Linguistics in a colonial world: a story of language, meaning and power
Linguistics in a colonial world: a story of language, meaning and power
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殖民世界的语言学：关于语言、意义和权力的故事
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发表时间：
2009
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通讯作者：
Alamin M. Mazrui
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作者：
Alamin M. Mazrui
从语言学的前身到现代的表述，语言学领域深深地卷入了征服和控制的殖民计划。许多语言的早期语法和词典都是殖民遗产的产物。在殖民统治范围内出现的关于非洲、亚洲和南美洲语言的学术体系暴露了其产生的几个条件。其中包括激发其作者身份的特定兴趣、它从特定制度背景和意识形态倾向中获得的生活，以及它在殖民差异铭文中所承担的认识论权威。欧洲殖民者利用他们掌握的技术，根据传教士和其他殖民官员收集的语言证据来构建差异等级制度。殖民语言学学术日益为更全球化地绘制和解读文化、宗教和历史差异的等级制度提供了合法性，这些差异的遗产一直延续到今天。埃林顿试图揭示语言研究与欧洲殖民主义之间的相互作用。第一章是对殖民工作记录的总体概述，“这些工作使语言成为知识的对象，因此语言的使用者可以成为权力的主体”（第3页）。它为“将言语还原为书写”的语言实践提供了辉煌的理论背景，这是构建等级制度和边界的更广泛意识形态使命的重要组成部分。在此过程中，一种表达真实或想象的方式往往比其他方式享有特权，从而引发了对特定语言选择背后的假设、兴趣、信仰和目的的质疑。单一语言变体通常是作为宗教皈依和文明使命的工具而创造的。但从这种练习中产生的读写能力，被传递给殖民地地区的“当地人”，往往会呈现出他们自己意想不到的生活，为不同的读者实现不同的目标。通过广泛经验中的例子，本章有助于“衡量殖民语言学所服务的更广泛的权力限制”（第 17 页）。第二章探讨了传教士的信念，即打动异教徒心灵的最佳方式是通过他自己的语言，以及这如何导致他们坚定地努力提高“异教徒”语言的熟练程度，以便将它们用于福音目的和殖民地祖国的荣耀。将异教语言固定在从欧洲引进的文字中是这一过程的重要组成部分，并且成为确定当地人在文明等级中的位置的手段之一。通过比较墨西哥的纳瓦特尔语和菲律宾的他加禄语的例子，埃林顿展示了“修道语言学家”所面临的各种语言挑战，以及他们用来表示复杂语言现象的简化策略，所有这些都是为了使母语更容易被使用。这些语言努力的成果最终成为早期关于殖民地人性的争论的对象。多语言和多文化发展杂志卷。 30、第4期，2009年7月，361 373
From its philological precursors to its modern articulations, the field of linguistics has been deeply implicated in the colonial project of conquest and control. Early grammars and dictionaries of many languages are a product of the colonial legacy. The body of scholarship on the languages of Africa, Asia and South America that emerged under the ambit of colonial rule betrayed several conditions of its production. These included the specific interests that inspired its authorship, the life it received from specific institutional contexts and ideological leanings, and the epistemological authority it came to assume in colonial inscriptions of difference. European colonisers used the technologies at their disposal to construct hierarchies of difference based on linguistic evidence gathered by missionaries and other colonial functionaries. Colonial linguistic scholarship increasingly provided legitimacy for a more global mapping and reading of hierarchies of cultural, religious and historical difference whose legacy has continued to this day. It is the interplay between language study and European colonialism that Errington seeks to unravel. Chapter 1 is a general overview of the colonial record of work ‘which made languages objects of knowledge, so that their speakers could be made subjects of power’ (p. 3). It provides a brilliant theoretical context for the linguistic exercise of ‘reducing speech to writing’, part and parcel of a broader ideological mission of constructing hierarchies and boundaries. In the process, one way of speaking real or imagined was often privileged over others in a way that raised questions about the assumptions, interests, beliefs and purposes underlying particular linguistic choices. Unitary language varieties were often created as instruments of religious conversion and the civilising mission. But the literacies arising from this exercise, which were passed on to the ‘natives’ in the colonial zones, often came to assume an unintended life of their own, fulfilling different goals for different readers. With examples from a broad range of experiences, this chapter helps to ‘gauge the broader limits of power which colonial linguistics served’ (p. 17). Chapter 2 looks at the missionary belief that the best way to reach a pagan’s heart is through his own language and how this led to determined efforts to develop proficiency in ‘pagan’ languages so that they could be appropriated for evangelical purposes and for the glory of the colonial motherland. Fixing pagan speech in scripts imported from Europe was an essential part of this process, and became one of the means by which the native’s location in a civilisational hierarchy would be determined. Comparing the examples of Nahuatl in Mexico and Tagalog in the Philippines, Errington demonstrates the kinds of linguistic challenges that confronted the ‘friar linguists’ and the simplifying strategies they used to represent linguistically complex phenomena all in an attempt to make native speech more easily appropriated. The products of these linguistic efforts ultimately became objects of early debates about the very humanity of the colonised. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development Vol. 30, No. 4, July 2009, 361 373