ELT Journal

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Linguistic imperialism 10 years on: an interview with Robert Phillipson: Robert Phillipson talks to Sohail Karmani

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talking shop

Linguistic imperialism 10 years on:an interview with Robert PhillipsonRobert Phillipson talks to Sohail Karmani

sohail karmani Robert Phillipson, a very warm welcome to theUnited Arab Emirates.1 Its been said about your work that it ispatronizing because it treats vast areas of the non-English speakingworld, not least Africa, Asia and the Middle East, as somehow beingpassive recipients of English linguistic imperialism. How do you respondto that charge?

robert phillipson I think thats a disturbing claim and I certainlyhave only taken it upon myself to try to influence my own group. I doregard them as my primary audience. If other people can use my workin other contexts, obviously thats great. But I think that some of thepeople whove claimed that I am in some way implicitly operating withagentless victims would have difficulty in documenting that in thetext itself.

sk But what about the many thousands of parents in the developingworld who are very eager for their children to have an English-mediumeducation in the belief that it will somehow improve the quality of theirlives? Dont you think theres a risk here that your work might beconstrued as suggesting that these parents are possibly lackeys of theEnglish-speaking countries of the West?

rp Yes, and I think this is where I find David Lis analysis very helpful,in which he draws a distinction between my work that concentrates onthe supply side and these sorts of issues that relate to the demand side ofEnglish. So a lot of my analysis has been of British and Americangovernment policies particularly in the 50s and 60s in the pioneer phaseof the global expansion of English language teaching; that obviously hasto do with the supply. It has to do with the motives of the West in pushingfunding into English teaching in post-colonial educational systems, andtrying to influence the way English could maintain its eminence locallyas well as globally. But there hasnt been a great deal of work on thedemand side, i.e. why people wish their kids to get the sort of benefitsthat speakers of English have worldwide.

One of the things that came through very strongly when my wife and Iwere in India in March for a one-week conference in Poona was that thereis definitely an identification with English as a language that opens doors.This is well documented by the Mysore Central Institute for Indian

ELT Journal Month 2005; doi:10.1093/elt/cci045Q The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.

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Languages on research into slum dwellers where impoverished peoplewere saving up their tiny earnings in order to get their kids into Englishmedium schooling.

sk What would you like to see happening in this region? Theres clearlya dominance of English here, and its not always in the best immediateinterests of the people who are seeking it. Would you argue for instancethat they need to somehow sever their links with English and startadopting Arabic or giving Arabic more prominence?

rp Well, youre in the right sort of position, along with lots of peoplewho have grown up here, to assess whether English in any wayrepresents a threat to Arabic. It seems very improbable that English canin any way challenge the position of Arabic in this sort of culture.

sk Well, actually it is threatening the role of Arabic and there areconservative elements in this part of the world who are concerned thatthe prominence of English is attacking or eroding the culture andtraditions here in the region.

rp Curiously enough thats very similar in Western Europe at themoment, with conservative elements in many Western Europeancultures. Theres very definitely at the moment a feeling that theexpansion of English is taking place at the expense of even biglanguages like French, German and Swedish in ways that one wouldhave thought were totally unthinkable. How on earth could they bethreatened? They have the language of the state behind them,everything has been done through those languages for the last fifty,hundred to two hundred years. Theyre used for all scientific activity, forall administrative activity in servicing the public in terms ofmaintaining and developing the cultural heritage and so on. So onewould have thought that secure languages could not in any way be at riskfrom English, but I think that theres definitely a feeling these daysthat some of the underlying supply factors seem to be making peopleaware that certain cultural values and certain linguistic practices are atrisk.

sk On the question of cultural values, theres obviously a very clear valueorientation in your work and I think its fair to say that LinguisticImperialism was based very much on a neo-Marxist view of reality, a viewrooted in contemporary Western philosophy. I wonder if there is a risk ofyou yourself being accused of cultural imperialism if all youre simplydoing is putting forward an alternative way of looking at the status quoalbeit from an alternative set of Western values.

rp Definitely and I dont intend when Im in this country to prescribeanythingfar from it. I wish to try to diagnose some of the causes ofsome of the problems that there may be. Its not my task to sort out whatis done in Kenya or India or the Arab World. Im reluctant to in some waybe an advisor who barges in and after two weeks or two months orwhatever, and who is supposed to sort out anything locally becausetheres too much of that happening. The World Bank is still doing that allover the world with disastrous consequences.

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sk For the past 10 years Ive been following the debate on Englishlinguistic imperialism with great interest. Some of the key figures in thedebate have been people like David Crystal, Henry Widdowson, DavidGraddol, Alastair Pennycook, Adrian Holliday and others and I think youcan see what Im driving at. Theres a clear pattern here. Theyre allwhite, middle-class British males . . .

rp (interjects) You didnt mention Suresh Canagarajah . . .

sk Yes, Im going to come that. Its just interesting that theyre alltalking about their perceptions of the sociocultural and sociopoliticalimplications of English for mainly brown and black peoples in Africa andAsia. There are other people, youre right, although they sort of seem tobe at the periphery in the debate. Canagarajah, in all fairness, isresponding to or extending your work in Linguistic Imperialism. His workmay simply not have been possible if your work hadnt been published byOxford University Press . . .

rp (interjects) And hes using it for his purposes locally . . .

sk He might well be but my point is, do you not concede that the debateabout English linguistic imperialism is often very much a white privilege?

rp Yes, sure. I think its very healthy and productive to hear youarticulating that sort of position, because clearly one of the problemswithin the Western academy is that it may just become an intellectualgame, and that means it doesnt really change very much because itdoesnt slot into activism or into educational change that can in some waytry to remedy some of that Western dominance.

sk But its not just Western dominance. Its also tied up with issuesaround race. I say that because I dont know of any Black or South AsianBritish or American nationals that have had any significant impact on thedebate.

rp Not really, no. Have you ever heard of Chris Mullard? Because hewas the first British Black sociologist to get a chair first with BasilBernstein at the University of London and then in the University ofAmsterdam. And my Linguistic Imperialism would never have become adoctorate without Chris chairing the doctoral committee. All sorts ofother people were brought in as well. But it was Chris having theindependence to take on board something that was eminently politicaland being able to see the potential of it and steer it through the verycomplex procedures for getting that kind of thing accepted at acontinental European university. So certainly Ive been stronglyinfluenced by Chris analysis of racism.

sk Why do you think it took so long for a work like Linguistic Imperialismto eventually get published and to begin to have an impact in mainstreamEnglish language teaching? What do you think happened? I mean yourwork also coincided with Alastair Pennycooks at roughly the same sort oftime in the early 90s.

rp Well, I think there is a good deal of openness or repressive tolerance,depending on how one chooses to label it and the guardians of the

Robert Phillipson talks to Sohail Karmani246

English teaching profession approved of works like Pennycooks andmine being published. However, the grandees of the profession wereconvinced that we had got it all wrong and that the book would go awaywithin a couple of years, which fortunately hasnt happened. Thatsexactly why its very important to analyse the works of people likeDavid Crystal and Janina Brutt-Griffler because I think that theyretrying to wind the clock back again, thinking that theyre on the side ofthe angels just as much as I hope I am.

sk Its now been over ten years since Linguistic Imperialismwas published.Have you shifted in emphasis in any respect in regard to your work? Do youstill subscribe to everything you wrote back in the early 90s?

rp I think that many people have pointed out gaps, implications, andapplications, and the need also to focus on the demand side for English,the way that demand for English is fluctuating year by year in all sorts ofcountries because of changes of government or of new pressures fromglobalization. Some of the people who have worked in more depth withspecific studies of colonial education like Brutt-Griffler are trying to bringthings up to date. Fine. We do need many more people doing moreempirical work. Clearly Alastair Pennycooks work is trying to get adifference of focus, a difference of emphasis, more of an attempt toanalyse discourses or the way decisions are worked through. I suppose hethinks that my system is too rigid, that many of the concepts are toogeneral, that they are too big as labels to do justice to the complexity ofmany of the contexts. I think that all of that is a very healthy debate.I think that Tom Ricentos book, Ideology, Politics and Language Policies:Focus on English, where there are papers by Suresh, Alastair and severalothers is a useful attempt to tie some of these things together. I do find,though, that when people accuse me of factual errors in LinguisticImperialism, or errors of interpretation on the basis of statements that Imake, they are unjust. I cannot see that anything in the original book hasbeen fundamentally wrong. Brutt-Griffler certainly claims that I drawfrom my evidence a conclusion that English was pushed as being the solelanguage of education in countries like India from Macaulay onwards.There may be one or two sentences which are open to that sort ofinterpretation but nobody reading the book as a whole can then accuseme of saying that when I use the term linguistic imperialism this meansyou only teach English. Obviously English was an elite language in allcolonies. No colonies were democratic. The idea that somehowWestminster parliamentary government would be wheeled in when thegovernor general was removed from Ghana or Nigeria or whatever wasabsolute rubbish. The tiny elite that had competence in English hasobviously misused that in most post-colonial governments to maintaintheir privileges and English does serve as a mechanism for keeping theprivileges of a few and keeping the rest away from enjoying the fruits oftheir own labour. And as we all know, developments in the globaleconomy have made conditions for the poor far worse in most of thecountries of the world.

sk Just briefly, about your latest book, English-only Europe?; I was a littlesurprised when I saw the title. I mean Linguistic Imperialism as far as I

Linguistic imperialism 10 years on: an interview with Robert Phillipson 247

was concerned was very much about oppressed people in Africa and Asia,and your latest book seems to be about the language policy issues of therelatively more privileged nations of Europe. Dont you see a conflict herein your work between an increasingly powerful capitalist Europe and anincreasingly marginalized Africa?

rp Thats a worrying reflection and certainly I have written it becauseI think that language policies issues are not being handled confidentlywithin Europe, and therefore in order to influence things in aconstructive direction. But its not a very radical treatment perhaps evenwithin Europe, in the sense that I feared that if I started waving aroundlabels like linguistic imperialism early on, then I would not enter intodialogue with policy-makers who might be frightened off by that sort ofterminology. The French use it of course in relation to English, but theydont see the privileged position of French earlier, or still, in many formerFrench colonies as anything to do with linguistic imperialism. They havea sort of very divided self when it comes to that.

sk Your latest book appears to adopt a very clear white Christianframework. I was struck for instance by the fact that Punjabi did notfeature in your analysis, which is spoken by 1.3 million people in the UKas well as Arabic which is spoken by 56 million people in France.You seemed to be more concerned about the future of Breton or ScottishGaelic. So I got this impression that your book was based on a notion ofEurope as a white Christian enterprise. Was that deliberate?

rp Its a fair question and I suppose I could well, and should havedevoted more space to that because immigrant cultures tend to bemarginalized. On the other hand I think that the way in Britain this hasbeen handled, where you adopt a few of the immigrant languages asforeign languages in the mainstream curriculum and where you dontdistinguish between people for whom its a mother tongue and thosewho may be keen to learn it as a foreign language and assume that thesame audience can be accommodated within the same classroom is atotally unjustifiable way of dealing with the immigrant languages.They are monstrously marginalized in mainstream education rightthroughout Western Europe. The issue of maintaining and accordingrights to immigrant languages is well documented in a number of books,though progress in this area is minimal.

sk Thank you very much. Were going to have to end it here.

Note1 This transcript is based on the original audio of

an interview conducted in Abu Dhabi in May2003. A more extended version of the transcriptis available on the TESOL Islamia website andcan be accessed at http://www.tesolislamia.org/articles/interview_rp.pdf

ReferencesPhillipson, R. 1992. Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Phillipson, R. 2003. English-Only Europe?Challenging Language Policy. London: Routledge.Ricento, T. 2000. Ideology, Politics and LanguagePolicies: Focus on English. Impact: Studies inLanguage and Society, Vol. 6. Amsterdam: JohnBenjamins.

The speakersSohail Karmani teaches on the IEP programme atthe University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.

Robert Phillipson talks to Sohail Karmani248

He is the founder of TESOL Islamia(www.tesolislamia.org), a professional-academic organisation concerned with thecultural, political and economic ramificationsof teaching English in Muslim educationalcontexts.Email: skarmani@sharjah.ac.ae

Robert Phillipson is a Research Professor at theDepartment of English of Copenhagen BusinessSchool in Denmark. His current research exploresthe implications of globalizing English forlanguage policy, language rights, and languagepedagogy. (See recent numbers of the Journal ofLanguage, Identity and Education.) For details ofpublications, see http://www.cbs.dk/staff/phillipson

Linguistic imperialism 10 years on: an interview with Robert Phillipson 249

&?ri;Linguistic imperialism 10 years on: an interview with Robert PhillipsonReferences