Metropolitan languages in colonial grammars of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
Richard
Steadman-Jones, University of Sheffield
It is well known that in the eighteenth century
theories of general grammar provided the technical infrastructure for a range
of prescriptivist texts. The “universal” categories identified within general
grammar formed the basis for the criticism of particular languages at the
levels of both structure and usage and, if a language did not instantiate one
of the categories effectively it might be deemed structurally flawed or at
least in need of a reform of usage. Although the prescriptivist writers of the
eighteenth century expressed anxiety that general grammar would find the
English language wanting in this respect, they could at least console
themselves with the fact that it was not as “deficient” as the languages of the
colonies. This is a point well made by Janet Sorensen (2000, 11) when she
asserts that the assumptions of general grammar are “particularly troubling
when we remind ourselves that for the philosophical grammarians, Western
European languages, primarily Latin, provided the basic grid […] into which
were plugged “colonial” languages such as Gaelic, and rarely vice versa”. But,
although Sorensen is right that the dominant pattern was for “colonial”
languages to be analysed in terms of Western European ones, it is a regular
trope of colonial grammatical writing to reverse the direction of the
comparison and meditate upon what the “colonial” language can teach the reader
about the languages of metropolitan Europe. In this paper I shall look at a
number of examples of reversals of this kind and consider their meaning in
relation to the cultural politics of the period. In particular I shall show how,
for at least one writer, this practice provides a means of accumulating
symbolic capital despite speaking fro ma marginal position within British
society.
Sorensen, Janet. 2000. The Grammar of Empire in
Eighteenth-Century British Writing.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP.