Very resourceful lecture with a sharpe attitude. Thank you very much professor. I would love to give a information not necessarily correction. The British colonized what is now called Bangladesh first 1757 and gradually the rest of India & Pakistan. Everyone always mention India and sometimes Pakistan but never Bangladesh although we were the worst victim of British colonization.
This is a really great lecture!! I appreciate the linguist component presented here. I am Canadian Métis/plains Cree. The ignorance surrounding Canada's colonial legacy is rampant, many people are simply unaware and apathetic. For some , deeply embedded "White Fragility" prevents them from truly being able to assume a real and meaningful role in an alliance with Indigenous peoples to decolonize. Thank-you for your excellent and succinct Language/Colonialism lesson!
Colonialism as well as imperialism have still been alive. The russian federation is a case in point. It's still deluded by its insane ambition to return the former U.S.S.R. or russian empire to life. And this ambition ignited today's war in Ukraine. The above-300-year colonial policy of russia has affected the Ukrainian language, given birth to Surzhyk, a clumsy mixture of russian and Ukrainian, and led to sociolinguistic problems in Ukraine we're trying to handle now.
As a black person myself, I thank you for such valuable lecture on British/European colonialism. What really puzzles me though is that despite colonialism was an aggressive action at a global scale with severe damages to colonized populations, it is not taught in any British school that I am aware of! From a linguistic point of view I think English played a central role in what I call the systematic "linguistic cleansing" of other languages. In a number of colonized societies (possibly in French dominated ones) people were not allowed to use their native languages.
Many thanks for your comment, Telal. I'd like to point to the exchange of arguments between Tove Skutnabb-Kangas (who views English as a killer language) and Salikoko Mufwene (who criticizes that position from a postcolonial perspective). Links below. Skutnabb-Kangas: books.google.ch/books?id=yR5mspS2kpoC&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false Mufwene: mufwene.uchicago.edu/publications/globalization-killerLanguages.pdf
In addition to your dedication, I truly appreciate the fact that you bring our focus to behaviors and expressions that we take for harmless but hide deeply rooted racist stereotypes and "colonizer" ideologies. Racism and white power are in the mind before they are in the words.
Thank you for sharing. I am a MA - PPGE - student in Brazil, and my dissertation is about the discourses that are "in" the English teachers. Unfortunately we still have colonial voices in what we do here, in our practices, teachings ... This video will be a great contribution to my theorical chapter in dissertation.
Hey, again! So, in Brazil we are changing some "names", replacing "age of descovering" for "age of invasion"; "Mother country" for the thieves/robbers/intruders/killers.; Plantations - theft lands / Land owners = robbers. Great lecture!!
This series has been so helpful for my sabbatical work creating curriculum for my ESL students on World Englishes. Thank you so much for your expertise and sensitivity to the topic.
Thank you for the video. This is an incredibly important aspect of the modern state of English (and many other European languages), and yet it is too often glossed over by both schools and universities (in my personal experience). I hope that I one day I will no longer have to correct people who believe that English (or Russian, or French, etc.) is so wide-spread because it is somehow """""better""""" than other languages.
