Oxfam drew some political flak earlier in the year when it published a new version of its inclusive language style guide, to advise staff on their choices of words. The guide, among other things, described English as a colonial language – an idea that offended the sensibilities of some on the right. Criticisms included “totally bizarre”, “virtue-signalling”, “ridiculous” and “politically correct woke drivel”.
The style guide’s introduction says:
We further recognize that this guide has its origin in English, the language of a colonizing nation. We acknowledge the Anglo-supremacy of the sector as part of its coloniality. This guide aims to support people who have to work and communicate in the English language as part of this colonial legacy. However, we recognize that the dominance of English is one of the key issues that must be addressed in order to decolonise our ways of working and shift power.
Well, I find the prose style mildly offensive, and some parts of the advice in the guide seem a bit ill-thought-through, but on this point there’s no room for dispute. It’s a simple historical fact that English is a colonial language, steeped in conquest and violence.
When the settlers crossed the sea all those years ago, they brought words and weapons alike. They seized land and resources, and set up new political and social structures. They killed plenty of the indigenous people, drove many more away, and absorbed the rest – to some degree – into their own imported culture. Vanishingly few traces of the indigenous languages survived in the speech of the new society.
Then the Vikings turned up, with much the same idea.
For a long time they were a major force, dominating much of the nascent England and shedding plenty of blood, but they couldn’t do to the Anglo-Saxons what had previously been done the Celts. Ultimately the Scandinavian invaders and their descendants assimilated, adding some of their words to the stock and helping to reshape Old English grammar as well.
Then, as these changes were working their way through the language, the Normans turned up.
Their brand of colonialism was different: they didn’t want to wipe out the population, just the elite, so that they could become the new rulers. Once that was done, they weren’t too interested in the peasantry, and they weren’t too interested in English, either. They conducted their affairs in French and Latin.
But a lot of their language seeped into that of the common folk, who adjusted their ways as necessary to get along under the new political order. And after three centuries or so, the Middle English that we can still just about understand rose to become England’s dominant tongue – a product of Angle, Saxon, Jute, Norse and Norman linguistic colonialism.
I think some other stuff may have happened later, too, but that’s not really my period.
Stroppy Editor 
