A question put forward by Canagarajah (1999) questions the very motives of those who purvey monolingual language teaching as ”beneficial” for the people to whom it is taught, he asks “does English offer Third world countries a resource that will help them in their development, as Western governments and development agencies would claim or is it a “Trojan Horse” (Cooke 1988), whose effect is to perpetuate their dependence?”. It would seem that his somewhat cynical perspective may have a ring of truth; decision making elites in developing countries have usually been persuaded to share the interests of their neo-colonial patrons. Sir Anthony Parsons, former Foreign Policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher, once stated this policy without disguise in a rare moment of brutal honesty thinly veiled as national pride, and was quoted by the British Council in a recruitment brochure in 1988: “It is really dazzlingly obvious. If you are thoroughly familiar with someone else’s language and literature, if you know and love the country, the arts, the people, you will be instinctively disposed to buy goods from them rather than a less well known source, to support them actively when you consider them to be right and to avoid criticizing them too fiercely when you regard them as being in the wrong.” One could say this makes the massive annual enlistment of international students by British Universities seem a much less disinterested and beneficent process than their prospectuses could intimate.

This theory is supported and expounded upon by Toves Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) who talks about language being used for “control and domination, resistance and self-determination.” He talks of a calculating three step process used to persuade individuals to replace their mother tongue with another language, and believes this is usually for the financial, social or cultural gain of the language’s country of origin. He explains that in order to do this, one must invalidate the languages and culture of the area or social group in question. This is achieved by presenting the minority languages as wanting or as handicaps. The three steps through which this achieved are: glorification of the dominant/majority group, its language, culture, norms traditions, institutions, level of development, observance of particular human rights and so on; stigmatization and devaluation of the minorities/subordinate groups and their language, culture and beliefs in order to make them seem primitive, non-civilized, backward and unable to adapt to postmodern technological “democratic” information societies; rationalization of their relationship in every sphere, economically, politically, educationally, linguistically. So that every action of the dominant group is seen as a beneficial act for the minority group (so they are e.g. helping, giving aid, teaching democracy etc.) Skutnabb-Kangas provides examples of glorification: “the language of the superior ethno-national group (Nazi ideology), stigmatization “. The English Cape Town newspaper “The Cape Times” wrote in 1906 “Afrikaans is the confused utterance of half-articulated patois” (quoted in Prague 1995a:7) , with regard to rationalization Geoffrey Best shows that satirical parodies of French liberation were not far from truthful :” We have arrived and you are free. Anyone found on the street after sunset will be shot.”