Conclusion

Abstract

This is the story of a group of people whose relations with others have been marked by an unusually extreme tension between feelings of weakness and strength. The sense of weakness derives primarily from the group’s political marginality in the country in which it lives. The feelings of strength and potency come partly from its intimate connection with the contemporary world’s most powerful linguistic culture — the one defined by use of the English language as mother tongue — and from a nostalgic idea of what it once meant, in terms of political power, to be part of that culture.