Colonial Consequences for Indigenous Languages: Australia and New Zealand Through the Lens of Linguistic Imperialism

Abstract

Throughout the 1600s, the English language expanded significantly, and the British Empire became one of the most successful colonizers of all time. Many linguists, such as Kachru and Phillipson, offer perspectives on the expansion of English and how it achieved its global status. Phillipson’s discourse on linguistic imperialism contends that a global language is a threat to linguistic diversity and that the imposition of a language on another language or community is a way to establish dominance. This dominance is then systematically asserted and maintained. He argues that monolingualism is increasing in countries such as Australia and New Zealand, and that the promotion of English in those countries has been at the expense of other languages. This essay gives an overview of the colonial history of Australia and New Zealand and, by reviewing literature, seeks to analyze how colonialism has impacted their indigenous languages, through the lens of linguistic imperialism. The language of a speaker is inherently tied to its culture and identity and that is certainly the case for the indigenous populations of the aforementioned former colonies. Language has been one of the main tools used in the colonial process of assimilation, mainly through the establishment of missionary schools. English was forced upon the indigenous students while forbidding them from speaking their indigenous languages. The main purpose of these schools was to erase the students’ indigenous backgrounds and impose on them the Western ideologies and values of the colonizer. By doing so, the indigenous voices were silenced and made to be inferior. Phillipson’s discourse on linguistic imperialism can be applied to all these factors, as it discusses the imposition of a language on another language to establish authority and that favoring one language results in the marginalizing of another, which has been the exact case in Australia and New Zealand.Keywords: colonialism, linguistic imperialism, English, lingua franca, settler colonialism, dominance, marginalization.