Markets of English

Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World

Joseph Sung-Yul Park, Lionel Wee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138902510
• eBook ISBN: 9781136320460
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The global spread of English both reproduces and reinforces oppressive structures of inequality. But such structures can no longer be seen as imposed from an imperial center, as English is now actively adopted and appropriated in local contexts around the world. This book argues that such conditions call for a new critique of global English, one that is sensitive to both the political economic conditions of globalization and speakers' local practices.

Linking Bourdieu's theory of the linguistic market and his practice-based perspective with recent advances in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, this book offers a fresh new critique of global English. The authors highlight the material, discursive, and semiotic processes through which the value of English in the linguistic market is constructed, and suggest possible policy interventions that may be adopted to address the problems of global English. Through its serious engagement with current sociolinguistic theory and insightful analysis of the multiple dimensions of English in the world, this book challenges the readers to think about what we need to do to confront the social inequalities that are perpetuated by the global spread of English

Part I

The Problem of Global English

1	Introduction
	Towards a New Critique of Global English

The global spread of English—the increasing adoption and appropriation of English among communities across the world, as well as the growing belief that English has become the language for global communication—is an issue that fascinates observers of globalization. It is a phenomenon that is commonly invoked to illustrate the power and extent of globalization: how the English language, with its origin in the British Isles and later a handful of Anglophone countries, is now spoken all over the world, serving as a medium that facilitates the free cross-border flows of goods, finances, ideas, and people that define our global world. But as it fascinates, it also troubles—for the spread of English is not only an apt demonstration of how our world has become intensely interconnected; it is also a key example of the problems and dilemmas that globalization engenders or exacerbates. Thus, the central concern for the study of global English over the past few decades has been to produce a cogent critique of global English—one that insightfully identifies the problems of English in the world and suggests a perspective of English which can help us take action to counter those problems.¹

The desire to produce a critique of global English has been no doubt salient since the earlier stages of the spread of English, when English came to be used beyond the Anglophone world as a language of colonialism. The struggle of colonial and postcolonial writers who debated the place of English in their language use is well known; the debate, in a sense, still continues over whether English should be rejected as a language that reproduces imperialistic relations, leading to the destruction and devaluation of local language, culture, and identity, or whether it can be seen as a legitimate language of local expression, a language that can bear the burden of local experience without limiting such experience through the lens of the colonialist, and in fact, a language that even can be transformed into a weapon to strike back at the oppressive global relationships of power. No matter which side one takes in the debate, the common realization is that English, in its dominant conception, is a language of inequality, supporting and renewing relations of power—including the capitalist relations of oppression on the global scale between the center and periphery; the persistent language ideological distinction of native versus nonnative speaker which continues to delegitimize any effort to creatively appropriate the language outside the English-speaking West; and the class divisions that are reproduced as unequal access to English restricts the prospects of the poor in the educational and job market. Given the weight of the problems associated with English as a global language, there is an obvious need to produce a critique that can help us understand more precisely the nature of these problems and also suggest how we may address these problems.

Virtually all studies of global English that exist are motivated by this need. What should we do to deal with this ‘problem’ of global English? How are we to understand the spread of English around the world itself, and its concomitant phenomena, such as the new Englishes that have emerged around the world, new forms of multilingualism, language change, and shift? What are the causes and the consequences of this spread, and what should we do about it? What is the source of the power that (traditional) native speakers of English continue to wield, and what can or should be done to dismantle that power? What is this thing called English to begin with? These questions have led to a rich and highly influential body of work that offers poignant critiques of global English.

The perspective of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992), for instance, places English at the center of the present-day continuation of imperial relations of power, identifying the historical and institutional processes by which English continues to maintain its powerful reach in the world. The destructive power of global English on local domains of language, culture, and society is also criticized through the framework of linguistic human rights (Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas 1995), as well as that of linguistic ecology (Mühlhäusler 1996). The approach of world Englishes (Kachru 1985, 1986, 1997) has also been extremely influential. Directly challenging the sense of illegitimation that has been imposed on postcolonial and other new varieties of English, researchers in this tradition have relentlessly uncovered the legitimacy, systematicity, and creativity of those varieties, and the term ‘world Englishes’ is meant to indicate this very shift, a resistance towards the dominant influence of ‘inner-circle’ varieties including American and British (standard) English. Such effort has more recently been extended to the study of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF: Jenkins 2000, 2007; Seidlhofer 2001, 2004), which more radically wrests control of English from the hands of native speakers, claiming that those who speak English as a second language now outnumber those who speak it as a first, so those second-language speakers must be given the power to determine how English should be used. These perspectives, all of which are produced since the 1980s, have considerably changed the way we understand English in the world. Now, there is greater recognition about how deeply English is embedded in imperialistic relations of power, and how local appropriations and adoptions of English must be understood as legitimate manifestations of English rather than broken, degenerate forms of the language. Through continued work in these approaches, a critique of global English is still in the process of being forged, enriched, and refined.

The time during which such wide-ranging efforts were mobilized for producing a critique of global English, however, coincided with a period of rapid change in the context in which the spread of English continued. The emergence of neoliberal economic policies in the US and UK, coupled with the development of information-communication technology and the rise of the Internet, led to a considerable growth in the movement of people, goods, and ideas across national borders—in other words, it led to a period of intensified globalization, and more importantly, a heightened awareness of how we live in a globalizing world. This new phase in globalization presents a big challenge to the critique of the spread of English, for the changing conditions of the new economy complicate this picture considerably—or rather, they tell us that the context of global English has never been simple to begin with, forcing us to realize that assumptions upon which our critique of global English has been resting are in need of serious reconsideration.

On the one hand, the way in which power is exercised is increasingly embedded into material and symbolic relations on the local level. While imperialist relations in which powerful state actors and global institutions of the center exert control over the periphery through overt intervention via economic sanctions and military action remain real, today’s imperialist structures for the most part no longer have a ‘center’ in the sense that the Empire has no limits or outside, and mechanisms of control have become essentially immanent in local social and political relations (Hardt and Negri 2000). In this context, it is increasingly difficult to see English as an imposition from an imperial center or an external target of resistance, a significant shift from the way English was recognized in the colonial era. On the other hand, the conditions according to which English is used across the world are also becoming increasingly complex. Greater mobility of people and availability of extensive communication networks transform many notions upon which older models of language and identity have rested. For instance, the growth of mobile populations problematizes older notions of communities, as their boundaries become much more porous and flexible, and not rigid enough to sustain essentialist models that link ownership of English to a particular racially or ethnically imagined group. Language mixing and hybridity also become common features of language use, as English comes to be reshaped by a wider range of semiotic resources that become available to speakers through global media and transnational networks. Such changing conditions mean that building a critique of global English becomes an increasingly challenging task, as it needs to address issues of power that have become even more nebulous and immanent, and incorporate the greatly transformed contexts for language use in the new economy. While many of the scholars who engaged in a critique of global English were motivated by these rapid transformations in the condition of globalization, it is also true that developing such a critique has become more difficult, given the more obvious complexity that we must address in that process.

This book is an attempt to look back on the accumulated work on global English in order to advance a new framework for thinking about the problems of English in this increasingly complex global world. Our main point of contention is that a new framework for the critique of global English must be built upon a theory of value. The reason we make this claim is not only because, in the new economy, one of the most powerful bases for the hegemony of global English is the discourse of commodification that attributes economic value to English. It is also because an orientation to value can help us understand how English comes to be valued in the first place—that is, the specific material, discursive, and ideological processes that make English what it is today. Such an orientation also allows us to move beyond the domain of language itself, and to develop a more systematic way of thinking about how the problem of global English is rooted in other (nonlinguistic) aspects of social life—not only economic, but also political, cultural, and psychological dimensions of the way we live in the global world—which we see is a necessary and inevitable direction towards which a critique of global English must progress in our age of intensified globalization. Only when we have a full grasp of this process may we come to a cogent critique of global English, one that can stay relevant and powerful so that we may continue to address, in the rapidly changing conditions of the new economy, the problems of reproduction of inequalities, and come closer to devising ways of intervening in this process through progressive policy.

For this purpose, we draw upon the recent theoretical developments in the field of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology as a primary tool for this task. In particular, we advocate throughout this book a market-theoretic perspective. By a market-theoretic perspective we mean an analytic stance towards language that focuses on the ideologies and practices that shape and negotiate the value of language varieties as they are perceived in social context. The most obvious key work here is that of Pierre Bourdieu and his notion of the linguistic market. But we also rely on more recent developments in the field of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, which we believe allows us to bring deeper nuance to Bourdieu’s grand theory and to apply it to the material conditions of globalization that are rapidly transforming the world around us. The theoretical components that make up the framework we present in this book are thus not our inventions and are not new in themselves. However, the study of global English, as a field most actively explored by scholars working in the areas of applied linguistics and language learning, has been slow to consider what we may learn from these approaches. Conversely, socio-linguists and linguistic anthropologists have not shown much interest in applying their theoretical apparatus to the question of global English. It is unfortunate that the resulting lacuna is precisely an area where the intellectual and political engagement of scholars of language (whether coming from the discipline of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, or social theory) could make a big difference. As we argued above, the question of English is a major issue in our global world, a site of many inequalities and a structure that buttresses many relations of power. This book is a call to transform the study of global English by proposing a new framework for analysis and engagement.

ORGANIZATION OF THIS BOOK

This book is organized into four parts. Part I of this book sets up the goals and theoretical preliminaries of our project. This chapter introduced our main goal: to develop a new critique of global English that can address the complexities of English in the age of globalization and help us generate meaningful policy implications. Chapter 2 explains in greater detail the complexity of the phenomenon of global English, and outlines the challenges it provides to a development of such a critique. Chapter 3 outlines the theoretical foundation that guides our attempt to develop a critique of global English—Bourdieu’s framework of the linguistic market—as well as resources from recent sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological research that can help us highlight the practice-based implications of Bourdieu’s theory in our own analysis.

Part II uses the market-theoretical perspective to look back critically at some of the most influential approaches that have been proposed as a critique of global English, in order to establish the new directions in which our new perspective can contribute most effectively. In Chapter 4, we look at the research on English as a lingua franca (ELF), in particular what we will call the ELF research project, associated primarily with the work of Jennifer Jenkins and Barbara Seidlhofer. In Chapter 5, we turn to the highly influential framework of World Englishes, considering the ideological implications of Braj Kachru’s Three Circles model of World Englishes. In Chapter 6, we consider Alastair Pennycook’s work on rap and hip-hop, which applies the notion of performativity to the analysis of English in global popular culture. Through these chapters, we illustrate how a market-theoretical perspective can complement the limitations of these approaches, and suggest ways in which they can be further developed.

Part III, building up on the insights gained through Part II, provides an outline of the material, discursive, and semiotic processes through which global English emerges, with the hope that a clearer analysis of these processes can help us identify points of critique and intervention. Chapter 7 identifies the first step, the language-ideological processes through which English is divorced from its nature as practice and constructed as an abstract, bounded entity, which makes it relevant to ideas such ownership and native speakerhood. Chapter 8 then turns to how this bounded entity of English is transformed into a commodity with value, an economic resource that can be exchanged for profit in the market, through interdiscursive processes that link English with images of personhood that enrich its indexical meaning. Chapter 9 discusses English as capital—how English comes to be seen as commensurable across different markets through ideological construction of neutrality, thus finally having a global scope—and considers this process in terms of capital conversion across markets.

Part IV summarizes the discussion so far and identifies particular points of intervention through language policy and critical engagement. Chapter 10 outlines possible policy responses derivable from the observations and insights from earlier chapters, focusing on the domain of education and practices that emphasize critical and collaborative reflection on identity and language use. Chapter 11 closes our book by summarizing the key implications our discussion has for any future efforts to further the critique of global English.

2	The Challenge
	The Complexity of Global English

THE COMPLEX CONDITIONS OF GLOBAL ENGLISH

Our effort to assemble a market-theoretical perspective on global English is motivated by the need to be able to address the wide range of phenomena that relate to the English language which we see throughout the globalizing world. A framework for understanding global English must have the general capacity to talk about diverse aspects and complexities of the problem of global English, ranging from postcolonial politics to educational and economic equality; from class relations in employment and migration to hybridity and language mixing; from practices of language teaching to discourses of neoliberalism. This challenge not only calls for a theoretical perspective with a sophisticated understanding of language, community, identity, and power, but also for a more unified vision that can speak to all these issues under a coherent framework: how speakers understand the meaning of English and negotiate the value of the language in broader social context. The range of issues involved here are so vast that it is impossible to present a comprehensive picture of the complexity of global English; the best we can do is perhaps to offer a series of snapshots of the difficult questions the condition of English brings about.

Let us take, for example, a case which appears to be a classical illustration of the tension between postcolonial resistance towards English and pragmatic pursuit of English. In the Indian state of Karnataka, native speakers of Kannada make up about 70% of its 60 million people. Despite a 1994 court ruling that prescribed Kannada as the primary language of instruction in elementary schools, a number of schools have continued using English instead. Frustration with this ongoing violation of the court ruling has led pro-Kannada groups, a powerful and vocal minority, to compel the state to start enforcing the 1994 ruling. ‘The mother tongue is the right of the child, not the choice of the parents,’ said a supporter of indigenous-language schools. ‘We do provide for teaching English … after 2 or 3 years of primary education.’¹ Amid this surge of activism promoting indigenous languages across India, the state announced that any campus established in the past 12 years must teach in the local tongue, Kannada, or shut its doors. As a result, schools in Karnataka have recently been threatened with closure for making English their chosen classroom language. However, the government’s crackdown on the use of English has in turn triggered protests from educators concerned about academic freedom, parents who see English as important to their children’s future success, and business leaders who warn that the competitive edge of Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka, could be affected. Supporters of Kannada, though, see this as a way of cleansing Bangalore of its colonial past.

In this case, we might want to analyze this situation as a clash between postcolonial linguistic nationalism and economically driven pursuit of English, particularly given the highly politicized nature of lobbying from both sides. However, we must also ask: where do these politicized stances come from? Are they simply reflections of the particular social positions of those people who make up each side of the debate—for instance, their class position? Or are these politicized stances linked in some way with the broader role English has played in Indian society, and throughout the world? These are important questions we must answer, questions that require us to move beyond a dichotomous view of political action that we might be tempted to adopt when observing the Karnataka case. What we need here is a deeper understanding of the respective values of English and Kannada—not only the economic, but also cultural and political values—and how they are formulated through speakers’ everyday practices.

Similar issues may be seen in cases involving debates over social inequalities reproduced through limited access to English. Due to the growing recognition that English is a key to the global economy, in many societies, knowledge of English is considered critical for continued progress upstream in the education system or access to better-paying jobs. This serves as an important sou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Part I The Problem of Global English
• Part II Past Approaches to Global English
• Part III The Making of Global English
• Part IV Interrupting Global English
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index