Some introductory thoughts

The last five hundred years have witnessed an unprecedented global expansion of European languages, largely as a result of imperialism of one form or another. The official languages of all but four of the states of South and Central America are Spanish or Portuguese (although some states, at least constitutionally, mention indigenous languages); in North America, English and, in pockets, French, are dominant. In the Caribbean, French, Spanish, Portuguese, English and Dutch have all left traces of greater or lesser tenacity. In sub-Saharan Africa, a similar post-colonial linguistic ecology is dominant, even when, as is often the case, actual full command of the originally imported official languages is relatively limited among the population as a whole. In Asia, different patterns present themselves with, for instance, Spanish retreating in the Philippines and, somewhat more recently, Dutch in Indonesia and French in Indochina following essentially the same process. English has become omnipresent in many places. While native languages have held up fairly well among the inhabitants of most of the Pacific islands (albeit with different relationships between local varieties and the languages of the – former or contemporary – colonial power, as can be seen when comparing French Polynesia with, say, Tonga), European settlement colonies on their fringes, such as Australia and New Zealand, represent a situation where the language of the incomers has become dominant and, perhaps more vitally, ubiquitous. Native languages do survive in both countries; in the case of Māori, something of a resurgence has taken place in terms of use, speaker numbers and status since the end of the Second World War. With a few admirable exceptions, however, particularly with New Zealand, the language of imperialism is without doubt the primary language of choice or necessity in communications between speakers of aboriginal languages and speakers of the (former) imperialists’ language. In other words, an unequal bilingualism exists where members of the colonising group are not normally in command of both languages, while the colonised are expected to be.