Literature / 24
This ,glσttophagie, went through two stages: at first, the foreign
language is adopted by those who are closer to the colonial power, who
represent it or work for it along a class axis; later the linguistic
differentiation spreads along a geographical axis, dividing town and
country. At this aacro-level, the result is a L2 monolingual dominant
class, a bilingual urban population and a Ll monolingual rural population
(Calvet,1974). This involves a complex process of L2 language acquisition
and use, as part of the dominant class and the whole urban population
were at one time Ll monolinguals. In the classical colonial situation,
The recognition by the colonized of the inferior position imposed
on him leads him to try to beat the colonizer at his own game. He
attempts ... to reduce the differences that the colonizer has
defined as being at the origin of his second-class status. This
reduction is attempted in terms of language. Insofar as the
colonized is evaluated in terms of distance from the colonizer's
cultural model, he is tempted to speak the colonizer's language
with more refinement than his 'master' himself and to avoid any
verbal pattern that would betray his own origin. (Clignet,1984:86)
Assimilation became the ideology used by the colonizing power to assert
Its own culture as universal without restricting it to the citizens of the
metropolis, a move which would not permit a full exploitation of the
colony. Assimilation as overt aim of colonial policy is usually considered
to be more typical of the French and Portuguese (see 3.3.1 and 3.3.2) than
of the British (see page 26), but differentiation tends to blur in the
realm of language policy, if not in that of language in education
policies:
Vithout going as far as to credit British colonialism with a label
of 'linguistic liberalism', one must recognize that its
institutional and ideological components are less savage, less
paranoic than the French. ... But the relationship between dominant
and dominated languages remains [the samel ... right until now : in
Anglophone Africa, English is as much a language of class as
French is in Francophone Africa. (Calvet,1974:84 and 85 - my
translation from French).
Mastery of the colonial language was at one time the price for and the
sign of successful assimilation in all the colonized world: a 'credit card'