ABSTRACT
The linguistics introduced by Saussure placed theoretical constraints upon the freedom of the individual speaker no less rigid than the authoritarian recommendations of the old-fashioned grammarian pedagogue. The spread of English under colonialism occasioned a massive increase in studies of the language. In her study of the politics of language around the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, Larry Smith shows how attitudes towards language served to justify and maintain the harshly inequitable social divisions during this period. In Crowley's extensive investigation of the development of a notion of standardization, he first points out yet another myth associated with linguistics. This oft-repeated belief is that there was a major shift from the eighteenth-century social and rhetorical concerns with language to an objective and scientific approach in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This political construct was to take on even greater significance in the nineteenth century with the coming of industrialization and colonialism.
