33.2071, Review: English; Anthropological Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Onysko (2021)

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Subject: 33.2071, Review: English; Anthropological Linguistics; Sociolinguistics: Onysko (2021)

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Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2022 15:43:51
From: Marc Deneire [Marc.Deneire at univ-lorraine.fr]
Subject: Research Developments in World Englishes

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-2798.html

EDITOR: Alexander  Onysko
TITLE: Research Developments in World Englishes
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Marc Deneire, University of Lorraine

SUMMARY

In the introduction to this inaugural volume to a series on World Englishes,
titled “Where are WEs heading to?”, A. Onysko reminds us of Braj B. Kachru’s
initial project of “pluralizing English to emphasize an egalitarian approach
towards Englishes as fully emancipated and appropriated codes in their diverse
social and geographical localities around the world” (1). After a
comprehensive review of research in World Englishes (WE), he concludes with
Saraceni’s observation (2015) that this research might have fallen into an
impasse between micro and macro sociolinguistic approaches, and between a
focus on a multiplicity of individual contexts and users and a reifying
tendency to use categories such as identity, genre, ethnicity, etc.  

In Chapter 2, Mario Saraceni and Camille Jacob attempt to show the way out of
this impasse through “decolonizing (World) Englishes.” In a few pages that
summarize B. Kachru’s position and that could well have been written by Kachru
himself, they remind us of how the periphery managed to “write back” at the
center by nativizing English, using the examples of authors such as Chinua
Achebe and Raja Rao, and the scholarship of Edward Saïd and Salmon Rushdie
among others.  However, they argue, WEs still focus more often than not on
formal aspects of English and need to move to more socio-political and
ideological aspects, issues such as ownership, coloniality, economically-based
inequalities, and historically-rooted issues of power.  Therefore, they argue,
we need to decolonize WEs by: (1) demythologizing WEs, I.e., moving beyond
form to focus on cultural, economic, and sociopolitical contexts and
processes; (2) de-silencing them, that is, giving voice to their speakers,
including them in the research process as researchers rather than relegating
them to the role of mere informants; and (3) de-colonizing WEs, including in
education, by paying attention to local histories and contexts and
de-centering the inner circle itself.

In Chapter 3, titled “’The Communicative Event in international English(es) as
social practice: adducing a tricodal/trimodal theory of the linguistic
structuring of social meaning,” Allan James proposes a model that participates
in this decentering through a “practical theory of language” (3) that focuses
on specific, ever-changing situations characterized by hybridity and
translanguaging.  In line with Halliday’s social semiotic (1978), A. James’
analysis is not so much oriented toward the linguistic codal properties of
language, but rather to its role as a signaling resource on a par with other
semiotic resources present in verbal exchanges (29).  In his tricodal/trimodal
approach, James combines, on one hand, the linguistic/structural codes of
“dialect,” “register,” and “genre,” – based on Halliday’s concept of a dialect
as “a variety according to user,” and register as “a variety according to
use,” to which he adds the Bakhtin-based category of “genre,” defined as “a
variety according to using,” – and, on the other hand, the corresponding
social semiotic modes of “identification,” “representation,” and “action,”
which closely correspond to Foucault’s distinction between the “relation with
oneself,” the “relation of control over things,” and the “relation of action
over others” (31).  James admits that any text in reality exclusively
manifests a single code/mode combination, but argues that considerable
empirical evidence  attests that “these co-specifying functional-structural,
modal-codal dualities can be specified” (32).  He further elaborates on this
model in the second part of the chapter, and links it to the concept of
heteroglossia as a superordinate term covering situations of multilingualism
and multilectalism, involving more than one code, reflecting the
“glossodiversity” of the world and the “semiodiversity” in language use, and
illustrates these processes in the last part of the chapter.  

In Chapter 4, “Extending the scope of World Englishes interactions across
Englishes in post-protectorates and at the grassroots,” Christiane Meierkord
examines interactions in typically lingua franca contexts – that is, where
hardly anybody uses English as an L1 – and specifically those of the former
British protectorates, the League of Nation mandates, and the United Nation
trust territories.  Taking the examples of Uganda and the Maldives, she uses
the term “English(es) at the grassroots” to refer to “non-elitist” uses of
English, that is, those that are used outside the contexts of international
organizations, education, academia, and the business world” (57).  She argues
that these non-elitist uses have typically been excluded from WE research and
proposes a research agenda for their description and integration into
theorizing.

The next three chapters focus on the interaction of Englishes with other
languages in specific areas and/or countries. In Chapter 5, “Contact, Asia,
and the rethinking of Englishes in multilingual ecologies,” Lisa Lim and
Umberto Ansaldo offer an account of the contact between Englishes and
substrate languages in several non-settler Asian exploitation colonies
(Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, etc.). By closely examining the historical,
typological and sociolinguistic contexts within different multilingual and
ecologies, and drawing parallels with other contact scenarios and approaches
(e.g., creoles, translanguaging), they show how the dynamics and outcomes in
WEs align with more general patterns of language contact and evolution.

In Chapter 6, “Multilingualism and the role of English in the United Arab
Emirates, with views from Singapore and Hong Kong”, Peter Siemund, Ahmad
Al-Issa, Sharareh Rahbari and Jakob R.E. Leimgruber draw a broad
sociolinguistic profile of the UAEs, a particular environment because of its
recent international development starting in the 1960’s, its promotion of
English in a diglossic Arabic-English context, and the presence of a large
multilingual community, mainly from South Asia.  The author’s attitude survey
shows that most respondents feel confident and secure using English, but also
that Arabic remains strong as a marker of identity. The second part of the
chapter focuses on Singapore and Hong Kong, which allows the authors to
contrast two environments in terms of language policy and language shift. 
They conclude that the UAE, and Dubai in particular, are more likely to follow
the Singapore route, and, arguably, that it is in the process of moving from
the expanding circle to the outer circle.  

In Chapter 7, “The history of English language attitudes within the
multilingual ecology of South Africa,” Susan Coetzee-Van Rooy and Bertus Van
Rooy choose  to adopt an historical perspective to show why South Africa
remains attached to English in spite of the strong promotion of multilingual
policies for education.  Their analysis of 19th and 20th fiction and
non-fiction literature shows that positive attitudes towards English developed
because of differences in colonial policies by English authorities compared
with those of the Afrikaners who gradually deprived the South-African elite of
their ability to earn property and to participate in the political process. 
Black South Africans developed positive attitudes towards the language and all
“things English” such as social attitudes and other aspects of English
culture.  The authors conclude that issues of political freedom, economic
opportunity, and the desire for a better education far outweigh the love of
language itself.  In the context of South Africa, the attitudes towards
ruthless Afrikaners, who took steps to limit the access to English, only
resulted in making that language more desirable.

In her chapter (8), titled “Transnational dialect contact and language
variation and change in World Englishes,” Rebecca Lurie Starr examines WEs
through the lens of language variation and change.  She makes three
observations based on the analysis of transnational dialect contact: (1)
exonormativity: she notes that British English often remains the favored norm,
even in societies with well-established local norms; (2) in a section on
mobility, she notes that L2 learners and users strongly orient towards what
they perceive to be the standard variety, avoiding acquisition of regional and
non-standard varieties, especially in the context of short-term exchanges. On
the other hand, contexts of migration, such as the Gulf States, offer a
fertile ground for the creation of new contact varieties and innovations; and
(3) she examines the effects of local and international media consumption on
WEs trough the lens of traditional and social media.  She observes that WE
speakers are drawing upon features they encounter and appropriate them to
index social meanings within their own environment and to express their own
identity.  

David Crystal starts his chapter, “’I don’t get it’: Researching the cultural
lexicon of Global Englishes,” (Chapter 9) with four utterances that are
completely incomprehensible to English speakers without proper encyclopedic
knowledge.  Thus, he argues, we need a large variety of “cultural lexicons”
that address “culture-specific vocabulary.” Further, he points to cultural
metaphors that need to be elicited in intercultural communication and when
addressing larger audiences.  He concludes that nativized vocabulary and
expressions should not be considered negatively as mother tongue interference,
as is still often the case, but rather positively as cultural-lexical
appropriation by competent non-native users.  

In a refreshing chapter on “Colonial cultural conceptualizations and World
Englishes,” Frank Polzenhagen, Anna Finzel, and Hans-Georg Wolf explore texts
written during the colonial period in India and sub-Saharan Africa from a
cognitive-social and cognitive-sociolinguistic perspective.  They show how,
through metaphoric construction, authors contributed to the construction of
the colonizers and the colonized, a process of othering using opposing
concepts such as US vs THEM, UP vs DOWN, AHEAD vs BEHIND, and PARENT vs CHILD.
 They demonstrate how certain aspects of African society and social
organization were reconstructed as “disturbing” and “downright primitive”
through cultural engineering, giving specific interpretations of homosexuality
and witchcraft.  In their conclusion, they argue that this whole process may
have influenced conceptualizations found in African and Indian Englishes, but
that this influence has not been a one-way street, as some of the colonized
materials have found their way into the common core of English.

In Chapter 11, “Individual lives in collectivist faces: On social norms in a
radio show,” Eric A. Anchimbe explains how individual and group face is
negotiated in a collectivist society such as Cameroon.  Within his framework
of postcolonial pragmatics, he analyses verbal interactions between a radio
show host and young mothers and shows how a number of components such as age,
kinship roles, social norms and respect guide speakers’ choices as they
navigate through the complex web of social norms and expectations.

In a Chapter (12) on “Teaching (about) World Englishes and English as a Lingua
Franca,” Andy Kirkpatrick comes to the conclusion that such teaching efforts
have had limited effects on student perceptions in University and teacher
education/training contexts, and practically no effect on the teaching of
English itself. Scholars have amply demonstrated that what Braj Kachru called
“six fallacies” concerning English Language Teaching are indeed “wrong,” but
this research has had, at the end of the day, little or no impact on learners’
perceptions.

In the closing chapter of the volume, “Documenting World Englishes in the
Oxford English Dictionary: Past perspectives, present developments, and future
directions,” Danica Salazar, the World English Editor for Oxford Languages
explains how, from the onset, the OED has been concerned with the inclusion of
dialectal words, slang, and foreign words.  She details today’s strategies and
procedures that allow for a multi-local approach to data collection and
selection in a collegial and dynamic way.  The last part of her chapter
focuses on the technical developments that make the on-line dictionary
user-friendly for linguistic and World Englishes researchers and allows them
to be included in the project. 

EVALUATION

This first volume contributes a great deal to getting out of the impasse in
which some authors argue the WE paradigm has been locked in recent years,
between form and function on the one hand, and social and historical
approaches on the other (see for example Chapters 2, 5, 7, and 10).  Other
chapters contribute to shifting to everyday language use (Chapters 3 and 8)
and to Englishes “at the grassroots” (Chapter 4). Finally, Chapter 12
highlights the difficulty many of us have conveying these innovative
approaches to our students.  Some chapters raise interesting questions, for
example, the latter chapter (12) does not seem to adopt the traditional
distinction between World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca.  In
Chapter 6, the authors make the now traditional argument that the UAE could
now be considered part of the Outer Circle based on the number of users.
However, considering, in Kachru’s words, that the difference between the three
circles is essentially a question of institutionalization (personal
communication), is it appropriate to move places like Dubai into the Outer
Circle?  Finally, in Chapter 2, the authors argue that we need to go beyond
the concept of appropriation through nativization by examining more closely
the social, economic, and political mechanisms operating in the post-colonial
world.  However, if we agree with this position, shared by B. Kachru himself
and by Susan and Bertus Van Rooy in this volume, that “English is not the
problem,” but rather what we do with it, it remains to be seen to what extent
in what way “English [remains] incrusted in the coloniality of knowledge” in
the words of Kabel, cited by the authors.  Volume 2 of this series, which
focuses on ideology, promises to further the discussion on these issues.  

REFERENCES

Saraceni, Mario. 2015. World Englishes: A Critical Analysis. London:
Bloomsbury.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Marc Deneire is presently Associate Professor of linguistics, sociolinguistics
and applied linguistics at the University of Lorraine, France. He obtained his
PhD in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education (SLATE) at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1994 under the direction of
Professor Braj B. Kachru.





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