Abstract
Joseph Errington’s book Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power, which consists of seven chapters, offers a primarily retrospective discussion of European colonialism. In the author’s words, the text is about “engagements with linguistic diversity in disparate colonial projects around the world. It focuses on the ways colonial agents [on various continents] made alien ways of speaking into objects of knowledge, so that their speakers could be made subjects of colonial power” (vii). The volume shows that social and scientific theories occupied central and highly influential—rather than marginal—roles across colonial systems from the sixteenth century onward.
The first chapter, “The Linguistics in the Colonial,” introduces the book’s main arguments. Examining histories and linguistic scholarship from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, Errington points out that language difference has been endemic to the terrains of contact implicated in colonial-era expansion, rule, and domination. Grammars, dictionaries, word lists, and linguistic theory all record colonial attitudes toward and reactions to linguistic difference. The author shows readers that these documents reflect arrangements of political-economic power at the same time that they attest to talk’s status as “one of the lowest common denominators for colonial dealings when some humans made others targets of their efforts to persuade or awe, threaten or coerce, and who in turn resisted or cooperated, retreated or collaborated” (2).
Chapter 2 shows how practices of literacy have historically used writing to situate speakers of indigenous languages in natural, spiritual, and political hierarchies. The discussion centers on Spanish friar linguists who worked on Nahuatl and Tagalog, in Mexico and the Philippines, respectively. In Mexico, the Christian invaders refused to recognize native practices as examples of literacy, even though they identified one of the indigenous languages, Nahuatl, as the variety of the dominant elite living in a complex society. Spaniards imitated prestigious Nahuatl genres of “lordly speech” (i.e., tecpillatolli), striving to convert them into a written code that resembled their own language and would be able to displace indigenous words, meaning, and practices. In the Philippines, outsiders saw speakers of Tagalog as possessing indigenous practices of literacy, especially when their language was described within a Latin framework. Its speakers, however, were generally considered primitives living in a simple society. In this latter case, early Spanish friars were keenly interested in understanding phonological properties that they believed were unique to non-European languages (e.g., minimal pairs distinguished by glottal stops) and improving orthography. Nevertheless, the practices of literacy clerics associated with Tagalog were targeted for eradication.
The second chapter also discusses the Spanish Requerimiento. A document formalized in 1513 under King Ferdinand, it required indigenous persons in the Americas, as well as Moors and Jews on the Iberian Peninsula, to submit to the Spanish king and the Christian church whenever it was read aloud in Castilian. Those who did not cooperate, including indigenous listeners who did not understand European languages, were subject to enslavement, theft, and death. As Errington explains, the “enabling presupposition was that (prototypically male) creatures who heard it but did not understand its import were subhuman” (25) and deserving of subjugation. When Friar Bartolomeo de las Casas contested the practice, church officials rejected his argument, emphasizing that los indios failed to demonstrate the eloquence of the classic tradition’s Greeks.
The third chapter concerns European responses to the realization that linguistic diversity within the realms of empire substantially exceeded what they previously imagined. Motivating this shift were word lists, grammars, arguments, and accounts by missionaries, explorers, traders, and colonial administrators. Errington covers the German philosopher Johann Herder’s 1787 essay on language origins and linguistic diversity and philologer and judge William Jones’s work for the British East India Company in Bengal. Echoing certain sentiments put forward by Harris (2004), the author asserts that Jones’s ideas, which were neither novel nor particularly challenging to his European readers, were popular and plausible because they demonstrated that the historical study of texts could serve as a model for the historical study of languages. Errington explains,
[T]exts result from events of writing in different times (and maybe spaces) which need to be brought into analytic proximity. The overall contour that connects these points, in turn, is a progressive distancing and falling away from a perfect, originary moment, because acts of copying introduce cumulatively more derivations. (59-60)
The chapter is not very clear about how Jones actually saw non-European languages and the extent to which his reputation as a “founding father of linguistics” perpetuates the myth that he is a founder of comparative philology. Significantly, Harris (2004:104) establishes that Jones considered the languages in question “mere instruments of real learning” and rejected the view that those interested in linguistic analysis should approach them as objects of knowledge.
Chapter 4 focuses on philology, perhaps the earliest discipline to be structured around specific ideas about linguistic evolution. Describing the emergence of the discipline in Germany, Errington gives attention to ways in which science used specific discursive strategies as a resource for nationalist ideologies. The chapter includes sections on Friedrich and August von Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Franz Bopp, Jakob Grimm, and August Schleicher. The perspective offered is fresh and critical.
The next chapter, “Between Pentecost and Pidgins,” discusses nineteenth-century missions. Its main focus is sub-Saharan Africa (e.g., communities in Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, the Congo). Errington compares Catholicism and Protestantism, asserting that different strategies of conversion shaped their engagement with non-European languages. He explains that Catholics were generally less interested in describing or learning the languages of their converts and more inclined to “civilize” pagans by having them participate in Catholic rituals and social practices. In contrast, Protestants saw the role of language in conversion differently: they “understood that biblical truth could only come directly to individuals through personal knowledge of that text” (96). Various historical anecdotes nuance the significance of these broad patterns.
Chapter 6 investigates linguistic projects that qualify as imperial rather than strictly colonial. It deals with Swahili and Malay, “civilizing” languages of the state, neither of which had substantial numbers of speakers on either side of the imperial divide at the time of contact. Drawing from Fabian (1986), a study of Swahili, Errington discusses how Belgians’ custodial relationship with the language positioned it as a civilizing force at the same time that it was reinvented as “pure,” severed from Islam. The chapter provides an intriguing description of pertinent “strategies of selection . . . to bypass messy pluralities of talk in Swahili in different colonial communities” (133) and marginalize unfamiliar and/or less useful varieties. A striking parallel exists with Malay, a print-literate language for wider communication in the Netherlands East Indies. Errington contextualizes its emergence in terms of Dutch linguists’ calls for a variety of Malay that could be “understood and spoken everywhere.” Giving special attention to van Ophuijsen’s 1910 grammar, he tracks the emergence of a unified and homogenous “good” Malay written in a Latin orthography. Its promotion “muted Islamic and ethnic Chinese themes in favor of visions of modernity, progress, and humanism” (142).
Chapter 7 examines two topics that Errington holds are reshaping interests and values in linguistics. The first concerns the North American Summer Institute of Linguistics and missionaries seeking “to transform speakers of exotic languages in the formerly colonized world into literate Christians” (150). The author juxtaposes a sketch of the organization’s work in Guatemala with ideas put forward by Maya intellectuals such as Demetrio Cojti. The latter speaks eloquently and convincingly about the importance of a level of activism that many continue to reject as unscientific, overly confrontational, and/or otherwise inappropriate, one “in favor of a new linguistic order in which equality in the rights of all languages is made concrete” (161). The final chapter also addresses factors contextualizing language endangerment and death. It situates practices that Everett (2004) describes as “pragmatic” and “coherent” research as potential impetuses for rethinking linguistics.
The book’s strengths are many and its shortcomings few. The author offers an informative, readable, and convincing narrative. As far as weaknesses are concerned, the book does not clearly situate its specific findings within the growing body of contemporary scholarship devoted to the relationship between colonialism and linguistics. A second critique concerns an omission that Errington acknowledges: creole languages. As demonstrated by publications such as Ansaldo, Matthews, and Lim (2007), longstanding debates about the role that colonialism plays in defining these languages remain central in the field. Finally, race deserves more attention. Young (2003), like several of the scholars the author cites, shows that anthropological theories of race legitimized that the colonized were “incapable of looking after themselves (despite having done so perfectly for millennia) and required the paternal rule of the West” (2).
Given that these are minor weaknesses, Errington is to be commended for this intelligent illustration of how colonialism is deeply entrenched in the epistemological conditions that contextualize language change and the scientific practices that define linguistics. This makes the text most fitting for courses that address issues related to the language–ideology interface, language and power, postcolonialism, and the history of linguistics.