Abstract
This collection proposes a radical conceptual expansion of the field of missionary linguistics (ML) through an exploration of its relationship with colonialism, including nonmissionary colonial linguistics (CL). The CL thus proposed seeks not only to expand the scope of previous ML by including lay linguists under its purview or widening its temporal and geographical boundaries; rather, it aims to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the influence of military linguists on social and political issues such as language policy, place naming, language contact, language ideologies, and– most interestingly for readers of this journal– colonial discourses.
The nine empirical studies, arranged in two sections (six on Africa and three on Latin America), are preceded by a theoretical introduction by Stolz and Warnke which develops this new research program, which is much more ambitious, vast and interdisciplinary than ML as originally conceived by Zimmerman. Whereas ML takes colonialism as merely the background to its historiography of descriptive linguistics and has been ‘heavily biased towards the descriptive linguistic achievements or failures of missionary linguists’ (p. 12), CL seeks to investigate all reciprocal effects between language and colonialism, with the impact of ML on the historical development of mainstream linguistics being just one topic among many.
The volume thus provides a snapshot of a field in transition between two different approaches, and its internal diversity, or perhaps incoherence, bears witness to that state of flux. From Hackmack’s very historiographical analysis of Swahili grammars to the contributions by Castillo-Rodríguez, Fountain and Alexander-Bakkerus, who engage with concepts such as transculturation that are more familiar to literary studies, the reader is offered a wide array of possibilities. All contributors seem very willing to break the new ground pointed at by Stolz and Warnke and steer away from a merely historiographical understanding of ML. Yet despite what they state in their summaries, in many cases their implicit focus ends up shifting from a judgment of the descriptive adequacy of missionary grammars or their effect on the development of linguistics to an equally narrow preoccupation with passing a ‘guilty/not guilty’ verdict on each particular missionary or text for their suspected complicity with colonialism.
However, attempts at assessing purely linguistic rather than discursive data in this way will inevitably fail to persuade the reader if the authors cannot provide guiding criteria: was borrowing, for instance, a better means than coining, paraphrasing or using metaphor in order ‘to conquer the consciousness of the natives’ (p. 96) as implied by Castillo-Rodríguez in Chapter 4? Moreover, if missionary linguists were neither conservative nor revolutionary, but in step with contemporary linguistic theory as Hackmack argues (Chapter 3), and if the most influential grammars and dictionaries conceal their authors’ language attitudes according to Strommer (Chapter 5) and Fountain (Chapter 8), it may be difficult to fulfill the promise of analyzing ‘the specific use of language that shapes the interdependence between language and colonialism’ (p. 16) through such texts.
Other kinds of archival documents may prove more helpful, and indeed Strommer and Castelli (Chapter 6) contribute the most engrossing and outstanding chapters precisely by resorting to a wealth of private diaries and letters that afford tantalizing glimpses of the ad hoc, shifting nature of the missionaries’ everyday language policies against very precise directives sent from their headquarters. Yet when using this biographical approach to archival material, more attention would have to be paid to adequate discourse analytical procedures to avoid jumping to conclusions without sufficient empirical backing, as does, for instance, Strommer when claiming that missionary linguistic activity ‘created a new sense of identity and solidarity among the Herero’ (p. 121): this might well be the case, but it cannot be substantiated by the particular texts that she analyzes. Reception of ML by mainstream linguistics and the European center has figured prominently in the field’s research program; it may be just time for CL to start comparing missionaries’ linguistic activities with their actual uptake by the colonized as well, rather than by a metropolitan scholar 60 years later as Castelli does. Only then will the field of discourse studies take advantage of the rich data that ML/CL can contribute.