A

Colonial
Language
CHAPTER 3
The British Empire- history and Reaction
• Depending precisely on how you determine its beginning and ending, the British Empire
stretched from at least the sixteenth century to the end of the twentieth century (with the
transfer of sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997);
• The focus of this chapter is on the major role played by British colonization in the spread and
identity of the English language, both in the UK and around the globe.
 The term colonization refers here to processes involving the establishment, often by force,
of communities of English speakers in territories around the world, subjugating speakers
of other languages. These communities positioned themselves in a relationship of power to
the indigenous or pre-existing populations of the territories in which they settled, often
through violence and force, while at the same time maintaining economic and cultural
links with Britain as the central seat of power.
Colonization and languague contact

• Colonization was the first and the main key reason for the expansion of the English
language beyond Britain to Ireland, the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
• As a result of its spread, there was language contact, as English was transplanted into
other cultures and came to co-exit with other languages. The influence of language
contact was on the form of language as it has developed into different varieties in diverse
world contexts.
• Colonization also played a role in terms of the political and cultural associations that
English now has around the world and the complex issues of cultural identities and
divided language loyalties which accompany the global spread of English. (Leith,
Seargent & Tagg, p.90)
Colonialism
• Colonialism has not just influenced the form and identity of the English language,
but it has also had a great impact on the way people think about and study the
language. One such influence has been what Gramling (2016) calls, ‘ the invention
of monolingualism’ – that is the assumption that being monolingual is the norm,
whichever language you speak.
• This ideology is mainly a result of the emphasis in 18 th and 19th century Europe on
national identity and its relation to a national language. Many 20 th century American
and European linguists promoted this ideology in their writings although it did not
reflect the multilingual global reality especially of the former British colonies or the
‘Global South”(Bagga-Gupta and Rao, 2018). (p.91)
Colonialism and Colonization
• The distinction is made between colonization as the process or action of settling
in another land and subjecting the population to political, economic and social
control; and colonialism as referring to the underlying ideologies, systems and
policies underlying colonization.
• The term British Imperialism also refers to exercising of power by Britain over
other territories, and the ideologies that underpinned this, which was its height in
the nineteenth century.
Colonization- the background
• The process of colonization took different forms at different times and in different places.
• After the Germanic invasions of the fifth century which established English in English in England, Celtic languages
continued to be widely spoken in Ireland, Scotland and Wales. These areas witnessed a spread of English but it wasn’t a
simple matter of one nation state – ‘England’ – setting up a colony in another.
• According to the historian Robert Bartlett (1993), these Celtic and other ‘peripheral’ areas in Europe were coloniszed during
the Middle Ages from what he calls the ‘centre’ of medieval Europe, formed by Latin Christendom and stretching from
London through Paris, Genoa and Venice to Rome.
• Interestingly, the new varieties of English which arose throughout Britain and Ireland were later to be very
influential in the development of English beyond the British Isles, since Irish and Scottish emigrants formed a
substantial proportion of some English colonies.
• The establishment of English colonies beyond Britain and Ireland began at the end of the sixteenth century.
Overseas colonization, initially shaped primarily by the individual actions of settler communities and trading
companies rather than a concerted effort by the British government, lasted more than 300 years and affected
multiple continents.
Colonization- beyond Britain and Ireland

• The establishment of English colonies beyond Britain and Ireland began at the end of the
sixteenth century. Overseas colonization, initially shaped primarily by the individual
actions of settler communities and trading companies rather than a concerted effort by the
British government, lasted more than 300 years and affected multiple continents.
• The East India Company began setting up trading posts in India from the early 1600s, and
colonies were established in the Caribbean from the 1620s. In the late 1700s, British
imperialism spread to the Pacific, including Australia and New Zealand, while the colonization
of Africa happened later, most notably in the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the late nineteenth
century when European powers divided much of the continent between them.
The Three Main Types of Colonization
and their Linguistic Consequences
• We can distinguish three main types of British overseas colonization, each with its own linguistic
consequences .

• The three types are : Settlement, Exploitation and Plantation.

1) Settlement: A type of colonization that involved the decimation and often violent displacement of the
indigenous population and substantial/large settlement largely by English-speaking settlers. Consequently,
indigenous languages were often replaced by English. Examples include North America and Australia.

 As a result of that English became a first language of these new settlements. These territories,
together with the UK, established what Kachru called the Inner Circle of English speakers who use
English as a mother tongue for all functions of their life. They are the norm-providing countries.
The Three Main Types of Colonization
and their Linguistic Consequences
2) Exploitation: A type of colonization primarily aimed at the exploitation of resources, including
labor. The indigenous population was kept in a state of subordination, even if existing power structures
remained in place. Territories were governed by ‘indirect rule’, that is, with the participation of the
indigenous elite. The English language was instrumental in ensuring communication between the British and
their colonial auxiliaries/officers/, while local languages continued to be used by the indigenous population.
Examples include India and Nigeria.

 The linguistic consequence of this type of colonization and extended contact between English
and the local/ indigenous language(s) was the development of new varieties of English. They are
the norm-developing countries. These countries became what Kachru called the Outer Circle of
English speakers who use English as a second or additional language. English has an official
status and is mainly used for education, administration and the media.
The Three Main Types of Colonization
and their Linguistic Consequences
2) Exploitation: A type of colonization primarily aimed at the exploitation of resources, including
labor. The indigenous population was kept in a state of subordination, even if existing power structures
remained in place. Territories were governed by ‘indirect rule’, that is, with the participation of the
indigenous elite. The English language was instrumental in ensuring communication between the British and
their colonial auxiliaries/officers/, while local languages continued to be used by the indigenous population.
Examples include India and Nigeria.

 The linguistic consequence of this type of colonization and extended contact between English
and the local/ indigenous language(s) was the development of new varieties of English. They are
the norm-developing countries. These countries became what Kachru called the Outer Circle of
English speakers who use English as a second or additional language. English has an official
status and is mainly used for education, administration and the media.
The Three Main Types of Colonization
and their Linguistic Consequences
3) Plantation: A type of colonization where land was seized and colonies were set up to develop
large-scale cultivation of agricultural products. English-speaking settlers owned and administered
the territory. The indigenous population was largely replaced by enslaved laborers forcibly
transported from Africa. English served as a lingua franca between the landowners and the laborers.
Varieties of English that subsequently developed were heavily influenced by the contact with the
various languages spoken by the enslaved laborers. Examples include Jamaica and Trinidad.
Jamaica, for example, was exposed to the subjugation and slavery of African people who were
forced to provide cheap labor for the developing colonies in the Caribbean.
From a linguistic perspective, the long-term effect of the slave trade on the development of the English
language is immense. It gave rise not only to AAE in the USA and the Caribbean, which has been an
important influence on the speech of young English speakers worldwide, but also provided the
extraordinary context of language contact which led to the formation of English pidgins and creoles..
Pidgins and Creoles
3) Pidgins are new languages which initially come into being through a particular type of language contact which occurs
between speakers who need to develop a sustained means of communication (often for trading purposes) but don ’t share a
common language or lingua franca. Much of their vocabulary is taken from a European language (e.g. English or French)
known as the lexifer, while their grammar or linguistic structure is shaped by other (often African) local languages.
Pidgins are closely associated with creoles. Traditionally, creoles were seen as emerging from pidgins, a view still held by some
today (e.g. McWhorter, 2018).
Creolisation is the process by which a pidgin develops into a fully functioning language – happened in many parts of the
English- speaking Caribbean, including Jamaica, where Jamaican Creole had emerged by the late 1700s. The traditionally
observed distinction is that pidgins are languages without native speakers – that is, they’re learnt later in life by people who
already have a first language. When a pidgin is acquired by the children of a community, and is thus used as a first
language for a greater variety of functions, it becomes a creole.
The term expanded pidgin is sometimes applied to a variety which is used in various different domains (e.g. for education
and administration), has some native speakers, but isn’t considered to have quite the status of a creole (p.110).
Pidgins and Creoles
• More recently, scholars such as Salikoko Mufwene have argued that the distinction is actually that ‘creoles and pidgins
developed in separate places, in which Europeans and non-Europeans interacted differently ’ (Mufwene, 2006, p. 315), with
pidgins resulting from limited and infrequent contact in ‘trade colonies’ (where the locals also spoke a shared language
between themselves) while creoles emerged from more regular contact in the early stages of settlement and plantation
colonies where African people from different language-speaking backgrounds were brought together to work as slaves on
plantations. Creoles spoken by large diverse groups of enslaved Africans may have gradually diverged from their lexi fiers,
becoming less recognizable to Europeans over time (Mufwene, 2020, p. 311). As Mufwene (2020) argues, creoles and
pidgins shouldn’t be seen as ‘defective, abnormal’ varieties (p. 301). Their emergence may in fact parallel that of the
Romance languages – e.g. French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish – from the ‘lexifier’ Latin in early medieval
Europe.
The Linguistic Consequence of Colonialism
• It’s usual for languages which come into contact to influence each other in some form or another. This can be by means of
the adoption of loanwords or by changes in pronunciation and grammatical structure. The extent and direction of the
influence will depend on the length and depth of the contact between the two communities, as well as the political
relationship between them.
 The colonial process brought English into contact with other languages; it did so within particular relations of power. It
privileged the English language and those who spoke it.
 Linguistic colonialism relates to economic, political and social inequalities.
 One of the more striking linguistic consequences of these inequalities has been the development of new varieties of English
across Britain’s colonies.
 At the same time, these new English varieties were shaped by local customs and cultures, as evidenced, for example, through
lexical borrowings or loanwords into English from indigenous languages.
The Linguistic Consequences of Colonialism
Emergence of English varieties –Edgar Schneider’s Five
Stages
• Edgar Schneider identified five stages in the development of varieties of
English in colonial and postcolonial settings, ‘from the transplanting of
English to a new land through a period of vibrant changes, both social and
linguistic, to a renewed stabilization of a newly emerged variety.’
• The process took different forms in settlement, exploitation and plantation
colonies
The Linguistic Consequences of Colonialism
Emergence of English varieties –Edgar Schneider’s Five
Stages
1 . Foundation: The process begins when English is brought to a territory where it’s not previously been spoken. Although there’s some contact between
the indigenous community and the newly arrived settlers, communication between the two is usually con "ned to interpreters or those with high status.
2 Language contact: English then begins to be regularly spoken in the territory, at least in contexts such as administration, education and the legal
system. The emerging variety is modelled on external norms – that is, from the settlers’ home country (in this case, Britain) – and as such has no distinct
identity of its own. There tends to be lots of lexical borrowing between English and the indigenous languages.
3 Emerging variety: In the next stage, ties to the ‘mother land’ become weaker and are replaced by a new sense of cultural – and linguistic – identity.
The territory is thus developing its own cultural practices and ways of doing things, and part of this is the development of a localized, or indigenized,
variety of English. This can include phonological innovation, where the emerging variety gets some of its own distinctive accent features ref lecting both
English and pre- colonial languages.
4 Codification: The local variety of English then not only begins to be accepted as legitimate in its own right, but also gets actively codi "ed and
standardized as an important part of the territory’s culture. By this point, the population no longer looks to British English for its standards, but instead
relies on, and promotes, local norms for the language. There may be, for example, a dictionary of this variety published, or the variety may get its own
name, such as Indian English. This often follows political independence for the territory, and issues related to language can play a key role in the
establishment of a distinct political identity.
5 Internal differentiation: By now the local variety is well established and what begins to happen is that a process of internal variation takes place
within the territory, as different sectors of society
(e.g. communities in different geographical regions) begin to establish their own particular usage patterns of English, which can be considered separate
dialects of the variety now spoken in the territory.
The Linguistic Consequences of Colonialism
Emergence of English varieties –Edgar Schneider’s Five
•Stages
Schneider’s model has been critiqued as taking a descriptive view which sidelines the political and moral
factors of colonial English (Mesthrie, 2020) and the model can be said to downplay the complexities
involved. Not all territories progress through all of these stages in the same way, and depending on the
particular historical circumstances involved, different aspects of the process will be more salient in different
places.
Political Incorporation – The Celtic Territories

• The Celtic territories were the first to experience political incorporation in

this way. In 1536, for instance, the state known as ‘England’ also included
Wales. Both Wales and Scotland were formally joined with England as ‘Great
Britain’ in 1707, while Ireland was formally incorporated in 1800 as part of
what had come to be called ‘the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Ireland’ (now ‘Northern Ireland’). For the greater part of the nineteenth
century all these territories were officially ‘British’, and many individuals from
Ireland, Scotland and Wales played an active part in forming the British Empire
overseas.
English in Ireland –

• The first colonies were established in the south-east of Ireland towards the end of the twelfth century . English law was introduced to
protect the colonists and disadvantage the Irish . New towns or ‘boroughs’ – a distinctive form of Anglo-Saxon settlement that contrasted
with local dispersed habitations – were built and became centers of Anglo- Norman influence (that was in the very early stages that
followed the Norman Conquest in the Middle Ages) . A century later, two-thirds of Ireland had been conquered after military campaigns
against the Irish earls.
• It’s a feature of colonial activity that personal identities and loyalties change. By the fourteenth century, many of the colonists had married
among the Irish and adopted ‘the language of the Irish enemiesThis process continued, so that by the late fifteenth century English control
was limited to a small area around Dublin known as ‘the Pale’. (The expression ‘beyond the pale’, meaning outside the bounds of
acceptability, is often thought to originate from the Pale.)
• Colonization as we know it in the modern times started in the 16 th century.
English control, however, was reasserted during the sixteenth century , reflecting the monarchy’s preoccupation with territorial
boundaries. Henry VIII urged that ‘the king’s true subjects’ in Ireland ‘shall use and speak commonly the English tongue ’ (An Act for the
English Order, Habit and Language, 1537, cited in Crowley, 2000, p. 22). The Protestant Reformation gave a new twist to Anglo-Irish
relations, since the Irish continued to practice Roman Catholicism.
• Under Elizabeth I (who reigned from 1558 to 1603) England was at war with Catholic Spain and Irish Catholicism was seen as treachery.. An English army was sent to
overcome the resurgent Irish chieftains. In the course of long and bitter f ighting, the invading English defined the enemy as the opposite of all those qualities claimed
for the Protestant English.
English in Ireland – pp.97-100
• Under Elizabeth I (who reigned from 1558 to 1603) England was at war with Catholic Spain and Irish Catholicism was seen
as treachery.. An English army was sent to overcome the resurgent Irish chieftains. In the course of long and bitter f ighting,
the invading English defined the enemy as the opposite of all those qualities claimed for the Protestant English.
• The Irish were eventually defeated, and their land confiscated and awarded to new colonizers. Many of these colonizers in the
north- east of Ireland were Scots, who gave rise to the linguistic area known today as Ulster Scots. Among the other
colonizers were the poorest sections of the English population in London, encouraged to go to Ireland because the
government feared they would be ‘seditious’ if they stayed in England (Stallybrass, 1988).
• The new colonists of the seventeenth century clung to their non-Irish Protestant identities, while the Irish were resettled in
the poorer west of the country.
• But by the end of the eighteenth century, new democratic and nationalist ideas among the Irish fuelled a movement for
independence from English rule which also took root among sections of the Protestant population, who were pushing for
democratic reform and enfranchisement. It was after an uprising in 1798 that Ireland was incorporated into the United
Kingdom by the Act of Union of 1800, partly as a way of appeasing the Protestants.
English in Ireland – pp.97-100
• It’s been estimated that by 1800, English was the first language of half the population of Ireland.
• In the course of the nineteenth century Irish was increasingly abandoned .
Why?
Three reasons have been suggested (Harris, 1991, p. 38).
A) One of these was depopulation. Famines in the 1840s which hit the poorer, more agricultural west of the country (where many Irish
speakers had been resettled) greatly reduced the Irish-speaking population, either by death or by emigration (principally to America).
B) Second was the introduction of universal English language education.
C) The final one is significant in the context of ideas linking nationalism and language. English, not Irish, became the language of the two
institutions which claimed to speak on behalf of the Irish population: the Catholic Church and the independence movement.
D) Before the seventeenth century, Irish was the first language of the whole population of Ireland. Today it’s used as the main
community and home language of only about 3 per cent of the population
Today, English is recognized in the Irish constitution as a ‘second official language’, but in practice is used alongside Irish.
Despite the fact that most Irish people speak English in their daily lives, they often explicitly express loyalty to the Irish
language as part of their ‘national’ identity.
English in North America – pp.101
A settlement colony
 In 1607 an English expedition established the colony of Jamestown in Virginia (although a smaller settlement had been
founded slightly earlier in Newfoundland). The group who would become known as the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ were among
those who followed, sailing on a ship called the May!ower to settle in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. Their colony
was perhaps the most successful at attracting settlers: within twenty years a further 25,000 Europeans had migrated to
the area. The Pilgrims, like many early English settlers, sought religious freedom. Pennsylvania, further south, was
settled originally by a Quaker colony, but attracted English and Welsh settlers of various religious denominations too.
 The pattern of colonization in the southern areas differed slightly from the North.
 In contrast to smallholdings in the North, huge plantations and estates developed in the South growing rice and, later, cotton. These
colonies tended to be settled by people from the south and west of England (many deportees and political refugees). Between the
sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, millions of Africans from different regions of Africa were forcibly transported to work on the
plantations as part of the transatlantic slave trade . By the early 1700s, slaves in South Carolina greatly outnumbered free people.
These estates formed the nucleus of what has come to be known as the American South. Many West African languages were brought ( by
the enslaved people( in North America and the Caribbean.
English in North America – pp.101
A settlement colony
 First, how and when did American English become differentiated from British English
and recognised as an independent variety?
 The variety of English which was transplanted to North America was that of the Early Modern period. As a result,
it’s sometimes claimed that many differences between American and British English can be explained in terms of:

a colonial lag: the language of colonial settlers was more ‘conservative’ than that of the country they left. Thus, some
features of American English, such as the widespread pronunciation of /r/ in words like cart and far (known as ‘non-
prevocalic /r/’) might attributed to the fact that /r/ in such words was generally pronounced in Elizabethan English.
• The problem with this explanation is that some areas on the east coast of North America – the oldest settlements among them
– have /r/-less varieties.

• A better explanation for this dialect variation is that different areas had different patterns of contact with
England after the !rst settlement. Those areas which maintained close cultural and trade links with England
continued to use British English for longer as a model of social correctness. Other inland communities seem not
to have maintained such close ties with England and are perhaps more likely to use /r/.
English in North America – pp.101
A settlement colony

 First, how and when did American English become differentiated from British English
and recognised as an independent variety?
 The variety of English which was transplanted to North America was that of the Early Modern period. As a result,
it’s sometimes claimed that many differences between American and British English can be explained in terms of:

a colonial lag: the language of colonial settlers was more ‘conservative’ than that of the country they left. Thus, some
features of American English, such as the widespread pronunciation of /r/ in words like cart and far (known as ‘non-
prevocalic /r/’) might attributed to the fact that /r/ in such words was generally pronounced in Elizabethan English.
• The problem with this explanation is that some areas on the east coast of North America – the oldest settlements among them
– have /r/-less varieties.

• A better explanation for this dialect variation is that different areas had different patterns of contact with
England after the !rst settlement. Those areas which maintained close cultural and trade links with England
continued to use British English for longer as a model of social correctness. Other inland communities seem not
to have maintained such close ties with England and are perhaps more likely to use /r/.
English in North America –
A settlement colony

Second, how did internal dialect differences in

American English arise?
• It might also be supposed that in North America some dialect variation arose from contact with
different indigenous languages. The influence of precolonial languages on American English,
however, has been relatively slight. That influence was mostly in terms of lexical borrowings
such as moose, racoon, persimmon, tomahawk and squaw, all of which appeared in the early
1600s.

What caused the difference in dialects?

English in North America –
how did internal dialect differences in American English arise

• As English settlements in North America became more established, the different economy of the South gradually pulled its
culture and speech habits in a different direction from that of the North. So emerged one of the major modern dialect
boundaries of the United States: that between northern and southern speech. Southern American English has a number of
distinctive features, such as the use of y’all for the second-person plural pronoun (where American Standard English uses you),
and double modals such as might could as in the sentence ‘he might could !x that car right up for you, if you asked him kindly’.
• As different local economies developed, and conflicts of economic interest with England grew, the colonists themselves
became increasingly aware of these linguistic differences. Once the colonies gained independence from Britain in 1783, the
issue of a distinct linguistic identity became a key issue for some of those active in the process of founding the new republic, the
most notable figure in this respect being the lexicographer Noah Webster (1758–1843).
• For Webster, America in 1783 was no longer a colony but it wasn’t yet a nation.

He felt that ‘As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own , in language as well as government’
(Webster, [1991] 1789, p. 20) ‘Great Britain [...] is at too great a distance to be our model, and to instruct us in the principles of our
own tongue’ (p. 21).

Language was a sense of identity, and variation from Britain was

English in North America –
how did internal dialect differences in American English arise

• The nationalist ideal of linguistic uniformity in American English hasn’t, however, been completely achieved.
One reason is that the processes of internal differentiation mentioned above haven’t been diminished

• The economic and cultural division between North and South led to the Civil War of the 1860s, which the North
won.
• Another source of differentiation is the sheer diversity in the American population.

• Theoretically, the newcomers/settlers were to form what’s often called the ‘melting pot’ of American society, in
which ethnic origin is subsumed by a common American citizenship; in practice, however, new composite
identities such as ‘Irish American’ and ‘Italian American’ have been created, and European cultural practices
maintained. Influences from other sources have produced further diversity in terms of other varieties, such as
that spoken by Spanish-speaking immigrants from Mexico, which is known as Chicano English (Fought,
2003), or African-American English (AAE), which shares many features with the American South, but also
with many creoles
English in Jamaica–
The Development of Pidgins and Creoles

Pidgins are new languages which initially come into being through a particular type of language contact which occurs
between speakers who need to develop a sustained means of communication (often for trading purposes) but don ’t share a
common language or lingua franca. Much of their vocabulary is taken from a European language (e.g. English or French)
known as the lexifer, while their grammar or linguistic structure is shaped by other (often African) local languages.
Pidgins are closely associated with creoles. Traditionally, creoles were seen as emerging from pidgins, a view still held by some
today (e.g. McWhorter, 2018).

Creolisation is the process by which a pidgin develops into a fully functioning language – happened in many parts of the
English- speaking Caribbean, including Jamaica, where Jamaican Creole had emerged by the late 1700s. The traditionally
observed distinction is that pidgins are languages without native speakers – that is, they’re learnt later in life by people
who already have a first language. When a pidgin is acquired by the children of a community, and is thus used as a
first language for a greater variety of functions, it becomes a creole.
The term expanded pidgin is sometimes applied to a variety which is used in various different domains (e.g. for
education and administration), has some native speakers, but isn’t considered to have quite the status of a creole (p.110).
Pidgins and Creoles
• More recently, scholars such as Salikoko Mufwene have argued that the distinction is actually that ‘creoles and pidgins
developed in separate places, in which Europeans and non-Europeans interacted differently ’ (Mufwene, 2006, p. 315), with
pidgins resulting from limited and infrequent contact in ‘trade colonies’ (where the locals also spoke a shared language
between themselves) while creoles emerged from more regular contact in the early stages of settlement and plantation
colonies where African people from different language-speaking backgrounds were brought together to work as slaves on
plantations. Creoles spoken by large diverse groups of enslaved Africans may have gradually diverged from their lexi fiers,
becoming less recognizable to Europeans over time (Mufwene, 2020, p. 311). As Mufwene (2020) argues, creoles and
pidgins shouldn’t be seen as ‘defective, abnormal’ varieties (p. 301). Their emergence may in fact parallel that of the
Romance languages – e.g. French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish – from the ‘lexifier’ Latin in early medieval
Europe.
English in Malaysia and Singapore:
Exploitation colonies
• M a l a y s i a a n d i t s n e i g h b o u r Si n g a p o re i ll u s t ra t e d iff e re n t a p p ro a c h e s t o la n g u a g e p o l i c y a ft e r i n d e p e n d e n c e . Li k e t h e v a s t m a j o ri t y o f fo rm e r e x p l o i t a t i o n c o l o n i e s , M a l a y s i a a n d Si n g a p o re a re m u l t i -e t h n i c , m u l t i -c u l t u ra l a n d m u l t i l i n g u a l .

• They controlled most of the Malay peninsula by the mid 1870’s and all of it by 1914.
• The population remained Asian.
• The British made sure there was a English speaking elite, mainly from the prestigious class.
• At the same time, the vast majority of the population didn’t have access to English.
• The British also created and took advantage of the ethnic, religious and linguistics divisions in the
local population, in order to better control it, applying the principle of divide et impera (‘divide and
rule’). Ironically, one unintended consequence of this strategy was that English became bound up with
the anti-colonial struggle. As there was no single indigenous language that was spoken by the entire
population, English was often the only language that would cut across ethnic, cultural and linguistic
boundaries and, of course, was the only language that the British understood .
English in Malaysia and Singapore:
Exploitation colonies (p.115)
 Malaysia and its neighbor Singapore illustrate different approaches to language policy after independence. Like the vast
majority of former exploitation colonies, Malaysia and Singapore are multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multilingual.
 Malaysian government was very keen to attain social unity in the country by making Malay the national language.
 The first problem with that goal, however, was that for nearly half of the Malaysian population, made of people of
Chinese and Indian background, Malay was a language that didn ’t belong to their identity.
 In addition, the growing importance of English as a language of international trade has made the Malaysian
government re-think its policy several times during the past few decades, t orn between wanting to pursue building of a
strong sense of national unity and recognzing the strategic importance of access to English .
• The approach of the Singaporean government, by contrast, has always been very much in favor of promoting the English language,
recognizing its importance as a global language and also the fact that it was the only language that would be equally shared by the
different ethnic and cultural groups in the country. This approach has led the Singaporean government to crack down heavily on
Singlish, an informal mixed variety.
Post-colonialism & Anti-colonial sentiments

Postcolonialism: the period of postcolonialism that followed independence is

often marked by the continuing use of English, and its appropriation for local
purposes, as well as recognition of its role in perpetuating existing inequalities and social
hierarchies.
Nationalist reaction in the form of anti-colonial movements began in North America in the second half of the
eighteenth century, when political independence for the ‘United States of America’ was achieved by means of armed
force, and the new state declared itself a republic in 1776. Fearing this might set a precedent, the British
government offered a form of self-government to the United States’ neighbour, Canada, in 1867. Dominion status,
as this was called, was similarly granted to other, more recent colonies with substantial settler populations from
Britain and Ireland: Australia (in 1901), New Zealand (in 1907) and South Africa (in 1910; but this was complicated by
the presence of a large Dutch settlement)

Read South Africa (pp122-123)