Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

The global spread of English 117
The third point is that promotion is not the same as, nor does it entail, the uptake
of that which is promoted. For successful promotion, leading to diffusion, a
reciprocal is needed; specifically, acceptance of English by those at whom the
promotional efforts are directed. This much is evident from cases where the
promotion, even imposition, of a language has not led to widespread use. One
example might be the coercive introduction of Russian into the state school curricula
of the former Soviet-controlled Eastern bloc countries, which cannot be said to have
diffused Russian language proficiency very widely. Another might be Hindi in postcolonial
India. 2
It might be supposed, then, that among the necessary conditions for successful
promotion of a lingua franca such as English are (1) the absence of ideological
resistance to that which is promoted, and (2) the popular perception that there is
some personal advantage to be gained from adoption. Phillipson (1992), and others
of similar views, do, of course, have alternative explanations for the apparently ready
acceptance of English, which we shall come to presently, but for the moment let us
simply observe that the scale of the uptake of English is problematic for linguistic
imperialism in its simplest top-down form.
The appropriation of English
By degrees, this leads us to what is perhaps the greatest single weakness of the
linguistic imperialism hypothesis, one noted by a number of commentators (e.g.
Bisong 1995; Pennycook 1994, 2001; Canagarajah 2000; Ridge 2000; Brutt-Griffler
2002), which is that it denies significant agency to speakers in the periphery,
portraying them as passive recipients, or dupes, of imposition from the Centre.
Such one-sided attribution of agency is, however, problematic, indeed erroneous, for
several reasons.
First, there is a body of historical evidence (see Brutt-Griffler 2002) that colonial
subjects often had to struggle for access to English language education against
colonial authorities, who sought to withhold it. Moreover, once acquired, English
eventually became a resource for mobilising colonial subjects in resistance against
imperial rule. From Nyasaland (now Malawi) to the Gold Coast (now Ghana), and
from Kenya to northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), nationalist leaders such as Banda,
Nkrumah, Kenyatta and Kaunda used English alongside indigenous languages to
draw linguistically and ethnically varied populations into a common struggle against
colonial rule (see Mazrui and Mazrui 1998). There is, in short, sound evidence for
Brutt-Griffler’s (2002: 65) claim that:
Africans and Asians under British rule deliberately took advantage of the imperial
role of English … to undertake a policy of their own. They transformed English
from a means of exploitation into a means of resistance. Through appropriating
the language, they empowered themselves to resist colonialism at the most
essential level.
One of her key conclusions, indeed, is that that the spread of English was as much a
by-product of anti-colonial struggles as imperialism itself (Brutt-Griffler 2002: 111).