Global Issues in Language, Education and Development: Perspectives from Postcolonial Countries by Naz Rassool (original) (raw)

2008, Journal of Sociolinguistics

Reviewed by CHRISTOF DEMONT-HENRICH Global Issues in Language, Education and Development delivers a thoughtprovoking and frequently sobering assessment of linguistic hegemony in multiple postcolonial contexts. It does so by melding macro-theoretical analysis and reflection with case study analysis. According to Naz Rassool and her co-authors Maggie Canvin (Mali), Kathleen Heugh (South Africa), and Sabiha Mansoor (Pakistan; Rassool co-authors the Pakistan case study with Mansoor), continued domination of excolonial languages in power domains such as law, business, and, especially, higher education, in postcolonial contexts has played an integral role in the reproduction of a hierarchical social order which generally favours comparatively few elites. In this account, too much focus placed on English in specific postcolonial contexts such as South Africa and Pakistan has slowed progress toward literacy, inhibited upward mobility, and led to a decidedly undemocratic situation in which crucial legal and political discourse is conducted in language(s) not readily understood by the majority of the population. Rassool's perspective is a refreshing one that challenges the notion that the spread of (ex)colonial languages has been, especially in the last 20 years or so, a mostly, if not wholly, positive development characterized almost exclusively by masses of people clamouring loudly and happily for English. Her use of terms such as linguistic hegemony, and, especially, 'linguistic imperialism', might meet with critique from those who have alleged the death of (linguistic) imperialism and prematurely banished the concept for its apparent lack of attention to individual agency. But Rassool-and Canvin, Heugh and Mansoor-deliver the empirical support to back up their claims, illustrating through systematic and concrete review the continued utility of a critical analytical framework to understanding complex sociolinguistic phenomena. The book is divided into three parts and eight chapters. Part 1, 'Language diversity in development discourse' contains four chapters: 'Language and the colonial state'; 'Postcolonial development, language and nationhood'; 'The global cultural economy: Issues of language, culture and politics'; and, 'Language in the global cultural economy: Implications for postcolonial societies'. In Chapter 1, Rassool emphasizes the ways in which a tapered, subtractivelanguage system with multiple languages used at the lower educational levels,