The Globalisation of English
One of the most momentous developments in human affairs in recent decades has been the unprecedented, unexpected, and (for many) unwelcome globalisation of the English language. This process commenced in the early seventeenth century with the establishment of British settlements in North America and trading stations in India, and was remarked upon with increasing degrees of fascination and satisfaction in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries 1 ; but it is only in the past 30 years that English has become the unrivalled and perhaps unassailable global lingua franca, as indeed may be gathered from its status as the sole âhypercentral languageâ in De Swaanâs (2001) global language system and from its characterisation as âGlobishâ (McCrum, 2010) and the âlast lingua francaâ (Ostler, 2010) in recent accounts of its evolution from tribal to global tongue. The transformation in the number and nature of the languageâs users and the contexts and characteristics of its uses has inevitably raised a myriad of practical and theoretical issues, particularly for individuals and institutions in the domains of education, business, and international relations. In the past three decades, these issues have been the subjects of steadily intensifying research and debate in the language sciences as well as in disciplines such as economics and business which have traditionally eschewed the study of language questions. Scholarly interest in these issues has been manifested in the establishment of major journals, associations, and conferences dedicated to the study and use of English worldwide; the compilation of handbooks (Kirkpatrick, 2010), overviews (Galloway & Rose, 2015), reference works (Mesthrie, 2008), and corpora (Davies & Fuchs, 2015) to assist students and researchers in their academic endeavours; and, not least, the publication of numerous monographs (Northrup, 2013; Saraceni, 2015; Seargeant, 2012) and edited volumes (Collins, 2015; Green & Meyer, 2014; Hickey, 2012) exploring this complex, multi-faceted phenomenon from a range of theoretical, methodological, and geographical perspectives.
A significant strand of this voluminous literature has examined the history, features, and sociolinguistics of English in particular societal or regional settings. Much of this research has centred on the former settlement colonies of North America and Australasia, where English has traditionally been acquired and used as a native language (ENL) and where a well-established academic infrastructure has offered scope for the diachronic and synchronic study of the varieties that have evolved in different places and among different people over the generations. These investigations have yielded substantial bodies of work on the English language in Canada (Boberg, 2010), Australia (Damousi, 2010), New Zealand (Hay, Maclagan, & Gordon, 2008), and, particularly, the USA (Amberg & Vause, 2009), whose variety was the first of the colonial Englishes to be described and accepted (Mencken, 1936; Pickering, 1816; Webster, 1828) and, in consequence of its homelandâs power and prestige in the twentieth century, now stands at the apex of the global English order (Mair, 2013). This long-standing line of research has also contributed to the production of authoritative dictionaries (the sine qua non of codification) and other reference works on the now-autonomous varieties of the language in Canada (Avis, 1967), Australia (Ramson, 1988), and New Zealand (Orsman, 1997).
In recent decades, this strand of research has broadened to encompass post-colonial contexts in Asia and Africa, where English is typically acquired as a second language (ESL) in the education system or via informal contact or a mixture of the two and, as befits its official status, plays a leading or supporting role in the major institutions of government and in the upper echelons of the business and professional worlds. The indigenised varieties that have evolved in these former trade or exploitation colonies since the Victorian era have been the subjects of considerable empirical research in the past three decades, much of it inspired or framed by Kachruâs (1985) influential world Englishes paradigm. These investigations have generated an ever-growing array of monographs exploring the features and sociolinguistics of these varieties as well as innumerable articles in journals such as English World-Wide, World Englishes, and English Today. The monograph-based literature includes studies of English in contexts in South Asia, such as India (Sailaja, 2009) and Sri Lanka (Bernaisch, 2015); South East Asia, such as the Philippines (Bautista & Bolton, 2008), Malaysia (Rahim & Manan, 2014), and Singapore (Leimgruber, 2013); sub-Saharan Africa, such as Kenya (Budohoska, 2014) and Nigeria (Banjo, 1996); and some of Britainâs former insular possessions in the Caribbean (Deuber, 2014), the Mediterranean (Buschfeld, 2013), and the Pacific (Biewer, 2015) as well as a remote imperial remnant in the Atlantic (Schreier, 2008). This book examines the English language in another of Britainâs erstwhile insular possessions: the one-time Crown colony of Hong Kong (1842â1997) and now Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the Peopleâs Republic of China.
The study seeks to traverse two conspicuous gaps in the literature on English in post-colonial ESL contexts or, as will presently be discussed, settings in the Outer Circle of Kachruâs (1985) seminal Three Circles of English model. First, these accounts tend to focus on the linguistic features of the variety in question rather thanâexcept at a high level of generalityâon its uses and users. Such studies typically provide meticulous descriptions of the varietyâs lexical, grammatical, or phonological features, but generally lack empirical evidence of its institutional roles vis-Ă -vis the principal indigenous language(s) or baseline data on the range and depth of the societyâs English-using community. Indeed, in his landmark paper, Kachru (1985) stressed the importance of compiling sociolinguistic profiles of English in the three circles, including studies of âthe composition of English-using speech fellowshipsâ (p. 25). Three decades later, there is still a dearth of accurate, up-to-date information of this nature on many post-colonial societies. A prime example in this respect is India, a quintessential Outer Circle context, where, according to Graddol (2010), âthere is no credible estimate of how many Indians actually know Englishâ (p. 66) and where there is little hard evidence, in the shape of survey results, case studies, and enrolment statistics (inter alia), of its precise functions in the domains of government, education, and business.
Second, most studies of English in the Outer Circle understandably document and analyse the contemporary characteristics of the variety under investigation, in many cases using specially compiled corpora such as the International Corpus of English. Similarly, those studies that preface their linguistic analyses with an account of the varietyâs uses and users quite reasonably concentrate on modern-day developments, and if the historical landscape is depicted at all, it tends to be captured in brisk and broad brushstrokes using an assortment of secondary sources rather than primary data derived from archival research. One reason for the paucity of detailed historical research on Outer Circle contexts and varieties has been the general unavailability of diachronic corpora (NoĂ«l, van Rooy, & van der Auwera, 2014). To date, corpus-based research in this area has centred on ENL (or Inner Circle) settings such as Australia (Collins, 2014) and New Zealand (Macalister, 2006). The dearth of diachronic data on Outer Circle Englishes has impeded attempts to test the second major framework to emerge in the field of world Englishes in the past 30 years: Schneiderâs (2007) Dynamic Model of the evolution of post-colonial Englishes (PCE). Like Kachruâs (1985) Three Circles of English, the Dynamic Model forms an important part of the theoretical background to the present study, and thus before we narrow our focus to Hong Kong, it is necessary to outline the key characteristics of these two groundbreaking theories.
Models and Theories
The transformation of English from an important, though hardly paramount, international language in the aftermath of the Second World War into the pre-eminent global language during the current, accelerated phase of globalisation has inspired scholars to develop a multitude of models and theories to try to describe, represent, or explain this vast, complex phenomenon. The majority of these frameworks have been synchronic categorisations of contexts, varieties, and users, in most cases employing the nation-state as their principal conceptual base. These include Strevensâ (1980) map-and-branch family tree of English, McArthurâs (1987) wheel of world English, as well as the earliest and perhaps best-known framework, the classification of states and students into English as a native language (ENL), second language (ESL), and foreign language (EFL). The latter category (EFL), which essentially corresponds to Kachruâs (1985) Expanding Circle, refe...