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.

Th. Ki.u Ly Ph.m holds a PhD in Language Sciences (2018) from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She teaches in Hanoi, at the Vietnam National University (School of Interdisciplinary Studies), 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.

Introduction. Language Teaching and Grammatization in the Colonial Empires (Dan Savatovsky)
I. Iberian Mission Lands
Chapter 1. Toward a Historiography of Foreign Language Documentation: Teaching and Learning of Non-Western Languages in a Missionary Context (16th–18th Centuries) (Otto Zwartjes)
Chapter 2. A Contribution to the History of Missionary Grammars and Romance Languages Grammars: The Commensurability of Metalanguage and Categories in the Sixteenth Century (Alejandro Díaz Villalba)
II. The Sinic World
Chapter 3. Learning a Language While Making It Up. Matteo Ricci’s Ways of Inculturation and the Communicative Strategy of the Company of Jesus (Diego Poli)
Chapter 4. For an Epistemological and Cognitive Approach to Matteo Ricci’s The Palace of Memory: Didactics and Imaginative Processes († Maria Lucia Aliffi and Mariangela Albano)
Chapter 5. The Role of British Missionary Scholars in Setting the Foundations for the Academic Study of Chinese in British Universities (Tinghe Jin and Steven Cowan)
III. West Africa
Chapter 6. Language Policy within the French Colonial Army: The First World War and Beyond (Cécile Van Den Avenne)
Chapter 7. The “Civilization-Language-Culture” Relationship in Reading Books for Teaching in French to Allophone Schoolchildren (1885–1930): A Window Opened to the Past (Valérie Spaëth)
IV. East Africa
Chapter 8. From Teaching Non-Arabs Arabic to Arabization in 1950s Sudan (Andrea Facchin)
Chapter 9. Italian Colonial Educational Policy in the Horn of Africa (Raymond Siebetcheu)
V. Middle East
Chapter 10. How to Create a Language by Describing It? Orientalists and Pure Colloquial Arabic (Tarek Abouelgamal)
Chapter 11. Politique d’enseignement au Liban au début du Mandat français: les manuels scolaires en français et la place de l’arabe au Collège de Beyrouth (Manar El Kak)
VI. Southeast Asia
Chapter 12. The Romanized Writing of Vietnamese: A Unique Case in the Far East (Th. Ki.u Ly Ph.m and Mariangela Albano)
Chapter 13. On Indonesian and English as Lingua Francas: Colonial, National, Global (Joseph Errington)
VII. Europe
Chapter 14. Un empire culturel et littéraire: quelques grammaires de l’italien langue étrangère (seizième–dix-septième siècles) (Giada Mattarucco)
Chapter 15. “A Language that Reigns in the City:” Italian in Grammar Books for Foreigners (Second Half of the 18th Century) (Norma Romanelli)
Chapter 16. L’enseignement du grec moderne comme langue étrangère: des missionnaires catholiques aux grammairiens philhellènes (Lélia (Evangélia) Pantéloglou)