Who do the English think they are?

Today in class we talked about why Hugh may be so restant to change. His idea that the past of a person is embodied in a language, and his nationalism both contribute to this resistance. For me, though, his resistance could be even more simple. I put myself in Hugh's position, or the position of the Irish people for that matter. I cannot imagine some authority figure, who I have been taught is "evil" (i.e. the British in the eyes of the Irish), coming in and just changing my language. That in itself would be enough for me to resist the change, even if I did not have an intense love of my country like that of Hugh. Even if I was not involved in a revolutionary movement, or felt a connection to the past through my language, the mere fact that some outsider was coming in and changing my language would be enough for me to resist the change. Who were the English to come in and think that they could just change a language? It was pretty ambitious of the British to believe that they could do such a thing without meeting any resistance, and they Irish who complacently let the change occur obviously were not thinking what they were doing. If the British could come in and change a language, what else could they do?