U2142Book 2 Chapter 3

A colonial languageDick 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 north-western areas, this process of colonisation affected all the Celtic territories of the British Isles.

• Displacement. A substantial settlement by first-language 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 non-prevocalic /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.