The Language

Of Empire

Made Adi Wijaya Kusuma

202241121075
The Language of Empire describes how the Empire was constructed,
given shape and meaning, for its contemporaries. The author
explores how the imperial 'story' was imagined and how the day-to-
day activities of its participants were understood. He focuses on both
the face of Empire as it was presented to the public, and at the lives
of individual imperial soldiers or adventurers, exploring how the idea
of Empire gave meaning to the actions of its participants.
 Myths and Metaphors of Popular
Imperialism
1880 - 1918

During the last 30 years of the 19th century the British Empire increased
enormously and by 1900 the Empire covered a fifth of the world's land
surface. In Britain itself, the growth of Empire came to the centre of the
political debate and was applauded by a large sympathetic press. Two
sides of imperialism had emerged - the acquisition of territory and a
campaign of propaganda to make imperialism "popular". Both are the
subject of this book. "The Language of Empire" decribes how the Empire
was constructed, given shape and meaning, for its contemporaries.
 The Oxford English dictionary
The Oxford dictionary was an outstanding work of historical
scholarship, but it was not the first historical dictionary. This was
Charles Richardson's A new dictionary of the English language, which
appeared in 1836 - 1837, and which attempted to trace the historical
development of the meanings of words using historical quotations
rather than definitions. The original intention of the Philological
Society in 1857 was simply to produce a supplement to the
dictionaries of Johnson and Richardson, but it was soon clear that a
completely new work was required.
 Working-class English
The kind of English which was provided with a historical
background in the nineteenth century was also the kind that
resulted from the normalizing forces of the previous century.
Standard English now apparently had a rigorous scientific
underpinning. Scholarly study also gave an impression of what
constituted a typical sample of English. A paragraph from Dickens
standard, written, literary, Victorian English would appear to be
typical in a way that, say, the transcript of a conversation between
working-class youths in Bradford would not. The reality was that
scholars had not yet even begun to describe the normal language
activity of the vast majority of English speakers.
 Poetics
the attitudes of 1916 can be recovered through a
reconstruction of a poetics of popular imperialism,
incorporating that intricately complex set of tropes,
signs, codes, discourses, plots and myths. It establishes
the 'singleness' of imperialism, a voice speaking to and
constructing the 'purity' of the upper and middle-class
English male. If the meaning of militant imperialism
was conveyed through apparently contradictory topoi
as the laughter of the Maxim gun and 'playing the
game', ideology was made dynamic through narrative.
The war of conquest, as comic plot, was presented as
an accomplice of the laws of Nature or Providence. In
the imagining of the late Victorian wars, the
combatants were seen as opposing teams, in a
discourse of power that Patrick Brantlinger has called,
citing its 'deafness to alternative voices', notably one-
sided.
 Language deficit
From the later nineteenth century there is a growing association
between allegedly bad or incorrect English and educational
failure. At this time scholars knew a lot about the etymological
roots of English words and nothing about the sociology of
language. For the teacher in the classroom faced with the clash of
cultures, the obvious inference to be made was that working-class
usage was incorrect. There must also have been a high correlation
between this usage and failure on educational tests, and in the
absence of an understanding of statistics, the inference to be
made is that working-class usage is the cause of educational
failure.
 The standard of English pronunciation
The development of a standard pronunciation is the latest stage in
the movement to fix the language which starts with Swift for the
language as a whole and with Sheridan for pronunciation in
particular. Throughout the nineteenth century, and into the
twentieth (e.g. Lounsbury, 1904), books appeared discussing the
pronunciation of contested words. But there were now three
important new factors. as a result of interest in local dialects, much
more was now known about variation in English speech.
 CONCLUSION
The video presents some closing thoughts on the concepts
discussed in the preceding chapters of the video. The video
begins by analysing some of the general rules which seemed
to organise the metaphorical realities of empire. It also
presents the fictional worlds of two imperial best-sellers.
Between these poles of 'fact' and 'fiction', the narrator argues
for the importance of a controlling narrative of empire, the
myth of History, and explores its particular representations in
the signs of the hero.
THANK
YOU