ELTWeekly Newsletter Vol. 3 Issue#92 | July 17, 2011

Colonial Past of English Language

Politics of language has always been crucial in the human history as it has proved the most potent tools in the hands of colonizers to colonise the natives. Language was then taken as the carrier of culture and means to dominate and it was commonly upheld by the radical anti-colonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon for whom “to speak a language is to take on a world, a culture” (1986: 38). The question of language and culture have been debated by a range of colonial/postcolonial thinkers to condemn English as a language signifying colonial authority or to defend it as the most obvious uniting force not only among the colonies but also the lingua franca of the world at large. (more…)