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Language, Power, and Software 289

Pakistan. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhala- and Tamil-speaking popula-
tions have deep and destructive conflicts. So any simple generaliza-
tion about the role of language in South Asia fails. In India,
language is largely a non-issue in the political sense; in other na-
tions, it is a cause or symbol of violent political polarizations.
One fact is constant, however. Throughout the entire subconti-
nent, English is the language of wealth, privilege, and power. For
this reason, in Karachi, Dakha, Delhi, Colombo, and Katmandhu,
parents who can afford it commonly seek English-language instruc-
tion for their children, aspiring to fluency in English at least as a
second language in order to open to their children access to positions
of responsibility, wealth, privilege, and power in their own societies
and abroad. An Indian colleague tells of Hindu-nationalist villages
in the most fundamentalist areas of India where every fourth shop
on the streets offers English language instruction.
That English is the language of power, wealth, prestige, and
preferment in South Asia is no accident. As many have documented,
in the 1830s the English policy-maker Macauley laid down the rules
that guided English colonial educational work in India (and else-
where) from the start. His goal was to use the English language, and
to import English pedagogic methods and content in order to create
a leadership group of “brown skinned Englishmen,” infused with En-
glish cultural values and loyal to the Empire. For more than a cen-
tury, in India as well as in English colonies in Africa, Singapore,
Malaysia, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, this plan guided British colo-
nial linguistic policy.
Lord Macauley was a complex figure, an imperialist to be sure,
but one who foresaw the day when India would claim independence
as what he termed the “proudest day” in Great Britain’s history. 5
Moreover, in his belief that learning a language meant acquiring a
culture, he anticipated the thinking of many modern applied lin-
guists. One need not believe that language is reality in order to ac-
knowledge that each language makes it easy to say some things,
difficult to say others, and impossible to say still others. In short,
language shapes, organizes and structures what we can communi-
6
cate, how we think, and what we experience. I recently worked with
an MIT student brought up in Korea who was losing his facility with
the Korean language. I expressed my regret and urged him to keep
up his fluency. He commented with perception, “It doesn’t really
matter, because I can still think Korean.” In other words, he was as-
serting that knowing a language entails knowing a way of organiz-
ing reality.