Linguistics in a Colonial World

Linguistics in a Colonial World PDF Author: Joseph Errington
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1444329057
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
Drawing on both original texts and critical literature, Linguistics in a Colonial World surveys the methods, meanings, and uses of early linguistic projects around the world. Explores how early endeavours in linguistics were used to aid in overcoming practical and ideological difficulties of colonial rule Traces the uses and effects of colonial linguistic projects in the shaping of identities and communities that were under, or in opposition to, imperial regimes Examines enduring influences of colonial linguistics in contemporary thinking about language and cultural difference Brings new insight into post-colonial controversies including endangered languages and language rights in the globalized twenty-first century

The Colonial Expansion of English - English as a global language

The Colonial Expansion of English - English as a global language PDF Author: Christina Boampong
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640556011
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 23

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Lüneburg (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: History of English and English historical linguistics, language: English, abstract: English is the language of commerce and tourism, of international politics, of science, the official language of international and multinational companies and industries, the language of air traffic control, of international news agencies, of mass entertainment, of computers and of the Internet. It is assumed that about a quarter of the world`s population is already fluent or competent in English (that means around 1,5 billion people) and that there is a total of 75 territories where English has a special place in society. These regions can be divided according to the status they give English: Either they have English as a native language, as a second or official language or as a foreign language. This classification is visualized by the so-called Three-circle-model: The inner circle compromises those countries where English is the primary language of communication and is learnt as a native language by the majority of the population. It includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The outer or extended circle represents the countries where English plays an important role in a non-native setting. In many cases these are former British colonies where the English language is part of the countries leading institutions and of various other domains. This circle includes India, Malawi, Singapore and 50 other territories. The expanding circle involves those countries in which English is learnt as a lingua franca by many people. These countries neither have a history of colonization nor have they given English any administrative status. Such countries are Germany, Japan, Israel and a growing number of other states. Fennel (2004) divides the global spreading of English that has lead to its status as a world language into four phases: I. British colonialism from the seventeenth to the twentieth century II. British leadership in the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries III. American economic superiority and political leadership IV. American technological domination In what follows we will focus on the first phase: The colonial expansion of English, which also marks the beginning of the Modern English period. The main idea of this term paper is to introduce the most popular varieties of English around the world and to familiarize with the historical facts and development of these countries emphasizing on the specific linguistic characteristics.

English and the Discourses of Colonialism

English and the Discourses of Colonialism PDF Author: Alastair Pennycook
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113468407X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
English and the Discourses of Colonialism opens with the British departure from Hong Kong marking the end of British colonialism. Yet Alastair Pennycook argues that this dramatic exit masks the crucial issue that the traces left by colonialism run deep. This challenging and provocative book looks particularly at English, English language teaching, and colonialism. It reveals how the practice of colonialism permeated the cultures and discourses of both the colonial and colonized nations, the effects of which are still evident today. Pennycook explores the extent to which English is, as commonly assumed, a language of neutrality and global communication, and to what extent it is, by contrast, a language laden with meanings and still weighed down with colonial discourses that have come to adhere to it. Travel writing, newspaper articles and popular books on English, are all referred to, as well as personal experiences and interviews with learners of English in India, Malaysia, China and Australia. Pennycook concludes by appealing to postcolonial writing, to create a politics of opposition and dislodge the discourses of colonialism from English.

Language and Colonial Power

Language and Colonial Power PDF Author: Johannes Fabian
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520076257
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Book Description
"..a work of very high scholarship and of a particularly valuable cultural critique...Fabian shows that European scholars, missionaries, soldiers, travellers, and administrators in Central Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used Swahili as a mode of extending their domination over African territories and people. The language was first studied and characterized, then streamlined for use among laboring people, then regulated as such fields as education and finance were also regulated. Any student of what has been called Africanist discourse, or of imperialism will find Language and Colonial Power an invaluable and path-breaking work (from Foreword).

Colonizing Language

Colonizing Language PDF Author: Christina Yi
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231545363
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Japan embarked on a policy of territorial expansion that would claim Taiwan and Korea, among others. Assimilation policies led to a significant body of literature written in Japanese by colonial writers by the 1930s. After its unconditional surrender in 1945, Japan abruptly receded to a nation-state, establishing its present-day borders. Following Korea’s liberation, Korean was labeled the national language of the Korean people, and Japanese-language texts were purged from the Korean literary canon. At the same time, these texts were also excluded from the Japanese literary canon, which was reconfigured along national, rather than imperial, borders. In Colonizing Language, Christina Yi investigates how linguistic nationalism and national identity intersect in the formation of modern literary canons through an examination of Japanese-language cultural production by Korean and Japanese writers from the 1930s through the 1950s, analyzing how key texts were produced, received, and circulated during the rise and fall of the Japanese empire. She considers a range of Japanese-language writings by Korean colonial subjects published in the 1930s and early 1940s and then traces how postwar reconstructions of ethnolinguistic nationality contributed to the creation of new literary canons in Japan and Korea, with a particular focus on writers from the Korean diasporic community in Japan. Drawing upon fiction, essays, film, literary criticism, and more, Yi challenges conventional understandings of national literature by showing how Japanese language ideology shaped colonial histories and the postcolonial present in East Asia. A Center for Korean Research Book

Postcolonial English

Postcolonial English PDF Author: Edgar W. Schneider
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139463667
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
The global spread of English has resulted in the emergence of a diverse range of postcolonial varieties around the world. Postcolonial English provides a clear and original account of the evolution of these varieties, exploring the historical, social and ecological factors that have shaped all levels of their structure. It argues that while these Englishes have developed new and unique properties which differ greatly from one location to another, their spread and diversification can in fact be explained by a single underlying process, which builds upon the constant relationships and communication needs of the colonizers, the colonized, and other parties. Outlining the stages and characteristics of this process, it applies them in detail to English in sixteen different countries across all continents as well as, in a separate chapter, to a history of American English. Of key interest to sociolinguists, dialectologists, historical linguists and syntacticians alike, this book provides a fascinating new picture of the growth and evolution of English around the globe.

Aspects of (Post)Colonial Linguistics

Aspects of (Post)Colonial Linguistics PDF Author: Daniel Schmidt-Brücken
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110436906
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
Research in Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics has experienced a significant increase in contributions from varying fields of language studies, gaining the attention of scholars from all over the world. This volume aims to showcase the variety of topics relevant to the study of language(s) in colonial, postcolonial and decolonial contexts. A main reason of this variety is that the new paradigm invites and necessitates research on different subject matters such as language typology, grammar and cross-linguistics, meta-linguistics and research on language ideology, discourse analysis and pragmatics. The contributions of this volume are selected, peer-reviewed papers which were partly invited and partly given at the First Bremen Conference on Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics, held in September 2013.

Mining Language

Mining Language PDF Author: Allison Margaret Bigelow
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469654393
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 377

Book Description
Mineral wealth from the Americas underwrote and undergirded European colonization of the New World; American gold and silver enriched Spain, funded the slave trade, and spurred Spain's northern European competitors to become Atlantic powers. Building upon works that have narrated this global history of American mining in economic and labor terms, Mining Language is the first book-length study of the technical and scientific vocabularies that miners developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as they engaged with metallic materials. This language-centric focus enables Allison Bigelow to document the crucial intellectual contributions Indigenous and African miners made to the very engine of European colonialism. By carefully parsing the writings of well-known figures such as Cristobal Colon and Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes and lesser-known writers such Alvaro Alonso Barba, a Spanish priest who spent most of his life in the Andes, Bigelow uncovers the ways in which Indigenous and African metallurgists aided or resisted imperial mining endeavors, shaped critical scientific practices, and offered imaginative visions of metalwork. Her creative linguistic and visual analyses of archival fragments, images, and texts in languages as diverse as Spanish and Quechua also allow her to reconstruct the processes that led to the silencing of these voices in European print culture.

Not Like a Native Speaker

Not Like a Native Speaker PDF Author: Rey Chow
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231522711
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Book Description
Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering historical experience of being caught among unequal languages, is the subject of Rey Chow's book. A diverse group of personae, never before assembled in a similar manner, make their appearances in the various chapters: the young mulatto happening upon a photograph about skin color in a popular magazine; the man from Martinique hearing himself named "Negro" in public in France; call center agents in India trained to Americanize their accents while speaking with customers; the Algerian Jewish philosopher reflecting on his relation to the French language; African intellectuals debating the pros and cons of using English for purposes of creative writing; the translator acting by turns as a traitor and as a mourner in the course of cross-cultural exchange; Cantonese-speaking writers of Chinese contemplating the politics of food consumption; radio drama workers straddling the forms of traditional storytelling and mediatized sound broadcast. In these riveting scenes of speaking and writing imbricated with race, pigmentation, and class demarcations, Chow suggests, postcolonial languaging becomes, de facto, an order of biopolitics. The native speaker, the fulcrum figure often accorded a transcendent status, is realigned here as the repository of illusory linguistic origins and unities. By inserting British and post-British Hong Kong (the city where she grew up) into the languaging controversies that tend to be pursued in Francophone (and occasionally Anglophone) deliberations, and by sketching the fraught situations faced by those coping with the specifics of using Chinese while negotiating with English, Chow not only redefines the geopolitical boundaries of postcolonial inquiry but also demonstrates how such inquiry must articulate historical experience to the habits, practices, affects, and imaginaries based in sounds and scripts.

Linguistic Imperialism

Linguistic Imperialism PDF Author: Robert Phillipson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780194371469
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
This study explores the contemporary phenomenon of English as an international language, and sets out to analyze how and why the language has become so dominant. It examines the historical spread of the language, the role it plays in Third World countries, and the ideologies it transmits.