Emperor’s Last Crown: Lingua Franca, Coloniality, and the Child’s Mind

Culture & Education

By Dr Shravan Nosib

“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart”. Nelson Mandela

I read with interest the article by Mr Soobarah in Mauritius Times (August 7th, 2026) with respect to introduction of Kreol Morisien (KM) in parliament and in the mainstream educational curriculum. I wish to emphasize few pertinent points with respect to language and its educational import. I am multilingual.

The battlefield nobody names

Territory is usually imagined as land — borders, checkpoints, flags. But colonisation also claimed a quieter, more intimate ground: the mouth. When a child in Riviere-du-Rempart, Delhi, Lagos, Lima, or Manila opens a textbook in English, French, or Spanish, they are stepping onto contested territory as surely as if they’d crossed a border. The tongue itself becomes colonised space — a place where power decides which words count as knowledge and which are demoted to “dialect,” “vernacular,” or worse, silence. Dialect is a derogatory colonial term used to destroy ancestral languages.

“Nigeria has more than 500 languages; India has dozens of major ones. In such settings, no single indigenous language is neutral enough to serve as a national language without privileging one ethnic group over the rest. A shared second language, however it arrived, can function as neutral ground precisely because it belongs to no single group inside the country…”

This is why the debate over which language should lead in education is never purely technical. It is a debate over sovereignty — who governs the space between a child’s thoughts and their expression of them. And because it involves real children learning in real classrooms, it also has to answer to scientific evidence, not just symbolism. The two pressures — the political weight of linguistic territory and the practical science of how children actually acquire language — turn out to point toward similar conclusions.

Mauritius: Layered hierarchy and linguistic paradox

Few places illustrate the above as vividly as Mauritius. Settled by nobody before colonisation, then ruled successively by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British atop the labour of enslaved Africans and later indentured workers from India and China, the island built a linguistic hierarchy so precise it functions as a social map.

At the top sits French-not the official language, but the language of prestige, inherited from the Franco-Mauritian planter class. An unaccented “pure” French still signals proximity to the old plantation elite, and French dominates the press and polite public life. English holds the formal “Emperor’s crown” — Parliament, the courts, the curriculum – yet is rarely anyone’s mother tongue; the British left the French-speaking elite undisturbed and used English instead as an administrative layer, a gatekeeping credential for global commerce and white-collar work.

Beneath sits KM, born of forced contact between enslaved Africans and French colonists. It only gained a standardised orthography in 2011 and entered primary schools as an optional subject in 2012 — a genuine, if belated, act of reclamation.

A second ethnic axis runs alongside Bhojpuri, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telegu, Marathi, and Mandarin, carried by indentured labourers and Chinese settlers — long relegated to “ancestral” heritage subjects tied to religious identity but which assume political leverage come elections.KM speakers are folded into a residual category, their language treated as belonging to everyone and so, politically to no one.

New emperor wears no crown

Today’s linguistic colonisation needs no flags or treaties. It arrives through admissions requirements, scientific publishing, and search algorithms. English functions as what linguist Robert Phillipson called “linguistic imperialism” — enforced not by decree but by the architecture of global systems.

Artificial intelligence adds a new layer. Large language models trained disproportionately on English text risk flattening the idioms and reasoning of other linguistic traditions, nudging parents to raise children in the tongue the machine understands. The mechanism has changed — from missionary school to app store — but the transaction is familiar: access to modernity, exchanged for linguistic conformity.

The case for reclaiming the territory

The evidence gathered by UNESCO and echoed across African and Latin American education research is fairly consistent: children build stronger foundational literacy and numeracy when first taught in their mother tongue. The early years of school are when a child is learning how to learn — decoding symbols, linking sound to meaning, grasping abstraction. Doing this in an unfamiliar language adds friction that has nothing to do with the material itself.

There is also a cost that outlives any single child’s education. Many indigenous and ancestral languages are endangered, and schools are frequently the last institution positioned to keep them alive. When a language is territory, losing it isn’t just losing vocabulary — it’s losing the specific way a people historically organized memory, law, humor, and relationship to land. And there is a structural inequity baked into colonial-language schooling: children who already speak the colonial language at home — usually urban, wealthier families — get a head start before the race even begins. The classroom quietly reproduces the same hierarchy the coloniser built.

The case for holding the shared ground

The counterargument isn’t nostalgia for colonial history — it’s coordination. Nigeria has more than 500 languages; India has dozens of major ones. In such settings, no single indigenous language is neutral enough to serve as a national language without privileging one ethnic group over the rest. A shared second language, however it arrived, can function as neutral ground precisely because it belongs to no single group inside the country.

There’s also the matter of what already exists on that ground. Higher education, scientific literature, legal systems, and international trade still run largely through English, French, or Spanish. Fluency in these languages carries genuine economic return. And practically, building textbooks, training teachers, and designing assessments across dozens of local languages simultaneously is slow and expensive for already under-resourced systems. Abandoning the shared language entirely risks trading one inequity — cultural erasure — for another: cutting children off from the wider economic and academic world.

What successful systems actually do

The pertinent question isn’t whether the coloniser’s language should yield territory — it’s how the handoff is sequenced and resourced. Countries getting this right generally follow a pattern: mother-tongue instruction for the first three to six years, building deep foundational literacy, followed by a planned, well-supported transition into the global or national language for later grades. South Africa, Ethiopia, and the Philippines have all tested versions of this model. Where it has failed, the cause has almost always been underfunding and inadequate teacher training — not a flaw in the sequencing itself.

This is, in effect, a negotiated settlement over disputed territory: local languages hold the earliest and most formative ground, while global languages are granted access later, on the child’s terms rather than imposed from the start.

What the science of multilingual children adds

What’s often missing from this debate is that children are simply better built for holding multiple linguistic territories at once than policy conversations assume. There is no fixed ceiling on how many languages a child can learn. Kids raised in genuinely multilingual households or regions — parts of India, Switzerland, Nigeria, Mauritius — regularly become fluent in three or four languages, sometimes more. The limiting factor isn’t brain capacity; it’s the quality and consistency of exposure to each one.

This directly supports the mother-tongue-first, transition-later model: it isn’t asking children to do anything cognitively unnatural. It mirrors how multilingual children already navigate multiple linguistic territories in naturally multilingual settings. And while multilingual children sometimes hit individual-language milestones slightly later than monolingual peers, their combined language development typically keeps pace or exceeds it. The apparent “delay” is an artifact of measuring one territory in isolation instead of the whole map.

Redrawing the linguistic map

Framed this way, the debate over colonial versus local languages in education stops being a binary fight over which flag flies over the classroom. It becomes a question of sequencing sovereignty: which territory does a child inhabit first, and how is the border crossing into a second or third language managed, so it opens doors instead of erasing ground.

Mother-tongue-first education, done well, is not a rejection of global languages, and it is not an attempt to freeze a colonial-era hierarchy — inverted or otherwise — in place. It is an attempt to let children hold their ancestral territory securely first, then expand outward into shared, global ground on terms that serve them rather than terms imposed by history.

References: UNESCO’s Policy Guidelines on Inclusion in Education (2009), Right to Education Handbook, and Convention against Discrimination in Education

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Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 21 August 2026

Tags:Child Development, Colonial Languages, Colonialism, Education, English, Foundational Literacy, French, kreol Morisien, Language, Language Policy, Linguistic Diversity, Linguistic Identity, Linguistic Imperialism, Mauritius, Mauritius Times, Mother tongue, Multilingual Children, Multilingualism, Parliament, Sovereignty, UNESCO