Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T05:29:39.288Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

27 - The Politics of World Englishes

from Part IV - Current Challenges

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2019

Daniel Schreier
Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
Marianne Hundt
Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
Edgar W. Schneider
Affiliation:
Universität Regensburg, Germany
Get access

Summary

Language is inherently political – the way we use it and the way we talk about it. In the field of World Englishes (WEs), the political character of language and language practice is particularly evident. Originating from 1960s and 1970s debates on the necessity (or not) of recognizing the validity of varieties other than British and American English, the egalitarian stance in the WEs paradigm is inherently political. Similarly, the positions of those who express more critical views with respect to the presence and uses of English(es) in the world are political, too. This chapter provides an overview of the intrinsically political nature of much of the discussions and debates that have unfolded about WEs and, in general, English as a global language over the years. It highlights the centrality of (in)equality in such contentions and concludes by observing how any argument in this regard is intimately embedded in, and cannot transcend, the analysis of the conditions of great social and economic inequality that characterize the world today.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abad, Gemino, Butler, Susan, Evasco, Marjorie, Jose, Francisco Sionil and Pantoja-Hidalgo, Cristina. (1997). Standards in Philippine English: The writers’ forum. In Bautista, Maria Lourdes S., ed. English Is an Asian language: The Philippine context. Manila: The Macquarie Library, 163176.Google Scholar
Achebe, Chinua. (1965). English and the African writer. Transition 18, 2730.Google Scholar
Ager, Dennis. (1999). Identity, Insecurity and Image: France and Language. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Andersen, Julie Tetel and Phillip, M. Carter (2016). Languages in the World: How History, Culture, and Politics Shape Language. Chichester: Wiley.Google Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Azodo, Ada Uzoamaka. (2008). Interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Creative Writing and Literary Activism. www.iun.edu/minaua/interviews/interview chimamanda ngozi adichie.pdfGoogle Scholar
Bhatia, Aditi. (2008). Comment 1. World Englishes 27(2), 268269.Google Scholar
Bisong, Joseph. (1995). Language choice and cultural imperialism: A Nigerian perspective. ELT Journal 49(2), 122132.Google Scholar
Block, David. (2015). Social class in applied linguistics. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35, 119.Google Scholar
Blommaert, Jan and Rampton, Ben. (2011). Language and superdiversity. Diversities 13(2), 121.Google Scholar
Bolton, Kingsley. (2008). Comment 2. World Englishes 27(2), 270271.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brutt-Griffler, Janina. (2002). World English: A Study of Its Development. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Canagarajah, Suresh. (2013). Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Credit Suisse. (2013). Global Wealth Report 2013. Zurich: Research Institute.Google Scholar
Crystal, David. (2003). English as a Global Language (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Damousi, Joy. (2010). Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia, 1840–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Delbridge, Arthur. (2001). Lexicography and national identity: The Australian experience. In Blair, David and Collins, Peter, eds. English in Australia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 303316.Google Scholar
García, Ofelia. (2009). Bilingual Education in the 21st century: A Global Perspective. Oxford: Wiley.Google Scholar
García, Ofelia. and Wei, Li. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K., McIntosh, Angus and Strevens, Peter. (1964). The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. London: Longmans.Google Scholar
Hamid, M. Obaidul and Kirkpatrick, Andy. (2016). Foreign language policies in Asia and Australia in the Asian century. Language Problems and Language Planning 40(1), 2646.Google Scholar
Hamilton, Thomas. (1833). Men and Manners in America. Edinburgh: William Blackwood.Google Scholar
Hammerton, James and Thomson, Alistair. (2005). Ten pound Poms: Australia’s invisible migrants. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Horvath, Barbara. M. and Horvath, Ronald J.. (2001). A Geolinguistics of short A in Australian English. In Blair, David and Collins, Peter, eds. English in Australia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 341355.Google Scholar
Jefferson, Thomas. (1813). Thomas Jefferson to John Waldo [Manuscript/mixed material], August 13, 1813. www.loc.gov/item/mtjbib020982/Google Scholar
Jørgensen, J. Normann. (2008). Polylingual languaging around and among children and adolescents. International Journal of Multilingualism 5(3), 161176.Google Scholar
Joseph, John E. (2004). Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Google Scholar
Joseph, John E. (2006). Language and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Kachru, Braj B. (1976). Models of English for the third world: White man’s linguistic burden or language pragmatics? TESOL Quarterly 10(2), 221239.Google Scholar
Kachru, Braj B. and Smith, Larry E.. (1985). Editorial. World Englishes 4(2), 209212.Google Scholar
Kubota, Ryuko. (2015). Inequalities of Englishes, English speakers, and languages: A critical perspective on pluralist approaches to English. In Tupas, Ruanni, ed. Unequal Englishes: The Politics of Englishes Today. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2142.Google Scholar
Lambert, James. (2018). A multitude of “lishes”: The nomenclature of hybridity. English World-Wide 39(1), 133.Google Scholar
Wei, Li. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: Discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Journal of Pragmatics 43(5), 12221235.Google Scholar
Makoni, Sinfree B. (2011). Sociolinguistics, colonial and postcolonial: An integrationist perspective. Language Sciences 33(4), 680688.Google Scholar
Marks, Robert B. (2007). The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
McArthur, Tom. (1993). The English language or the English languages? In Bolton, Whitney French and Crystal, David, eds. The English Language. London: Penguin Books, 323341.Google Scholar
Milroy, Jim. (2002). The legitimate language. In Watts, Richard and Trudgill, Peter, eds. Alternative Histories of English. London: Routledge, 725.Google Scholar
Mufwene, , Salikoko, S. (2001). The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mufwene, , Salikoko, S. (2010). The role of mother-tongue schooling in eradicating poverty: A response to Language and Poverty. Language 86(4), 901932.Google Scholar
Nash, Manning. (1989). The Cauldron of Ethnicity in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Naysmith, John. (1986). English as imperialism? Paper presented at the IATEFL Annual Meeting, Brighton, April 1–4. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED274197.pdfGoogle Scholar
Ngũgĩ, wa Thiong’o. (2013). HARDtalk with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, BBC. www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/p01d17d6Google Scholar
Okara, Gabriel. (1963). African Speech … English words. Transition 3(10), 1516.Google Scholar
O’Leary, John. (1995). Prince says Americans are ruining the language. The Times, March 24.Google Scholar
Omoniyi, Tope. (2004). The Sociolinguistics of Borderlands: Two Nations, One People. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.Google Scholar
Omoniyi, Tope. (2009). West African Englishes. In Kachru, Braj, Kachru, Yamuna and Nelson, Cecil, eds. The Handbook of World Englishes. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 172187.Google Scholar
Otheguy, Ricardo, García, Ofelia and Reid, Wallis. (2015). Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics. Applied Linguistics Review 6(3), 281307.Google Scholar
Parakrama, Arjuna. (2012). The Malchemy of English in Sri Lanka: Reinforcing inequality through imposing extra-linguistic value. In Rapatahana, Vaughan and Bunce, Pauline, eds. English Language as Hydra: Its Impacts on Non-English Language Cultures. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 107132.Google Scholar
Park, Joseph Sung-Yul and Wee, Lionel. (2012). Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pennycook, Alastair. (2007). Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pennycook, Alastair. (2008). Translingual English. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 31(3), 30.130.9.Google Scholar
Pennycook, Alastair. (2012). Afterword: Could Heracles have gone about things differently? In Rapatahana, Vaughan and Bunce, Pauline, eds. English Language as Hydra: Its Impacts on Non-English Language Cultures. Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 255262.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pensalfini, Rob. (2014). The Americans are destroying the English language – or are they? The Conversation, January 7. http://theconversation.com/the-americans-are-destroying-the-english-language-or-are-they-21461Google Scholar
Phillipson, Robert. (1992). Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Phillipson, Robert. (2008a). Lingua franca or lingua frankensteinia? English in European integration and globalisation. World Englishes 27(2), 250267.Google Scholar
Phillipson, Robert. (2008b). The linguistic imperialism of neoliberal empire. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 5(1), 143.Google Scholar
Piller, Ingrid. (2016). Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Prator, Clifford H. (1968). The British heresy in TESL. In Fishman, Joshua, Ferguson, Charles and Das Gupta, Jyotirindra, eds. Language Problems of Developing Nations. London: Wiley, 459476.Google Scholar
Rao, Raja. (1938). Kanthapura. London: George Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Rubdy, Rani and Alsagoff, Lubna, eds. (2013). The Global-Local Interface and Hybridity: Exploring Language and Identity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Rushdie, Salman. (1982). The Empire writes back with a vengeance. The Times, July 3.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. (1978). Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Saraceni, Mario. (2015). World Englishes: A Critical Analysis. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Saraceni, Mario. (2016). Back to the 19th century: How language is being used to mark national borders. The Conversation, October 4. http://theconversation.com/back-to-the-19th-century-how-language-is-being-used-to-mark-national-borders-66357Google Scholar
Schneider, Edgar. (2016). Hybrid Englishes: An exploratory survey. World Englishes 35, 339354.Google Scholar
Shaw, Flora. (1897). Nigeria. The Times, January 8.Google Scholar
Shin, Hyunjung. (2012). From FOB to COOL: Transnational migrant students in Toronto and the styling of global linguistic capital. Journal of Sociolinguistics 16(2), 184200.Google Scholar
Tiffin, Helen. (1987). Post-colonial literatures and counter-discourse. Kunapipi 9(3), 1734.Google Scholar
Tupas, Ruanni. (2006). Standard Englishes, pedagogical paradigms and their conditions of (im)possibility. In Rubdy, R. and Saraceni, M., eds. English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles. London: Continuum, 169185.Google Scholar
Tupas, Ruanni and Rubdy, Rani. (2015). Introduction: From World Englishes to unequal Englishes. In Tupas, Ruanni, ed. Unequal Englishes: The Politics of Englishes Today. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Webster, Noah. (1789). Dissertations on the English Language. Boston: Isaiah Thomas.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×