Missionaries, Colonialism and Language in Nineteenth‐Century South Africa

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, driven by the need both to communicate with potential African converts and to produce written Scriptural translations, Christian missionaries set about studying, transliterating and transforming South African languages. Their work served, in various ways, the demands of the developing British colonial order; established new ‘standard forms’ of South African vernaculars; and facilitated the development of literacy among African people in the region. The close relationship between missionaries, colonialism and language study in South Africa has been documented and analysed by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. This article summarizes some of the key issues in the field, as they have defined critical debates since the 1980s, by focusing on models of ‘invention’ on the one hand and ‘reciprocity’ on the other, and exploring continuities and dissonances between these debates and the wider fields of colonial studies and colonial discourse analysis. It concludes by arguing for a balance. On the one hand, it is vital that we acknowledge the significance of missionary language study as a mode of colonial discourse with the power to shape the social, linguistic, and political realities it purported only to describe. On the other, this should not eclipse our understanding of missionary linguistic work in social context, as the product of fraught, complex, and often mutually transformative encounters between European missionaries and African speakers of the languages in question.

Harmonisation and South African languages: twentieth century debates of homogeneity and heterogeneity

“…When Nhlapo and Alexander formulated their proposals, neither was aware of a critique of missionary linguistics which was to question the very foundations of the process of selection, exclusion, codification, reduction, and codification of spoken to written language/s in Southern Africa (cf. Harries 1988;Makoni 1998Makoni , 2003Gilmour 2007). In the case of Nhlapo, this literature post-dates his proposals.…”

African language publishing for children in South Africa: challenges for translators

“…The nine languages other than English and Afrikaans recognised in the South African constitution are the same languages that were used for educational and administrative purposes in the various Bantustans under apartheid. These, in turn, are the product of the pioneering work of Europeans to commit speech to writing (Gilmour 2007). Competition between missionaries resulted in the arbitrary fragmentation of the linguistic landscape.…”

Lancelot Threlkeld, Biraban, and the Colonial Bible in Australia

“…As part of a wider historical revision of missionary writing, more sympathetic interpretations are emerging as historians and linguistic anthropologists turn their attention to colonial linguistic texts, a domain previously dominated by linguists. Peterson (1999) and Gilmour (2004; 2006; 2007) have pioneered a more nuanced investigation of the circumstances in which missionaries created frontier grammars, dictionaries, and scripture translations. Pennycook (1998) has investigated the ways in which English displaced majority languages in imperial cities such as Hong Kong, and missionary linguistics continues to expand beyond its antiquarian origins in other colonial contexts.…”