Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

114 Language Planning and Education
look carefully into the colonial and post-colonial eras for evidence of policies and
plans to impose English at the expense of other languages. We may also observe here
that linguistic imperialism is a strongly top-down, as opposed to bottom-up, theory
of language spread in that it appears to attribute remarkable potency to language
policy/planning as an instrument for effecting change in language behaviour.
Colonial language policy
As evidence for his view that colonial language policy was a vector of linguistic
imperialism, Phillipson (1992) places considerable emphasis on Macaulay, and
specifically his famous Minute of 1835, which he sees as settling the Orientalist–
Anglicist controversy over the content and medium of government education in
India in favour of the Anglicist position that education was best conducted in
English, the aim being to cultivate a cadre of persons ‘Indian in blood and colour,
but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect’(cited in Phillipson 1992:
110), who might serve as intermediaries between the colonial rulers and the masses.
Phillipson goes on to argue that Macaulay had a ‘seminal influence’ not just on later
colonial policy in India but ‘throughout the empire’.
His strategy [Macaulay’s] was endorsed at the Imperial Conferences of 1913 and
1923. … English was the master language of the empire. The job of education was
to produce people with mastery of English. (Phillipson 1992: 111)
However, this interpretation of colonial language policy, and of Macaulay’s role, is
contested by Evans (2002), who discusses in considerable detail the antecedents of
the Macaulay Minute and subsequent colonial despatches, making the following
points:
1. Nineteenth-century colonial language policy in India was steered as much by
financial parsimony as by language ideology.
2. Anglicists and Orientalists agreed on the objective of developing vernacular
language education for the masses, but disagreed as to the best means for its
attainment.
3. The Wood’s Despatch of 1854, with an importance equal to the Macaulay
Minute, envisaged the use of both English and vernacular languages for the
diffusion of ‘European knowledge’. (‘We have declared that our object is to
extend European knowledge throughout all classes of the people. We have
shown that this object must be affected by means of the English language in
the higher branches of institution, and by that of the vernacular languages of
India to the great masses of the people’ [cited in Evans 2002: 276 from Richey
1922: 392].)
4. The expansion of English language education in India in the late nineteenth
century reflected the growing urban demand for English, a language popularly
seen as opening doors to employment in government service.
5. Colonial language policies were reappraised at the beginning of the twentieth
century in the light of concerns that the spread of English-medium education