U2142
Book 2 Chapter 3
A colonial language
Dick and Philip Seargeant
Dr Amel Salah
• 3.1 Introduction
• The idea that English had the potential to
become a ‘world language’ began to emerge
as early as the mid-eighteenth century.
• The more fundamental reasons for its global
spread are related to processes of geopolitical
significance: to the history first of the British
Isles, then of Europe, and ultimately of the
world.
• Central to the expansion of the language is the
history of colonisation.
• The concept of colonisation refers here to
processes involving the establishment, often by
force, of communities of English speakers in
territories around the world. These communities
positioned themselves in a relation of power to
the indigenous (native) or pre-existing
populations of the territories in which they
settled, while at the same time maintaining
economic and cultural links with England. It was
processes of this sort which played a significant
and decisive role in the expansion of English
usage around the world.
• In terms of Kachru’s model of the spread of
English that we looked at in Chapter 1, both the
Inner and Outer Circle countries almost all trace
their current usage of English back to some of
colonial relationship with England.
• In this chapter we will examine the relationship
between colonisation and the spread of English,
looking at the promotion of the language beyond
England – the first within the British Isles, and
then to places such as The Americas, Africa and
Australia.
• We also consider the language contact that
occurred as English rubbed up against other
languages and cultures, and the influence this
has had on the shape of the language as it has
developed in diverse world contexts.
• Finally, we will consider the part that the history
of colonisation has played in the political and
cultural associations that English now has
around the world, and look at the complex
issues of cultural identity and divided language
loyalities which accompany the language’s
global spread.
• 3.2 The colonial experience
• The spread of English has been closely associated
with a colonial process from as far back as the 12th
century. There was no single, universal colonial
experience, however. Each colony provided a unique
context politically, socially and linguistically.
Nevertheless, it is possible to distinguish a common
sequence of events in many of those colonies where
English emerged as a main language:
• First, colonisation, whereby an original settlement
was made by English speakers.
• Second, political incorporation, whereby the
colonised region was brought under the central of
the English/British government.
• Third, a national reaction which sometimes led to
independence.
• Stage 1: Colonisation
• The process of colonisation took different forms in
different places. For a long period after the
Germanic invasion of the fifth century which
established English in England, Celtic languages
continued to be widely spoken in three areas of
the British Isles: Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
• According to the historian Bartlett (1993), the
marginal areas in Europe were colonised during
the Middle Ages from what he calls the ‘centre’ ,
formed by Latin Christendom. In the northwestern areas, this process of colonisation
affected all the Celtic territories of the British Isles.
• Displacement. A substantial settlement by firstlanguage speakers of English displaced the
precolonial population (examples are America
and Australia)
• Subjection. Lighter colonial settlements kept the
precolonial population in subjection, allowing
some of them access to learning English as a
second, or additional language (examples are
Nigeria, Cameroon and India). This type of
colonisation is often called ‘indirect rule’.
• Replacement. A precolonial population was
replaced by new labour elsewhere, principally
West Africa
• Moving next to the establishment of England
colonies beyond the British Isles, this began at
the end of the 16th century. The motives in
this cases were threefold: economic, social
and political.
• Since the process of colonisation beyond the
British Isles lasted more then 300 years and
affected four continents, it is very difficult to
make generalisations about its character. In
this chapter we will examine three distinct
types of English colonisation, each with its
own linguistic consequences.
• Stage 2: political incorporation
• As colonies developed and became of greater
strategic importance to England, the English
government took grater responsibility for their
administration. The Celtic territories were the first
to experience political incorporation in this way.
• Originally, colonists were subjects of the English
monarchy, economically dependent on and
controlled by the mother country. Linguistically this
meant that the language usage of England
remained a powerful model. It was not until the
19th century that the British government assumed
the administration of the remaining colonies,
creating the British Empire. And by that time the
issue of political incorporation had become
complicated by national reactions.
• Stage 3: National reaction
• The political incorporation of communities that
feel they have a distinct cultural identity provides
fertile ground for the emergence of nationalist
reaction. Language figured prominently in such
nationalist reaction: in some cases, the
precolonial language provide a focus for the
assertion of a separatist identity, in others this
role was played by English itself.
• For example, by the end of the 19th century the
newly emerging nationalism in Ireland, Scotland
and Wales were beginning to fear for the survival
of the Celtic languages. One consequence of this
was that they became taught languages, learned
by many people who otherwise knew only
English.
• 3.3 The linguistic consequences of colonisation
• One of the more striking linguistic consequences
of colonisation has been the appearance of new
varieties of English worldwide. Whenever the
colonial process brought English into contact
with other languages it did so within particular
relations of power. This colonial conditions of
language contact played an important role in
shaping the new varieties of English that
emerged.
• Edgar Schneider (2007, pp. 32-55) has identified five
broad stages of historical development for new
varieties of English in the context of contact
between different speech communities brought
about by colonialism.
• The process begins with the foundation stage, in
which English is brought to a territory where it had
not previously been spoken. At this initial stage the
indigenous community and the newly arrived
settlers see themselves very much as distinct
groups., and although there is some language
contact, communication between the two is usually
confined to certain members of the communities,
either interpreters or those with high status.
• The second stage in the process is what
Schneider calls exonormative estabilisation:
English begins to be regularly spoken in the
territory, though mainly in contexts such as
administration, education and the legal system.
The variety that is spoken is one modelled on
norms from the settlers’ home country – that is
Britain – (it is an exonormative variety, or one
that looks to external norms), and so has no
distinct identity of its own.
• The next stage in the process is the one
Schneider considers to be the most important,
from both a cultural and a linguistic point of
view. This is the period of nativisation: by this
point, the earlier cultural and political loyalties
that had existed precoloisation are beginning
to be seen as no longer relevant for the
realities of the new situation in which people
are living, and are being replaced by a new
sense of cultural and linguistic identity for the
territory.
• Nativisation is followed by the fourth stage,
endonormative stabilisation, during which the local
variety of English begins not only to be accepted as
legitimate in its own right, but also gets actively
promoted as an important part of the territory’s
culture. By tis point, the population no longer looks
to the model of English that is used in Britain, but is
instead relying on local norms for the language.
• The final phase in the process is differentiation. By
now the local variety is well established and what
begins to happen is that a process of iternal
linguistic variation takes place within the territory,
as different sectors of society (e.g. communities in
different geographical regions) begins to establish
their own particular usage patterns of English,
which can be considered separate dialects of the
variety now spoken in the territory.
Dialect levelling and internal variation
• The mixed demographic background of early
settlers (with people coming from different
class backgrounds and different areas of
Britain) suggests that the varieties of English
taken to the colonies were diverse and often
non-standard. When speakers of these
different varieties were brought together in a
new community, a process of dialect levelling
often occurred. That is, differences between
speakers tended over time to become eroded
and a more uniform variety emerged.
• When political incorporation occurred, this model
of a common standard across the community was
reinforced by the high-status English speakers sent
out
as
representatives
of
the
British
government(this is a factor in the stage Schneider
calls exonormative stabilisation). Nationalist
reaction, and the seeking of independent political
and cultural identity, could then lead to the
promotion of a different standard model, by
encountering the identification and codification
(particularly in spelling books and dictionaries) of a
local variety of English (nativisation in Schneider’s
model). The case of American English is a notable
example.
• As the final stage of Schneider’s model suggests,
there were other tendencies that led to internal
variation in usage of the language. As colonies
expanded and became more established,
different areas and groups usually developed a
sense of local cultural and linguistic identity.
• The most complex linguistic situation was found
in those colonies where speakers became
bilingual in English and a local language. This was
the case in India and West Africa, where a
relatively small number of Europeans imposed
political and economic control over precolonial
populations.
• Here, the English language came into the most
intimate contact with other languages and
new forms of English arose.
• When a language is imposed on a community
as part of a colonial process, local speakers
tend to incorporate many linguistic features
from their first language when speaking the
new, imposed one. In situations such as these,
the local language which influences the
colonial language is described as a substrate.
• A good example of linguistic substrate is
provided by Hiberno-English (also called Irish
English), the variety that arose in Ireland as a
consequence of contact between English and
Irish. An example of grammatical structures
affected by the Irish language is a sentence
such as ‘ they are after doing the work’, where
the construction ‘after’ plus the ‘-ing’ form of a
verb indicates the immediate past (which, in
standard British English, would be: ‘They have
just done the work’).
• Perhaps the most extreme consequence of
language contact, where only the vocabulary
appears to be English and the grammar is
derived from elsewhere, can be found in the
English pidgins and creoles which have appeared
in many parts of the world since the 17th century.
These are varieties which began as simplified
forms of English that were originally developed
as a means of communication between
communities which did not share a common
language. Many of the are a linguistic legacy of
the slave trade which brought speakers of African
languages to the American language.
• The spread of English within the British Isles
• The colonisation of Ireland
• The first colonies were established in the
south-east of Ireland towards the end of the
12th century. English law was introduced to
protect the colonists and disadvantages the
Irish. New towns which were a distinctive form
of Anglo Saxon settlement that contrasted with
local dispersed habitations – were built and
became centers of Anglo-Norman influences.
(You can read more details about that on pp.
112-116)
• Despite the fact that an overwhelming proportion
of Irish people speak English in their daily lives,
they often explicitly express loyalty to the idea of
Irish as part of their national identity. Both this
language loyalty and the role of Irish in the Irish
Republic today can be seen as the result of 19th
century language nationalism.
• In time, there emerged a distinctive form of English
spoken in Ireland, now known as Hiberno-English
or Irish English. As was mentioned above, this was
influenced in various ways by the Irish language,
which was the first language of many of its original
speakers. Irish English gradually became the form
of English learned by monolingual English speakers
in Ireland.
• 3.5 The spread of English beyond the British
Isles
• English in North America: an example of
displacement
• The establishment of English-speaking colonies in
North America at the beginning of the 17th
century was the first decisive stage in the
colonial expansion of England that made English
as international language. The first English
settlers were by no means the first European to
set up colonies. South America was the first to be
discovered by Europe – by the Portuguese and
Spanish – in the late 15th century.
• Any linguist examining the eraly period of
settlement in North America is faced with two
main questions. First, how and when did
American English become differentiated from
British English and recognized as an independent
variety (i.e. at what point did exonormative
stabilisation take place)? Second, how did
internal dialect differenced in American English
arise?
• The variety of English which was implanted in
North America was that of the early Modern
period. It has sometimes been claimed that many
of the differences between American and British
English can be explained in terms of a colonial
lag: the language of colonial settlers is more
conservative than that of the country they left.
Thus, some features of the American English,
such as the widespread pronunciation of /r/ in
words like cart and far (known technically as nonprevocalic /r/) might be attributed to the fact that
/r/ in such words was generally pronounced in
Elizabethan English. See pp. 118-120.
• National Dictionary project
• The dictionary produced by Noah Webster
(1758-1843) in the years after American
independence is a prime example of the
promotion of a distinct cultural identity for
political means. One of Webster’s ambitions
was to give his newly independent nation a
language of its own. In the early stages of its
development, Webster was planning to call his
project a Dictionary of the American Language,
and he wrote of American and English as being
distinct languages.
• English in West Africa: an example of
subjection
• New British colonies were established in Africa
1880. between that date and the end of the
century the entire continent was seized and
shared out among the European powers.
• Pidgins and creoles are the new languages
which initially come into being through a
particular contact which occurs between
speakers who need to develop a sustained
means of communication but do not share a
common language.
• Pidgins typically have a small vocabulary and little
grammatical complexity, and often depend heavily on
context for understanding. See pp. 124-129.
• English in Jamaica: an example of replacement (See pp.
130-133)
• Language education policies and colonialist agendas
• In the context of context of the slave trade it has been
suggested that the lack of a common language among the
colonised population was exploited by the colonisers as a
means of political control. Depending on the context
though, the introduction of English into the colony could
serve a number of different functions, and English
language education and the decision colonisers took with
respect to how and when the language should be taught,
has thus been a very important part of the history of
colonisation.