{"id":685,"date":"2014-06-21T15:17:04","date_gmt":"2014-06-21T15:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/?p=685"},"modified":"2017-08-29T23:02:46","modified_gmt":"2017-08-29T23:02:46","slug":"language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/2014\/06\/21\/language\/","title":{"rendered":"Language"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201c\u2026 make language stammer, or make it \u2018wail,\u2019 stretch tensors through all of language, even written language, and draw from it cries, shouts, pitches, durations, timbres, accents, intensities.\u201d –\u00a0G. Deleuze and F. Guattari,\u00a0A Thousand Plateaus<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Language is often a central question in postcolonial studies. During colonization, colonizers usually imposed or encouraged the dominance of their native language onto the peoples they colonized, even forbidding natives to speak their mother tongues. Many writers educated under colonization<\/a> recount how students were demoted, humiliated, or even beaten for speaking their native language in colonial schools. In response to the systematic imposition of colonial languages, some postcolonial writers and activists advocate a complete return to the use of indigenous languages. Others see the language (e.g. English) imposed by the colonizer as a more practical alternative, using the colonial language both to enhance inter-nation communication (e.g. people living in Djibouti, Cameroon, Morocco, Haiti, Cambodia, and France can all speak to one another in French) and to counter a colonial past through de-forming a \u201cstandard\u201d European tongue and re-forming it in new literary forms.<\/p>\n

\"Decolonising<\/a>
Decolonising the Mind, 1986<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Most radical among those writers who have chosen to turn away from English,\u00a0Ng\u0169g\u0129 wa Thiong\u2019o<\/a>, a Gikuyu writer from Kenya, began a successful career writing in English before turning to work entirely in his native language. In\u00a0Decolonising the Mind<\/em>, his 1986 \u201cfarewell to English,\u201d Ng\u0169g\u0129 posits that through language people have not only described the world, but also understand themselves by it. For him, English in Africa is a \u201ccultural bomb\u201d \u00a0that continues a process of erasing memories of pre-colonial cultures and history and installs the dominance of new, more insidious forms of colonialism. Writing in Gikuyu, then, is Ng\u0169g\u0129\u2019s way not only of harkening back to Gikuyu traditions, but also of acknowledging and communicating their continuing presence. Ng\u0169g\u0129 is concerned primarily not with universality, though models of struggle can always move out and be translated for other cultures, but with preserving the specificity of individual groups. In a general statement, Ng\u0169g\u0129 points out that language and culture are inseparable, and that therefore the loss of the former results in the loss of the latter:<\/p>\n

[A] specific culture is not transmitted through language in its universality, but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific history. Written literature and orature are the main means by which a particular language transmits the images of the world contained in the culture it carries.
\nLanguage as communication and as culture are then products of each other \u2026 Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we perceive ourselves and our place in the world \u2026 Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world. (15-16)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On the other side of the language debate is\u00a0Salman Rushdie<\/a>. Although Rushdie\u2019s novels often tackle the history of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Great Britain, his comments have wider relevance, particularly considering his status in world literature. He comments on how working in new Englishes can be a therapeutic act of resistance, remaking a colonial language to reflect the postcolonial experience (See Postcolonial Novel)<\/a>. In the essay \u201cImaginary Homelands\u201d (from the eponymous collection published by Granta in 1992), he explains that, far from being something that can simply be ignored or disposed of, the English language is the place where writers can and must work out the problems that confront emerging\/recently independent colonies:<\/p>\n

One of the changes [in the location of anglophone writers of Indian descent] has to do with attitudes towards the use of English. Many have referred to the argument about the appropriateness of this language to Indian themes. And I hope all of us share the opinion that we can\u2019t simply use the language the way the British did; that it needs remaking for our own purposes. Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free. (17)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"The<\/a>
The Empire Writes Back, 1989.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The theoretical and scholarly debate about language is addressed in detail in\u00a0The Empire Writes Back<\/em>\u00a0(1989). Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin explore the ways in which writers encounter a dominant, colonial language. They describe a two-part process through which writers in the post-colonial world displace a standard language (denoted with the capital \u201ce\u201d in \u201cEnglish\u201d) and replace it with a local variant that does not have the perceived stain of being somehow sub-standard, but rather reflects a distinct cultural outlook through local usage. The terms they give these two processes are \u201cabrogation\u201d and \u201caccommodation\u201d:<\/p>\n

Abrogation is a refusal of the categories of the imperial culture, its aesthetic, its illusory standard of normative or \u201ccorrect\u201d usage, and its assumption of a traditional and fixed meaning \u201cinscribed\u201d in the words. (38)<\/p>\n

Appropriation is the process by which the language is made to \u201cbear the burden\u201d of one\u2019s own cultural experience \u2026 Language is adopted as a tool and utilized to express widely differing cultural experiences. (38-39)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The authors are careful to point out, however, that abrogation alone, though a vital step in \u201cdecolonizing\u201d a dominant language (see\u00a0Ng\u0169g\u0129<\/a>) is not sufficient, in that it offers the danger that roles will be reversed and a new set of normative practices will move into place.<\/p>\n

Another issue Ashcroft et al. describe is the three types of linguistic communities they identify: the monoglossic, the diglossic, and the polyglossic. Monoglossic communities, corresponding roughly to old settler colonies, are places where \u201cenglish\u201d (the lower-case \u201ce\u201d in \u201cenglish\u201d denotes local, non-standard\/British usage) is the native tongue. Diglossic communities, by far the most common of the three, occur where\u201d\u2026 bilingualism has become an enduring societal arrangement, for example in India, Africa, the South Pacific, for the indigenous populations of settled colonies, and in Canada, where Qu\u00e9becois culture has created an artificially bilingual society\u201d (39).\u00a0Finally, polyglossic societies \u201c\u2026 [o]ccur principally in the Caribbean, where a multitude of dialects interweave to form a generally comprehensible continuum\u201d (39).<\/p>\n

Many of the language issues Native Americans face parallel postcolonial debates, although the status of Native American studies remains unclear in postcolonial scholarship. Gerald Vizenor, a writer and critic, has celebrated english as a vehicle for resistance:<\/p>\n

The English language has been the linear tongue of the colonial discoveries, racial cruelties, invented names, the simulation of tribal cultures, manifest manners, and the unheard literature of dominance in tribal communities; at the same time, this mother tongue of para-colonialism has been a language of invincible imagination and liberation for many people of the post-indian worlds. English \u2026 has carried some of the best stories of endurance, the shadows of tribal creative literature, and now that same language of dominance bears the creative literature of distinguished post-indian authors in cities \u2026 The shadows and language of tribal poets and novelists could be the new ghost dance literature, the shadow literature of liberation that enlivens tribal survivance. (Manifest Manners<\/em>, 1994, 105-6)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The issue of languages raises several polemical questions for consideration in the study of literary texts: does the author choose to work in a local language or a major European one? If the former \u2014 how does the work get translated and by whom? What might the translation have done to the work? What kind of semantic processes of abrogation\/deformation and appropriation\/reformation occur in the work? When a local language lends terms, in what context do they occur? Finally, what does the use of language imply about an implicit theory of resistance?<\/p>\n

For other views on language in postcolonial studies see authors such as: Braj B. Kachru, Raja Rao, Bill Ashcroft, W.H. New, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Chantal Zabus, among others.<\/p>\n

See Representation<\/a>, Languages of South Asia<\/a><\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/h3>\n