TEMA 62. LA COMMONWEALTH.

LA DIVERSIDAD CULTURAL

The Commonwealth is a free association of sovereign states comprising Great Britain and a
number of its former dependencies. They have chosen to maintain ties of friendship and practical
cooperation and acknowledge the British monarch as a symbolic head of their association.
The Commonwealth was born on the basis of the development of a national consciousness
on the Dominions; the participation in the First World War led Canada, Australia, New Zealand
and South Africa to be considered independent states. These former dominions were granted the
same rights as England. By 1931 they were recognized as having special status within the
Empire by the Statute of Westminster, which referred specifically to a “British Commonwealth
of Nations”.
The Commonwealth does not have a Constitution, but it pursues a common policy based on
sentimental, political and economical ties. The seven sovereign states which formed this “first”
Commonwealth were Great Britain, South-Africa, free-State of Ireland, Canada, Terranova,
Australia and New Zealand. The rapid growth of nationalism in the other parts of empire from
the 1920s on, produced a long series of grants of independence, beginning with that of India in
1947, and thus they required a redefinition of the Commonwealth. The adjective “British” was
dropped from official use in 1946. In 1948 India, Pakistan and Ceylon became members of the
Commonwealth. Further broadening of the meaning of Commonwealth recognized the
possibility of resignations from the association, as was done by the Irish Republic (1948), South-
Africa (1961) and Pakistan (1972). Most colonies were granted their independence: Cyprus
(1959), Kenya (1963), Zimbabwe (1980), Brunei (1984), etc.
The ties that bound the Commonwealth were highly diverse. Sentiment was one,
particularly in the old dominions; trade, investment and current agreement were another;
population migrations, common educational, professional and judicial heritages, and sports
(Commonwealth Games) were still others.

2. Linguistic varieties
In the various parts of the former British Empire, the English language has developed
differences which distinguish it from the language of England. In some countries the most
striking changes are the result of imperfect learning and systematic adaptations by speakers of
other countries. Differences of nature and material civilization, and general contact with some
other tongues, are clearly reflected in the vocabulary.
2.1. Australia
Well over ninety per cent of the population of Australia is of British origin. Australian
English uses many old words which have acquired new meanings by being applied to new
concepts. The only foreign languages which have exerted much influence on the distinctively
Australian vocabulary are those of the aborigines and of Maori in New Zealand. Words such as
“boomerang”, “kangaroo”, “koala” or “billabong” are borrowed from these languages.
In view of the differences in natural features and flora and fauna between Australia and
Great Britain, there was scope for much more borrowing than actually took place. However, the
English settlers preferred, when possible, to adapt English words to make them meet the new
demands made on them. The new adaptation of English words affected both form and meaning.
New compounds were formed such as “the outback” to describe the country remote from towns.
Some of these compounds describe aspects of the relations between the settlers and the
aborigines; an example is “blacktracker”, a native used by the police to track down criminals and
people lost in the bush.
One source of the Australian vocabulary has been the local dialects of British English.
Some of the most familiar Australian words may have this origin, and there are many words of
uncertain etymology which resemble British dialect words. Some of these words have been
introduced into British English from Australian and their ultimate dialectal origin has been
forgotten. Some possible examples are:
to barrack (to jeer, N.Irish); cobber (Suffolk, to cob), dinkum (honest, Lincs).
Sometimes the difference between British and Australian English is one of idiom.
Corresponding to British You’ll be all right, Australian English has You’ll be right/ She’ll be
right. Corresponding to You’ll be in trouble, it has You’ll be in strife.
When English describe Australian pronunciation the most frequent summing up is to say that it is
like Cockney. Though Australian usually resent this description, there are some points of
resemblance and many points of difference between the two dialects. The point of resemblance
most often quoted is the development of the diphthong ei in words like day towards ai. In the
development of vowels in Australian English, some general tendencies are for vowels to become
more front and more closed and for them to be diphthongized. In this respect, Australian English
is simply carrying further the tendencies that have affected British English vowels since the
Middle English period.
Within Australia there are different patterns of General Australian, the dialect of the great
majority, Cultivated Australian, a minority accent that approaches the received standards of
England and Broad Australian at the uncultivated extreme of the scale.
The English of Australia offers an interesting example of the changes that take place in a
language transplanted to a remote and totally different environment.

2.2. Canada
Canada is officially a bilingual country; about one third of its population is French-
speaking. The English spoken in Quebec includes many French loan words.
The great majority of Canadians live within a hundred miles of the border with the United States,
and by far the most important influence on Canadian speech is the English spoken in the United
States. This influence is encouraged by constant travel across the border between the two
countries, by radio and cinema, and by newspapers and commercial links. At the same time,
there are packets of resistance where British English is still influential, like fashionable private
schools. In course of time, Canada will no doubt evolve into its own variety of English, but it
seems likely that this will closely resemble the English of the United States.
As we have already pointed out, Canadian English has much in common with that of the
United States while retaining some features of British English. Where alternative forms exist, the
likelihood for a particular choice to be British or American varies with region, education and age.
British items such as chips, serviette tend to occur more frequently in the west, while the more
common American choices French fries and napkin tend to occur in the east.

2.3. New Zealand

New Zealand has often been called the most British of the Dominions and , in fact, the
linguistic divergence has not been great. New Zealand has shown stronger resistance than
Australia to the influence of American English.
Not many Maori words have passed into the vocabulary of New Zealand English. Whare
(hut) is well established, but others, such as kit (basket) and hoot (money) are now obsolescent.
Some pronunciation features are:
- The sibilant / / is often voiced to / / as in the names Asia and Persia.
- Words than in British English are stressed on the second or this syllable are often stressed on
the first syllable as in magazine or mankind.
- Words like the conjunction and an prepositions receive more stressed than in British English.
2.4. India and Pakistan
In India and Pakistan the first question concerning English is whether it shall be used at all
as an official language. It has been found to be a convenient lingua franca for communication
among the many linguistic groups in India and Pakistan, but only a very small proportion of the
population of the two countries speak English. Since most Indians and Pakistanis who speak
English use it as a second language, they normally aim at speaking the British variety of English.
Indian English tend to be bookish and not sufficiently in touch with the living English of
today. This characteristic is a natural result of the method of teaching. Most English-speaking
English have been taught by other Indians and they have often had to rely on books for their
knowledge of the language. Indians have a good deal of difficulty in distinguishing between one
level of English and many examples of what has come to be called Babu English is the result of
this.
Dozens of words and phrases which strike British and American speakers as strange are the
natural expressions of cultural contexts which are absent in western society. Indian English is
characterized by greetings such as bow my forehead or fall at your feet and modes of address
such as king of pearls or mother of my daughter.
The future of English in India and the rest of South Asia will be determined by a set of
social, political and linguistic forces. English will be spoken and written by a small but
influential minority of the Indian population.

2.5. South Africa

The present Republic of South Africa had been occupied successively by the Bushmen,
Hottentots, Portuguese and Dutch before the English settlers came. From all these sources, but
especially from Dutch and its South-African development, Afrikaans has acquired elements.
A few words which occurred earlier in South African contexts have passed into the general
English vocabulary, for example, apartheid, commando, commandeer and trek. As in
Australian English, a number of good English words are used in quite new senses. For instance,
camp refers to the fenced-in portion of a farm, and the leopard is sometimes called a tiger.
South African English has to compete with Afrikaans, which is gaining ground, and it is to be
expected that the process will continue at a greater rate now that South-Africa has left the
Commonwealth. In the country districts, speakers of Afrikaans greatly outnumber those who
speak English, but English is in general the language of commerce and industry and it flourishes
chiefly in the towns.
In pronunciation, South African English has been much influenced by the pronunciation of
Afrikaans and to a lesser extent by the speech of many Scottish school-masters. To Afrikaans it
owes its higher pitch and the tendency to omit one or two or more consonants at the end of a
word ( e.g. tex for text ).

2.6. Sub-Saharan Africa

In other parts of Sub-Saharan Africa which were once British colonies and now
independent countries, the English language has a complex relationship to the many African
languages.
In Nigeria, three main African languages and scores of languages spoken by smaller groups
subsist alongside English. Although a tiny minority of the population speaks English almost
always as a second language, it is the official language of the country.
Swahili is the official language in Tanzania, but government business is transacted in
English. Some nations have deferred making the choice of an official language and continue to
use English simultaneously with one or more African languages.
3. An approach to overseas literature
3.1. Anglo-Indian Literature
Before the Indian Independence Act of 1947, Anglo-Indian literature meant the literature
produced during the 17th, 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries by a small body of British
administrators, soldiers and missionaries. It also meant the literature written in English by Indian
themselves, many of whom had been educated both in India and in England and who had thus the
advantages of a cosmopolitan view.
The literature produced since 1947 by Indians, Pakistanis and others is the so-called Indo-
Indian or Indo-British literature. Some of the most outstanding authors are Ahmed Ali ( Ocean
of Night ), Raja Rao ( Kanthapura ) and R.K. Narayan ( The Sweet-Vendor ).

3.2. English Canadian Literature

The English literature of Canada, even more than the French literature of the Canadians,
must be accepted as a fact without seeking precisely for a definition.
The most famous Canadian writer of fiction in the mid-twentieth century was Morley
Callaghan. Some of his works are A Passion in Rome (1961), That Summer in Paris (1963), The
Loved and the Lost (1951) where he touches what is perhaps the most significant theme in
modern Canadian literature, the existence of the two cultures of English and French Canada.

3.3. The literature of Australia and New Zealand

The earliest literature of Australia and New Zealand characterizes for being more accessible
to the non-specialist reader and much more readable. It becomes more and more interesting as it
becomes more and more individual, eventually creating a new literature of its own from a
combination of British, American and native sources.
The settings of most novels and stories began to change from the bush or the outback to the
big city or the suburbs, and writers began to realize than “antipodean” is a relative term, that
England is as much down Under in regard to Australia and New Zealand as they are to England.
The interests of both Australian and New Zealand writers can be seen in novels like Nellie
Scanlan´s Pencarrow Series or Miles Franklin’s All that Swagger (1936).
From “colonial” to “Commonwealth”, from “Commonwealth” to “cosmopolitan”: that, in a brief
metaphor, is the story of the novel in Australia and may even be regarded as the overall summary
of Australian and New Zealand literature in general.

 South African literature in English is particularly strong in the field of realistic fiction,
usually with political implications as in novels written during the nineteen-fifties and sixties by
Jack Cope, Nadine Gordimer and others. No easy walk to Freedom was the sad but truthful
title Ruth First gave to her collection of articles and speeches by the imprisoned Nelson Mandela.
His belief in “a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and
with equal opportunities” is the voice of one powerful tradition in South African life and
literature.

4. E.M. Forster (1879-1970)

Edward Morgan Forster was born in London and educated at Tonbridge School, Kent. He
met and befriended Lowes Dickinson, a classicist like himself who may have helped to infect him
with “the Greek Spirit”. He travelled in Germany, Italy and Greece. In Italy he wrote his first
novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) and where he may have begun his third, A room with
a view (1908).
For his second novel, The longest journey (1907), he drew on his experience of Tonbridge
School and of Cambridge. Forster himself admitted that “most readers” dismissed it “as a
failure”, and indeed deficiencies of structure are evident. The Forsterian message is pressed
more gravely in Howard’s End, published in 1910. Here the collision is between the Wilcox
family who are solidly efficient but narrow in their sensitivities, and the half-German Schlegel
sisters who are interested in culture and sensitive to human needs. In 1912 he made his first visit
to India, in the company of his friend Dickinson. It was this visit and a second paid ten years
later that inspired his finest novel A passage to India (1924). In fact, his work as a novelist was
consummated in this novel which explores the obstacles in the way of sympathetic
communication between the English and the natives in British India, and where personal
dilemmas are painstakingly articulated.
A passage to India is set in pre-1914 British India. It portrays the gulf between the Anglo-
Indian administration and the natives and the sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, failures to
achieve real friendship across the divide. Forster shows both the bad and the good in the British
attitudes, and likewise both the good and the bad in Indian attitudes. The Forsterian ethic is
based on respect for “passion and truth” and for “personal relations”.
Forster was also rather loosely connected with the circle of artists that had come to be
known as the Bloomsbury Group. In 1946 he was made an honorary Fellow of his old College in
Cambridge, and he lived there in quiet retirement for the remainder of his life. His sixth novel,
Maurice, published after his death, is a candid expose of his own psychology and homosexuality.

5. Doris Lessing (1919)

She was born in Kermanshah, Iran, of British parents. In 1924 they moved to Southern
Rhodesia. She went to England in 1949, taking her first novel The Grass is Singing (1950). A
later non-fiction book, In Pursuit of the English (1960), gives an account of her departure from
Africa and her confrontation with the English.
Her major achievement is the sequence of five novels about Martha Quest, eventually
called Children of Violence. It comprises Martha Quest (1952), A Proper Marriage (1954), A
Ripple from the Storm (1958), Landlocked (1965) and The Four-Gated City (1969). It records
Martha’s African upbringing, her encounter with post-war London, and finally it takes a prophetic
leap into the future. Lessing has been highly praised for her portrayal of modern women.
Martha’s experience matches her own in many respects. Indeed, the personal tone and the heavy
documentation often have the flavour of undoctored autobiography. The world D. Lessing
evokes has credibility and authenticity that extends over a panoramic range of interests and
portrayals.
Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971), a study of mental breakdown, reflects the author’s
interest in sufism. Her output as a short-story writer was garnered in 1978 in two volumes of
collected stories To Room Nineteen and The temptation of Jack Orkney.

6. N. Gordimer (1923)
Novelist and short-story writer, Gordimer was born in Springs, near Johannesburg, South
Africa. She has chosen to live and work in South Africa, despite her hatred of apartheid. Her
fiction has chronicled, very substantially, the damaging effects of oppressive racial laws upon the
human potential of white South-Africans. It also makes very clear the brutal burdens that black
people bear.
Her first volume of short stories Face to Face (1949) appeared the year after the Afrikaner
Nationalist government assumed power, and each succeeding book has reflected the hardening
grip of racist legislation upon every aspect of South African life.
A Guest of Honour (1971), the only novel she has not set in South Africa, is the fulcrum of
her writing career. The events take place in a newly independent black African State, and
concerns and Englishman’s breaking out of his lifelong liberalism and learning how to know
reality and himself afresh.
While her novels and many of her short-stories report sensitively and with chilling accuracy
upon South African economic, social and political divisions and tensions, they are seldom overtly
political. She has said that her interest in politics has arisen from her concern for individual and
for personal relationships. Some instances are Friday’s footprint (1960) or The Lying Days.
In The Conservationist and Burger’s Daughter there is a breaking away from traditional
novelistic procedure. We appreciate the abrupt shifts in time sequence, the sudden changes from
first-person monologue to third person narration and back and the modulations from realism to a
tentative, suggestive symbolism. These devices came into play to set up and intricate structure of
meaning which becomes a devastating analysis and commentary upon white South-Africa.
However, Gordimer does not abandon the accustomed use of detailed observation to give
actuality.
It is Nadine Gordimer´s aseptic understanding of the corrosive effects of a system which
cripples humanity that gives her writing its strength and originality. Moreover, she knows herself
to be, though protesting, a part of that system. Each of her novels have been also an attempt to
record its blight upon herself. Warmth and feeling are very deliberately controlled, but the
impact of her writing s would be impossible without them.
Gordimer has been awarded, among others, the W.H. Smith Award in 1961, the Booker
Prize in 1975 and the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1991.