Malagasy at the Mascarenes
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Date
2007
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Comparative Studies in Society and History
Abstract
European expansion from the fifteenth century produced much writing on, and
sometimes in, non-European languages that served a broad array of imperial
interests. Most European ventures into what one scholar has termed “colonial
linguistics” were based on investigations among speakers of native tongues in
the regions in which those speakers normally resided, twining language studies
with observed “native” cultural qualities and setting out territories of colonial
interest defined by local language and culture.1 Fewer colonial linguists ventured
into plural societies to study the linguae francae of trade and labor that
enabled communication across broad cultural and language differences, in
part because such zones were considered dangerous and unstable, or lacking
in mother tongues. Fewer still elected destinations of forced migration such
as slave societies or freedmen’s towns and villages to examine the mother
tongues of persons who had come coercively from afar, though many such
settings in certain periods offered a rich menu of languages for study.2
1 Joseph Errington, “Colonial Linguistics,” Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 19–39.
2 Among the works of this nature are Alonso de Sandoval, Naturaleza policia sagrada y
profana, costumbres y ritos, disciplina i cathecismo evange´lico de todos Etiopes (Sevilla, 1627);
Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle, Polyglotta Africana: Or, a Comparative Vocabulary of Nearly Three
Hundred Words and Phrases in More than One Hundred Distinct African Languages (London,
1854).
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Keywords
Malagasy, Mascarenes, French Revolution
Citation
Comparative Studies in Society and History 2007;49(3):582–610.