serious than the allegation that English can never be made adequate
to describe Philippine realities is the charge that English stratifies society,
with English speakers forming an elite that enjoys a monopoly of material
rewards and in the process alienating themselves from the so-called masses.
While it is true that Americans, in the early years of colonization, systema-
tically implemented a program of training and development for a select group
of Filipinos that would assist them in the gargantuan task of administering
their newly acquired territory, and while it can also be argued that those
Filipinos who studied in the U S A and mastered the English language even-
tually occupied key positions not only in government but in the economy of
the country as well, blaming social inequity in the Philippines on English is
way too convenient and dangerous. For one thing, it absolves Filipinos of
their own culpability in the matter. Certainly the deplorable quality of public
education, the inegalitarian distribution of land, the limited employment
opportunities, the rampant corruption in government and civil service, and the
general perversion of democratic institutions are the real root of the problem.
Replacing English with Tagalog, as nationalists have been insisting on, is not
going to eliminate the problem. Those who already enjoy a monopoly of
material resources will continue to dominate Philippine society, as they are
the ones who can and will continue to afford the expensive high-quality edu-
cation and language training offered mostly by private institutions. Mean-
while, native speakers of Tagalog will find themselves enjoying undue advan-
tage in addition to their geographic proximity to the center of power. This, in
turn, could incite feelings of envy if not enmity from other ethnolinguistic
groups and exacerbate the problem. At this historical juncture, with the con-
flicts in the Balkans, Central Africa, and Indonesia, to cite a few examples,
reminding everybody of the disagreeable consequences of nationalist policies
that place certain ethnolinguistic groups at a disadvantage, the Philippines is
well advised to steer clear of policies that could translate into chauvinism,
interethnic animosity, and open violence. The only viable solution is to make
high-quality education available and accessible to the vast majority of the
population. That means more schools, better infrastructure, more attractive
compensation and training programs for teachers, and a general reevaluation
The Limits of a Nationalist Language Policy in the Philippines 491

of school curricula and education policies. These are the real issues; these are
the real challenges.
To conclude, it is high time that the Philippine government re-examined its
language policy and admitted that its aim to dislodge English from its privi-
leged position in the controlling linguistic domains and make Tagalog the sole
official language is a costly and divisive project, devoid of any merit save
perhaps for the symbolic triumph of ridding the Philippines of another colo-
nial legacy. Instead of waxing Romantic in anticipation of the day Filipinos
would speak one indigenous language, nationalists are better off acknowl-
edging that the culture of the Philippines is the sum total of different ethni-
cities, linguistic backgrounds, and foreign influences. The integrity of Philip-
pine society is not necessarily guaranteed by language unity, let alone by the
imposition of one indigenous language which is viewed with skepticism by
other ethnolinguistic groups (Hidalgo 1998: 27–28; A. González 1991: 12). A
more pragmatic alternative is the adoption of a two-pronged strategy that
enhances the surviving indigenous languages in the country, even as it pushes
for Philippine English as the primary means of communication among the
different ethnolinguistic groups and as a legitimate vehicle for their visions.
The nationalists’ objection to English is a matter of pride – false pride. More
than half a century after the Philippines claimed its independence from the
U S A , they are still wailing over the legacies of colonialism. N.V.M.
González put his finger on the problem as early as the mid-1970s when he
admonished detractors of the English language in the Philippines to “ask
whether […] the despair is real or only an expression of […] self-flagellation”
(N.V.M. González 1976: 424). It is one thing to be critical and to resist
attempts to hold up one nation, race, or belief as worthy of emulation, or
promote inegalitarian relations between the sexes or among different social
classes. It is an entirely different matter to wallow in cultural insecurity and
nationalistic paranoia. Filipino nationalists will be doing themselves a huge
favor by “put[ting] away [their] childish things.”

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[
List of Contributors

R ICHARD J. A LEXANDER
Institut für Englische Sprache, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien
Augasse 9, A–1090 Wien, Austria
[email protected]

V ERA A LEXANDER
Philosophische Fakultät II, Fachrichtung 4.3 – Anglistik, Amerikanistik und
Anglophone Kulturen, Universität des Saarlandes, D–66041 Germany

E LEONORA C HIAVETTA
Via Lincoln 37, 90133 Palermo, Italy
[email protected]

D AGMAR D EUBER
Freytagstr. 5, D–79114 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
[email protected]

F IONA D ARROCH
4 Glebe Court, 9 Glebe Ave, Stirling FK8 2HZ, Scotland
[email protected]

H UBERT D EVONISH
Department of Language, Linguistics, and Philosophy, University of the West
Indies
Mona, Kingston 7, Jamaica
Email: [email protected]

H AIKE F RANK
Talstr. 40, D–79102 Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany
[email protected]
494 L INGUISTICS , L ITERATURE AND P OSTCOLONIAL E NGLISHES

D.C.R.A. G OONETILLEKE
University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka
No. 1, Kandawatta Road, Nugegoda, Sri Lanka
[email protected]

E RIKA H ASEBE –L UDT

Faculty of Education, University of Lethbridge
4401 University Drive, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada TIK 3144
[email protected]

J ANET H OLMES
School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, Victoria University
P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand
[email protected]

J ENNIFER J ENKINS
Department of Education and Professional Studies, King’s College London
Franklin–Wilkins Building, Waterloo Road, London SE1 9NN, Great Britain
email: [email protected]

N KONKO M. K AMWANGAMALU
Department of Linguistics, University of Natal
King George V Avenue, Durban 4041, South Africa
[email protected]

K EMBO –S URE
Department of Linguistics and Foreign Languages, Moi University
P.O. Box 3900, Eldoret, Kenya
[email protected]

M ICHELLE K EOWN
5B High Street, Dunblane FK15 0EE, Scotland
[email protected]

K ERSTIN K NOPF
Bleichstr. 34a, D–17489 Greifswald, Germany
[email protected]
List of Contributors 495

P HOTIS L YSANDROU AND Y VONNE L YSANDROU

University of North London
42 St. John’s Villas, London NI9 3EG, Great Britain
[email protected]

S AFARI T.A. M AFU

PO Box 1390, Morogoro, Tanzania
[email protected]

D ANILO V ICTORINO S EVERO M ANARPAAC

Allerheiligenstr. 40, D–60313 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
[email protected]

M ICHAEL M EYER
An der Universität 9, D–96045 Bamberg, Germany
[email protected]

P ETER H. M ARSDEN
Institut für Anglistik, R W T H Aachen
Kármánstr. 17/19, D–52062 Aachen, Germany
[email protected]

S USANNE M ÜHLEISEN
Institut für England- und Amerikastudien, Abteilung Linguistik, Johann
Wolfgang Goethe-Universität
Grüneburgplatz 1, D–60323 Frankfurt am Main, Germany
[email protected]

P ETER M ÜHLHÄUSLER
C E S A G L , University of Adelaide
Adelaide, S.A. 5005, Australia
[email protected]

P ATRICK O LOKO
University of Lagos
Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa
[email protected]
496 L INGUISTICS , L ITERATURE AND P OSTCOLONIAL E NGLISHES

P REMILA P AUL
c/o S C I L E T , The American College
Madurai – 625002, India
[email protected]
[email protected]

A LASTAIR P ENNYCOOK
Faculty of Education, University of Technology Sydney
PO Box 123, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia
[email protected]

R OBERT P HILLIPSON
Department of English, Copenhagen Business School
Dalgas Have 15, DK–2000 Copenhagen F, Denmark
[email protected]

J ENNIE P RICE
7 Southport Road, Lydiate, Liverpool L31 2HX, Great Britain
[email protected]

H ELGA R AMSEY –K URZ

Klöcklstr. 17, A–806 St. Radegund, Austria
[email protected]

R ICHARD S AMIN
Département d’anglais, Université de Nancy 2
3, place Godefroy de Bouillon, F–5400 Nancy, France
[email protected]

B ARBARA S EIDLHOFER
Institut für Anglistik, Universität Wien
Universitätscampus A A K H , Spitalgasse 2-4, A–1090 Wien, Austria
[email protected]

T OVE S KUTNABB –K ANGAS

Roskilde University
3.2.4., P.O. Box 260, DK–4000, Roskilde, Denmark
[email protected]
List of Contributors 497

Y VETTE T AN
Department of English and Cultural Studies, University of Adelaide
Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia
[email protected]

M ICHAEL T OOLAN
Department of English, University of Birmingham
Birmingham B15 2TT, Great Britain
ToolanMJ@hhs. bham.ac.uk

P ETRA T OURNAY
6 Diogenes Street, 1516 Nicosia, Cyprus
[email protected]

R AJIVA W IJESINHA
8 Alfred House Road, Colombo 3, Sri Lanka
[email protected]

C HRISTINE V OGT –W ILLIAMS

Franz-Diltz-Str. 8, D–61440 Oberursel, Germany
[email protected]