R.V. Routh, 1941. The diffusion of English culture outside England. A problem of post-war

reconstruction. Cambridge University Press.A new career service is needed, for gentlemen

teachers of English with equivalent status to ‘the Civil Service, Army, Bar, or Church’,

an ‘army of linguistic missionaries’a ‘central office in London, from which teachers

radiate all over the world’.The new service must ‘lay the foundations of a

world-language and culture based on our own’. mea culpa

Linguistic imperialism1. interlocks with imperialism in culture, education,

media, communication, economy, politics, military, …2. exploitation, injustice, inequality, and hierarchy3. structural: material resources, infrastructure, …4. ideological: beliefs, attitudes, imagery5. hegemonic: internalised as normal and ’natural’6. unequal rights for speakers of different languages7. subtractive, consolidating some languages at the

expense of others8. a form of linguicism (cf. sexism, racism)9. contested and resisted.

Examples• Suppressing regional languages (Welsh, Kurdish, …)• Colonial education promoting European languages and

neglecting local languages• World Bank, British Council, Francophonie policies

funding European languages only in ’Third World’, post-colonial countries

• Western models of education being seen as universally relevant, as culturally ’neutral’

• English as a ’lingua franca’ being fraudulently marketed as ensuring equality in communication

• Monolingual native speakers of English posing as experts on language learning.

Professional fallacies in British ’English Language Teaching’, ESL

• the monolingual fallacy• the native speaker fallacy• the early start fallacy• the maximum exposure fallacy• the subtractive fallacy.

Central to the global US-UK ELT and TESOL business, World Bank activities, etc.

Phillipson, Linguistic imperialism, chapter 7, (Oxford UP, 1992, Shanghai, and Delhi)

Educational Testing ServicesPrinceton, NJ

• As ETS's wholly-owned subsidiary, ETS Global BV is structured to bring ETS's expertise and experience with tests, assessments, and related services to educational and business communities around the world. ETS Global BV now has subsidiaries in Europe and Canada, and it will be expanding into other countries and regions as well.

• Our subsidiaries offer a full range of ETS products, services and learning solutions, including

English language learning products and servicesTraining and technical assistance Design, development and delivery of large-scale

assessments Test design and delivery.

• Our global mission goes far beyond testing. Our products and services enable opportunity worldwide by measuring knowledge and skills, promoting learning and performance, and supporting education and professional development for all people worldwide.

Examples of ongoing processes of linguistic imperialism: the global English project

• Elite formation in corporate globalisation• Marketing policies in post-communist world• ‘English-medium’ higher education• University commodification: universities in

‘English-speaking’ countries establish subsidiaries in Asia, Middle East; and at home become dependent on income from ‘foreign’ students

• European Union advocacy of increased multilingualism is contradicted by many of their own practices and by the Bologna process

More examples of ongoing processesthat consolidate the product English

• Academic productivity increasingly measured by bibliometric quantification that is supplanting quality, and restricting academic freedom.

• The dominance of publishing in English is restricting publishing in other languages.

• In European schools and universities, French, German, the Slavic languages, etc are studied less as foreign languages.

• UK-USA language policy scholars argue that the expansion of English, the English language product serves all equally well.

From linguistic imperialism to linguistic neoimperialism

• economic, financial and educational McDonaldization• military force: English for ‘peace-keeping’• a neoimperial world order largely constituted through

English builds on English linguistic capital accumulation and the dispossession of other types of linguistic capital

• contested and resisted– English serving anti-imperial purposes– EU language policy recommendations– Nordic governments advocate ‘parallel competence’– Minority language rights & linguistic human rights– Critical scholarship: English as project/processes/product– China– International schools?

Whether linguistic imperialism is occurring in any given context can be investigated empirically

See on the handout• section A, page 3, True or False

Four statements that exemplify the global English project

• section D, page 4the nine questions on constituent elements of linguistic imperialism for exploration.

Exemplification and a historical perspective follow

Monolingualism in the British Isles(Geraint Jenkins, A concise history of Wales)

The 1536 Act of Union with Wales entailed subordination to the ‘rights, laws, customs and speech of England... Since the English – whether government officials, religious reformers or moralists – presumed superior wisdom in matters associated with “civility” and “politeness”, it was thought prudent to ensure that a monoglot Welsh people living in “rude” and “dark” corners of the land should become familiar with the language and mores of the “civilising” English world’.

The Welsh language survived because a 1563 Act decided that the Bible should be translated into Welsh. This played a decisive role in Christianising Wales and spreading literacy. Over 2,600 books were published in Welsh in the eighteenth century, whereas in Ireland and Scotland, Protestantism was propagated in English and the imposition of English was more thorough: ‘only 70 titles were published in the Scottish Gaelic language before 1800’.

UK - internal colonisationMatthew Arnold

His Majesty’s Inspector of Schools, 1853Whatever encouragement individuals may think it desirable to give to the preservation of the Welsh language on grounds of philological or antiquarian interest, it must be the desire of a government to render its dominions, as far as possible, homogeneous, and to break down barriers to the freest intercourse between the different parts of them. Sooner or later, the difference of language between Wales and England will probably be effaced, as has happened with the difference of language between Cornwall and the rest of England.

Antoine de Rivarol 1783 Discours sur l'universalité de la langue française

• le français, ayant reçu des impressions de tous les peuples de l'Europe, a placé le goût dans les opinions modérées, et ses livres composent la bibliothèque du genre humain.

• Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français. Ce qui n'est pas clair est encore anglais, italien, grec ou latin.

French, by absorbing input from all of Europe’s peoples, privileges taste through temperate opinions, and its books comprise the library of humanity.

Whatever is unclear is not French; whatever is unclear is just English, Italian, Greek or Latin.

Rivarol’s legacy: Yves Marek, counsellor to Jacques Toubon, 1996, cited in Phillipson 2003,

English-only Europe?...

• Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français. Ce qui n'est pas clair est encore anglais, italien, grec ou latin.

• That which is not clear is not French; that which is not clear is just English, Italian, Greek or Latin.

There is no demand in France for the linguistic rights of so-called minorities. Since we have no minorities we avoid the very idea of discrimination between so-called minorities.

[…]Our principles are confirmed at the level of the European Union.

Contrast Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Weltliteratur = texts in all languages enrich humanity and the individual

withthe Anglo-American World English project, Global English,

= global linguistic (neo)imperialism

Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt,

weiß nichts von seiner eigenen...

Wer Englisch kennt,braucht nichts

von anderen Sprachen.

Those who know no foreign languages

know nothing of their own.

Those who know English needn’t bother with

other languages.

The USA: an empire,articulated since 1786

From the time of the USA declaring its independence, it has seen itself as a model for the world, with a divine mission to impose its values. George Washington saw the United States as a a ‘rising empire’, and ‘in 1786 wrote that, “However unimportant America may be considered at present … there will assuredly come a day when this country will have some weight in the scale of empires”. The address was read out in its entirety in Congress every February until the mid-1970s’.

Global = American

manifest destiny of Anglo-Saxon cultureto spread around the world

1830

President Woodrow Wilson stated during the First World War, ‘When the war is over, we can force

them [the British] to our way of thinking, because by that time they will … be financially in our

hands’.

Global English is a project not a reality.

Winston Churchill

• the British Empire and the United States who, fortunately for the progress of mankind, happen to speak the same language and very largely think the same thoughts. House of Commons, 24 August 1941

• The power to control language offers far better prizes than taking away people’s provinces or lands or grinding them down in exploitation. The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

Harvard University, 6 September 1943

Imperial USA

The whole world should adopt the American system. The American system can survive in America only if it becomes a world system.

President Harry Truman, 1947

We have 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which permit us to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality … we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratisation.

George Kennan, 1948

D. Armstrong in Harper’s Magazine 305, 2002

THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURYThe plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its military superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.

David Hare, Stuff happens

They [US leaders] know we [the British government] have voluntarily surrendered our wish for an independent voice in foreign affairs. Worse, we have surrendered it to a country which is actively seeking to undermine international organisations and international law. Lacking the gun, we are to be only the mouth. The deal is this: America provides the firepower. We provide the bullshit.

David Hare 2005

Macaulay 1835 Graddol 2010

Størrelse: 640 × 574

Type: 35KB JPG

                     Billedets webstedeg

Macaulay’s goal: ‘to create a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’

• denigrate and stigmatize the local‘a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.’

• glorify one’s own culture and languageEnglish provides ‘ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations’

• Rationalize the asymmetrical relationship‘India cannot have a free government. But she may have the next best thing – a firm and impartial despotism.’

The imperial context

- Implement a technocratic mission- Ignore wider economic rationales and goals- Fail to address the context of military

occupation.

This was the foundation for education throughout the British colonial empire. How far are the underlying attitudes in force in ‘international’ educatiion?

Macaulay 1835 Graddol 2010

We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother tongue. … the literature now extant … is of far greater value than all the literature which 300 years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together.

English is now seen as a ’basic skill’ which all children require if they are fully to participate in 21st century civil society…. It can now be used to communicate to people from almost any country in the world … We are fast moving into a world in which not to have English is to be marginalised and excluded.

The British Council goal (Annual Report 2009-10):to ensure that English is used in every home in India

• denigrate and stigmatize the localEducation in India is inadequate

• glorify one’s own culture and languageEnglish ‘a basic skill’, necessary for all

• Rationalize the asymmetrical relationshipYou need British expertise to sort out Indian educational language learning problems

David Graddol, English next India, British Council 2010

Current myths that Graddol draws on

• English as a ‘global’ language• English ‘the language of business across

Europe’• Continental European universities are shifting

from local languages to English• There is a global consensus on how English

should be learned• The early start fallacy

Gandhi

To give millions a knowledge of Englishis to enslave us.

EU, European integration:a Franco-German agenda, or …?

The process of European integration might never have come about had it not been imposed on Europe by the

Americans.Erik Holm, 2001. The European anarchy.

Europe’s hard road into high politics. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press

Pascaline Winand, 1993. Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe. New York: St Martin’s Press.

2007 EU-US summit endorsedthe Transatlantic Economic Integration Plan

and the coordination of foreign policy globally

Diversity in what unity?

The Union shall respect cultural,religious and linguistic diversity.

Artícle 22, The Charter ofFondamental Rights of the European Union

Emotional! Explosive!

Es gibt in der EU kein emotionaleres Thema als Sprachen.Wilhelm Schönfelder, Head of Mission for Germany at the EU,cited in Süddeutsche Zeitung, 1 April 2005

Un sujet qui peut être qualifié d’explosif en Europe. Pierre Lequiller, Président, réunion ouverte à l’ensemble des membres français du Parlement Européen, le 11 juin 2003.

Linguistic unification of Europe?

The most serious problem for the European Union is that it has so many languages, this

preventing real integration and development of the Union.

USA ambassador to Denmark, Mr Elton, 1997

English should be the sole official languageof the European Union.

Director, British Council, Germany, 26 February 2002, in

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

EU Commission Promoting language learning

and linguistic diversity: An Action Plan 2004-2006, 24 July 2003

• learning one lingua franca alone is not enough

• English alone is not enough• In non-anglophone countries recent trends

to provide teaching in English may have unforeseen consequences on the vitality of the national language.

Fluidity in language policy in Europe

• unresolved tension between linguistic nationalism (monolingualism), EU institutional multilingualism, and English becoming dominant in the EU

• competing agendas at the European, state (national), and sub-statal levels

• increasing grassroots and elite bi- and multilingualism, except in the UK and among the older generation in demographically large EU countries,

• largely uncritical adoption of englishisation, lingua economica/americana

• rhetoric of language rights, some national and supranational implementation, and advocacy of linguistic diversity.

The Bologna processtowards a single European higher education and research area by 2010

• implements structural synchronisation,• endorses neoliberalism,• advocates privatisation of university funding,• wants accountability to the corporate world.

The communiqués from the bi-annual meetings of Ministers of Higher Education and Research never refer to language policy. Implicitly this means that ’internationalisation’ is seen as ’English-medium higher education’.

Nordic government policy:the parallel use of English and Nordic languages

• that it be possible to use both the languages of the Nordic countries essential to society and English as languages of science

• that the presentation of scientific results in the languages of the Nordic countries essential to society be rewarded

• that instruction in scientific technical language, especially in written form, be given in both English and the languages of the Nordic countries essential to society

• that universities, colleges, and other scientific institutions can develop long-range strategies for the choice of language, the parallel use of languages, language instruction, and translation grants within their fields …

University of Helsinki language policy The language policy is in Finnish, Swedish, and English.

… University Language Policy is based on the following strategic precepts:Languages are a resource within the academic community.

• The University’s bilingual and multilingual environment and internationalisation are sources of enrichment for all and are a necessity for the international comparability of its research performance.

• Language skills are a means to understanding foreign cultures and for making Finnish culture known to others. The university promotes the language proficiency of its students and staff as well as supports their knowledge of different cultures. Multilingual and multicultural communities promote creative thinking.

Plan

• Confession – and let’s not be defensive• Linguistic imperialism, approach, with examples

of continuities in imperialist discourse over time• A historical perspective• The transition from colonial linguistic imperialism

to contemporary linguistic neoimperialism• European Union language policy• Implications for ‘international’ schools