Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

The global spread of English 127
There is still a case to answer, however, and a problem to address. Clearly, there are
situations of contact with English where the consequences have been very adverse for
indigenous vernaculars (e.g. Irish, Scots Gaelic, Australian aboriginal languages,
etc.), but there are also others where the outcomes have been not at all threatening.
So one wonders what the distinguishing circumstances are. Taking account of
Mufwene’s point above, it seems useful to start from an examination of the socioeconomic
circumstances of language contact, and identify those that seem more
threatening.
The distinction drawn by Mufwene (2001, 2002) between settlement and
exploitation colonies is helpful here. 4 It is predominantly in the former (e.g. in North
America, Latin America, Australasia, Ireland, etc.) rather than the latter that
European colonial languages – Spanish, Portuguese and French as well as English –
have posed a threat to other languages. Mufwene (2002) attributes this to the socioeconomic
characteristics of settlement colonies: namely, the demographic pressures
exerted by substantial European in-migration – leading eventually to demographic
preponderance, the geographical displacement of indigenous peoples, their decimation
through conflict and by infectious disease and the imposition of a new
economic order to which indigenous peoples found it necessary to accommodate
both socially and linguistically. The picture is one, then, of demographic, social and
economic domination and eventual integration into a system of governance over
which the language of the coloniser’s nation held almost exclusive sway.
By contrast, in the exploitation colonies (e.g. Nigeria, the Gold Coast, the Congo,
Senegal, Malaya, etc.), the key objectives were not settlement but control of raw
materials and the opening of new markets for the manufactures of the metropole.
Relative to the mass of the population, the European colonisers remained few in
number, limited principally to civil servants, business people and missionaries, nearly
all of whom looked forward to a retirement back in Europe. Under these circumstances
a two-level economic system evolved: the mass of the population continued
to function in indigenous lingua francas or ethnic vernaculars, while a small indigenous
elite acquired English in their role as intermediaries between the masses
and the colonial rulers (Mufwene 2002, Brutt-Griffler 2002).
In Africa then – as now – the language of (former) colonial powers have not so
much displaced local languages from the repertoires of indigenous populations as
added to them, a situation attributable to the clear functional demarcation between
them: the former tend to be the languages of secondary and higher education, of
higher public administration and of international commerce, spoken mainly by
educated urban elites; 5 the latter the vernaculars of the majority of the population
who work in lower economic sectors or live in rural areas, only partially touched by
the apparatus of the state. Among a restricted elite, there are, it is true, signs that
English is increasingly used in informal domains, but there are also, as Mufwene
(2002: 10) suggests, countervailing pressures: elites retain competence in ethnic
vernaculars to keep up links with relatives in rural areas.
Meanwhile, in the more affluent former colonies of Hong Kong, Malaysia and
Singapore a similar situation obtains. English, to be sure, is an important language