Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning, and Power

"Errington … provides a useful overview of analytical and methodological developments and changing applications in the history of linguistics. Highly recommended." (CHOICE, November 2008)

"The succinctness of the writing and the importance of the central argument make the reviewed text likely to appear on many course syllabi." (Journal of Sociolinguistics)

"This book provides both an introduction and an innovative argument about the development of colonial linguistics and its place in the rise of 19th century European linguistics as a field of expert knowledge. This is stimulating scholarship and a valuable teaching resource for linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, history of linguistics, cultural studies and historiography."
Kathryn Woolard, University of California: San Diego

"This splendid history of ideas is a nuanced reflection on how language and humanity became each other's deepest theoretical mirrors as the world made the transition from colonialism to the more recent forms of globalization. It is also a superb contribution to the general dialogue between linguistics and its cognate human sciences."
Arjun Appadurai, The New School

"In this concise, eloquent yet wide-ranging book, Joseph Errington demonstrates the importance of understanding linguistics as a special kind of colonial encounter. Linguistics, he shows, has always operated within particular relations of power, constructs of sameness and difference, and ways of reducing languages to writing. The European science of language helped legislate on the one hand national difference in Europe and on the other human inequality in European empires. Linguistics, Errington shows, may claim scientificity but it can never be insulated from the speech of those it studies; it is always entangled with contexts, projects and linguistic ideologies from the past. This book therefore provides not only key historical discussion of the long and fraught connections among colonialism, linguistic description, literacy practices, and social imaginations, but also challenges any contemporary practising linguist – whether engaged in pan-human speculations about universal language, continuing missionary linguistic projects, or attempts to save and preserve endangered languages – to understand current postcolonial linguistic projects in relation to the colonial past."
Alastair Pennycook, University of Technology-Sydney