Northern perspectives on language and society in India

This chapter describes Northern attempts to fathom the relation between language and society in India / south Asia and Northern representations of it. We examine the nature of two such interventions: British colonial scholarship and American scholarship in the early years of Indian independence. We demonstrate that the methods and tools (including philology and ethnology) used by both these institutions to approach language and society relied on assumptions of homogeneity and unitarianism. We critique conceptual categories such as language, language family, dialect, vernacular, mother tongue, and speech community, which emerged from these interventions, and suggest that these were at variance with the indigenous social and language practices in India. In conclusion, we gauge the long-lasting impact of northern scholarship on present-day sociolinguistic research and practice in India.

Colonial creep

This commentary engages with the book’s chapters on colonial linguistics by highlighting that in their struggles to maintain their ancestral sovereignty, Indigenous peoples remind all of us that, for most of our histories as human beings on the Earth, we have exercised and cultivated our individual and collective powers to set in motion dynamic relationships of well-being and mutual benefit. The commentary argues that Indigenous peoples also remind us that it has only been in the last few millennia and in a few aberrant cultures that systems of domination such as patriarchy, ethnocentrism, and accumulation of wealth have sought to assure that our deployment of what Foucault refers to as the ‘awesome materiality’ of these powers no longer serves the life-seeking interests of ourselves, our communities, and humanity, but instead serves the death-seeking interests of processes of domination, such as colonization.

Decolonial linguistics as paradigm shift

This commentary focuses the creation of often contradictory disciplinary boundaries, practices, and institutions. It argues that writing on colonial linguistics can traverse several components of this knowledge project. These colonial texts can tell us about the researchers’ encounter with materials, i.e. the data of linguistics, and with the human sources of this data, the “informants.” They tell us about the search for patterns, the moment of generalization and theorizing. And they tell us about the workforce of the knowledge project, particularly its academic workers, and the publication of ‘results’. The collective character of the project, and its close but ambiguous relationship with the political structure of empire, stand out very clearly. There are various conclusions to be drawn at this point. One thing we can be sure about: there is struggle ahead before we have decolonized the academy.

Tracing (de)colonial options in German philology around 1900

The Berlin Lautarchiv holds a large collection of historical recordings with POWs during World War I. These recordings were produced with the prisoners in German camps by a group of German linguists, anthropologists, and musicologists in an ambitious project to ‘collect the languages of the world’. The acoustic documents were archived and are now digitally available. Most of the recordings with African prisoners and civilian internees were never translated, yet some of them surfaced in radio broadcasts and publications. By means of approaching acoustic, visual, and written traces in European archives, which relate to two of the speakers and their biographies, this chapter engages with linguistic practices, with epistemic regimes that framed the project of recording in camps, as well as its racist assumptions at specific moments of colonial knowledge production.

Introduction

Debates about the legacy of colonialism in the academy are not new. In linguistics, however, critiquing and interrogating the history of the discipline and its status as being part of the practices and epistemes of colonialism, which continue into the here-and-now, have only been carried out reluctantly. This chapter introduces the reader to key themes in critical research on the historical foundations of linguistics. It is concerned with the contexts in which data has been and is produced, the ways in which analysis is carried out, and how expert knowledge is formed.

Accomplished works and facts

There are different traditions that focus on ‘capturing’ endangered languages such as field linguistics and documentary linguistics. They position themselves somewhat differently to the language or practices they aim to represent, their user community(/ies), and the nature of the enterprise. Focusing on aspects such as research goals, methods, outcomes, and agents, this chapter examines the similarities and differences between these traditions to uncover their ideological underpinnings based on an assessment of (classic) training manuals or guides. Despite critical voices and changes in these traditions, both remain preoccupied with amassing data to feed Northern scientific activities, notions such as objectivity, representativeness, replicability, and, among other things, asymmetries between speakers’ and researchers’ interests are not resolved. Change has not fundamentally transformed the research paradigm on endangered languages, freeing it from its colonial origins, because there is a reluctance among linguists to embrace reflexivity as part of their research process.

Walking decolonially with Nick Shepherd

Decolonial Linguistics can be described as an intellectual critical movement that, according to Buaventura de Sousa Santos (2018), aims to end the Western “cognitive empire.” This chapter argues that even though it is not hard to document this type of coloniality in linguistics, not all of the inadequacies of the state of the art about languages of former European colonies need be associated with coloniality. As so often, the situation is complex. However, the idea of decolonial linguistics is important for current practice: it allows scholars to reduce the Western bias and hegemony in how languages of the global South and the (socio)linguistic behaviours of their speakers/writers are analysed.

The decolonizer iconoclast

Linguistic purism and other radically essentializing concepts of language—such as “mother tongue” or “ethnic language”—form part of the colonial matrix of power. The monolingual speaker emerges as some kind of hegemonic figure in these narratives, while the multilingual speaker is positioned as deficient. These two poles are part of the many binary constructions that characterize coloniality, as well as recent sociolinguistic approaches which, implicitly, position multilingualism as ‘decolonization-in-action’. Based on a sociolinguistic study of speakers in Mali, this chapter explores their desire for monolingualism, as well as the persistence of multilingualism in participants’ biographies in Bamako, Mali.

The missionary in the theatre of linguistics

Colonial discourses and practices have affected the discipline of linguistics and knowledge production for a long time. This chapter focuses on Jamaican, by looking at how the study of Jamaican is embedded in colonial linguistics. The chapter examines the historical development of Creole Studies in this regard. Furthermore, it investigates Jamaicans’ creative ways with writing and spelling by analysing different practices in various media forms. The examples show how these practices can be read as postcolonial answers to the complex problematic of the standardization and destandardization of Jamaican. Writing practices are discussed against the background of speakers’/writers’ metalinguistic knowledges. The chapter further reflects on whether creative writing and spelling practices can be regarded as a form of decolonization.

Jamaican postcolonial writing practices and metalinguistic discourses as a challenge to established norms and standards

There are moments when people imagine languages differently, sometimes even radically rethinking “language” beyond the conventional idea of “language” itself as a coherent entity. Such moments tend to coincide with, or be triggered by, other historically significant occasions such as the casting off of the yoke of cruel colonial ministries, or the search for a new collective sense of self, previously stigmatized. Often accompanying such reimaginings is a new embodied and euphoric sense of self, suddenly made possible through language, together with the realization that language has the power to form other subjectivities. This chapter considers a singular and brief moment of such reimagining. It is the reimagining of Portuguese in the dawning of a post-colonial, independent Mozambique.