Search Results

This chapter discusses the concept of “Anglo English” as a shared core of American English, British English, Australian English, and other long established varieties of English. The chapter uses some examples from Australian English to show both “Australia's British inheritance” and the cultural distinctiveness of some Australian-English words, concepts, and cultural norms. It also introduces a framework for studying and describing meaning: the NSM theory of semantics, based on a mini-vocabulary of sixty five universal human concepts. These concepts, which can be identified through simple words such as do, happen, want, know, and feel, provide a basis for a “natural semantic metalanguage” (NSM) for the description and comparison of meanings.

This chapter focuses on global English and its relationship to global inequality. In a major correlational fallacy that misrecognizes the privileges accruing to dominant speakers as privileges resulting from their speech, global English is widely perceived as key to global development. “English for all” language policies entrench existing inequalities within a society. “Englishization” engenders an external orientation to development, and knowledge produced and disseminated through the medium of English comes to be regarded more highly than knowledge produced and disseminated through the medium of other languages. The global spread of English is also unjust because the language costs associated with it generate a financial subsidy stream paid by peripheral countries to Anglophone center countries. The hegemony of global English also carries psychological costs and may contribute to linguistic marginalization and feelings of inferiority.

The data presented in this chapter highlight the Indonesian state’s influence on citizens’ access to education as it implements policies that simultaneously aim to secure a national identity through enforcing Indonesian as medium of instruction in public schools and categorizing English as a Foreign Language. The state is in a double bind, and its policies are ineffective: in globalization, English cannot be avoided, but the state lacks the resources needed to meet internationalized standards with language and curriculum content appropriate to the needs of Indonesia’s student populations and the skills of its teachers. Because of these dynamics, the English language is accessed mostly by those who already have access to mobility, wealth, and “international standard” educations. The national categorization of English as a Foreign Language combined with a contradictory rush to get citizens English alone by increasing its distribution throughout educational curricula, promises nothing more than to reinforce levels of English fluency as indicators of individuals’ access to or marginalization from wealth and state-distributed educations. Beliefs that English alone will earn the Indonesian state and its citizens prosperous positions in national and global society act to conflate the English language with the other important material factors alongside which this symbol of wealth “hitchhikes” (Mendoza-Denton, 2011), and this has led to rushed and ineffective policy implementation on many levels.

Chapter five examines the writings of Julia Alvarez and Ha Jin as examples of literary bilingual brokering in the age of global English. As writers of bi-national scope in their writings, Alvarez and Ha Jin explore a cultural politics of circulation to dislodge the assumption of an organic relationship between national language and literature. However, the coexistence of World Literature in English and US multicultural literature in these writers’ works places their representations of political oppression and human rights abuse abroad within the pedagogy of neoliberal multiculturalism at home that is geared toward an individualistic understanding of freedom and rights. Even as Alvarez and Ha Jin seek to claim belonging in the homeland of language outside the narrow confines of national literature, that choice itself is circumscribed by the cultural politics of writing in English at a time of global English hegemony.

This chapter examines the complexity and confusion that the term “global English” has generated in various literatures. The chapter considers the evolution, relevance, and utility of the constructs English as a lingua franca (ELF) and lingua franca English (LFE) described in the applied linguistics and world Englishes literatures. In doing so, the chapter considers the challenges in describing a dispersed and contextualized language variety (LFE) and mapping it with a coherent speech community. The chapter then considers the role of English in development in low-income countries where it is a medium of instruction or offered as a subject in schools and argue that there are socioeconomic and sociopolitical “facts” that favor access for some people (and not others) to English in postcolonial and expanding-circle countries, and especially to the “appropriate” sort of English that can facilitate access to the domains where this linguistic capital can be “cashed in.”

This chapter recounts how René Étiemble became a fierce advocate for translation. It analyzes Étiemble's exuberant linguistic range in many of his works, such as Essais de littérature (vraiment) générale in “Sur quelques adaptations et imitations de haiku” where he quotes poems in Japanese, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Croatian, German, and modern Greek. It also highlights the importance of translation for the next generation of comparatists in Étiemble's edgy survey titled Comparaison n'est pas raison. The chapter explores the quality of literary translation that has steadily grown during the past several decades. It also addresses crucial and highly problematic questions of language with the rise of global English that leaves many literary scholars too comfortably ensconced within the imperium of English.

This chapter explores how an economic ideology—neoliberalism—serves as a covert language policy mechanism pushing the global spread of English. The chapter's analysis builds on a case study of the spread of English as a medium of instruction (MoI) in South Korean higher education. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–1998 was the catalyst for a set of socioeconomic transformations that led to the imposition of “competitiveness” as a core value. Competition is heavily structured through a host of testing, assessment, and ranking mechanisms, many of which explicitly privilege English as a terrain where individual and societal worth are established. University rankings are one such mechanism structuring competition and constituting a covert form of language policy. One ranking criterion—internationalization—is particularly easy to manipulate and strongly favors English MoI. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the social costs of elevating competitiveness to a core value enacted on the terrain of language choice.

The chapter presents a brief history of the contact of French with English, from 18th-century Anglomania to the global English of the turn of the 21st century, in order to contextualize the singularity of the latest contact period. It then chronicles the changes that commonly occur as donor words become new French words. These changes, illustrated with many borrowed items from the period of virtual contact (1990–2015), can be classified as grammatical shift, semantic shift, stylistic shift, and connotative shift. Beyond demonstrating that an English etymon masks heterogeneous types of French Anglicisms, an up-to-date typology shows how English morphemes are used in novel word-formation devices, such as serial bilingual compounds. The borrowing of phrases plays a marginal yet innovative role in French, including emphasis and punning, and raises the issue of typologies for borrowed/neological phrases.

Recent years have seen an increased interest from political theorists into questions of language rights, linguistic justice, and language politics. This interest has produced a call for greater connection between those language scholars working from more empirical and practical approaches, including language policy, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology. This chapter endorses this general project by highlighting the limitations and problems raised specifically by the dominance of liberal individualism within political theory. The chapter takes the work of Will Kymlicka as possibly the most useful liberal political theorist and interrogate his theoretical approach to language in order to assess its appropriateness to grapple with key features of the advent of “global English,” especially the conceptualization of the native speaker and the role of language politics in global, “cognitive,” or “communicative” capitalism. The chapter concludes by turning to Antonio Gramsci’s approach to language to further illustrate the limits and occlusion of liberal political theory for understanding language politics.

In 2006, the Karnataka state government in India mandated the official state language, Kannada, as medium of instruction at the primary school level, not only in public schools but in popular English-medium private ones as well, unleashing an intense controversy, particularly in Bangalore, Karnataka’s state capital and India’s Silicon Valley. This controversy provides the context for analyzing competing narratives of globalization in language politics. One narrative embraces economic globalization and its concomitant linguistic dimension of global English; English is seen as facilitating India’s global integration and enabling Indians with English-language skills to join the emerging middle class. The second narrative, what the chapter calls the “politics of the governed” after the title of Partha Chatterjee’s 2004 book, attempts to reconcile appeals to particularism, in the form of local, regional languages, with celebration of “globalization-from-below.” The chapter demonstrates how the competition between the two narratives is structured by India’s political economy.

Since French Anglicisms readily conjure up the Académie française, the introductory chapter presents purist views on Anglicisms, which tend to be implicitly political (Anglicisms as an allegory for the decline of French as an international language) and explicitly lexical (substitution of French words with English words). The raison d’être of this book was to provide an objective linguistic analysis that would test the myth, discussed here, that Anglicisms are lexical polluters, a myth magnified by the advent of the World Wide Web and the use of English as its lingua franca. The linguistic behavior of the resulting lexical items in the lexicon and morphology of French is the topic of this book, as, mainly because of this purism, linguistic research on these words has not been intensively pursued in France.

The snapshot of the period of linguistic contact revealed in this study expands the definition of an Anglicism, for these Anglicisms, reanalyzed, take on a myriad of French characteristics, which accounts for the title, Remade in France. It is clear from the findings that the case of French Anglicisms is one of complexification: they require the creative application of complex linguistic rules and they continuously change, taking on novel characteristics. This concluding chapter underscores the capacity of global English to augment the lexicon of French (and other European languages) abundantly, quickly, and often ephemerally. This book has provided ample evidence that reducing Anglicisms to lexical invaders masks how French productively and creatively manipulates and reinvents English materials to meet its own needs.

Since the emergence of the nation-state languages have been territorialized and formalized. This involves hegemony, not as a conspiratorial ideological process since ideology is not constituted before the act, but as a feature of social practice. Neither should the power dimension be understood in terms of dominance and suppression, but rather, as a force that constrains while also integrating through coordinated self-governance. Practice is integrated with how social institutions operate in tandem in unselfconsciously constituting the hegemonic order. Social groups are articulated through the indeterminancy of the same institutions, while their discourses construct subject places that prioritise the state identity. Language groups are social groups only when language is integrated with the institutional contextualization of society. Knowledge of a language is insufficient as a criterion of membership. Consequently Global English differs from British or American English. Also, integrating minority languages into autonomous regional systems transforms them into regional languages.

Cassin analyzes the Aeneid, where she underscores the way in which Aeneas, who must leave his native Troy behind him, is allowed by the gods to settle in Rome so long as he makes Latin his new language. Hence the language of the other comes to take precedence over Aeneas’s own language as he is forced to build a new homeland in a language that was not initially his. From nostalgia to exile, from Odysseus to Aeneas, Cassin examines the passage of the Greek language as logos, universal language-reason, to the Latin language as second language, the language of those Romans who cannot not be aware that there are at least two languages—from logos, then, to languages and translation. Cassin looks at the political implications of this cross-breeding of Greek and Latin in the founding of the new nation and shows how Rome will come to symbolize the place of an inclusive alterity.