The Handbook of Language and Globalization

Nikolas Coupland

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781118347171, 9781405175814
• eBook ISBN: 9781444351620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Handbook of Language and Globalization brings together important new studies of language and discourse in the global era, consolidating a vibrant new field of sociolinguistic research.

• The first volume to assemble leading scholarship in this rapidly developing field
• Features new contributions from 36 internationally-known scholars, bringing together key research in the fieldand establishing a benchmark for future research
• Comprehensive coverage is divided into four sections: global multilingualism, world languages and language systems; global discourse in key domains and genres; language, values and markets under globalization; and language, distance and identities
• Covers an impressive breadth of topics including tourism, language teaching, social networking, terrorism, and religion, among many others
• Winner of the British Association for Applied Linguistics book prize 2011

Part I
Global Multilingualism, World Languages, and Language Systems

1

Globalization, Global English, and World English(es): Myths and Facts

SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE

Introduction

Today’s world is claimed to be economically and culturally more globalized than ever before, thanks to faster and more reliable means of transportation and communication, which have facilitated greater human traffic and the exchange of larger volumes of information and goods. This concurrent evolution has also led to increased mutual cultural influences across national and regional boundaries, which prompted some experts to claim that the world has been homogenizing by convergence, at the expense of cultural diversity. To be sure, the directions and volumes of traffic are not necessarily symmetrical. The players or partners involved in the relevant world-wide networks of interconnectedness and interdependence do not hold equal economic powers; it is the more powerful who control which populations and commodities (including languages) are transported more freely, and in which directions. Thus, to the eyes of many, globalization is no more than McDonaldization and Americanization (largely through the world-wide diffusion of Hollywood movies); and the spread of English is no less than a part of this trend (for such views, propounded in one form or another, see for instance Crystal 2000, 2004; Nettle and Romaine 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; Phillipson 2003; Hagège 2006). Some linguists have thus claimed that a ‘global English’ is bound to emerge which should facilitate communication world-wide, alongside – or perhaps superseding – ‘indigenized’ or ‘world Englishes.’ According to the same futurologists, the more widely this ‘global English’ spreads, the more likely it is to drive other languages to extinction, just as has been witnessed in North America and Australia.

However, neither economic globalization nor language spread is new in the history of mankind. What is especially striking today is both the scale and the speed at which these processes are evolving. I submit that examining them comparatively, with more historical depth than is exhibited in the current linguistics literature, should help us sort out myths and facts about how English is actually spreading and whether it is justified to expect the consequences of the process to be uniform all over the world. I therefore invite the reader to be patient and to review with me a selective, informative history of mankind from the point of view of colonization, which will help us assess more critically the spread of English. This history will explain why we need not fear the emergence of a ‘global English,’ let alone of a time when it might function as the world’s exclusive or dominant vernacular. I will start by articulating from the outset the interpretation of globalization that really bears on language endangerment.

What Is Globalization and What Is New about It?

Answers to the above questions vary and depend largely on what particular aspects of the manifold phenomenon called ‘globalization’ a scholar chooses to focus on. If we start with the characterization of globalization both as “the process of becoming global” (Keohane and Nye 2000) and as “the state that results from this process,” then we must also articulate what the word global means. Although most dictionaries privilege its meaning as ‘world-wide’ (as in global warming), we cannot ignore its other interpretation as ‘all-inclusive’ or ‘comprehensive’ (as in global war – which is different from world war – and as in global problem/solution).¹ Thus there can be globalization at the local level, consisting of interdependences which obtain among the different components of the industry or economic structure of a city, or at the regional level, for instance when neighboring countries form economic alliances, such as in the now very successful case of the European Union.²

Globalization need not be thought of exclusively or primarily at the world-wide level. This level differs from the local especially in scale. Although the two may be claimed to differ also in complexity, this is not necessarily the case, unless one conceives of world-wide globalization as an economic system in which all the components of national industries are fully integrated, in complementary ways. The reality is that most of Africa and a great deal of the Pacific Islands remain on the margins of the present world-wide economic system. Moreover, only some industries (such as car and computer manufacture) are distributed complementarily over different parts of the world. However, the relevant trade networks, which should connect the missing links, do not include all parts of the world – especially not those still lagging in transportation infrastructure.

Telecommunications, transportation, shipping, and banking are indeed among the handful of industries that can be claimed to instantiate world-wide globalization qua networks of interconnectedness and interdependence. These particular industries also make it obvious that the world is not equally interconnected; countries with the highest globalization index are more centrally connected than others, and the so-called ‘global cities’ are more interconnected than other places. One can likewise argue that world-wide globalization is simply a geographically expanded version of glocalization, although students of multiculturalism discuss the latter as if it were a consequence of world-wide globalization. As cultures, and therefore languages, travel primarily and the most naturally with people, these observations prompt us to assess critically claims that English is becoming a global language (see the sections “The Fallacy of ‘Global English’” and “Will there be an English-only Europe?” below).

One may also argue that the most primitive forms of globalization in human economic history can be traced back all the way to the beginnings of agriculture, when farmers colonized the hunter–gatherers and some complementarity and interdependence arose in modes and kinds of food production. The evidently monumental differences between, on the one hand, the forms of cooperation and trade that emerged then and, on the other, today’s international industrial conglomerations and networks of trade amount to differences in scale and complexity rather than to differences in kind or spirit. The goal remains for different partners to specialize in what they produce best, or more extensively, and to buy the remaining commodities from other parties, thereby improving and maximizing production through cooperation. That the spirit of this practice has remained fundamentally the same is evident in the asymmetrical power relations which obtain between partners – namely in the tendency for the economically and/or militarily more powerful to dominate the weaker ones. This tendency may entail the adoption of cultural practices, including the language, of the more powerful by the weaker party. However, things have not always proceeded this way in human history (see below). For our purposes, this perspective should help us not only to determine the places where English has spread, but also to assess discriminately the communicative functions it serves and to establish whether its impact on the indigenous languages has been uniform around the world. On the other hand, it is evident that non-local globalization can be related to colonization, as explained below – except where partnership is negotiated between equals.

Complexity in local globalization may have started also with the emergence of towns and cities. Life in such larger agglomerations has required a certain amount of interdependence through complementary organization – such as with housing, food and water supplies – and adequate communication and transportation networks in order for the residents to function adequately. The cities’ specialization in industries, as opposed to farming and hunter–gathering, also led to an interdependence between rural and urban environments, although the division of labor and some amount of cooperation in food production varied from one part of the world to another, according to particular times in history. All this anticipated the emergence of nation–states, in which national economies would be coordinated (and even planned, to the extent that this was possible) in ways that can be described as involving globalization. As a matter of fact, we can say that the more globalized a city’s or nation’s economic system is, the higher its globalization or glocalization index is, and the more centrally or significantly it can participate in the world-wide global economic network. The so-called ‘global cities’ (such as New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, Chicago, and São Paulo) are those with a high glocalization index, and they function not only as major world financial centers but also as primary ports of entry and as principal diffusion centers in the spread of world-wide trends. They are also places that can best highlight differences in the ways English and other major languages have spread around the world, especially through the extent of the contrast between them and the surrounding rural areas. Otherwise the characteristics of interconnectedness and interdependence associated with world-wide globalization are generally extensions of those that apply in glocalization.

‘Global cities’ also remind us that world-wide globalization started with long-distance trading practiced at an early date by, for example, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Chinese (on the Silk Road), and, later, the Greeks and the Romans (Cowen 2001): essentially they remind us that enterprises started from economically and politically powerful cities. Then as now, the size of the world was largely determined by how far technology enabled the traders to go and their respective languages to travel with them. In the Middle Ages the Arabs and the Chinese definitely expanded the size of that world-trade, as the former sailed across the Mediterranean as well as eastwards and southwards along the Indian Ocean, while the latter sailed southwards in the Pacific and westwards in the Indian Ocean. Further improvements in transportation technology would lead to the European Great Explorations of the fifteenth century and to the consequent colonization of most of the rest of the world by Europeans (see for instance Osterhammel and Peterson 2005). Since then, world-wide globalization has changed in respect of how far away the colonizers and traders traveled from their homelands, how fast they journeyed, how much commodity and human traffic actually took place, how much more complex the exchange system has become, and how asymmetrical the share of profits has been between partners.³

Long-distance trade involved not only exchanges of commodities, but also traffic of people and ideas, and hence of cultures. This produced language spread, which sometimes transformed the vernacular a into lingua franca, as has been the case in history with Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Malay, Swahili, Nheengatu (Lingua Geral), Quechua, and Mobilian, to name but a few (see Ostler 2005 for many more examples), before the age of modern European languages. Out of the latter, English has emerged as a pre-eminent world language and, being ‘indicted’ by linguists for the loss of several indigenous languages, especially in North America and Australia, it has been mischaracterized as the ‘killer language’ par excellence. I will return to most of the issues related to this topic from the next section onward. I would just like to conclude this section with some comments on the role of urbanization in language coexistence and competition, which will explain why the impact that the usage of English as a vernacular has exerted, in particular on indigenous languages in North America, may not be replicated in former British exploitation colonies, especially those of Africa.

Cities have usually been contact settings, where individuals of different ethnolinguistic backgrounds have migrated either from rural areas or from other cities, typically in search of better economic opportunities. It is probably around them that one can most easily defend the hypothesis that, due to complex webs of interconnectedness and interdependence among residents and among the industries in which they (hope to) function, globalization cum glocalization is homogenizing places culturally, hence linguistically. Cities also happen to be the nodes that connect different nations in the world-wide ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sociolinguistics in the Global Era
• Part I: Global Multilingualism, World Languages, and Language Systems
• Part II: Global Discourse in Key Domains and Genres
• Part III: Language, Values, and Markets under Globalization
• Part IV: Language, Distance, and Identities
• Index