Attitudes to (Teaching) English: De-Hegemonizing Language in a Situation of Crisis

Abstract

The local élites’ attitudes towards English in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) have varied across the entire spectrum, from unqualified acceptance and valorization above Sinhala and Tamil, to outright rejection as colonialist and discriminatory. In this sense, over the past 150 or so years, these polarities (if not their relative importance and the more widely held positions in between) have remained roughly the same, a factor that allows me to treat the contemporary situation as metonymic of its history. My intuition is that the non-élite perceptions on English, have, however, changed considerably in its favour, as a result of increased exposure/use and appropriation, though I do not have ‘hard’ evidence of this change in the form of historical data.