Linguistic and cultural imperialism

Linguistic rights – a concept promulgated by the UN and other international organizations to defend the right of peoples to develop and promote their own languages, in particular the right of children to have access to education in their languages. The case for linguistic rights has been made particularly strongly with regard to the hegemonic spread of English around the world. Beyond the symbolic link frequently established between language and territorial or cultural identity there is also another link that has more to do with the promulgation of global ideologies through the worldwide expansion of one language (linguicism). Linguicism has bee defined as ideologies, structures, and practices which are used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce an unequal division of power and resources between groups which are defined on the basis of language (English linguistic imperialism).

The spread of English is undeniable, and it is viewed by those who suffer from it as a totem for a certain Anglo-American culture or way of life. The babel threat is not the splintering off in mutually unintelligible languages, but the monopoly of one language over others. As in Babel’s days, the complacent belief that people are working for a common cause just because they speak a common language is dangerous illusion. Being human means working through the shoals of mutual misunderstandings across incommensurable languages. Each language provides a uniquely communal, and uniquely individual, means by which human beings apprehend the world and one another.

 

Summary

Language is the most sensitive indicator of the relationship between an individual and given social group. Language is an integral part ourselves – it permeates our very thinking and way of viewing the world. It is also the arena where political and cultural allegiances and loyalties are fought out.

 

Current issues

Who is a native speaker?

Linguists have relied on native speakers’ natural intuitions of grammatical accuracy and their sure sense of what is proper language use to establish a norm against which the performance of non-native speakers is measured. Native speakers have traditionally enjoyed a natural prestige as language teachers, because they are seen as not only embodying the authentic use of the language, but as representing its original cultural context as well.

“Native speaker” is an abstraction based on arbitrary selected features of pronunciation, grammar and lexicon, as well as stereotypical features of appearance and demeanor. For example, children of Turkish parents and bearing a Turkish surname, but born, raised and educated in Germany may have some difficulty being perceived as native speakers of German when applying for a language teaching job abroad, so entrenched is association of one language with one national stereotype in the public imagination. NS is a monolingual and monocultural abstraction. In reality many people partake of various languages or language varieties and live by various cultures and subcultures.

It is not clear whether one is a native speaker by birth, by education, or by virtue of being recognized and accepted as a member of a like-minded cultural group.

NS is a person who is recognized, linguistically and culturally, by members of a discourse community as being one of them.

Cultural authenticity

Stereotypes, like French chic, German know-how, American casualness, are shorthand symbols, readily recognized and applied to their respective realities; they help to draw cultural boundaries between US and Others in order to appreciate the uniqueness of both. Language learners, keen on slipping into someone else’s shoes by learning their language, attach great importance to the cultural authenticity of French bread or German train schedules, and the cultural appropriateness of Japanese salutations or Chinese greeting ceremonies. Their desire to learn a language couples with the desire to behave and think like them.

However, there is a diversity of authenticities within one national society, depending on such contextual variables as age, social status, gender, ethnicity, race; what is authentic in one context might be inauthentic in another.

Cultural appropriateness may need to be replaced by the concept of appropriation.