| Chapter 1: | The Dying Gael |
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the middle passage of the enslaved Africans and the exodus of Vietnamese boat people.
The Imperial Language
—Defoe (1720/1965, p. 231)
Language is more than a system of rules of pronunciation and grammar. It comprises a complex of behavioral “domains” (Ovando, 2003) and, perhaps more importantly, an implicit ideology and worldview (Whorf & Traeger, 1938) that sometimes involves invidious assumptions of the superiority of one language or even a variety of language over another, such as evinced by the character Robinson Crusoe in the excerpt from Daniel Defoe's novel of the same name.
One of the ideologies that the English-speaking world has inherited is that other languages are to be dominated and, in large part, eradicated. Other languages were not allowed in the public forum—only English was accorded status, with the effect that wherever English speakers went, local languages and cultures were for all practical purposes ignored and forgotten (except in the case of the Victorian Celticists who advocated the preservation of the culture, but only safely under glass in the museum setting of a Celtic studies university department); and what's more insidious, English was assumed to have the capacity of civilizing those who acquired it (Phillipson, 1992, p. 128).
As “learning English cannot be disassociated from attitudes to ethnicity, racism, social aspirations, and concepts of the nature of multicultural societies,” (Phillipson, 1992, p. 20) ethnocentrism is obviously involved in the teaching of English and especially in the curriculum and study of