Pragmatics: Linguistic Imperialism

The article summarizes some of the issues for exploration through the analysis of linguistic imperialism, and the main features of a dominant language maintaining inequality and injustice by means of language. It refers to key studies from the imperial/colonial period and to aspects of the structural, material constitution of linguistic hierarchies and to attitudinal legitimation in ideologies of linguistic supremacy. It reports on more recent work on English as a post-imperial language and as the language of an American global ‘empire,’ pointing out the complexity of pinpointing the role of language in dominance in domains such as education and the media.