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This chapter examines a selection of syntactic and discourse features and pragmatic norms in English speakers in Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries. It provides some examples of grammatical variation in the dialects of British English and in new varieties of English. The chapter discusses the emergence of non-standard forms of Asian varieties of English and considers the possible causes of these developments.

This chapter follows the native English speakers through their first phase, when euphoria reigned because they (incorrectly, as it turned out) assumed that Englishnization was solely about language. It also follows them through the second phase, about two years into Englishnization. By this time, they found it nearly as difficult to accept the changes wrought in their day-to-day workplace as did the native Japanese speakers. While the Japanese employees had to change to adopt a foreign language, the American employees had to change to adopt the Rakuten organizational culture that had been mostly suppressed by the language barrier. Employees in both groups had to adjust their perception of themselves and their place in the company—in this respect, the groups were mirror images of one another.

The puzzle this chapter addresses concerns a passage from Oliver Wendell Holmes’s well-known essay “The Theory of Legal Interpretation.” Judges following Holmes have used this essay as a kind of multi-purpose tool. Their opinions have cited the essay to support different interpretive conclusions and apparently contrasting theoretical commitments. And yet one of the most frequently cited passages in the essay refers repeatedly to a figure about which neither judges nor scholars have had much to say: the figure Holmes calls the “normal speaker of English.” Although judges sometimes mention this figure, they invoke it only about a third as often as they quote other passages from the essay or simply cite the entire essay. This neglect is odd because Holmes explicitly likens the “normal speaker of English” to another legal figure that has received a great deal of scrutiny: the reasonable person (or as Holmes calls it, the “prudent man”). Thus the puzzle: Why have judges and commentators paid so little direct attention to the figure of the normal speaker of English, given the evident attractions of Holmes’s essay as a resource for justification and analysis, and given the analogy Holmes drew between the normal speaker and the reasonable person?

This chapter studies the category of language popularly known as “Chinglish” and what this stigmatizing label means for the speakers to whom it is attached. For individuals to discover that their speech or writing was in actuality Chinglish was perhaps the most discomfiting news a Chinese English speaker could hear, implying as it did that the language in use was not only semantically or syntactically wrong but, more importantly, that the speaker's status as an authorized user of the English language was illegitimate and false. Chinglish is formed through the process of enregisterment, where discursive practices encode and systematize the evaluative judgments of entire speech communities, and then sediment over time into particular semiotic registers imbued with social value and identified with distinct social types. The metapragmatic statements that shape the perceptions of Chinglish may be explicit but are more generally embedded within other speech genres such as jokes. Ultimately, membership in the stigmatized speech community of Chinglish users is not claimed by intentional use of the variety but instead assigned by others, reflecting and maintaining existing inequalities in linguistic capital.

In the late 1980s, the Adrian Dominican Sisters faced an issue common to religious communities: the aging of its membership and a lesser need overall for sisters to teach in the parochial-school system. Wanting to find a way for its highly trained educators to remain active, and to address a significant societal need at the same time, the Adrian Dominicans began a literacy center in Detroit for adult learners. More centers followed in Michigan, Florida, and Illinois. Other Dominican communities have established literacy centers as well. The centers each serve a wide range of adult learners, including immigrant populations, in helping these learners to build better lives for themselves and their families. This essay looks at each of the Adrian Dominican-sponsored literacy centers as well as those of other communities, with input from directors, tutors, and learners.

This chapter assesses the commerce of foreign languages in contemporary Shenyang. It focuses on the production of language as a commodity, the means by which certain forms of language are imbued with social value through the practices of marketing them to consumers. In the scramble to develop Shenyang's foreign language marketplace, school owners developed innovative strategies to build and maintain their businesses, strategies that themselves were crucial in reconfiguring the nature of language itself from something that is learned to something that is sold. The commodity logic of English extends far beyond their reach through uptake into almost all aspects of foreign language use in China, from public schools to testing to corporate management of linguistic (human) resources. It is no longer a stretch to say that English speakers in China are manufactured in much the same way as the vast number of goods bound from Chinese factories to Western marketplaces.

Challenges facing the History of the English Language (HEL) instructor include the students’ lack of preparation for such a course, as well as the students’ lack of motivation to see how this course has any relationship to them. To spur interest in the HEL class, the instructor can use the students in the class themselves as a starting place for the study of the origins and development of the language. Every student has a history with the English language. Let students explore how the language came into their lives and investigate what part it has played in shaping them. Also, use course assignments that employ the students’ own experiences and interests, such as a linguistically based review of a film in a less familiar English variety or a five-minute talk on a broad topic, related to the course and in which the speaker is interested and has become a superficial expert.