Although English is indeed now spreading rapidly all over the world, it is not necessarily endangering the indigenous vernaculars of the populations that have been embracing it as an international lingua franca. Much of this has to do with the fact that globalization is far from being a uniform phenomenon and has in fact created more socio-economic inequities around the world. In this lecture, Mufwene focuses on Africa and the Americas to paint a global picture from a long, differential historical perspective connecting globalization and colonization.
Hosted by: African-American Studies and Research Program, Department of French, Department of Linguistics, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, Graduate School of Library and Information Sciences, Language Dynamics Reading Group (Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities), Linguistics Student Organization