Monday, May 3, 2010

Archaeo-Linguistic Ghost of Neo-Colonialism

*I’m inclined to side with the poets, and take issues of linguistic clarity with a lethal seriousness… but this situation is getting so much weirder, at a rate we can scarcely describe. Language has been delaminated from regionality by digital culture. It will never be stapled back on there again.

*There must be a lot of places in this world — Burma and Afghanistan leap to mind — where Indian cultural power exports English and enforces it on non-Indian peoples. Then there are the Chinese, who don’t resent English as an imposition of the Raj, but envy it as a tool of globalization that the Indians have, and they yet don’t. If you’re an Indian patriot, do you really want the Chinese to speak more English than you? In what conceivable way is that in your national interest?

*There’s a brief mention in this article of Indian ethnic, Indian born monolingual English speakers. They must be an interesting crowd. This being India, there must be at least a couple dozen million of those people.

Full report here Wired.com

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