Sunday, March 31, 2019
British Colonialism and its Linguistic Consequences
British Colonialism and its Linguistic Consequences accentColonization (and more recently globalization) trustedly accounts for the drastic changes in the lingual landscapes of the world everyplace the centuries. Conceptualized as as the directing control of politics, indian lodge and people by foreign states, colonization has imposed to the colonise some(prenominal) harmful challenges. The compulsory necessity of engaging with a language ascribed to oppression, developing and slavery stands out, though.Moreover, colonialism, in m whatever territories meant alike an imposed mosaic of polar ethnic classs and human types that prior to European penetration, had different political, cultural and affectionate structures which were randomly obliged to coexist in that space. Such impositions regarding language and vitality styles reflected and altered the individualism of the settled people and, according to Trkmen (2003), contend an important percentage essential to coloni alism to be successfulIdentity is ace of the indispensable comp angiotensin-converting enzyments of colonialism, if we consider colonialism as a body personal individualism constitutes its philia while the economic exploitation is its corporal body. The colonizer coming to the utter(a) lands with the feeling of colonial desire and obsession to subscribe to cheap avail in his heart finds himself ready to defame the inhabitants, regard them as the separatewise. And he starts his policy by deterritorializing and reterritorializing (p.189).In that sense, people were forced to be what they be not. This is evident by the fact that the colonizers employ to call the colonies new lands, as if they were virgin lands, uninhabited before their arrival. Trkmen (2003) stresses that the colonizers did not perceive their actions over the colonies as reconstruction because they did not consider the institutions and cultures established in the colonies as valuable. The colonizers also imp osed their culture and language as a carriage to legitimize their military unitIn the colony what is asymmetrical, rather than merely different proves to be pathological. In order to legitimize their maltreatment, the colonizer tries to project the another(prenominal) not only different further also dangerous, primitive, aggressive, lazy, etc. The calculate is making people feel that colonialism is not an unfair perpetration, rather, it is a demand drive, for, and these people do not de administer these lands by virtue of their ill-famed traits. Also, the drive, later all, will promote their life standards. This is for their interest. (Robert Young in Colonialism and Desiring railroad car as cited in Trkmen (2003), p.190)As shown, the colonized is forced to ascribe a new identicalness through the reinforcement of stereotypes by the colonizer, which is soft understandable if one thinks that the colonized finds him/herself in a circumstance they have never experienced befor e, after having been obliged to abandon all what constitutes his/her world. The colonized then has no option other than emulate the colonizer as a sole model in front of him. However, his attempt is rejected by the colonizer. Motivated by his urge for exploitation, he makes sure to toughened hard limits to the difference, as to them the difference is what feeds the colonial brass, what legitimize and postulates it (Trkmen, 2003).So the colonized loses his former identity but he is also not back up in building a new one. As Trkmen (2003) puts, it, he will neither be like the colonizer nor himself. Thus, he lives in a complete oblivion. All at once, he is casted out from his history, computer memory and citizenship. Nonetheless, through colonialism identity is not totally lost, but set in the unknown ground temporally placed between prior and after the colonizers came.Identity and languageIdentity and the cognate equipment casualty in other languages have a long history as technic al terms in Western philosophy from the ancient Greeks through contemporary uninflected philosophy. They have been used to address the perennial philosophical problems of permanence amidst demo change, and of unity amidst diversity. Wide spread vernacular and fond-analytical use of identity and its cognates, however, is of more more recent vintage and more topical anaestheticized provenance.The introduction of identity into fond analysis and its initial diffusion into social sciences and public hold forth occurred in the United States in the 1960s (with some anticipation in the second half of the 1950s). The most important and best-know trajectory involved the annexation and popularization of Erik Erikson (who was responsible, among other things, for coining the term identity crisis).But there were other paths of diffusion as head. The notion of identification was pried from its original, specifically psychoanalytic setting (where the term had been initially introduced by F reud) and linked to ethnicity on the one expire and to sociological role theory and reference assort theory.The term identity proved highly resonant in the 1960s diffusing readily across disciplinary and soilal boundaries, establishing itself in the journalistic as well as the academic lexicon, and permeating the language of social and political analysis. (Davis, 2004, p.61)Stuart Hall, one of the well-known scholars specialized on identity, points that identity is dynamic, not stable and is in constant fluxPerhaps instead of thinking as identity as an already accomplished historical fact, which the new cinematic discourses represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a production, which is never complete, always in process, and always established within, not outside, representation (ibid 210), (Davis, 2004, p.184).Therefore, cultural identity can be considered as a historically located set of experiences that need to be vulcanized in order to fulfill the desire to beco me one nation or one people, hence, happens to the language.As it announcees beyond what its words signifies, language also reveals the way individuals situate themselves in relationship to others, the way they company themselves, the powers they deed of conveyance for themselves and the powers they stipulate to others (Sterling, xxx). People use language to indicate social allegiances, that is, which groups they atomic number 18 members of and which groups they are not. In addition, they use language to create and maintain role relationships between individuals and between groups in such a manner that the linguistic varieties used by a community form a system that corresponds to the structure of the society.Therefore, a speaker uses language not only to express but to create a representation of him/herself in relation to others with whom s/he is interacting. The issue of respect is an aspect of the broader relationship between power and language. Power is the degree to which on e interlocutor is able to control the expression of the other. S/he then uses the language of intimacy and familiarity as they used it in greetings, communicating about family, and leave-takings. In talking about their jobs and other external acquaintances, they use the colonizers language, which possibly signs distance.Sterling (xxx) also argues that within a society or a culture, speech patterns become tools that speakers manipulate to group themselves and categorize others with whom they are interactingBecause of the relationship between language use and group membership, language can inspire deep group loyalties. It can serve as a symbol of unification on several levels. On the national level, language loyalty can serve an important political function. Many people in the United States are threatened by the use of languages other than side. To speak a language other than English is thought to be un-American. This is because English is promoted as the one and only thinkable lang uage of a unified and healthy nation. On a local level, language is a symbol of loyalty to a community. (Sterling, xxx, p.xx).For the community as a whole, socialization through language learning creates conformity to social norms and transmits the culture of the community. As s/he learns language, a child learns the social structure of the culture, learning the appropriate linguistic form for each affable of person. This is part of communicative competence. Communicative competence is not only crafty how to speak the specific language(s) used in the speech community but also knowing how to use language appropriately in any given social situation in the community. And the ability to know that is tight related to the identity that one holds. Speech patterns become tools that speakers manipulate to group themselves and categorize others with whom they are interacting and that is only shared with those sharing a certain identity, whether in a community or a culture.
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