Language Learning and Teaching in Missionary and Colonial Contexts

This volume assembles texts dedicated to the linguistic and educational aspects of missionary and colonial enterprises, taking into account all continents and with an extended diachronic perspective (15th–20th centuries). Strictly speaking, this “linguistics” is contemporary to the colonial era, so it is primarily the work of missionaries of Catholic orders and Protestant societies. It can also belong to a retrospective outlook, following decolonization. In the first category, one mostly finds transcription, translation, and grammatization practices (typically, the production of dictionaries and grammar books). In the second category, one finds in addition descriptions of language use, of situations of diglossia, and of contact between languages. Within this framework, the volume focuses on educational and linguistic policies, language teaching and learning, and the didactics that were associated with them.

Dan Savatovsky is an emeritus professor at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle and member of the Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques (Paris). His research concerns history and epistemology of linguistics or philosophy of language, with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g., Graßmann, Peano, Saussure, Meillet, Bally, Guillaume, Damourette and Pichon, Benveniste); his work also engages with the history of language teaching. Mariangela Albano is associate professor of French linguistics and French didactics at the University of Cagliari. Her work aims at observing language theory and epistemology, critically examining the position of some contemporary cognitive approaches. She also investigates problems of metaphors, phraseology, lexicography, didactics, and translation. Thi Kieu Ly Pham, member of the Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, teaches in VNU School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Vietnam National University, Hanoi. Her research mainly focuses on the history of grammar books and romanized writing in Vietnamese (1615-1919), as well as on missionary linguistics in Asia from the sixteenth century onwards. She plans to conduct research on the work of the missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions on the grammatization of the languages of minority ethnic groups in Vietnam Valérie Spaëth has been full professor of didactics of languages and language sciences at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle since 2012. She was director of the DILTEC laboratory (Didactics of languages, texts and cultures) from 2014 to 2020. She works on the history of the diffusion of the teaching of French, especially as a second language and Francophonie. Her work combines political and historical analysis.