Colonial Language Research Articles

Postcolonial feminism: silence and storytelling in J.M. Coetzee's Foe

This paper looks at the intersections of feminism and postcolonialism as far as the issue of silence and storytelling is concerned. It does so by examining the characters of Friday and Susan Barton in J. M. Coetzee’s 1986 novel Foe. It is argued that colonialist ideology functions in the same way patriarchal ideology does with regard to the oppression of the racial other and women, respectively. Just as Friday is silenced on racial grounds, as an African slave with no access to power, Susan Barton is silenced as a woman pushed outside the canon of male authorship. Coetzee’s novel draws our attention to the dangers of appropriation inherent to any oppressive ideology. Importantly, the novel tackles the discursive resistance to colonialist and patriarchal ideologies via the resistant body of the mute Friday (a body that resists reduction to colonial language) and Susan Barton’s adamant attempts to get her story of island adventures told. By intertwining postcolonialism and feminism, Coetzee’s achievement, thus, is twofold: a critique of Western totalizing narratives and a doubling of the political and ideological thrust of his novel.

The decline and fall of English in Hong Kong's Legislative Council

This article presents the findings of a corpus-based study of the use of English vis-à-vis Cantonese and Putonghua in Hong Kong's Legislative Council in the past four decades. The objective of the study was to track the changing fortunes of the three languages in a key government institution during a period of unprecedented political, economic and social change. This was accomplished by analysing a 91-million-word corpus of Council proceedings derived from Hong Kong Hansard, which is the verbatim record of Council meetings. For the greater part of the colonial era (1842–1997), English was the sole medium of communication in the chamber. It was only in 1972 that Cantonese-speaking members were permitted to use the city's majority language in Council debates. In that year every speech was in English. Forty years later, only 0.38% of the addresses were in the colonial language, the overwhelming majority being in Cantonese (99.45%), with only a handful in Putonghua. This article describes and discusses the rise of Cantonese and the concomitant demise of English since the early 1970s, with a particular focus on the transitional 1990s, and speculates on the roles of Cantonese and Putonghua in the legislature in the years ahead.

Competition between four “world” languages in Algeria

AbstractAs a post-colonial society with an almost unique colonial history on the African continent and in the Arabophone zone, Algeria can serve as a focus on this millennium’s rivalry between a few “world” languages – namely Arabic, Chinese, English, and French. This article highlights the importance of the influence of colonialism in shaping post-colonial language policy in a multilingual society. It also looks at the role of elites and the effects of their top-down language implementation on planned and unplanned developments as related to the position and status of “world” languages within a polity. And it reasserts the dominant position of English as a global language despite the maintenance of the former colonial language, French. From a theoretical and applied perspective, this article raises questions about what constitutes a “world” language, and it shows the importance of some indicators in measuring the international standing of languages in the globalized world.

The First Language (L1) or Mother Tongue Model Vs. The Second Language (L2) Model of Literacy Instruction

The First Language (L1) or Mother Tongue Model Vs. The Second Language (L2) Model of Literacy Instruction Daria Mizza Abstract In several developing countries with linguistic minorities where the colonial language is preferred for educational purposes, curriculum content is often presented in a language unfamiliar to a significant portion of children beginning school. When the language used for instruction is not understood, pupils do not have the opportunity to learn, and therefore neither ableto understand the content nor to interact with it by participating in class.Researchers raise concerns that those children who do not acquire adequately the language used for instruction will facedifficulties in becoming fully literate (McLaughlin, 1984;Collier & Thomas, 1989; Collier, 1992, 1995; Collier & Thomas, 1995).In order to avoid this situation, children should learn the language used for instruction before learning basic literacy skills in it. Otherwise,pedagogical practices should be conducted in the mother tongue to support the initial stages of their literacy development.Bringing language theories and research findings in literacy development together, this paper advocates for a mother tongue-oriented approach to classroom practices related to literacy acquisition and claims that adequate pedagogical support in the pupil’s first language (L1)is crucial during the early acquisition process of literacy skills. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jehd.v3n3a8

Africa's indigenous languages as the cornerstone of the African Renaissance

This article explores and emphasises the crucial link between the African Renaissance and Africa's indigenous languages. It sheds light on the impact of colonial languages on Africa's colonial state. Indigenous African languages, Ndhlovu (2008, 42) says ‘are essential for the decolonisation of African minds and for the African Renaissance’. However, the finding was that the promotion of colonial languages at the expense of indigenous African languages is characteristic of the colonial state of Africa. The argument is, therefore, in favour of the consideration of indigenous African languages in the promotion of African Renaissance.

Folkloric Axis of Relexified Language and the Subversion of Colonial Cultural Hierarchy

Language has an aspect of universality and another aspect of particularity. Ethnic culture is conveyed through the aspect of particularity, and that is the very point which makes a nation particular and its culture distinct. Colonization by imposing colonial language and non-native cultural poetics perishes the aspect of particularity of the substrate language. However, the counteracting strategy of relexification appeals to the universality of superstrate language to transmit the particularity of substrate language. Ethnic folk stories, myths, mythical elements, fables, parables, proverbs, and idioms are interposed on the colonial language to make ethnic colonized culture universally palpable. In this regard, the aspect of universality is provided by the colonial superstrate language and the aspect of particularity by the colonized ethnic language. In general, because of the ubiquity of mythic elements in time and place, the folkloric aspect of relexified language gives nations the sense of dignified historical background and makes the relexified work relevant to a multitude of societies, rather than just one ethnic local community. This paper deals with the way Chinua Achebe uses the folkloric axis of relexified language to bring the particularities of Ibo culture on universal scale and above all to restore the dignity of Ibo cultural identity which was lost through colonial discourse: “Thus, as represented by Chinua Achebe, and contrary to the discourse of colonial anthropology, Umuofia, the primordial Igbo village emerges as a locus of reflective civility” (Irele 9). Achebe’s relexified language gives voice to Ibo experience throughout the English speaking world. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n9p487

Unsettling North of Summer : Anxieties of Ownership in the Politics and Poetics of the Canadian North

Canadian writers continue to struggle with their ambivalent settler-colonial inheritances, especially as they relate to Canada’s North. By troubling invaluable but thus far incomplete considerations of Canada’s settler-colonial history, this essay examines why Canada’s relations with its Arctic territories remain unsettled: settler-invader practices of land possession hinge on agricultural-cum-epistemological limits that find resistance in the Canadian North’s environmental conditions. Drawing predominantly from Al Purdy’s 1967 collection North of Summer: Poems from Baffin Island and secondly from CBC Radio’s 2011 feature “Northwords,” this essay demonstrates some of the ways that incompletable practices for colonial land claims, those that could only fail in the face of Arctic environments’ natural resistances, have fostered anxieties of (dis)possession that linger throughout poetic representations and political policies concerning Canada’s northern territories. Behind these anxieties are as yet unanswerable questions that shape Canada’s relationship with the North and with its colonial history: it goes without saying that certain landscapes trouble colonizing practice, so can a landscape, through its physical conditions, also be said to resist an ideology? If so, what are settler-colonialism’s ontic limits? Can we imagine an end to settler-colonial modes of relating to landscape in Canadian literature? This essay contends that resistances to settlercolonialism are not solely conceptual—for example, the failure of colonial language to represent colonized landscapes, the focus of so much critique at the crossroads of postcolonial and ecocritical thought—or even anthropocentric, though the North’s Inuit and Indigenous communities ably demonstrate that colonization is never an uncontested project. In addition to these indisputable embodiments of resistance, there are also physical limits to colonizing ideology, limits rooted in environmental conditions that, without any human agency or intent, deny colonial understandings of nature and the natural. Here, literary works help demonstrate how environmental resistances foster a disconnect between Canada’s southern and northern experiences of colonization.

Cultural Clash and the Manichean Translation of African Culture in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart

Colonial languages have caused a serious epistemological upheaval in the mind of Africa. Many aspects of African cultural identity are lost due to the failure of these languages to name concepts that do not exist in the semantic scope of the colonial linguistic structures. This article studies Chinua Achebe’s attempt to write back to the colonial discourse which has for a long translated African culture in Manichean ways that are informed by racist ideologies, most of which are used to maintain concepts and definitions rooted mainly in the anthropological imagination. Highlighting semantic gaps and ambiguities in the colonial representation of African culture, he commits himself, through his novel Things Fall Apart, to establish the ontological and epistemological perspectives of African cultural identity in an artistic manner. This novel becomes a narrative space that reflects the ideological struggle between the culture of the colonizer and the colonized for social and political dominance.

A , hello and bonjour: a postcolonial analysis of Arab media's use of code switching and mixing and its ramification on the identity of the self in the Arab world

Code switching is a practice exercised by multilingual speakers. Linguists define the term as the simultaneous use of more than one language. Code switching is prevalent in postcolonial countries in which the colonial language has continued to exist alongside the native language. In the past, code switching in the Arab world has been confined to those educated in the missionary schools set up by the colonial powers. However, with the changes of media, its domain has grown to include a larger number of people. The linguistic-anthropologist Edward Sapir's hypothesis of linguistic relativity has stressed the important role that language has played in the formation of the individual. I partly look at the role of the Arab media and its effect on identity formation drawing on postcolonial theory to situate the practice of code switching historically.

The position of English globally and nationally: a comparison of Cameroon and Vanuatu

This paper investigates language ideologies relevant to medium of instruction policy within two postcolonial countries: Cameroon and Vanuatu. Each country experienced British and French rule, and has retained both English and French as official languages and media of instruction. However, since Independence, there has been a difference in the way the two languages are perceived in each country, due to the numerical imbalance between those who are considered ‘Anglophone’ and ‘Francophone’. In Cameroon, the majority language has been French. In Vanuatu, it has been English. Drawing on data collected during two independent studies, this paper examines the extent to which the global spread of English affects this situation, given the dominant ideology in which English is considered the language of opportunity. In Cameroon, while French still dominates, there is some evidence of a shift towards English, as this language is afforded increasing value. In Vanuatu, English continues to be the language of power at both national and global levels, and yet there appears to be a resurgence of support for the maintenance of French. The desire to know both ‘international languages’ reaffirms the privileging of the former colonial languages in both contexts, although it appears that the hegemony of English itself is tempered to a certain extent.

Languages, Literatures, Pedagogies: The MLA, Africa, and Diaspora Studies

Languages, Literatures, Pedagogies: The MLA, Africa, and Diaspora Studies

Challenges and Prospects for E-Planning in Lusophone African Countries

The level of E-Planning development in African cities is in general far behind cities in developed countries. This is also, to a large extent, what happens in the five Lusophone African countries (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe). Besides sharing a common colonial history, administrative tradition and language these five African countries have in common similar urban planning cultures. In the recently published report “E-Government Survey 2012: E-Government for the People” the United Nations confirms a growth tendency in the implementation of e-government throughout the world, a trend that will make possible the development of E-Planning in countries where this new urban planning paradigm is still missing or has been insufficiently implemented, as is the case of the five Lusophone African countries. This review of the UN 2012 E-Government Survey aims to summarize and discuss the key challenges for e-government development identified in the survey and, based on these findings, to explore the challenges and prospects for e-Planning adoption in the five Lusophone African countries.

The language factor in the development of Africa: A case for the compilation of specialised dictionaries in indigenous African languages

The pace at which African countries are developing has been in the spotlight for a long time, with many in agreement that it is generally slow as mirrored by rampant hunger, unemployment, disease and poverty. Many reasons, ranging from economic, political, educational, historical, and others have been cited as key explanations for this sluggish rate. In all this, the language question rarely features as a crucial development factor. When it comes to key processes of national development, indigenous African languages continue to be ignored in favour of foreign and former colonial languages such as English, French and Portuguese. In this article, an argument is made that development in Africa will remain unachievable unless indigenous African languages are used for all key socio-economic and political transactions in African communities. This argument is premised on the fact that mother tongue communication is at the centre of any kind of development, be it personal or communal. However, for it to be effective as a communicative tool, a language has to be developed or empowered. This article thus develops further by proposing the compilation of specialised dictionaries in African languages as one sure way of empowering the languages so that they become usable in all domains of life, including those that are highly technical.

African Literary Topoi in Modern African Texts and the Problematics of Europhone Forms

Abstract This article treats selected oral poems whose topoi or motifs have transcended time and space to play out themselves in modern African fictions where colonial languages and their consequent habits of thought serve as media of enunciation. Thereafter, it beams attention on African scholars and writers who have attempted, presumably, to translate the oral medium of expression into indigenous and/or colonial written form(s) while maintaining the navel-strings that linked them, through the transfer of topoi and from the local and indigenous language to the Europhone form which, though, has led to international recognition, also serves to affirm a classic consequential illustration of the zero sum game

Le lingála dans l’enseignement des sciences dans les écoles de Kinshasa. Une approche socioterminologique

In most African countries, former colonial languages are still used as languages of instruction in the school system, especially for science courses in secondary schools and in universities, although, ironically, proficiency in former colonial languages is dwindling. At the same time, however, African languages lack in specialized terminology to accommodate teaching. Empowering African languages is therefore becoming urgent, so that teachers can use them efficiently as languages of instruction. My PhD work strives to provide a solution to that problem by finding tools for the empowerment of the vocabulary and scientific discourse of Lingála, as well as its validation and diffusion among teachers and students of Kinshasa. This is why my PhD work aims at analyzing morpho-semantics of derivatives (verbs, deverbal nouns, nominals), since in Bantu languages, as widely established, derivation and compounding are very productive. I have systematically extracted general meanings from each combination of affixes (nominal prefix-verbal extension-final vowel). While doing so, I have created a derivative generator, i.e. a table where, by replacing a certain verbal stem, a list of nouns and verbs candidates is generated, alongside a brief definition allowing a terminologist to link a certain term to a certain scientific concept the specific definition of which best fits the general definition. The ultimate goal is the coinage of scientific terms. Creating specialty terms is useful, but fining those terms in a discourse also needs characterization of the language syntax requirements and limits. Therefore, I have then moved on to analyzing and describing noun phrases and verb phrases structures. Following that, I have then worked on verifying if the terms coined really fit in natural Lingála language, through tests designed to identify and distinguish verb and sentence complements. Having theorized the morpho-semantics and the syntax of Lingála, I have applied it in writing chemistry text in Lingála. I have conducted all of my PhD work in Lingála, which means I have conceived and written my PhD work in Lingála. Doing so has also allowed me to coin linguistics terms and discourse in Lingála.

Caribbean Cultural Landscape: the English Caribbean potential in the journey from ‘tentative listing’ to being ‘inscribed’

There is an imbalance of Caribbean sites on the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage List, yet there resides in the region sites of outstanding universal value. This article discusses the potential of the Caribbean Cultural Landscapes when preparing Tentative Lists as part of the journey to inscribing World Heritage Sites. Emphasising that the tangible cultural heritage of the Caribbean has been preserved in more ways than may have been previously considered or even understood, the article demonstrates its potential in Caribbean cultural identity with possible benefits to the sustainable tourism agenda. The information presented stems primarily from workshops and expert meetings organised in the region by various Caribbean Governments in association with the UNESCO. Adopting a historical review approach, the article addresses issues for integrated research and dialogue between all Caribbean territories regardless of colonial history or language. The Cultural Landscape is the combined works of nature and man, illustrative of the evolution of human society and settlement over time, under the influence of the physical constraints and/or opportunities presented by their natural environment and of successive social, economic, and cultural forces, both external and internal.

Finding space for non-dominant languages in education: language policy and medium of instruction in Timor-Leste 2000–2012

Timor-Leste offers a rich case study of the array of discursive influences on medium-of-instruction (MOI) policy in multilingual, post-colonial developing contexts. MOI policy in this young nation is a site of tension between struggles to define national identity in the shadow of colonial language ideologies and the globalised discourses of powerful international development aid partners. Guided by the notion of opening up ideological and implementational space for non-dominant languages in education, this article reviews the evolution of MOI policy in East Timorese primary education over the decade since independence. Paying particular attention to recent proposals for mother tongue-based multilingual education, the review highlights the ideological nature of the relationship between language planning and the MOI. The East Timorese case shows how MOI policy emerges from historical and socio-political experiences and is shaped by complex interactions between external and internal forces.

The Wampanoag Word: John Eliot’s Indian Grammar , the Vernacular Rebellion, and the Elegancies of Native Speech

In the 1640s, God began to speak Wampanoag. (1) He formed his first words in the new tongue when John Eliot in his early years as Puritan missionary of Massachusetts Bay started translating Christian doctrine into the native language of southeastern New England. Yet aside from such divine polyglossia, the richness of Native American speech from this world at the back of beyond had not even dawned on European minds. One of the first Eliot tracts reporting on the progress of Indian mission contains an exquisite metareflection on the ontology of Native American language and the power of speaking to God in that tongue. The tract details John Eliot's encounter with the Indian leader Waban in October 1649 and some of the questions the Puritan minister was asked by prospective Indian converts. A Nipmuk man tells Eliot a story about praying in his wigwam, in which another man of his tribe interrupts him and says: that hee in vaine, because Jesus Christ understood not what Indians speake in prayer[.] [H]e had bin used to heare English man pray and so could well enough understand them, but Indian language in prayer ... he was not acquainted with it, but was a stranger to it and therefore could not understand them. His question therefore was, whether Jesus Christ did understand, or God did understand Indian prayers. (Clark 85) (2) Here, a native gives voice to the vexed status of Indian tongues: the contested value, that is, of vernacular New World languages and their ability to communicate spiritual truth. Introduced in studied casualness, the dialogue takes us to the very core of colonial language politics. Explicitly, the scene addresses native concerns: could the God of the English understand prayers in Wampanoag? More directly perhaps, the scene articulates lingering apprehensions of Eliot's English audience. Could the locutions of savage barbarians, as Governor William Bradford put it in Of Plymouth Plantation (31), render the complexities of Christian faith? Which is to say: could God really speak in Wampanoag? Questions of language engrossed Eliot's generation on both sides of the Atlantic. The seventeenth century was a period acutely attuned to issues of speech, diversity, and the discursive foundations of spiritual legitimacy. As over ten thousand novel words flooded into English, freshly coined and borrowed from afar, lexicographers and grammarians busily charted the standard of the nation's vernacular? It is within this larger context that Eliot answers the Nipmuk's query about whether God was familiar with Indian tongues or if they prayed in vaine. Citing divine omniscience, Eliot's response accommodates conflicting orders, pagan and English, within a single Christian universe of discourse. If he [God] made them both [English and Indian] Eliot sermonizes, hee knew all that was within man and came from man, all his desires, and all his thoughts, and all his speeches, and so all his prayers, and if hee made Indian men, then hee knows all Indian prayers also (Clark 85). The creator who made all things supposedly understands all tongues. Eliot's response argues for equality between the Old and New Worlds and between radically different verbal practices. By and large, however, scholars have assumed that European settlers never contemplated such a possibility for equality. Native Americans, so the received opinion of the encounter goes, were imagined as either lacking language or as prattling in heavily corrupted tongues. In Learning to Curse, Stephen Greenblatt famously theorized this paradigm as linguistic colonialism (17). Here the usurped Caliban of Shakespeare's The Tempest, who could only gabble like a thing most brutish (3066), stands for the European denigration of indigenous tongues. But might it be that we all too quickly generalize this model of imperialism? This essay seeks to rattle Caliban's imperial prison house of language and focuses on Protestant Anglo-American renderings of native speech and their transatlantic traditions between 1640 and 1670. …

Postcolonial literary heteroglossia: a challenge for homogenizing translation

Postcolonial translation studies, has for the most part, been centered on the strategies employed by postcolonial subjects to subvert language, thus fashioning a counter-hegemonic anti-colonialist discourse. Research in this subfield of translation studies has closely followed trends in postcolonial studies which have been largely defined in terms of a dichotomous framework based on an oppositional discourse, pitting the West against the East, the colonized against the colonizer, the Global South versus the Global North, etc. Although this approach has enhanced knowledge in the area of multilingualism and the sociolinguistics of power relations, it has often overlooked those linguistic and cultural practices in the postcolony that are fairly autonomous and not subordinate to relations with the colonial métropole. This essay highlights the heterogeneity of language practice in the postcolony and the challenge it poses for normative translation theory, which often assumes a transfer or exchange between stable or monolithic linguistic or cultural entities. Early postcolonial literature featured a colonial language that could lend itself easily to monolingual translation practices, despite its local specificities. Today, we are dealing with a decidedly heterolingual literature, where several languages or language varieties interact, defying traditional monolingual translation principles and the enthnocentrism prevalent in homogenizing translation.

Color Categories in Language Contact: ‘Pygmy’ Hunter-Gatherers and Bantu Farmers

<p>When speakers adopt colors from another language, do they only borrow certain lexical forms or do they absorb whole concepts? And if both a lexical term and a color category are borrowed, are they both borrowed at the same time or is one of them borrowed first? In this paper, I address the question of how color categories are borrowed, providing evidence from Gyeli ‘Pygmy’ hunter-gatherers (PHGs) in contact with Bantu farmers in southern Cameroon. The data shows rich variability in borrowing patterns. Color categories are not borrowed in toto, but only partially, i.e. the resulting color category in the recipient language only partially coincides with the color category in the donor language. Further, the borrowing of a color category may or may not be in conjunction with the borrowing of a color term from the recipient language. While Gyeli PHGs borrow a lexical term first from neighboring Bantu farmer languages and then expand the color category in a second step, the path of borrowing of Bantu farmers from colonial languages is the inverse. Farmer languages first adopt a new color category, but reject loanwords. Their second step in acquiring a new color is to find a name for the new color category.</p>