It's happened 🥁 Language as Statecraft is available now from @RoutledgeLing 🎉 The book offers an original analysis of the politics of language in Rwanda, for a theory of global English that centres class struggle, capitalism, and colonialism. 🧵 .

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An opportune moment to say I'll touch on some of this in my talk Global English, Decolonisation, and the Critique of Capitalism at the @wminlinguistics seminar next week! This may also be my final Twitter diatribe as thesisgate finally broke me and I've joined the other place. .

As a result, it is stoking social tensions rather than resolving them, and there's a good argument to say that it is manufacturing consent and discontent at the same time. These latest figures - 90% unable to understand an English text at their grade level! - are emblematic.

Put another way, they become the low-paid workers that transnational corporations and local investors in agribusiness and manufacturing alike rely on to make profit. Language policy promises prosperity while reinforcing structures of social class and exploitation.

I've written about this at great length in Language as Statecraft (; the majority do not learn English, but English is one factor that pushes them out of education. They become 'unskilled' workers, who labour in the harshest parts of the economy.

In reality, learning a profitable kind of English is connected in all sorts of ways with class position, and the dream is at striking odds with the lives of most Rwandans who make a living from agriculture and mining.

There's a great narrative around the promotion of English - that it will bring well paying work, spurred by foreign investment, and expand the middle class (meaning *you* can join that class through mastering the language) (ahem: .

Rwandan schools were asked to change their language of instruction from French to English practically overnight, and they were ill-equipped to do so. French instruction was already a barrier in the classroom, particularly for poor students, and English is no different.

Post-2008 #languagepolicy in Rwanda promised children of all social classes access to English, and, the logic goes, wealth and the freedom it brings. It's been flawed from the outset, and a political gamble.

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RT @KingsUgwuanyi: FUNDED PhD OPPORTUNITY at @UniWestminster. Sociolinguistics at Westminster is great. I worked there - great researchers.….