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and Ngũgĩ, colonial language politics are always monolingual in nature. “The monolingualism imposed by the other,” Derrida argues, “reduce[s] language to the One, that is, to the hegemony of the homogenous.”²¹ In response, linguistic counterpolitics resists the “hegemony of the homogeneous” by featuring nonnormative multiplicities as a basic principle. Put another way, whereas a monolingual politics of language seeks to inculcate within varied linguistic subjects the law that “we [the civilized] only ever speak one language”—Standard English, for example—a multilingual counterpolitics of language spawns heterogeneity within the fantasy monolanguage itself.²²

      “Monolingualism” in Derrida is a political construction. It is a discourse of control that is instituted through the purposeful imposition of normative language forms over a population that is perceived to be linguistically inferior, untethered in loyalties, and therefore threateningly mobile, as has regularly been the case in colonial and provincial situations. Following Derrida, Yasemin Yildiz has lucidly historicized the fetishized concepts of monolingualism and the “mother tongue” within the context of European nationalism.²³ Yildiz demonstrates that in Europe the long eighteenth century gave rise to a nation-based and “reified conception of language,” one that enabled the very “distinction between monolingualism and multilingualism” in the first place. The difference between monolingualism and multilingualism was not salient before this period, Yildiz argues. Relatedly, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio offers a detailed analysis of the eighteenth-century birth of “ethnolinguistic prejudice,” a way of thinking about language in which monolingualism as “modeled on the elite speech of the court and of the best authors” becomes “an organ of the political power of the nation and empire.”²⁴ In these authors, monolingualism is a contingent and historically situated method of centralizing cultural and political power. Under this regime, monolingualism buttresses and reproduces itself through sustained attempts to police or “imprison” the nonnormative and often multilingual linguistic behaviors of the other, to paraphrase Ngũgĩ.²⁵

      For Derrida, monolingualism metaphorizes authority and “sovereignty” whereas nonnormative linguistic practices trouble both. Monolingualism is thus peddled as a form of linguistic identity toward which the colonized, subaltern, and multilingual are compelled to aspire, a form of identity that will presumably confer cultural capital, career advancement, and full humanity.²⁶ This fantasy vision of monolingualism is the very heart of the matter. The nonnormative linguistic subject is obliged through rhetoric, education, and “raw power” to see the monolingualism of the “master” as a terminus ad quem, a perpetually receding destination where—should they ever arrive—nonnormative linguistic subjects will attain normativity and thus be enfolded into the structures of cultural power. In this way, a politics of monolingualism becomes a tool of control. Monitoring, corralling, and attempting to eradicate nonnormative linguistic identities occurs whenever linguistic difference connotes danger, illegality, arrested development, or inassimilable alterity. In brief, the monolingualism that Lyons, Ngũgĩ, and so many others have faced is all at once political and nomothetic—“political” because it concerns the linguistic norms of the polis and “nomothetic” because it usurps the power to give names and form deliberate linguistic communities.

      Derrida conceives of the politics of monolingualism in a way that productively resonates with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, whose exploration of the “dialogic imagination” provides a capacious idea of multilingualism emphasizing the “peasant’s” obligation to move between diverse sociolinguistic registers, especially in dealings with “authority”: “An illiterate peasant, miles away from any urban center, naively immersed in an unmoving and for him unshakable everyday world, nevertheless lived in several language systems: he prayed to God in one language (Church Slavonic), sang songs in another, spoke to his family in a third, and, when he began to dictate petitions to the local authorities through a scribe, he tried speaking yet a fourth language (the official-literate, ‘paper’ language).”²⁷ This passage encourages one to seek linguistic multiplicities where they do not initially disclose themselves. More generally, Bakhtin’s humanizing celebration of the “illiterate [but still multilingual] peasant” opens up new avenues for thinking normative linguistic power as it works to define nonnormative identities. The “illiterate peasant” is “multilingual” in his particular way, an unexpected qualifier, perhaps, but an instructive one. What I mean is that such a form of multilingualism allows the peasant to move from the linguistic registers of local life, family, and religion to the monolanguage of authority when the exigencies of subaltern life so demand. This is different from but comparable to the multilingualism displayed by cosmopolitan writers and translators of the eighteenth-century world republic of letters, people who transfer cultural material between different linguistic system like Samuel Johnson, Robert Lowth, Alexander Tytler, and others who are taken up in later chapters. Indeed, it is under the banner of a nonnormative multilingualism so construed that the “provincial” peasant can be brought together with the most highly educated translator. Monolingualism is, as in Derrida, a political construction. It is the simple idea that the great messy spectrum of human linguistic behavior can be singularized, standardized, and (forcibly) exported to others.

      For me, the value of thinking with this binary of normative monolingualism and nonnormative multilingualism is that it brings together seemingly disparate ways of being in language. To be clear, the term “multilingual” as I will use it hereafter gathers in its fold subjects whose multilingualism is as commonly construed: an interlingual ability to communicate in different language systems, like “English” or “French” for example. The term also includes intralingual multilinguals, that is, subjects who choose or are compelled to code switch between differently marked forms of a particular linguistic system (in this case anglophony) irrespective of whether or not they are capable of using another linguistic system like French. The reason I have chosen to use these terms in this novel way is that, during the eighteenth century, these two figures—the multilingual cosmopolitan and the nonnormative, local “peasant”—both came into contact with the politics of anglophone monolingualism’s rapid and invasive spread. For me, this is the multilingualism of the other—whether as the interlingual ability to use different linguistic systems or as the intralingual obligation and ability to move from one’s local linguistic identity to “the official-literate, ‘paper’ language.” Both of these abilities amount to a counterpolitics of language that productively troubles those fantasies of linguistic homogeneity that have had a narrowing influence on anglophone culture.

      In addition, the definitions of monolingualism and multilingualism that I am deriving here are supple in the way they bring together colonial and provincial space. For example, monolingualism has had inestimable implications for rural and nonmetropolitan spaces of England. These spaces cannot rightly be construed as subject to colonization, at least not insofar as we currently define colonization, but nonetheless, the monolingual politics of Standard English has had important cultural effects in these spaces. Katie Wales makes a related point in her book Northern English: A Cultural and Social History (2006). Wales points out that “there has also been a strong bias in histories of English towards both a metropolitan bias, and a southern one: what I shall term metrocentrism and austrocentrism respectively.”²⁸ With these terms metrocentrism and austrocentrism, Wales registers the geographical origins of the normative vision of Standard English around which the politics of monolingualism grew. While we can trouble this geographical origin by engaging with works staging the multilingualism of the other as well as a counterpolitics of multilingualism in metropolitan and “austral” parts of Britain—works such as Samuel Pegge’s Anecdotes of the English Language (1803), for example, which I take up in a later chapter—Wales’s point is instructive. The incursion of linguistic normativity emanating from the court, bar, and universities of metropolitan southern England had a particular impact on northern England, and this matters immensely during a period when northern England was experiencing rapid (though uneven) economic and demographic growth.

      One way of summarizing what I have been arguing so far is to reiterate that a politics of monolingualism chases after linguistic difference wherever it resides. This is a metaphor, of course, but one that has literal manifestations in the historical archive. What follows in the next section is an investigation of the politics of monolingualism as it appears in a particularly

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