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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781853595776 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 03/14/2002 |
| Series: | Bilingual Education & Bilingualism , #34 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.85(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.50(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Images of World English: Writing English as an International Language
Defining World English
It might appear that nothing should be easier than to define the subject matter of a book about English. Given that the book is written in the medium of its topic, English, the author might reasonably operate on the tacit assumption that this is one subject, at the least, about which she and her reader have a shared knowledge. It is, after all, the language of their communication. Thus, while this is certainly not the first book to investigate the (international) history of English, it might be the first to begin by questioning the subject of the investigation.
In what does the shared knowledge of English consist? Just what is it that we know about this language? Perhaps, the answer to those questions is suggested by its name: English, a language born in England, the language of England. That notion locates the language in a particular nation, or more accurately, a particular people. It is their language, to spread, to change, to share or withhold from the world. By that view, World English is the means and results of the spread of English from its historical (perhaps even natural) boundaries to its current position as the preeminent global means of communication.
Every language has its history, real or imagined – or, perhaps, real and imagined. English was not precisely "born" in England. It was transported there from another place, or more exactly, it traveled there together with the Anglo-Saxon migrants to the island. That is why we call it a Germanic language. And there is another consideration. Those Anglo-Saxons who first made the trip across the English Channel would be utterly at a loss to understand the English of the fourteenth century, that of Chaucer's day. For in the intervening centuries, the language was irrevocably altered by the Norman Conquest in 1066, which Latinized the Germanic language of the Angles and Saxons.
Perhaps recognition of those two caveats solidifies the common notion of English. For certainly the final result is an English language suitably distinct from the Germanic languages that gave rise to it. The language was, after all, all the more English for its specifically English history and thereby all the more at home in the British Isles, or more exactly, the non-Celtic portion of them. Then again, does not that history immediately call to mind the other inhabitants of those islands, who spoke various Celtic languages amongst others? Did their languages not inhibit the islands first, and was English not an interloper in their midst, just as were, initially, the Angles and Saxons who migrated there (or invaded)?
What should be made of the fact that the process by which the English language became a distinctively English product involved the subjection of the English people at the hands of a French-speaking people, the admixture of the two languages, a change so dramatic that the language had become incomprehensible to its forbears? In a crowning irony to the attempt to associate the language with a land, a nation, and a people, English became associated with all three precisely because its history was so mobile, its context so transnational, and the people who made it so diverse: Germanic, Celtic, French and Nordic.
Of course, all of that might be said to belong to the prehistory of the language, just as every social phenomenon must have roots in some more remote past. Perhaps the investigator need not trace the language back quite that far. The discussion might be confined to a more recent period, what is often called "the modern world." If so, how is it to be decided what constitutes the proper frame of reference for English between our own day and the aftermath of the Norman invasion some nine centuries ago? Should we split the difference – say, some 450 years or so, or approximately the time of the English Renaissance? Already by that time, however, English was not confined to its earlier "natural" (or is it "historical"?) boundaries: within the British Isles it was, or was on the verge of, spreading to Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. It was, moreover, making trans-Atlantic voyages to the "New World," opening up vast new territories for itself. And it was soon thereafter to begin its world historic tour de monde – Asia, Australasia, and Africa. Nevertheless, it continued to belong to the English, who, after all, had the longer claim on it.
At the least, if a consideration is carefully delimited to a brief historical window, some few centuries in the middle of the past millennium, it seems justifiable to claim English as the language of England, and so return to the comfortable notion, the imagined history, with which textbooks on the history of English begin. Or is it? What makes those few centuries so special in the history of English? What sets them apart from the other centuries of English's development? Why should those centuries and those peoples be privileged over others? And just who were those peoples? Were they really Anglo-Saxons? Or were they not also Celts, Norse French, and others? So just what, then, are we so sure about that we do not question what we mean by English?
There is another problem with this familiar, commonsense, interpretation of the history of English. It may suggest a conception of stages in the history of English, a prehistory (linguistic origins), a developmental stage, and a finished product – presumably an unalterable linguistic entity that we stamp with the name English. Implicit in this notion is a teleological and normative view of language development in which the language as process gives rise to language as final product, its whole development leading to that point. Prior to some arbitrary point in time (perhaps the English Renaissance), the language was incomplete. Now it is complete. It is English.
The same, however, holds true for any language at any stage in its development: insofar as it exists, is spoken, it is a language and not a stage in the development of some future language. To measure it by a fixed standard ("modern English") applies a subjective standpoint, just as surely as when we divide history into the pre-Christian (or pre-Muslim, or pre-Hindu, or pre-Buddhist) epoch as opposed to "ours." Those who spoke the language of Beowulf did not view themselves as speaking "old English." They did not view their language as a developmental stage of some future language, any more than we do so today. And yet the one is no more justified than the other.
That idea suffers from an obviously presentist flaw: that what has gone before is history, but what is now is removed from time, space, and development. This conception privileges the language as we know it – or, rather, as we imagine it.
The usual approach to the history of English consists precisely in privileging this brief portion of the history of English since the English Renaissance and calling it the "true" history, the essential history, the defining history. For the development of any language is a continuous process, and boundaries that we mark in that process are only more or less arbitrary and convenient (in both senses of the word) breaks in the continuous flow of the language as process. Taking a non-teleological approach, it is just as possible to divide the history of English as follows (cf. McArthur, 1998):
(1) Germanic roots; development in Northern Europe by Germanic peoples (prior to c. 500 AD);
(2) Period of development in the British Isles by Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Celts, and others, prior to the Norman Conquest (c. 500–1150);
(3) Period of development subsequent to the Norman invasion under the influence of the English, French, Celts (to whom the language continuously has spread), Danes, etc. (c. 1150–1450);
(4) Period of development that accompanied the consolidation of a "people" and a nation out of the heterogeneous elements of the earlier phase, often called the "Early Modern" period of English (McArthur, 1998: 87) (c. 1450–1700);
(5) The epoch constructed as "Modern English," which featured the continued change of the language within the British Isles, where it continued to spread, joined by other outposts of English speaking communities, in particular in North America and Australia;
(6) Period of development in the world, as English continuously spread around the globe, jointly developed by the English, but also by Asians, Africans, and others.
The identification of the first five periods of the history of English more or less corresponds to the common view, one reproduced in most texts on the history of English. Where this approach differs, following scholars like Graddol et al. (1996) and particularly McArthur (1998), is in not regarding Phase 5 as a finished product, but one that, like its predecessors, gives place in turn to a new "stage" in the history of English, that is, the continued development of the language. Following this demarcation of the history of English, this study takes the last period as encompassing the subject matter of the field of World English. The topic of this work is the phase of the development of English that has taken place on the world scale.
This account regards the English language that has spread globally not as a finished product but a continually developing language, conceiving its international spread as part of that further development. Defining World English as a phase of the process of development of English necessarily historicizes the question. That is, it grounds the subject matter in the definite sociohistorical conditions or contexts in which English has evolved.
Writing World English
The first five periods of the history of English have long been subjects of scholarly inquiry. Yet, while the English language has been spreading beyond the confines of the British Isles for some three centuries, World English as a field of study has only recently emerged. Closely identified with the globalization of English Language Teaching (ELT), and arising out of its scholarly tradition, the understanding of World English has pivoted not so much on theoretical linguistic questions but on practical and even ethical issues of English spread.
Conceptions of World English
Smith (1976) provided an early account of World English under the term English as an International Language (EIL). Smith operationalized the term international language as a language other than one's mother tongue – that is, a second language – "which is used by people of different nations to communicate with one another" (p. 38). As such, he distinguished it from the more traditional auxiliary language, one used for internal communication in a multilingual society. In these functional terms, English in the Philippines, for example, constitutes an auxiliary language, whereas English in Brazil represents an international language.
In conceiving this definition by domain of use, Smith (1987) was concerned with raising practical questions, those pertaining to English usage among speaker from mother tongue and non-mother tongue contexts. Smith found through his (and others') long practice a sense of "ownership" of English on the part of its mother tongue speakers. They seemed to feel instinctively that since the language was theirs it fell to them to dictate the terms of use of English when its speakers met in the international realm, a modus operandi that Smith found to hinder international and intercultural communication.
Smith (1987) delineated several essential characteristics of an international language:
(1) It implies no essential relationship between speaking the language and assimilating an associated culture. There is no necessity for second language speakers to internalize the cultural norms of behavior of the mother tongue speakers of a language to use it effectively.
(2) An international language becomes denationalized. It is not the property of its mother tongue speakers.
(3) Since English as an International Language plays a purely functional role, the goal of teaching it is to facilitate communication of learners' ideas and culture in an English medium.
The core of Smith's (1987) argument is that a non-mother tongue user does not need to "become more like Americans, the British, the Australians, the Canadians or any other English speaker in order to lay claim on the language. To take the argument a step further, it isn't even necessary to appreciate the culture of a country whose principal language is English in order for one to use it effectively" (p. 39). For a language to become internationalized, it must lose its identification solely with one culture or nation.
Smith's (1987) work helped to touch off a longstanding controversy over whether the "ownership" of English (and thereby authority and control) is vested in its mother tongue users. The debate has been rather one-sided, as numerous scholars have taken the field to deny the proposition (B. Kachru, 1996; Rampton, 1990; Widdowson, 1994). That they continually feel called upon to do so, however, attests to the resiliency of the opposite, tacitly assumed, standpoint.
Linguistic imperialism
Although Smith's (1987) work in EIL centered on practical issues of English's worldwide use, World English scholarship thereafter turned to questions of the ethics of English spread. The question of the "ownership" of English was itself cast in moral terms, far from the practical realm of Smith's concerns. The attempt to assert something other than "native-speaker custodians" of English – to use Widdowson's (1997) apt phrase – met with Quirk's (1988) characterization as "liberation linguistics" – the encroachment of politics into a linguistic realm ostensibly insulated from such issues. This transition to the ethical and ultimately the political reached full fruition in Phillipson's (1992) influential, albeit controversial, work Linguistic Imperialism, in which he transferred to the scholarly realm the characterization of English as an alien influence in postcolonial African and Asian society present for decades within nationalist discourse.
Phillipson's (1992) theory of linguistic imperialism is one of the few to attempt a comprehensive theoretical account of "the contemporary phenomenon of English as a world language" (p. 1). According to Phillipson, English attained its current "dominant" position through its active promotion "as an instrument of the foreign policy of the major English-speaking states" (p. 1). He traces the development of World English to the imperialist domination of the world at the hands of England and the United States, positing a linguistic form of imperialism, or subjugation and oppression of certain peoples by others, taking its place alongside of others (political, economic, cultural).
In basing itself in a central process in modern world history, European colonial rule in Africa and Asia, Phillipson's framework offers a compelling, historically-grounded, thesis. Since colonialism coincides chronologically with the development of World English, it is certainly justifiable to inquire whether causal significance attaches to the role of imperialism in the international spread of English.
It is worth posing this question whether Phillipson himself does so. He remarks rather ambiguously that "English is now entrenched worldwide, as a result of British colonialism, international interdependence, 'revolutions' in technology, transport, communications and commerce, and because English is the language of the USA, a major economic, political and military force in the contemporary world" (pp. 23–4). Of these factors, apparently only the first, however, is intended to refer to the pre-World War II period, a circumstance that might appear to imply that British imperialism lies at the root of the question. Phillipson's lack of specificity notwithstanding, it has seemingly become customary to regard the conceptual framework that linguistic imperialism presents as an explanation for the development of World English (Alatis & Straehle, 1997; Canagarajah, 1999; Davies, 1996b; Pennycook, 1994; Widdowson, 1997, Willinsky, 1998). And it is, perhaps more importantly, implicit in the widespread characterization of English as a colonial language in Africa and Asia. Taken as a coherent explanatory framework for World English, the central premise of linguistic imperialism is that the spread of English represents a culturally imperialistic project, which necessarily imparts English language culture to its second language learners.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "World English"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Janina Brutt-Griffler.
Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Table of Contents
GlossaryPreface
1 Images of World English: Writing English as an International Language
2 The Representation of the Social in a Social Science: Methodology in Linguistics
3 Ideological and Economic Crosscurrents of Empire
4 The Contested Terrain of Colonial Language Policy
5 Access Denied: Containing the Spread of English
6 The Becoming of a World Language
7 Macroacquisition: Bilingual Speech Communities and Language Change
8 The Macroacquisition of English: New Representations in the Language
9 (The) World (of) English: Englishes in Convergence
10 Decentering English Applied Linguistics
Appendices
References
Index