ABSTRACT
The devaluing of local language and culture One major legacy of the two diasporas of English is the assumption of the inferiority of the indigenous language, culture, and even character of the colonised, alongside the assump tion of the superiority of the colonisers and their language. During the colonial period, this took an extreme form, and it is not uncommon in the literature to nd references to the native populations of colonised lands as ‘savages’, to their languages as ‘primitive’, and to their cultures as ‘barbaric’. e following three quotations illustrate this point:
A knowledge of the English tongue and its authors, therefore, appears to hold a place of the rst importance in a plan for the intellectual and moral elevation of the Hindoos. e English language will not only prove a more correct medium of giving public instruction to the students, but it will facilitate their progress in useful knowledge. All the Indian languages have been for so many ages the vehicle of every thing in their superstition which is morally debasing or corrupting to the mind, and so much is the grossly impure structure of heathenism wrought into the native langu ages, that the bare study of them oen proves injurious to the mind of the European
(London Missionary Society 1826, quoted in Bailey 1991: 135-136)
Fearful indeed is the impress of degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage, more fearful perhaps even than that which is stamped upon his form. When wholly letting go the truth, when long and greatly sinning against light and conscience, a people has thus gone the downward way, has been scattered o by some violent catastrophe from those regions of the world which are the seats of advance and progress, and driven to its remote isles and further corners, then as one nobler thought, one spiritual idea aer another has perished from it, the words also that expressed these have perished too. As one habit of civilization has been let go aer another, the words which those habits demanded have dropped as well, rst out of use, and then out of memory, and thus aer a while have been wholly lost.
