Language, Nation & Colonization: the role of English
The languages of Europe’s nation states have not only been major vehicles of nation building but also of colonization and the export and reification of hegemonial perspectives. The connection of language and nation has indeed been so powerful that today we are still confronted with the legacies of late 18th and early 19th-century thinking in our conceptualizations of “language”. Which linguistic varieties are afforded and which denied the label “language” is not so much linguistically informed as socio-politically conditioned and here lingering colonial legacies loom large.
In this seminar we will study the roles of language in nation building and colonization, with special emphasis on the various instantiations of English. We will revisit the making of English as a national and imperial language, starting in Old English times and stretching all the way to the present. We will critically review the key achievements in the English language, such as Johnson’s dictionary, the prescriptive grammar tradition, the Oxford English Dictionary (Brewer 2007) or the Quirk et al. grammar (1985), and test their conceptualizations and presuppositions against notions that are associated with standard languages, such as homogeneity, superiority and purity.
We will see that, surprisingly, in some present-day approaches to language the discourses of hegemony still lurk in unsuspecting corners relating to what is perceived as a language and what not (Dollinger 2019a). It is safe to say that these discourses have left their mark on most if not all standard varieties (e.g. Dollinger 2019b), often via a stifling of Indigenous voices (Griffith 2019).
Select references:
Brewer, Charlotte. 2007. Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED. Yale: Yale University Press.
Dollinger, Stefan. 2019a. The Pluricentricity Debate: On Austrian German and Other Germanic Standard Varieties. London: Routledge.
Dollinger, Stefan. 2019b. Creating Canadian English: the Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gramling, David. 2016. The Invention of Monolingualism. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Langer, Nils and Winifred V. Davies (eds). 2005. Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Nelson, Cecil, Zoya Proshina & Daniel Davis (eds.) 2020. Handbook of World Englishes, Second edition. Malden, MA: Blackwell-Wiley.
Piller, Ingrid. 2017. Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Watts, Richard and Peter Trudgill (eds). 2002. Alternative Histories of English. London: Routledge.
Watts, Richard. 2011. Language Myths and the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Willinsky, John. 1994. Empire of Words: the Reign of the OED. Princeton: Princeton University Press.