Persuasive discourse and language planning in Ireland

Colonial language discourse typically consists of evaluations concerning the respective merits of two or more languages, and the cultures they represent. This can serve as a warrant for imposing a ‘superior’ language. Although such discourse tends to be associated with the conquest of the New World and subsequent European expansion, there is evidence that in the case of Ireland – England’s first overseas colony – an adversarial relation between English and Irish languages existed even before the Elizabethan period. Referring to English legislation, chronicles and other documents, this paper examines the norms, arguments and rhetorical strategies that were used to exert the dominance of English language in Ireland during late-medieval and early-modern times. In the latter half of the paper, the focus will shift to attempts to create, especially from the seventeenth-century onwards, a ‘pro-Irish reversal’ that used similar arguments and rhetoric to reclaim this denigrated language. Our suggestion is that these pro- and anti-colonial language discourses anticipate those that were used later on in colonial and postcolonial environments

Book Review: \u3cem\u3eThe Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India\u3c/em\u3e

A review of The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in British India by Robert A. Yelle

An incident at Kilang: a further note on the death of lieutenant G.F. Phillips

In a recent article dealing with the Tangale Peak or Kilang, as it is called in the local Tangale language, Herrmann JUNGRAITHMAYR presents an account narrated by a Tangale elder about the attempted ascent of that characteristic mountain by a British colonial officer and his subsequent death.1 Kilang mountain is a basaltic cone approximately 1300 m high, about 8 km southwest of Kaltungo, one of the principal settlements of the Tangale people, in southern Bauchi State, northeastern Nigeria. During a research stay at the National Archives in Kaduna in November 1993 I was able to consult a file containing various documents relating to this incident in detail.2 In the following note I present an outline of the events based on the evidence in the colonial records. By doing this I not only intend to shed more light on a tragic event from the very early years of the colonial era. The picture of the circumstances emerging from the investigations of the colonial authorities may serve as a background to the narrative by the Tangale elder presented in JUNGRAITHMAYR's publication

The issue of Bahasa Malayu from colonial to decolonial era

This paper illustrates a general picture of development of Bahasa Melayu in terms of its socializati on through out the colonial and de-colonial periods. Colonialism ought to be regarded to a larger extent, a reconstruction of the languages of the natives in their homeland. On the other hand, de-colonialism has witnessed the process of de- con str uction of existing language policies an d practices in n ewl y established nation -states. This is a process that cannot be alienated from the efforts of the colonial scholarly rulers, since they played a paramount role and functioned well pertaining to the use of Bahasa Melayu, though they did not plan for what appeared during the de- colonial era. To map the position of Bahasa Melayu during the different colonial periods, the investigation has been narrowed to certain fields focusing on the use of the language in an education system. Henceforth, it would be naïve to expect that the language issue would be settled in a short time after the independence. Wh en all steps and phases are traced, it would become clear that how the process was stressful and is still in evitably, at least to some extent, a national issue. It was during the British era and most of the post -in dependence era, that various types of policies were designed to rediscover the phenomen on of Bahasa Melayu in terms of history, sociology, culture and civilization. All the policies have played paramount roles and functioned as tools in the construction of cultural unity and nation -state formation in a successive manner. These transformations have led Bahasa Melayu to be brought into full existence normatively from a mere position of vernacular system wh ich was described as a malfunction during the colonial era. The attempts to design a national and official language are claimed as the cement of socio-political unity in the newly established nation-state. The language transformation process was smooth , in stead, it in cluded extremely challenging situations and contradictory encounters. The nation-state building during the decolonization has witnessed the growing competitiven ess between languages, not only the English and Bahasa Malayu but also Bahasa Malayu and minority languages as an expression of exoglossic policy and endoglossic policies

Orthography and Identity in Cameroon

The tone languages of sub-Saharan Africa raise challenging questions for the design of new writing systems. Marking too much or too little tone can have grave consequences for the usability of an orthography. Orthography development, past and present, rests on a raft of sociolinguistic issues having little to do with the technical phonological concerns that usually preoccupy orthographers. Some of these issues are familiar from the spelling reforms which have taken place in European languages. However, many of the issues faced in sub-Saharan Africa are different, being concerned with the creation of new writing systems in a multi-ethnic context: residual colonial influences, the construction of new nation-states, detribalization versus culture preservation and language reclamation, and so on. Language development projects which crucially rely on creating or revising orthographies may founder if they do not attend to the various layers of identity that are indexed by orthography: whether colonial, national, ethnic, local or individual identity. In this study, I review the history and politics of orthography in Cameroon, with a focus on tone marking. The paper concludes by calling present-day orthographers to a deeper and broader understanding of orthographic issues

Common tongue: The impact of language on economic performance

This paper investigates the impact of language on economic performance. I use the 1956 reorganization of Indian states on linguistic lines as a natural experiment to estimate the impact of speaking the majority language on educational and occupational outcomes. I find that districts that spoke the majority language of the state during colonial times enjoy persistent economic benefits, as evidenced by higher educational achievement and employment in communication intensive sectors. After reorganization, historically minority language districts experience greater growth in educational achievement, indicating that reassignment could reverse the impact of history.Language, Communication costs, Education, Occupational choice, Reorganization of Indian states

Settlement histories and ethnic frontiers

One of the powerful conventional images of pre-colonial Africa is that of a continent of more or less immobile ethnic groups, living since time immemorial on their ancestral lands, steeped in their traditional cultures. In this image, Africa appears like a mosaic, with clearcut ethnic boundaries, each sherd representing a different people cum language cum culture cum territory. Since a number of years, however, historians and anthropologists of Africa have insisted that this image is misleading. Most pre-colonial societies were characterised by mobility, overlapping networks, multiple group membership and the contextdependent drawing of boundaries. Communities could be based on neighbourhood, kinship and common loyalties to a king, but this did not absolutely have to include notions of a common origin, a common language or a common culture. Our own research on the West African savannah has also shown the enormous importance of mobility. Among the societies of southern and southwestern Burkina Faso, for instance, which several projects have studied, there is hardly a single village whose history has not been characterised repeatedly by the arrival and settlement of new groups and the departure of others. In some cases, we can even speak of systematic practices of multilocality

Islamic Learning in Arabic-Afrikaans Between Malay Model and Ottoman Reform

Through the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century the Muslim community of Cape Town produced a large number of texts in various fields of Islamic learning, written in Afrikaans, a creolized variety of the language the Dutch traders had brought to South Africa. The Cape Muslim community had its origin in South Asia and Southeast Asia; most of its founding members had been transported by force by the Dutch colonial authorities. Malay was the language in which they had been educated, and for some time it remained in use as the written language. For oral instruction, the Cape Muslim community soon shifted to Afrikaans. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman scholar Abu Bakr Effendi introduced the use of Afrikaans in Arabic script, replacing Malay as written language. In this paper I deal with the shift from Malay to Afrikaans and the relationship between Malay heritage and Ottoman reform in the Cape community

Parasitism Revealed: On the Absence of Concession

An examination of the role of ideologies from the past in shaping educational thought, action, policy and practice in the present. Takes the position that inequality is an expression of a fundamentally parasitic relationship forged during the 17th century colonial push and cemented institutionally in the early 20th century by a progressive version of social Darwinist thought known as eugenic ideology. Considered are the roles of historical disciplinary limitations, memory, and the co-optation of the language of social justice in perpetuating a racist, classist, hierarchy in education that has been bearing fruit for nearly two centuries. Warns against uncritical use of the language and framework of social justice specifically and progressivism in general

Estopped by Grand Playsaunce: Flann O'Brien's Post-colonial Lore

This article seeks to extend our understanding of the Irish writer Flann O'Brien (Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O'Nolan) by reading him from a Law and Literature perspective. I suggest that O'Nolan's painstaking and picky mind, with its attention to linguistic nuance, was logically drawn to the languages of law. In this he confirmed the character that he showed as a civil servant of the cautious, book-keeping Irish Free State. The Free State, like other post-colonial entities, was marked at once by a rhetoric of rupture from the colonial dispensation and by a degree of legal and political continuity. I suggest that O'Nolan's writing works away at both these aspects of the state, alternating between critical and utopian perspectives. After establishing an initial context, I undertake a close reading of O'Nolan's parodies of actual legal procedure, focusing on questions of language and censorship. I then consider his critical work on the issue of Irish sovereignty, placing this in its post-colonial historical context. Finally I describe O'Nolan's treatment of Eamon de Valera's 1937 Constitution. I propose that his attention to textual detail prefigures in comic form the substantial rereadings of the Constitution that have been made in the last half-century