English Language Imperialism and Our Mother Tongues Today
Sanjeev Kumar Nath

The English language is so much a part of our lives today, that many Indians consider English as just another Indian language.
But does that erase the historical reality of how English came to be so much a part of our lives?
It came as a part of a “package deal” we did not want (but had no option other than accepting): the package deal of the incredibly exploitative, oppressive British imperialism.
However, today, it is a language that helps us in many pan-Indian communication situations, and also as a global language. (Again, it has become a global language mainly through the expansion of the erstwhile British empire and the hydra-growths of the empire’s political and economic ambitions.)
It certainly has great utility for us, but it is also a fact that in the world today English is considered a cannibal language because it eats up other languages.
In other words, the powerful presence of this dominant language causes language shift, and ultimately the death of smaller languages. In India’s northeast alone, many tribes have already lost their languages, and many beautiful, but small languages (languages with a small number of speakers) will almost certainly die soon.
Even large languages are not safe in India and other countries of Asia and Africa which were once ruled by the British, and in which English is the most dominant language.
David Crystal, the British linguist says that-
…during a visit to Southern Africa in 1998, speakers of several of the newly recognized official languages of South Africa expressed to me their anxiety for their long-time future, in the face of English—including several Afrikaners (whose language, Afrikaans, is spoken by around 6 million). The same reaction was observed in Zimbabwe, where not only speakers of Ndebele (1.1 million) but even of Shona (7 million) professed the same anxiety. One experience illustrates the trend that these people find so worrying: engaging a Johannesburg driver in conversation, it transpired that he was conversant with all 11 of his country’s official languages—an ability which he did not think at all unusual. However, his main ambition was to earn enough to enable all his children to learn English. None of the other languages ranked highly in his esteem. (13)

English being the most dominant language in South Africa, and a global language, the Johannesburg driver’s understanding of the benefits of English language skills for his children is quite correct, but his perception that African languages were not of much use, and that English is a better language than African languages, is wrong.
“With some of the less-informed families comprising the Assamese lower middle-class, the situation is such that I don’t know whether to call it a comic or a tragic situation. If you approach one of their little kids and ask, in Assamese: “Tomār nām ki?” the child will invariably rattle off an English sentence: “My name is….” The poor child may not be going to an English school, the parents may not know English well enough, but they have at least taught him one English sentence, and they are all very happy about it. Such is the sense of prestige connected with this imperial language.“
If the driver knew anything about how language universals are absorbed by our brains/minds from our mother tongues, or how our mother tongues help us develop basic thinking skills, or how early mother-tongue learning is linked to success or failure in any chosen field of work, he would perhaps have understood the importance of teaching his children at least their mother tongue well, if not all the eleven African languages he knew.
It is not merely for sentimental reasons that we need to respect and learn our mother tongues, but practical reasons as well. Mother-tongue learning, especially early mother tongue learning, is connected with learning itself, or with all learning in any language, with the learning mechanism of the brain/mind.
Besides, each language of the world has a right to live because every language—whether spoken by millions or just a few—is a unique way in which humans comprehend things, and communicate meanings. The languages of the world enrich the world. The death of languages across the globe, now occurring in an alarming rate, should therefore be a concern for everyone, irrespective of what his or her own language is.
English is seen by many as a neutral medium in countries like Nigeria and India because of the multi-lingual ground realities of these countries. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the famous Nigerian leader who was martyred during his tribe’s resistance against the Nigerian government’s decision to bequeath their land, a river-delta region of Nigeria, to the international oil company Shell, was from a tiny Nigerian tribe called Ogoni. Because the Ogonis are numerically insignificant in Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa felt that English being the language of education and conversation in school gave him protection from being bullied by boys from the numerically large Igbo or the Yoruba communities. He said that had a large African language been the language of the school, the boys from that language community would certainly have bossed over others like him who spoke smaller languages.
However, another African writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o tells a different story. He recalls how English teaching was done in Kenyan schools-
English became more than a language: it was the language, and all others had to bow low before it in deference.
Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment—three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks—or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. Sometimes the culprits were fined money they could hardly afford. (Ngugi, 11)
When all other languages have to “bow low” before English, then it is a clear case of English language imperialism. When there is the wrong perception of English being a better language than any other language, then it is English language imperialism. When a person can be demeaned, called a donkey or stupid simply for speaking in his or her mother tongue, the issue at hand is not just language.

” In Assam, Assamese is the most important spoken language, but even within Assam, Assamese doesn’t enjoy supremacy everywhere. In the Barak Valley, for example, the most widely used language is Bengali, not Assamese. Then in the Brahmaputra valley, too, certain ethnic groups prefer some other language to Assamese when it comes to using a lingua franca. The Bodos, for instance, use the Devnagari script rather than the Assamese script, and many of them prefer to speak in Hindi or English rather than Assamese even when interacting with someone who speaks Assamese. These are ominous signs for those whose identity is bound up with the Assamese language.”
Across the world, English language teaching programmes (sometimes funded or supported by British associations) have pushed the “English only” approach, and there have been countless English teachers in countries like Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, India and Sri Lanka, who have followed these absurd guidelines in dutiful, servile ways. Such purist English language teaching methods are ultimately based on the presumption that English mustn’t be corrupted with baser stuff.
In his 1992 book Linguistic Imperialism Robert Phillipson writes that English linguistic imperialism, which is a sub-type of linguicism, involves a situation in which “dominance of English is asserted and maintained” by various means (47). In many former colonies of Britain, as in India, there is a clear division between English-medium education institutions and vernacular-medium ones.
In Assam, the situation is terrible, with the government vernacular-medium schools struggling for survival with meagre resources, and many of the English-medium ones patronized by the rich and mighty. It is almost as if the fate of the little children is decided right in the beginning of their educational career, depending on the school to which their parents can afford to send them.
The English language acquired pre-eminence in India through conscious and concerted efforts of the British Government in colonial India. Lord Macaulay’s aggressive promotion of English in his position as the chairman of the Governor-General’s Committee on Public Instruction in India led the colonial government to formulate such a policy that throughout the Indian subcontinent, “English became the sole medium of education, administration, trade, and commerce, in short of all formal domains of a society’s functioning. Proficiency in English became the gateway to all social and material benefits.” (Misra 150; quoted in Phillipson 111)

English Language Teaching departments across the world, particularly those parts of the world which were once colonised by the British, and organizations like the British Council, have sought to maintain the master-servant relationship when it comes to teaching English.
“While there is reluctance on the part of some of the age-old inhabitants of Assam to speak in Assamese, there seems to be a growing use of the Assamese language in many Muslim-dominated rural areas of the state. The news media has sometimes reported about an alleged ISI-backed plan to disseminate knowledge of the Assamese language in areas populated by Bangladeshi immigrants. Why? Apparently to help immigrants acquire an irrefutably ‘pure’ Assamese identity by becoming fluent speakers of Assamese. And how is the community of people whose mother tongue is Assamese reacting to all this? There doesn’t seem to be much reaction. Besides, more and more Assamese middle-class families are sending their children to English-medium schools where Assamese is not given the importance that it deserves in Assam. I am not at all suggesting that studying in English-medium schools is bad, nor am I advocating any fanatical rejection of English; I’m only saying that many young Assamese are not learning their mother tongue well, and their elders don’t seem to find anything wrong in that.”
The 1961 Commonwealth Conference on ELT, held at University College, Mekerere, Uganda set the tone of this relationship when it recommended that English is best taught monolingually, without any interference from any other language, that the ideal teacher of English would be a native English teacher, that the earlier English is taught to the little child, the better, that the more English is taught, the better, that if other languages are used in the teaching of English, standards will drop. The report of the conference, containing such recommendations, is a glaring example of the master-servant or centre-periphery relationship between Britain and her former colonies, but more or less, that report has been fully accepted by ELT departments.
What these propagators of servility to the English language do not know or choose to ignore is that a large, dominant language doesn’t have better qualities than a smaller language. (Size here implies the number of speakers/users). Historical, political reasons make a language dominant, not any inherent value that it possesses.

Unfortunately, the imagined perception of the superiority of the English language is shared by a large number of people across the world, and that is what makes many parents in our Northeastern states blind to the fact that their children who are learning English are not learning their mother tongues well enough. They feel that as long as their children are learning English well, they need not bother.
With some of the less-informed families comprising the Assamese lower middle-class, the situation is such that I don’t know whether to call it a comic or a tragic situation. If you approach one of their little kids and ask, in Assamese: “Tomār nām ki?” the child will invariably rattle off an English sentence: “My name is….” The poor child may not be going to an English school, the parents may not know English well enough, but they have at least taught him one English sentence, and they are all very happy about it. Such is the sense of prestige connected with this imperial language.
“Unlike the European nations which are sensitive about their languages, however, we the people of India’s Northeast seem to be happy to flaunt our expertise in English and are not bothered about our lack of expertise in our mother tongues. The location of India’s Northeast in a situation of volatile identity politics actually calls for much greater awareness of this problem than our people have shown so far. All the languages of Northeast India, including Assamese, are exposed to the dominance of three very big languages: English, Hindi and Bengali. Unless our language communities do not understand what this means, and do nothing about strengthening their languages, then their languages will just die in the decades to come.”
India’s Northeast in general and Assam in particular has seen a lot of politics in the name of identity. There have been various demands, for example, for particular privileges for particular groups of people at different times. This is also a place where a very large number of ethnic groups speaking a large number of distinct languages live.
In Assam, Assamese is the most important spoken language, but even within Assam, Assamese doesn’t enjoy supremacy everywhere. In the Barak Valley, for example, the most widely used language is Bengali, not Assamese. Then in the Brahmaputra valley, too, certain ethnic groups prefer some other language to Assamese when it comes to using a lingua franca. The Bodos, for instance, use the Devnagari script rather than the Assamese script, and many of them prefer to speak in Hindi or English rather than Assamese even when interacting with someone who speaks Assamese. These are ominous signs for those whose identity is bound up with the Assamese language.

While there is reluctance on the part of some of the age-old inhabitants of Assam to speak in Assamese, there seems to be a growing use of the Assamese language in many Muslim-dominated rural areas of the state. The news media has sometimes reported about an alleged ISI-backed plan to disseminate knowledge of the Assamese language in areas populated by Bangladeshi immigrants. Why? Apparently to help immigrants acquire an irrefutably ‘pure’ Assamese identity by becoming fluent speakers of Assamese. And how is the community of people whose mother tongue is Assamese reacting to all this? There doesn’t seem to be much reaction. Besides, more and more Assamese middle-class families are sending their children to English-medium schools where Assamese is not given the importance that it deserves in Assam. I am not at all suggesting that studying in English-medium schools is bad, nor am I advocating any fanatical rejection of English; I’m only saying that many young Assamese are not learning their mother tongue well, and their elders don’t seem to find anything wrong in that.
“I think the most reasonable thing for them would be to learn their mother tongues very well, teach their mother tongues to their children, and use their mother tongues for communication, as library language, and language of learning and literature. At the same time, they must learn Hindi and English well. To neglect English would be courting irrelevance in today’s world, and expertise in Hindi can facilitate pan-Indian communication, at least to a certain extent. Besides, linguistic skills can only empower an individual or a people. However, even while acquiring multilingual skills, one must not neglect one’s mother tongue, and this is especially true for the Assamese and other Northeast Indian ethnic groups inhabiting a region marked by identity politics.”
If this trend continues unabated it is quite possible that a time will come when ethnic Assamese people will lose their grip on their own mother-tongue while Bangladeshi or erstwhile Bangladeshi immigrants will assert their ‘Assamese-identity’ vigorously on the ground of their command over the Assamese language. The mistake that the ethnic Assamese are committing in not ensuring that their children learn and use Assamese properly may have disastrous consequences.
Again, if such is the case with Assamese in Assam, the situation is certainly not better for the many small languages spoken in Assam and the other Northeastern states. Early Christianization of many of our hill tribes went hand in hand with English education for them, which has had an empowering effect on them in certain ways, but the process has also led to the loss or weakening of native languages and cultural practices.

Besides, education has become more and more career-oriented today. Careerism, on the other hand, is connected with market-demand. In this scenario, regional languages like Assamese or Bodo or Mising do not stand a chance in the competition against the global language English.
Again, of the many varieties of English in the world, American English is in ascendancy today because of the successes of Big Brother America in everything from commerce to war. While European nations like France and Spain do not wish to let English take over Europe, and are very conscious about the status of their languages within the European Union, Big Brother America—true to its character of always meddling in other people’s affairs—has even tried to pressurize the European Union countries to accept English wholeheartedly and without any reservations.
Unlike the European nations which are sensitive about their languages, however, we the people of India’s Northeast seem to be happy to flaunt our expertise in English and are not bothered about our lack of expertise in our mother tongues. The location of India’s Northeast in a situation of volatile identity politics actually calls for much greater awareness of this problem than our people have shown so far.
All the languages of Northeast India, including Assamese, are exposed to the dominance of three very big languages: English, Hindi and Bengali. Unless our language communities do not understand what this means, and do nothing about strengthening their languages, then their languages will just die in the decades to come.

While English language imperialism has desensitized people to the problems of their own languages, there has also been much resistance to English in many parts of the world. In some countries it has been replaced by a regional language as the official language. Some individuals have shown stiff resistance to English. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer sees the need to reject English as crucial to the process of decolonizing the mind. For him, the submission to the language of the colonizers is synonymous with continued acceptance of the supremacy of the colonizers.
Obi Wali, the Nigerian critic was also famous for his call to the African writers to reject English and embrace African languages. Others like Chinua Achebe and Kofi Awoonor have defended their use of the English language rather than African languages in their writings. Achebe feels that while colonialism was the cause of much misery in Africa, it also did two good things for the Africans. It created large political units, although by force, in place of small autonomous political units, and it gave Africans a few European languages—English, French, Portuguese—to converse in.
The highly complex linguistic scene in Africa is such that most tribes cannot communicate among one another in their own languages, and need a lingua franca for mutual communication. Writers like Achebe, Awoonor and Wole Soyinka also acknowledge the benefits of publishing in a world language. One needs to also consider the fact that although Ngugi wa Thiong’o has called for a rejection of English, he teaches literature in America—he is a Fanonian Marxist but he apparently benefits by his stay in the seat of capitalism—and hasn’t rejected English fully. He translates all his Gikuyu novels into English.
While the debate over rejecting or accepting English still rages unabated in Africa, it is quite clear that English is there to stay. In India, the demand to throw English away (angrezi hatao andolan, as it is phrased in Hindi) is no longer relevant, but it is not clear if English has acted as a lingua franca for us, bringing us Indians together, or if it has only helped to divide our society into two: an English-speaking elite section, and the rest, the “common” Indians. Mahatma Gandhi used the English language so much, but he also deplored the fact that English enjoyed a position of supremacy in India. His mother tongue was Gajarati, but he supported attempts to project Hindi as the most acceptable lingua franca for all Indians.

In this backdrop of a volatile global and national linguistic scenario, how should the people of Assam and the other states of the Northeast behave?
I think the most reasonable thing for them would be to learn their mother tongues very well, teach their mother tongues to their children, and use their mother tongues for communication, as library language, and language of learning and literature. At the same time, they must learn Hindi and English well. To neglect English would be courting irrelevance in today’s world, and expertise in Hindi can facilitate pan-Indian communication, at least to a certain extent. Besides, linguistic skills can only empower an individual or a people. However, even while acquiring multilingual skills, one must not neglect one’s mother tongue, and this is especially true for the Assamese and other Northeast Indian ethnic groups inhabiting a region marked by identity politics.

My argument here may seem needlessly alarmist to some, but considering the really complex and difficult situation in which our identity finds itself today, one cannot do away with anxiety about the condition of our mother tongues. The thought of even the possibility of the death of one’s language can be chilling, and you don’t need to be the speaker of a very small language to have this fear, as what Australian author David Malouf’s statement, quoted by David Crystal, seems to suggest:
When I think of my tongue being no longer alive in the mouths of men a chill goes over me that is deeper than my own death, since it is the gathered deaths of all my kind. (Crystal, 25)
Works Cited.
Crystal, David. Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Third editon, 2003.
Misra, B G. “Language Spread in a Multilingual Setting: the Spread of Hindi as a Case Study” in Cooper R. L. (ed) Language Spread: Studies in Diffusion and Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1982.
Phillipson, Robert. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. First pub 1992.
(Sanjeev Kumar Nath, English Department, Gauhati University, sanjeevnath21@gmail.com)
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