Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

116 Language Planning and Education
the point of view of practical bilingualism’ (Makerere 1961: 492).
Phillipson (1992) is on potentially stronger ground when discussing the Anglo-
American post-colonial promotion of English through such agencies as the British
Council and the United States Information Agency (USIA), and through ELT aid
projects in developing countries. That such promotion has indeed occurred and in
a variety of forms – subsidised English language lessons, scholarships for ELT
professionals, direct English language teaching operations, teacher-training programmes
– is indisputable. This author, for example, was personally involved in
the early and mid-1990s in the British Council-funded Service English Project in
Hungary, whose main aim was to improve the quality of ESP/EAP teaching in
selected Hungarian universities. One cannot easily dissent either from Phillipson’s
(1992) point that support for ELT is not disinterested, coinciding as it frequently
does with the foreign policy goals of extending British and United States political and
diplomatic influence and of gaining commercial advantage. Indeed, this much is on
occasion openly avowed.
What we need to consider, then, is not so much the factual evidence for the
promotion, or export, of English by these agencies as its interpretation, and whether
or not it is most appropriately conceptualised as linguistic imperialism. On this
matter we make three main points.
The first is that it is somewhat surprising that Phillipson seems surprised, or
affronted, by the self-interested nature of support for English language learning,
which he ipso facto adduces as evidence for linguistic imperialism. The foreign
policies of most nation states – Japan, Britain, China, Germany, France – have long
been recognised as animated principally by national self-interest. Indeed, extending
influence and gaining a competitive advantage economically is largely what foreign
policy is for; to the point, in fact, that failure to prosecute what is believed to be in
the national interest might elicit charges of incompetence.
A second point, related to the first, is that nearly all of the major nations of the
OECD – Germany, Japan, USA, Britain, France, Spain – invest considerable sums
in exporting their national language. Kaiser (2003: 199) reports, for example, that
the Japan Foundation, an agency of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has established
language centres around the world – in Bangkok, Jakarta, Cologne, Los Angeles, Sao
Paulo, Sydney and elsewhere – whose main function is to teach Japanese and support
Japanese language teaching in local schools. MacLean (1999: 94), meanwhile, notes
that the German government gives substantial support to the teaching of German
abroad through such agencies as the Goethe Institut, the DAAD (Deutscher
Akademischer Austauschdienst) and the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft. In 1989, for
instance, the Goethe Institut, which then had 149 branches in 68 countries, received
DM230 million from the public purse. And similar, even stronger, support from the
French government could be shown for the international teaching of French. It
would be consistent, then, if one applies the term ‘linguistic imperialism’ to Anglo-
American efforts to promote the learning of English, to apply it also to Japan and
Germany and speak of Japanese or German linguistic imperialism; an extension too
far one feels.