Sava Tatiana, 3LM1

 What is linguistic imperialism?

 What are the most successful imperial languages?
 Who is the scholar, who did the most thorough research concerning the problem of
linguistic imperialism?
 Definition
 Historical background
 Robert Philipson’s approach
 Critique
 Other opinions
 Sources
 Linguistic imperialism, or language
imperialism, linguistic dominance a phenomenon that
occasionally occurs, defined as "the transfer of a
dominant language to other people". This language
"transfer" comes about because of imperialism. The
transfer is considered to be a demonstration of power—
traditionally, military power but also, in the modern
world, economic power—and aspects of the
dominant culture are usually transferred along with the
language. Among the most successful imperial languages
are Latin, Arabic, and English.
 In the modern world, linguistic imperialism may also be considered
in the context of international development, affecting the standard by
which organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and
the World Bank evaluate the trustworthiness and value of providing
structural adjustment loans.
 The dominant language can survive the collapse of the
imperial power itself. At this stage the original native
speakers lose control of the language, which eventually
passes to a new evolving power structure. For example,
Latin survived for 1,000 years as the language of the Roman
Catholic Church, and it spread to areas such as Scandinavia
that had never been part of the Roman Empire. During its
period of dominance, the position of a language may
appear to be unassailable, but it can be destroyed by
successful challenges to the power structure on which it
depends. Latin declined after the rise of the nation state
and the Protestant Reformation, both of which led to the
rise of national languages, including English.
 By the time the English language began to spread overseas in the wake of British
military and mercantile expansion, the written language was already on the way to
standardization. Leaving aside some differences in vocabulary--and some minor
variations in spelling, such as British colour and American color--essentially the same
written form has been adopted worldwide. In the absence of a true standard of
pronunciation, correct spoken English was assumed to be the preserve of polite
London society, a view that was eventually formalized in the British Received
Pronunciation of the early 20th century.
 In America, and later Australia and New Zealand and South Africa, new varieties of
English were developed by native speakers coming from the British Isles. Early
colonists would not in general have moved in fashionable circles in London, and
consequently colonial speech was generally regarded by Londoners as an inferior
form of English. The first Americanism to be condemned was the use of bluff as
"headland," first recorded in 1735. Even among quite advanced ancient Asian
civilizations, 19th-century colonial administrators sought to impose the English
language and culture. In 1813 the official education policy in India was to impart "to
the Native population knowledge of English literature and science through the
medium of the English language." English came to be used as an official language not
only in southern Asia but also in Singapore and Hong Kong, Malaya and the East
Indies, and later in East Africa.
 The total number of English speakers was small before 1800, but since then
the number has grown rapidly. Great Britain was indisputably the dominant
English-speaking power in the 19th century, but it was already being
overtaken by the United States both in population and as an economic power.
International English in the 20th century has consequently been dominated by
American rather than British English. The use of English has spread far beyond
the old British Empire. It has even begun to replace French in Francophone
Africa--e.g., Algeria and the former Zaire. English has some special status as
official or second language in more than 70 countries.
 By the 1990s immigration and natural growth in the former colonies had
created a population of some 350 million people who spoke English as their
mother tongue, most of them in the United States. A further 250 million to 350
million people use English in some way as a second language. The number of
people using English as a foreign language is impossible to assess, since it is
arbitrary at what point someone with a limited knowledge counts as an English
speaker. Something like a quarter of the world’s population has some
competence in English, and the vast majority are not native speakers of the
language.
 Up to the late 19th century, developments in mass communications--printing, newspapers, and
the telegraph--had involved the written language. For the next century, beginning with the
telephone and the phonograph, developments were to involve the spoken language. The film
industry grew rapidly in importance after the addition of sound to moving picture, and since the
main centre was in Hollywood rather than London, it was American English that was spread with
the new medium. At about the same time, the broadcasting industry--initially radio and later
television--developed first in Great Britain but was soon dwarfed by its American counterpart.
People’s lives began to be controlled, in English-speaking countries and elsewhere, by the
American-dominated advertising industry. Popular music found its way onto the airwaves, but
following the introduction of rock and roll in the 1950s, broadcasters began to determine what
kind of music was popular. The dominant language in this medium has always been American
English.
 Computer-based technology has led to a massive extension in the use of English, both in
computer software and on the Internet. Computer languages are based on English, and English
is the language normally used to communicate with the user. Software can, of course, use other
languages, but it will doubtless make use of English-based commands. Texts in other languages
can be found on the Internet, including Arabic and Japanese, but these few exceptions only
underline the basic fact that the vast majority (about 85%, according to one recent French study)
are in English. Anybody can in principle contact anybody else anywhere in the world, but in
practice they can do this only if they are sufficiently proficient in English.
 Since the early 1990s, linguistic imperialism has attracted attention
among scholars of applied linguistics. In particular, Robert
Phillipson's 1992 book, Linguistic Imperialism, has led to considerable
debate about its merits and shortcomings. Phillipson found
denunciations of linguistic imperialism that dated back to Nazi
critiques of the British Council (European aristocracy was at the time
agreeing on the use of English), and to Soviet analyses of English as
the language of world capitalism and world domination. In this vein,
criticism of English as a world language is rooted in anti-globalism.
 Phillipson defines English linguistic imperialism as "the dominance
of English... asserted and maintained by the establishment and
continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities
between English and other languages.“
 A central theme of Phillipson's theory is the complex hegemonic
processes which, he asserts, continue to sustain the pre-eminence of
English in the world today. His book analyzes the British Council's use
of rhetoric to promote English, and discusses key tenets of
English applied linguistics and English-language-teaching
methodology.
These tenets hold that:
 English is best taught monolingually ("the monolingual fallacy");
 the ideal teacher is a native speaker ("the native-speaker fallacy");
 the earlier English is taught, the better the results ("the early-start
fallacy");
 the more English is taught, the better the results ("the maximum-
exposure fallacy");
 if other languages are used much, standards of English will drop ("the
subtractive fallacy").
According to Phillipson, those who promote English—organizations
such as the British Council, the International Monetary Fund and
the World Bank, and individuals such as operators of English-language
schools—use three types of argument:
 Intrinsic arguments describe the English language as providential,
rich, noble and interesting. Such arguments tend to assert what
English is and what other languages are not.
 Extrinsic arguments point out that English is well-established: that it
has many speakers, and that there are trained teachers and a wealth
of teaching material.
 Functional arguments emphasize the usefulness of English as a
gateway to the world.
Other arguments for English are
 its economic utility: it enables people to operate technology;
 its ideological function: it stands for modernity;
 its status as symbol for material advance and efficiency.
 "The study of linguistic imperialism can help to clarify whether the
winning of political independence led to a linguistic liberation of Third
World countries, and if not, why not. Are the former colonial languages a
useful bond with the international community and necessary for state
formation and national unity internally? Or are they a bridgehead for
Western interests, permitting the continuation of a global system of
marginalization and exploitation? What is the relationship between
linguistic dependence (continued use of a European language in a former
non-European colony) and economic dependence (the export of raw
materials and import of technology and know-how)?" (Robert Phillipson,
"Linguistic Imperialism." Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, ed. by
Margie Berns. Elsevier, 2010)
 "The rejection of the linguistic legitimacy of a language--
any language used by any linguistic community--in short, amounts to
little more than an example of the tyranny of the majority. Such a
rejection reinforces the long tradition and history of linguistic
imperialism in our society. The harm, though, is done not only to
those whose languages we reject, but in fact to all of us, as we are
made poorer by an unnecessary narrowing of our cultural and
linguistic universe." (Timothy Reagan, Language Matters: Reflections
on Educational Linguistics. Information Age, 2009)
 "The fact that… no uniform British empire-wide language policy
developed tends to disconfirm the hypothesis of linguistic
imperialism as responsible for the spread of English…" (Janina
Brutt-Griffler, World English: A Study of Its Development. Multilingual
Matters, 2002)
 "The teaching of English by itself…, even where it did take place, is
not sufficient grounds to identify the policy of the British empire
with linguistic imperialism." (Janina Brutt-Griffler, World English: A
Study of Its Development. Multilingual Matters, 2002)
 Many scholars have participated in lively discussions of Phillipson's claims. Alan Davies, for
instance, envisions the spectre of Phillipson haunting the Department of Applied Linguistics in
Edinburgh:
'Round up the usual suspects', he cries, outing those who have pretended all these years merely
to teach applied linguistics, but who have really been plotting with the British Council to take
over the world”
For Davies, two cultures inhabit linguistic imperialism: one, a culture of guilt ("colonies should
never have happened"); the other, that of romantic despair ("we shouldn't be doing what we are
doing"). Rajagopalan goes a step farther and maintains that Phillipson's book has led to a guilt
complex among English language learning and teaching (ELT) professionals.
Davies also argues that Phillipson's claims are not falsifiable: what "if the dominated... wanted to
adopt English and continue to want to keep it? RP's unfalsifiable answer must be that they don't,
they can't, they've been persuaded against their better interests."It has thus been argued that
Phillipson's theory is patronizing in the sense that it does not regard developing countries as
being capable of independent decision-making (to adopt or not to adopt ELT). In the context
of Nigeria, Bisong holds that people in the "periphery" use English pragmatically—they send
their children to English-language schools precisely because they want them to grow up
multilingual.
 Cooke (1988) uses the metaphor of the Trojan horse to describe the way that English may be
welcomed initially in a country but then cause concern as it dominates the native language(s)
and cultures. The metaphor builds on the historical story of the giant wooden horse, which
concealed Greek soldiers who wanted to invade Troy. Cooke's (1988) metaphor is a valid one,
suggesting that colonialism and class interests threaten indigenous languages and act as a
gatekeeper to employment and economic opportunities. There is inner conflict in the learning
of English since it may carry unwanted ideologies and cultures, like a Trojan horse
(Canararajah 1999, p. 3).
 "There is by now a well-entrenched and very respectable branch of sociolinguistics which is
concerned with describing the world of globalization from the perspective of linguistic
imperialism and 'linguicide' (Phillipson 1992; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000), often based on
particular ecological metaphors. These approaches… oddly assume that wherever a 'big' and
'powerful' language such as English 'appears' in a foreign territory, small indigenous languages
will 'die.' There is, in this image of sociolinguistic space, place for just one language at a time.
In general, there seems to be a serious problem with the ways in which space is imagined in
such work. In addition, the actual sociolinguistic details of such processes are rarely spelled
out--languages can be used in vernacular or in lingua franca varieties and so create different
sociolinguistic conditions for mutual influencing." (Jan Blommaert, The Sociolinguistics of
Globalization. Cambridge University Press, 2010)
 Anachronistic views of linguistic imperialism, which see
as important only the power asymmetry between the
former colonial nations and the nations of the 'third world,'
are hopelessly inadequate as an explanation of linguistic
realities. They especially ignore the fact that 'first world'
countries with strong languages seem to be under just as
much pressure to adopt English, and that some of the
harshest attacks on English have come from countries
which have no such colonial legacy. When dominant
languages feel they are being dominated, something much
bigger than a simplistic conception of power relations must
be involved." (David Crystal, English as a Global Language,
2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2003)
 English is now used by so many people on an international scale and in so many
areas of everyday life that its role as the language of the world might seem
assured and permanent. Already within the last 50 years, however, there have
been signs of a reaction against English and in favour of a local language,
particularly where English was introduced as an imperial language. One day
people everywhere might want to use their own languages. Erasmus wrote in
Latin and modern Dutch intellectuals write in English, but in the future Dutch
scholars might want to write in Dutch.
 Finally, there is an obvious threat from computer technology to the status of
English as an international lingua franca. Machine translation, if it can be fully
automated, will make it possible for users of any language to access information.
Translation linked to the technology that enables computers to recognize and
produce speech will lead to automatic interpretation. Some automatic teller
machines already give the user a choice of language, and Web sites are
beginning to appear on the Internet with a choice of languages. In this way,
although computer technology has in the short term given a massive boost to the
use of English, it is likely in the longer term to make language use a matter of
choice. Of course, nobody can see into the future, but sooner or later the
dominant position of the English language is going to be successfully challenged.
 Rainer Enrique Hamel. Language Empires, Linguistic Imperialism,
and the Future of Global Language. 2005
 https://www.britannica.com/topic/language-imperialism-1016976
 https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-linguistic-imperialism-1691126
 https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/english-form-
linguistic-imperialism
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_imperialism
 https://opus.lib.uts.edu.au/bitstream/10453/6369/1/2004001444.pdf
 What is linguistic imperialism?
 What are the most successful imperial languages?
 Who is the scholar, who did the most thorough research concerning the concept of
linguistic imperialism?