Individual Bilingualism and Collective Bilingualism: Difference between revisions

In a colonial context, bilingualism is necessary. It is the condition of any communication, any culture, and any progress.<br />

[...] The command of two languages is not only that of two instruments, it is the participation to two psychic and cultural realms. Now here the two symbolized universes, carried by the two languages, are in conflict: they are those of the colonizer and the colonized.<br />

Moreover, the mother tongue of the colonized, that which nourishes his sensations, his passions and his dreams, that in which he expresses his tenderness and his amazement, finally that which conceals the greatest affective charge, that one precisely is not valued. In the linguistic conflict which inhabits the colonized, his mother tongue is humiliated, crushed. And this contempt, objectively founded, he ends up making it his own. Of himself, he begins to push away this crippled language, to hide it to the eyes of strangers, to appear at ease only in the language of the colonizer. In short, colonial bilingualism is not a diglossia, where coexist a popular [[Wikipedia:idiom|idiom]] and a language of purists both belonging to the same affective universe, nor simply the richness of the polyglot, who benefits of an additional instrument, one relatively neutral: it is a linguistic drama.}}