Abstract
In all postcolonial debates the issue of a foreign language has been
a site of controversy and a major source of contention regarding
issues of identity and cultural authenticity. The colonizer wherever
he went imposed his own language on the colonized, thereby
denying them the freedom to choose their medium of expression.
As language carries cultural assumptions within it, the colonized
learnt to name the world in terms of a foreign culture. The power to
name the world provides the terms by which reality is constituted,
understood and ultimately controlled. But for the colonized, it was
only a borrowed means of perception; it was an indoctrination of
belief and value systems. As he was forced to learn the foreign
language, he had the opportunity to view the world from the
oppressor‟s point of view. The tool he was asked to acquire spoke
for somebody else‟s culture and worldview. According to Franz
Fanon, to use a language is to assume a culture.1 To be cut off
from one‟s mother tongue implies a loss of contact with the culture
the language represents. It is what Ngugi wa Thiong‟O calls the
„cultural bomb‟ whose effect is to „annihilate a people‟s belief in
their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their
heritage of struggle in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately
in themselves.‟ 2
Shaheera Jaffar. (2005) The Politics of English Language, Journal of Research ( Humanities), Vol XLI, Issue 1 .
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