Linguistic Imperialism Quotes

The issue of American world cultural dominance is moot. All the international debates on the issue seem to be held in English.

I‘ve said it once and I will say it again, why can‘t everyone just speak English? The Americans give it a bit of a go — why can‘t other nations?

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.

We have evolved to understand that language of power that's taken too much.

The Negro was taught to speak the white man's tongue, worship the white God, and accept the white man as his superior.

Under the tropic is our language spoke, And part of Flanders hath receiv'd our yoke.

I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare.

Colonialism is a terrible bane for a people upon whom it is imposed, but a blessing for a language. English's drive to exploit the new and the alien, its zeal in robbing words from other languages, its incapacity to feel qualms over the matter, its museum-size overabundance of vocabulary, it shoulder-shrug approach to spelling, its don't-worry-be-happy concern for grammar-the result was a language whose colour and wealth Henry loved.

Oppressed groups are frequently placed in the situation of being listened to only if we frame our ideas in the language that is familiar to and comfortable for a dominant group. This requirement often changes the meaning of our ideas and works to elevate the ideas of dominant groups.

English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.

Requiring this kneeling down of all languages before French is sheer linguistic imperialism.

As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions.

The canker has so eaten into the society that in many cases the only meaning of education is a knowledge of English.

It is a general truth that students of language in every era try to colonize some or all of the other human sciences.

However virile the English language may be, it can never become the language of the masses of India.

We Irish had the right word on the tip of our tongue, but the imperialist got at that. What should trip off it we trip over.

This belief in the necessity of English training has enslaved us. It has unfitted us for true national service.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.