27.764, Review: Anthropological Ling; Historical Ling; Socioling: Saraceni (2015)

Tue Feb 9 21:56:49 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-764. Tue Feb 09 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.764, Review: Anthropological Ling; Historical Ling; Socioling: Saraceni (2015)

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Date: Tue, 09 Feb 2016 16:56:13
From: Emilia Slavova [eslavova at gmail.com]
Subject: World Englishes

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-1449.html

AUTHOR: Mario  Saraceni
TITLE: World Englishes
SUBTITLE: A Critical Analysis
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Emilia Kirilova Slavova, University of Sofia

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

INTRODUCTION

World Englishes: A Critical Analysis by Mario Saraceni is an illuminating,
thought-provoking and very readable book on a topic that has become highly
relevant in recent years in language studies and language teaching: the
multitude of Englishes spoken around the world, the subversive nature of world
Englishes as opposed to a monolithic, standard, ‘native’ version of English;
and the implications for learners of English around the globe. 

The book is organized into an Introduction and four parts, exploring World
Englishes (WE) from four different perspectives: History, Language, Ideology,
and Pedagogy. The four parts are further divided into short, well focused
sections and subsections, and take the reader through a journey of exploration
of a fascinating linguistic topic. The book does not rely on the analysis of a
substantial linguistic corpus; instead, the four parts give an extensive
summary and critical evaluation of research conducted in each area, with some
illuminating examples from various sources to prove the author’s points and
clearly articulated positions on each topic.

SUMMARY

The Introduction presents the aims of the book and contextualizes the main
theme within previous research on World Englishes, tracing the way the
research paradigm has developed in recent decades to reflect how the
understanding of language in general, and of the English language in
particular, has changed. This calls for a different approach to language,
which sees “boundaries – between languages, sexes, nationalities, rules” – as
only existing in the mind and challenging to be trespassed (p. xi). The
fluidity and hybridity of languages is further highlighted by the statement
that “Languages don’t exist alongside each other, but merge, blend, mesh,
coalesce into a symbiosis where traditional labels struggle to find a place.”
(p. xi).  

Starting as a revolutionary, anti-establishment, paradigm-shifting philosophy
which developed in the 1980s to challenge traditional monolithic ideas about
the English language, the research field of WE has been superseded by other
theories and is in need of updating and revamping, Saraceni claims, in order
to restore its initial subversiveness and vigor. Saraceni makes a somewhat
(admittedly) simplified distinction between two major views of language:
language-as-system (or langue, in Saussure’s langue/parole distinction) and
language-as-social-practice, taken in its socio-cultural context (after
Halliday, 1978). His approach to language, clearly pronounced and maintained
throughout the volume, sides with the latter. It sees language as being in a
state of perpetual flux, contextually negotiated, integrated within social
action, and tied to individual situations rather than to a particular
community with clearly delineated borders (p. 15). 

PART ONE. HISTORY is divided into Old Englishes and New Englishes, each taking
a historical approach to the English language in its many varieties and forms.
After analysing popular metaphorical representations of the development of
English (English as a moveable physical object; English as a living organism;
English as part of a family tree, and so on), Mario Saraceni questions the
ideological baggage of each of those metaphors. The linguonym ‘Old English’ is
also put to the test (p. 25): on what grounds, the author asks, is the use of
the name English justified regarding a language that has very little in common
with 21st-century English? To what extent can we talk of a single language,
‘Old English’, in the absence of strong processes of linguistic
standardization? A number of examples from ancient texts show substantial
code-switching, language mixing and hybridity (p. 25). Instead of the
mainstream narrative of the continuous development of English through time,
Saraceni offers an alternative story and demonstrates how ‘Old English’ is
ideologically constructed in order to suggest continuity and historicity at a
particular period in British history, namely, the nineteenth century. This
alternative narrative challenges the concept of Old English as a monolithic,
homogeneous entity which gradually morphs into present-day English, and offers
instead a story in which history and linguistics merge with ideology in the
creation of ‘a language’. 

The next chapter looks at New Englishes. They are first contextualized within
two types of colonization: settler colonization and exploitation colonization.
As a result of the first, local languages (and people) are displaced, and we
have several varieties of English considered native and used in (almost) all
social domains in the countries in the Inner Circle, in Kachru’s terms (Kachru
1983). In the second type of colonization, local languages survive, but are
often demoted to lower status compared to English. These are the Outer Circle
countries, where English is often a (co-)official language with unequal
distribution across the population. In addition, there are the Expanding
Circle countries, where English is spoken mostly as a lingua franca – a shared
means of communication between non-native speakers. In exploring the
‘prehistory’ of World Englishes, Saraceni observes that probably the first
recorded appearance of the term in the plural dates back to 1910 with
reference to American English. Concerns voiced today, about whether WE
adulterate or enrich the English language, were expressed with reference to
American English a century ago. The next section looks at postcolonial writers
and their efforts to decolonize the English language, to claim ownership and
change it in ways that reflect their own individuality and culture. “The price
a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds
of use,” world-famous Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe is quoted as saying (p.
65). The post-colonial writers’ perspective offers an enlightening enmeshing
between literary writing and linguistics and outlines the intellectual
background against which WE theory came into being. 

PART TWO. LANGUAGE is divided into two chapters. The first one, Understanding
World Englishes, gives a very useful overview of the development of the field
of WE since the 1970s, while contextualizing it within earlier writing on the
topic. The origin of the field is identified to be in 1976, with an article by
Braj Kachru in the TESOL Quarterly (Kachru 1976). While similar ideas could be
heard previously (e.g. Halliday et al. 1964), they were met with fierce
criticism and described as ‘heresy’ (Prator 1968). Quirk (1985, 1990) is
another influential voice in favour of keeping English as uniform as possible
so as to facilitate international communication. This now ‘classic’ debate
about world Englishes may be a debate about singularity and plurality on the
surface, Saraceni claims, but essentially, it is a debate about (in-)equality
(p. 77). Next Saraceni explores the difficulty in reconciling the idea of
different Englishes with that of equal Englishes. How different is a variety
allowed to be in order to be considered a variety of English and not another
language altogether? When is a departure seen as ‘error’ and when is it a
‘feature’ of one of the many varieties of English? An example with Singaporean
English further clarifies the question posed and point made. Challenging a
concept such as ‘Singaporean English’, Mario Saraceni discusses the wide
variety of Englishes within this broad term and explores some old and new
models for accounting for those differences: the continuum, diglossia and
poliglossia models (the old ones); and the cultural orientation and
indexicality models (the new ones, accounting for more complex types of
variation and assigning a greater role to individual choice, pp. 84-85). In
questioning the treatment of varieties as departures from British or American
English, Saraceni is critical of the procedure which he calls the ‘spot the
difference’ approach, typical of much WE research which focuses on the
differences between new Englishes and English as a native language (ENL) and
proposes a new approach, dealt with in the following chapter. 

The chapter, aptly called Untidying Englishes, is a bold attempt to disconnect
WE from Standard English (SE) by “cutting the umbilical cord with the
ancestral home” (p. 108), offering a radical switch from a view of language as
a closed system with pre-fixed boundaries to a view of language as social
practice, as drawing from a range of shared linguistic repertoires (p. 117).
This shift in perspective makes popular sociolinguistic concepts such a
code-switching and borrowing seem inadequate, and names of language varieties
such as ‘Thai English’ even more so, as they presuppose homogeneity and
boundedness. Exploring the notion of hybridity, Saraceni draws on Otsui and
Pennycook (2013) to make a point that it is not that languages exist in
isolation and become hybrid as they come in contact with each other, but
rather the other way round: hybridity is the default state, while the
separation and boundedness of languages is emergent and the result of human
effort at categorization and uniformity (p. 123). Thus, the traditional view
of the existence of distinct varieties of WE is seen as essentialist, assuming
clearly defined national frames; it is consistent with the 18th and 19th
century nation-state ideology which also inspired the new discipline of
linguistics at the time (p. 127). So, Saraceni maintains, in order to make a
radical reconceptualization of dated paradigms, a World Englishes philosophy
needs to acknowledge the fact that “monolingualism and language purism are
political products of European nationalism and are ideologically very close to
concepts of racial purity,” while also taking into account “forms of
hybridity, translanguaging, metrolingualism and truncated repertoires
resulting from global cultural flows, mobility and super-diversity in the
twenty-first century” (p. 129). 

PART THREE. IDEOLOGY consists of a single chapter, dealing with the
influential theory of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992), which
highlights the direct link between the spread of the English language and
British imperialism, recently replaced by American imperialism and its global
spread through international trade, popular culture and technology. Saraceni
remains skeptical about the stronger claims of the theory and provides an
overview of the most popular responses to it: the ‘agency’ response; the
‘linguistic determinism’ response; and the ‘appropriation’ response. Posing
the question “Who owns English?” Saraceni challenges another metaphor of
language, that of ‘language is property.’ The ownership and appropriation of
English, he contends, and the right to subvert its rules, are in the hands of
speakers of English, rather than professional linguists. He then comes up with
the notion of ‘open-source English’ in which, similar to the development of
software, a language can be treated as property of the developer, but it can
also be developed collaboratively and made publicly available, encouraging
people to freely modify the code. And the place where this open-source concept
can be fostered, the location where the English language can finally be
uncoupled from England in the minds of the learners is, undoubtedly,
education. This is the topic of the next, final part of the book. 

PART FOUR. PEDAGOGY discusses the teaching of World Englishes, and also serves
as a conclusion to the whole book by outlining the applications of the study
of World Englishes in the area of English language teaching. The part seeks to
answer the following questions, taking into consideration the new ideas
developed about WE in recent decades and the pluralization of English into
Englishes: 
 Which models of English should be taught? 
Who should be teaching English? 
What is the role of culture in English language teaching and how can we avoid
the dangers of cultural and linguistic imperialism? 

After discussing two particular sociolinguistic and pedagogical landscapes, of
Singapore and Malaysia, Saraceni demonstrates that in spite of decades of
research into WE and sociolinguistic interest in local varieties, educational
authorities are still interested in promoting a variety based on the
Anglo-American standard. This leads to a preference for ‘native’ speakers to
the disadvantage of local teachers and is seen as detrimental to the ELT
profession. Moreover, ‘nativeness’ often correlates with ‘whiteness.’ In a
section on (non)native speakers, Saraceni sums up a number of questions
challenging the myth of the linguistic superiority of the ‘native’ speaker – a
myth which creates very real discrimination in the ELT job market. To counter
these negative effects, Mario Saraceni draws on Kachru’s (1992) suggestions:
providing students with a sociolingistic awareness about the world context of
English, its major varieties and its users and uses in monolingual and
multilingual societies; exposure to the repertoire of major varieties of
English; focusing on the teaching of one specific variety but developing
attitudinal neutrality and awareness of the functional validity of other
varieties; exploring the functional appropriateness of varieties within a
single variety of English; exploring the pragmatic conventions, discoursal and
stylistic innovations and multidimensionality of functions in various
linguistic contexts. In other words, as Saraceni sums it up, there should be
less emphasis on ‘models’ of English and the need to codify them, and more
focus on attitude and awareness. 

EVALUATION

World Englishes: a Critical Analysis is an intelligent, provocative and
original approach to a topic that has been widely explored in recent decades.
As clearly stated in the Introduction, Mario Saraceni sets out to update an
anti-establishment, revolutionary philosophy that has gone slightly out of
date and has been superseded by more recent theories; his ambition to offer a
fresh approach to World Englishes, taking into account the new sociolinguistic
realities that English has found itself in, is clearly observed throughout the
text. The book presents an overview of major writing in the area of WE and
related linguistic fields, delving into the interplay between history,
ideology, linguistic theory and foreign language pedagogy.  

One of the definite advantages of the book is its clear language, its lively
and engaging style of writing and the variety of illuminating examples which
illustrate the arguments of the author. While there is no robust and
homogeneous linguistic corpus on which the theoretical discussion rests, there
are multiple references to other studies and examples from contemporary online
communication, Old English texts and runic inscriptions, historical documents,
literary texts, graphic representations of word frequency change through time
and computer-generated word concordances. Some of the examples are extremely
recent, such as the 2014 Russian – Ukrainian conflict, or the March 2014
decision of Gambia to stop using ‘colonial relic’ English. 

This ‘recentness’ has its downsides, however: a number of minor typos
occurring throughout the text reveal that there was not much time left for
final editing and polishing. This may also (perhaps) be the reason for the
lack of a proper conclusion, which could have summed up and brought together
the ideas from the four parts. As it is, the book ends somewhat abruptly and
unexpectedly. However, the clear structure, the separate introductions and
conclusions to each of the four parts, as well as the keywords and Key Reading
section make it particularly well organized and easy to follow, and definitely
appropriate for students of linguistics and sociolinguistics. The ideas
explored would also be of interest to, and will hopefully reach, not only
researchers, but also language teachers, teacher trainers and policy makers.

In terms of the linguistic claims made, I find some of them to be slightly
stronger than I would be happy to embrace myself, but this provocative
approach is necessary in order to achieve the objectives set, namely, to offer
a subversive account of English and a critical analysis of linguistic
theories. In particular, I would argue with the strong form of the view that
language is a social practice and not a system; it can be both, and it largely
depends on whether we agree that ‘language’ is what people use in the street
to communicate, or what linguists have described in normative reference
sources. For years, linguists have focused on ‘langue’ and dismissed ‘parole’,
but there is no reason why we should reverse the fallacy and dismiss the
systematic aspect of language (which, although an abstraction, does have
material existence in the prescriptive, linguistic and language teaching
literature).    

Regarding the intention to disconnect World Englishes from Standard English,
it is evident from this critical analysis that it would be extremely difficult
to agree on an alternative variety to be shared by all speakers, native and
non-native. So this could also answer the question posed by ELF researchers
looking for shared features and trying to codify them into a single stable
variety. It is virtually impossible to agree on a single variety to suit all.
What we could do instead is keep using (some form of) Standard English as a
shared point of reference, while expanding our awareness about language and
its countless variations, its hybrid and unbounded nature, its resistance to
systematization and homogenization, and the fact that it is shared by all and
possessed by none. 

In conclusion, I would strongly recommend the book to anyone interested in the
English language and the wider context in which it functions--in modern
language teaching approaches, in critical pedagogy and in developing not only
knowledge and skills, but also an enlightened attitude towards the fascinating
and very complex phenomenon that we have agreed to call English.  

REFERENCES

Blommaert, J. 2010. A sociolinguistics of globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Halliday, M. A. K. 1978. Language as social semiotic: The social
interpretation of language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold.

Halliday, M. A. K. et al. 1964. The linguistic sciences and language teaching.
London: Longmans. 

Kachru, B. B. 1976. “Models of English for the third world: White man’s
linguistic burden or language pragmatics? TESOL Quarterly, 10(2), 221-239.

Kachru, B. B. 1983. Models of new Englishes. In J. Cobbarubias & J. A. Fishman
(Eds), Progress in language planning: International perspectives, 145-170.
Berlin: Mouton

Kachru, B. B. 1992. Teaching World Englishes. In B. B. Kachru (Ed.): The other
tongue: English across cultures (Second edn.,pp. 355-365). Champaign, IL:
University of Illinois Press. 

Otsui, E. and Pennycook, A. 2013. Unremarkable hybridities and metrolingual
practices. In R. Rubdy and A. Alsagoff (Eds), The global-local interface and
hybridity. (pp. 83-99). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. 

Phillipson, R. 1992. Linguistic imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Prator, C. H. 1968. The British heresy in TESL. In J. Fishman, C. Fergusson
and J. Das Gupta (Eds), Language problems of developing nations. (pp.
459-476). London: Wiley. 

Quirk, R. 1985. The English language in a global context. In R. Quirk and H.
G. Widdowson (Eds), English in the world: Teaching and learning the language
and literatures. (pp. 1-6). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  

Quirk, R. 1990. Language varieties and standard language. English Today 6(1),
3-10.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Emilia Slavova is a Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of
English and American Studies at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria. Her
doctoral dissertation is on politeness across cultures, with a specific focus
on English and Bulgarian. Research interests and courses taught include
English language and culture, sociolinguistics, politeness theories,
politeness in a cross-cultural and in a historical perspective, communication
skills, intercultural communication, critical discourse analysis, language and
cultural diversity, varieties of English, English as a lingua franca,
Multicultural London English.

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