Linguistic Imperialism - Critique

Critique

Many scholars have participated in lively discussions of Phillipson’s claims. Alan Davies, for instance, envisions the spectre of Phillipson haunting the Department of Applied Linguistics in Edinburgh:

'Round up the usual suspects', he cries, outing those who have pretended all these years merely to teach applied linguistics, but who have really been plotting with the British Council to take over the world.

For Davies, two cultures inhabit Linguistic Imperialism: one, a culture of guilt ("colonies should never have happened"); the other, that of romantic despair ("we shouldn’t be doing what we are doing"). Rajagopalan goes a step farther and maintains that Phillipson’s book has led to a guilt complex among English language learning and teaching (ELT) professionals.

Davies also argues that Phillipson’s claims are not falsifiable: what "if the dominated... wanted to adopt English and continue to want to keep it? RP’s unfalsifiable answer must be that they don’t, they can’t, they’ve been persuaded against their better interests." It has thus been argued that Phillipson’s theory is patronizing in the sense that it does not regard developing countries as being capable of independent decision-making (to adopt or not to adopt ELT). In the context of Nigeria, Bisong holds that people in the "periphery" use English pragmatically—they send their children to English-language schools precisely because they want them to grow up multilingual. Regarding Phillipson, Bisong maintains that "to interpret such actions as emanating from people who are victims of Centre linguistic imperialism is to bend sociolinguistic evidence to suit a preconceived thesis." If English should be abolished because it is foreign, Bisong argues, then Nigeria itself would also have to be dissolved, because it was conceived as a colonial structure.

Furthermore, the assumption that the English language itself is imperialistic has come under attack. Henry Widdowson has argued that "there is a fundamental contradiction in the idea that the language of itself exerts hegemonic control: namely that if this were the case, you would never be able to challenge such control." Additionally, the idea that the promotion of English necessarily implies a demotion of local languages has been challenged. Holborrow points out that "not all Englishes in the centre dominate, nor are all speakers in the periphery equally discriminated against." Irish English, for instance, could be regarded as a non-dominant centre variety of English.

Thus it could be argued that, while those who follow Phillipson see choices about language as externally imposed, the other camp sees them as decisions made by individuals.