Democratization in non-Western states drives out colonial languages

Evidence

Following independence, however, the elites of these societies needed to distinguish themselves from the common people of their societies. Fluency in English, French, or another Western language did this. As a result, elites of non-Western societies are often better able to communicate with Westerners and each other than with the people of their own society (a situation like that in the West in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when aristocrats from different countries could easily communicate in French with each other but could not speak the vernacular of their own country). … To the extent that non-Western societies establish democratic institutions and the people in those societies participate more extensively in government, the use of Western languages declines and indigenous languages become more prevalent. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 170 (#expands, via linked claim)

This difference owes much to census and map. New Guinea’s remoteness and rugged terrain created over the millennia an extraordinary linguistic fragmentation. When the Dutch left the region in 1963 they estimated that within the 700,000 population there existed well over 200 mostly mutually unintelligible languages. Many of the remoter ‘tribal’ groups were not even aware of one another’s existence. But, especially after 1950, Dutch missionaries and Dutch officials for the first time made serious efforts to ‘unify’ them by taking censuses, expanding communications networks, establishing schools, and erecting supra-‘tribal’ governmental structures. This effort was launched by a colonial state which, as we noted earlier, was unique in that it had governed the Indies, not primarily via a European language, but through ‘administrative Malay.’ Hence West New Guinea was ‘brought up’ in the same language in which Indonesia had earlier been raised (and which became the national language in due course). The irony is that bahasa Indonesia thus became the lingua franca of a burgeoning West New Guinean, West Papuan nationalism. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 667 (#complicates, via linked claim)

A.C.: I don’t deny French influences myself. Whether I want to or not, as a poet I express myself in French, and clearly French literature has influenced me. But I want to emphasize very strongly that - while using as a point of departure the elements that French literature gave me - at the same time I have always strived to create a new language, one capable of communicating the African heritage. In other words, for me French was a tool that I wanted to use in developing a new means of expression. I wanted to create an Antillean French, a black French that, while still being French, had a black character. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 284 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial English persists as an instrument of bourgeois state centralization. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 293; Post-colonial state expansion deepened rather than reversed colonial language structures — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 117; Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 667 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Democratic participation tends to erode colonial elite languages in favor of indigenous ones. #expands (0.94) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 170
• Colonial administrative language can become the lingua franca of anticolonial nationalism #complicates (0.82) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 667
• Colonial language can be repurposed into a new anticolonial literary language #complicates (0.78) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 284