[lg policy] All hail Goddess English?

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

All hail Goddess English?

Global English may be about to go celestial. A political activist in India wants the country's poorest caste to improve its status by worshiping the English language, and to start off he's building a temple to Goddess English in the obscure village of Bankagaon, near Lakhimpur Khiri in Uttar Pradesh.
English started on the long path to deification in the colonial age, and in many former British colonies English has become both an indispensable tool for survival in the modern world and a bitter reminder of the Raj. In 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay recommended to fellow members of the India Council that the British create a system of English-language schools in the colony to train an elite class of civil servants, "Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect," who would help the British rule the subcontinent. . . .

Today Indian nationalists shun Macaulay for his condescending, Eurocentric view of language and culture, but the Dalit activist Chandra Bhan Prasad wants millions of India’s Dalits (the former untouchable caste, before caste discrimination was outlawed), to learn English and let their local languages “wither away.”

Read the rest of this most excellent post on the Web of Language: http://bit.ly/weblan
____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English                    
University of Illinois 
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801                                               

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage








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