Linguistics in a colonial world is a compact, clear, and helpful introduction to a growing body of “critical” literature on the history of linguistics. The book contributes both reviews of recent work and original scholarship by Errington himself. Special emphasis throughout the seven chapters is placed on the varied dimensions and implications of the “reduction to writing” (Errington considers the metaphor of “reduction” to be particularly apt), but many other themes appear as well, including theories of language relationships, both genetic and typological, and their implications, ideologies of the relationships between “languages” and “peoples,” and the political impacts of contemporary encounters between indigenous communities and well-meaning documentary linguists.
I sometimes feel that “critical” approaches throw the scientific baby out with the Foucauldian bathwater, but Errington does not fail to remind us, in chapter 1, “The linguistic in the colonial,” that linguists of all eras have contributed to our knowledge and can be read with profit in “empirical” as well as “critical” perspective. Errington summarizes the latter perspective, that of his own text, as grounded in the understanding that linguistics in all eras can make “languages objects of knowledge, so that their speakers could be made subjects of power” (p. 3). The chapter is exceptionally clear on what is lost in linguistic accounts of language, when the extraordinary complexity of human interaction is “reduced” to representation in writing; this point is taken up repeatedly, from different angles, in subsequent chapters. Errington’s brief elucidation of Wittgenstein in this chapter is one of the most helpful I have encountered, and the chapter might be read on its own to those who are uncertain about the significance of the Philosophical investigations.
Since I have worked with some of the early Spanish grammars of Mesoamerican languages, I read the second chapter, “Early conversions, or, how Spanish friars made the little jump,” with interest. By the “little jump” Errington means the sound that the Spanish called by that name, saltillo, the glottal stop, and discusses the problems that this sound, not represented by a “letter” in Spanish or Latin, posed for the grammarians of Mesoamerican and Philippine languages. His discussion of the encounter with the baybayin writing system used in the pre-colonial period for some Philippine languages, which did represent the sound but was abandoned, was new material for me. I note, though, that Errington perpetuates what I think is a too-facile critique of some of these grammarians, who pointed out that the languages under description “lacked” certain sounds, or cases, or words found in Latin (the language in which most grammarians of their day were trained). At least in the case of the Spanish in Mesoamerica, in other passages in their works they gave great attention to the beauty, richness, and flexibility of the languages they described, for which they had immense respect. I believe that we can often read their comparisons with Latin as simply pedagogical devices, intended to help the student avoid error and to highlight what might be unexpected features of the languages in an era when typology did not exist.
Chapter 3, “Imaging the linguistic past,” takes up theories of the descent of languages developed by Wilhelm Gottfried Herder, William Jones, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. Errington argues that their findings made the “microscopic details” of linguistic and human diversity legible as a whole, accessible to the European colonial gaze. Chapter 4, “Philology’s evolutions,” continues to develop this history, focusing on the emergence in early historical linguistics of “organic” images of languages and “evolutionary” models of linguistic diversity, expressed as typological grades that could be linked to racial grades. Errington focuses on German scholarship (the Schlegels, Bopp, Wilhelm von Humboldt again, Jakob Grimm, Schleicher), which he finds is neglected in the critical literature on specifically colonialist forms of knowledge. He argues that the political specifics of the emerging German nation are reflected in the concerns of the German linguistic scholarship that is so significant in the origins of historical and typological studies of language. I cannot completely agree with Errington’s claim that in this chapter he has dealt mainly with “dubious heuristics.” No linguist today (I hope) would equate typological variation with evolutionary grade, or the radiation of a language family with “invasion.” However, it’s important to remember that the empirical problems remain. The early typologies were crude, but their authors identified genuine issues that remain for us today. And we continue to argue about exactly what human processes are reflected in the genetic and typological relationships among languages. Errington’s chapter, however, is extremely valuable in reminding the student that empirical claims unavoidably have political ramifications.
Chapter 5, “Between Pentecosts and pidgins,” takes up the efforts of Protestant missionaries in the creation of “languages” (which in turn came to define “tribes”), through the development of systems of writing and standardization by workers who had to choose among the multiplicities of ways of speaking on the ground, often in almost complete ignorance of this diversity and its meanings. Errington’s “pidgins” are the simplified and distorted products of these missionary labors. The chapter treats the emergence of scientific “orthographies” from the “letters” of the earlier grammatical tradition – which gave scholars unwarranted confidence in the propriety of their “reductions to writing”. Errington’s familiarity with the Dutch colonial literature permits attention to a fascinating mid-19th-century figure, Hermann Neubronner van der Tuuk, who worked on developing Christian texts for speakers of Batak in Sumatra, and concluded that what his employers required him to produce was a mere “effigy” of the language. Errington deals as well with several other fascinating cases, including the political use of the supposed “literacy” of the Maori chiefs at the imposition of the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840, and the intervention of two kings of Madagascar who sought to shape competing missionary efforts into a unified local literacy (which ended up facilitating French rule). Errington also succinctly reviews two classic cases, the creation of “Tsonga” and “Shona” in southern Africa (Harries Reference Harries1988, Ranger Reference Ranger and Vail1989).
In chapter 6, “Colonial linguistics, (proto)-national languages,” Errington builds on Fabian’s (Reference Fabian1986) model of the construction and promotion of Swahili as a “language of wider communication” in the Belgian Congo, providing an original contribution to a critical history of Malay linguistics. Van der Tuuk appears again in this chapter as a creator of a “cultured” version of the “Low Malay” that he saw as a “babble.” Ironically, the “High Malay” suitable to the dignity of colonial administrators was ultimately appropriated by Indonesian nationalists in realizing their own vision of a postcolonial modernity. In this chapter, Errington’s butts are the visions of “progress” advanced by the linguist Otto Jesperson, and Ernst Gellner’s models of modern nationhood. He also has a trenchant note on the political dangers of the benign expression “language spread,” widely used without any critical attention in the sociolinguistic literature.
The final chapter, “Postcolonial postscript,” questions whether today’s linguists have shaken off their colonial history (his answer is, predictably and probably correctly, “No”). This chapter segues from a discussion of contemporary missionary efforts, especially the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, to the struggles of native-speaker linguists of Mayan languages in Guatemala with the political issues inherent in literacy and standardization, to the broad concern of linguists with “language endangerment.” I took particular delight in Errington’s tweaking of Steven Pinker, who, like many linguists of universalist persuasion, produces an odd sort of folk-Whorfian rhetoric when discussing this issue. Pinker’s book sales aside, the “current universalist paradigm” is certainly not dominant among linguists all over the world who are most active in documentation of endangered languages. Although Errington frames his chapter as attending to this version of contemporary linguistic theory, almost none of the major figures in documentation are committed to this paradigm in any of its well-known versions, especially Chomsky’s. However, it is absolutely the case that very few linguists, regardless of theoretical persuasion, are trained as they should be in critical and reflexive thinking, a gap that forces awkward reinventions of the wheel in the middle of fieldwork (the field of documentary linguistics is full of anecdotes of this type, where high-minded efforts at “capacitation” in indigenous communities run up against intractable political problems).
In summary, this is a very valuable book. The idea that knowledge and power are ineluctably intertwined is old news in some fields (to the point of being counterproductive, in fact), and critical discourse analysts have framed their attacks on popular understandings of language within this perspective. However, the approach has seldom been trained on linguistics “proper,” so most linguists and sociolinguists will find Errington’s reflections fresh and valuable. The work is straightforward, richly referenced, and minimally bogged down in the unapproachable deconstructonist argot that often burdens critical scholarship. This book can be read with profit both by undergraduate novices who need an introduction to the basics, and scholars who will encounter new case material and fresh insights.
