Bloomsbury World Englishes Volume 2: Ideologies 9781350065871, 9781350065840, 9781350072022

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 5.1 5.2 13.1

Achieve Goal English Success Academy Jook Hair Salon Angel’s Hamburger Raciolinguistic categorical assimilation Vision for multilingual francas including ELF Organizational Axes for English at BNCC

13 14 15 20 93 94 221

TABLES 5.1 Self-rated English listening and speaking 12.1 Levels of context for the analysis of the discursive construction of language ideology 13.1 Oral skills for the ninth year 13.2 Reading skills for the sixth year 13.3 Intercultural skills for the ninth year

91 204 222 223 224

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Nathan John Albury holds a PhD in sociolinguistics from the Centre for Multilingualism in Society across the Lifespan at the University of Oslo and is a policy advisor at Leiden University. His research is oriented in the sociology of language and especially resides at the intersection of language, ethnopolitics and economic mobility. His work has surveyed the sociology of language in diverse political and sociolinguistic settings, including language revitalization in New Zealand, multilingualism and ethnic affairs in Malaysia, and urban multilingualism in Hong Kong. Usree Bhattacharya is Assistant Professor in the Language and Literacy Education Department, College of Education, UGA. She holds a PhD in Education from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research is inspired by questions of diversity, equity and access in multilingual educational contexts. The primary aim of her work is to illuminate the role of discourses, ideologies and everyday practices in the production and reproduction of hierarchical relations within educational systems. Motivated by her toddler daughter’s recent diagnosis of Rett Syndrome, one of her emerging areas of interest is exploring language and literacy socialization within the severe, complex and multi-disability context. Brook Bolander is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, at Monash University. She is a sociolinguist with major research interests in language and globalization, digital discourse and qualitative research methodology. Major publications include a monograph on Language and Power in Blogs (John Benjamins, 2013); and articles on language and transnationalism in Language in Society (2016), the International Journal of the Sociology of Language (2017) and Language Policy (2018). Eva Codó is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her critical ethnographic research is currently centred on the study of the sociolinguistics of EFL in Catalonia (Spain), with a particular focus on family language policy, and the search for and construction of spaces of language immersion. Her most recent publications can be found in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (2019, 2010), Language Policy (2018), Language and Intercultural Communication (2018) and International Journal of the Sociology of Language (2018). Jaya Dantas is Dean International in the Faculty of Health Sciences and Professor in the School of Public Health at Curtin University in Western Australia, where she leads a programme of research in refugee and migrant health. Her research interests focus on post-conflict adversity, resilience among refugee and migrant populations, health inequalities, and participatory research. Jaya has worked for thirty-four years in India, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Australia. She has been a Delegate to the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations since 2015.

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Peter De Costa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages and the Department of Teacher Education at Michigan State University. His research areas include emotions, identity, ideology and ethics in educational linguistics. He also studies social (in)justice issues. He is co-editor of TESOL Quarterly. Sender Dovchin is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Education, Curtin University. She is a Discovery Early Career Research Fellow of an Australian Research Council. Previously, she was an Associate Professor at the University of Aizu, Japan. She has authored numerous articles in international peer-reviewed journals. Her single-authored monograph Language, Media and Globalization in the Periphery was published in 2018 by Routledge. Her co-authored research monograph with Alastair Pennycook and Shaila Sultana, Popular Culture, Voice, and Linguistic Diversity: Young Adults On- and Offline, was published in 2017 by Palgrave-Macmillan. Curtis A. Green-Eneix is a doctoral student in the Second Language Studies programme at Michigan State University where he is currently the editorial assistant for TESOL Quarterly and a research assistant for the College of Education. Prior to joining the SLS programme, he earned his MA in TESOL at the University of Arizona and was awarded the status of McNair Scholar. His work has been featured in TESOL Journal and English Today. His research interests include teacher development, identity, power dynamics in the classroom, language policy and planning, as well as socioeconomic position and online education. Adrian Holliday is Professor of Applied Linguistics and Intercultural Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, where he supervises doctoral research in the critical sociology of English language education and intercultural communication. He worked in Syria and Egypt throughout the 1980s as a university curriculum developer. He has written about appropriate methodology, native-speakerism, qualitative research methods and intercultural communication. His 2011 book, Intercultural Communication & Ideology, Sage, sets out the basic theory of a non-essentialist, postmodern approach; and Understanding Intercultural Communication: Negotiating a Grammar of Culture (Routledge 2018) provides a detailed application of this theory to everyday life. Funie Hsu is an interdisciplinary scholar and Assistant Professor of American Studies at San José State University. One field of her work investigates the relationship between English language instruction and empire. Her first book, Instructions for (Erasing) Empire: English, Domestication, and U.S. Colonization in the Philippines, examines the manner in which English instruction facilitated the erasure of American occupation in the Philippines. Much of her work is informed by her prior experience as an elementary school teacher. Her scholarship on English language instruction and American empire has appeared in Educational Studies, CATESOL, and the L2 Journal. Christopher Jenks is a discourse analyst presently working in Denmark. He has also worked in the United States, England, South Korea and Hong Kong. Christopher specializes in the study of language in society and is particularly interested in the political and cultural implications of the global spread of English. His research interests include online communication, intercultural encounters, political discourse and identity construction. He is the editor and author of nine books. Ahmed Kabel is an Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco. His research interests include language

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and education policy, critical approaches to TESOL, the global politics of English, and the challenges of creating an equitable linguistic and cultural order. He holds a PhD in Applied Linguistics from Mohamed V University, Rabat. Ryuko Kubota is a Professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at University of British Columbia, Canada, where she teaches applied linguistics and teacher education. Her research draws on critical approaches to language education, focusing on race, gender, culture and language ideologies. Her work has been published in journals, such as Applied Linguistics, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Second Language Writing, TESOL Quarterly, and World Englishes, and in many edited books. She is a co-editor of Race, Culture, and Identities in Second Language Education: Exploring Critically Engaged Practice (Routledge 2009). Rachele Lawton is Professor of Academic English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, where she chairs the Academic Literacy and Languages Department and teaches academic ESOL courses. She has also taught ESL, college composition and graduate courses in TESOL at several universities in Maryland. Her main research interests are critical discourse studies, with an emphasis on ideology and language policy, second language reading and writing, and educational linguistics. Jerry Won Lee is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Irvine. His publications include a monograph on The Politics of Translingualism: After Englishes, coedited volumes on Translinguistics: Negotiating Innovation and Ordinariness and Korean Englishes in Transnational Contexts, along with co-edited special issues of World Englishes and the International Journal of Multilingualism. Wendy Li is an Assistant Professor at Nagoya University of Commerce and Business. Her research interests include language teacher identity, agency and emotions, ethics in applied linguistics, second language socialization, and multilingual and multimodal literacy practices. Her work is published in Language Teaching Research, English Today, and Language Teaching. Indika Liyanage is Associate Professor in TESOL at Deakin University, Australia. He is also an Honorary Professor at the Faculty of Education, Sichuan Normal University, and Researcher at the Research Centre for Multi-culture, Sichuan Province, People’s Republic of China. He has been an English language teacher educator and doctoral supervisor for many years. Ajit Mohanty is a former Professor and ICSSR National Fellow, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). He was a Fulbright Visiting Professor (Columbia University), Fulbright Senior Scholar (University of Wisconsin), Killam Scholar (University of Alberta) and a Visiting Professor in University of Western Ontario, Canada. His publications include The Multilingual Reality: Living with Languages (2019, Multilingual Matters, UK) and nine other books and over 185 papers. He is a fellow of the Association of Psychological Science, USA, and a fellow and past president of the National Academy of Psychology, India. Mohanty developed Mother Tongue–based Multilingual Education Policy for Nepal and Odisha (India).

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John P. O’Regan is Professor of Critical Applied Linguistics at UCL Institute of Education, University College London. John specializes in English as a global language, intercultural communication and critical discourse analysis, and has broad interests in political economy, critical social theory and colonial history. He has published widely in applied linguistics and cultural studies. His latest book is Global English and Political Economy (2021) in the Routledge Language, Society and Political Economy series. Rhonda Oliver is Professor of Education and Head of the School of Education, Curtin University, Western Australia. She has researched extensively about second language and dialect acquisition, especially in relation to child and adolescent language learners in schools and universities. Her more recent work includes studies within Australian Aboriginal education settings. Joseph Sung-Yul Park is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. His current research explores the subjective and ideological dimensions of language in the political economy, with a focus on English as a global language in the context of neoliberalism and transnationalism. He is the author of The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea (Mouton, 2009), Markets of English (with Lionel Wee, Routledge, 2012), and English, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Alastair Pennycook is Distinguished Professor of Language, Society and Education at the University of Technology Sydney and Research Professor at the MultiLing Centre at the University of Oslo. He is best known for his books on the global spread of English, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language (now a Routledge Linguistics Classic) and Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows (both winners of the BAAL Book Prize), as well as books on critical applied linguistics, posthumanism, popular culture and language diversity, metrolingualism, and most recently applied linguistics and the Global South. Hima Rawal is a doctoral candidate in Second Language Studies at Michigan State University. Her research interests include humanizing research and pedagogy in linguistically diverse educational settings, teacher/learner emotions and well-being, second language teacher professional development. In these areas she has published a number of co-authored papers in international journals. Rani Rubdy has served as Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, and as Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore. Her research explores the sociolinguistics of English as a global language, ideological dimensions of language-ineducation policies and linguistic landscapes. Her co-edited volumes include: English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles (Continuum 2006); Language as Commodity: Global Structures, Local Marketplace (Continuum 2008); The Global-Local Interface: Exploring Language and Identity (Multilingual Matters 2014); and Conflict, Exclusion and Dissent in the Linguistic Landscape (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). Paula Tatianne Carréra Szundy is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics in the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she teaches and supervises both undergraduate and graduate students. She was the president of the Association of Applied Linguistics of Brazil (ALAB) in two biennia: 2010–11 and 2016–

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17. Her research interests include English as an Additional Language, teacher education, literacy studies and language ideologies. Ruanni Tupas teaches sociolinguistics in education at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. He is sole editor of Unequal Englishes: The Politics of Englishes today (2015), and is co-editor of several volumes on the politics of language and multilingual education. The Linguistic Society of the Philippines has awarded him honorary lifetime membership for his contributions to Philippine language studies. Tony Walker is a Research Fellow in TESOL and LOTE in the School of Education, Deakin University, Australia. He worked in Australia as an English teacher and language teacher educator for many years and continues to publish in the field and to work with teacher educators in Asia as an international consultant on academic writing. Lionel Wee is a Provost’s Chair Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and Vice Dean of the Research Division (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) at the National University of Singapore. He sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics, English World-Wide, Sociolinguistic Studies and Multilingual Margins. His books include Language Without Rights (Oxford University Press, New York, 2011), The Language of Organizational Styling (Cambridge University Press, 2015) and The Singlish Controversy: Language, Culture and Identity in a Globalizing World (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

Introduction MARIO SARACENI, RANI RUBDY AND RUANNI TUPAS

The academic field of World Englishes (WE) was originally animated by the realization that the worldwide presence, roles and uses of English meant that traditional notions associated with the concept of a language were no longer adequate and needed radical reframing. This re-conceptualization concerned three broad areas. First of all, the idea that a language is naturally tied to a particular nation and territory is seriously challenged by a phenomenon whereby hundreds of millions of people use the same language across countries and continents, in different circumstances and in different forms. The fundamental shift that the WE paradigm introduced was the fact that English was best thought of in plural terms, namely as a conglomerate of distinct varieties, all with their own phonological, lexical and grammatical features, that developed principally in former British colonies. In an early theorization of this concept, Larry Smith noted: It is important to note that there is a single English language but many varieties. The language of the United States is American English. Certainly speakers of American English are identifiable by their pronunciation, intonation, stress, rhythm, and some vocabulary items but the language (the general orthography, lexicology, semantics, syntax—the grammar, if you will), is English. It is the same English that is spoken in Singapore, however; Singapore English speakers are also identifiable by their pronunciation, intonation, stress, rhythm, and some vocabulary items. (Smith 1976: 38) So the plural suffix in the term ‘Englishes’ refers precisely to this plurality of worldwide varieties of English. Secondly, the acknowledgement of the fact that English was not a monolithic entity had a direct consequence in terms of language teaching, and a number of questions arose. If English was not one but many, which variety was to be taught in the language classroom? Which cultural content was to be selected in the pedagogy of English as a foreign language? To what extent was one to ensure that learners knew about different varieties of English and different cultures? Braj Kachru (1992) addressed these issues, and the points he made nearly thirty years ago are still relevant today. In fact, one can say that the very roots of WE are set in discussions about the transformations that needed to occur in the pedagogy of English as an international language (Saraceni 2010: 30–41). Finally, the WE framework also contained a strong ideological dimension. The necessity to recognize the validity of varieties other than British and American English was very much a matter of equality, not just linguistic (all Englishes are equal) but also social (all speakers of English are equal). The pluralization of English cannot be described purely in terms of phonology, vocabulary or grammar. The use of English in countries such as India, Nigeria or Malaysia is not just marked by distinct linguistic features, but is implicated in complex issues of identity – national, social, ethnic – unequal distribution

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of wealth and availability of opportunities, migration, social and language rights and de-colonization. In the last fifty years, the world has become much more globalized. One manifestation of globalization is the increasingly hegemonic role of English as played out in some countries, where colonial imperialistic policies and practices continue to persist, or where the economic value of English as prime linguistic capital becomes a determinant of social mobility in a consumerist, utilitarian and instrumentally oriented neo-liberal world. In this scenario, although confronted with linguistic heterogeneity and diversity everywhere, monolithic and monolingual ideologies and practices prevail in the form of government directives, national and regional institutional mandates and authority-driven public opinion. Another manifestation of globalization is one which acknowledges the dynamics of highly transforming communities, triggered by transnational mobility, transmigration and deep diversity. Such communities are characterized by translingual and transidiomatic practices, opening up spaces for fluidity and hybridity of languages to thrive. This volume focuses on the ideological assumptions and conceptions, whether implicit or more overtly stated, that inform the beliefs, perceptions and understandings underlying scholarly and public discussions about the pluralization of English in a globalized world. Its primary aim is not only to deconstruct these dominant ideologies but also, where relevant, to consider ways in which their negative impact may be neutralized or even transformed to bring about a more just and equitable social order. These ideologies can be so pervasive and powerful as to become normalized into widely accepted common-sense notions. Often they are applied to devalue, marginalize, denigrate and demonize varieties of WE, or are used as a means to discriminate against certain linguistic groups. At other times, ideologies can work to exacerbate existing social and structural inequalities or create new ones. Even among scholars who study the pluralities and the pluralization of English, ideologies are frequently ignored or sidestepped, with implications for how Englishes are perceived and legitimized. The chapters in this volume explore the ways ideologies relating to the English language influence decisions related to language policy, language education as well as language attitudes and practices as they operate in particular contexts of communication across the globe. It its broadest sense, language ideologies are ideas about language, but it is these ideas, according to Woolard and Schieffelin (1994), which serve as the ‘mediating link between social structures and forms of talk’ (p. 55; see also Irvine and Gal 2009; Rosa and Burdick 2017). Therefore, these ideas are formed systems of beliefs about language which help govern how people speak, think, act and move in everyday life (Blommaert 2010; Rosa and Burdick 2017). They help explain why particular groups of people think of certain uses of language in particular ways because such thinking is linked with people’s identities, social standings and cultural affiliations. More importantly, they help explain what Eagleton (1991) refers to as the ‘legitimating’ power of particular groups of people in imposing their own version of reality which includes their preferred view of what counts as ‘good’, ‘correct’ or ‘standard’ view of language. Language ideologies, in other words, are people’s views about language which are invested with power to govern how people should live their lives using particular language(s), language varieties or accents (Lippi-Green 1997; Warriner 2016; Rosa and Burdick 2017). Thus, applied to the study of the globalization, localization and pluralization of English, a focus on ideologies alerts us to as many ideas or beliefs about English as there are varieties of the language (Pennycook 2008). “It is a pity,” according to Pennycook, Kubota and Morgan (2017: xiv), “that so much work has focused on putative varieties of

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English from a world Englishes perspective”, and less on how these varieties are themselves embedded in all forms of social inequalities and ideologies. In fact, constructions of the ‘pluralities’ (Jenkins et al. 2017; Seidlhofer 2005) and ‘translingual’ or ‘translanguaging’ practices (Li 2018; Garcia and Li 2014; Canagarajah 2013) associated with English are themselves ideological in nature, taking on particular “visions of plurality” (Pennycook 2008: 30.7) which thus must be unpacked in order to reveal their ideological assumptions (Jaspers and Madsen 2019; Flores and Rosa 2015). Bhatt (2017) correctly refers to contestations and debates over global English and its spread as constituting “language ideological warfare” (291) which necessitates work along the lines of ideological analyses, although it must be added that Bhatt’s construction of the ideological debates is by itself another vision of plurality also in need of ideological unpacking. Consequently, language ideologies are both people’s ideas or beliefs about language and language varieties and scholars’ own construction of language and language varieties (Irvine and Gal 2009: 402); thus, ideological analyses are necessary in order the unmask the configurations of politics and power underlying and mobilizing such ideologies (Kubota 2016; Tupas 2015). To explore such language ideological issues which accompany the localization and pluralization of global English, the present collection seeks to provide a far longer theoretical and historical reach in making a critical accounting of English today. In order to understand the contemporary ideological dynamics of World Englishes, we need to unframe particular understandings of Englishes which have mobilized past and recent work in the field (even as we further build on them). Thus, the chapters in this volume not only expand and extend current theoretical and historical underpinnings of World Englishes but, more importantly, also propose different or alternative starting points in conversations about global English and its impact on communities and speakers around the world. The volume is structured into four sections. The chapters presented in the first section of this volume tackle broad theoretical and historical understandings of global English. More specifically, the chapters tackle the key question, ‘How does one study the globalization, localization and pluralization of English?’ They seek to unframe past and current understandings of the nature of global English through a broadening of the theoretical scope and historical reach of the analysis. Alastair Pennycook proposes the notion of ‘entanglements of English’, arguing that English is entangled with local/ global conditions, structures and practices of everyday life, thus cannot be removed from these entanglements when we examine the nature of its use today. John O’Regan offers a corrective to prevailing narratives in language studies, including World Englishes, about the dominance of English and its standard form, focusing largely on the postcolonial period prior to the Americanization of capital. While English and capital are indeed inextricably linked, especially in present-day global ‘commodified’ networks, the rise of English as a global language has a far longer historical trajectory, stretching back to the sixteenth century when the search for and accumulation of capital began to shape the world economic system. Ahmed Kabel endorses a historicized delinking of English from the logics of coloniality and proposes a decolonial ‘pluriversalingualism’ where non-hegemonic multilingualisms can transform the lives of individuals and communities. Joseph Sung-Yul Park and Lionel Wee, on the other hand, explore work in the commodification of language, proposing the study of variation in terms of how language varieties are ideologically positioned within specific linguistic markets and material conditions. Ryuko Kubota provides a sobering reminder that there is a disconnect between scholarly discourse on the pluralized and/

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or multilingual nature of English, such as that advanced in World Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca and translanguaging, and language ideologies among the general public, including language education professionals. The chapters in the second section of the volume present different lenses in unpacking ideologies of English. All equally rich theoretically, they offer specific lenses through which ideologies associated with the globalization, localization and pluralization of English can be studied in addressing certain gaps identified in the relevant research literature. Through the lens of ‘small culture’, a grounded or bottom-up way of viewing the world we operate in, Adrian Holliday interrogates the persistent ideological construction of the ‘nation’ and ‘methodological nationalism’ which together almost always constitute the starting and central point of studies on the global phenomenon and impact of English today. In similar vein, Jerry Won Lee and Christopher Jenks foreground the Bakhtinian notion of ‘heteroglossia’ as a lens through which relations of ideology and identity in different Englishes can be studied, thus helping unravel the problematic assumption that particular Englishes correspond to particular nations or communities of speakers. Through the lens of ‘raciolinguistics’, Peter De Costa, Curtis Green-Eneix, Wendy Li and Hima Rawal examine the racialization of the Teaching of English as a Second Language (TESOL) today, arguing specifically that language ideologies are embedded in other identity-forming ideologies in practices associated with TESOL. On the other hand, the approach of Sender Dovchin, Rhonda Oliver and Jaya Dantas is to closely map out the relationship between the global hegemonic power of English and the health and well-being of immigrant English language learners, arguing that prevalent studies in English language pluralities which highlight and celebrate the seeming playfulness and creativity inherent in hybrid-language practices must recognize the linguistic and symbolic violence experienced by speakers. The third section of the volume includes chapters which highlight the ideological pluralities of English and offer a strong reminder about the need to locate studies of ideologies associated with English within specific historical and cultural contexts. The chapters essentially argue that when it comes to ideologies which accrue to English, one must locate them within specific cultural, political and socioeconomic contexts; there are hegemonic ideologies but their local configurations differ from one context to another. Usree Bhattacharya and Ajit K. Mohanty map out ideological plurality in India in relation to English, arguing that this has been shaped by the contending forces of anti-colonial projects and neoliberal aspirational desires and practices, with the latter making a stronger impact on policy and practice, thus exposing ideological plurality as a configuration of language hierarchies. Nathan John Albury provides nuance to the claim about English as the undisputed linguistic superpower in the world today, showing how in Malaysia the economic currency of English is challenged by ideologies associated with Mandarin, while in New Zealand it is the cultural currency of English that is being challenged by ideologies associated with the state-supported revitalization of the indigenous te reo Māori. Rachele Lawton unpacks the ideological network that sustains and mobilizes the English Only Movement in the United States, which overtly highlights the unifying role of English in the country, but underlying it are discriminatory attitudes against other languages spoken in the country and their users. Lastly, Paula Szundy unpacks the ideological formations of the Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) following the recent designation of English as the only additional language to be taught in the schools in Brazil, showing how such ideologies align with the new conservative government’s emphasis on decontextualized skills in the service of the neoliberal market.

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The chapters in the last section of this volume place the focus on the local politics of global English, involving the production, circulation and consumption of particular ideologies within specific political, socioeconomic, historical and cultural contexts. The chapters showcase how the ‘local’ politics of English, which implicates class, race and gender relations (among others), is sutured with global economic conditions and geopolitics. Thus, on top of unpacking ideological pluralities, the chapters more importantly describe how such ideologies emerge from and operate within specific local political configurations which is important if one looks for ways to oppose or transform such ideologies. Eva Codó tracks the ideological formation of the dichotomy between ‘non-localizable’ and ‘localizable’ English in Spanish education today, tracing a new classed, monolingualized, and aspirational kind of English which circulates among teachers and students in élite schools, which thus creates or inscribes practices of distinction and new class-based linguistic hierarchies. Brook Bolander tracks the erasure of everyday multilingualism in language policy among Ismaili Muslims in northern Pakistan and eastern Tajikistan which, while projecting an image of unity in the promotion of English and the dominant community language, also prevents the struggle to learn and maintain the communities’ respective local languages. Funie Hsu unravels the complexly layered politics of language in the study of Bilingual Nation, a recent language policy reform which seeks to locate language at the centre of Taiwan’s economic and political assertion in the world today, thus showing how the mobilization of languages such as English defies straightforward explanation. Lastly, Indika Liyanage and Tony Walker track the role of desire and the cultural anticipation of ‘shame’ in using a foreign language among the I-Kiribati (the people of Kiribati) in explaining why English has not taken root culturally in the community. A “focus on language ideologies”, according to Rosa and Burdick (2017: 104), “is not simply a fad or minor concern, but rather a foundational site from which to apprehend the dynamic nature of language and semiotic practice more broadly in social life”. This is what we hope to accomplish in this volume in relation to the study of language ideologies which accompany and activate the localization and pluralization of global English. Whether more general or particular in orientation, the chapters collectively offer sophisticated understandings of how ideologies associated with English are not only deeply intertwined and embedded in structural and symbolic distributions of resources and configurations of social relations, but are also deeply and simultaneously historical and personal in nature. The textual and functional dimensions of Englishes are entangled with ‘the world’, are connected historically with the rise of capital and neoliberalism through traceable discourses and practices, and are structurally embedded in individual speakers’ emotions and feelings. They are also culturally mediated; thus, their efficacy and value can be understood clearly by locating them within specific configurations of community and social life. The contributions to this volume offer alternative entry points for the study of and conversations about global English today. Indeed, they tell us that language ideologies are fundamental – not tangential – to the study of World Englishes.

REFERENCES Bhatt, R. M. (2017), ‘World Englishes and Language Ideologies’, in M. Filppula, J. Klemola and D. Sharma (eds), The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes, 291–311, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

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Blommaert, J. (ed.) (2010), Language Ideological Debates, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Canagarajah, S. (2013), Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations, New York: Routledge. Eagleton, T. (1991), Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso. Flores, N. and J. Rosa (2015), ‘Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education’, Harvard Educational Review, 85 (2): 149–71. Garcia, O. and W. Li (2014), Translanguaging: Language, Bilingualism and Education, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Irvine, J. T. and S. Gal, S. (2009), ‘Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation’, in A. Duranti (ed.), Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, 2nd edn, 402–34, West Sussex, UK: WileyBlackwell. Jaspers, J. and L. M. Madsen (2019), ‘Fixity and Fluidity in Sociolinguistic Theory and Practice’, in J. Jaspers and L. M. Madsen (eds), Critical Perspectives on Linguistic Fixity and Fluidity: Languagised Lives, 1–26, New York, NY: Routledge. Jenkins, J., W. Baker and M. Dewey (eds) (2017), The Routledge Handbook of English as a Lingua Franca, Oxford and New York: Routledge. Kachru, B. B. (1992), ‘Teaching World Englishes’, in B.B. Kachru (ed.), The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures, 2nd edn, 355–65, Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Kubota, R. (2016), ‘The Multi/plural Turn, Postcolonial Theory, and Neoliberal Multiculturalism: Complicities and Implications for Applied Linguistics’, Applied Linguistics, 37 (4): 474–94. Li, W. (2018), ‘Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language’, Applied Linguistics, 39 (1): 9–30. Lippi-Green, R. (1997), English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States, London: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2008), ‘Translingual English’, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 31 (3): 30–1. Pennycook, A., R. Kubota and B. Morgan (2017), ‘Preface’, in B. Lorente (ed.), Scripts of Servitude: Language, Labor Migration and Transnational Domestic Work, xi‒xv, Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Rosa, J. and C. Burdick (2017), ‘Language Ideologies’, in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Society, 103–23, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Saraceni, M. (2010), The Relocation of English: Shifting Paradigms in Global Era, Basingtoke: Palgrave. Seidlhofer, B. (2005), ‘English as a Lingua Franca’, ELT Journal, 59 (4): 339–41. Smith, L. (1979), ‘English as an International Auxiliary Language’, RELC Journal, 7 (2): 38–42. Tupas, R. (ed.) (2015), Unequal Englishes: The Politics of Englishes Today, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Warriner, D. S. (2016), ‘“Here, Without English, You are Dead”: Ideologies of Language and Discourses of Neoliberalism in Adult English Language Learning’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37 (5): 495–508. Woolard, K. A. and B. B. Schieffelin (1994), ‘Language Ideology’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 23 (1): 55–82.

Chapter 1

Entanglements of English ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK

I.  INTRODUCTION The idea of entanglements of English aims to address the multiple ways that English is connected to all that surrounds it, from global political and economic forces to local relations of class, culture and education, from the circulation of discourses and ideologies to the contextual dispositions of people, artefacts and place. The need for such an articulation comes from the problem that the “surgical removal of language from context produced an amputated ‘language’ that was the preferred object of the language sciences for most of the twentieth century” (Kroskrity 2000: 5). In order to construct itself as a respectable discipline, linguistics had to make an extensive series of exclusions, relegating people, history, society, culture and politics to a role external to languages. To overcome this problem, the more grounded fields of socio- and applied linguistics adopted an idea of context as the preferred tool for understanding language and its surrounds, but context has never been a very well-theorized account of how to understand linguistic settings, providing little more than a backdrop for pre-existing languages: Languages are whole and complete and are performed amid particular environmental factors. “If the history of a language and its users is not factored into the theory as a primary standpoint”, argues Nakata (2007: 37), “then any knowledge generated about the language is flawed”. The need for this articulation also emerges from the constant demand to find adequate ways to deal with the politics of global Englishes. This is both an old and a new project. It is old to the extent that many of us have been trying to get at this question from a variety of perspectives for a long time. In trying to find ways to understand the interconnectedness of English and its surrounds (Pennycook 1994), I adopted Edward Said’s (1983) use of the term worldliness. As a politically engaged literary critic, Said’s interest was in finding a way of dealing with a text that does not leave it as a hermetically sealed textual cosmos with no connection to the world, while at the same time avoiding the reduction of a text to its worldly circumstances. Linking Said’s concerns to more general issues of language, the goal becomes one of finding a space between a view of language as an idealized, abstract system disconnected to its surroundings, and a materialist view of language determined by worldly circumstance. If, on the one hand, we focus on linguistic system alone, we not only miss all that matters around language, but arguably misconstrue what language is. If, on the other hand, we view language only as a manifestation of a prior materiality, we also miss the point that language plays a dynamic role in relation to the world around it. From a different perspective, Judith Butler (1997) makes a related point in her discussion of the politics of the performative, suggesting that neither Austin’s felicity conditions nor Bourdieu’s prior social arrangements can account adequately for the work language may

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do politically. “Is there no way”, Said (1983: 35) asked, “of dealing with a text and its worldly circumstances fairly?” This, then, was the work that I wanted the idea of the worldliness of English to do: English could be understood as worldly not only by dint of its vast global expansion, but also in the sense that a person may be called worldly: it has been and is constantly in the process of being changed by its position in the world. English is in the world and part of the world: to use English is to engage in social action which produces and reproduces social and cultural relations. The worldliness of English referred both to its local and to its global position, to the ways in which it both reflects and constitutes social relations. Looking at the global spread of English(es) in relation to popular transcultural flows (especially hip-hop), I later (Pennycook 2007) developed this notion of worldliness in relation to Mignolo’s (2000: 278) distinction between the macro-global forces of colonialism, capitalism and globalization (globalización/globalisation) and the local ways in which such processes are “adapted, adopted, transformed, and rearticulated” (mundialización/ mondialisation). This, then, has been a long process of trying to understand the ways in which English is both global and local, part of local struggles for communication and recognition, bound up with class, race, culture, gender and education. This is also a new project, however, insofar as recent ways of thinking about relations among language, place, things and people have opened up innovative avenues for thinking about English (and other languages) and its relation to the world. A variety of different work has sought ways to deal with the “total linguistic/semiotic fact” in relation to “cultural ideology” and “sociolinguistic stratification” (Blommaert 2017: 58), to understand the multiplicity of factors that come together around people and place: “These dense and complex objects are the ‘stuff’ of the study of language in society” (2017: 59). If, as Blommaert urges, we do not seek so much to reduce this complexity as to account for it, then we need not only ways of studying this complexity (linguistic ethnography) but also ways of articulating how multiple things come together at a given moment. For Blommaert this is a question of bringing chronotopes, scales and complexity together. One way of approaching this has been through conjunctural analysis focusing on “spatial and temporal composition of moments, or periods, within larger historical processes and their uneven and intersectional materialisations” (Varis 2017: 38). The idea of a conjuncture – with its particular focus on a combination of events or circumstances – can be understood as a “description of a social formation as fractured and conflictual, along multiple axes, planes and scales, constantly in search of struggle and negotiation” (Grossberg 2006: 4). The idea of a conjuncture seeks to get beyond “mere context” in terms of “an articulation, accumulation, or condensation of contradictions” (2006: 5). In line with other recent attempts to grasp complexity, conjunctural analysis moves away from abstraction and regularity towards “temporary settlement” or “temporary stabilities” (Grossberg 2006: 5). Other attempts to grasp this “coming together” of things, this “throwntogetherness” of both the “human and nonhuman” (Massey 2005: 140) also emphasize this move from the abstract to the temporary. Scollon and Scollon’s (2004: 159) nexus of practice is where “historical trajectories of people, places, discourse, ideas, and objects come together”, with a focus on “moments of action rather than on abstractable structures such as cultures and languages” (Scollon and Scollon 2007: 620). Li’s Moment Analysis similarly draws attention to the need to move away from “frequency and regularity oriented, pattern-seeking approaches to a focus on spontaneous, impromptu, and momentary actions and performances of the individual” (2011: 1224). Rather than the predominant linguistic and sociolinguistic approach to seek regularities,

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underlying principles, genres, registers and concatenations of identifiable structures, this is a call to see the complexity of the moment. This has also been central to the focus on semiotic assemblages, bringing together the notion of assemblages as “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials of all sorts” (Bennett 2010: 23) with a focus on how linguistic and semiotic resources, artefacts and places come together in particular moments (Pennycook 2017; Pennycook and Otsuji 2017, 2019). Toohey et al.’s (2015: 466) study of sociomaterial assemblages brings a similar focus on the complexity of sociolinguistic events to contexts of school literacy and the collaborative production of digital video texts, asking “how human bodies, the physical setup of classrooms, classroom materials (furniture, books, paper, computers, and so on), discourses about teaching and learning, what is considered to be knowledge, school district policies, the curriculum, and so on are entangled with one another, and how they may be moving and changing together”. From their point of view, it is by understanding these entanglements (de Freitas and Sinclair 2014), the ways in which all these things come together at one moment that we can help minority language students to engage with literacy. Drawing on Nuttall’s (2009: 11) use of the idea of entanglement as a means by which we can include in our analysis ways in which sites that were “once thought of as separate – identities, spaces, histories – come together or find points of intersection in unexpected ways”, Kerfoot and Hyltenstam (2017: 5) explore the entanglements of north/ south politics, epistemologies and histories in order to “illuminate the shifting structures of power and asymmetrical relations between North and South that render some types of knowledges, practices, repertoires, and bodies more legitimate, and therefore more visible, and thus construct different orders of visibility”. By extending the notion of the worldliness of English, the notion of entanglements of English aims to take us beyond utopian World Englishes or English-as-a-lingua-franca emphases on varieties of, or variation within, English as a linguistic system. These approaches to English have been widely critiqued for being politically disengaged and twentieth-century constructs that have outlived their usefulness (Bruthiaux 2003; O’Regan 2014). At the same time, the notion of entanglements of English also aims to take us beyond dystopian approaches to monolithic English, such as linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992, 2009), that fail to attend to the complex relations between English and its uses and users. It therefore implies both broad theoretical and empirical scope that includes social theories of globalization, political economy and development; ways of understanding relations between language and discourse or ideology; a solid and critical understanding of education and how language is linked to particular modes of knowledge distribution; an understanding of changing modes of communication and popular culture; and an appreciation of the relation between the human and the non-human, the living and the non-living (Povinelli 2016). The idea of entanglements of English draws our attention to the multiple levels and ways in which English is part of social and political relations, from the inequalities of North/South political economies to the ways it is connected to discourses and ideologies of change, modernization, access and desire. At the same time, this way of thinking avoids a framework that suggests levels or scales, placing the global at the top and working its way down through nations to the local, since such an approach potentially implies levels of importance that do not match with people’s lives (an English-only classroom language policy may be far more important than a global discourse of economic development) and also that certain forms of entanglement occur at some levels and not others (a sign in English may relate to its surrounds in ways that a larger sociology cannot account for).

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This also avoids necessarily favouring one set of social and political relations over another, so that, for example, political economy is seen as more fundamental than, or as determining, classroom materiality. Such a move may appear to problematically equalize inequality (all inequalities are the same) but I shall present an alternative way of understanding this issue in terms of the politics of assembly. I want to argue for a more intertwined set of policies, practices and discourses that occur across multiple spatiotemporal domains. English is enmeshed within local modes of distribution, and all the inclusions, exclusions and inequalities this may entail. It is bound up with changing modes of communication and forms of popular culture. It is entrenched in educational systems, bringing to the fore many concerns about knowledge, pedagogy and the curriculum. Drawing on insights from Southern Applied Linguistics (Pennycook and Makoni 2020) and post-humanist theory (Pennycook 2018), this chapter seeks to give an account of how English can be understood in relation to these local and global entanglements. And as Southern theory insists, this needs to be knowledge and practice grounded in realities different to those of the global North. It is not possible, of course, in a chapter of this length to sketch out more than a brief outline of how this agenda works on the ground. I shall focus, therefore, on one small example of entangled English to try to show the ways this is involved in multiple worlds.

II.  ACHIEVE GOAL ENGLISH: TANGLED WIRES AND BROWNOUTS A good place to start is with a sign (Figure 1.1), announcing ‘AGESL: Achieve Goal English as a Second Language’. We might of course observe that, at least for some users of English, there seems something slightly odd about this ‘Achieve Goal English’ name, though we should immediately be cautious about ascribing too much to this in a world in which advertising slogans have long been messing with English. Current trends in English advertising, for example, do new things with adjectives: ‘Spread the Happy’ (Heinz/Nutella), ‘Find your Fabulous’ (Thai Tourism), ‘Unlock your more’ (Fiat), ‘The future of awesome’ (Xfinity), ‘Rethink possible’ (AT&T) and many more. It would be unwise to make much of this ‘Achieve Goal English’ and unhelpful to try to categorize it as some sort of Philippine English on the basis that it may differ from supposed centre norms. Of more interest is the interpellative force of the sign (calling whoever the sign is intended for, to see English as a goal) and its material position in the landscape. The location of this sign matters. It is on a backstreet in Banilad, Cebu City, in the central Philippines, surrounded by the bustle of cars, bikes and Cebu jeepneys (dyipne in Filipino) – different from those in Luzon – and a tangled expanse of electricity wires. The state and precarity of municipal wiring are often good indicators of economic development (United Nations 2006). Much has been made of the supposedly Philippine English ‘brownout’ (a partial blackout or dimming of the lights) (Bautista 1997). Like a number of such terms claimed as specifically local, and exoticized as part of a regional English, its status is unclear: the term itself seems to date to the United States in the early 1940s, and it is commonly used in textbooks on power systems (Blume 2016: 183). It is of course possible that its provenance is nonetheless in the Philippines or that it originated in different places at the same time. It may also be that speakers of other varieties of English, unfamiliar with the term, assumed it to be specifically Philippine English when they encountered it there. The term additionally has a number of popular uses in different parts of the

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FIGURE 1.1:  Achieve Goal English.

world, such as not remembering something from the night before until mentioned (not quite a total blackout) (Urban Dictionary 2019). Such terms may have multiple origins, and further operate variously across different speaker repertoires. Of more importance, however, is that it is indeed a fairly common term in the Philippines (particularly ‘summer brownouts’ and not necessarily in contrast to a more total blackout) because of the insecurity of the power supply. It may therefore be more useful to focus on the tangled wires behind the AGESL sign, and all they imply for electricity supplies, health, environment and power. For Bennett (2010: 24), the “electrical power grid offers a good example of an assemblage. It is a material cluster of charged parts that have indeed affiliated, remaining in sufficient proximity and coordination to produce distinctive effects”. Analysing a blackout in the United States, Bennett asks how we can understand such events in terms of assemblages and agencies, or put another way, how we make sense of something like a power failure or a brownout. If human agency does not seem to play much of a role (it may not be attributable to human error), do we simply fall back on a position that ‘stuff happens’ or might it be more productive to explore how it is that events occur? For a ‘vital materialist’, the electrical grid “is better understood as a volatile mix of coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, nuclear fuel, plastic, fantasies of mastery, static, legislation, water, economic theory, wire and wood” (Bennett 2010: 25). These tangled wires are more than just carriers of current, or lines indexical of economic development. Rather they are variously connected to forms of power. It is this way of looking at assemblages, and in this context the complex relations between a sign for an English school and its emplacement, that is important for this chapter. Tangled wires are entangled wires. At stake are the

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relations among English, power, class, capital, gender, race and the material implications of the enunciated word. This is an assemblage of signs and power lines.

III.  ACHIEVE GOAL ENGLISH: MANUFACTURING ENGLISH AND NEOLIBERAL SUBJECTS The location of this backstreet English school matters. Common in many parts of the world, selling English to local buyers, backstreet English schools offer to the relatively disadvantaged – those who may have missed out through school and other forms of capital accrual on the advantages that English may bring, but who can also envisage, and afford to invest in, its purported benefits – one potential means of gaining advantage. Such gains are not necessarily through the actual use of English that the school may or may not facilitate, but rather through the certification of English ability that the school provides. Another school around the corner (Figure 1.2) – ‘Success Academy’ – provides more explicit details: ‘ESL, TOEFL, TOIEC, Tutorial, English Camp’. These English language tests often have less to do with anything we may recognize as language use, and more to do with forms of regulation or cultural capital. As Kubota (2011: 258) points out, they may “serve a primarily symbolic function of measuring individuals’ level of effort rather than proficiency itself”. Ostensibly designed to discriminate between linguistic abilities, many tests now serve to reinforce neoliberal regimes through their modes of distinction. “The use of a language test is closely and complexly linked to a larger political, economic, and ideological terrain” (Kubota 2011: 258). Already, then, this sign is pointing in several

FIGURE 1.2:  Success Academy.

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different directions, not just inside to the school but outside to an entangled world of tests, accreditation, success and power. It also matters that this is a backstreet in Cebu City, where there is a strong Korean presence: two shops around the corner announce ‘Jook Hair Salon/ Royal Family/ Korean Total Beauty/ Any Lenght [sic] Rebond and Cut/ For Only P 1000.00’ next door to ‘Korean Kimchi’ (Figure 1.3). The presence of Koreans in Cebu, and the Philippines more generally, where they make up a significant diasporic population, is connected to a number of factors, including its affordability, its desirability as a tourist destination, the presence of English and the possibility of setting up small businesses, including English schools for Korean visitors (Garcia-Yap 2009). Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO: ‘Energizing lives, powering communities’) has also become a major player in the provision of electricity in the Philippines, particularly through its large plant at Naga, just down the coast in Cebu. When we ask to whom this sign – with its call to ‘achieve goal English’ – is addressed, therefore, the answer is as likely to be Koreans as anyone else. English, as has been well documented (Tan and Rubdy 2008), has become a global commodity. In itself, this observation is less remarkable (or possibly less accurate from a purer neo-Marxist analysis; Block 2018) than is suggested. The critique that English is a commodity sold for profit rather than a language involved in more affective relations (Duchêne and Heller 2012) potentially relies on an idealistic vision in which languages are preferably isolated from material concerns, a position that is both historically and empirically improbable. Languages have always been subject to economic and material forces, be they capitalist, communist, feudal or otherwise.

FIGURE 1.3:  Jook Hair Salon.

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The important question is what kind of profit (rather than its juxtaposition with non-profit-making ideals), what kind of inequitable economic forces, English is tied up with. And here there are strong grounds for critical analysis. The Philippines has become a cheap destination to learn English, and, like all processes of impoverishment, these are not mere accidents of history but a very clear result of political and economic policies in the twentieth century that saw the Philippines change from a colony of the United States, to a part of the Japanese empire, and a cornerstone (basecamp) of US counter-communist operations (American desperation to maintain its own class and racial inequalities were played out in South East Asia). As a new destination for such English language learners, the Philippines markets itself as a place where ‘authentic English’ is spoken (one marketable effect of it being designated an ‘Outer Circle’ variety), yet its real drawcard is that its English is “cheap and affordable” (Lorente and Tupas 2014: 79). Cheap but good English is something that the Philippines has been able to market for some time (and note the two English school signs above are clear that this is English as a Second Language). For countries where English has long been institutionally embedded – the so-called Outer Circle – there is the possibility of marketing English as a second, even an authentic, language. Such an appeal buys into the inequitable market of what counts as real English. These are not the cheap “copy-watches” of Hong Kong that unashamedly imitate the real thing, but the cut-price designer brands that are sold at wholesale prices. The Philippines, as McGeown (2012: np) has noted, “is fast becoming the world’s low-cost English language teacher”. Indeed Cebu City is full of English schools, with AGESL sitting far behind the bigger players: English Factory, Idea Academy, 3D Universal Academy, International Mac School, and so on. English Factory – “your one-stop English language services that makes studying English fun and accessible for all ages” – suggests not only that it can provide “a gateway to broader opportunities and wider horizons”, but that following a “strict protocol like a real factory” provides the “students with the best quality learning experience”. The teachers are “also known as manufacturers” (English Factory 2019, emphasis added). It is no coincidence that it is the two principal regional client states of the United States – two states used to oppose the growth of communism in the region, two states whose divergence from capitalist orthodoxies could not be countenanced – that are buying and selling English. South Korea, with its ‘frenzy’ for English (Park 2013; Piller and Choi 2013), has become a keen consumer. English fever in Korea has driven people to remarkable extremes, from prenatal classes, to tongue surgery and sending young children overseas to study. It is produced by a range of forces, from South Korea’s “close dependent relationship with the United States in trade, security, culture, and politics” (Park 2013: 287) (like West Berlin, South Korea has been produced as a counterpoint to the evils of the North) to its insertion into a neoliberal order, and desire to compete in global economic terms. Local conditions of culture and class and “local ideologies and contingencies” (Park 2013: 300) matter too, as do the close collaboration between government, business and education sectors. English has become naturalized “as the language of global competitiveness”, so that English as a neoliberal language is regarded as a “natural and neutral medium of academic excellence” (Piller and Cho 2013: 24). As Tabiola and Lorente (2017: 123) note, ELT projects are “particularly potent instruments for transforming citizens into neoliberal subjects”. The ‘Achieve Goal English’ invites students to invest in “the elusive promise of English” as a form of “speculative capital” (Tabiola and Lorente 2017: 133). The sign interpellates potential learners into discourses of the entrepreneurial self, and the person seeking such English accreditation is “reimagined” as “an assemblage of commodifiable

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elements . . . a bundle of skills” (Urciuoli and La Dousa 2013: 176). This is an assemblage of language and commodified subjectivities.

IV.  ACHIEVE GOAL ENGLISH: LINKING GENDER AND DESIRE This sign announces of course a private enterprise. This private–public tension around English echoes across the world. English is already widely available in the public school system in the Philippines; indeed, it has often been too much so. The Philippine education system, as Ordoñez (1999: 19–20) remarked some years ago, appears to be aimed at “supplying the world market economy with a docile and cheap labor force who are trained in English and the vocational and technical skills required by that economy”. The problem with an education system that has long favoured English is the highly negative impact for many children (Azurin 2010), who receive minimal support in their first language, and an inadequate education through the medium of English. More recently, education in the Philippines has moved away from an overemphasis on English and Filipino in the direction of a greater inclusion of mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTBMLE) particularly at elementary levels, a move that has been met with some approval among teachers (Amarles 2016). Lorente (2013) welcomes this move from being stuck in the ‘grip of English’ to a better acknowledgement of the role of education in the first language. For Cruz and Mahboob (2018), this use of local languages in education – when developed with careful attention to how the broader multilingual resources of the students can be used, and how different languages can play diverse roles at different stages in lessons – must be beneficial. Many issues nonetheless remain, in terms of both whether education in the Philippines can escape the grip of English and its associated emphasis on Standard American English and English-Only instruction (Canilao 2019) and whether the ‘multilingualism’ taken up by the school system reflects the multilingualism experienced in daily life (Makalela 2018; Pennycook and Makoni 2020). Despite this recent move towards a more balanced multilingual system, the focus on English is further perpetuated by the development of call centres, the export of domestic workers and other aspects of becoming a service economy to an inequitable global order, so that the pressure to export English-speaking workers has implications across the school system (Lorente 2017). Call centres, English classes, online English and domestic workers all trade on this. For the Philippines, like other countries such as Bangladesh or Pakistan (Rahman 2009) with relatively low economic development but relatively strong access to English, the language becomes one of commercial opportunity, so that businesses such as call centres on the one hand open up jobs for local college-educated employees but on the other hand distort the local economy and education system and perpetuate forms of global inequality (Friginal 2009). As Tajima (2018) makes clear, ‘cheap English’ also extends to the online Eikaiwa (English conversation) industry, where Japanese and Korean companies are able to offer cheap Skype conversation classes using Philippine workers. These women – often college students or graduates – are paid around 50 pesos (US$1) for a twenty-five-minute lesson. This is also, as Tajima observes, a highly sexualized domain, with predominantly male students learning from younger Filipinas. This in turn replicates a long history of Japanese male exploitation of Filipina women, from sex tours to bar ‘hostesses’ and marriages between mainly rural Japanese men and Filipinas. ‘Cheap English’ is therefore tied both to the neoliberal economics that breed call centres and

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language schools and to a history of sexual exploitation of Filipina women. English is entangled with sexuality and women’s labour. English is often marketed in relation to a particular set of images of sexual desire – along with images that tie English to travel, a White consumer lifestyle and aspirational goals for learning English (Gray 2010, 2012). English, as advertised for language schools and presented in textbooks, “emerges as a powerful tool to construct a gendered identity and to gain access to the romanticized West” (Piller and Takahashi 2006: 69). At the heart of every English language learning moment, Motha and Lin (2014: 332) contend, lies desire: “desire for the language; for the identities represented by particular accents and varieties of English; for capital, power, and images that are associated with English; for what is believed to lie beyond the doors that English unlocks”. Takahashi (2013: 144) explains Japanese women’s “desire” for English, as “constructed at the intersection between the macro-discourses of the West and foreign men and ideologies of Japanese women’s life-courses in terms of education, occupation, and heterosexuality”. Focusing on the ways in which these discourses of desire implicate White Western men, Appleby (2013: 144) shows how “an embodied hegemonic masculinity” is constructed in the Japanese ELT industry, producing as a commodity “an extroverted and eroticized White Western ideal for male teachers”. Any understanding of the motivations to learn English, therefore, has to deal with relations of power not only in economic and educational terms but also as they are tied to questions of desire, gender, sexuality (Nelson 2009), and the marketing of English and English language teachers as products The other side of this picture links to the ways English is bound up with the export of labour, and particularly domestic workers (Lorente 2017). Here we are confronted by the entangled relations of language, gender, domestic work and migration. The export of domestic and other workers affects language and education policy back in the Philippines, and these domestic workers now market themselves to prospective employers, while also negotiating the local language politics of places such as Singapore. This is about Filipina women being inscribed into a neoliberal order of supermaids and scripts of servitude (Lorente 2017). Filipino workers can be found on boats and construction sites among many other workplaces, but it is in domestic and health care that many women work. Crucial within these wider class formations, therefore, are the gendered nature of this work and the ways this fits into patterns of domestic labour, transnational migration (Parreñas 2001) and everyday operations of linguistic diversity in relation to forms of labour (Gonçalvez and Schluter 2017). The position of the Philippines in the global economy requires a “cheap, female labour force that has a working knowledge of English” (Tinio 2013: 221). These women – domestic workers, aged care workers, bargirls, singers, middle-class colegiala working in business, English skype teachers – “serve as the very foundations of the global economic order that oppresses them. The English that they speak, idiosyncratic as it is, serves as a not so silent witness of the tenderness, care, libido, pretense at/desire for an ease with Western culture that is imbricated into this oppression” (Tinio 2013: 221). For Lorente (2017), the scripts of servitude turn these women into particular kinds of languagized domestic workers that are also stratified by country of origin. This is an assemblage of gender, language and labour.

V. ACHIEVE GOAL ENGLISH: THE STRATIFICATION OF UNEQUAL RESOURCES While pluralist approaches to English have opened up an understanding of postcolonial diversity, there has also been a tendency to “romanticize the multiplicity of local language

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use without sufficiently interrogating inequalities and injustices involving race, gender, class and so on” (Kubota 2015: 33). What we really need to address are unequal Englishes (Tupas and Rubdy 2015; Tupas and Salonga 2016), or the unequal distribution of English resources (Dovchin et al. 2016) and the lines along which such inequalities are constructed. All varieties of English are in complex relations of power with other varieties and intertwined with questions of access and discrimination along lines of class, gender and race. As Martin (2014: 53) observes in the context of the Philippines, there are at the very least circles within circles, comprising an Inner Circle “of educated, elite Filipinos who have embraced the English language”, an Outer Circle who may be aware of Philippine English as a variety but are “either powerless to support it and/or ambivalent about its promotion” and an Expanding Circle for whom the language is “largely inaccessible”. The issue, therefore, is not centrally about how Philippine English differs from American English but how English resources are spread and used and how they become available or inaccessible to people of different classes and ethnicities across these islands, as well as how English operates amid questions of access, education, style, disparity and difference. “Can all English users regardless of their racial, gender, socioeconomic, and other background,” asks Kubota (2015: 33), “equally transgress linguistic boundaries and engage in hybrid and fluid linguistic practices?” Any claim to a variety of English, while at one level a defiance of Inner Circle norms, is also always a political claim in relation to other varieties, and a claim amid competing social, economic and political values, a question of unequal Englishes, “the unequal ways and situations in which Englishes are arranged, configured, and contested” (Tupas and Rubdy 2015: 3). Laying claim to a variety of English (such as Philippine English) is a claim on multiple levels: Philippine English over other (inauthentic or expensive) varieties, or one kind of Philippine English at the expense of others (regional and class varieties). The claim that is hardest to make, however, is to native speaker-hood, since such claims run up against the racial classification of English speakers: “Both race and nativeness are elements of ‘the idealized native speaker’” (Romney 2010: 19). Because of the “tendency to equate the native speaker with white and the non-native speaker with non-white” (Kubota and Lin 2009: 8), people of colour face discrimination as non-native speakers, and non-native speakers are stigmatized within a racial order (Rosa and Flores 2017). These raciolinguistic ideologies link “the white speaking and listening subject to monoglossic language ideologies” (Flores and Rosa 2015: 151). This turns the focus away from the language practices of the racialized non-native speaker towards the “interpretive practices” of “White perceiving subjects” (Rosa 2019: 6). Unequal Englishes therefore need to be seen in relation to the ethnic and racial divisions, both within Philippine society and in relation to the “global colour line” (Lake and Reynolds 2008: 5), the technologies of distinction and surveillance that divide speakers along racial lines. The Philippines, as Reyes (2017: 211) shows, replays its racial colonial history in which “mestizo elites, not colonial officials, uphold the bifurcated racial state: lighter races on top; darker races on bottom”. As Reyes goes on to show, the construction of this conyo elite is tied in complex ways to the idea and use of Taglish (a mix of Tagalog and English), but not along the reductionist sociolinguistic line of elites speaking elite varieties. Rather, the construction of this supposed elite language user, excessively mixing English and Tagalog, reconfigures colonial hierarchies in the Philippines “through reassemblages of elite social figures and linguistic registers across discursively connected events” (2017: 228). This is not, then, the linguistically describable register against which we can map a sociolinguistic elite, but rather a construction of an

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elite in order to normalize the non-excessive postcolonial subject who uses languages appropriately. Such language stratifications, whether a construction of a Taglish-speaking conyo elite, or a set of registers used by call centre workers, online English conversation teachers, bar hostesses or domestic workers, Tinio (2013: 209) explains, are “symptomatic of the harsh and polarized social stratification in the Philippines”. They are also entangled with the wider ‘English divide’ that permeates social relations across the globe. For Block (2018: 12) English “becomes the mediator of increasing inequality in job markets and societies at large, as we see the emergence of what is, in effect, an English divide”. While the question of mediation still needs greater clarification – mediator or agent, correlation or causation – this is a divide both between types of English (unequal Englishes rather than the liberal dream of variety equality), “reaffirming different forms of inequality between speakers of Englishes” (Tupas and Salonga 2016: 368), and between English and other languages. Elsewhere, the divide between English and local (‘vernacular’) education has been shown to be deeply divisive, with English education in India connected on the one hand with the denigration of vernacular languages, cultures and ways of learning and teaching, and, on the other, dovetailing “with the values and aspirations of the elite Indian middle class” (Ramanathan 2005: 112). This English divide is entangled with “racialized discourses that position the bilingualism of white students” – or of a conyo elite or an elite Indian middle class – “as more valuable than the bilingualism of language-minoritized communities” (Flores 2017: 79). The co-optation of elite bilingualism is what Flores (2017) calls the Coke-ification

FIGURE 1.4:  Angel’s Hamburger.

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of language education, which brings us back to the sign in the backstreets of Cebu City, and the realization that the entanglements of English combine at multiple levels across multiple material and semiotic domains. Just behind the AGESL sign is another for Coca Cola. Across the road Angel’s Hamburger – “24 hours . . . Hamburger 23 pesos” (about US$ 0.45, so an online Eikaiwa teacher could afford two of these hamburgers from the payments she gets from her twenty-five-minute class) – carries the rival Pepsi sign (see Figure 1.4). The entanglements of this sign link it to the ways that English, like Pepsi, Coke and hamburgers, has penetrated local economies and tastes, again with implications for health and cultural affiliations. All of this, I want to argue, is going on at the same time around this sign. This is why I want to see this sign in terms of an assemblage of matters of concern. Just as Bennett (2010) sees the power grid as an assemblage of multiple elements, so this sign and its emplacement is an assemblage of cheap English, sexual desire, neoliberal goals, domestic workers, multilingual repertoires, Korean English frenzy, American colonialism, brownouts, call centres, racial hierarchies, global inequality, unequal Englishes and tangled wires.

VI.  CONCLUSION: IMAGINING NEW SUBJECTIVITIES I have sought in this chapter to open up “a broader perspective on the contingency of language and its entanglements” (Beck 2018: 1) by showing how English is entangled with social, cultural, political and economic relations. I have tried not to favour one over the other, not to suggest that class matters a priori more than race or gender, economy more than health, materiality more than discourse. In these local assemblages, certain things do of course matter more than others – modes of inequality are not equal – but the point is not to operate with a predefined hierarchy of inequality. Inequalities have to be understood in relation to each other. Although at times a focus on assemblages may appear to lead to flattened hierarchies and ontologies – or even, heaven forbid, a levelplaying field – it is, by contrast, intended as a way of understanding and engaging with contemporary political relations: “The logic of assemblage”, Hardt and Negri (2017: 295) assert, “integrates material and immaterial machines, as well as nature and other nonhuman entities, into cooperative subjectivities. An enriched freedom of assembly generates the subjective assemblages that can animate a new world of cooperative networks and social production”. A focus on entanglements and assemblages, therefore, does not eschew old materialism for either new materialism or discourse, but rather seeks an understanding of their interrelationship. In order to engage with the entanglements of English, neither the utopian logics of World Englishes and English as a lingua franca, nor the dystopian logics of linguistic imperialism, will get us very far. Race and empire, rather than varieties and methodologies, need to be our point of departure (Motha 2014: 129). English remains arguably the language of the Global North (Pennycook and Makoni 2020), not so much because its origins lie in geographically northern regions, but because it is so embedded in the institutions and injustices that the Global North created and still maintains that its prevalence and use cannot be separated from the political and economic forces that dominate the world. An English-speaking Philippine elite is already closer to the Global North than to the Global South that surrounds them. The ‘Achieve Goal English’ sign is an invitation to escape the material conditions (heat, dust, noise, jeepneys, tangled wires) of the Global South and to head instead towards the North.

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“Any discussion of English as a global language and its socioeducational implications”, Rubdy (2015: 43) reminds us, “cannot ignore the fact that far from being a solution to the dismantling of ‘unequal power’ relations in the world, English is in fact often part of the problem”. A focus on English entanglements sheds light on how being ‘part of the problem’ is about the interconnectedness between language, location, wealth, power, class, race, gender and other domains of inequality. To create a new post-neoliberal society, and a new post-homo economicus subjectivity, therefore, we need to be able to imagine “new subjectivities that operate increasingly according to a logic of assemblage, defined no longer by their possessions but by their connections” (Hardt and Negri 2017: 295, italics added). This is to bring time and space – everydayness and worldliness – together and to show how these are entangled in everyday, simultaneous activities and material encounters.

REFERENCES Amarles, A. M. (2016), ‘Multilingualism, Multilingual Education, and the English Language: Voices of Public School Teachers’, Philippine Journal of Linguistics, 47: 93–108. Appleby, R. (2013), ‘Desire in Translation: White Masculinity and TESOL’, TESOL Quarterly, 47 (1): 122–47. Azurin, A. M. (2010), ‘Reinventing Basic Education: The Shift to Mother Tongue Instruction’, in R. Nolasco, F. Datar and A. Azurin (eds), Starting Where the Children Are. A Collection of Essays on Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education and Language Issues in the Philippines, 1–7, Quezon City: Talaytayan. Bautista, M. L. S. (1997), ‘The Lexicon of Philippine English’, in M. L. S. Bautista (ed.), English Is an Asian Language: The Philippine Context, 49–72, Manila: The Macquarie Library Pty Ltd. Beck, R. (2018), ‘Language as Apparatus: Entanglements of Language, Culture and Territory and the Invention of Nation and Ethnicity’, Postcolonial Studies, 21 (2): 231–53. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Block, D. (2018), Political Economy and Sociolinguistics: Neoliberalism, Inequality and Social Class, London: Bloomsbury. Blommaert, J. (2017), ‘Chronotopes, Scales and Complexity in the Study of Language in Society’, in K. Arnaut, M. Sif Karrebaek, M. Spotti and J. Blommaert (eds), Engaging Superdiversity: Recombining Spaces, Times and Language Practices, 47–62, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Blume, S. (2016), Electric Power System Basics for the Nonelectrical Professional, 2nd edn, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Bruthiaux, P. (2003), ‘Squaring the Circles: Issues in Modeling English Worldwide’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 13 (2): 159–77. Butler, J. (1997), Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, London: Routledge. Canilao, M. L. E. N. (2019), ‘Looking Through the Eyes of Global Englishes: Enhancing English Language Teaching in Multicultural Classrooms’, in F. Fang and H. P. Widodo (eds), Critical Perspectives on Global Englishes in Asia: Language Policy, Curriculum, Pedagogy, Assessment, 84–103, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Cruz, P. A. T. and A. Mahboob (2018), ‘Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education in the Philippines: Perceptions, Problems and Possibilities’, in J. Choi and S. Ollerhead (eds),

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Chapter 2

Capital and the Hegemony of English in a Capitalist World-System JOHN P. O’REGAN

I.  INTRODUCTION: THE MODERN WORLD-SYSTEM The modern world-system is a capitalist world-system which has its origins in the long sixteenth century (1450–1640). I believe with Andre Gunder Frank (1969), Paul Sweezy (1972) and Immanuel Wallerstein (2011c) that the indispensable rationale of the capitalist world-system is “the endless accumulation of capital” (Wallerstein 2011c: xiv), and of the accumulation of capital in order to accumulate more capital. From this vantage point, I wish to propose that the present-day global dominance of an ideologized standard English in the modern world-system – that is, an English in form and use which appears indistinguishable to that which is to be found in formal Inner Circle contexts (Kachru 1990) – is best explained by the relationship which has existed since the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries between capital accumulation and English, particularly as encapsulated by the consecutive hegemonic world-economies of Britain and the United States. Historiographies of English as a global language, as opposed to histories of the English language, have tended to look to the territorial British empire in the nineteenth century and then, more specifically, to the expansion of US structural power since 1945 in order to explain the present-day global dominance of English and its normative Inner Circle forms (Phillipson 2008; Saxena and Omoniyi 2010; Park and Wee 2012; Chowdhury and Phan 2014; Lemberg 2018). In such interpretations, nineteenth-century British colonialism and post-1945 processes of US-led globalization are usually conjoined in order to explain the present-day global dominance of English, often with an emphasis on the post-1945 US hegemony and still more recent globalization processes since the 1980s and 1990s (Blommaert 2010: 16). But in the present chapter, I wish to suggest that even the inclusion of the nineteenth century might yet be considered a foreshortened view, while the emphasis on the colonial empire as often occurs could also be seen as a simplification of the capitalist world-system’s true extent. The unifying element that is absent, and which this discussion presents, is the accumulation of capital in a capitalist world-system since the sixteenth century, and the relationship of English to this.  Drawing upon Marxist political economy and world-systems analysis (Marx and Engels 1998/1845; Marx 1976/1867; Wallerstein 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d), I

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propose that English has acted as a free rider upon capital (Olsen 1965; Tuck 2008; Fontaine 2014; O’Regan 2021) and that by means of capital’s global spread the rise of English to a position of hegemony in the world is initiated as early as the 1500s. The account which is given is deliberately focused upon the centuries prior to 1919 and the beginnings of the rise of the US hegemony, because it is with this earlier era, and with the formation of capital and of capitalism, that I believe the origins of the global hegemony of an ideologized or normative standard English in the present-day are to be found (Gramsci 1975; Ives 2010). This is because the United States built upon the global capital networks that had already been established by the British down to 1919, but how these evolved as the structural components of successive world-economies in a capitalist world-system is not usually well-accounted for. In the pages that follow, an outline overview and periodization of large-scale historical formations and tendencies in the capitalist world-system from the 1500s down to 1919 is presented. This is exemplified by seven moments in the rise of English to global domination. These moments, although evidently suggestive to me, are not presented as definitive or ‘privileged’ temporal demarcations, as alternatives could be put forward which might lead to a different historicity. Rather, they are proposed for the explorative purposes of calibrating in a structured and illustrative way the longer historical time frame that is treated in this overview, and in order to be able to indicate factors for the hegemonic expansion of English which are not usually captured in alternative accounts. The post-1919 and especially post-1945 era (or ‘American century’) is also deliberately secondary to this narrative since it is one which is already well-documented in other studies of English dominance (Phillipson 2008; Block, Gray and Holborow 2012; Chowdhury and Phan 2014; Lemberg 2018). In anticipation of further possible objections, the precise policy formulations and/or empirical sociolinguistic mechanisms for the spread of English within particular nations and regions also do not form a part of this survey, since it is not within the compass of this account to be able to specify them, although some indicative observations are made. Of more significance is that this is an historical outline of capital and of the ideological linkage of a ‘capital-centric’ English to it, which may, one hopes, give cause for contemplation and also encourage further empirical investigation. Due to the scale and complexity of the historical periodization presented, the claims which are made for the dominance of English – particularly its dominance as a normative standard form – are also necessarily interpretative and exploratory, while at the same time indicating a personal view. It is with these acknowledged limitations that this perspective is offered as an alternative to contemporary accounts which have tended to adopt a shorter historical time frame, or which on empirical as well as moral grounds portray the Inner Circle standards as inappropriate and anachronistic, and decreasing in global significance (Jenkins 2006; Seidlhofer 2011; Sridhar 2019). The history of capital in its economic form is not normally factored into such accounts. Nor is it usually factored into accounts of the emergence of global Englishes (Kachru 1990; Schneider 2003; Smith 2016), or of the English that is to be found in superdiverse, translingual and trans-spatial realizations (Blommaert and Rampton 2012; Canagarajah 2017; Jenkins 2017; Li 2018; Pennycook 2020). This is why it is presented here; for the history of capital accumulation in a capitalist world-system is also the history of the rise to global hegemony of English, and of the ‘symbolic violence’ and ideological governance of its structuring normative form (Bourdieu 1991; Gramsci 1975; Ives 2010). By drawing attention to this history, it is my hope that we may better understand the ongoing global dominance of the ideologized standard as this persists in processes of sociolinguistic production and exchange.

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II.  CAPITAL ACCUMULATION AND THE FREE RIDING OF ENGLISH It is the long sixteenth century (1450–1640) that inaugurates capital as inherently mobile. In Marx’s (1976/1867: 247) words, “World trade and the world market date from the sixteenth century, and from then on the modern history of capital starts to unfold.” In the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the 1500s, commerce, as moveable capital, is separated from craft or estate-based production, such that by 1600 they could be carried on as separate activities (Marx and Engels 1998/1845: 75–80). A division of labour occurs, which permits “the formation of a special class of merchants” (Marx and Engels 1998/1845: 75) whose business is commerce alone. This leads to “the possibility of commercial communications transcending the immediate neighbourhood” (Marx and Engels 1998/1845: 75) and provides the basis for what becomes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “the extension of markets into a world market” (Marx and Engels 1998/1845: 78). I propose that English has acted as a free rider upon capital since this time, and that it has done so by parasitically attaching itself to the components of capital at no cost to itself. These components are threefold: (1) investment (the raising of money), (2) trade (in commodities) and (3) the return (on the money originally invested). Marx gave this the formula M-C-M'. M is Money, C is the Commodity, and M' is the surplus value accrued in the exchange (Marx 1976/1867: 251). If M-C-M' is the general formula for capital in circulation, then we may suggest that ME-CE-M'E is the general formula for the free riding of English upon capital – where superscript E stands for English, since this highlights its presence at every point in the capital circuit: in investment, in commodity production and exchange, and in the financial return. Similarly, if in trading capital the free riding of English is ME-CE-M'E, then in money dealing or financial capital – M-M' – where the production of increased value is unmediated by commodities, the free riding of English is ME-M'E. In these processes, English may be said to act as a transactional lingua franca (O’Regan 2021). In general terms, in the period from 1550 to 1850 the dominant form of this relationship was ME-CE-M'E, but for the purposes of simple commodity exchange where no surplus value is involved it could also be CE-ME-CE. After 1850, with the increased dominance of financial capital led by the City of London, the algorithm shifted more towards ME-M'E as trade in goods – while still substantial – was overtaken by finance and commercial services (Cain and Hopkins 1980: 478; 2013: 161; Arrighi 2010: 293). M-C-M' and M-M' are thus the dominant bases upon which capital circulates in the capitalist world-system, and ME-CE-M'E and ME-M'E are the principal modes in which English free rides. In addition to the classical accounts of accumulation by Lenin, Hilferding, Luxemburg and Bukharin, Marx’s treatment of capital accumulation was influential for Fernand Braudel, whose notion of the longue durée as “the endless, inexhaustible history of structures and groups of structures” (Braudel 1980/1958: 75) was in turn instrumental for world systems analysis and dependency theory (Wallerstein 2000, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d; Arrighi 2010; Amin 1977; Frank 1969).

III. EMPIRE IN A CAPITALIST WORLD-SYSTEM Before turning to an overview of the historical periodization for English in a capitalist world-system, let us deal with a further immediate issue. This is the use of the term empire, which is very often uniquely referenced to the formal acquisition of overseas territories by

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the nineteenth-century imperial powers, particularly Britain. This may work well enough as a description of the territorial British Empire, but is much less functional as a description of the twentieth-century US hegemony, though this has not prevented its routine employment as a description of the era since 1945 (passim). It is only relatively recently that imperial historians have grappled with Britain’s informal empire. For a long time, the principal frame of reference was the territorial formal empire – when it began, when it ended, its extent and what occurred within its boundaries (Louis 1976). In a seminal paper critiquing the preoccupation with British territorial acquisition, the historians Gallagher and Robinson (1953: 1) commented that, “The conventional interpretation of empire continues to rest upon study of the formal empire alone, which is rather like judging the size and character of icebergs solely from the parts above the water-line.” Of equal importance for Gallagher and Robinson is the spread and influence of an informal empire within which forcible control or annexation is only applied when “new regions fail to provide satisfactory conditions for commercial or strategic integration” (1953: 6). In a move which anticipates world systems analysis by some years, Gallagher and Robinson argue for the treatment of British imperial expansion as a world-economic totality which includes both formal and informal dimensions: “From this vantage point the many-sided expansion of British industrial society can be viewed as a whole of which both the formal and informal empires are only parts. Both of them then appear as variable political functions of the extending pattern of overseas trade, investment, migration and culture” (1953: 6–7).

From core to historical arena: C>HA As a modern world-system, the capitalist world-system exists as “a unit with a single division of labour and multiple cultural systems” (Wallerstein 2000: 75). This naturally includes linguistic systems as well. The division of labour is based upon the production for profit in a world market, where some nations and some languages benefit at the expense of other nations and other languages within the frame of a core/semi-periphery/periphery relationship, or C>SP>P, in which there is a graduated order of dominance such that C exploits/incorporates SP, which exploits/incorporates P (Wallerstein 2011a: 349).  Unlike the world-economy of the later nineteenth century, the world-economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not encompass the entire globe. This only came with the fuller incorporation of Africa and Asia after 1880. Until that time, these regions – or more accurately parts of them – formed part of an external arena (EA) which was adjacent to but not fully incorporated into the capitalist world-economy (Wallerstein 2011a: 301–2); hence, C>SP>P>EA. Regions beyond the external arena, and hence entirely disconnected from processes of primitive accumulation (Marx 1976/1867; Arendt 1968; Nichols 2015; Wallerstein 2011a), such as the ancient kingdoms of Tibet and Siam, and the interiors of China and Africa, we might refer to as being in a historical arena (HA), although Wallerstein himself offers no specific term for this zone. For the purposes of this illustration, we can suggest C>SP>P>EA>HA as a rendering which includes it. The regions of the historical arena are promoted to the external arena as the regions of the external arena are themselves increasingly incorporated into the world-economy and market, and so enter into the world-capitalist system: “It is as though there were an outward ripple of expansion. As India was incorporated, China became part of the external arena” (Wallerstein 2011c: 167). Between the core and the periphery, trade consisted in bulk goods and between the core and the external arena, via the periphery and the semi-periphery, it consisted in

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“trade in preciosities, the former but not the latter being based on unequal exchange” (Wallerstein 2011a: xxiv). With England increasingly the dominant global power after 1650, and its currency and capital markets also becoming the basis of global trade from the 1690s onwards (Cain and Hopkins 2013), international commerce inevitably became dominated by capital transactions to which English was attached as a free rider (ME-CE-M'E, or CE-ME-CE). How the free riding of English was realized in local contexts differed, but even where there was official resistance to educating the local population in English, as occurred in the nineteenth century and later, in, for example, India and Africa (Evans 2002; Clarence-Smith 1994), it had already long insinuated itself by means of English-speaking consuls and private merchants, commercial factors, ships’ captains, customs officials, soldiers, missionaries, overseers, middlemen, linguists, local retailers and sex workers (Coleman 1965; Zacek 2010; Van Dyke 2017). An outline historical periodization for the global rise of English in its connection with capital follows. This is conjointly based upon Wallerstein’s historical study of the capitalist world-system (2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2011d) and the imperial perspectives of Gallagher and Robinson (1953) and Cain and Hopkins (1980, 1986, 1987, 2013). The selected periodization, 1600–1919, is divided into seven moments, with the post1919 era accounting for a further three. The term ‘moment’ is selected because, as Marx (1973: 258) points out, “Capital is not a simple relation, but a process, in whose various moments it is always capital”.

IV. SEVEN MOMENTS IN THE GLOBAL RISE OF ENGLISH First moment Although not fully incorporated into the capitalist world-system, the external and historical arenas and the geopolitical regions within them were nonetheless sites in which the more economically powerful nations of the capitalist core, such as Portugal, Spain, Holland, France and England, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, established rival capital networks of trade and investment (M-C-M'; M-M'), and so also capital networks of language (M L-C L-M'L; M L-M' L), such as in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, Malacca, Macau and the East Indies. The long sixteenth century also witnesses the entering of England into the critical period (1569–1652) of its brutal centuries-long incorporation of Ireland as England’s first overseas colonial possession (Kee 1976), and with it (by 1850) the near annihilation of Irish as a language (Hindley 1990). Simultaneous with the English genocide in Ireland (Shaw 2011), it was in the aftermath of the economic downturn of the 1590s that in December 1600 Elizabeth I decided to grant the English East India Company (EIC) a Royal Charter “for the increase of our navigation, and advancement of trade . . . by way of traffic and merchandize to the East Indies” (cited in Mukherji 1918). The granting of a Royal Charter for trade beyond Europe leads to the complementary process of the free riding of English upon the commercial activities of the EIC, and upon the capital networks which the Company created, for example at Bantam, Surat, Hirado, Siam, Madras and Bengal, as well as at a number of locations in the Persian Gulf and along the Red Sea coast. India, through the EIC, became a major destination for the silver bullion re-export trade out of England, from where the silver was then used for investment in the opium trade in China (Coates 1966). The granting of the EIC Charter in tandem with England’s colonial assimilation of Ireland mark a first moment in the global rise of English.

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Second moment By the early 1650s, following a decade-long Irish rebellion, English colonial rule was being ferociously reasserted in Ireland; and internationally, by means of the Great Navigation Act of 1651, the English felt powerful enough to make an open challenge to the Dutch mare liberum, or ‘free seas’. According to the Act, goods entering English ports, and that included ports controlled by the English in the Caribbean and India, had to be carried in English ships or ships of the country of production. The English vessels were multilingual, largely using English as a lingua franca. In the 1651 Act, these were defined as ships, “whereof the master and mariners are also for the most part of them of the people of this Commonwealth” (italics supplied). A crew could therefore be made up of individuals from non-English-speaking societies and nations so long as more than 50 per cent were of English nationality. A revision of the Act in 1660 increased this to three quarters. That these were multilingual crews using English as a lingua franca is of interest, not only because this shows that such lingua franca contexts with English were common in this period, but because of the role the Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660 played in the dissemination of English via the trade in goods at the ports where they were landed, particularly in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the East Indies. Here bilingual commercial ‘factors’ would be engaged in mediating the trade for the English ships that came in, while the port itself would be a centre of multilingual exchange, in several languages including English, as crews went in search of food, drink and sex (Zacek 2010). The Navigation Acts were in many respects the foundation of a British world-economy made in English, because up to 1849, when they were abolished and the era of free trade commenced, they regulated the movement of British capital around the world, and so also the movement of English. Following this theme, the Great Navigation Act of 1651 may be considered a second moment in the global rise of English.

Third moment France was not sufficiently able to arrest the advance of English economic power despite the not indifferent strength of its navy for a good part of the eighteenth century (Parry 1967). This was due to a number of considerations, but chief amongst them was that French mercantilism, as this was realized in France’s domestic economy, was “relatively incoherent and unformulated” (Wilson 1965: 65, cited in Wallerstein 2011b: 95) in comparison with the much more integrated state-managed mercantilism of England; and, secondly, because France was almost a century behind Britain in the development of finance and commercial services (Cain and Hopkins 2013: 71). The founding of the Bank of England and the London Stock Exchange in 1694, and the development of the City of London as a major centre for financial services and insurance underwriting, enabled Britain in the eighteenth century to borrow more extensively and over a longer period than France was able to because investors felt more assured of a secure return (Cain and Hopkins 2013: 71; Wallerstein 2011b: 279). As Cain and Hopkins (2013: 68) observe, “The external effects of these innovations were felt, in turn, on other activities in the service sector. Improvements in credit and commercial activities boosted the shipping industry, promoted overseas trade and assisted the balance of payments by generating invisible earnings.” By these means, over the next 100 years, the flow of London capital – and so also the flow of English – through Britain’s trading networks was greatly augmented, particularly in the Caribbean and India, but also further afield in Asia and the

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African Cape, and especially at the expense of the French. In the final analysis, according to Cain and Hopkins (2013: 72), “debt saved Britain from defeat at the hands of France”. Other factors and events also contributed. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 which ended absolutism in England and the accession of the Dutch Protestant William of Orange to the English throne in 1689 impacted positively upon the nation. The accession of William not only conjoined the financial interests of Holland with those of England, it also reconciled Amsterdam to a “junior partnership” (Cain and Hopkins 2013: 115) with the City of London, thus giving a further fillip to English in international finance and trade. In addition, the Revolution of 1688 was an advance for domestic statecraft in England which was not matched in France until after the end of the French Revolution in 1799. In the words of Plumb (1967: 13, cited in Wallerstein 2011b: 119), “the core of the [English] government was growing stronger and more efficient”, while the French state mechanism stagnated and showed itself to be resistant to modernization. It was ultimately the expansive flow of London capital in conjunction with the increasingly obsessive economic and political introversion of the French state which was decisive in orienting mediation of the capital networks of the world-economy towards English and away from French. The English commercial revolution and the spatial expansion of London capital after 1688 can thus be considered a third moment in the global rise of English.

Fourth moment Between 1700 and 1815, France steadily lost economic ground to England. In 1701, France was granted the Asiento by England’s rival Spain. This gave French ships a monopoly to trade in slaves in the Spanish Indies. But following the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13), the Asiento was transferred to England. The main protagonists – England, France and Spain – had attempted to destroy the other’s capital networks, and France and Spain were defeated. In the new Asiento, in addition to the monopoly on slaving, England was permitted to establish an English settlement on Rio de la Plata, “and an annual English ‘permission ship’ of 500 tons . . . was allowed to carry a general trade in Hispanic America” (Wallerstein 2011b: 189). The transfer of the Asiento also led to an explosion in piracy, much of it conducted by English buccaneers who ran multilingual ships upon whose decks English, amongst other languages, was a lingua franca (Rediker 2012). By means of the transfer of the Asiento to England and the wide extent of English pirate activity between the Caribbean, West Africa and the southern Indian Ocean, the position of English was enhanced. As before, the extension of hegemonic capital was in turn an extension of the free riding of English upon it. The military rivalry between England and France occupied the best part of the eighteenth century through the War of the Austrian Succession (1739–48) and the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), but always with continued and often disastrous setbacks for France. According to Wallerstein (2011b: 257), “The Treaty of Paris of 1763 marked Britain’s definitive achievement of superiority in the 100 years struggle with France.” It would, however, take until 1815 for France finally to concede the point. As a consequence of the Seven Years’ War, the French – and the French language – were, with the exception of a few trading posts, purged from India, and much of the French Caribbean was lost. This prepared the ground for Britain’s soon-to-be unrivalled global dominance after 1815, including in relation to the external and the historical arenas. Up to 1750 these arenas included Russia, the Ottoman Empire, India, Africa and East Asia (Wallerstein 2011d: 276). In spite of the location of the regions of the external and historical arenas relative to

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a still-expanding capitalist world-economy, capital penetration, and so also the free riding of English upon it, had by 1757 already made inroads into Eastern and Southern India, parts of East and West Africa, and also as far as Canton in China. By the 1790s, London had also eclipsed Amsterdam as the world’s leading centre and export-conduit for global capital accumulation. The London capital markets became the basis for the vast rentier fortunes (M-M') which were later to be made (Cain and Hopkins 2013: 86), while the French Revolution (1789–99) and the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815) were bloody postscripts for a struggle which had already been lost with the Treaty of Paris in 1763. In Wallerstein’s view (2011c: 122), “With the end of wars, Britain was finally truly hegemonic in the world-system.” In addition, between 1783 and 1816 Britain had also extended its formal reach to twenty-seven strategic maritime bases in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic Ocean area, the Indian Ocean and Australasia, so enabling British power to encircle the globe (2011c: 122). In no uncertain terms, the capital networks for the later emergence of Standard American English as the dominant international lingua franca of the post-1945 era were set in place at this time. The denouement of France after 1763 and the globalization of British power down to 1815 make this period a fourth moment in the global rise of English.

Fifth moment With the period 1815 to 1850, we enter a more familiar geohistorical terrain upon which the initial expansion of British imperial influence is often mapped (Gallagher and Robinson 1953; Cain and Hopkins 2013). In Britain, it is a time of transition from a landed rentier economy which is based upon agriculture and agrarian capital (as both C-M-C and M-C-M') to a commercial and industrial economy which is based upon manufacturing and industrial capital (mainly M-C-M') as well as speculation and financial capital (MM'), and for which capital export remains an overriding concern. Overcrowding and a fear of unrest in the major cities persuaded the government that rapid industrialization was needed in order to absorb a rising population, and that it was necessary to increase manufacturing exports in order to pay for the agricultural imports required to feed the growing populace (Cain and Hopkins 2013). The need to increase manufacturing exports and the increased ability of the industrial and financial sectors to compete abroad without state aid had by the 1820s persuaded the government to take a step away from managed economic nationalism towards free trade as a means of opening markets to new customers as well as reducing the costs to government and industry. It also gave a boost to overseas acquisition. Between 1815 and 1843, Britain extended its colonial interests into the Gambia (1816), Singapore (1819), the Straits Settlements (1825), Burma (1826), Fernando Po (1827), West Australia (1829), South Australia (1835), Aden (1838) and Hong Kong (1842).  The coming of free trade had the effect of recalibrating the class-based relationship which had dominated up to then between an English aristocratic landed interest and a relatively newer financial moneyed interest of ‘gentlemanly’ speculators and financiers centred upon the City of London. Cain and Hopkins (1980, 1986, 1987, 2013) refer to the ideal which informed this relationship as one of gentlemanly capitalism, through which the landed aristocracy came by the 1820s to accept the financiers as gentlemanly, and also to appreciate the City of London as an additional, even necessary, repository of speculative and commercial wealth generation (M-M'; M-C-M'). As manufacturing became increasingly

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significant to the health of the economy after 1815, so did manufacturers become much more prominent in political life. To the landholding aristocracy and the City financiers, it was evident that the self-styled “gentlemen manufacturers” (Cain and Hopkins 1986: 505) could not be ignored, and so as the nineteenth century progressed, they too were gradually admitted into the elite trappings of English gentlemanly society, including its standard language. By 1850, a new tripartite class settlement comprising the landed interest, the moneyed interest and the industrial interest had come into being. Over the next half century down to 1914, a relative social equality and mutual tolerance emerged from the financial and commercial fortunes that were made so as to form a tripartite class interest that was ideologically made coherent by the gentlemanly capitalist ideal and its markers of group identity. These included wealth, a gentlemanly demeanour and an educated competence in the normative standard as the essential requirements of membership. Cain and Hopkins divide the British imperial era into two broad periods: 1688–1850, in which the landed interest dominated, and 1850–1945, in which financial and commercial interests dominated. In their words (1986: 510), “these two phases of gentlemanly capitalism and the transition between them left an enduring mark on Britain’s presence abroad.” Through the capital networks which gentlemanly capitalists established, this included English as well. From the commercial revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, gentlemanly capitalism (GC), as a discursive and ideological subcategory (⊆) of the British world-economy (C>SP>P>EA), permeated Britain’s capital relationship with the semi-periphery and the periphery, in addition to the arenas beyond them; hence, GC⊆C>SP>P>EA>HA. The confluence of landed and pecuniary gentlemanly capitalism with manufacturing after 1815 gave standard English greater global purchase as the British world-economy expanded in the remainder of the century. In this context, the development of gentlemanly capitalism between 1815 and 1919 marks a fifth moment in the global rise of English.

Sixth moment From the perspective of the mid-nineteenth century and the formal imperial domain of the British world-economy, Britain’s sovereign influence stretched to India, West and East Africa, the Straits Settlements, Hong Kong and the “White” settlement colonies of Canada, Australia and the African Cape. From the perspective of Britain’s traders and financiers, and the informal domain, British influence also extended to Latin America, the Persian Gulf, the East Indies and along much of the coast of China. The growth in the invisible dimension of the world-economy after 1850 was immense and was centred on the City of London as “the financial and commercial centre of world trade” (Cain and Hopkins 1980: 481). Sterling became the currency cornerstone of the world financial system, and so also of world capital flows and of the free riding of English upon them. The centrality of sterling gave Britain certain economic advantages in the world-economy which were not available to other nations – what economists refer to as seignorage (Gilpin 2001: 246– 7). This was because a large amount of world debt was held in sterling and so the Bank of England could simply print more pounds as a “free loan” to the government as and when required, while also absolving Britain of any of the currency transfer costs which were incurred by other nations when dealing in pounds. The centrality of sterling thus also gave English a linguistic seignorage which other languages could not rival. Alongside these developments, British imperialist acquisition in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean proceeded apace with vast extensions in territorial occupation and control.

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The railway era also came into its own, as Latin American railway companies with headquarters often based in the City of London began to open up the interiors of the continent (Davis, Wilburn and Robinson 1991; Herranz-Loncan 2011). In Brazil, after 1856, economic control was strengthened by the building of the railways, financed and operated by British companies, and encouraged by generous concessions from a pliant Brazilian government (Gallagher and Robinson 1953; Manchester 1964). Similar ventures took place in Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Uruguay and Paraguay, “the rhythm of their economic life being dependent upon the ebb and flow of London funds” (Cain and Hopkins 1987: 11). In Latin America as a whole, between 1865 and 1913, British capital holdings increased from nearly £81 million to about £1.2 billion, with approximately a quarter of this being accounted for by the railways (Stone 1977: 692). These were also largely built with British steel, and under the oversight of British engineers and overseers (Coleman 1965). In China, after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5, territorial incursions by Germany, Japan, France and Russia saw the Dowager Empress Cixi turn increasingly to Britain and its representatives in the English Legation at Peking and in the British-controlled Imperial Maritime Customs Service at Shanghai as a buffer against further imperialist aggression, and as conduits for the local arrangement of British government loans (Cain and Hopkins 2013: 653). The growth in the invisible trade and the linguistic seignorage this implied may be counted as a sixth moment in the global rise of English.

Seventh moment Less visible than even the ‘invisible’ capital flows, was the intrusion of English along with the flows. For commentators of the period, then and now, it is noticeable how trade appears simply to have happened; with the medium in which it was undertaken going largely unmentioned. Yet ‘exchange’ through English must have happened or capital accumulation could not have occurred. This took place across a range of social classes and occupations, in ports, in inland centres of commerce and in foreign-settlement contexts across the British world-economy, with many of those involved becoming bilingually proficient in the process. Where a standard form was deemed overcomplex for the purposes of conducting business, local transactors often conversed in pidgins which, as in the foreign settlements at, for example, Canton, Shanghai and Yokohama, usually had English as one of their roots (Cranmer-Byng 1965; Fujita 1981; Si 2013; Van Dyke 2017). In the nineteenth century, the process of the social diffusion of English was a pattern which was repeated in many locations where the British informally held sway, such as the treaty ports of the China coast, and in Egypt prior the British occupation of 1882, or where they sought to exert influence, such as in Japan (e.g. Yokohama, Kobe, Yedo and Nagasaki) and Latin America (e.g. Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay). First, there was the introduction of British capital and the creation of onsite mercantile institutions for managing it (e.g. trading houses, godowns, banks and municipal structures). Concomitant with this was the physical staking out of tracts of land where core commercial activities might be concentrated, accompanied wherever possible by the creation, by treaty or accord, of a legal-political framework to secure them – ideally in the form of land rights, the principle of extraterritoriality and the removal of barriers to trade. This was, incidentally, a format that was later widely copied by the United States, particularly in the century after 1898 (Panitch and Gindin 2012). Finally, there was the development of a local service industry to meet the needs and diversions of those employed in the

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commercial operations of the settlement. Connecting all of these nodal points together was the use of English structured at different levels of indexicality from pidgin English to more elaborate, but still formulaic, exchanges (e.g. with shopkeepers, higher-class servants and tailors), through to functional ‘nativeness’ in the normative standard (e.g. in municipal and administrative bodies). The foreign settlement superstructure was held together and reinforced by a rigid gentlemanly social hierarchy, at the very apex of which was a British expatriate elite made up of the merchants and financiers, managers and commercial assistants of the major British trading houses and their associated investment institutions. On a par with these in the informal zones of British influence, such as at Shanghai, Cairo and Valparaiso, would usually be a London-appointed British Consul with a small coterie of consular staff. The principle (if not the fact) of extraterritoriality was widely applied by the British, as well as by the Americans and the French, in many parts of the world, including Japan, China, Siam, the Ottoman Empire, and some parts of Latin America. Moreover, as a Western concept, it was mostly only applied in ‘non-Western’ states (Kayaoglu 2010: 8). In the treaty ports of China, “Extraterritoriality came to mean more than a jurisdictional arrangement; it came to stand for a panoply of practices establishing and protecting foreigners’ prerogatives in China” (Benton 2002: 251); and in British zones, such as Shanghai, extraterritoriality was often “aggressively extended by firms to British owned property or goods” (Bickers 2010: 276). The spread of exterritoriality and the linguistic structuration processes which this locally brought about may be considered a seventh moment in the global rise of English.

VI.  CONCLUSION: THE AMERICAN CENTURY, 1919– Space does not permit a fuller discussion of the capital expansion of the United States and of English alongside it (see Phillipson 2008; Panitch and Gindin 2012; Lemberg 2018 for good overviews). Some indicative comments can nevertheless be made. In keeping with the argument with which I began, the present global hegemony of the American normative model is not to be explained by a focus on the period since the end of the Second World War in 1945, or even since the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, but is directly connected to the global capital networks which were established by Britain in the preceding centuries, and to the free riding of English upon them. It is the free riding of English which after 1945, and still today, gives ideologized standard English its ongoing economic and symbolic value, and its peculiar social resilience, in the linguistic markets of the world. This is notwithstanding the widespread emergence of English-inflected translingual, superdiverse and trans-spatial realizations (passim). Although my focus is not the present but the past, some general observations on the US global hegemony, and on the imbrication of normative English within it, may be presented. The American century begins in 1919 with the defeat of Germany and the Treaty of Versailles (eighth moment), and is then consolidated from 1944 with the Bretton Woods currency and trade accords which after 1945 reconfigured the international financial and trading system along US lines (ninth moment). This was then further consolidated again after 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union (tenth moment). The US world-economy has mostly been based on an informal empire rather than a formal one, although in its rise to hegemonic supremacy it too has had acquisitional and colonizing tendencies, such as Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines (all 1898), the Panama Canal Zone (1903), Japan and South Korea (1945), and Vietnam (1954). It also occupies as part of the

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strategic forward projection of its power around 800 military bases around the world. A number of these are under US sovereign jurisdiction, such as Guam and Wake Island. But for the great majority, it is extraterritorial rights which apply. As with the British world-economy, the driving force of the US world-economy is the endless accumulation of capital. US capital accumulation has been original as compared to the British hegemony in being characterized by autocentrism (Arrighi 2010), which is the internalization of US corporate practices within the organizational domains of giant business corporations and the world’s global governance institutions. Coca Cola, McDonalds, Goldman Sachs and Apple are examples of the former. The IMF, the World Bank, the WTO and the US Federal Reserve are examples of the latter. By its domination of the global governance structures of the international system since 1944, the United States has been able to construct the world-economy in its image far more successfully than Britain ever managed to do, and as part of that instill its standard language norms within the world-system as a whole. Globally, US structural power is immense, encompassing economic and cultural production, global credit and finance, military power, and extensive control over the global knowledge base and the kinds of knowledge that are valued within it (Strange 1989). In recent years, China has come more to the fore, but its overall hegemonic challenge has been critiqued as structurally uneven, geopolitically unserious and lacking in market trust (Shambaugh 2016; Tooze 2019; Sharma 2020). Dollar centrality in the modern world-economy and the current place of the US Federal Reserve at the heart of the international monetary system gives the US dollar enormous currency seignorage, while also conferring immense ideological seignorage upon normative English as well. The process of currency seignorage transfer from sterling to the dollar begins with the dollar indebtedness of many of the world’s nations after 1919, including Britain. US conditionality loans in the 1920s marked the beginnings of a uniquely US model for the economic and linguistic structuring of the capitalist world-economy, which as the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine after 1945, and as “structural adjustment” from the 1980s onwards, was extended into the modern era. The loans, supported by the outward projection of US technical, corporate, military, religious and cultural might (Rosenberg 1982), contributed to the establishment of dollar-denominated global capital networks which from 1919 down to the present time were structured through standard English (Bentley and Grebstein 1956; Phillipson 2008; Lemberg 2018). These built upon the networks which had already been established in the pre-1919 world-economy by the British, or they forged them anew. Where US structural power holds sway in the modern world-system, ideologized standard English is invariably the language of preference for its governance and for its documentary administration. In addition, it is also the form which is most promoted in national language policies, and is most frequently demanded and appropriated by national and international class-based elites (Hannerz 1990; Myers-Scotton 1993; Block 2012). It is the proximity of English to British- and US-dominated capital flows over the past four centuries which seems best to explain this phenomenon. Despite widespread criticism of the structural inequity of normative forms relative to alternative multi/plural practices and realizations (Kubota 2016), in the unequal world of unequal Englishes nothing much seems to change (Tupas 2019). But this has to be with the knowledge that in the global ideological mechanics of capital and capital accumulation historically, it is the orientation to exchange which supersedes the orientation to use, so that in the capitalist market of language forms, it is the most capital-centric forms which dominate. From this we may conclude that in the history of the capitalist world-system it is not so much language

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which is set free by free individuals; it is, rather, as Marx might say, capital which is set free to decide the limits upon the freedom of language.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I am grateful to John Gray, Rani Rubdy, Ruanni Tupas and the anonymous reviewers for the helpful comments they made on an earlier draft of this chapter.

REFERENCES Amin, S. (1977), Imperialism and Unequal Development, New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Arendt, H. (1968), Imperialism: Part Two of the Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego: Harvest. Arrighi, G. (2010), The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, London: Verso. Bentley, R. S. and S. Grebstein (1956), ‘English – Tomorrow’s International Language’, The English Journal, 45 (7): 395–9.  Benton, L. (2002), Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bickers, R. (2010), ‘Shanghailanders and Others: British Communities in China, 1842–1957’, in R. Bickers (ed.), Setters and Expatriates. Britons Overseas, 269–301, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Block, D. (2012), ‘Commentary: Transnational South Korea as a Site for a Sociolinguistics of Globalization and the Distinction of Global Elites’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16 (2): 277–82.  Block, D., J. Gray and M. Holborow (2012), Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics, London: Routledge. Blommaert, J. (2010), The Sociolinguistics of Globalization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. and B. Rampton (2012), ‘Language and Superdiversity’, MMG Working Paper, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, 12–05: 7–30.  Bourdieu, P. (1991), Language and Symbolic Power, Oxford: Polity. Braudel, F. (1980/1958), On History (S. Matthews, Trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cain, P. J. and A. G. Hopkins (1980), ‘The Political Economy of British Expansion Overseas, 1750–1914’, The Economic History Review, 33 (4): 463–90.  Cain, P. J. and A. G. Hopkins (1986), ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas I. The Old Colonial System, 1688–1850’, The Economic History Review, 39 (4): 501–25.  Cain, P. J. and A. G. Hopkins (1987), ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas II: New Imperialism, 1850–1945’, The Economic History Review, 40 (1): 1–26.  Cain, P. J. and A. G. Hopkins (2013), British Imperialism 1688–2000. 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Canagarajah, A. S. (2017), ‘Translingual Practice as Spatial Repertoires: Expanding the Paradigm Beyond Structuralist Orientations’, Applied Linguistics, 39 (1): 31–54.  Chowdhury, R. and L. H. Phan (2014), Desiring TESOL and International Education: Market Abuse and Exploitation, Cleveland: Multilingual Matters. Clarence-Smith, W. G. (1994). ‘The Organization of Consent in West Africa, 1820s to 1860s’, in D. Engels & S. Marks (eds), Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India, 55–78. London: British Academic Press.

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Chapter 3

‘The Tide is Coming in Fast’ Ideologies of English, Global Linguistic Coloniality and Decolonial Pluriversalingualism AHMED KABEL

I.  INTRODUCTION In the conclusion to his book On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe asks: “Have we really entered another period, or do we find the same theater, the same mimetic acting, with different actors and spectators, but with the same convulsions and the same insult? Can we really talk of moving beyond colonialism?” (2001: 237). The postcolony is an oxymoronic absurdity, insists Mbembe (242), giving the lie to the illusory postcolonial epoch sanguinely heralded by the literary pantheon in US universities. Colonialism still percolates the psyches and bodies of indigenous peoples and those languishing under contemporary settler colonial regimes, and its enduring fossilized detritus persists in shaping the lives and futures of those Frantz Fanon evocatively called ‘les damnés de la terre’. Colonialism is not an event; it is a sedimented historical formation. These sedimented colonial formations and the “compounded layers of imperial debris” still vigorously “contour and carve through the psychic and material space in which people live” (Stoler 2013: 2), thus shifting from colonialism/ruins as a state to (colonial) ruination as a dynamic and uninterrupted, albeit variegated, historical process – from colonialism to coloniality (Maldonado-Torres 2007; Quijano 2007; Mignolo 2011; Dussel 2013a) and, in its planetary configuration, to global coloniality (Grosfoguel 2006). Contemporary language policies are forged and enunciated in the crucible of these imperial formations and histories – they are hewn in global coloniality. Linguistic ruination, however elusively, pervades and invigorates language hierarchies and ideologies. Global linguistic coloniality is the condition of possibility for contemporary language policy, articulated and disarticulated in the fulcrum of the detritus of the colonial present marked by multilayered language heterarchies, colonial racialized difference, arrested decolonization, militarism, developmentalism, educational imperialism, epistemicism, culturalism, asymmetrical neoliberal/neocolonial discourses and designs of political economy and global geopolitics (see Kabel 2016a). Thus, English language ideologies need to be situated within historically constituted and relational stratified linguistic ecologies marked by global linguistic coloniality. The coloniality of global English in Morocco is sutured onto local and global language hierarchies and ideologies involving Arabization and francophonie, and also onto multi-scalar designs of power constitutive

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of global coloniality. This creates intersecting linguistic colonialities, and conversely generates contradictions and unsettled ambivalences, ‘structures of feeling’ that open up spaces for decolonial critique and resistance. With particular emphasis on Morocco and the region, this chapter will attempt to offer a glimpse into the manifold entanglements of English language ideologies and global linguistic coloniality.

II.  ARABIZATION AND THE FAILURE OF DECOLONIZATION Linguistic coloniality is inscribed in logics and histories of patterned colonial difference. The construction of ‘imperial identities’ (Lorcin 1999) dovetailed with language ideologies and practices in North Africa. The linguistic constitution of an essentialized ethnic difference between ‘Berber’ and ‘Arab’ was a cornerstone of colonial governmentality in Morocco. Colonial policy, hinged on the ‘Berber Myth’ (Ageron 1971), was hoisted on rigid ethno-linguistic identities interwoven with law and religion (Kosansky 2016). It was aimed to assimilate Berbers into the colonial order by educating a buffer class of indigenous ‘lords’ to administer their native kin, akin to what Macaulay, in his (in)famous Minute, proscribed for India. Architects of colonial policy equally envisioned French language and education as a tool to placate Arab and Islamic corruption and atavistic subversion of the civilizing mission for Berbers. ‘Franco-Muslim Colleges’ were also established for urban elites to furbish the burgeoning colonial economy and bureaucracy. The ‘moral conquest’ (Hardy 2017) of the ‘Moroccan soul’ (Segalla 2006) would have to be staged in the fraught terrain of language and knowledge confectioned around essentialized identity, culture and history. Such is the linguistic legacy of colonialism that would fatefully blunt both the nationalist and the postcolonial imagination, and still hews language policy. The failure of Arabization is not one of language policy alone. It is rather symptomatic of the unfulfilled promise of the postcolonial state. The latter is attributable to the persistent institutionalized colonial structures and the debacle of the decolonial and ‘development’ projects as the postcolonial state reappropriated and augmented colonial reason and technologies of governing. Postcolonial constructions of the nation were hinged on the ethnic, linguistic and cultural classificatory and discursive grids of colonial policy. Arabization paradoxically embodied ‘Gallicization’ (Laroui 2009: 12), the Jacobin linguistic and cultural monologics which occasioned the exclusion of local diversities, namely Amazigh, and a fissured national identity. Arabic consolidated itself as the emblem of a purloined culture and identity now prized from colonial bondage. French continued to reign supreme in major sectors of higher education, development, high culture, the economy and administration. French then remained the purveyor of both symbolic violence and material value in a stratified linguistic and educational market. This ‘postcolonial linguistic market’, with its regulated and differential value allocation, reflected and was grafted on the inherent dualism of the colonial regime (Laroui 2010: 111–14), a protectorate ‘à double visage’ (Rivet 1999) – a Janus-faced political matrix consisting of two parallel and interposed universes: a local world drenched in invented/ reconstructed tradition and a colonial one steeped in modern technologies of political control, violence and economic exploitation. Postcolonial Morocco maintained and further consolidated the economic, social, legal and political matrix of colonial power (Rivet 2002: 419, 423–4; Belal 1980: 46). The postcolonial Arabic/French diglossic divide merely consolidated this dual colonial order and its attendant aporia. But what is

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often dismissed as the contingent ‘ambivalence’ of Arabization is in reality a structuring logic of the matrix bequeathed by colonialism and generatively reconstructed by the postcolonial state. These realities of social and cultural stratification and exclusion have endured to this day with a class politics that is increasingly widening the gulf between the rich and the poor (Hanieh 2016: 103) refracted through sharp contours of language and education. With the growing penetration of English and new discourses buttressing it, global linguistic and epistemic coloniality is taking on new dimensions of ideological erasure and neocolonial continuity. Such is the colonial economy of Arabization. Failed Arabization is a ‘morbid symptom’ of unfulfilled decolonization. The language in education policy currently in gestation will foreclose this ‘ambivalence’. French is groomed for resurgent supremacy after decades of (thinly) camouflaged status as the ‘unofficial official language’. This resurgence interlaces with concerted designs for linguistic and geopolitical jockeying. Morocco, the French Institute in Morocco declares, is a cornerstone of francophonie. The institute crows over the recent resurrection of French and over its “close collaboration” with the Moroccan Ministry of Education to implement the new language in education policy and “the promotion of francophonie in its educational system” (IFM)1. The hegemonic grip of francophonie, both locally and transnationally, further illustrates how language policies and ideologies are fashioned in this imperial detritus, greasing the machinery of global linguistic coloniality.

III.  FRANCOPHONIE AND COLONIAL RUINATION The promotion of French worldwide is embedded in global geolinguistic and geopolitical designs. France is hobbled by internal social and economic problems, waning influence within an enlarged and German-dominated EU and diminishing global standing (Rieker 2017; Maclean and Szarka 2008: 6), including in its former colonial bastions. The increasing economic, military and linguistic infiltration of Africa by China (Brautigam 2009) and continued expansion of the United States are disconcerting for France. It is against this geopolitical backdrop that recent aggressive francophonie needs to be situated. Such anxieties permeate President Emmanuel Macron’s address on Francophonie Day at the prestigious Institut de France (March 20, 2018) which outlines a grand ‘strategy’ for the global expansion of the French language and culture (Macron 2018). In a homily for an ‘ambitious’ francophonie, Macron avers that French is a ‘post-imperial’ ‘langue-monde’ cleansed of any vestige of colonial domination and arrogance. Couched in a(n) (old)new vision foregrounding ‘multilateralism’, ‘cooperation’ and ‘universalism’, this ‘langue-monde’ now unites, inspires and liberates. Professions of faith notwithstanding, these narratives are reflective of ‘French exceptionalism’, and hark back to and reproduce colonial discourses and legacies. ‘Practicing grandeur’ as soft power represents France’s long-standing foreign policy creed (Rieker 2017: 15–38). The rhetoric of exceptionalism blends reminiscence of a lost glorious past, grandeur and mission civilisatrice (Mesfin 2008). The exceptionalism is bolstered by the superiority and ‘genius’ of the French language, which underlies the language ideologies of francophonie (Majumdar 2012; Vigouroux 2013) predicated on linguistic ‘Othering’ and ‘benevolent’ linguistic intervention. Much of this neocolonial trance is played out in an article that markets French in Morocco as a language of social, cultural and political emancipation transcending economic considerations (Jablonka 2015). French transfuses modernity through the inculcation of rationality, enlightenment values and liberty, and poses as antidote to retrograde tribal and neo-feudal tradition.

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Similarly, francophonie’s ostensible defense of multilateralism, democracy and human rights globally (Diouf 2010) seeks to secure political patronage and geopolitical rayonnement. High-mindedness, however, seems to be only a prelude to power realism or to ‘unefrancophonie à l‘offensive’ (Majumdar 2012): French ought to restore and enhance its past luster in its ‘natural colonial habitat’ and beyond; French should act as an indispensable weapon of soft power in a world rife with struggles for global hegemony, against Chinese global ambitions, and English linguistic, educational, cultural and political domination. Also integrated in this is the promotion of the Bologna Framework in many African countries, in its decidedly neoliberal variations, in order to secure long-term academic and intellectual dependency of Africa on Europe (Obasi and Olutayo 2009) and on France more specifically. It is also an attempt to counteract the hegemony of English and mounting competition by English-medium education in Africa. Educational and scientific leverage and the promotion of French cohabit, as summarized by one enthusiast, “La politique de la langue française constitue un des fondements de l’action culturelle extérieure française: en effet, le développement des échanges culturels et scientifiques s’accompagne de la promotion du français, composante essentielle de la politique d’influence dans le monde” (Lane 2016: 93), as part of the New Great Game. In the context of the economic crisis afflicting Europe and France, francophonie is a potentially lucrative investment. Francophonie and ‘Francophilie’, writes Attali (2014), no less, should reshape this emerging cultural and linguistic geography to serve France’s economic and strategic priorities echoing French state rhetoric of the 1960s. An originary aporia thus haunts francophonie. Officially, there is much solemn sermonizing about universalism and respect for cultural and linguistic diversity. In reality, francophonie as linguistic coloniality is inextricably entangled with a fundamental preoccupation to salvage the French language from imminent global decline (Pinhas 2004) and with global coloniality: durable materialities of empire, and geopolitical and cultural domination. Professed respect for linguistic diversity is public relations and reproduces the colonial discourses of benevolence and altruism. The political paradigm informing francophonie rests on embedding French in local language ecologies where the language is positioned both hierarchically and oppositionally, which is a consistent historical pattern (Spaëth 2010: 68; Majumdar 2012). Such colonial language reconfigurations merely conceal “but do not erase durable hierarchies and relations of dependency they help to reproduce”, often accentuated through class divisions (Errington 2008: 151).

IV.  LINGUICISM/EPISTEMICISM AND LINGUISTIC/EPISTEMIC COLONIALITY Language policies are not hermetically sealed ciphers; they acquire meaning and legitimacy because they are situated within a multiplicity of ‘texts’ and ‘discourses’ (Ball 2006: 43– 53; Hult 2017). Language policy prescriptions are articulated and thought in the context of strong enthusiasm for and promotion of neoliberal education reforms in the region (Barnawi 2017). This involves the strategic embedding of language discourse in various non-educational referential systems of meaning and discursive regimes like governance, human capital, development, the knowledge economy and employability. These educational frameworks are in tune with the neoliberal zeitgeist in Morocco and entwined with the variegated topographies of neoliberalism permeating a vast array of spheres and spaces. Neoliberal discursive constellations of governance, competition, autonomy and

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benchmarking underwrite those policies. What makes current policy hegemonic is its iterative intertextualization within the coloniality of neoliberal discourse: the thickness of authoritative texts and discourses formed by ideological, social, political, economic, cultural and neocolonial neoliberal formations. The neoliberal linguistic imaginary, nurtured through the ideological meanings and associations of neoliberal keywords (Holborow 2012), incubates in the bosom of this generalized neoliberal condition. This overlapping positions language policy at the core of multi-sited instantiations of neoliberal designs. The Strategic Vision for Education in Morocco (the Vision henceforth), an ambitious plan to revamp Moroccan education, is sutured onto a dense grid of policy texts, statements, official speeches, evaluation reports, programmatic recommendations and global policy discourses. This discursive policy corpus is generated by an array of local and global policy hubs such as government ministries, Bank Al Maghreb (Central Bank), the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE)2, The Council for Education, Scientific Research and Training (CSEFRS)3, the World Bank, IMF, OECD, USAID and others. Like global neoliberal formations (Plehwe 2016), these networked constellations of policies and ideas are central to the constitution and reproduction of global and linguistic coloniality. Recurrent borrowings and relayings across scales and sites normalize discourses. Overlappings, for instance, between the Vision (CSEFRS 2015) and World Bank neoliberalese, are striking. The Vision overlaps with, borrows and seeks legitimation from dominant international education discourses. For instance, the same semantic clusters of quality, accountability, efficiency and positivistic rationality permeate the Vision, its discursive formation and legitimation. Decentralization, efficiency and quality along with various neoliberal conceptual assortments of human (intangible) capital and knowledge economy populating the Vision are part of powerful World Bank (WB henceforth) narratives (WB 2008: 83–95) as well as the national neoliberal vulgate (CESEand Bank Al Maghreb 2016). These ideological framings anchor the coloniality of global English in the structures of knowledge economy, science and development. Moroccan language policy consecrates a hierarchical patterning of ‘local’ and ‘global’ languages’. While it is true that English is slowly, but steadily, impinging on French’s exclusive terrain, what is taking place is a de jure affirmation of a de facto reality on the one hand and, on the other, an intersecting grip of both dominant/imperial languages. However, the increasing infiltration of the neoliberal coordinates of human capital, knowledge economy, competitiveness and science as harbingers of progress normalizes English as both carrier and gateway to these stupendous modern prizes. They also act as performatives of a collective imaginary where English emerges as fetish in the (unequal) race for accumulating/intensifying symbolic and material capital. French and English, in tandem, are thus differentially staged as the languages of power and prestige. English is crowned as the language of modern knowledge and ‘development’ and promoted to be a significant language of teaching and research in higher education. Language-in-education policy (CSEFRS 2015) thus institutionalizes il/legitimate multilingualisms and generates regressive multilingualism (Kabel 2018) prompting interlocking linguistic colonialities. Such a scheme leads to the impoverishment of the local ecology: Arabic functional displacement and Amazigh devitalization (Kabel 2018). It is potentially a recipe for linguistic and epistemic dispossession, linguistic hierarchization and English hegemony, augmenting linguistic/epistemic coloniality in the service of global coloniality. The hierarchical and oppositional assemblage also characterizes the colonial osmosis between English and knowledge.

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English is encrusted in the coloniality of knowledge4 mapped onto the neoliberal/ neocolonial topographies of knowledge political economy. The knowledge economy epitomizes a response to the crisis of capitalism and the Fordist production regime. It embodies a search for new venues of accumulation for US corporations, enhancing US competitiveness and continued global dominance (Unger 2019; Jessop 2004). Knowledge economy regimes deepen these asymmetries by restructuring local economies to bolster global neoliberalism (Carnoy 2014; Plehwe 2007) which animates rentier capitalism (Standing 2017), the new extractive oligarchy (Hudson 2017) parasitic on monopoly and intellectual property rents. This lodges knowledge and English at the center of a new planetary cartography of accumulation by dispossession wherein the Global South is locked into a lopsided post-Fordist architecture resolutely beholden to the interests of the North. Indeed, “the knowledge-economy narrative is not about developing countries becoming knowledge-based” (Robertson 2008: 270). Rather, knowledge economy “is a tool for putting into place the ideological and institutional means to enable the developed economies, in particular the USA, to generate value from knowledge services globally” with the active midwifery of the World Bank, OECD and the WTO (Robertson 2008). The knowledge economy is both an “updated version of the old modernization” theory (Moughrabi 2008: 23) and “structural adjustment cloaked in a consensual, progressive mantle” (Robertson 2008: 270). Equally, the knowledge economy for the Global South appears to be another neoliberal response to the horrendous legacy of neoliberal structural adjustment programs (Chang 2014: 266; Olssen and Peters 2005), a tunnel vision rife with “optical illusions” (Chang 2014: 261) and truncated economics, history and politics. The coloniality of developmentalism (Escobar 1995; Esteva 2010) sustains English for the knowledge economy. The latter is an appendage to its dubious forebear: ‘English for/in development’, both equally problematic; nonetheless, its retailers still abound. A veteran of the trade, David Graddol, was invited to preach the gospel of English and development in Morocco (http​:/​/ww​​w​.mac​​ece​.o​​rg​/wp​​-cont​​ent​/u​​pload​​s​/201​​2​/12/​​2013​ -​​MFAA-​​Conf.​​doc).​Such prescriptions are driven by the assumption that English is a solution to Morocco’s development problems and that the UK United Kingdom and the United States have the necessary knowledge and expertise to deliver the goods. English for development is animated by unsubstantiated faith, remains divisive and ignores the ambivalences of English in development in neocolonial times (Bruthiaux 2002; Vavrus 2002). “Widespread competence in English is in no matter associated with higher levels of economic growth” (Grin and Arcand 2013), and English may indeed inhibit local development in low-income countries (Ricento 2012). Coleman (2010) thus counsels ‘caution’ when peddling the economic marvels of English and warns that English-philia may both conceal and sanction linguistic and social inequality. Despite these critiques, rarely has ‘English in development’ been radically questioned as colonial detritus, as the tangle of linguistic and global coloniality. Despite semantic variations, genealogies of ‘development’ lay bare an enduring legacy of the colonial matrices of knowledge and domination embodied in structures, practices and cultural attitudes (Kothari 2005). Global knowledge structures are instrumental to this matrix; the coloniality of knowledge interweaves with the coloniality of development discourse (Sachs and Esteva 2003; Escobar 2004). Like ‘English for development’, ‘English for the knowledge economy’ easily slides into ideological flirtation naturalizing and reproducing global coloniality. The new dispensation of the knowledge economy supplements the operative development paradigm in legislating a new field of colonial discourse and intervention, political, economic and linguistic. The Arab Human Development Report (UNDP 2003)5

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was a landmark in constructing this new-fangled assemblage of thinking and performing development in the Arab World that is pivoted on the knowledge economy and society as a novel episteme for social and cultural transformation. Like its counterparts in the UNDP series, the Report’s construction of knowledge economy and society in the Arab world is a multi-sited field of intervention (Sukarieh 2017: 73) wrought at the nexus of global designs, elite power and the international development industry (Mazawi 2008), with the WB (Plehwe 2007; WB, 2002, 2007, 2017) and the IMF (IMF 2019) entering the fray. The Report “is couched and squeezed in the administrative and spiritless language of the ‘World Bank’ and drenched in ‘neo-liberal orthodoxy’”, celebrating free markets and unfettered economic freedom (Bayat 2005: 1230). The clusters of knowledge society and economy “cannot be dissociated from the broader unequal power frameworks associated with Western colonialism and imperialism”. “This particular version of the knowledge society”, Mazawi (2008: 254–5), further argues, “deepens the dependency of the Arab region on Western capitalist economies”, precludes “national liberation and emancipation” and “ultimately institutes technological consumption” as proxy for knowledge production. On the other hand, the dismal state of knowledge in the Arab World is the corollary of the protracted history of Western colonial domination and recurrent imperial interventions in the region (Bayat 2005), occasioning not only underdevelopment and dependency, but cultural cleansing (Baker et al. 2010) and low-intensity epistemicide. Such systemic considerations are woefully absent in a collection of studies on English in the Middle East and North Africa (British Council 2013a). The fairytale of English therein is that of a goodhearted ‘auntie’ inhabiting a utopian world of interfaith dialog and personal and economic advancement. The class politics of English education in the Arab world is invisibilized as is how English as a language of publication leads to the ghettoization of Arabic and to the isolation of knowledge production and academics from their societies (Currie-Alder et al. 2018; Hanafi 2011). The global imbrication of the research architecture in the Arab world in the knowledge economy “institutionalizes dependency” on the West, disrupts local education autonomy and fuels the brain drain (Mazawi 2008: 258). Under the present matrix of “transnational academic capitalism” (Kauppinen 2015), academic research and knowledge are reconstituted as commodities to be produced, packaged and promoted by ‘academic entrepreneurs’ and subjected to the Market Imperative. The structural linkages between transnational academic capitalism – academic entrepreneurialism, research funding and the politics of knowledge – and the English language constitute a nexus of linguistic and epistemic power – transnational linguistic capitalism. This nodal point is the global coloniality of language/knowledge. By promoting commodification and ‘western’ epistemic paradigms, the latter immiserates local knowledges and linguistic ecologies. It undercuts the organic function of education and research systems to actively contribute to the public good of local communities and generate knowledge conducive to solving local and regional problems (Currie-Alder et al. 2018) rather than being subordinated to global academic and geopolitical agendas with the attendant alienation, exploitation and disillusionment (Sukareih and Tannock 2019). Local scholars are extorted by the morbid language economy of scientific production: publish globally and perish locally or publish locally and perish globally (Hanafi and Arvanitis 2014; Hanafi 2011); the balance seems to tilt toward the former, with self-evident consequences for knowledge feudalism and slow epistemicide. Linguistic/epistemic coloniality is coupled with a marked culturalism which projects allegedly entrenched cultural traits as impediment to the development of a knowledge society. Culturalism is an ideology that construes cultures as walled monoliths

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“determinative of individual thought and action, as well as broader social, economic, and political structures and processes”. In this view, “the problems of the Arab world are construed primarily as matters of culture” and the Arab world is cast in a stereotypical and Orientalist mold antithetical to anything western, hence the insistence on cultural reform (Sukarieh 2012: 115). But this culturalism merely legitimates neoliberal economic, political, and legal reforms (Kabel 2014). Cultural and linguistic improvement thus mutates into neoliberal nomos. Such culturalism encapsulates profound language and epistemic ideologies undergirding conceptions of legitimate language and knowledge. Linguicism meets epistemicism. The purported deficit in science and knowledge production afflicting the Arab world is intimately tied to a dual language deficit: the structure and teaching of the Arabic language and a declining facility with English (UNDP 2003: 123–5). In a time of linguistic and epistemic morbidity, English is thus primed to occupy center stage in the chimeric mutation into an ‘Arab knowledge society’. The Arab Human Development Report also intimates an imaginary that is anchored in a necessary connubial connection between English, science and technology. Such configuration bifurcates into a double fissure: a linguistic divide between English (French) and Arabic, and an epistemic rift between science and the humanities. These two fissures are symbiotically interrelated generating two interlocking epistemic and linguistic cartographies: English-science/Arabic-humanities. This new politics of knowledge has nurtured epistemic diglossia. Low and High varieties of knowledge are confected which are clearly refracted along an Arabic/English diglossia. Interestingly, this intersectional linguistic and epistemic coloniality is crocheted onto the neoliberal educational reforms centered overhauling the structure and organization of curriculum, namely the increasing onslaught on the humanities6 on the grounds of their purported irrelevance for a market society (Collini 2017; Nussbaum 2010).

V.  OF MARKETS AND LANGUAGES: TIDES AND BULL HORNS Writing in the Financial Times in the aftermath of the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto7 (2011) exhorts Arab countries to do more than just “emancipat(e) the entrepreneurial poor”. Now that “the forces of the market have come to the Arab world” and that “poor Arabs are no longer outside but inside, in the market”, true revolution, he opines, entails no less than the unleashing of ‘Free Market’ forces. The future of democracy and modernity in the region, he ploughs on, is indeed attached to the libidinal discharge of repressed market energies. This is a classic Friedmanite trope – and a grand leap of neoliberal faith. English crisscrosses with the ideological tropes of ‘the end history’ and their legitimation. The Hydra (Bunce et al. 2016) slithers triumphantly with the ineluctable tide of history and the teleology of democracy and development as the ultimate political and economic horizon for the Rest. Echoing de Soto, Martin Rose, formerly director of British Council Morocco (2010–14), scarcely conceals his linguistic eschatology when he heralds the irrepressible and liberatory force of English. “The advance of English”, he avers, “is a tidal phenomenon – irresistible . . . [t]he tide is coming in fast”. “This incoming tide”, he prophesies “is doing something more than just washing a new language onto the beach”, “it will wash away many sandcastles and beachmermaids [sic] too”, including recalcitrant vestiges of linguistic and cultural atavism. And “if Morocco is to avoid the

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haphazard impact of language change”, it must embrace English and “grasp the bull by the horns” (Rose 2014: 125). For the unleashing of English is prerequisite for Progress: “it is a vector of democracy and development, as well as a hotlink to the globalized world of the twenty-first century” (Rose 2014). Like the Free Market energies, the power of English in Morocco, and the Maghreb, “is waiting with impatience to break out of its narrow confines” (Rose 2016: np). These two breeds of heady linguistic and political triumphalism are not unrelated in the Western response to the tumultuous aftermath of the Arab Spring. The Free Market and English both wash their teleologies onto the same beach. The promotion of democracy and English are fused in a single neoimperial narrative. Former secretary of state, William Hague, dubs the British Council as a “beacon for democratic values around the world” (British Council 2013b: 2). English is retailed as a vector of democracy, and progressive and civilized values are held to run through the marrow of the language. ‘Democracy’s faint pulse’ in the region can be invigorated by fine doses of English with British Council’s organization of debating clubs and training of activists enfolded within its English language operations (Rachman 2018). Part of inculcating democracy is to train youth in English and ‘debating skills’ in order to “foster a more constructive culture of political dialogue” (ICAI 2013: 17). English grants Arab youth ‘voice’ and political agency for “building democratic and pluralistic communities” (British Council 2016: 68). In reality, however, this exalted devotion to democracy does not neatly square with history and current practice. British global involvement, Mark Curtis concludes, is largely one of “complicity in some of the world’s worst horrors”, and “a story of crimes against humanity” (2003: 432). Curtis adds that “Britain’s role remains an essentially imperial one: to act as junior partner to US global power; to help organize the global economy to benefit Western corporations; and to maximize Britain’s (that is, British elites’) independent political standing in the world and thus remain a ‘great power’” (2003: 6). The lofty affectations of altruistic benevolence mask propagandistic, geopolitical and commercial rationalities. English is advocated as a geopolitical rite of passage to the global neoliberal order. The World Bank (2017) starkly endorses ‘shock therapy’ for Moroccan education and language policy in order to trigger an ‘educational miracle’ (4, 48, 58; also 2019). An earlier report (World Bank 2012) advances that democratic transition implies a shift in education policy and practice, making democracy conditional on employability and soft skills. The British Council has equally eagerly embraced the linguistic shock doctrine of English skills for employability in response to the ‘crisis of democracy’ in the region. This ‘discursive capture’ around soft skills development and employability strengthens neoliberal Anglicization under the cover of fulfilling an objective need for English (Erling 2015; Euromonitor 2012; ICAI 2013). In the same way that ‘shock therapy’ is prescribed as part of ‘creative destruction’, these blueprints can be interpreted as an attempt to contain dissent and stabilize global geopolitical and political economic hegemonies, especially when the ‘crisis’ is framed through the lens of ‘the Youth Bulge’ (World Bank 2012) symptomatic of the ‘global securitization of youth’ (Sukarieh and Tannock 2018). These discourses and policy proposals have also proliferated in the ideological cauldron of ‘the war on terror’. The newfangled educational fixations on employability, skills and the knowledge economy betray an unattractive mix of Islamophobia as a racialized and neo-orientalist project and neoliberalism as an economic and ideological orthodoxy in the service of Western designs for domination over the Middle East. Neoliberalization from below forms the centerpiece of the ideological war for hearts and minds (and pockets) to

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deradicalize young Muslims, a full-blown cultural project predicated on the inculcation of a set of ‘values’ and predispositions congruent with neoliberal ideology as the new civilizing mission of the Islamophobic-Neoliberal-Educational Complex (Kabel 2014). These colonial/linguistic governmentalities act as new global didactics to acculturate the subjects of the Global South into the neoliberal order and insulate the latter from political and ideological contestation (Sukarieh and Tannock 2008). The post-Arab Spring engagement of the WB and other financial institutions “demonstrates an attempt to articulate dissent in the image of neoliberalism, rendering North Africa’s uprisings within a discourse amenable to the deepening of pro-market policies” (Hanieh 2015: 134). Those institutions “have attempted to utilize the post 2011 moment to maintain the essential characteristics of past practice, while employing a language that professes a new course and sympathy with the social justice goals of the uprisings” (134). English features prominently in these neocolonial designs. It is resignified as part of a neoliberal and securitization matrix. The British Council has deployed analogous maneuvers in which ELT is strategically inscribed within the United Kingdom’s and EU’s foreign policy, security strategy and global trade strategy. Martin Rose is unequivocal in his advocacy of this neoimperialist vision. Morocco, and the Maghreb, represents a geopolitical and cultural frontier to be conquered deploying the symbolic armada of English. Cultura and lingua nullius (Phillipson 2018) are enfolded into the trappings of linguistic coloniality. Although he has put his nautical metaphors (momentarily) to rest, he nails his colors to the mast (Rose 2016: np): “The Maghreb . . . is a bit of a blank on the British mental map”, beckoning British pioneers. “This is a mistake”, he avers,“ and we need to understand much more clearly what it is that makes it a cultural frontier, dense with possibilities and facing massive change”. The Maghreb “is perhaps the most important cultural tipping-point in the ‘European neighbourhood’ and we ignore it very much to our cost”. It “is crucial to Europe’s future, very open to the cultural vectors of English, and much too important to ignore”. Spotting an enfeebled francophonie in the horizon, he swiftly erects his ambush. The watchword is: paint the geopolitical wilderness in the erstwhile glorious pink: “Changes in the outlook of traditionally French-speaking North Africa after the Arab Spring suggest an historic opportunity to take advantage of increasing demand for English – and with it to expand British engagement and influence – in a region of major strategic importance” (np). Indeed, English is a powerful brand, “a gateway to cultural . . . influence” that represents “the strongest predictor of trust in the UK” (British Council 2013b: 14). “The UK”, Rose (2016: np) adds, “should seize this opportunity to guarantee its future security and prosperity”. To face security challenges, the promotion of English will “help shape the future of this vital tier of European neighbours” and “pay long-term dividends” (np). In a precipitate glide, he concludes: “The internationalisation of the region, long held back by its confinement in a shrinking francophonie, will represent a geo-strategic wave of real importance. We need to ride it, not to see it pass by bearing other boats” (Rose 2016: np). The linguistic shock doctrine, clearly, has the wind in its sails. The British Council has garnered accolades from the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI 2013) for its response to the Arab Spring. ICAI stresses that the British Council “is a globally recognized brand and a key element of the UK’s ‘soft power’” (3) and is forthright about its mission: “We focus on maximising the effectiveness of the UK aid budget for intended beneficiaries and on delivering value for money for UK taxpayers” (ii). With this backdrop, the report highlights that “The British Council’s response to the Arab Spring has been considered, strategic . . . and has a strong delivery model” (1).

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It underscores that “The British Council ‘allocates its funds across countries according to . . . the UK’s national interest, inherent need of the recipient country and the potential for building linkages with the UK (for example, trade)’” (8, emphasis added), with the ‘inherent need’ very likely to be determined in line with ‘the UK’s national interest’ and ‘building (trade) linkages’. This connects with the rampant commercialism and ‘value for money’ that now define British Council’s language teaching and testing operations. Literally, ‘Trust pays’ (British Council 2012) – Charity Inc. British Council’s geopolitical brief subscribes to the EU’s ‘New Neighborhood Policy’ designed to neutralize the geopolitical reverberations of the Arab Spring. Its main brief has been to stall the security, geopolitical and economic ‘challenges’ in the aftermath of the protests. The underlying aim of the Policy “corresponds with the normative aspirations and realist interests of the EU but hardly with the needs and expectations of the partner states” (Tömmel 2013: 19), not to speak of those of the people; hence the vanity of “inherent need of the recipient country”. More specifically, “EU engagement in the Southern Mediterranean with respect to democracy promotion continues to be influenced by the security-stability nexus” which tends “to prioritize stability and security over democracy” (Dandashly 2018: 76). Europe’s pious commitment to ‘democracy promotion’ may not have been just hollow, but fundamentally counterproductive: “the EU did not induce reluctant elites to reform or split, did not empower social movements and civil society” and its efforts subsidize “polyarchy” rather than “deep democracy” (Sepos 2018: 521). This state of affairs seems to dovetail with the geopolitics of ‘Imperial Power Europe’ built on structures of power that include coercion, agenda-setting, as well as attraction with hidden elements of manipulation and characterized by hierarchical, centre-periphery structures, asymmetry, dependence and exploitation (Sepos 2018). In this understanding, the “EU does little to transform this structural relationship [of imperialism] – rather the Union has been complicit in its reproduction” (Sepos 2013: 278). Post-Arab Spring EU’s democracy promotion efforts amount to neocolonial governmentality aimed at ‘taming’. They are aggressively promoting neoliberal modes of economics and politics to confect subjectivities and political agencies that accord with EU’s norms and interests (Tagma, Kalaycioglu and Akcali 2013: 376). Amid the enduring Brexit saga, imperial nostalgia is reaching new heights, and new imperial schemes are crystalizing in the corridors of power. The Anglosphere (Kenny and Pearce 2018) and ‘Global Britain’ (Boussebaa 2019) are emerging as Britain’s neo-imperial doctrine in the making, including a refurbished role for English (Phillipson 2017). These new visions resurrect the ‘swashbuckling’ and ‘buccaneering’ spirits of yesteryears (Saunders 2019) and are likely to reinvigorate new British imperial jockeying including military interventionism, economic conquest and educational imperialism (Boussebaa 2019). The coloniality of global English consolidates these imperial ambitions to carve up a new role for Britain in the geopolitical chessboard. Linguistic and global coloniality dovetail.

VI.  LANGUAGING LIKE A BANK . . . Despite its much vaunted ‘vernacular turn’ (World Bank 2001), WB’s language policies are tainted by neoliberal doxa and the dual ideologies of deficit and instrumentalism which solidify the dominance of colonial languages and linguistic hierarchies, thus fortifying global linguistic coloniality. In tune with its ritualistic ‘alarmism’, the World

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Bank bemoans the “language learning crisis” in Morocco (2017: 10–11). This ‘crisis talk’ is corralled into a commodified model of language education, namely how ‘linguistic deficiency’ undercuts employability and economic development (2017: 10). In a recent missive on ‘language of instruction’ in Morocco, WB language politics is thinly disguised. It taunts its customary morose line of pending educational doom to which it reflexively prescribes ‘shock therapy’, including linguistic shock therapy. ‘Societal multilingualism’ is portrayed as a source of social tension (World Bank 2019: 26) and an apparent liability in education, if not the root of its woes. It trumpets alarm regarding the plight of foreign language competence but only through the tainted prism of market rationality, which is understood as a ‘nudge’ toward the promotion of French and English. The report rehashes hackneyed Orientalist mythologies about the Arabic language redolent of deficit ideologies. It signals that the language wallows in a state of mummified sacrality that renders it unsuitable to the contemporary world, further suggesting that students are stultified by its ‘newness’ and ‘foreignness’ (World Bank 2019: 25). In its stead, the report endorses the expunging of standard Arabic and its replacement by Moroccan Arabic, French and English. Many of these intimations are troubling in their apparent disregard for language practices and sociolinguistic theory. The history and the resultant politics of Arabic standardization remain fraught with ideological and conceptual difficulties including unstable boundaries between language, identity, nation and religion (Suleiman 2013). But to reduce the multifacetedness of these realities to the sacrality and ahistoricity of Arabic is patently disingenuous. Language practices are also multilayered and variegated involving creative appropriation of multiple linguistic resources and repertoires, thus belying the one-dimensional caricature foisting sharp demarcations between Classical Arabic (the language of the Quran), Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Moroccan Arabic on the one hand, and asserting the ‘foreignness’ of MSA on the other. Equally, reducing the question of medium of instruction to a ‘language problem’ occludes how current language debates are the ideological manifestation of ongoing elite struggles over cultural and political hegemony, as will be reiterated below. WB’s vernacular endorsement not only bolsters particular francophone and anglophile projects in Morocco but exhibits recurrent symptoms of the Bank’s language ideologies and politics. Similar proclamations are echoed by Martin Rose (2014), who exhibits a linguistic Manicheanism that etches a deficient Arabic and resourceful English in an irreconcilable binarism. He pits an English “language that is simple, universal, and flexible” against “Classical Arabic” that fails to exhibit these magical qualities “because it is complex, regionally and religiously specific, and not very flexible” (121). He imputes the bankruptcy of Moroccan public education to inherent failings of the language: “The abject state of the education system owes much to linguistic confusion, with Arabic itself in some ways a foreign language” (121). The political controversy around the ‘vernacular-standard divide’ is blithely dismissed as infantile fracas: “Debate about language is hobbled by religio-political hobby horses. Arabic and Darija [Moroccan Arabic] slug it out in depressingly barren debates (which remind one painfully of Jorge Luis Borges’s wry comment on the Falklands War, ‘Two bald men fighting over a comb’)” (121–2). The characterization patently fails to register how what appears to the neo-orientalist gaze as Don Quixote-like miniatures may, upon a moment’s reflection, be revealing of profound societal and political transformations. Gramsci (2000) famously wrote that “every time the question of language surfaces”, it is essentially in order “to reorganize cultural hegemony”

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(357). Rose prods local politicians to heed the “pressing national disaster that . . . is . . . the debilitating, illiteracy-generating diglossia forced on Moroccans” (Rose 2014: 122). In cahoots with French, Arabic, we should be apprised, has “made of Morocco a society that is substantially analphabète and overwhelmingly illettré” (122). Striking are the affinities between these musings and colonial and orientalist language ideologies. One might point to unsettling overlappings between these assertions and orientalist reveries of the most specious variety (Patai 1976).8 Arabic was deemed redolent of decadence (Patai 1976), unsuitable for “the conquest of modern civilization”, and its teaching a precipitous descent into “madness” (Drucker 2015: 6) – casting the language in hygienic, ‘bacteriological’ metaphors of pollution and contamination (Hoffmann 2008). Deliverance is, however, nigh: “English, the lingua franca of today’s world, may perhaps be able to help fill the gap” (Rose 2014: 121). Colonial habits die hard. The WB’s ideological blinkers of economism discount multi/bilingual education in favor of monolingual models whereby linguistic diversity is branded as a ‘problem’ and ‘cost-ineffective’. In the same vein, it flaunts a shallow pragmatism in which language is reduced to a means-ends model of communication (Borjian 2014). This creed is in keeping with ‘language as pure potential’ (Park 2016) underlying human capital theory and the knowledge economy, currently the new revealed gospel. Like the British Council (Kabel 2016a), while WB’s recent ‘multilingual love’ seems to run counter to its earlier imperialistic language policies (Mazrui 2004; Brock-Utne 2000), the same structural entanglement with colonial languages seems to endure (Brock-Utne 2010: 641). Its vernacular reorientation is lodged in a hierarchical multilingual architecture where local languages are consistently enfolded into deficit ideologies. WB’s language policies systematically espouse early-exit models, which is merely a tactical maneuver in the process of introducing dominant European languages at advanced levels of learning, as one WB flagship education strategy document suggests (Verspoor 2001: 38; Verspoor 2008). To be sure, the WB circumspectly acknowledges the pedagogical relevance of mother tongue education, but its linguistic encyclicals remain ensconced in a monolingual medium orthodoxy of either-or that disregards extensive research on effective multilingual education (Heugh and Skutnabb-Kangas 2012) and local multilingual ecologies (Brock-Utne 2010), which contributes to multilayered linguistic coloniality. Local modalities of multilingualism are marginalized because of narrow and locally inappropriate Western-centric modes of knowledge and language ideologies that confer legitimacy only on bi/multilingualism featuring colonial languages (Brock-Utne 2010: 641) producing il/legitimate multilingualisms. The half-hearted embrace of mother tongues seems to be foreshadowed by caveats about their likely interference with the development of proficiency in a colonial language and about the possibility of fomenting discord and impeding economic progress (Albaugh 2014: 100–101; Verspoor 2001: 37). Verspoor, a WB consultant, writes that “language of instruction issues are . . . often politically and culturally contentious. Selecting one African language for instruction may marginalize social groups in linguistically diverse countries” (Verspoor 2001: 37). However, by legislating either-or policies, WB monolingual orthodoxy only exacerbates these tensions and compromises possibilities for effective education. Also problematic is the presumption that employing colonial languages as media of instruction is neutral, politically and culturally uncontroversial. The perfunctory defense of mother tongue (and only rarely bilingual) education is adulterated by admonitions about ‘cost and management constraints’, and governments are sternly advised “to explore these resource issues fully when they review policy options on

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language of instruction” (Verspoor 2001: 37). Governments are also nudged “to consider the demand for education in European languages, which many parents see as opening doors to further education and professional employment” (37). Such prodding smacks of a patronizing mix of linguistic austerity and conditionality. These language policies have been central to the neocolonial development and dependency orders that have produced ‘underdevelopment’ (Escobar 2010), with the language policy prescriptions of the WB historically (Brock-Utne 2000; Mazrui 2004) and structurally priming colonial languages in lockstep with those same structures of (under)development. Coupled with the drive for internationalizing higher education, the primacy of the knowledge economy and human capital as engines of competitiveness and growth place English at the heart of WB’s ‘development’ rhetoric and policy. Many of these prescriptions are implanted in conditionality and ‘aid’ configurations and the structures of neocolonial political economy. These policy interventions amount to linguistic ‘recolonization’ (Brocke-Utne 2000) and make WB educational and language policy congeal into orders of global coloniality. Therefore, what seems to be an inclusive policy of vernacular education has the lineaments of a subtractive and hierarchical model that ordains English as a hegemonic language hierarchically grafted onto educational, language and knowledge ecologies in concord with the Bank’s neocolonial approach to development and knowledge. The global coloniality of language/knowledge is wedded to the global coloniality of power.

VII.  CODA: FOR A DECOLONIAL ‘PLURIVERSALINGUALISM’ The analytics of global linguistic coloniality strives to actively and critically historicize language policy and, to appropriate Stoler (2013: 11), to register the consequential colonial histories of differential language and education presents and futures. English language ideologies ought to be therefore studied and understood within the epistemics of global linguistic coloniality. Edward Said urges us to “widen, expand and deepen our awareness of the way the past and the present of the imperial encounter interact with each other” (1993: 45) in order to grapple with the ‘colonial present’ (Gregory 2005). A critique of global linguistic coloniality is not symptomatic of a lapse into ‘linguistic autarchy’ or of a rejectionist stance toward French or English or any other language. I am irredeemably in favor of enhancing multilingual repertoires and symbolic capitals of individuals and communities. It would be an egregious form of symbolic capital dispossession, if not a cognitive and social crime, to argue otherwise. But I am also strongly in favor of strengthening local languages and knowledges, building reflexive, subaltern and decolonial cosmopolitanisms (Zeng 2014; Mignolo 2012) and endorse constructing pluriversal alternatives and transitions (Escobar 2011; Dussel 2013b) and non-hegemonic multilingual projects which nurture our dignities to author and agentively transform our own lives as subjects and communities. To this end, we need to parse the grammar of language ideologies and hierarchies and attempt to unpack their discursive and material historicity and contemporaneity with a view to ‘delinking’ (Amin 1987) English, and language in general, from the logics of coloniality. It is hoped that an understanding of entangled global linguistic coloniality will prompt imaginative, but historically informed and politically responsible designs for ‘linguistic delinking’ and for a decolonial ‘pluriversalingualism’ – a new language order for the pluriverse.

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NOTES 1. https​:/​/if​​-maro​​c​.org​​/coop​​erati​​on​-1/​​educa​​tion-​​langu​​e​​-fra​​ncais​​e/ 2. The Council is an official think tank which produces strategic policy documents and evaluations of public policies. Its areas of intervention – development and governance – as well as its literature are solidly within a neoliberal gambit. http://www​.ces​.ma​/Pages​/faq​.aspx 3. CSEFRS is also an official think tank charged with strategic policy and evaluation in the areas of education, professional training and research: http:​/​/www​​.csef​​rs​.ma​​/ques​​tions​​-freq​​ uents​/​?lan​​g​=fr#​​15143​​95163​​141​-​3​​9d7e5​​5d​-93​​60 4. It is important to underline in this regard that the ‘knowledge’ in knowledge economy is particularly wedded to a version that is centered on codification, standardization, quantification and commodification (Kenway 2014). It is also distinctly and unreflexively Western-centric. However, I use ‘the coloniality of knowledge’ here not as deconstruction of Western epistemology and ‘geopolitics of knowledge’ (Mignolo 2000), but as a critique of knowledge in political economy. English and the global coloniality of knowledge and epistemology is treated in another work (Kabel, unpublished manuscript). 5. The report itself was originally written in English before a translation was subsequently made available in Arabic (Bayat 2005: 1229). 6. There is much to decolonize regarding the notion of Western humanism and the humanities (Sakai 2010), but space does not allow any elaboration on this matter. 7. de Soto is a prominent architect of the neoliberal overhaul in Latin America and globally. His missionary zeal for the neoliberal salvation of the poor has earned him the soubriquet of ‘the Messiah of people’s capitalism’ (Davis 2006: 80) and ‘the global guru of neoliberal populism’ (Davis 2006: 79). Elsewhere, he advocates a new role for the precariat and unemployed by rebranding them as ‘micro-capitalists’ (Ferguson 2015: 187). 8. Raphael Patai’s The Arab Mind is not only ‘the bible of neocon headbangers, but it is also the bible on Arab behavior for the US military’ (Whitaker 2014). Incidentally, Martin Rose designed a manual for ‘immunizing the (Arab) mind’ against ‘violent extremism’ (Rose 2015).

REFERENCES Ageron, C. R. (1971), ‘La Politique Berbère du Protectorat Marocain de 1913 à 1934’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 18 (1): 50–90. Albaugh, E. (2014), State-Building and Multilingual Education in Africa, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Amin, S. (1987), ‘A Note on the Concept of Delinking’, Review, 10 (3): 435–44. Attali, J. (2014), La Francophonie et Francophilie: Moteurs de Croissance Durable, Paris: Direction de l’Information Légale et Administrative. Baker, R, W., S. T. Ismael and T. Y. Ismael (eds) (2010), Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums Were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered, London: Pluto Press. Ball, S. J. (2006), Education Policy and Social Class, London: Routledge. Barnawi, O. (2017), Neoliberalism and English Language Education Policies in the Arabian Gulf, London: Routledge. Bayat, A. (2005), ‘Transforming the Arab World: The Arab Human Development Report and the Politics of Change’, Development and Change, 36 (6): 1225–37. Belal, A. (1980), Développement et Facteurs Non-économiques, Rabat: Société Marocaine des Editeurs Réunis.

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Chapter 4

World Englishes and the Commodification of Language JOSEPH SUNG-YUL PARK AND LIONEL WEE

I.  INTRODUCTION One important current phenomenon relating to English as a global language is its increasing conceptualization and treatment as a resource for economic profit. This is not a phenomenon unique to English, but reflects a more general shift in the way language and communication have come to be reconceptualized under neoliberalism, commonly called commodification of language (Heller 2003, 2010, 2017; Cameron 2000a, 2000b, 2005, 2012). Nonetheless, English is perhaps seen as the most prominent example of how language has come to be reimagined as an economic resource in neoliberalism. This commodification of English is also strongly tied with the fact that English frequently serves as a global lingua franca even as it also undergoes significant transformations through localization processes. It is this tension between the global value of English, perceived as a linguistic resource that can facilitate, if not actually unify, diverse communities, and its localization, where it comes to be adapted to local needs and to even serve as an emblem of local identity, that makes the issue of commodification a highly relevant topic for the research on World Englishes. In this chapter, we first review recent debates on the notion of commodification of language as a way of setting the theoretical frame for our discussion, and we then suggest an understanding of commodification as a simultaneously material, ideological, and semiotic process, extending our earlier framework of a market-based perspective on English as a global language (Park and Wee 2012). We also review research on some key areas in which commodification of English has been prominent, mainly in (1) language-based labor, (2) branding of local identity, and (3) language as communicative skill in the job market. Based on this review, we conclude by suggesting several key directions for future research on the intersection of World Englishes, neoliberalism, and commodification.

II.  THEORIZING COMMODIFICATION OF LANGUAGE Recent research has drawn attention to how the changing condition of the global economy leads language to be reconceptualized from an essential marker of one’s

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inalienable identity to a resource which can be acquired, developed, and managed for profit. The work of Monica Heller (2003, 2010) and Deborah Cameron (2000a, b, 2005) have been most influential in drawing our attention to this shift, with a large number of other scholars contributing to this discussion as well (Tan and Rubdy 2008; Duchêne and Heller 2012; Muth and Del Percio 2018, among others). This shift in language ideology has been identified in such research as commodification of language, which situates this reconceptualization of language within broader critiques of how the logic of capital actively attempts to exert its control upon all aspects of human life for the maximization of profit (Appadurai 1986; Ertman and Williams 2005). This has resulted in the notion of commodification of language becoming a prominent research topic in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. Recently, however, various critiques have been raised regarding how the term ‘commodification’ is used in such research (Block 2013, 2018a, 2018b; Holborow 2015, 2018a; McGill 2013; Simpson and O’Regan 2018). Mainly coming from scholars adopting a Marxist perspective on political economy, these works suggest that the notion of commodity has been applied rather too loosely in the research on commodification, often overlooking the fact that language is not a thing produced through labor and not paying sufficient attention to the material labor process that gives rise to a commodity’s value in a Marxist analytic framework. They in turn argue that such loose application of the notion of commodity to language risks reifying the capitalist view that fetishizes the commodity as a thing in itself, rather than as a product of concrete labor. Such critiques are valuable as they force us to remain both empirically and critically astute about the specific ways in which language comes to be treated (or not) as a commodity. They remind us that commodification of language is not a natural process, but one that is driven by the interests of capital, and that there are concrete material realities of labor and work that underlie the shifting ways in which language is highlighted in the economy. But at the same time, these critiques do not render the notion of commodification useless. Thinking in terms of commodification does not mean we necessarily acquiesce to the neoliberal fantasy that everything can be bought and sold. Heller and Duchêne (2016: 151) note, for example, in response to Marxist critiques of sociolinguistic research on commodification: it is important to reiterate that we do not consider that language is now completely understandable, and only understandable, as a commodity, but rather that it seems, under specific historical conditions, to be increasingly inscribed (albeit not always successfully and not always in exactly the same ways) in processes of commodification (and decommodification) . . . We need to distinguish between linguistic commodification and some of the other ways in which language is part of economic activity, just as it forms part of the unfolding of any other social activities. Just because we see attempts at linguistic commodification, that does not mean that acting as a commodity is the only way in which language is economically relevant. The debate over commodification of language, then, compels us to consider commodification as a simultaneously material (i.e., grounded in specific and concrete processes of labor), ideological (i.e., conditioned by specific political economic interests), and semiotic (i.e., involving a (re)framing of the social significance of language) process. That is, commodification of language should be approached as a process in which concrete, material actions of acquiring, using, and appropriating language are ideologically

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reframed in the context of neoliberalism, mediated by semiotic operations that attribute new meanings to linguistic practices, speaker images, and the act of communication itself. Developing such an approach to commodification requires outlining the specific language ideologies that facilitate the framing of language into a commodity. That is, how do the material, ideological, and semiotic processes involved in commodification work together to construct language as a resource with economic value, despite the nature of language as socially embedded practice? In our previous work (Park and Wee 2012), we outlined the language ideologies that underlie the commodification of English as a global language – that is, the process by which English as a language for global communication comes to be seen as an economic resource for individuals and states: (1) Commodification of English necessarily builds on and indeed reinforces the notion of language as a bounded, distinct entity, abstracted away from its nature as unstable and highly malleable communicative social practice. Here, we may think of social and institutional forces that establish and reinforce conceptions of ‘standard English’ and norms of ‘correctness’. “Without this process, there can be no value of English, no commodification, no valorization, no authoritative prescription over correctness and appropriateness. Only when a language is imagined to have an essential form can it be measured for its value in exchange” (Park and Wee 2012: 104). (2) English so imagined is subsequently subject to commodity formulations (Agha 2011); that is, it is placed within discursive contexts which highlight its market-based value. For instance, in dominant discourse of English as a global language, the ideologically imagined English-as-entity is juxtaposed with idealized images of personhood, such as that of the global, cosmopolitan elite, so that indexical associations are established between particular ways of using English and values such as economic power, mobility, and legitimacy. In this way, specific economic value is attributed to the entity of English, mediated by interdiscursive circulation of speaker images and contextual factors. (3) Finally, ideological construction of the neutrality of English (i.e., that English is no longer a language that is tied to anyone’s culture, and that anyone can benefit economically through its acquisition) leads English to be seen as carrying commensurability and convertibility across markets. In other words, English comes to be seen as a language whose economic value is recognizable across different contexts, leading it to be valorized as a true ‘global’ language. It is such construction of neutrality and convertibility that shapes the scope of the commodification of English. It is also important to understand how commodification of language relates to other related, overlapping ideologies, such as linguistic instrumentalism (Wee 2003) and linguistic entrepreneurship (De Costa, Park, and Wee 2016, 2019, 2021). Linguistic instrumentalism evaluates the relevance of a language in terms of how useful the language is in achieving utilitarian goals such as economic development or social mobility (Wee 2003: 211). In the context of globalization, linguistic instrumentalism thus tends to lead to investment in regionally and globally influential language varieties, or exonormative standards with wider geographical and sociopolitical scope. While ‘linguistic instrumentalism’ shares with commodification of language a concern for the economic value of language, it is a term more appropriate for characterizing motivations that underlie the linguistic choices of individuals, communities, or states (which may not only be determined by economic or material profit; Bourdieu 1986), whereas commodification of language must be understood as a more specific ideological reconceptualization of language reflected in the way language is mobilized in political economic processes. Linguistic entrepreneurship (De Costa, Park and Wee 2016: 696) refers to the “act of aligning with the moral

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imperative to strategically exploit language-related resources for enhancing one’s worth in the world”. Here, the emphasis is on the discourse of ethics and normativity: one should not only try to be an entrepreneur; one is obligated to be an entrepreneur, and language is one valuable resource that can help towards this end. Thus, linguistic entrepreneurship is useful for capturing the subjective effects that commodification of language has on individual and organizational actors. Considering these different ideologies in relation to each other allows us to approach the commodification of language holistically in terms of its multiple and complex refractions.

III.  DOMAINS FOR COMMODIFICATION OF ENGLISH The intersection of commodification of language and World Englishes becomes prominent in three broad areas of research: (1) language-based labor, (2) local branding, and (3) language as communicative skill. Each of these areas highlights different aspects of English as a global language that make it particularly salient as a language to be emphasized in the context of neoliberalism.

Language-based Labor By language-based labor we refer to contexts of work where careful management of the use of language and language varieties becomes a key element in the control of labor. While language has always been part of the labor process (minimally by enabling coordination between workers who communicate through language) and many traditional lines of work involve craft and expertise over language (e.g., writers, translators, copywriters; Thurlow 2019), contemporary conditions of the global economy, such as the growth of service industry and business process outsourcing, give new kinds of prominence to language as part of the labor process (Boutet 2012). For instance, ‘styling’ of workers’ language, that is, “regulation of interpersonal aspects of discourse” (Cameron 2005: 12) to emulate rapport, empathy, and intimacy as a means of securing customer loyalty, and ‘scripting’ for precise and efficient management of business transactions (Hultgren 2017; Woydack 2019) are both strategies in which workers’ language becomes a major object of control for profit. One of the most extensively discussed examples of language-based labor is work in the global call center industry, which also happens to be a case that is specifically relevant to World Englishes. Business process outsourcing leads the call center industry to operate across national boundaries. In this process, segments of the industry which serve English-speaking clients may settle in countries where wages are lower but whose nationals are seen as possessing good English language skills. As a result, countries such as India and the Philippines have emerged as major hubs for call centers during the early years of the twenty-first century (Cowie 2007; Friginal 2007; Mirchandani 2012; Rahman 2009; Tupas and Salonga 2016, among others). In this case, English language competence of local workers comes to be treated as an economic resource by the call center industry; locally, this may lead English language skills to be seen as valuable resource for individual workers as well, due to the possibilities of employment in the industry. However, an important complication in this case is that not all varieties of English are equally valued in the context of call center work. In other words, commodification of English in the call center industry raises the issue of which variety of English should the call agents be using, and this makes technological management of speech through ‘accent neutralization’ salient in such contexts.

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It is commonly observed that call center workers speaking English in Outer Circle countries are pressured to accommodate to the accents of customers in the Inner Circle. The offshore call center industry has gained much popular attention in the media of the United Kingdom and the United States, with many stories covering how call center workers in foreign countries are actively acquiring British or American accents. One example of this is shown below, from Nadeem (2011), which covers call centers in India: “Those with extremely good skills don’t want to [work in call centres],” says Kiran Desai, a veteran accent trainer. “What you get is a lot of people who don’t speak very well and aren’t from the best schools in Bombay,” she adds, in a crisp British-Indian accent. Schools do not concentrate on phonetics enough “and so they pick up sounds from their mother tongue. We teach them to get rid of mother-tongue influence.” Trainees repeat slippery sentences such as “Sachin’s sixes are superb” and practice proper pronunciation (“Ahfrica” not “Afreeka”). They read aloud from Hollywood scripts such as Saving Private Ryan, they dissect diphthongs and consonants, they rid themselves of Indianisms such as “will do the needful” and, of course, they learn to roll their r’s and soften their t’s. Clearly, the accents that the call center agents are encouraged to emulate through such training is not ‘neutral’. To be sure, there is complexity and competing concerns over what constitutes a ‘neutral’ accent of English. For example, Cowie’s (2007) ethnographic research of a Bangalore-based training agency for call centers reports that, while there is obvious pressure for agents to adopt the accents of their customers, it is seldom the case that clients specifically demand the workers be trained in American or British accents. She also observes that different trainers working at the agency also had differing opinions, with older trainers tending to consider British English or educated Indian English as the ideal goal, and younger trainers being more open towards American English. Nonetheless, the underlying assumption that local forms of English will not be understandable to Inner Circle clients, or that they will not be conducive to communication of rapport and servicemindedness, and therefore need to be modulated into something less jarring to clients in other countries, belies the continuing influence of older ideologies of language that posit essentialist ties between ways of speaking and ethnic, national, or racial identities. The fact that the targeted forms of American and British English are presented as ‘neutral’ also points to the persistence of the hierarchical positioning of Inner Circle and Outer/ Expanding Circle Englishes long criticized by the field of World Englishes (Tupas and Salonga 2016) and the recent framework of raciolinguistics, which emphasizes how linguistic difference and racial difference are co-constituted (Rosa and Flores 2017). In other words, the practice of accent neutralization training shows how commodification of English, despite its framing of language as an economic resource (as opposed to an emblem of identity), is also inseparable from essentialist ideologies of language. A related point is the affective and emotional impact of adopting another variety of English for the purpose of work. Transnational call center work, like other service-centered work, involves emotional labor (Hochschild 1983); workers are not just expected to accommodate to the variety of language used by the client, but they are required to adopt affects of being friendly, welcoming, and caring, often even taking up different personae, such as a British or American identity with a complete backstory, a practice often called “locational masking” (Mirchandani 2012). One way to describe this

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could be to say that this represents a commodification of identity as well as language, where language and identity become a flexible resource that a worker may put on or off like a mask, whenever it serves an economic purpose. And such view of language and identity as flexible economic resources can be a way of rationalizing the call center industry’s close management of the workers’ communicative practice: adopting another’s accent and identity provides a great economic opportunity for the worker, while it does not mean any compromise of the worker’s own inherent identity, because after work the worker can easily take off the mask and return to being who she really is. However, there is ample evidence that suggests it is not so easy to flexibly switch between identities. Mirchandani’s (2012) account of work at call centers in New Delhi servicing US customers shows the heavy physical, emotional, and psychological toll that workers need to endure to cope with such ‘flexible’ labor. Maintaining a daily life cycle adjusted to US time zones, enduring racist prejudice of callers, and sustaining a fabricated identity that the customers often see through due to their knowledge of how call center work is outsourced internationally – not to mention the low qualities of their jobs in which they are underpaid and not provided with good career opportunities – all contribute to the significant stress, dissatisfaction, and frustration for the workers (see also Heller 2003; Cameron 2005; Rajan-Rankin 2016). This does not exclude the possibility that some people with appropriate linguistic capital may strategically benefit from the specific opportunities that call center work offers. The popular account by Nadeem (2011) mentioned earlier, for instance, reports on the case of Akhil, a worker at a call center in India. Nadeem characterizes Akhil, who claims he is taking up call center work only temporarily until he joins his family business in a few years, as displaying “a remarkable instance of cultural self-alienation or youthful insouciance”, using the American name he adopted for work, Sean, even in his everyday interaction with friends and family outside of the call center, with apparently no sense of distress. Here, Akhil’s attitude towards English may be seen as one of linguistic instrumentalism, where language serves a primarily utilitarian (economic) purpose, with seemingly little consequence for identity itself. Yet, the fact that Akhil’s work identity as Sean spills into his everyday life suggests that even for him call center work is not so flexible, pointing to the entanglement of competing ideologies of language and identity involved in commodification of English in language-based labor.

Local Branding Another major area that has been discussed in relation to the commodification of language and identity is that of heritage tourism, in which local cultural traditions, practices, images, and products become a key for attracting tourists, who seek out authentic experiences of cultural encounter through their travels. Heritage tourism becomes prominent in the context of various political economic transformations associated with globalization and neoliberalism. For instance, withdrawal of centralized support of the state may lead minority communities to turn to tourism as a source for profit, particularly as many traditional industries face demise through economic downturns or are moved to other regions where cost of labor is cheaper (Heller 2003; Heller, Pujolar, and Duchene 2014). In this context, there is greater need for such communities to find ways to brand their localness and cultural difference, establishing themselves as unique and authentic cultural destinations for tourism, thereby attracting tourists and profit. Language, of course, is one important resource for constructing and highlighting such difference. Language can be an important way of enacting and performing cultural

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difference as well as authenticity. Thus, local languages may be used to stage cultural events and exhibitions, to decorate local cultural products, to produce signage that produce a traditional atmosphere, and so on. While language does not become an object of exchange in itself in these cases, we do see a shift in the conceptualization of language – that is, from an emblem of local identity to also a resource for seeking economic profit, where economic profit may come from a semi-theatrical performance of the local identity, of which language is a component – which makes these cases prominent examples of commodification of language. These conditions also give rise to tensions in the notion of authenticity. On the one hand, language becomes a powerful resource precisely because of older ideologies that link language and identity in essentialist ways; on the other hand, mobilizing language to represent and promote cultural products often requires presenting the language in a form that becomes recognizable to tourists as ‘authentic’, which might not align with local conceptions of what constitutes authentic linguistic practices (Heller 2003). While it is usually minority languages that become employed as a resource for local branding, the diversification of Englishes may also lead local varieties of English to become highly prominent resources for local branding. For instance, the local variety of English in Pittsburgh in the United States, Pittsburghese, is used to decorate T-shirts (Johnstone 2009) or for recorded messages on dolls that represent local figures of personhood (Johnstone 2017), thereby playing a major role in providing a sense of locality to these commercial products. In the same way, varieties of English outside of the Inner Circle may be used as part of local branding of products. Singapore English, or Singlish, is one good example, which is actively used in various products aiming towards international tourists as well as local consumers; souvenirs decorated with Singlish phrases, and phrasebooks that compile and explain (often in humorous ways) notable Singlish terms or expressions are widely sold – despite the fact that in most official domains, Singlish is largely suppressed (Wee 2018). Here, the local evolution and stabilization of new Englishes and their concomitant new identities are reframed as a semiotic resource for branding particular locales or products (Saraceni 2015). The growing emphasis on English language learning in Expanding Circle countries may lead English to be used as a resource for local branding in yet another way. As mobility increasingly becomes a strategy for English language learning – that is, many language learners decide to travel to different places where they can immerse themselves in authentic contexts for English language learning (Gao and Park 2015) – the presence of English (in particular, the presence of authentic English) may be highlighted strategically by certain communities to attract the flow of visitors. This is illustrated by Gao (2012, 2019), who describes how a small neighborhood in rural China, West Street in Yangshuo County, has become a so-called global village for domestic tourists. West Street initially catered to the great number of international tourists and backpackers who flocked to Yangshuo County because of its natural beauty, and boasted many Western food restaurants, small family hotels, shops specializing in carving, painting and calligraphy. West Street then acquired a reputation internal to China as a place where one could go to interact with Western, English-speaking tourists in an authentic way and improve one’s English. As Gao describes: West Street, thus, now is not just a place for international travelers to take a break, but has also become a ‘global village’ where aspiring middle-class Chinese tourists can try out stylistic repertoires. People from neighboring provinces and cities, Guangdong

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in particular, now literally consider Yangshuo their ‘backyard garden’ to spend the weekends. During summer time, West Street is the popular place for people from different parts of China to practice their spoken English. Part-time and unpaid volunteer working positions at hotels, bars, and cafés even become opportunities only available on a first-come basis due to the sheer number of people eager to talk to foreigners through this ‘convenient’ means. (Gao 2012: 344) This reputation of Yangshuo as a destination for learning English combined with tourism is also actively constructed by the local government and the English language learning industry. The Yangshuo government aimed to build upon the popularity of Yangshuo by establishing an active English education industry, starting with the English Summer Camp program in 1998, and commercial development of West Street for an authentic “global” image, with cultural activities like a Beer Festival and Christmas parties (Gao 2012: 343– 4). In this case, while English in Yangshuo does not represent a specific variety (due to the fact that the Western tourists do not come from a single, specific country), the image promoted by the local government is that of “authentic” English that has global currency, compared to the inauthentic English of Chinese English language learners. Yangshuo thus provides an interesting case where what is commodified is not the “local English” per se, but the sense of authenticity that the place facilitates. The contrastive values associated with different varieties of World Englishes may be a matter of concern for mobile language learners as well. In the case of South Korea, where many young people travel abroad to acquire and improve English language skills as part of their projects of self-improvement (see next section), which country one travels to can be of great importance because it means the difference of what English you will end up acquiring (Park and Bae 2009; Kang 2012; Shin 2012; Jang 2018). While Inner Circle countries, particularly the United States, are ideal destinations, many Koreans need to seek alternative choices, and turn to Outer Circle countries such as Singapore or the Philippines as less costlier options. Those countries, in turn, may brand themselves as ideal destinations for study abroad for Koreans, and such marketing points would include the local language teachers’ competence in globally recognized forms of standard English. But regardless of such marketing, Korean students may face challenges in convincing others back home of the value of the English they acquired in those countries, due to Korean language ideologies that view Outer Circle varieties of English as having less legitimacy than Inner Circle ones. This is another illustration of how local branding through English cannot be free from persistent ideologies of authenticity, legitimacy, and hierarchical relationship between varieties of English.

Language as Communicative Skill Under neoliberalism, notions of welfare, community, and solidarity are dismantled to give way to flexible employment, individualism, and endless competition as the new norm, and this leads to the view of language as commodifiable skill. While we have earlier discussed cases of language-based labor, in which language becomes a specific target of management within certain industries and work processes, neoliberalism also has a more general effect on language due to the shifting conditions of the job market. In order to rationalize the precarious conditions of employment, employers, educational institutions, and governments increasingly emphasize the importance of communicative skills as part of a set of “soft skills” that all workers are expected to have. Presentation skills, ability to listen intently, skills at persuasion and negotiation, knowing how to

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express one’s feelings, being perceptive at intercultural communication, and so on are promoted, reframing language and communication in terms of learnable, amassable, compartmentalized “skills” (Urciuoli 2008). Such skills are presented as allowing the worker to flexibly shift between different teams or tasks, and to quickly find a new job if one is to be retrenched by downsizing, thus as highly beneficial for the worker’s wellbeing. In reality, however, they rationalize the precarity of work under neoliberalism and capital’s interest in reducing workers into disposable labor. This means that the skills an individual worker acquires will not necessarily be used in the course of her work. Rather, acquisition of those skills serves as an index of her efforts at self-development, and thus her alignment with the logic of human capital that underlies neoliberalism (Park 2016, forthcoming; Holborow 2018b). English language learning is often seen as a strategy for boosting the human capital value of individuals, communities, or countries (Park 2010; Prendergast 2008; Sayer 2015). Particularly in Expanding Circle countries, competence in English is seen as an important general linguistic skill that allows one to succeed and survive in the changing global economy. In some cases, competence in English may be a skill that is specifically required for labor, as in tour guides who need to interact with foreign tourists through English as a lingua franca (Sharma and Phyak 2017). But in many other situations, it is not necessarily the case that competence in English itself comes to have value in the labor process, for English language skills acquired for this purpose may not actually be a skill that is required in the actual workplace; rather, it is the meaning of English as a language that indexes cosmopolitanism, modernity, and privilege that allows it to function as symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1991) indicating one’s preparedness for the job market and one’s positioning as an ideal neoliberal subject. In other words, English language learning in such context becomes a prominent route for linguistic entrepreneurship (De Costa, Park, and Wee 2016, 2021), frequently serving as a resource for competition in education or the job market, rather than a truly communicative resource (Park 2011; Price 2014; Proctor 2014). For instance, promotion of English as a commodifiable skill has led to a massive ‘English fever’ in South Korea during the decades surrounding the beginning of the twenty-first century (Park 2009). The government emphasized boosting the English language competence of Korean citizens as an important foundation for the country’s globalization, and, through several rounds of revisions to the national curriculum, highlighted communicative skills in English in the public education system. Major corporations also demanded greater competence in English from white-collar job applicants, with test scores in TOEIC or TOEFL becoming important criteria considered for hiring. These trends led to individuals making great investments in their English language learning as a means of economic survival. In particular, parents placed great importance in their children’s English language learning, fearing that not giving their children a head start in English may mean their falling down the socioeconomic ladder. In order to cater to such heated investments in English, a highly developed English language learning industry emerged, further adding to intense valorization of English language skills. The case of South Korea illustrates two important points about commodification of language as communicative skill. First, it is not just individuals who pursue English, driven by the “promise of English” (Park 2011) that acquisition of good skills in English will bring economic benefits. Various organizational actors such as states, countries, cities, or industries may be driven to develop the English language skills of its members as a way of competing with other organizational actors as well. The Korean government’s

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investment in English language education was frequently presented as a way of securing the country’s competitiveness in the global market and, in turn, a path to a more affluent life for its citizens. Rankings of different industries, cities, or countries produced by commercial English language learning service providers which purportedly compare the quality of English across such entities may similarly motivate such organizational actors to press its members to improve their English, as a means of maintaining their economic competitiveness (De Costa, Park, and Wee 2019). Just as English language learning of individuals comes to be seen as an index of their alignment with expectations of neoliberalism, such self-modulation of organizational actors also enables them to engage in linguistic entrepreneurship. Second, the fact that English is highlighted as an index for competition, rather than communication, emphasizes how the political economic conditions of the job market intersect with ideologies of language. While we noted earlier that the valorization of English as communicative skill was motivated by specific conditions of neoliberalism and the concomitant precarity of labor, it also illustrates the language ideological process by which language comes to be conceptualized as an entity independent from communicative practice. That is, the construction of English as commodifiable skill is perhaps the starkest illustration of how language needs to be conceptually detached from the social and material foundation of the human activity that is communication in order to be subjected to the process of commodification. In this case, English is reframed as a thing, a qualification that one can amass, which is in turn used in quantifying the value of an individual’s or an organization’s human capital, and this process completely erases the nature of English as a linguistic resource available to language learners for making and negotiating meaning. In this way, the phenomenon of English as commodifiable skill emphasizes the interconnectedness between material, political economic process and language ideologies.

IV.  ISSUES AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS Ongoing conversations and current developments on the topic of World Englishes and commodification of language lead to several key issues that warrant further investigation. In this section, we discuss them under three broad ideas: (1) dimensions of subjectivity, (2) multiple markets, and (3) the role of organizations.

Dimensions of Subjectivity Dimensions of affect and emotion are now recognized as crucial elements of language learning and language use (Gabrys-Barker and Bielska 2013; Li 2018; Pavlenko 2013, among others). In particular, the context of neoliberalism requires us to consider commodification of language not simply in terms of the economic value attributed to language but also in terms of its affective dimension. Neoliberalism promotes enterprise culture (Keat and Abercrombie 1991), in which qualities such as initiative, risk taking, creativity, and innovation are valorized, and this leads individuals to approach language learning as a resource that should be developed for enhancing their own value in the world. Linguistic entrepreneurship is also an affective regime, in the sense that it demands a certain moral orientation to language learning, in which developing language skills becomes a responsibility of an ideal neoliberal subject (De Costa, Park, and Wee 2019). Communicative skills in English, due to the language’s perceived global value,

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are closely linked to the ideology of linguistic entrepreneurship. A focus on linguistic entrepreneurship as affective regime can be a useful way of expanding the perspective of commodification of language, drawing our attention to the subjective processes by which we come to accept and internalize the commodifying logic as it is applied to language. An affective regime refers to ‘the set of conditions that govern with varying degrees of hegemonic status the ways in which particular kinds of affect can be appropriately materialized’ (Wee 2016: 109). Neoliberalism fosters a particular kind of affective regime, one where entrepreneurship is viewed as a moral imperative, where developing attributes of “entrepreneurship, self-reliance, and sturdy individualism” (Evans and Sewell 2013: 37) is seen as an important responsibility for workers and individuals. The emphasis is on a future orientation where the investment in skills (including language skills) is intended to help enhance, improve, and maximize the value of one’s capital. The result is a “vacillation between aspiration and anxiety, where economic valuations merge with estimations of moral worth”, and where validations of such moral worth arise from how well one is evaluated in terms of competitive rankings and other measures of reputational value (Van Doorn 2014: 359–61). In the same way, linguistic entrepreneurship functions as an affective regime. For instance, it can lead individuals to engage with English language learning with a sense of responsibility for developing their human capital. This may also be accompanied with feelings of anxiety. For example, an individual may deflect onto herself the social and economic conditions that dampen her progress in developing good English skills (e.g., not having access to good opportunities for English language learning), coming to see her lack of progress as a result of her lack of initiative. Or, simply the external pressure to invest greater amount of time and effort in English language learning regardless of one’s wishes may be frustrating and stressful in itself, much in the same way call center workers suffer under the regimes of stylized interaction in which they are forced to engage in emotional labor using a language variety of the other. As these examples show, these aspects of affect and subjectivity point to important ways in which commodification of language may be rationalized, internalized, or problematized. Thus, a productive future direction of research may be to pay greater attention to such dimensions of subjectivity, and how they intersect with the process of commodification of English: how the affective regime of linguistic entrepreneurship is sustained, what kinds of specific materializations might it take, and what forms of resistance might arise in response.

Multiple Markets Bourdieu’s (1991) theory of the linguistic market is often invoked in discussions of commodification of language. But one aspect of his theory that has not been actively adopted is the notion of multiple markets, which is reflected in Bourdieu’s discussion of autonomous and unified markets. For instance, traditional research in World Englishes tends to view English as a global language in competition with local languages, as evidenced by its focus on establishing and defending the self-sufficiency and legitimacy of new Englishes representing local identity. This view could be understood as implying a rather unified, homogeneous linguistic market that encompasses World Englishes, with Inner Circle, Outer Circle, and Expanding Circle varieties positioned in a hierarchical way, with the World Englishes paradigm attempting to subvert such hierarchical order. However, commodification of English suggests a more complex picture, with multiplicity of markets introducing alternative ways in which competing values of global and local

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varieties of English may coexist. For instance, as we saw earlier, English is frequently presented as a technical skill that one can acquire for economic profit without necessary implications for one’s ethnonational identity. Indeed, commodification of English skills may be a powerful way of constructing a distinct ethnonational identity, as in the way Filipino domestic workers are marketed as highly competent via their competence in English by the Philippines government (Lorente 2017). In this case, while the unified market that attributes less value to local varieties of English than globally recognizable standard varieties of English is still in operation, that market coexists, or overlaps, with another market in which commodified value of English (imagined in terms of generalized ‘skill’) can be mobilized for fostering national goals of economic development with no contradiction. Therefore, the notion of multiple markets can be useful in tracing the specific ways in which English and local languages are valued in different ways across contexts. One way to understand how multiple markets are variously aligned (or not) so that we can recognize degrees of unification/autonomy is to return to the notion of an affective regime and appreciate that affective regimes can expand their scope. Wee and Goh (2019) show how affective regimes emanating from different groups might come to be ‘stitched’ together in order to expand their reach or scope. For instance, various state, nonprofit, or business organizations may work in loosely coordinated ways in expanding and reinforcing the affective regime that pressures individuals to make greater investments in English language learning: language education policy that emphasizes communicative language skills in English may be pronounced by a government ministry, reflecting demands and interests of private corporations, thereby extending the reach of the affective regime. But just as affective regimes can be stitched together so as to expand their coverage, they can also be in conflict: for example, such education policy that highlights commodified value of English may be contested and resisted by social movements that challenge its neoliberal implications. Extrapolating from these examples, it is worth investigating the extent to which linguistic markets are analyzable in terms of affective regimes that can be stitched together or that work in conflict with one another.

The Role of Organizations Most research on the commodification of English has typically focused on the individual as making investments in their English language learning, the state as establishing language policy that emphasizes the economic utility of English, and the labor market as imposing conditions of work and hiring practices that valorize English language skills. However, as we saw earlier, neoliberalism and its inculcation of linguistic entrepreneurship operate in a significant way through organizations (De Costa, Park, and Wee 2019). Looking at the commodification of language through the lens of organizations, instead of in terms of individuals, states, and corporations, allows us to consider in more nuanced ways how the neoliberal logic of commodification operates to extend its control over society (Wee 2015). In the context of neoliberalism, organizations such as educational institutions, state agencies, regional governments, and corporations are themselves frequently subject to competitive evaluation and benchmarking, and as a result, are tasked to carefully manage and develop the linguistic resources of those under its purview. One relevant aspect of neoliberalism here is audit culture, by which principles of financial auditing become a prevalent logic for ensuring economic efficiency and regulatory accountability that constrains the operation of organizations, state and nonstate alike

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(Strathern 2000). Through audit cultures, organizations come to serve as channels for surveillance and technologies of management that guide individual members of society to approach language as a resource they should actively develop and cultivate for profit (De Costa, Park, and Wee 2019). Institutions of higher education across many parts of the world, for instance, play a major role in promoting the idea of English as a key skill for ideal citizens and workers. In Korea, for example, many universities have invested in developing the English language skills of their graduates, introducing increasing number of English-medium lectures or requiring a certain level of English language competence for graduation (Piller and Cho 2013). Universities engage in this practice because they are also subject to evaluation in terms of annual university rankings, which in turn have implications for the state support they can receive, and producing ‘globally minded’ graduates with strong competence in English is one way of demonstrating the higher quality of the educational service they provide. Thus, the commodification of English mediated through commodification of higher education in Korea is a process shaped significantly on the level of universities as organizations. As entities that have been created or established in order to serve particular goals (Blau and Scott 1963: 1), organizations thus have important consequences for linguistic entrepreneurship. Not only do organizations generally have more access to resources than individuals, and thus can arguably therefore exert greater influence in pushing their individual members towards linguistic entrepreneurship, but their goal-oriented nature serves as models for enterprise culture. That is, individuals under neoliberalism, who are encouraged to become an entrepreneur of the self by carefully managing their own human capital and to take risks in the unstable market, are increasingly likened to a one-person enterprise, an organization onto itself, thus engaging in the same kinds of market-oriented competition as organizations do. As such imagination of the individual as enterprise obscures the clear difference between individuals and organizations, and it in turn leads to a rationalization of linguistic entrepreneurship of individuals. But it is also important to note that “organizations are influenced by normative pressures, sometimes arising from external sources such as the state, other times arising from within the organization itself” (Zucker 1987: 443), and thus could be subjected to contradictory pressures that reveal the false premises of linguistic entrepreneurship. It is for this reason that intersections between organizational and individual manifestations of commodification of English serve as a key area worth attending to.

V.  CONCLUSION Through this chapter, we reviewed the notion of commodification of language and how it intersects with various issues in World Englishes. While this is a relatively new area of inquiry, our review points out how it addresses an important dimension of English as a global language, that is, how it is entangled in the working of neoliberal capitalism, and how it works to reproduce and rationalize material interests in the changing global economy. Turning our attention to the ideology of commodification of language can be a useful way of firmly establishing a historical and political view of the global spread of English. Our review, which attempted to situate commodification of language within a broader set of related ideologies, including that of linguistic instrumentalism and linguistic entrepreneurship as well as other forms of commodification, also underlines the importance of language ideologies in contesting the process of commodification. It suggests that World Englishes research move beyond the study of specific varieties of

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English, towards how those varieties are ideologically constituted and positioned within a market for language as a commodity, driven by material relations of political economy.

REFERENCES Agha, A. (2011), ‘Commodity Registers’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 21 (1): 22–53. Appadurai, A. (1986), ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, 3–63, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blau, P. M. and W. R. Scott (1963), Formal Organizations, London: Routledge. Block, D. (2013), Social Class in Applied Linguistics, New York: Routledge. Block, D. (2018a), Political Economy and Sociolinguistics: Neoliberalism, Inequality and Social Class, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Block, D. (2018b), ‘What on Earth Is “Language Commodification”?’, in B. Schmenk, S. Breidbach, and L. Küster (eds), Sloganizations in Language Education Discourse, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Bourdieu, P. (1986), ‘The Forms of Capital’, in J. G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research in the Sociology of Education, 21–258, New York: Greenwood Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991), Language and Symbolic Power, ed. J. B. Thompson, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Boutet, J. (2012), ‘Language Workers: Emblematic Figures of Late Capitalism’, in A. Duchêne and M. Heller (eds), Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit, 207–29, New York: Routledge. Cameron, D. (2000a), ‘Styling the Worker: Gender and the Commodification of Language in the Globalized Service Economy’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4 (3): 323–47. Cameron, D. (2000b), Good to Talk?: Living and Working in a Communication Culture, London: Sage. Cameron, D. (2005), ‘Communication and Commodification: Global Economic Change in Sociolinguistic Perspective’, in G. Erreygers (ed.), Language, Communication and the Economy, 9–23, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Cameron, D. (2012), ‘The Commodification of Language: English as a Global Commodity’, in T. Nevalainen and E. C. Traugott (eds), The Oxford Handbook of The History of English, 352–61, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cowie, C. (2007), ‘The Accents of Outsourcing: The Meanings of “Neutral” in the Indian Call Centre Industry’, World Englishes, 26 (3): 316–30. De Costa, P. I. (2016), The Power of Identity and Ideology in Language Learning: Designer Immigrants Learning English in Singapore, Dordrecht: Springer. De Costa, P., J. S. Park and L. Wee (2016), ‘Language Learning as Linguistic Entrepreneurship: Implications for Language Education’, The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, 25 (5–6): 695–702. De Costa, P., J. S. Park and L. Wee (2019), ‘Linguistic Entrepreneurship as Affective Regime: Organizations, Audit Culture, and Second/Foreign Language Education Policy’, Language Policy, 18 (3): 387–406. De Costa, P., J. S. Park and L. Wee (2021), ‘Why Linguistic Entrepreneurship?’ Multilingua, https://doi.org/10.1515/multi-2020-0037. Duchêne, A. and M. Heller (2012), Language in Late Capitalism: Pride and Profit, New York: Routledge.

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Ertman, M. and J. Williams (eds) (2005), Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture, New York: New York University Press. Evans, P. B. and W. H. Sewell, Jr. (2013), ‘Neoliberalism: Policy Regimes, International Regimes, and Social Effects’, in P. A. Hall and M. Lamont (eds), Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era, 35–68, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friginal, E. (2007), ‘Outsourced Call Centers and English in the Philippines’, World Englishes, 26 (3): 331–45. Gabrys-Barker, D. and J. Bielska (eds), 2013, The Affective Dimension in Second Language Acquisition, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Gao, S. (2012), ‘Commodification of Place, Consumption of Identity: The Sociolinguistic Construction of a ‘Global Village’ in Rural China’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16 (3): 336–57. Gao, S. (2019), Aspiring to be Global: Language and Social Change in a Tourism Village in China, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Gao, S. and J. S. Park, (2015), ‘Space and Language Learning under the Neoliberal Economy’, L2 Journal, 7 (3): 78–96. Heller, M. (2003), ‘Globalization, the New Economy, and the Commodification of Language and Identity’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 7 (4): 473–92. Heller, M. (2010), ‘The Commodification of Language’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 39 (1): 101–14. Heller, M. (2017), ‘Can Language Be a Commodity?’, in J. R. Cavanaugh and S. Shankar (eds), Language and Materiality, 251–54, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller, M. and A. Duchêne (2016), ‘Treating Language as an Economic Resource: Discourse, Data and Debate’, in N. Coupland (ed.), Sociolinguistics: Theoretical Debates, 139–56, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heller, M., J. Pujolar and A. Duchêne (2014), ‘Linguistic Commodification in Tourism’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 18 (4): 539–66. Hochschild, A. (1983), The Managed Heart, Berkeley: University of California Press. Holborow, M. (2015), Language and Neoliberalism, New York: Routledge. Holborow, M. (2018a), ‘Language, Commodification and Labour: The Relevance of Marx’, Language Sciences, 70: 58–67. Holborow, M. (2018b), ‘Language Skills as Human Capital? Challenging the Neoliberal Frame’, Language and Intercultural Communication, 18 (5): 520–32. Hultgren, A. K. (2017), ‘New Perspectives on Language and Gender: Linguistic Prescription and Compliance in Call Centres’, Language in Society, 46 (5): 671–95. Jang, I. C. (2018), ‘Legitimating the Philippines as a Language Learning Space: Transnational Korean Youth’s Experiences and Evaluations’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 22 (2): 216–32. Johnstone, B. (2009), ‘Pittsburghese Shirts: Commodification and the Enregisterment of an Urban Dialect’, American Speech, 84 (2): 157–75. Johnstone, B. (2017), ‘Characterological Figures and Expressive Style in the Enregisterment of Linguistic Variety’, in C. Montgomery and E. Moore (eds), Language and a Sense of Place: Studies in Language and Region, 283–300, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kang, Y. (2012), ‘Singlish or Globish: Multiple Language Ideologies and Global Identities among Korean Educational Migrants in Singapore’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16 (2): 165–83. Keat, R. and N. Abercrombie (eds) (1991), Enterprise Culture, New York: Routledge. Li, W. (2018), ‘Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language’, Applied Linguistics, 39: 9–30.

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Lorente, B. P. (2017), Scripts of Servitude: Language, Labor Migration and Transnational Domestic Work, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. McGill, K. (2013), ‘Political Economy and Language: A Review of Some Recent Literature’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 23 (2): 84–101. Mirchandani, K. (2012), Phone Clones: Authenticity Work in the Transnational Service Economy, Ithaca: ILR Press. Muth, S. and A. Del Percio (2018), ‘Policing for Commodification: Turning Communicative Resources into Commodities’, Language Policy, 17 (2): 129–35. Nadeem, S. (2011), ‘Accent Neutralization and a Crisis of Identity in India’s Call Centres’, The Guardian, 9 February. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/co​​mment​​isfre​​e​/201​​1​/ feb​​/09​/i​​ndia-​​call-​​centr​​es​-ac​​​cent-​​neutr​​alisa​​tion (accessed 19 October 2018). Park, J. S. (2009), The Local Construction of a Global Language: Ideologies of English in South Korea, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Park, J. S. (2010), ‘Naturalization of Competence and the Neoliberal Subject: Success Stories of English Language Learning in the Korean Conservative Press’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 20 (1): 22–38. Park, J. S. (2011), ‘The Promise of English: Linguistic Capital and the Neoliberal Worker in the South Korean Job Market’, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 14 (4): 443–55. Park, J. S. (2016), ‘Language as Pure Potential’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37 (5): 453–66. Park, J. S. (forthcoming), English, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Park, J. S. and S. Bae (2009), ‘Language Ideologies in Educational Migration: Korean Jogi Yuhak Families in Singapore’, Linguistics and Education, 20 (4): 366–77. Park, J. S. and L. Wee (2012), Markets of English: Linguistic Capital and Language Policy in a Globalizing World, New York: Routledge. Pavlenko, A. (2013), ‘The Affective Turn in SLA: From “Affective Factors” to ‘Language Desire’ and ‘Commodification of Affect’, in D. Gabryś-Barker and J. Bielska (eds), The Affective Dimension in Second Language Acquisition, 3–28, Bristol, England: Multilingual Matters. Piller, I. and J. Cho (2013), ‘Neoliberalism as Language Policy’, Language in Society, 42 (1): 23–44. Prendergast, C. (2008), Buying into English: Language and Investment in the New Capitalist World, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Price, G. (2014), ‘English for All? Neoliberalism, Globalization, and Language Policy in Taiwan’, Language in Society, 43 (5): 567–89. Proctor, L. M. (2014), ‘English and Globalization in India: The Fractal Nature of Discourse’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 24 (3): 294–314. Rahman, T. (2009), ‘Language Ideology, Identity and the Commodification of Language in the Call Centers of Pakistan’, Language in Society, 38 (2): 233–58. Rajan-Rankin, S. (2016), ‘The “Authentic Cybertariat”? Commodifying Feeling, Accents, and Cultural Identities in the Global South’, in S. Hofmann and A. Moreno (eds), Intimate Economies, 33–56, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Rosa, J. and N. Flores (2017), ‘Unsettling Race and Language: Toward a Raciolinguistic Perspective’, Language in Society, 46 (5): 621–47. Saraceni, M. (2015), World Englishes: A Critical Analysis, London: Bloomsbury. Sayer, P. (2015), ‘“More & Earlier”: Neoliberalism and Primary English Education in Mexican Public Schools’, L2 Journal, 7(3): 40–56.

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Sharma, B. K. and P. Phyak (2017), ‘Neoliberalism, Linguistic Commodification, and Ethnolinguistic Identity in Multilingual Nepal’, Language in Society, 46 (2): 231–56. Shin, H. (2012), ‘From FOB to Cool: Transnational Migrant Students in Toronto and the Styling of Global Linguistic Capital’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 16 (2): 184–200. Simpson, W. and J. O’Regan (2018), ‘Fetishism and the Language Commodity: A Materialist Critique’, Language Sciences, 70: 155–66. Strathern, M. (ed.) (2000), Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy, London and New York: Routledge. Tan, P. K. W. and R. Rubdy (eds) (2008), Language as Commodity: Global Structures, Local Marketplaces, London: Continuum. Thurlow, C. (ed.) (2019), The Business of Words: Wordsmiths, Linguists, and Other Language Workers, New York: Routledge. Tupas, R. and A. Salonga (2016), ‘Unequal Englishes in the Philippines’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 20 (3): 367–81. Urciuoli, B. (2008), ‘Skills and Selves in the New Workplace’, American Ethnologist, 35 (2): 211–28. van Doorn, N. (2014), ‘The Neoliberal Subject of Value: Measuring Human Capital in Information Economies’, Cultural Politics, 10 (3): 354–75. Wee, L. (2003), ‘Linguistic Instrumentalism in Singapore’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 24 (3): 211–24. Wee, L. (2015), The Language of Organizational Styling, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wee, L. (2016), ‘Situating Affect in Linguistic Landscapes’, Linguistic Landscape, 2 (2): 105–26. Wee, L. (2018), The Singlish Controversy: Language, Culture and Identity in a Globalizing World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wee, L. and R. Goh (2019), Language, Space and Cultural Play: Theorizing Affect in the Semiotic Landscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woydack, J. (2019), Linguistic Ethnography of a Multilingual Call Center: London Calling, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Zucker, L. (1987), ‘Institutional Theories of Organization’, Annual Review of Sociology, 13: 443–64.

Chapter 5

Examining and Overcoming the Theory/Practice Divide in World Englishes RYUKO KUBOTA

I.  INTRODUCTION Since the 1980s, research on World Englishes (WE) has problematized the normative language ideology underlying the traditional practice of using standardized British or American English as the dominant yard sticks for research, teaching, and learning. Studies on WE have paved a conceptual path for other related research, such as English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) and translanguaging, which recognize and affirm linguistic plurality in research and pedagogical practice. While efforts have been made to apply the concept of WE and other approaches that support linguistic plurality to language education (e.g., Ates, Eslami, and Wright 2015; Galloway 2017; Kubota 2001; Matsuda 2017), normative ideologies of English pervade language-in-education policies, teaching materials, and classroom instruction in teaching English as a foreign language. This chapter focuses on the gap between the pluralistic ideal sought by scholarly work on WE, as well as related heterogeneity-oriented approaches mentioned earlier, and the real-world tenacity of normative beliefs about language, language use, and language users in education. What I intend to argue is not to undermine the scholarly activities and achievements; rather, I want to problematize the disconnect between the scholarly valorization of linguistic plurality and the perpetual problems in the real world driven by fixed and troubling ideologies regarding language and language users. Put differently, in spite of the current mainstream scholarly knowledge that affirms linguistic plurality and hybridity, what is actually observed in language education, policies, and media discourse reflects the privilege given to the mainstream forms of English and white native English speakers, continuing to legitimate linguistic and racial hierarchies. Indeed, there is a deep chasm between what we as scholars conceptualize and how the real world operates. From a perspective of critical pedagogies, it is necessary to problematize inequities that continue despite the scholarly emphasis on linguistic plurality and to seek transformation of the reality (Kubota and Miller 2017). In this chapter, I take Japan as an example and examine how the disconnection has manifested in three social spaces – language assessment, media discourse, and a national policy for guest foreign workers. Through these examinations, I aim to expose the social,

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historical, political, and economic facets of language ideologies of English vis-à-vis Japanese and other languages. I demonstrate how the concept of legitimate English is normatively defined not only in linguacultural terms but also along racial lines, drawing rigid linguistic boundaries between languages and creating a linguistic hierarchy of power. Scholarly discussions on WE need to pay critical attention to the gap between the ideal of linguistic heterogeneity and the ideologies that continue to shape normative practices.

II.  THEORETICAL FOCUS ON HETEROGENEITY AND MULTIPLICITY In the field of language studies, scholars have recently paid increasing attention to the multiple, fluid, and hybrid nature of linguistic forms and practices, while problematizing the traditional understanding of language as normative, prescriptive, and bounded. This multi/plural turn (Kubota 2016) is seen in recent scholarly discussions on not only WE but also plurilingualism (Taylor and Snoddon 2013), metrolingualism (Otsuji and Pennycook 2010), English as a lingua franca (Matsumoto 2019), and translanguaging (García and Otheguy 2020). Of these concepts, WE, ELF, and translanguaging are particularly pertinent to English language teaching and learning. Focusing on the educational significance of the multi/ plural approaches to English, Rose and Galloway (2019) discuss Global Englishes as a paradigm that embraces these three approaches (as well as English as an International Language, which focuses on the implications of the global spread of English to language education; see Matsuda 2012, 2017; McKay 2002). Research on WE, in particular, has pioneered the multi/plural trend in education by problematizing the narrow conceptualization of legitimate varieties of English and valorizing other varieties of English, especially Outer Circle varieties that carry colonial legacies (Kachru 1992). The scholarship on WE has shed light on diverse varieties of English described from sociolinguistic perspectives and explored their implications for language teaching and learning (Bolton 2018). Another approach that challenges the normative belief about linguistic practices in English is the study of ELF, which investigates the characteristics of English interactions among diverse mother tongue speakers. Similar to WE, the ELF approach has questioned the taken-for-granted understanding of linguistic legitimacy. A more recent concept that has attracted scholars’ attention is translanguaging. Similar to WE and ELF, translanguaging questions the normative understanding of a language as a category with a fixed boundary. In translanguaging, multilinguals’ language use is understood as an individual’s deployment of the unique linguistic resources that are individually available to them, rather than using two or more separate languages as bounded categories that are uniquely different from each other (Otheguy, García, and Reid 2015). These approaches share a reformist stance against conventional knowledge. However, some limitations have been pointed out. For instance, in describing various national varieties of English, WE tends to homogenize intranational linguistic diversity, falling into the same essentialism that it attempts to disrupt (Bruthiaux 2003; Pennycook 1994; Tupas 2004). With regard to ELF research, an early attempt to identify common linguistic features of ELF communication would reinforce the concept of linguistic regularity, and the idea of ELF itself has been critiqued as an ideological construct (O’Regan 2014). Matsumoto (2019) further points out the mainstream ELF studies’ exclusive focus on linguistic

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features of cooperative interactions and calls for more attention to multimodality and uncooperative interactions. With regard to translanguaging, scholars in second language writing are skeptical of its practical usefulness, especially for multilingual learners of academic writing in English, who are expected to acquire the academic discourse of power (Matsuda 2014; Ruecker 2014; Tardy 2016). In composition studies, Lee (2018) has pointed out a lack of discussion on how assessment can and should be conducted within the pedagogical framework of translanguaging. Clearly, assessment poses a significant challenge in these multi/plural approaches to English. Although these limitations need to be overcome, they by no means diminish the importance of the multi/plural approaches for raising learners’ awareness of the diversity, fluidity, and hybridity of linguistic forms and practices. Affirming linguistic plurality as part of human diversity plays an important role in establishing equity and social justice. One caveat that needs to be taken into consideration is the scope of the diversity addressed in the multi/plural approaches to teaching and learning English. Due to the nature of the scholarly focus on language studies, linguistic plurality tends to be discussed only in linguistic terms. However, language is used by humans who carry with them diverse attributes, such as race, ethnicity, culture, social class, sexuality, ability, and so on. Thus, from a perspective of education for equity and social justice, categories extraneous but closely related to language need to be considered. Indeed, recent scholarship on English language education has shed light on issues of race (Flores and Rosa 2015; Jenks 2017; Kubota 2015; Kubota and Lin 2009; Motha 2014; Ruecker and Ives 2015; Rivers and Ross 2013), sexuality (Moore 2016; Nelson 2009; Paiz 2017), and social class (Gao 2014; López-Gopar and Sughrua 2014; Vandrick 2014, 2015). These individual attributes of English users are intricately related to language ideologies and need to be critically examined.

III.  PEDAGOGICAL IMPLEMENTATIONS The scholarly insights from various perspectives of Global Englishes have led to a range of pedagogical applications. Classroom interventions (i.e., teaching about the linguistic diversity of English) can positively influence learners’ attitudes toward diverse varieties of English (Galloway 2013, 2017). Pedagogical efforts have been made to unravel normative ideologies by implementing instructional approaches that raise ELF or WE awareness for learners and teachers (Sifakis et al. 2018). The areas, to which multi/plural perspectives can be applied, include curriculum, classroom activities, textbooks, other teaching materials, and teacher education (Ates, Eslami, and Wright 2015; Galloway 2013, 2017; Matsuda 2017; Rose and Galloway 2019; Sifakis et al. 2018; Suzuki 2011). There have been active scholarly discussions on how English language professionals could replace traditional norm-oriented pedagogies with more ELF- or WE-aware instruction. These efforts have yielded some positive effects in raising students’ awareness of linguistic diversity (including nonnative varieties) and building greater confidence in the legitimacy of their own variety of English (Galloway 2017; Sung 2015; Suzuki 2011). However, these positive outcomes coincide with learners’ continued ambivalence toward nonstandardized linguistic features, which is ingrained in the ideology that legitimates the superiority of the native speaker and standardized language. For instance, Galloway (2017) notes that despite the fact that Japanese university learners developed greater awareness of linguistic diversity of English after learning about Global Englishes, they

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remained attached to the native speaker norm, indicating the deep-rootedness of the ideology. Similarly, in a small-scale qualitative study focusing on three preservice teacher candidates in Japan, Suzuki (2011) documented how their heightened awareness of linguistic diversity of English did not translate into a willingness to integrate diverse varieties of English in their future teaching. These studies suggest that pedagogical innovations may not always lead to the transformation of learners’ and teachers’ attitudes, further underscoring the need to scrutinize how normative ideologies of native speakerism and standardized language are entrenched in the systemic problems of language education, media representations, and language policies.

IV.  NORMATIVE INNER CIRCLE BIASES AS REALITIES IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING AND LEARNING Despite the rise of the multi/plural orientation and its pedagogical advocacy in English language education, a contradicting reality – the prevalence of Inner Circle native speaker norms – persists. This demonstrates a theory/practice gap in the field. Given the large number of users of English as a foreign language across the globe – estimated to be twice of the number of users of English as a first language (McKay and Brown 2015) – addressing the discordance between theory and practice in Expanding Circle countries is important. The reality, in contrast to the multi/plural theories, is reflected in learners’ and teachers’ views on which varieties of English they prefer as a learning model. A number of previous studies on learners’ attitudes toward English (e.g., Galloway 2017; Kobayashi 2011; Matsuda 2003; Sung 2016; Suzuki 2011) demonstrate informants’ general, if not unanimous, valorization of Inner Circle standardized varieties of English spoken by native English speakers. What is preferred is not only the standardized varieties of English but also the whiteness attached to the native English speakers (Rivers and Ross 2013; Stanley 2012). These attitudes favoring the normative orientation are reproduced together with deep-rooted language ideologies. Even though teachers and students may come to embrace multi/plural perspectives, normative ideologies tend to slip back into their consciousness. This is partly due to a discrepancy between the traditional approach to language teaching, which conceptualizes language as a stable set of rules and regularities, and ELF- or WE-aware teaching, which rejects the assumption of language as a monolithic entity, and instead places an importance on communicative strategies that are fluid and context-bound (Sifakis et al. 2018). The normative understanding of language influences not only teachers but also parents, administrators, and policy makers. Teachers and administrators are often under pressure to meet parents’ expectations (Sifakis and Bayyurt 2015). These external expectations are further associated with language assessment. With an increased global emphasis on developing English language proficiency, stakeholders are eager to see tangible outcomes of learning, which are often test scores. The normative ideologies about English and English speakers also shape hiring practices for teachers. The preference of white native English speakers from Inner Circle countries as English teachers has been problematized in our field (Ruecker and Ives 2015). In 2006, the International Association of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) adopted a position statement to oppose

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discrimination against nonnative speakers of English in the field of TESOL.1 Nonetheless, discriminatory practices continue. Clearly, the pervasiveness of the ideologies of English can be observed in many discursive spaces and institutional structures beyond the language classroom. Elsewhere, I have discussed these broader super-macro issues, including neoliberalism, which promotes the learning of English as a global lingua franca to boost one’s employability in the new economy (Kubota 2018). Some of the obstacles mentioned earlier, such as the expectations of parents, administrators, and policy makers, are linked to the neoliberal ideology of human capital development and accountability. Another super-macro issue is the historical continuity of geopolitics which, in the case of Japan, covertly link the state interest in strengthening the US-Japan alliance with the teaching of English. In order to further examine how ideologies of English are manifested in social spaces, I will take Japan as an example and show how normative ideologies tend to define languages in terms of racialized linguacultural groups, preventing the plural, fluid, and dynamic understanding of language in language education. Evidently, plurality does not exist without the notion of fixity and vice versa, and these seemingly two opposite understandings need to be conceptualized in relation to one another (Jaspers and Madsen 2019). A brief discussion of the context would be useful. Since the mid-nineteenth century, the teaching and learning of English, especially the standardized American variety, has become prevalent with the strong sociopolitical relationship between Japan and the United States and a rigid examination system used for admissions to higher education. More recently, the neoliberal ideology of globalization has promoted the learning of English from younger ages, as seen in the implementation of English instruction in elementary schools, the assessment of all four skills in English for university admissions, and the continued practice of preferential hiring of white native English-speaking teachers. The racialized images of English speakers shape public discourses and everyday beliefs, undergirding the ideologies in English language education (Kubota and Fujimoto 2013). In what follows, I will present examples observed in three different social spaces: language assessment, media discourse, and a national policy on guest foreign workers. The first example demonstrates how the ideological view of English and English speakers is reflected and reproduced in an achievement test. The second example of media representations of English speakers confirms this ideological orientation. The media construction of the demand for English language learning in order to interact with white English-speaking foreigners in Japan contradicts the reality. In fact, visitors including temporary unskilled workers who arrive in Japan from Expanding Circle Asia outnumber visitors from Inner Circle countries. Despite the discourse of English as a global language, these temporary workers from Expanding Circle countries are required to learn Japanese, while some of them may be speakers of ELF. To scrutinize this paradox, the third example reports the results from a short survey, examining self-reported proficiency of English among foreign residents in a mid-sized city in Japan.

Example One: The National Achievement Test In Japan, a national achievement test for school children was first administered in the early 1960s. However, oppositions from parents, citizens, and the teachers’ union forced the government to discontinue it. In the 2000s, the decline of Japanese students’ academic performance, as revealed by OECD’s Programme for International Student

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Assessment (PISA), compelled the government to boost educational competitiveness. In 2007, the government reinstated national achievement tests for Grades 6 and 9 in mathematics and Japanese language. This initiative parallels the neoliberal educational accountability movement implemented earlier in England and the United States (see Kubota 2011). In 2019, an English subtest was added for the Grade 9 achievement test for the first time.2 The English assessment consisted of listening, reading (items on vocabulary, sentence-level grammar, and writing based on a reading passage were included), writing (grammar items were included), and speaking, which was assessed only in selected schools with available technology (National Institute for Educational Policy Research, n.d.). The test sheets and answer keys were publicized in newspapers and on a website immediately after the test was administered.3 Examining the content of the test items reveals language ideologies. First, the suggested answers for semi-open-ended items (i.e., writing and speaking) expect prescriptive linguistic correctness, rather than communicative effectiveness based on intelligibility and interactional authenticity. The scoring guide (National Institute for Educational Policy Research, n.d.) explains that the test measures students’ ability to think, judge, and express ideas in English in real communicative contexts with the goal of developing foundations for communicative competence. Consistent with this statement, the curriculum policies also move away from the traditional emphasis on grammar, and instead focuses on the development of communicative ability in English as an international language (Hashimoto 2011; Kubota 2002). This supposedly necessitates ELF- or WE-awareness. Nevertheless, what is expected from the test takers is grammatically correct prescribed English usage. This is evident in the explanations in the answer keys (see National Institute for Educational Policy Research, n.d.). For instance, in the speaking test, the computer screen shows a picture of a calendar for the month of July. The Arabic numeral 2 is circled and a blowout picture of a girl with a birthday cake is shown. Students hear a voice asking, “When is her birthday?” and they are prompted to say the answer. The most desirable answer marked with a double circle ◎ (i.e., the correct answer that fulfills all conditions for a response) is “It’s July second.” “July second” is the next desirable answer with a single circle ○ (i.e., a correct answer that responds to the question and fulfills necessary conditions), but it does not deserve ◎ since it is not a full sentence. Here, written grammar is inappropriately applied to oral communication. Other answers with incorrect vocabulary and grammar are marked as wrong, even if the date is correctly answered (e.g., “She is July second”). Another speaking test item has a picture of a boy in a bus near a school. Students hear “How does he come to school?” The answer key with ◎ is “He comes to school by bus” with a stress on “bus.” The answer without a stress on “bus” is ○, and so is “By bus.” An answer with a grammar error, such as “He come to school by bus,” which is appropriate from the perspective of ELF, is marked as incorrect. Another speaking item is based on a conversation between Yuiko (student) and Alan (teacher). Alan shows Yuiko a picture of his brother, who is cooking, and his mother, who is standing beside his brother. Students listen to the following conversation and are prompted to answer the final question: Alan: Look at this picture of my family. This is my favorite picture. Yuiko: Nice! Who is she? Alan: Oh, she is my mother, Nancy. And he is my brother, Tom. He can cook very well.

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Yuiko: I see. What kind of work does your mother do? Alan: She is a teacher. Do you have any other questions about them? The most desirable answers with ◎ should be in correct English (no lexical or grammatical errors) and with relevant content. The following two sample answers are given: ●●

What kind of food does your brother cook?

●●

What subject does your mother teach?

The following sample answers with errors that do not impede communication are marked as ○: ●●

What kind of food does your brother cooks?

●●

What subject do your mother teach?

However, according to the guide, “What is your brother’s name?” is incorrect since the information has already been provided. Yet, a question such as “What is your brother’s name again?” may actually be used in a naturalistic setting. Overall, adherence to linguistic correctness is prominently expected in this test. Although some grammatical flexibility is sometimes allowed, prescriptive linguistic correctness, rather than communicative effectiveness, is required for obtaining a full score. Second, the content is slanted toward not only Inner Circle standardized English, but also Euro-American content and whiteness. This is reflected in the audio recordings for speaking and listening test items, countries mentioned, the names of human characters, and their appearances in graphic illustrations. For the listening and speaking items, students hear clear and familiar native-like voices. With regard to the geographical information, almost all the overseas locations that are mentioned, except for Rome, belong to Inner Circle countries – namely, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. For instance, in a listening item, test takers listen to a student’s oral presentations about differences between the United Kingdom and Japan and are prompted to arrange three pictures illustrating the differences in the correct sequential order. Another listening item provides a situation of living with a host family in the United States. In the writing/grammar section, an item presents a short dialogue about visiting Australia during a vacation. With regard to human characters, all non-Japanese persons mentioned in the test are assigned white-sounding names, such as Alan, Nancy, Tom, Nick, and Ms. Smith. Furthermore, while the graphic images of many of the human characters appear to be ethnic Japanese, the non-Japanese characters mostly evoke white people. This includes illustrations of the aforementioned characters such as Alan and Tom, as well as an illustration of two TV crews from overseas. These examples reflect and reinforce the idea that legitimate varieties of English belong to Inner Circle countries and that legitimate English speakers are white. Although people’s names (e.g., Alan, Tom, Ms. Smith) and racial backgrounds do not always overlap, skewed representations of countries and racial images, together with Inner Circle accents, reinforce the existing ideology of English. Third, the test seems to have been developed with the assumption that all test takers are proficient in Japanese language and culture, which creates inauthentic communication in global English and disadvantages students who use Japanese as a second language (JSL). According to a government survey, primary and secondary school students in need of JSL instruction (78 percent of them are international students and 22 percent are Japanese returnee students from abroad) increased by 170 percent between 2006 and 2016

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(Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology 2018). To accommodate JSL students, the test sheet offers a version with rubi – small syllabic characters printed above Chinese characters to aid reading. Nonetheless, some of the test instructions are quite complex linguistically and would be incomprehensible for newcomer JSL students even with rubi. Some instructions even include information indispensable for answering questions. For instance, in the writing test, students are shown two sample pictograms depicting a school. They read in Japanese that a town in a foreign country is choosing a school sign for foreign visitors and seeking public comments on these two options. They are to choose either one and write a rationale. Assumed existence of students’ linguacultural knowledge is also evident in the use of Japanese words in reading passages. For instance, a reading passage on the intelligence of chimpanzees refers to janken, which is a hand game of “rock-paper-scissors,” as if all test takers understand the meaning of the word. In another passage on food waste, a Japanese adjective, mottainai (a sense of regret about waste), is inserted in a sentence without a gloss. While this translingual practice makes the content familiar for the students proficient in Japanese, it would alienate those who are not. Although the government is promoting learning English as a global language, these practices could ironically exclude multilingual students from other linguacultural backgrounds and implicitly send a message that Japanese students can invariably use their L1 words in English communication. All in all, the achievement test adheres to the prescriptive approach, reinforcing the normative beliefs related to legitimate forms of English and English speakers. Paradoxically, the ways English is used in the test evoke the sense that English is to be used only between native speakers of English and Japanese students, excluding culturally and linguistically minoritized students in Japan.

Example Two: “Japanese People Must Learn English” A TV Program English use is imagined not only in international spheres but also domestic contexts due to a growing number of foreign visitors and residents in Japan. According to the Japan National Tourism Organization (n.d.), the number of foreign visitors increased by 3.7 times between 2008 and 2018. This phenomenon of domestic internationalization seems to have inspired the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, or Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK), to create a twenty-five-minute episode of a regular weekday TV program (“Close-up Today Plus”), which addressed the question: “How do we cope with the era of English conversation?” In this program, each episode focuses on a current sociopolitical topic and presents various information by combining documentary-style video footage and an in-studio interview with an expert. The program on the demand for English language learning was aired on November 7, 2018.4 A critical analysis of the episode reveals the ideologies of English, race, and location. In this episode, the video footage featured the following scenes: (1) a maid café (an entertainment cosplay business, where young Japanese women dressed in maid servant costumes entertain customers) offering a service to foreign customers in English; (2) a tendon (tempura over rice) restaurant that attracts many foreign tourists because of the menu and service provided in English; (3) two taxi drivers in Tokyo interacting with a contrived customer in English and an English lesson for taxi drivers working for this particular company; (4) online English lessons in the Philippines and an interview with a Filipina teacher; (5) an elementary school in Tokyo, where two native English speakers are hired; (6) Tokyo Global Gateway, an “English village” where visitors can

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have simulated experiences using English; and (7) an elementary school English class in Fukuoka Prefecture, where the teacher uses a robot instead of a native speaker due to financial constraints. In the studio are two Japanese newscasters, a female and a male, and a commentator, Robert Campbell, a white American scholar of Japanese literature and a long-time resident in Japan. They discussed the content of the videos all in Japanese. The video footage reflects a particular view regarding who is an English speaker. With regard to racial representations, I examined how often foreigners with different racial appearances were shown in all scenes, except for aforementioned (7), which included no foreigners. The total length of these scenes amounts to approximately 9 minutes and 45 seconds. Ostensibly white people appear 76 percent of the time, whereas those ostensibly Asian appear 40 percent. Note that in scene (1), two British male customers – one ostensibly white and another ostensibly South Asian – are sitting together while being entertained by a Japanese maid. This makes the combined percentage more than 100 percent. Only one unnamed black person – an assistant language teacher – appears in scene (5) for merely 10 seconds in the teachers’ room, in contrast with a much longer (115 seconds) footage featuring a white, named female teacher with an American accent in the classroom. However, there are some scenes featuring nonwhite teachers. For instance, scene (4) on teaching English in the Philippines shows Filipina teachers and scene (3) shows an ostensibly Asian female teacher teaching English to taxi drivers. However, other instructional scenes (maid café, elementary school, and Tokyo Global Gateway) predominantly show ostensibly white teachers. As for Japanese service providers interacting with foreign visitors, scenes (1) and (2) show ostensibly white and ostensibly Asian customers. However, scene (3) focuses on the demand for English among taxi drivers and shows two drivers separately – an effective speaker of English and another with only basic proficiency in English. This difference is demonstrated by an experiment, in which a white male English speaker with an American accent hops into the vehicle as a passenger and interacts with the driver. This is followed by a scene showing an English conversation class that the taxi company offers to its employees. All in all, the video footage gives the impression that the majority of the foreign visitors to Japan are English speakers and many of them are white. However, this image is inconsistent with facts. According to the Japan National Tourism Organization (n.d.), 73.4 percent of the foreign visitors arriving in Japan in 2018 were from East Asian countries, namely South Korea, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. This is contrasted by 11.6 percent from Western countries and 11.2 percent from South and Southeast Asia. Visitors from the United States comprised merely 4.9 percent. Since English is taught globally, some of these East Asian visitors presumably have at least minimally functional proficiency in English, which would create opportunities for Japanese people to interact with them in ELF communication. Scene (2), which includes brief comments by an Asian customer, hints at this possibility. However, ELF communication is not brought forward throughout the episode. Furthermore, multilingual realities are downplayed.

Example Three: “Foreign Workers Must Learn Japanese” – Can They Also Speak English? As observed earlier, while the media perpetuate the idea that Japanese people need to learn English to interact mainly with white native English speakers from Inner Circle countries, the large presence of Asian visitors from Expanding Circle countries

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suggests the likelihood of Japanese people communicating with some of them in ELF. However, this possibility is absent in the recently established immigration policy for recruiting unskilled and semi-skilled foreign guest workers mainly from Asia. Instead, the government requires these workers to demonstrate Japanese language proficiency in order to work in Japan, whereas no such requirement is imposed on other foreign workers, such as elite professionals employed by large multinational corporations and English language instructors. The government clearly assumes that Japanese is the only viable language that enables communication between these newly recruited guest workers and Japanese employers, co-workers, or customers. Yet, engaging in ELF communication may be possible in some cases. In order to explore the likelihood of such communication, I conducted a small-scale survey targeting adult foreign residents in a rural community. To provide more background information, Japan experienced a labor shortage, mainly in the manufacturing sector, in the 1980s. In order to overcome this challenge, lawmakers revised the immigration policies in 1990 to allow nikkei people – foreigners of Japanese descent – and their families down to the third generation to legally live and work in Japan. Many nikkei workers and their families – mostly from Brazil and Peru – began to arrive in Japan, and until the global financial crisis in 2008, they constituted a large portion of temporary foreign residents in Japan. Also, in 1993, Japan implemented the Industrial Training and Technical Internship Program, which enabled trainees from other developing nations to stay in Japan for a maximum of three years (extended to five years in 20175). The 2017 data suggest that there were approximately 252,000 such trainees and 95 percent of them were from Vietnam, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand.6 In 2018, the revised immigration law created a category of “specified skilled worker” to allow semi-skilled and unskilled foreign workers to seek employment in fourteen industry fields, such as nursing care, food service, and construction.7 Upon demonstrating sufficient scores on professional and Japanese language tests, they are given a five-year work visa, followed by eligibility for obtaining permanent residency. A Japanese language test is to be administered from 2019 in the following nine countries: Vietnam, Philippines, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, Nepal, and Mongolia (Ministry of Justice 2019). Many of these countries belong to ASEAN and promote the use of English as a lingua franca (Kirkpatrick 2014). Although most of these workers are likely to be from working-class backgrounds and thus may not be proficient in English as a foreign language, some may be able to communicate in English. To gauge the percentage of English users in this population, I administered a simple survey on self-ratings of Japanese and English skills among learners of Japanese as an additional language who lived in the vicinity of a mid-sized city in rural Japan and participated in weekly JSL tutorials organized by a small community organization. Every Sunday morning, learners gather at a community center and learn Japanese in small groups from Japanese volunteer tutors. For more than ten years, I have participated as a volunteer tutor several times a year during my visits to Japan. Hosting many small manufacturing companies, the city and its vicinity have attracted nikkei workers as well as industrial trainees since the 1990s. The one-page survey asked (1) the country of origin, (2) self-rated Japanese proficiency, and (3) self-rated English proficiency in listening and speaking. It was written in simple Japanese with rubi and translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese. During a tutorial session in January 2019, I distributed paper copies of the survey to the learners and requested that they fill it out. At each table, there was at least one advanced learner of Japanese who was able to assist in the language the learners were

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familiar with. A total of thirty-five learners filled out the survey – twelve from Brazil, ten from Vietnam, three each from Thailand and Indonesia, two from Sri Lanka, and one each from Bolivia, China, Mexico, Peru, and South Korea. They were mostly, if not all, industrial trainees working for local factories. The results show that on a five-point scale (1=no proficiency, 2=limited proficiency, 3=some proficiency, 4=adequate proficiency, and 5=advanced proficiency), the average score for self-rated overall Japanese proficiency was 2.51, English listening was 2.25, and English speaking was 2.17, which implies that these respondents may be able to communicate slightly more effectively in Japanese than in English. Nonetheless, some respondents rated their English proficiency 3 or above, which could allow a minimally functional level of communication. There were ten of these people for listening and for speaking (28.6 percent). Table 5.1 shows the breakdown of these respondents. Three major observations can be pointed out. First, slightly more than one quarter of the respondents claimed that they have English proficiency ranging from functional to advanced levels, which may potentially enable them to interact with Japanese people in ELF. Yet, the ideologies of native speakerism may prevent ELF communication from taking place. Second, among the twenty-five people who rated their English listening and speaking as either 1 or 2, ten people rated their Japanese as 1. Seven of these people were from Brazil, two were from Thailand, and one was from Bolivia. Many of them seemed to have arrived in Japan recently, although accurate information was not available. This

TABLE 5.1  Self-rated English listening and speaking Score(1=no proficiency; 5=advanced)

Listening

Speaking

Country of origin

Total

1

Brazil (4)*, Indonesia (2), Vietnam (1)

7

2

Bolivia (1), Brazil (5), Indonesia (1), Peru (1), Thailand (2), Vietnam (8)

3

Brazil (2), Korea (1), Sri Lanka (1), Thailand (1), Vietnam (1)

6

4

Brazil (1), China (1)

2

5

Mexico (1), Sri Lanka (1)

2

18

Total: 35 Total (3 or above): 10 9

1

Brazil (5), Indonesia (2), Vietnam (2)

2

Bolivia (1), Brazil (5), Indonesia (1), Peru (1), Thailand (2), Vietnam (6)

16

3

Brazil (1), China (1), Korea (1), Sri Lanka (1), Thailand (1), Vietnam (2)

7

4

Brazil (1)

1

5

Mexico (1), Sri Lanka (1)

2 Total: 35 Total (3 or above): 10

* Number of people shown in parentheses.

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group may be most vulnerable socially, although the people with some English ability may also be marginalized since their English proficiency is not likely recognized as cultural capital. Third, the group with English ability (those who gave themselves scores of 3 or above) self-rated their Japanese proficiency slightly higher than the average. Specifically, the average Japanese score of those who rated their English listening 3 or above was 2.8 and that of those who rated their English speaking 3 or above was 3.0. People with English ability may generally have a larger amount of cultural and linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1991), obtained by greater access to education in general. Although the survey elicited only basic information, the results nonetheless indicate that some of the foreign workers from Expanding circle countries may be able to at least minimally interact in English. However, their linguistic capital in English may not be recognized in the Japanese mainstream field, in which only English spoken by native speakers is viewed as legitimate. While their potential English skills are made invisible/ inaudible, they are expected to interact with Japanese people in Japanese. Here, the strong expectations for Japanese people to learn English is contrasted by the demand for these foreign residents to linguistically assimilate into Japanese. Moreover, the relatively small number of these foreign residents with English ability indicates the elite profile of English users, even though the trope of English as a global language implies a universal spread of the language.

IV.  LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES AND A LINGUACULTURAL HIERARCHY FOR RACIALIZED AND CLASSED GROUPS The aforementioned three examples show how normative language ideologies surrounding English and English speakers are manifested in various ways within the realities of multilingualism that intersect with race and class. More specifically, the examples offer the following observations on language ideologies. First, English is customarily constructed as a language owned by white native speakers from Inner Circle countries. This makes English speakers of color, even those from Inner Circle countries, and those from other geographical locations invisible and inferior. Second, this strong ideological link between language and race (e.g., raciolinguistic ideology that connects English speakers with whiteness or Japanese speakers with Japaneseness) solidifies racialized linguistic borders. This categorization of language along the racial lines implies that the English language learners and test takers in Japan are assumed to be a homogeneous group of racialized Japanese people, further marginalizing ELF speakers from non-Japanese backgrounds. Third, normalized and essentialized languages – English, Japanese, and others – categorized along the racial lines are hierarchically positioned in power structures. This creates unidirectional expectations for language learning. Specifically, the raciolinguistic power hierarchy compels Japanese people from a common linguacultural background to assimilate themselves into the imagined community of white native speakers of English from Inner Circle countries, while requiring unskilled workers, mostly from Expanding Circle Asian countries, who are nonnative Japanese/English speakers, to become linguistically assimilated into Japanese. Figure 5.1 illustrates these ideologies in a general sense. Here, raciolinguistic boundaries are seen solid, allowing little legitimacy for communication in nonnative nonstandardized linguistic forms. These expectations are hegemonic in the sense that the top-down policies and associated practices for language education are taken

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FIGURE 5.1:  Raciolinguistic categorical assimilation.

up by the learners as natural and even necessary. These practices are all bound up in the capitalist ideology of globalization and market-driven institutional structures in which language and language skills are commodified within economic activities of producing, selling, and buying tests, textbooks, materials, teachers, and services (Block, Gray and Holborow 2012). Fourth, the assimilation of raciolinguistic inferior others into the perceived mainstream essentialized linguistic community creates little possibility for imagining communication in ELF or multilingua francas (Makoni and Pennycook 2012) as an educational model among diverse L1 speakers. Although lingua franca communication actually takes place in naturalistic settings involving many languages, it is not considered to be an instructional goal or instructional resource; rather the learning goal is set as being able to communicate with racially idealized native speakers of the target language with native-like linguistic competence. This ideology keeps us from imagining the possibility of using multilingual francas, including ELF, among diverse L1 users who may or may not be proficient in Japanese. Finally, the impossibility of such imagination also indicates the identification of the ideal users of English with socioeconomic elites. Whiteness and native speakerness attached to the image of the legitimate user of English excludes working-class nonnative nonwhite users of Outer/Expanding Circle Englishes from the group of privileged English users. All in all, these layers of normative language ideologies reflect and reproduce racialized, classed, and hierarchized power relations, while undermining the fluid and dynamic reality of linguistic forms and practices as discussed by scholarship on WE or Global Englishes in relation to foreign language education, which is described in the illustration of Figure 5.2. This vision does not deny the existence of distinct languages,

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but, rather, it makes the raciolinguistic boundary blurred, allowing communication in multilingual francas among people from diverse L1 backgrounds. The conventional approach to understanding language, language speakers, and language education as seen in the three examples contradicts the scholarly attention to the multi/plural perspective of communication in globalized society, indicating significant challenges to overcome.

V.  OVERCOMING THE THEORY-PRACTICE DIVIDE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING Research on WE, and more broadly Global Englishes, has illuminated the linguistic diversity of English. It is no longer appropriate to conceptualize and discuss English as a singular term. Not only has the multiplicity of Englishes been discussed in terms of linguistic features, it has also been conceptualized in relation to race, class, and other social categories. However, this multi/plural conceptualization is not reflected in everyday ideology and discourse as observed in language tests, the media, and public policies, demonstrating a knowledge disconnect between scholars and the general public including language education professionals. The scholarship on WE and Global Englishes needs to go beyond describing language and language use and further explore how the multi/plural orientation can be advocated and implemented for engaging in genuine communication in a foreign language with people from diverse backgrounds in terms of race, gender, class, sexuality, and so on. In other words, scholarly knowledge needs to be utilized for transformative purposes to develop more equitable human relations in language education. One strategy may be to focus on the broader public domain and make our scholarly knowledge more accessible for various stakeholders and the general public to invite them to explore different ways

FIGURE 5.2:  Vision for multilingual francas including ELF.

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of understanding language, language use, and language users. The original impetus of WE research focusing on the multi/plural orientation can be utilized to fill the gap between the scholarly knowledge and the ideologies that exist in the real world.

NOTES 1. https://www.tesol.org/docs/pdf/5889.pdf 2. English is currently required from Grade 5 to 12 and will be required from Grade 3 from 2020. 3. Other wide-scale tests, such as senior high school and university entrance examinations, are publicized in a similar way. 4. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nhk​​.or​.j​​p​/gen​​dai​/a​​rtic​l​​es​/42​​06/ 5. https://www.nishinippon.co.jp/item/n/677932/ 6. https://www.meti.go.jp/policy/mono_info_service/mono/fiber/ginoujisshukyougikai/ 180323/3_mhlw-genjyoukadai.pdf. It is important to note that these trainees are often treated as cheap labor and problems of abuse and exploitation have been reported as violation of human rights. 7. https​:/​/ww​​w​.mof​​a​.go.​​jp​/mo​​faj​/f​​i les/​​000​45​​9527.​​pdf

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Sifakis, N. C. and Y. Bayyurt (2015), ‘Insights from ELF and WE in Teacher Training in Greece and Turkey’, World Englishes, 34 (3): 471–84. Sifakis, N. C., L. Lopriore, M. Dewey, Y. Bayyurt, P. Vettorel, L. Cavalheiro, D. S. P. Siqueira and S. Kordia (2018), ‘ELF-Awareness in ELT: Bringing Together Theory and Practice’, Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, 7 (1): 155–209. Stanley, P. (2012), A Critical Ethnography of “Westerners” Teaching English in China, London, England: Routledge. Sung, C. C. M. (2015), ‘Implementing a Global Englishes Component in a University English Course in Hong Kong’, English Today, 31 (4): 42–9. Sung, C. C. M. (2016), ‘Does Accent Matter? Investigating the Relationship between Accent and Identity in English as a Lingua Franca Communication’, System, 60: 55–65. Suzuki, A. (2011), ‘Introducing Diversity of English into ELT: Student Teachers’ Responses’, ELT Journal, 65 (2): 145–53. Tardy, C. M. (2016), Beyond Convention: Genre Innovation in Academic Writing, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Taylor, S. K. and K. Snoddon (eds) (2013), ‘Plurilingualism in TESOL (special topic issue)’, TESOL Quarterly, 47 (3). Tupas, R. (2004), ‘The Politics of Philippine English: Neocolonialism, Global Politics, and the Problem of Postcolonialism’, World Englishes, 23 (1): 47–58. Vandrick, S. (2014), ‘The Role of Social Class in English Language Education’, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 13 (2): 85–91. Vandrick, S. (2015), ‘No “Knapsack of Invisible Privilege” for ESL University Students’, Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 14 (1): 54–9.

Chapter 6

Linguaculture, Cultural Travel, Native-speakerism and Small Culture Formation on the Go Working up from Instances ADRIAN HOLLIDAY

I.  FINDING A WAY IN In this chapter I explore the proposition that English in the world is hybrid in the sense of being varied, multiple and diverse, not because it has moved away from a so-labelled ‘native’ norm, but by the nature of how it has always been, and presumably as all languages are. After looking at the ideological Centre discourses that say otherwise, I will try to put them aside by means of a deCentred investigation of small instances. To embrace and to apply discipline to the inevitable intersubjectivity of this process, I will employ what has been referred to as analytical autoethnography (Anderson 2006), through which I attempt to lay bare and apply ethnographic discipline to what I see, while at the same time being hopefully sufficiently evocative (Ellis et al. 2011) for readers to identify my experience with theirs. My focus on ideology and discourses is more sociological than sociolinguistic. I will look at the relationship between English and culture but not as how large national cultures are spoken by large languages. Instead, I will seek a deCentred way in through my concept of small culture formation on the go, by which I mean the transient and creative way in which we all engage with the intercultural on an everyday basis from early childhood. It is both a methodology for looking and the location in which the intercultural takes place. This enables a parallel concept of ‘small English formation on the go’. Making sense of ‘the world’ from this ‘small’ perspective, also connects with what Stuart Hall (1991: 35) refers to as needing “to retell the story from the bottom up, instead of from the top down”. This working up from instances in turn resonates with the awareness of the ideological nature of the grand narratives of ‘nation’ and other large-culture propositions and also of the inaccuracies of methodological nationalism, by which is meant a false preoccupation with always starting with nation, that has grown out of this ideology (Delanty 2006; Mannheim 1936).

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In my own professional and research trajectory, I have come to this approach and understanding by means of both fallacious and positive experiences. First, living the linguistic imperialism as described by Phillipson (1992), my very early career, as a British Council English teacher in Iran and then setting up university English curricula in Egypt and Syria, was spent thinking that standards of teaching English were bound up in Western-defined types of cultural behaviour (Holliday 2005). Indeed, English constructed as a ‘superior’ language has been the basis of my entire career. Learning through experience that this point of view was fallacious required the development of a postmodern research approach that realized the ideological nature of the structures involved and also the implicatedness of myself as the researcher in trying to work things out (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Digging very deep into my own history in the research was particularly important because I was witnessing neo-racist prejudice about culture and language – the hidden racism that is claimed not to be racist, that some think is by far the most dangerous type of racism (Hervik 2013; Jordan and Weedon 1995; Spears 1999).

II.  WORLD ENGLISH EVERYWHERE In the World Englishes literature, there are two reassuring and helpful notions that are becoming established. The first is that English is located everywhere – that is, not belonging to one place and then found problematically everywhere else (Saraceni 2015). The second is that English is hybrid (Schneider 2016). It is only recently that I have become comfortable with the notion of hybridity on re-reading Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall. Whereas before I had felt it to mean ‘imperfect’ and ‘in-between’, I now see that it can be a permanent and indeed desirable state of difficult-to-define and uncertain identities for all of us (Bhabha 1994: 56; Delanty 2006: 33; Hall 1996: 619; Holliday 2018a: 146). This therefore helps us get away from the false idea of purity that has made us think that some Englishes might not be as good as others. This movement towards a better understanding of what is real – the real hybrid complexity of things – is part of an ongoing struggle to get to the bottom of things in both social science and life, as we are strung between the real and the imagined. To really understand that ‘English’ is socially, politically and ideologically constructed is to keep ourselves in a disciplined way informed by what we see and hear rather than what we are told. Perceptions of English should therefore be unrestricted by dominant and popular discourses, narratives and ideology. This requires keeping a sharp eye on the social construction of things, with a disciplined constructivist research methodology (Berger and Luckmann 1979; Holliday 2016). At the same time, English is mediated by social structures, education systems, ‘standards’, large culture, small culture and personal identities. Whatever is believed about it, this is very ‘real’ to the people who believe it. Therefore, there is the slight conundrum in the contrast between the clear diversity of World Englishes versus what people might imagine it to be.

III. CULTURAL TRAVEL AND DIVERSITY One only needs to look around at everyday examples of language and culture to see the clear diversity. Recently, my Italian colleague said, ‘I will leave my money in Canada’,

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meaning that she would spend so much while in Canada that she would have none left. In one of her novels, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2007: 423) has one of her Nigerian characters say, ‘Did you come out well this morning?’ Both of these are phrases that I had never before encountered in my lifetime as a speaker of a particular British English. However, they make perfect sense and break no ‘traditional’ grammatical rules. While staying with a bilingual Arabic-English family in Syria, I heard a young person, who had just arrived from the United States where she was a freshman student, switch, in a matter of hours, from the English she brought from there to the one she spoke in Syria, along with very different body language and cultural references. In all the cases, we have no business as academics to judge or prefer what we expect to what we hear. I am now aware that I use different variations of English when I am with Iranian and Syrian friends or family or with students and colleagues from a range of language backgrounds – who are probably most of the people I interact with. I therefore find it meaningful when Indian Amritavalli (2012) says that her English is just one of the several languages that she speaks, and that despite these being her only languages, she speaks them all imperfectly on a daily basis. Indeed, this reminds us that we all speak all our languages imperfectly. It also resonates when Kamal (2015) reports her Kuwaiti university students using English as part of their identity statement, and when Clemente and Higgins (2008) describe how Mexican University students connect English with their political identity. These few examples contribute to the now common idea that English is used for diverse social and political purposes.

IV.  POWERFUL BRANDING In the midst of this diversity, there are however powerful ideological and commercial forces that we should be aware of. Gray’s (2010) discussion of how commercial English language textbooks often present an agenda-ridden and simplistic slice of English ‘culture’ for the purpose of selling an exoticized brand, not unlike Burberry, is a now well-known exemplification of this. While not wishing here to enter into a critique of the concept of English as a lingua franca, it does have to be noted that its conceptualization results from a particular professional-academic discourse of English and pedagogy. Such an observation is no more than an acknowledgement of the way in which professions and academic small cultures are structured everywhere (Bernstein 1971). Hence, there is a particular professional construction of how English might be described and therefore taught based on who is speaking it and under what circumstances, which, in this case, may indeed be less naïve than trying to attach it to a narrow slicing of something called ‘culture’. However, it also needs to be noted that some people can find that the professional discourse that then grows up around what has been named with the ‘ELF’ (English as a Lingua Franca) acronym alienating. An example is Vicky Kuo’s (2006) critique of English as a lingua franca as culturally bland and patronizing, as she makes the contrary point that her students actually want to work hard to achieve the to them impossible pronunciation of a ‘brand’ of imagined ‘British English’ so that they can wear it rather like a Burberrylike brand. What I find significant about her position is that she acknowledges the ‘brand’ factor in terms of a right of acquisition. I emphasize again that I do not make these observations about English as a lingua franca to in any way critique the concept, but instead to draw attention to the discoursal nature of any claims about English of which all parties who teach, learn, adopt or embrace

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any aspect of the language need to be aware. Wherever students and teachers use any textbook that purports to represent particular uses or cultures of English, they need all to be aware that the content is a particular, subjective, aligned, slice or brand. Indeed, the content is as much to be critiqued in discourse analysis as it is to be emulated, as I describe in Holliday (2014). English language textbooks are as much examples of a discoursal or even political alignment as of models of language – just as any content in any educational curriculum, where hidden curricula are always present (e.g., Anyon 1980).

V.  WHETHER OR NOT ‘LANGUAGE’ OR ‘CULTURE’ CAN BE OWNED This necessary perception of language and culture as always questionable discourse resonates with Saraceni’s (2015: 163) discussion of English as commodity or software. He reminds us in this discussion of other metaphors – plant, territory, family, organism – system or practice – spread, colonizing or colonized. One such icon of ownership which is very much of interest to me is to be found within the powerful and pervasive ‘us’‘them’ ideology of native-speakerism, born in the English-speaking West but evident to greater or lesser degrees everywhere (Holliday 2005, 2018b). Whether it relates to the false imperialist agenda of teaching the cultural Other ‘how to think’ and ‘be civilized’, or insinuates a false construction of race and whiteness, it discriminates against people who are labelled as ‘non-native speakers’, or it leads people everywhere to marginalize themselves by believing that people who are simply labelled as ‘native speakers’ are superior teachers (e.g., Holliday and Aboshiha 2009; Kubota et al. 2005; Kumaravadivelu 2012), it is an ideologically driven icon. Even without getting into such ideology wars, one only has to consider scenarios of extreme linguistic diversity to appreciate the unlikely nature of the ‘native speaker’ concept. Following her comments cited earlier, Amritavalli (2012: 54) puts this well with reference to India: “shifting the discussion from the imperial language to our own garden-variety languages may help us separate incidental questions of power and prestige from the genuinely linguistic ones”. She goes on to say that she does not feel sufficiently competent to call herself a ‘native speaker’ of any of the four languages she has to use on a daily basis (2012: 54). Speaking of the same linguistic context, Rajagopalan (2012: 210) makes the opposite yet similar point that “a member of such a society is a ‘native speaker’, not of this or that language, but of the entire linguistic repertoire he/she uses”. He goes on to say that “in so stretching the use of the concept of native speaker beyond recognition we end up revealing its ultimate uselessness and utter dispensability” except for supporting “an openly racist ideology, aided . . . by a billion-dollar EFL industry” (2012: 210). Even where the ‘native speaker’ label is considered to signify an objective measure in linguistic analysis, as Kuhn (1970) reminds us about the political structures of science, it will have been constructed as such in the early days of the paradigm. Hence, when Kumaravadivelu (2016) complained that he himself had struggled in his career because of the way in which the ‘non-native speaker’ label had been thrust upon him, all I could think was that I had never considered him, as a friend and colleague, never mind as an established academic in his field, as someone who could be labelled a ‘non-native speaker’ of English. To me he is just someone who ‘speaks English’, like most of my family, many colleagues and students, who also just ‘speak’ English as one of other languages. This observation leads me simply to think that the ‘native speaker’ label is a bit of professional

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discourse that has sustained because it is useful within the hierarchies and delineations that pervade the everydayness of work settings. I then think of my British master’s students, all experienced teachers, who, when confronted with the possibility of native-speakerism, claim that they do not use the label. Then I hear some of them use it without thinking. Then, a bit of critical discourse analysis would reveal that there was indeed a degree of neo-racism hidden between their lines. I feel safe to make this observation because I have found similar traces of racism in my own ethnographic field notes about students from Hong Kong, even though I already felt myself fully aware of how they were being ideologically positioned (Holliday 2005: 31). We all therefore need to look at ourselves. In a recent blog, I try to do this – to put into writing what I think of the following, probably, very common statement: ‘If I want someone to teach my children Russian I will look for a native speaker because they know the real Russian language’. I could easily have said that myself. But when I really think about the sentence I begin to see that ‘native speaker’ is not an objective category. When I search into what I actually mean, I discover some sort of idealisation. It should not be any Russian, but one who fits the image that I have in my mind – perhaps appearance, skin colour, class, accent, name, demeanour, or an image from literature or film. It relates to the branded, exoticised and packaged, ‘us’-‘them’ slices of so-called ‘culture’ that one can find in commercial textbooks and that we might have been brought up with since primary school. (Holliday 2020: 58) The overall point that I wish to make here, again, is that the common association between the ‘native speaker’ label, ‘English’ and the so-called culture is real in its presence in discourses of language and culture and the multiple narratives that express it, but that this does not mean that it is real outside these discourses. The strengths and apparent reality of these discourses and narratives can be increased immensely through institutionalization, reification, normalization and so on. The apparent solidity of common acronyms such as ‘NS’ and ‘NNS’, as perhaps with ‘ELF’ referred to earlier, and the establishment of scholarship and sub-disciplines that specialize in the technicalities of researching the native-non-native speaker topic contribute to this in effecting a false sense of reality. At the same time, these ‘realities’, perhaps rightly, are used in acts of political resistance – the strategic essentialism, often attributed to Gayatree Spivak (Danius and Jonsson 1993), in which ‘us’-‘them’ narratives are inverted and used as ideological weapons against those who invented them.

VI.  INTERROGATING THE DISCOURSE However, appreciating that there is reality in the existence of discourses about the relationship between English and culture does not excuse inaction if such discourses promote an essentialist, neo-racist understanding, and if methodological nationalism, as referred to at the beginning of this chapter, enables false science. Action needs to be taken to put such discourses in their place. We all need to do what we can. We need to realize that strategic essentialism is still essentialism and that imagining that we can ‘mean nothing’ by using false native-non-native speaker distinctions as though they are innocent is a naïve illusion. One might imagine that it is easy for someone such as me, who has no problem with being labelled ‘white’, ‘male’ and ‘native speaker’, has low stakes in these issues. However, I have also resented, especially early in my career as an English teacher, being thought that this was the main reason for my successful employment rather than my professional training and hard work.

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I have therefore taken a personal stand by tweeting that “I no longer review research that compares ‘native’ and ‘non-native speaker’ teachers as though the groups are real and not imagined” (Holliday 2017). The plea behind this statement, which I believe should be extended to all research around the native-non-native speaker distinction, is that researchers should be aware of, and make it clear in their writing, the discoursal and indeed ideological nature of what they are researching. This is also with the belief that research into language, culture and speakerhood would do better if other ways of talking about these issues could be found. I take this stance also from broad, post-modern, constructivist ethnographic disciplines of making the familiar strange, allowing the unexpected to emerge, and interrogating the positionality of the researcher. Within this approach it would be normal to problematize any terminology which characterizes the prominent discourses within the setting being researched with the presumption that they are always socially if not ideologically constructed.

VII.  SMALL CULTURE FORMATION ON THE GO With regard to getting to the bottom of what might be going on with the relationship between language and culture that might underpin perceptions about English in the world, I would like to come back to the concept referred to at the beginning of the chapter, of small culture formation on the go. This works from the presumption that shared, underlying universal cultural processes are the basis for the way that we all engage with culture on an everyday basis from early childhood, wherever we are (Holliday 2018a). Focusing on this mezzo level of interaction might enable us not only to cut through presumptions about large (i.e., national or ethnic) culture and English, but also to observe how the discourses and narratives that underpin such presumptions operate. Even the distinction between the cultural and the intercultural blurs. I will illustrate this with two cases, both of which come from the small-up witnessing of everyday events.

VIII.  HEALTHILY DECENTRED BY UNEXPECTED ENGLISH The first event is a research interview reported in Amadasi and Holliday (2018) in which my Italian colleague, Sara, and I conversed with a postgraduate student from another linguistic and cultural background, who, for the purposes of readability in this chapter, I will call Beata. Not referring to the country of origin of the student is part of our strategy to ‘disturb’ the data by trying to see beyond cultural backgrounds that are known to carry prejudicial assumptions, as discussed by Baumann (1996: 1–2) in his study of multiple constructions of culture in the London suburb of Southall. As well as the main findings of the study in which the interview took place, what I wish to note here is my own unexpected experience of being wrong-footed by no longer being able to rely on ‘my own English’ which I have been brought up to believe to be an unquestionable resource. I think that I might cautiously say that both Sara and Beata were competent users of English – but English that I did not always have a background of certainty with. In my struggle to explain what this is, now that I am trying to resist dominant discourses, surprisingly new understandings begin to emerge. I find this paragraph from Karen Risager useful: People carry their Danish language resources with them into new cultural contexts and perhaps put them to use in new ways under new circumstances . . . For example,

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when I as a Dane move around the world, I tend to build on my Danish linguaculture, when I speak English, French or German. I therefore contribute to the flow of Danish linguaculture across languages. (2011: 107, 10) It is of course important to note here that this flow of linguaculture is highly fluid and defined and redefined by personal cultural trajectories within the process of small culture formation on the go on a daily basis. Beata and Sara are therefore both bringing their own cultural experience into their English as part of this transient and creative process. I ask Sara what she thinks about this. She tells me what she thinks about the possibility of linguaculture; and I include all of what she says here in her email because we see her making sense. It is also important to note that she is not a linguist, but a sociologist with most of her experience with young children and conversation analysis: Is this linked mostly to a figurative use of the language rather than grammatical? Well this is all very complicated, because for me there are multiple levels in which this can be realised. It depends for example whether you are speaking with someone you know well, or someone you barely know. Or again, if the other person is using English to communicate with you but normally speaks another language, for example French, or if I am speaking with someone who is totally ‘competent’ (forgive the term but I don’t know how to say it better) in English. I am thinking more about those times when I am using English to communicate with someone who is also using English as a second language. In those occasions, as English is for both of us a tool to communicate, I think it becomes easier to let our linguaculture enter in the exchange. We both allow each other to draw upon those terms and images we are used to, to express ourselves. At the same time, it’s easier to switch to the other two languages, Italian and French for example, to express something better and to give a meaning you might feel will be lost with English as a medium language. But another situation is the one I have with you for example. I mean, now I know I can let my linguaculture enter more in our conversations, because I know you appreciate this and you don’t judge the non-perfection of my English. But I would be careful to use some of those expressions if I am in the UK speaking with someone I barely know. It might be because Sara knows my views about not using the familiar ‘native speaker’ label that she does not use that term. Adopting the more unfamiliar term, ‘linguaculture’, might just be helping her to explain something else that she had not thought about before – which is the value of moving out of the familiar. The factor of expectation is certainly there in what she says – who you are speaking to and what they expect of you – and that this will be different in settings where English is more commonly spoken. Sara further comments that she will make strategic choices about how far she can bring her Italian linguaculture into her English dependent on her perception of the expectations of the person she is communicating with, and on how ‘creative’ she feels that she can be. This is not so much ‘respecting’ what might have been previously considered a ‘native speaker’ norm, but assessing how far she can be herself. The implication here is that her linguaculture will enrich her English where she feels that she can be creative. Of course, there are also narratives at play here – that speaking English in Britain is different. However, what the concept of linguaculture might do is to open something, perhaps unexpected, to do with identity. Sara continues:

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However, I frequently wonder how and to what extent this is also linked to the ability of discovering new sides of yourself. I probably mentioned this to you already, and I still can’t give an explanation to this, but for example to me, it happens to be able of an ironic timing when I speak English more than when I speak Italian. Am I in that occasion trying to adopt another linguaculture? Am I feeling different from the me who speak Italian because of this? I wish to argue that Sara thinking about ‘discovering new sides’ of herself and my own wrong-footedness and trying to think about what was going on with our Englishes without resorting to the established native-non-native speaker distinction, by trying to make sense of the new concept of linguaculture, are forms of deCentring. In other words, we were stepping outside a Centre, established, structural, and expected way of defining how everything should be. Again I find Stuart Hall the most helpful of the many people who speak about this when he refers to ‘the de-centred cultural’, which exists at the unrecognized margins (1991: 35). I am taking the liberty of spelling the term with a capital C to emphasize the major existence of the Centre, which could be any dominant discoursal force or ideology that constructs the dominant stories of who we are. This could be ‘the West’ defining the rest of the world with its image of globalization which is driven by global markets (e.g., Bhabha 1994: xiv; Fairclough 2006: 40). A world that is neatly organized around the false concepts of one language, one culture, one nation, serves this Centre convenience. The ethnographer also needs to be deCentred – to observe realities directly rather than as they are imagined by the Centre. Thus, feeling my language was marginalized, even for a moment, helped me to acquire a deCentred position. It increased my criticality and helped me to make the familiar strange. In submitting myself to the linguacultures that Sara and Beata brought to the conversation, I am also healthily considering that the cautious, faltering English that Sara refers to can be more productive in the way in which it works to communicate its sense-making and is self-conscious in the way in which it expresses small culture formation on the go. This is why I often think that my students who struggle with English, which they construct as a second, third or other language, do far better than students who are complacent with overconfidence that their so-thought ‘native’ language automatically works. Where the researcher needs to deCentre how they look at the world, it helps immensely if they can deCentre their English in how they talk about it. Removing ‘native speaker’ or ‘non-native speaker’ from one’s language, and perhaps even ‘second language’, especially the discourse-fixing acronyms NS, NNS, L1 and L2, will inevitably take one’s thinking somewhere else. Indeed, part of trying to be deCentred is to disturb the discourse by saying something like ‘labelled as’ before placing such as ‘non-native speaker’ in inverted commas.

IX.  ENGLISH IN TEXTBOOKS The second event relates back to the issue of English language textbooks. I recently heard an experienced teacher say in a seminar presentation that her students believed that English was an individualist language. She gave the example of their reaction to the content of a textbook. Because of their religion, they found the reference to wine in a party scene culturally taboo. They also found the reference to a woman on the motorway waiting for a breakdown service to attend to her car while her husband was at home cooking impossible in ‘their culture’. My first response, which seemed to be shared by others in the seminar who came from the same country as the presenter, was to be

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shocked that students should still think like this, especially regarding the woman on the motorway – denying their cultural diversity with a restricted view of gender roles. My second response was that the textbook must have been written by an author who was using it as an opportunity to make a point about gender, and that if ‘wine’ should be excluded from the text because it was forbidden by the religion, ‘murder’ should also be excluded – and that the teacher should be able to discuss these points with the students. I have written elsewhere about teacher and student strategies for dealing with what they consider to be culturally problematic texts and how to pull students away from essentialist viewpoints (Holliday 2014). Here I want to look briefly at the possible agendas behind the textbook. It occurred to me that what the students were calling ‘individualist’ might actually therefore be the textbook writer’s freedom to play with the text, which they would not expect from a ministry of education approved textbook. However, after the seminar, when I discussed this further with the teacher, she said that the textbook was written by a ministry of education team who selected and approved texts to include in the book from a variety of sources. This piece of information changed everything. I had been presumptuous to imagine that there was not an integrity in the educational system within which this reported event took place. Nevertheless, it remained clear that the statement, ‘students believe that English is an individualist language’, could not be taken or left at face value. It is a statement that cannot be let go because it represents a native-speakerist and indeed neo-racist assumption that particular cultural values and behaviours belong to a particular large culture and a language that is falsely presumed exclusively native to it. The details of the circumstances within which such a statement is made always need, as much as is realistically possible, to be laid bare, and in whatever social environment might seem relevant. The place to begin with getting to the bottom of what was going on might be to talk to the students about what they meant, to observe how textbooks were presented to them by the school, their teachers, what was said about it by their wider community of peers, family and the media inside and outside the school. One could also go and talk to members of the ministry textbook team to find out their intentions, agendas, what narratives they were bringing to the task, the policies and structures and the wider environment they were responding to, and so on. Implicit in this investigation would certainly be a search for the discourses that were being responded to or produced. Questions to be asked might be whether the ministry curriculum committee were using the textbook (a) to broaden students’ perceptions regarding cultural and gender roles, or (b) to conform to the Centre native-speakerist view that English represents a ‘native’ large culture and should therefore have ‘foreign’, ‘individualist culture’ content. There might of course be a complex mixture of both along with other unexpected and hidden agendas. Looking at the reported statement about student beliefs in this way is not only what we can do, but also what we must do once the grand narratives of English and culture have been put in their place as ideologically constructed. Seeing the statement as an instance of small culture formation on the go, instead of as an example of the grand narrative that ‘English represents a particular culture’, both enables and necessitates a very different type of research project. It is rather like Clifford Geertz’s (1993: 6, citing Ryle) famous example. Two boys are each seen rapidly opening and closing one of their eyes. An ethnographic study of the wider group to which they belong produces a thick description of instances of data that indicates that one of the boys is winking to parody the other boy who is blinking to make fun of him in front of the rest of the group.

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What I am learning from Geertz’s example, which underpins the small culture formation on the go approach, is that one should always go to the wider group of people to see what might be going on. It should be a group that is relevant, large enough and small enough to have the richness and to be manageable – small culture with a visible dynamism – on the go – and accessible. A problem with beginning with large culture is that it relies on generalization and imagination rather than experienced instances.

X.  EMERGING FINDINGS There is nothing particular about the aforementioned two events except that they emerged as places where the relation between English and culture could be glimpsed in operation. They were instances of small culture formation on the go that each revealed an aspect of the relationship. In a sense, events that show some sort of aspect of the relationship might be found anywhere where English is used in one way or another by people who are carrying it and fragments of cultural experience from place to place and event to event for a multiplicity of reasons. On the one hand, when the grand narratives of English and culture are put aside, researchers have more opportunity to find the unexpected. On the other hand, without the grand narratives to create a false image of organized reality, the intersubjective nature of the research and the subjectivity of the researcher is laid bare. A small culture approach has by its nature to be aware of the heuristic nature of ‘culture’ as an instance of social behaviour. This perpetual lack of certainty helps deCentred investigation in which the researcher can be sufficiently wrong-footed to see the unexpected. Hence, in the first event, I am forced to see English differently because I could not use it as expected. In the second event, investigating further my first presumption about the authorship of the textbook makes me realize that I was wrong and reveals a new, more complex line of investigation. Out of this wrong-footed deCentredness, the two events therefore show the following unexpected aspects of English in the world. (1) English is not confined to the so-labelled native-non-native-speaker positions; and looking further reveals the hybrid nature of linguaculture that confounds all expectations. (2) The discourses and narratives surrounding how people perceive the relationship between English and culture are complex and require looking further at the concerned parties and their agendas to see how meanings are constructed. In Holliday (1999: 255), I make the point that a culture is a slice of social life selected by the researcher for their purposes – in the aforementioned cases, which the researcher comes upon by chance. It will however be perceived and understood or not understood at all as cultural by the other people who happen to be there. The study of English and culture, as indeed the study of culture everywhere, is therefore an open-ended exploration of what happens to be going on from the exigencies of particular detail up – acknowledging that that detail might be seen differently by all the parties involved. If, therefore, someone states that ‘this is not English’ or ‘that is the culture of English’, they have to be taken seriously; but it is the reasons for why they construct and reify the particular reality that they prefer, and the ideologies that underpin this, that have to be got to the bottom of. This is very different to confirming the essence of the relationship.

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XI.  WORKING UP FROM INSTANCES The larger point that emerges from the two cases in this chapter is that one must not work down from prescriptions – starting with what might appear to be the established grand narratives of English and culture, but which are in fact ideological. There is no point in trying to pin down, describe, define, measure or compare these grand concepts because they are an illusion. Rather, it is useful to look at how and why they are constructed as such. To do this, I hope that my examples have shown that it is better to work up from instances – to get to the bottom of what is going on between people. World Englishes? All that is clear is that English is in the world in a vast and complex multiplicity of different ways and forms.

REFERENCES Adichie, C. N. (2007), Half of a Yellow Sun, Kindle edn, London: Harper Collins e-books. Amadasi, S. and A. R. Holliday (2018), ‘“I Already Have a Culture.” Negotiating Competing Grand and Personal Narratives in Interview Conversations with New Study Abroad Arrivals’, Language & Intercultural Communication, 18 (12): 241–56. Anderson, L. (2006). ‘Analytic Autoethnography’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35 (4): 373–95. Amritavalli, R. (2012), ‘Visible and Invisible Aspects of Language Ability’, in R. K. Agnihotri and R. Singh (eds), Indian English: Towards a New Paradigm, 49–62, New Delhi: Orient Black Swan. Anyon, J. (1980), ‘Social Class and the Hidden Curriculum of Work’, Journal of Education, 162 (1): 67–92. Baumann, G. (1996), Contesting Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Berger, P. and T. Luckmann (1979), The Social Construction of Reality, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bernstein, B. (1971), ‘On the Classification and Framing of Educational Knowledge’, in M. F. D. Young (ed.), Knowledge and Control, 47–69, London: Collier Macmillan. Bhabha, H. K. (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Clemente, A. and M. Higgins (2008), Performing English as a Postcolonial Accent: Ethnographic Narratives from México, London: Tufnell Press. Clifford, J. and G. E. Marcus (eds) (1986), Writing Culture: The Poetica of Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press. Danius, S. and S. Jonsson (1993), ‘An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’, Boundary, 20 (2): 24–50. Delanty, G. (2006), ‘The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory’, British Journal of Sociology, 57 (1): 25–47. Ellis, C., T. E. Adams and A. P. Bochner (2011), ‘Autoethnography: an Overview’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 12 (1). Fairclough, N. (2006), Language and Globalization, London: Routledge. Geertz, C. (1993), The Interpretation of Cultures, London: Fontana. Gray, J. (2010), ‘The Branding of English and the Culture of the New Capitalism: Representations of the World of Work in English Language Textbooks’, Applied Linguistics, 31 (5): 714–33. Hall, S. (1991), ‘The Local and the Global: Globalisation and Ethnicity’, in A. D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalisation and the World-system, 19–39, New York: Palgrave.

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Hall, S. (1996), ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in S. Hall et al. (eds), Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, 595–634, Oxford: Blackwell. Hervik, P. (2013), ‘Racism, Neo-racism’, in ENAR (ed.), Recycling Hatred: Racism(s) in Europe Today: A Dialogue between Academics, Equality Experts and Civil Society Activists, 43–52, Brussels: The European Network Against Racism. Holliday, A. R. (1999), ’Small Cultures’, Applied Linguistics, 20 (2): 237–64. Holliday, A. R. (2005), The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holliday, A. R. (2014), ‘Intercultural Awareness for Young Learners’, AL Forum, TESOL Applied Linguistics Interest Section, (September 14). Available online: http:​/​/new​​smana​​ger​.c​​ ommpa​​rtner​​s​.com​​/teso​​lalis​​/issu​​es​/20​​14​​-08​​-27​/4​​.html​ (accessed on 14 March 2020). Holliday, A. R. (2016), Doing and Writing Qualitative Research, 3rd edn, London: Sage. Holliday, A. R. (2017), ‘I No Longer Review Research that Compares “Native” and “Nonnative Speaker” Teachers as Though the Groups are Real and Not Imagined’, Twitter @ adrianholliday, (6th May). Holliday, A. R. (2018a), Understanding Intercultural Communication: Negotiating a Grammar of Culture, 2nd edn, London: Routledge. Holliday, A. R. (2018b), ‘Native-speakerism’, in J. Liontas (ed.), TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching, Bognor Regis: Wiley. Holliday, A. R. (2020), Blogs 2013–2020: How it is Possible to Write - Issues with Culture. adrianholliday​.com​/boo​ks. Holliday, A. R. and P. J. Aboshiha, (2009), ‘The Denial of Ideology in Perceptions of “Nonnative Speaker” Teachers’, TESOL Quarterly, 43 (4): 669–89. Jordan, G. and C. Weedon (1995), ‘The Celebration of Difference and the Cultural Politics of Racism’, in B. Adam and S. Allan (eds), Theorizing Culture: An Interdisciplinary Critique after Postmodernism, 149–64, London: UCL Press. Kamal, A. (2015), ‘Interrogating Assumptions of Native-speakerism from the Perspective of Kuwait University English Language Students’, in A. Swan, P. J. Aboshiha and A. R. Holliday (eds), (En)countering Native-speakerism: Global Perspectives, 124–40, London: Palgrave. Kubota, R., K. Bashir-Ali, S. Canagarajah, L. Kamhi-Stein, E. Lee and H. Shin (2005), ‘Race and (Non)nativeness in English Language Teaching: A Brief Report’, NNest Newsletter, 7 (1). Kuhn, T. (1970), The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2012), ‘Individual Identity, Cultural Globalization, and Teaching English as an International Language: The Case for an Epistemic Break’, in L. Alsagoff, S. L. McKay, S. L., G. Hu and W. A. Renandya (eds), Principles and Practices for Teaching English as an International Language, 9–27, New York: Routledge. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2016), ‘The Decolonial Option in English Teaching: Can the Subaltern Act?’, TESOL Quarterly, 50 (1): 66–85. Kuo, I. C. (2006), ‘Addressing the Issue of Teaching English as a Lingua Franca’, ELT Journal, 60 (3): 213–21. Mannheim, K. (1936), Ideology and Utopia, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company. Phillipson, R.(1992), Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rajagopalan, K. (2012), ‘Colonial Hangover and the New “Hybrid” Englishes’, in R. K. Agnihotri and R. Singh (eds), Indian English: Towards a New Paradigm, 206–15, New Delhi: Orient Black Swan. Risager, K. (2011), ‘Linguaculture and Transnationality’, in J. Jackson (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication, 101–5, London: Routledge. Saraceni, M. (2015), World Englishes: A Critical Analysis, London: Bloomsbury.

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Schneider, E. W. (2016), ‘Hybrid Englishes: An Exploratory Survey’, World Englishes, 35 (3): 339–54. Spears, A. K. (1999), ‘Race and Ideology: An Introduction’, in A. K. Spears (ed.), Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism, and Popular Culture, 11–58, Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Chapter 7

Ideology, Identity, and World Englishes Toward a Heteroglossic Framework JERRY WON LEE AND CHRISTOPHER JENKS

I.  INTRODUCTION Ideology and identity are central to the pluralization and localization of Englishes, as belief systems and identification practices are the basis from which languages evolve and change over time and across geographic spaces. Furthermore, the interplay between ideology and identity provides a lens through which to understand the linguistic similarities and differences that exist within and across speech communities, thus representing a key area of research on the use of Englishes in global contexts. For instance, scholarship on World Englishes (WE) contends that ideology plays an important role in how interlocutors construct their linguistic identities and explores the degree to which speakers adopt particular communicative practices, including localized pragmatic norms. Investigations of ideology and identity help advance WE scholarship into a more encompassing area of study concerned with not just surface linguistic features, but also, for example, how a propensity to follow a neoliberal logic shapes the degree to which an individual uses, and identifies as a speaker of, English. The chapter will first offer an overview of such scholarship; namely, the chapter focuses on the intersections between WE, identity, and ideology, including the practice of performing new identities through WE and the ideological issues related to the globalization of English. While such research has been instructive in decentering the status of English in Inner Circle contexts, it also inadvertently constructs homogeneous portraits of nations and peoples within them. As a response to this body of literature, the chapter uses Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia as a lens through which to understand ideology and identity. Heteroglossia offers an alternative to the dominant tendency within scholarship of providing static documentations of “English” within a given national imaginary and invites scholars to instead consider how simultaneous and co-constitutive aspects of English ideologies and identities operate within a given geopolitical context. The chapter concludes with a series of recommendations for scholars to pursue further research on the relationships between ideology, identity, and World Englishes through a heteroglossic framework.

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II.  THE IMPACT OF GLOBALIZATION OF ENGLISH ON LOCAL IDENTITIES The globalization of English has had a profound impact on the identities of individuals in communities in which English is not a “local” language. While we of course cannot account for the wide range of perspectives on the question of “identity,” which is itself a complex concept that has been explored through a variety of academic disciplines, in the context of our chapter it is useful to understand identity as the constellation of sentiments and practices related to one’s self-being, especially as they pertain to general social affiliation. Identity is not merely how an individual sees themselves, but refers also to the complexities of group identification, which can include, for instance, national identification, ethnic/racial identification, sexual orientation identification, or any other aspect of cultural identification as achieved and negotiated through a broad range of linguistic and social practices. Identity, in this regard, is not fixed but performative, subject to reconstitution through acts of languaging and self-stylization (Chun 2001; Coupland 2007; Maher 2010; Büscher, D’Hondt and Meeuwis 2013; Li and Zhu 2013; Rampton 1995, 2013; Choi 2015). Of particular interest in this chapter is the relationship between language, particularly English, and identity. An influential position on the deleterious impacts of English on local identities is found in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s (1981) Decolonising the Mind. Writing from his experience growing up in British occupied Kenya, Ngũgĩ recounts being physically and emotionally punished by teachers for speaking his mother tongue, Gikuyu. Colonial hierarchization operates, as Ngũgĩ (1981: 16) notes, through a “deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture” along with “the conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser.” Local language, argues Ngũgĩ (1981: 16), “carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature [oral literature] and [written] literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world.” It thus follows that English, especially if understood as a colonially imposed language in many contexts, facilitates a “colonization of the mind” and with it an effacement of local identity and sense of self. Ngũgĩ thus bids a “farewell to English” and chooses to embrace Gikuyu as his primary language for his creative writing. Phillipson’s (1992) thesis of linguistic imperialism further emphasizes the impact of the globalization of English on local identities. Understood from the perspective of English linguistic imperialism, “the dominance of English is asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages” (Phillipson 1992: 47). The British Empire’s agenda of “civilizing the natives” was accomplished by implementing a “master language,” which helped to obliterate “local traditions and educational practice” (Phillipson 1992: 128). The British further manipulated their subjects by instituting a hierarchy of access for English language instruction. In the British colonies of Africa, African languages were typically taught through the first few years of primary school, but the students were expected to eventually transition their studies into English, as “[l]ocal languages were never accorded high status in any society” (Phillipson 1992: 112). Phillipson emphasizes the role of the language teaching profession in the perpetuation of the global hegemony of English, and others, such as Tollefson (2000), note that English continues to produce material barriers to educational access while producing new socioeconomic hierarchies in local contexts (see also Ramanathan 2005). In the era of late capitalism, it is also important to recognize the role of multinational corporate power in the promotion

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of the dominant status of English at the expense of local identities (Phillipson 2008; see also Lee, M.W. 2016). Existing research on the impact of the globalization of English on local identities is expansive. Research has focused on different populations in various sociocultural and geographic contexts, including Aboriginal peoples of Australia (Ober and Bell 2012), Māori peoples of New Zealand (Smith and Rapatahana 2012), Elderly women in South Korea (Lee, J. S. 2016), university students in Hong Kong (Evans 2017), and the English-speaking communities in Cyprus (Buschfeld 2013), Ghana (Huber 1999), and the Philippines (Bautista and Bolton 2008). While these examples are certainly not an exhaustive representation of available research, they provide a sense of the pervasiveness of the issue at hand. Nonetheless, it is important to note that scholars have also examined at length how local communities are not mere recipients of linguistic imperialism, but can also, in Canagarajah’s (1999) terms, “resist linguistic imperialism” and can perform new identities through WE, as will be discussed later in the chapter.

III.  PERFORMING NEW IDENTITIES THROUGH WORLD ENGLISHES While Ngũgĩ presents a unilateral rejection of English on the grounds that, in contexts such as Africa, its very usage functions as a means of epistemic colonization, a critical premise of WE is that English is not owned by speakers of the so-called Inner Circle alone (Kachru 1986, 2005; Widdowson 1994). Although Phillipson’s work initiated an important discussion in the field of ELT, it has been critiqued for assuming the “victory” of the English language (Pennycook 1998) and for imagining former colonial societies as helpless consumers of English with no capacity for resistance or agency (Canagarajah 1999). As Canagarajah (1999: 76) argues, we also need to recognize the capacity of periphery communities to adapt to the inherited conventions of English to serve a variety of purposes: “The manner in which the Tamil community appropriates English to dynamically negotiate meaning, identity, and status in contextually suitable and socially strategic ways, and in the process modifies the communicative and linguistic rules of English according to local cultural and ideological imperatives, is very instructive. These are the strategies by which the powerless carve a niche for themselves in the face of historical forces.” In other words, periphery users are not subject to a monolithic variety of English as a result of the hegemonic processes of contemporary coloniality; they readily adapt to English. The critiques of Phillipson’s work collectively emphasize the plurality of Englishes, obviating the possibility of a linguistic imperialism of a singular monolithic English. Scholars of WE recognize that users from so-called periphery contexts regularly make innovative usage of English and perform new identities through English. Tan’s (2013) volume on the use of Englishes in Malaysia provides one such example; the book-length investigation uncovers how contact between different speech communities in Malaysia creates systematic variation and change in the use of all languages spoken in the country, including different varieties of English. Examining Bangladesh and Mongolia, Sultana, Dovchin, and Pennycook (2015) explore how young adults co-establish emergent forms of English communication in online spaces and, in so doing, perform new cultural identities within their local contexts (see also Dovchin, Pennycook and Sultana 2017). In an earlier but seminal investigation on English in Japan, Stanlaw (2004) uncovers the

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complex and complicated ways the language is used with Japanese, and within a number of cultural contexts, including pop music and food packaging; in this study, English does not only operate within a binary opposition where notions of right and wrong are based on Inner Circle varieties, but rather the use of English in Japan represents a celebrated variety that is uniquely Japanese. While such research emphasizes the possibility of performing new identities through English, it is also important to note that identity and ideology are closely intertwined, as ideological factors can shape not only the various roles and functions of English in a given sociopolitical context but also the parameters of identity performance. An instructive example is found in Besnier’s (2011) ethnography of language in Tonga, in which using English constitutes a double-edged sword: while indexing a global, cosmopolitan identity, it simultaneously marks one as a traitor to local heritage. It is thus productive to understand the globalization of English in tandem with the role of language ideology in micro-level (individual) and macro-level (societal) practices of adopting and adapting English.

IV.  IDEOLOGICAL ISSUES RELATED TO THE GLOBALIZATION OF ENGLISH Scholarly definitions of language ideology are wide-ranging, drawing from a number of different, yet sometimes overlapping, theoretical frameworks. Yet, it is expedient to begin the present discussion with the work of Kroskrity (2010), as his work is foundational to the study of language ideologies. Kroskrity (2010: 192) defines language ideologies as “beliefs, feelings, and conceptions about language structure and use.” Implicit in this definition is the observation that linguistic features, such as syntactic structures, may take on a particular form because of a preference for (or belief system pertaining to) a language. As Kroskrity (2015: 98) argues, “notions of what is ‘true,’ ‘morally good,’ or ‘aesthetically pleasing’ about language and discourse are grounded in social experience and often tied to their political economic interests.” That is to say, larger social and historical structures and issues are central to the ways in which the study of language ought to be approached. For instance, in Silverstein’s (1979) seminal work on language ideology (what he referred to as linguistic ideology), it is argued that preference for particular features cannot be limited to structural considerations alone. For instance, arguing that African American English expressions are semantically incorrect (e.g., the double negative in “I ain’t got no idea”), while neglecting the fact that they are nonetheless pragmatically effective, is to sustain a racialized hierarchy that prioritizes standardized English. Language, then, along with derivative beliefs that guide what is considered a “good,” “standard,” “correct,” or “appropriate” usage of English is a discursive formation: defined by Foucault (1972: 130) as “the general enunciative system that governs a group of verbal performances.” In the Foucauldian sense, discourse reflects the ways in which ideological factors determine the conceptual units by which we conceive of, and categorize, knowledge. No particular language, word, or even sound is inherently appropriate, for notions of appropriateness are readily recalibrated to serve the interests of social elites and pathologize the language practices of racialized populations (Flores and Rosa 2015). Language features, including WE features, are imagined and discursively constructed as such by individuals and institutions who possess the authority (at times self-proclaimed authority) to make, and disseminate, such determinations. While the breadth of studies looking at English belief systems demonstrate that WE scholars understand the importance of language ideology, the larger theoretical arguments

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made in such research vary. For instance, McKenzie’s (2008) work, an examination of 558 Japanese university students’ attitudes toward different varieties, uses language ideologies to offer suggestions for which varieties of English to prioritize in Japanese classrooms more broadly. Similarly, other investigations, such as Crismore, Ngeow, and Soo’s (1996) study of English in Malaysia, and Hyrkstedt and Kalaja’s (1998) examination of English in Finland, attempt to draw generalizations on how English is perceived by a particular national imaginary. More recent studies, such as Bernaisch’s (2012) analysis of the Sri Lankan context, are somewhat more nuanced in that they attempt to consider perceptions of different varieties of English (such as British English vs. Sri Lankan English) within a specific geographic space, but they nonetheless attempt to draw generalizations of the ideological commitments of an entire populace. While such research is instructive, there are potential limitations to this approach. First, while such research can account for “measurable” indicators of language attitudes, it does not really reveal much about language ideology, for ideology is, in general, not something that can always be measured or perceived through “empirical” means – for instance, an individual indicating, in a closed-ended survey, that they believe that British English is just as acceptable as, say, African American English, would not necessarily tell us what they actually believe. Another issue lies in scholars’ use of an analysis of language ideologies to draw generalizations of an entire sociolinguistic region or country. Certainly, often such generalizing observations are made with pragmatic considerations, for instance, in order to establish a pedagogical agenda or recommendations for national language policy. In most research of this type, there is a propensity to conflate nation and language, creating an epistemology that views English in terms of a single variety spoken uniformly by a demographic majority. Issues that emerge from the presumption of a homogeneous ideology of English will be discussed in the following section.

V.  UNIFORMITY OF IDENTITY AND IDEOLOGY IN WORLD ENGLISHES A key contribution of WE scholarship, as noted earlier, has been a greater understanding of the impact of globalization of English on local identities, the practice of performing new identities through WE, and the ideological issues related to the globalization of English in diverse contexts. Certainly, such research has helped to move beyond the notion of an ostensibly universal and monolithic English worldwide. Nonetheless, a key limitation is that such research is premised on a uniformity of identity and ideology within a particular national imaginary. In terms of usage, as Schneider (2014) notes, focusing on macrolevel concerns of nativization of English cannot account for the vast range of proficiency levels, discourse styles, and educational attainment among individual users. To use the example of “Hong Kong English,” its usage in the singular form, or even in expressions such as “Hong Kong usages of English” or “Hongkonger attitudes toward English,” can potentially suggest that all Hongkongers speak English, or even think about English, in a constant, static, and uniform way. The sociolinguistic literature on Hong Kong recognizes English as an autonomous variety with phonetic and grammatical particularities (see Hung 2000; Wong 2014, respectively). For example, scholars have noted the existence of L1 Cantonese features in Hong Kong English. Stibbard (2004: 140) observes that “pronunciation is clearly due to transfer from Cantonese,” and Gisborne (2009: 166) notes that “HKE has a grammar system which is typologically similar to Cantonese.”

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While such research is helpful in understanding the extent to which there is linguistic stability or variability within a group of speakers that represent a demographic majority (e.g., Cantonese-speaking Chinese individuals), the epistemology that assumes Hong Kong English is a (or one) variety belies the great cultural and economic diversity that exists in the region (cf. Joseph 2000; Jenks and Lee 2016). Some researchers have taken steps to move beyond this potentially essentializing approach by arguing that “the problem of describing regional varieties of English is less a question of assigning linguistic features to the usage of particular speech communities and more a question of assigning them to particular sociocultural contexts of language use” (Benson 2000: 379). Nonetheless, studies, even those that attempt to present Hong Kong English as variable and dynamic (cf. Evans 2011, 2014), result in generalizations that cannot provide a comprehensive portrait of language in the region. While work such as Evans (2011, 2014) acknowledges this nuance, it is not always the case elsewhere. For instance, Setter (2006: 767) imagines a homogeneous Hong Kong through observations, such as “Hong Kongers do not speak English with each other outside of . . . tertiary-level educational establishments.” This is reflective of the common tendency for studies in WE to attribute linguistic features to regions (e.g., Hong Kong), rather than groups (e.g., university students), communicative contexts (e.g., business meetings), or other social categories, such as age or socioeconomic status. More importantly, such generalizations neglect the ways in which technology-mediated tools and globalization, such as social media, blur the boundaries that are often created in the literature to demarcate communication styles and language ideologies into binary oppositions, such as the English used in institutions versus noninstitutions or the language preferred in universities versus outside of universities. Therefore, while Benson (2000) is correct in highlighting the importance of looking beyond the region to include communicative contexts, WE scholars must also contend with the complexities of national imaginaries, not specifically Hong Kong, but also more generally, as invariably plurastic and ontologically unstable. Any national imaginary is necessarily an ontological uncertainty in that it is a discursive formation continually reproduced by various narrative efforts and thus founded on what Bhabha (1994: 140) refers to as a “continual slippage of categories.” Adopting this line of thought is especially urgent for the investigation of English in a region like Hong Kong, which exemplifies the unprecedented scale of migrations and cultural flows initiated toward the end of the twentieth century, reflective of a phenomenon that Vertovec (2007) terms “superdiversity.” In the context of superdiversity, the basic demographic categories that are relied on to conceptualize and categorize a people in a given sociolinguistic space can only provide us with a partial and flattened portrait of those who comprise the nation-state. The issue of who can be considered a Hongkonger, for example, is bound to not only state-originated or -mediated notions of citizenship, but also ethnicity, race, language, and cultural practices. The identities of biracial, multiracial, or multiethnic Hongkongers or expatriate or “expat” Hongkongers, as well as the looming “handover” of Hong Kong to Mainland China, to use some obvious examples, challenge static representations of a Hong Kong national identity. As Arnaut et al. (2016) argue, if nation-state governmentality has been premised on the documentation of populations within, then super-diversity increasingly represents challenges for state apparatuses, especially in the context of globalization (see also Bigo 2002). In highlighting the importance of moving beyond static representations of people within nations, we are not suggesting that superdiversity presents an entirely new set of theoretical and methodological challenges for WE (see Pavlenko 2017). In fact, the

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conception of “new” forms of demographic diversity, regardless of whether superdiversity or any other label is invoked, neglects the ontological instability already inherent to the algorithm of the nation. Therefore, by identifying globalization, along with its derivative sociolinguistic flows, as the catalyst for the ontological instability of the nation-state is to presume and reify the a priori stability of the nation-state. In other words, as Krishnaswamy and Burde (1998) have asked, is it even possible to conceive of what is the language in a nation if we cannot conceive of what the nation is in the first place? Our purpose here is not to criticize the legitimacy of various conceptualizations of WE, and we maintain that the importance of identifying linguistic features for such documentation helps to counter the common view that regional varieties, like the ones spoken outside of “Inner Circle” contexts, are deficient forms of standardized North American or British English. Further, to state the obvious, it would be naive to assume that any of the earlier-referenced scholars of WE actually believe that all people in a given region share a collective identity through their usage of English or that their ideological commitments involving English are uniform. This being said, the scholarship nonetheless inadvertently represents nations as homogeneous in terms of identity and ideology when the reality is one of uncertainty and instability. Again, this is most evident in the widespread use of the singular form of English in conjunction with a nation or region, such as Malaysia or Asia. Moving forward, it is increasingly urgent and useful to adopt theoretical frameworks that account for such instability. One possible corrective, as will be discussed below, is to be found in the notion of heteroglossia.

VI.  IDENTITY AND IDEOLOGY AS HETEROGLOSSIC The expression heteroglossia was introduced by Bakhtin (1981) in the context of understanding the novel as a literary form. It has since been widely applied outside of literary theory in order to describe the multiplicity of discourse styles present within a single utterance. Many scholars have adopted heteroglossia as a theoretical framework to make sense of the co-presence of multiple languages in a given sociolinguistic space. Such an approach is not entirely unreasonable if one considers Bakhtin’s (1981: 291) argument that the interrelationship between “languages” leads to a condition of linguistic untransposability: [l]anguages do not exclude each other, but rather intersect with each other in many different ways (the Ukrainian language, the language of the epic poem, of early Symbolism, of the student, of a particular generation of children, of the run-of-the mill intellectual, of the Nietzschean and so on). It might even seem that the very word “language” loses all meaning in this process – for apparently there is no single plane on which all these “languages” might be juxtaposed to one another. (Emphasis in original) This being said, it can be said that heteroglossia, in the original Bakhtinian sense, references not multilingualism but rather multivocality. It can be thus argued that heteroglossia, in spite of the prefix hetero-, was reflective of a decidedly monolingual ethic and ecology. As Gramling (2016: 107) notes, “[t]he political import of heteroglossia in Bakhtin’s Soviet environment was more akin to a certain kind of civic monolingualism, whereby differently voiced articulations of civic subjectivity would present comprehensible alternative interventions to those orthodoxies cultivated by the Soviet state” (emphasis in original). Understood from this perspective, and to return to the aforementioned Bakhtin passage,

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the invocation of Ukrainian as a “language” serves not so much to reify it as a “language” discrete from and transposable to Russian, but instead to imagine it as a “voice” and thus subsume it within a broader aesthetic code of the multivocal novel. Despite such theoretical qualifications in applying “heteroglossia” to multilingual contexts, the term is applicable for any inquiry interested in the intersecting and co-constitutive aspects of identity and ideology as they relate to not a language, but rather, a geopolitical space. Indeed, as Bakhtin (1981: 291) argues, it is not possible to see language through a singular lens: at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socioideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a bodily form. These “languages” of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying “languages.” Bakhtin argues that an utterance arranges into a constellation of voices (cf. polyphony); each voice represents a unique life experience, and thus an utterance has the capacity to create dialogic relationships between distinct social and cultural groups within a society. Bakhtin (1981) expresses how dialogic relationships between two or more voices are borne out in heteroglossia in the following way: The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions. (293–4) The pluralization of voice within an utterance is an active process that both reveals how members of society achieve intersubjectivity and represents the inherently multifaceted nature of language. What leads readers to assume otherwise is the fact that the multiplicity of voices is not always immediately apparent within a speech community or sociolinguistic region because dominant ideologies espoused by social groups in positions of power often subdue peripheral discourses, thus resulting in the assumption and creation of a singular style within a particular textual space (see Canagarajah 2006, 2013; Young 2004). A heteroglossic framework offers an alternative to the tendency within WE scholarship of providing static documentations of “English” within a given national imaginary and invites scholars to instead consider how simultaneous and co-constitutive aspects of English ideologies and identities operate within a given geopolitical context. It is important to recognize that, any sociolinguistic context, whether conspicuously “multilingual” or even functionally “monolingual,” is nevertheless always already heteroglossic once we are able to acknowledge that any utterance is invariably shaped by the residual voice of additional interlocutors across both time and space. Therefore, it is important to clarify that one cannot say that a given individual or community is heteroglossic and another is quite simply not. In the words of Holquist (2014: 8), the eminent translator of Bakhtin’s work, “the language of those who are said to speak only one language, in this everyday sense of the term, is already immersed in the ineluctable disunity and formal multiplicity that are the necessary condition for having any language at all.”

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It is arguably not in the spirit of heteroglossia to use this construct to capture diversity and difference in a more generic sense. This being said, given the homogenizing tendencies of WE scholarship described earlier, it would be more productive to deploy heteroglossia to conceptualize different interrelated linguistic identities and ideologies, even if inconsistent and contradictory, that co-populate and co-constitute a given sociolinguistic ecology. In this sense, heteroglossia can help make sense of not only the co-presence of different Englishes within a particular national or regional context, but also how these different varieties result in the performance of English language identities and ideologies that circulate within and through communicative encounters and social domains of life. Such encounters, which are both shaped by and shape varying identities and ideologies, understood from a heteroglossic framework, are simultaneously discrete and untransposable, or “half someone else’s.”

VII.  CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS The study of ideology and identity is a promising line of investigation in WE scholarship. Such research is integral to understanding how belief systems and identification practices shape the ways in which languages evolve and change over time and across geographic spaces. The interplay between ideology and identity in particular is important to the advancement of WE scholarship, as this relationship provides a lens through which to understand the linguistic similarities and differences that exist within and across speech communities, along with how such “differences” come to be evaluated and enregistered as indexing various social values. This chapter has reviewed studies that uncover the globalizing impact of English on local identities, the practice of performing new identities through WE, and the ideological issues related to the globalization of English. Such research is helpful in moving away from the belief that English varieties must be evaluated against Inner Circle contexts (a practice which has the effect, intended or not, of reifying Inner Circle norms), and helps create narratives that complicate homogeneous portraits of nations and peoples within them. It was argued that a key theoretical framework for developing a more nuanced understanding of ideology and identity within defined geographic spaces is Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia, which provides an alternative to the dominant tendency within scholarship of providing static documentations of “English” within a given national imaginary, and, more importantly, opens up a discussion of the complex, complicated, and sometimes competing English ideologies and identities that operate within given geopolitical contexts. This being said, we maintain that investigating the dynamic and, as we argue, heteroglossic nature of language ideologies and identities does not aim to dismiss or obviate previous important studies in WE, including those which have been the subject of our aforementioned critique. Such research needs to be acknowledged as laying an important foundation for the contemporary study of WE in its various forms. Simultaneously, a heteroglossic framework invites numerous opportunities for future research. First, as was intimated earlier, there is much that can be accomplished with a fuller engagement with the concept of heteroglossia itself, attending to the complexities of the concept in the writings of Bakhtin, while theorizing broader implications for the study of sociolinguistics more generally, and the study of identity, ideology, and WE in particular. For instance, the meshing of ideology and identity is a window into critical societal issues, including the ways in which the global spread of English feeds off of

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neoliberalism, racism, and classism. Heteroglossia is also a reminder that English does not operate within a vacuum, but is rather part of a system of ideologies and identities that is being negotiated and co-constructed. Furthermore, although this chapter has largely addressed ideology and identity as separate topics of investigation, heteroglossia allows us to move beyond an understanding of English as a set of binary oppositions, such as native versus nonnative or users versus learners, in that the framework attends to the nonlinear and evolving nature of belief systems and systems of identification. It is important to clarify that we do not mean to prescribe an exclusive or all-inclusive understanding of heteroglossia. As suggested earlier, specific passages in Bakhtin readily lend themselves to competing interpretations, and many scholars have made productive use of the concept that do not necessarily align with our own (c.f. Joseph 2000). However, a fuller engagement with the concept can offer a corrective to understandings of heteroglossia as merely representing the multiplicity of codes within a given geographic space, as some other scholars have offered. In addition, a heteroglossic approach, regardless of how heteroglossia is conceptualized, can potentially lead to more nuanced understandings of the fluidity, negotiability, and reconstitutive nature of identity in relation to English in a range of contexts. It can also lead to a critical understanding of ideology as also fluid, negotiable, and reconstitutive in relation to English. Heteroglossia affords an understanding of English that is unmoored from and operates beyond and in spite of sedimented sociolinguistic and sociopolitical histories that continue to frame English dichotomously as a “local” or “foreign” language. Such approaches can lead to radical reframings of “context,” which is an important direction for WE scholarship, insofar that it has hitherto hinged on the notion of “context” as fixed, and therefore represents at least one way forward to attending to the geopolitical realities of globalization.

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Kroskrity, P. V. (2010), ‘Language Ideologies: Evolving Perspectives’, in J. Jaspers, J. Östman and J. Verschueren (eds), Society and Language Use, 192–211, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Kroskrity, P. V. (2015), ‘Language Ideologies: Emergence, Elaboration, and Application’, in N. Bonvillain (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, 95–108, London: Routledge. Lee, J. S. (2016), ‘“Everywhere You Go, You See English!”: Elderly Women’s Perspectives on Globalization and English’, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 13 (4): 319–50. Lee, M. W. (2016), ‘“Gangnam Style” English Ideologies: Neoliberalism, Class and the Parents of Early Study-Abroad Students’, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 19 (1): 35–50. Li, W. and H. Zhu (2013), ‘Translanguaging Identities and Ideologies: Creating Transnational Space through Flexible Multilingual Practices amongst Chinese University Students in the UK’, Applied Linguistics, 34 (5): 516–35. Maher, J. C. (2010), ‘Metroethnicities and Metrolanguages’, in N. Coupland (ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization, 575–91, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. McKenzie, R. M. (2008), ‘Social Factors and Non-Native Attitudes towards Varieties of Spoken English: a Japanese Case Study’, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 18 (1): 63–88. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1981), Decolonising the Mind, London: James Currey. Ober, R. and J. Bell (2012), ‘English Language as Juggernaut: Aboriginal English and Indigenous Languages in Australia’, in V. Rapatahana and P. Bunce (eds), English Language as Hydra: Its Impacts on Non-English Language Cultures, 60–75, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pavlenko, A. (2017), ‘Superdiversity and Why It Isn’t: Reflections on Terminological Innovation and Academic Branding’, in B. Schmenk, S. Breidbach and L. Küster (eds), Sloganizations in Language Education Discourse, 142–68, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pennycook, A. (1998), English and the Discourses of Colonialism, London: Routledge. Phillipson, R. (1992), Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, R. (2008), ‘Lingua Franca or Lingua Frankensteina? English in European Integration and Globalisation’, World Englishes, 27 (2): 250–67. Ramanathan, V. (2005), The English-Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Rampton, B. (1995), Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents, London: Longman. Rampton, B. (2013), ‘Styling in a Language Learned Later in Life’, The Modern Language Journal, 97: 360–82. Schneider, E. W. (2014), ‘New Reflections on the Evolutionary Dynamics of World Englishes’, World Englishes, 33 (1): 9–32. Setter, J. (2006), ‘Speech Rhythm in World Englishes: The Case of Hong Kong’, TESOL Quarterly, 40 (4): 763–82. Silverstein, M. (1979), ‘Language Structure and Linguistic Ideology’, in P. R. Clyne, W. F. Hanks and C. L. Hofbauer, (eds), The Elements: A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, 193–247, Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Smith, G. H. and V. Rapatahana. (2012), ‘English Language as Nemesis for Māori’, in V. Rapatahana and P. Bunce (eds), English Language as Hydra: Its Impacts on Non-English Language Cultures, 76–104, Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Stanlaw, J. (2004), Japanese English: Language and Culture Contact, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Stibbard, R. (2004), ‘The Spoken English of Hong Kong: A Study of Co-Occurring Segmental Errors’, Language, Culture and Curriculum, 17 (2): 127–42.

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Chapter 8

Interrogating Race in the NEST/NNEST Ideological Dichotomy Insights from Raciolinguistics, Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Translanguaging PETER I. DE COSTA, CURTIS GREEN-ENEIX, WENDY LI, AND HIMA RAWAL

Understanding language ideologies is at the heart of understanding the relationship between language and power in schooling. It is the language ideologies underpinning current language policies, curricula, and teacher education and classroom practice that need to be changed if we are to change what counts as language and as legitimate language use in schooling. (McKinney 2017: 161; emphasis added)

I.  INTRODUCTION In the above epigraph, McKinney (2017) underscores the power of language ideology to shape schooling, highlighting how certain languages (and by extension, varieties of the same language) are deemed legitimate as opposed to nonlegitimate ones. As astute as her observation is, we need to realize that there is more at stake than just language ideologies because such ideologies are often intertwined with other ideologies that index a series of corresponding identities (De Costa 2016). To ignore this reality would only invisibilize how other identity aspects, in particular race, shape much of the native/ nonnative divide in English language education. As observed by Kubota and Lin (2006, 2009), the racialization of English language teaching is often overlooked in the field of TESOL. Such silence over race issues is well documented in education research (e.g., Del Carmen Salazar 2018; Pollock 2004), with Pollock (2004) describing this phenomenon as colormuteness. Within TESOL over the past two decades, much of the vibrant discussion on the native/ non-native English-speaking teacher (NEST/NNEST) ideological dichotomy has begun to put race front and center (Hague and Morgan 2009). It is this centering of race that forms

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the focus of this chapter. To this end, we examine the ideologies surrounding language, the language learner, and the language teacher within second language acquisition (SLA) and second language teacher education (SLTE), and use English language learning and teaching to illustrate this race-inflected ideological divide.

II.  UNPACKING STANDARD ENGLISH LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY As noted by De Costa (2010), English language teaching professionals have to contend with the myth of a standard variety of English. Consequently, students who are deemed to use ‘standard’ English are reified by teachers; by contrast, students who speak languages other than English and a nonstandard variety of English are constructed as the racialized Other, prompting Fránquiz and Ortiz (2017) to equate the acquisition of standardized language codes with the acquisition of whiteness. This white normativity is fueled by multiple mutually constitutive factors. The first factor is that of native-speakerism (Holliday 2006), which establishes a hierarchy within and outside of white Western society not just by labeling anyone who is or is not born with, in this case, English as their first language. Rather, this hierarchy is contingent on the use, or the lack thereof, of standard language codes by this White normativity often found within English dominant communities in both the United States and the United Kingdom. This hierarchy, according to Jenks (2017), occurs because the English language is often taught through American or British culture, which in turn solidifies white privilege. Multiple studies around the world have recorded languages being hierarchized specifically along race lines. For example, in his examination of a public school in Cape Town, Collins (2017) found that schools assigned English and Afrikaans as ‘standard’ languages associated with higher status white South Africans. This linguistic and racial stratification became more evident because African languages at that school were viewed as ‘nonstandard’ languages used by lower-status black South Africans. Another example is Chaparro’s (2019) investigation of a two-way immersion classroom in the United States, where she found that three Latinx kindergarten students were socialized into raciolinguistic ideologies (discussed further later in this chapter) based on their ethnicity, which then shaped their language development in both English and Spanish. Her findings corroborated those of Pimentel’s (2011) case study, which was conducted in a similar context, and Jenkins (2019). The latter study focused on two African American Muslim TESOL teachers who were socially marginalized because of their ethnicity and religious background. Such marginalization subsequently affected their status as ‘authentic’ native English speakers in Saudi Arabia. Collectively, the aforementioned studies highlight how language becomes a proxy for race through school policies and programs, resulting in raciolinguicism, a phenomenon where higher status is accorded to English because of its association with whiteness, while languages spoken by students or teachers of color are assigned a lower status (e.g., Chaparro 2019; Malsbury 2014; Pimentel 2011). To counter such White normativity and raciolinguicism – a point to which we will return later in this chapter – critics such as Nero (2006a) have called for Anglo-American ethnocentrism in English language teaching (ELT) to be challenged by inculcating respect for all varieties of English in the curriculum and through pedagogy that validates the ties between language, ethnicity, and student identities.

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III.  PROBLEMATIZING THE LANGUAGE LEARNER IN SLA AND THE CHOMSKYAN LEGACY As discussed, the elevation of a mythical standard variety of English within TESOL resulted in an attendant construction of a mythical ‘native’ English speaker whose creation can be traced in part to the concept of nativeness. This notion of nativeness dates back to early developments in the field of linguistics that focused on the biological and innate aspects of language. Specifically, Bloomfield (1933) is often cited as the first recorded account propagator of the term ‘native speaker’ (Cook 1999). The initial use of this term only focused on a bio-developmental definition of speakerism, one that Bloomfield considered “the first language a human being learns to speak [as] his native language” (as cited in Cook 1999: 186). Such a definition would not be reexamined and complexified until Chomsky (1965, 1986) introduced the notion of a cognitivist and idealized monolingual native speaker, conceived as existing within “a completely homogeneous speech-community” (emphasis added, 1965: 3). Crucially, this Chomskyan understanding of an ideal speaker-hearer of English typically focused on white, middle- to upper-class individuals (Kubota and Lin 2009; Motha 2006; Rudolph, Selvi and Yazan 2015) who used a ‘standard’ variety of English that resided within ‘Inner Circle’ English-speaking countries such as the United States (Kachru 2017) and continues to be the ideal for language learners (Firth and Wagner 1997) and teachers (Jenkins 2006). This skewed understanding of the ideal English speaker-hearer can be attributed in part to mainstream SLA research that continues to rely on “pastoral language learning participants” (Ortega 2012: 219), or individuals who are found in higher education and have the luxury of choosing to become bi-/multilingual at tertiary institutions. While Kachru and other World Englishes scholars began to interrogate the very notion of nativeness (while remaining silent on the issue of race), scholars within SLA (see De Costa and Crowther 2018) focused on the development of an ideal second language learner whose language development was benchmarked against the ideal monolingual native speaker. Within TESOL, the goal of instruction was often to assist these second language (L2) learners to become ‘native-like’ speakers of English (Cook 1999; Selvi 2014) by first identifying their deficiencies that subsequently needed to be corrected through instruction.

IV.  THE NATIVE SPEAKER FALLACY AND THE NEST/NNEST IDEOLOGICAL DICHOTOMY The white normativity that underpins how language and language learning are constructed also permeated second language teacher education (SLTE). The divide between native English speakers and non-native English speakers prompted Phillipson (1992) to coin the term ‘the native speaker fallacy’. Central to this fallacy was the idea that native speakers would make better teachers of their first languages than teachers who learned it as an L2. Within TESOL, the NEST/NNEST ideological divide generated much discussion revolving around (1) the varying differences between these groups, and (2) why NNESTs were vital to the profession (e.g., Braine 1999; Mahboob 2018; Medgyes 1992, 1994; Rudolph, Selvi, and Yazan 2015). The separation between NEST/NNESTs, however, was not imagined. Rather, this divide was sustained through a complex set of mechanisms that colluded to preserve this separation. The TESOL literature has a rich record of discriminatory hiring practices. Walelign (1986: 40), for example, reported hiring

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practices for international English language positions that emphasized the need for having the right accent, which was a euphemism for a ‘standard’ English accent. In a similar vein, Bonfiglio (2013: 30) described how a Singapore newspaper advertised a position that was to be filled by “native speaking Caucasian English teachers”, while Ruecker and Ives’ (2015) analysis of 59 websites recruiting for language schools in China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand revealed a preference for young, white, native speakers of English. Yet, the dialogue around these discriminatory perceptions and practices – especially centering around race – was marginal. In sum, Anglonormative biases have been kept alive through a postcolonial agenda that continues to make sharp distinctions between NEST/NNESTS (Aneja 2016). Admittedly, within TESOL, efforts have been made to decenter such a postcolonial enterprise. Leung, Harris, and Rampton (1997), for example, argued persuasively for the need to alternatively reconceptualize the native/nonnative divide through the lens of language expertise. In other words, teachers should be evaluated in terms of their expertise rather than on the basis of their birthright. Similarly, World Englishes scholars (e.g., De Costa and Crowther 2018; Kachru 2017) have advocated the need to recognize the pluricentricity of English by acknowledging the different varieties of English. However, it was not until Braine’s (1999) pathbreaking volume, to which we turn next, did the spotlight shift to center on (1) the current discussion around the NEST/NNESTS dichotomy, and (2) the racially inflected ideologies that characterized such a dichotomy.

V.  RACE AND SLTE: UNPACKING WHITENESS IN TESOL Braine’s (1999) edited volume was seminal because it provided first-hand accounts as to how nonnative English teachers/researchers were marginalized because of their accent. Put simply, having a different accent became a euphemism for being racially constructed as the Other. As explained by Braine, who is of Anglo-Indian heritage: Others, with decades of ESL teaching experience and exposure to NNSs from diverse language backgrounds, have told me that they could not understand my accent. I have also been told that my [brown] skin color and accent do not match my [English] name and asked to explain the historical and genealogical causes for this mismatch. (1999: 15) Another contributor in Braine’s (1999) edited volume, Xiao-ming Li, went on to disclose: Sitting in the same class with bright young graduate students who had been speaking English since birth, I was not self-conscious of my skin color, although I was the only non-White in almost all my classes. But I was intensely aware of my “faulty” accent and usage of English. (1999: 44–5) As illustrated, Braine’s and Li’s different accents and, more importantly, skin color became a marker of their marginalization and stigmatization within the TESOL profession. Braine’s edited collection of narratives by NNESTs ignited an active discussion of race in the field in the following decade. For example, Kubota and Lin’s guest-edited special issue of TESOL Quarterly, which focused on the lack of inquiry on race in the field, rightly pointed out that TESOL “has not sufficiently addressed the idea of race and related concepts” (2006: 472). Contributors to their special issue underscored the privileged

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status of teachers as native speakers of English, with Motha, for example, noting how NEST and NNEST are raced categories “within an institutional culture that underscored the supremacy of both Whiteness and native speaker status” (2006: 495). Race was also a key focus of Curtis and Romney’s (2006) volume. In her contribution to this volume, Nero critiqued employers for often conflating “race, language, and nativeness” (2006b: 29) and consequently perpetuating the NEST/NNEST dichotomy. In conjunction with the emergence of these publications, the professional organization, TESOL, reissued its 1992 open statement against discriminatory hiring practices in 2006. Their reissued statement explicitly stated that the organization did not approve labeling teachers on the grounds of whether they sounded ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’. Instead, their letter emphasized other hiring criteria – in addition to teachers’ “linguistic expertise” – in order to gauge where teachers were placed on the ‘professional preparation’ continuum (TESOL 2006). However, the inclusion of equal worth was still problematic because the field continued to turn a blind eye to the racial discrimination that persisted in TESOL. The studies on discriminatory hiring practices by Bonfiglio (2013) and Ruecker and Ives (2015), described earlier, are cases in point. Significantly, the perpetuation of racial and linguistic hierarchies within the field resulted in Motha (2014) calling for NNESTs to take on and problematize the White NEST gaze. In sum, by and large, the inextricable relationship between language and race continued to remain obscured. To move beyond this impasse, we turn to three intellectual developments outside of TESOL – the emergence of work on raciolinguistics, culturally sustaining pedagogy, and translanguaging– for future guidance next. Significantly, each construct can be integrated into designing anti-racist pedagogy that (1) addresses the intertwined nature of race and language teaching, and (2) supports both students and teachers in recognizing and making visible the racialized nature of language.

VI.  RACIOLINGUISTICS Admittedly, and as seen in the preceding sections, earlier work in sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics (e.g., Malsbary 2014; Pimentel 2011) did a commendable job in highlighting the racialization of language and the preservation of white supremacy in that nonwhite students were expected to adopt the ‘standard’ English used by white students. However, more recently, it is scholars working within the realm of raciolinguistics (e.g., Alim 2016; Flores and Rosa 2015; Rosa and Flores 2017) who have called scholarly attention to the fact that racialized language users are often constructed as “linguistically deviant even when engaging in linguistic practices positioned as normative or innovative when produced by privileged White language users” (Flores and Rosa 2015: 150; emphasis added). Put differently, even when nonwhite students approximated ‘standard’ linguistic practices, their practices were viewed in deficit terms because of their race. This observation has led critical sociolinguists (e.g., Corona and Block 2020; Flores and Rosa 2015; Flowers 2019; Jenkins 2019; Rosa 2016; Seltzer 2019) to adopt a framework of raciolinguistic ideologies to interrogate the white gaze. Such a stance stands in contrast to that adopted in earlier SLA (e.g., Corder 1967; Selinker 1971) and SLTE (e.g., Davies 1991) empirical studies that investigated language practices (e.g., accent, vocabulary) with a view to improve the language practices of nonnative speakers (i.e., the racialized speaking subjects) by remedying problematic linguistic features that deviated

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from Anglonormative linguistic practices. These Anglonormative linguistic practices thus served as the baseline for comparison (Firth and Wagner 1997) between the native and nonnative students as well as between NESTs and NNESTs. Put simply, such a deficit stance also only perpetuated the privileged status of NESTs in contrast to their NNEST peers. Raciolinguistic ideologies frame (1) racialized speaking subjects’ language practices as linguistically deficient, and (2) the language practices of racially unmarked subjects, that is, white subjects, as normative (Flores and Rosa 2015). This framework of raciolinguistic ideologies is breaking new ground in that it shifts the scholarly focus from examining the linguistic practices of the racialized speaking subject to interrogating how such linguistic practices are seen and heard (i.e., perceived) by the white listening subject (Flores and Rosa 2015, 2019). Informed by Inoue’s (2006) conceptualization of listening subjects, Flores and Rosa (2015) used the term “the White listening subject” to powerfully illustrate that the language practices of racialized speakers can be overdetermined to be linguistically deficient and in need of remediation regardless of the nativeness of their language practices. By examining the White listening subjects and the speaking subjects, scholars who employ a raciolinguistic perspective can go beyond an understanding of the native and nonnative speakers as a fixed set of individual identities or positions. Specifically, a raciolinguistic perspective allows us to examine both the speaking subjects (i.e., the white and the racialized speaking subjects), who conform to the practices of “Standard English”, and the listening subjects (i.e., the white and the racialized listening subjects), who hear and determine the linguistic practices of the racialized speakers as deficient (Flores and Rosa 2015). By extension, and as noted by Solorza (2019), regardless of one’s assigned identities (i.e., NNEST vs. NEST), when one subscribes to the pedagogies supported and perpetuated by standard English ideologies, he/she becomes a white listening subject. As Solorza further pointed out, “as the White listening subject, we listen for the language we want students to learn – we actively regulate and monitor their linguistic output . . . [and] filter out and correct language deemed non-academic and push informal language varieties outside the perimeters of the lesson” (2019: 107). Therefore, the interrogation of the NEST/NNEST dichotomy can be buttressed by adopting a framework of raciolinguistic ideologies because the ideological biases that characterize the NEST/NNEST are racially inflected. In addition to positioning racialized speakers’ language practices as inferior and deficient, raciolinguistic ideologies also operate in a way that maps stereotypical perceptions of racial categories onto certain language practices. In other words, raciolinguistic ideologies associate certain language practices with “particular models of personhood such that we expect a person identified in a particular way to produce those features or we come to assign identities based on the perception of those features” (Flores and Rosa 2019: 149). That is, when we encounter a racialized body, we expect a certain voice; and when we encounter a voice, we associate it with a racialized body. This social imaginary (De Costa 2016) subjects racialized individuals to the dynamics of what Rosa (2019) termed, ‘looking like a language, sounding like a race’. As a result, many racialized English teachers are discriminated against by the white English speakers because they are perceived as being deficient by virtue of being associated with inferior modes of personhood (Rosa 2016, 2019; Rosa and Flores 2017). In sum, a raciolinguistic ideological framework is pivotal because it (1) helps us to better understand how race continues to drive ideological biases that characterize the NEST/NNEST, and (2) allows us to interrogate the language ideologies that naturalize

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the perceived linguistic deficiencies and racialized categories (Rosa and Burdick 2016). Importantly, raciolinguistics provides us with new tools to explore and explain the NEST/NNEST dichotomy because as observed by Alim, raciolinguistics “analyz[es] language and race together rather than as discrete and unconnected social processes and employing the diverse methods of linguistics to raise critical questions about the relations between language, race, and power” (2016: 5). The gaze afforded by raciolinguistics thus cultivates a form of critical awareness and reflexivity or “double consciousness” (Du Bois 1903/1961) that will enable NNESTS to realize that they are being evaluated by unmarked (racial) dominant Anglonormative standards. Thus, while creating awareness is vitally important, active measures need to be taken to ensure that the structural racial inequalities that Rosa and Flores write about are remedied. To this end, we contend that two pedagogical options – Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Translanguaging – that are described next can offer promising possibilities to better understand and negotiate the NEST/NNEST divide.

VII.  CULTURALLY SUSTAINING PEDAGOGY ‘Culturally sustaining pedagogy’ (CSP) can be considered an umbrella term that aims to decentralize current hegemonic views of school that assimilates students into the majority of society. Specifically, a pedagogy is sustaining if students (and teachers) are able to use their full repertoire of linguistic, semiotic, and sociocultural resources acquired at their home community practices in order to navigate the curriculum while legitimatizing students’ racial identity. CSP, therefore, “positions dynamic cultural dexterity as a necessary good, and sees the outcome of learning as additive rather than subtractive, as remaining whole rather than framed as broken, as critically enriching strengths rather than replacing deficits” (Paris and Alim 2017: 1). Moreover, CSP can also take the form of the recognition of World Englishes (Crowther 2019) or English as an international language (Matsuda 2017) pedagogy that allows classroom dialogue regarding the ownership of English, what ‘nativeness’ is and what it looks like, and provides the teacher and students a space to recognize the reality and legitimacy of nonnative varieties of English. Prior to Paris’s (2012) adoption of the term ‘culturally sustaining pedagogy’, there had been various other constructs in the field of education that had addressed the mismatch between the school system and multiple linguistic and cultural background the students came from. Some of these terms included ‘culturally appropriate’ (Au and Jordan 1981), ‘culturally congruent’ (Mohatt and Erickson 1981), ‘culturally compatible’ (Jordan 1985; Vogt, Jordan, and Tharp 1987), and ‘culturally responsive’ (Cazden and Leggett 1981; Erickson and Mohatt 1982) pedagogies (as cited in Ladson-Billings 1995). And while all these and several other terms addressed the inequities prevalent in the educational settings, such terms could not address the more dynamic nature of the relationship between educational institutions and students’ identities. To bridge this gap in the scholarly literature and research, Ladson-Billings (1995) proposed the term ‘culturally relevant pedagogy’, which is a theoretical model that “not only addresses student achievement but also helps students to accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities that schools (and other institutions) perpetuate” (Ladson-Billings 1995: 469). Even though Ladson-Billing’s (1995) term ‘culturally relevant pedagogy’ brought about a very critical lens of addressing the issues of difference and inequality along with a more dynamic aspect of students’ identity, Paris (2012) questioned if the terms ‘responsive’ and ‘relevant’ went “far enough in their orientation

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to the languages and literacies and other cultural practices of communities marginalized by systemic inequalities to ensure the valuing and maintenance of our multiethnic and multilingual society” and offered the term ‘culturally sustaining pedagogy’ (93). CSP seeks “to perpetuate and foster – to sustain – linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling” that resists monolingual and monocultural society and “embrace cultural pluralism and cultural equality” (93). One way to achieve the above goal is through creating a platform to discuss race issues that are tied to the linguistic practices of individuals who are Othered by their race and languages as well as problematizing language varieties that do not conform with white normativity. More importantly, this reaffirming approach to teaching, which also goes beyond unpacking race-based ideologies that underpin English language learning and teaching, allows us to celebrate linguistic diversity in schools. Such effects can take the form of fostering an inclusive classroom that honors the different semiotic resources that both learners and teachers bring to a multilingual and multiethnic classroom. In order to address the issues related to multicultural, multilingual, and diverse educational settings, there have been recent calls to adopt culturally and linguistically sustaining pedagogies (Paris 2012), such as translanguaging (Vogel, Ascenzi-Moreno and García 2018) that facilitate teaching and learning processes in multilingual classrooms. As mentioned earlier, such practices emerged to disrupt the “directionality” of the classrooms (Seltzer and de los Ríos 2018: 74) and to promote counter-hegemonic (Metz 2019) views toward standard language ideologies (Lippi-Green 2012). Despite the growing interest in adopting such counter-hegemonic pedagogical practices, some resistance is still prevalent in classrooms (Prinsloo and Krause 2019). While attempts have been made to incorporate CSP approaches such as translanguaging in teaching students in diverse educational settings, the issue of whether such pedagogies hinder the students’ access to higher education, high stakes tests based on the English language, and job opportunities still abounds. On the one hand, the dialogues about adopting CSP-based teaching methods are assisting teachers, teacher educators, and students in making content comprehensible as they negotiate meaning. On the other hand, the challenges about whether the outside world is open and receptive to the pedagogical practices that resist the standard monolingual ideologies are still vague and debatable.

VIII.  TRANSLANGUAGING As noted, translanguaging is a related form of CSP that enables us to transcend the NEST/NNEST ideological dichotomy. Translanguaging is considered a bi-/multilingual performance that allows bi-/multilingual speakers to use their full linguistic and semiotic repertoire as a form of social practice to construct meaning within a specific context and local situation (Flores and García 2013; García 2009; García and Leiva 2014; Li 2018). A translanguaging stance illustrates and argues how ‘standard’ English based on Inner Circle varieties (e.g., British English and US English) should not be the only means of communication within the classroom. Framing translanguaging as a practical theory of language, Li (2018) contends that translanguaging goes beyond language by incorporating an individual’s life history, membership in cultural communities, and their beliefs and ideologies tied to a context to enact a “coordinated and meaningful performance” (23). Translanguaging compared to similar terms, such as multicompetence (see Cook 2012), is “explicitly concern[ed] with social justice and linguistic inequality” (Poza 2017: 108) and provides a way to counter language and raciolinguistic ideologies evident within and

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outside of the English language classroom. Thus, this socially embedded and semiotically oriented view of language stands in contrast to the static notion of a standard variety of a language described earlier. Relatedly, and by extension, a translanguaging pedagogy positions teachers and students as bi-/multilingual performers that allows them to use their full linguistic and semiotic repertoire as a form of social practice to construct meaning within a specific context and local situation (Flores and García 2013; García 2009; García and Leiva 2014; Li 2018). Poza further elaborates that engaging in translanguaging as a form of pedagogy allows both teacher(s) and students to “challenge and overturn ideologies of language rooted in racist, classist, and imperialist histories of language standardization” (2017: 103). This is particularly done by transforming the classroom context into a translanguaging space, which legitimizes the mixing of multiple linguistic and semiotic repertoires both as a form of instruction and classroom participation (Flores and García 2013). This allows for a more equitable space in which students can fully participate while not being viewed as deficient because they may not have access to or elect not to adopt the prestigious linguistic capital associated with the ‘Standard’ variety of English. Therefore, this pedagogy allows students and teachers to validate their minoritized linguistic resources and practices in the educational space that has traditionally erased and assimilated them to be ‘White’ by (1) confronting raciolinguistic ideologies, and (2) providing access to other linguistic and semiotic resources that are valued alternatives to ‘Standard’ English. Finally, because NNESTs are individuals with multilingual repertoires, a translanguaging pedagogy nicely complements and reinforces a World Englishes-oriented one (Cenoz 2019; Li 2016), thereby enabling NNESTs to not be pinned down by an essentialist understanding of race and language. Yet, as García and Kleyn (2016) have noted, a translanguaging pedagogy is dependent on a teacher’s ideological stance toward the use of multiple linguistic and semiotic repertoires. This entails that teachers, teacher-educators, and researchers understand and acknowledge how powerful language ideologies contort schooling as well as legitimize and delegitimize the speech communities that schools are found within.

IX.  CONCLUSION Rather than maintaining the status quo that has kept NEST and NNESTS separate and unequal on the grounds of race, we need to develop an inclusive and transformative NNEST lens. One way to start, as observed by Motha, is to critically analyze “the English language, its promises, and the practices involved in the teaching industry” (2014: 114). In this vein, we identified several concerns in this chapter: the collusion between a standard English language ideology and a reproduction of the native speaker fallacy which, when extended to teachers of English, exposed a dichotomy between NESTs and NNESTs. And while race has been the primary driver of this divide – with nativeness used to camouflage racial bias – it is only in the last two decades has TESOL begun to investigate how race characterizes and colors the ways teachers are constructed. Building on these key developments, we argued that raciolinguistics affords us the intellectual tools to better understand how race is inextricably linked with language. Looking ahead, we anticipate that developments in the areas of culturally sustaining pedagogy and translanguaging can help us better understand and bridge the NEST/ NNEST dichotomy in a systematic manner. These measures and moves need to be calibrated against a wider backdrop characterized by multilingualism (May 2014), and

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language variation and superdiversity (Creese and Blackledge 2018). Small initial steps such as analyzing and critiquing how racial discourses and ideologies embedded in textbooks (Curdt-Christiansen and Weninger 2015), which sharpen the NEST/NNEST dichotomy, can help foster the necessary critical awareness that is needed in a robust, culturally sensitive and supportive TESOL. These measures need to be embedded within broader efforts to rethink teacher education with a view to develop critical multilingual awareness (Prasad and Lory 2020) among pre- and in-service teachers. However, as Copland et al. (2020) remind us, we also need to be careful and not go overboard in demonizing and stereotyping all NESTs by labeling them as racists. To do so would only accentuate and skew the divide in the reverse direction, and we would end up just trading one form of racism for another. Instead, a good place to start would be by unpacking the structural inequalities that feed and fuel racism that has pervaded school and society. Admittedly, displacing racism within English language teaching is a challenging, long-drawn-out task, one that is further compounded by opposition to replacing deeply entrenched pedagogies by contemporary pedagogical practices such as culturally sustaining pedagogy and translanguaging that resist standard monolingual ideologies. But we need to make a concerted effort to start somewhere.

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Chapter 9

Translingual Englishes and the Psychological Damage of Global English SENDER DOVCHIN, RHONDA OLIVER, AND JAYA DANTAS

I.  INTRODUCTION Australia is a multicultural and multilingual society. Almost half of Australia’s population was either born overseas or has at least one parent born overseas. According to the 2017 census report of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than one-fifth (21 percent) of Australians spoke a language other than English at home. After English, the next most common languages spoken at home were Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese, and Vietnamese. Yet in spite of Australia’s identity as a multilingual society, there is a distinct lack of public understanding and a large gap in academic knowledge on immigrants’ potential for, or early signs of, low social integration, and about the challenges of linguistic, cultural, racial, or religious intolerance that they face. Around one-quarter of young Australians aged above fifteen years, particularly young immigrants, refugees, speakers of Indigenous languages, and nonstandard varieties of English, have experienced some level of social exclusion, such as a lack of housing, limited employment, education, and health opportunities based on their language use (Azpitarte 2013). The inferiority complex that comes with not being able to communicate well further weakens one’s sense of belonging to society, resulting in immigrants becoming depressed, feeling anxious, and having low self-esteem (Dovchin 2019a). To date, language education policy makers in Australia have focused on improving the language competence of English as second language speakers and, generally, have tended to underestimate how their everyday linguistic practices might be linked to troubling issues related to poor mental health and well-being. In other words, the everyday English practices of immigrants in Australia have only been ‘assumed’ rather than systematically investigated. This is a problem because it is almost impossible to explain the status and impact of English and other languages within particular realms of society without understanding its practical use by such speakers. Yet, at the same time, immigrant speakers’ linguistic practices are rapidly evolving due to the impact of globalization and other factors. Therefore, there is a need to investigate their actual usage within contemporary sociolinguistic settings which this study seeks to do. Specifically, it provides a comprehensive account of the linguistic experiences of Mongolian background female

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immigrants in Australia and does so by examining their English language practices in relation to their mental health and well-being. In particular it explores these immigrants’ everyday communicative English practices, and reflects on the implication of these for broader local sociolinguistic ideologies. Such research may open up new spaces and possibilities for the overall language education and mental health context in Australia. It is particularly crucial to carry out this kind of investigation in Australia because there is a dearth of research about the language practices of female immigrants, particularly those from Mongolian backgrounds (Dovchin 2019a). The majority of studies that have examined migrants from Asian backgrounds have only included Chinese (Couchman and Bagnall 2015) and Vietnamese (Nguyen 2005) backgrounds and only a few studies have examined the small, emerging, and recently arrived Mongolian migrant community (Dovchin 2019a). Unlike other Asian groups, their migration did not occur until 1990 when the nation transformed itself from a communist to democratic society. This chapter, therefore, focuses on the sociocultural realities of English practices in the context of Mongolian immigrant women in Australia, a context very much underrepresented in the field of World Englishes (WE) studies.

II.  TRANSLINGUAL ENGLISHES In addition to addressing the gap in the research literature pertaining to female Mongolian background immigrants, this chapter explores the sociolinguistic practices of these women in Australia from the theoretical perspectives of ‘translingual Englishes’ (TE) (Dovchin and Lee 2019), which is, in turn, informed by the concept of “the psychological damages of global English” (Piller 2016: 191). The primary concern of ‘TE’ is the flexible and fluid mobility amid and across semiotic resources, complicating clear linguistic topographies and language categories (Dovchin 2018; Hawkins and Mori 2018). It problematizes the conventional concepts embedded within WE because it ratifies static language boundaries and nation-state categories of English (e.g., Singaporean English and Indian English) and this is insufficient because it does not encompass the dynamic and super diverse communicative practices shaped out of semiotic mobility and fluidity (Canagarajah 2013; Pennycook 2007). Understanding any named languages, including English in terms of the nation-state, underestimates many other emergent and embryonic developments of English (Lee 2017). Thus, the main and underpinning question of TE is to address the following questions: “Whose norm and rule apply when a supposed English speaker starts displaying unconventional and non-standard linguistic vernaculars and creoles?” “How should we describe when an English speaker from the Outer Circle communicates with somebody from the Expanding Circle?” As Tupas and Rubdy (2015: 5) note, “while WE research has challenged the monolithic nature of English in significant ways, it has been critiqued for not going far enough, for reproducing the same normative linguistic framework and thus contributing to an exclusionary paradigm. A major shortcoming that has been pointed out is that the Englishes of the postcolonial world are often described along the lines of monolingual models, by comparing their grammatical structures with those of center Englishes, thus reinforcing centrist views on language while ignoring eccentric, hybrid forms of local Englishes.” The notion of TE addresses this point by moving beyond linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and national boundaries and “considers the language practices of bilinguals not as two autonomous language systems as has been traditionally the case, but as one linguistic

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repertoire” (García and Li 2014: 2). It recognizes that translingual activities are dynamic processes whereby language users take up “multiple linguistic and semiotic resources, including scriptal, digital, and visual resources, as an integrated communication system to mediate complex social and cognitive activities – to act, to know, and to be” (Li and Zhu 2019: 7). This process brings together “different dimensions of language users’ personal histories, experiences, and environments; their attitudes, beliefs and ideologies; and their cognitive and physical capacities into one coordinated and meaningful performance, making it into a lived experience” (Li and Zhu 2019: 7). English, from this point of view, should be understood in terms of the processes of “borrowing, blending, remaking and returning, to processes of alternative cultural production” (Pennycook 2007: 6) in which “cultural forms move, change and are reused to fashion new identities in diverse contexts.” In turn, these processes, according to Hawkins and Mori (2018: 3), mean that “language is shifting and fluid, such that even a named language takes on different forms, as it moves across spaces, time, and usages, and integrates with multiple semiotic resources in various communicative acts and exchanges.” Therefore, the integration or entanglements of language with other semiotic resources becomes a common thread for translingual studies. Despite the advantages of TE, most studies using this methodology have mainly concentrated on ‘creative discourses’ among multiethnic urban youth (Jørgensen et al. 2011), mediated popular culture discourses such as hip-hop and pop music (Alim, Ibrahim, and Pennycook 2008; Dovchin 2017), digital and social media practices (Blommaert 2019), and other artful and entertainment performances (Dovchin 2018), where discussants tend to mostly dwell on creativity, hybridity, and playfulness (Li and Zhu 2019). As Pennycook (2007) describes it, TE users are “always connected with forms of pleasure and desire, and forms of pleasure and desire are dependent on transgression” (2007: 41–2) and intricately intertwined with the “pleasure of doing things differently.” It is not surprising to find that TE users are often described as innovative, playful, and humorous, subverting the conventional language and culture norms in society. They are heavily engaged with unconventional speech styles such as banter, slang, parody, mockery, jokes, puns, and vernacular language use (Sultana, Dovchin, and Pennycook 2015; Li and Zhu 2019). Such a dominant opportunistic tendency has, however, been criticized for extensively celebrating the “recreational exuberance and popular youth culture in the neighborhoods they investigated, usually dwelling more on conviviality than actual or potential violence” (Rampton et al. 2018: 19). As Kubota (2015: 33) asks, “Can all English users regardless of their racial, gender, socioeconomic, and other backgrounds equally transgress linguistic boundaries and engage in hybrid and fluid linguistic practices?” In response, new pluralist approaches toward English have been criticized for overlooking “inequalities that mediate relations between Englishes, English users, and other languages” (Tupas and Rubdy 2015: 7) since they have been “seduced into celebrating [their] victories over English but forgetting the massive inequities sustained and perpetuated by the unbridled dominance of English today” (2). This study seeks to take up this critical challenge by refocusing the heavy celebratory scenes of ‘playful’ and ‘creative’ discourses that have dominated the research on ‘TE’ perspectives by looking at those settings that may be affected by the darker of side TE, in particular speakers’ use of English with the potential consequences of mental and psychological damage. In this way, critical discussions on TE will expand their continuing value through an ethnographic space that is sharply different from the celebratory settings

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of playful linguistic activities and the recreational enthusiasm of mediated cultures that have dominated the literature.

III.  GLOBAL ENGLISH AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DAMAGES As noted above, this chapter seeks to expand the current critical dialogue highlighting the risks and challenges associated with TE speakers’ mental and psychological well-being. Piller (2016: 203) coined the concept of ‘psychological damages of global English’ when she argued against the hegemony that English carries with its “psychological costs for the subordinated, as learning English also means to become alive to one’s marginality in English and to a perpetual falling short of the imagined ideal of ‘perfect’ homogeneous English.” Much of the psychological damage of English is, Piller (2016: 203) adds, “inflicted through practices of linguistic shaming such as representing peripheral speakers as incomprehensible or as ridiculous impostors.” The ideal of ‘perfect’ English in which everyone is conditioned to believe that English fluency holds many promises, creates opportunities, and opens doors can actually lead to adverse psychological issues. In fact, we propose that many English learners live with “the cognitive dissonance that learning English has not opened doors for them” (Piller 2016: 197) because it has “simultaneously closed the door of living a meaningful local life.” Put simply, the psychological consequences of the hegemony of global English include self-marginalization, depression and anxiety, linguistic inferiority, addictive hyper-consumption, self-blame, and alienation: “It is the global ‘system’ of English-related discourses and practices that produces these psychological deformities” (Piller 2016: 197). Compounding this situation, recent studies show that immigrant background people, whose first language is not English, lack awareness and education about mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and suicide, while maintaining a higher prevalence of self-reported suicide attempts than their peers who are deemed ‘native’ speakers of English (Aseltine and Demartino 2004; Rishel and Miller 2017). Some of the most important factors for this psychological damage are the links between depressive symptoms and perceived discrimination, alienation, and disorientation reported by immigrant background young adolescents (Cristini, Scacchi, Perkins, Santinello and Vieno 2011). As Rishel and Miller (2017: 5) note, “ELs [English Learners] who are also immigrants are often uprooted against their will (e.g., parents deciding to relocate or fleeing due to war), leaving behind their friends and extended family, the language (and consequently the ability to communicate), familiar schooling expectations, environment, and culture,” creating a sense of insecurity and vulnerability among them when transplanted into a new sociocultural and academic environment. Language (i.e., not having proficiency in the dominant language of society) is also noted as a significant barrier to access and participation in education, employment, and all activities associated with successful settlement. In particular, disconnection at the discourse level impedes immigrant and refugee participation, especially in educational settings (Baker et al. 2018). The literature also highlights that beyond language, immigrant, refugee, and minority students face cultural and systemic challenges especially when they have not previously engaged in an education system informed by Western epistemological norms. For example, these norms and conventions emphasize independent study, critical

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analysis of appraisal of ideas, and argumentation approaches that can be disorienting for students unfamiliar with such educational imperatives (Joyce et al. 2010). Furthermore, without sufficient navigational information about opportunities, systems, rules and expectations, it can be difficult for immigrants and refugees to make informed decisions resulting in significant culture shock (Joyce et al. 2010; Morrice 2012; Naidoo et al. 2015). This is often exacerbated by other pressures, such as family expectations, and financial stressors that contribute to poor decision-making practices (Morrice 2011; Gately 2014). As Gately (2014) notes, refugees and migrants are consistently faced with problems related to temporary accommodation, poor access to health care, lack of money, and, at times, a lack of clarity about their immigration status. These multiple personal realities of navigating systems and spaces significantly impact mental health and well-being (Earnest et al. 2015). English learners especially may find themselves in a vulnerable position once the familiarity of their home environment is gone and as they struggle to learn a new language or to navigate in new social and school environments where the expectations are not clear, and where individuals or classmates fail to welcome them (Rishel and Miller 2017). These potentially prolonged stressful experiences pose a significant threat to the mental well-being of the individuals involved (Cristini et al. 2011). As Rishel and Miller (2017: 7) caution us, “the struggles of ELs [English Learners] and the systemic exclusion of what they bring to the educational experience, leads them to live a life that parallels other adolescents who are at risk of contemplating or committing suicide, or engaging in other risky behaviors.” For example, as widely reported across the Australian news media, Chinese national and Melbourne university student, twenty-four-year-old Zhikai Liu, ended his life in March 2016 for these reasons. Zhikai Liu exhibited signs of undiagnosed and untreated mental ill-health after moving to Australia to study. He started suffering from severe insomnia and confided to his sister that he had developed suicidal ideation. However, he refused to seek any help for his suspected depression, and eventually fell from the balcony of his apartment. The outcome of the coroner’s report shows that one of the most critical factors that caused Zhikai Liu’s suicide was the linguistic inferiority complexes relating to his English language communication in Australia (Jamieson 2018). It is not only immigrants whose mental health is affected by low levels of English proficiency. When imprisoned in detention centers, the well-being of young Aboriginal juveniles has been observed to severely deteriorate, particularly for those who do not have English as their first language. For example, an Aboriginal Australian teenager, Dylan Voller, who was locked in a detention center in NT revealed at the royal commission investigating the mistreatment of young Aboriginal detainees: “On a number of occasions I have witnessed officers abusing and yelling at Aboriginal men in here and putting them down because they can’t speak English properly and that’s not fair and needs to stop” (The Guardian, December 12, 2016). Understanding the socio-emotional needs of English learners worldwide has been one of the most overlooked themes in the field of critical applied linguistics, and requires urgent inquiry for its implications in helping to identify vulnerable TE speakers who might be at high risk of mental disorder, depression, anxiety, and other suicide-related issues. Therefore, this chapter seeks to examine the connections between TE speakers’ affective responses to their everyday lingua-cultural struggles and the apparent characteristics of mental health disorders and depression observed in this particular context (i.e., female Mongolian immigrants).

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IV.  TRANSLINGUAL ENGLISHES AS A COPING STRATEGY While one focus of this research is on the deleterious impact of being an English learner, the concept of TE is further expanded in this chapter by conceiving of it as a ‘coping strategy’ that immigrants can use. Specifically, TE can also be used as a translingual practice to help cope with mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. TE speakers can use their preferred forms of communication drawing on the combination of multiple layers of diverse linguistic, cultural, and semiotic resources (be it one’s heritage language, English or other forms of genres, voices, mockeries, styles, codes, accents, dialects, modes, etc.). In so doing, these speakers establish translingual space to feel emotionally safe, comfortable, and mentally reassured. TE as a coping strategy is also in line with recent studies that indicate that English speakers with immigrant backgrounds seem to find mental and emotional relief or comfort when they are engaged in translingual practices to cope with their anxiety and stress (Canagarajah 2017; Dovchin 2019a). Wohler and Dantas (2017) provide an example of how female migrants voiced their difficulties in communicating with service providers due to lack of proficiency in English. They feared being judged because of their language and accent and were concerned about not being understood. In some cases, cultural specific issues or daily emotional stressors related to acculturation could also not be clearly articulated in English. When they, however, communicate informally and within friendship groups, they seem to incorporate their preferred forms of communication to resist dominant linguistic norms and standards in the dominant culture. Canagarajah (2017) similarly shows how Zimbabwean nurses in the hospitals of the United Kingdom tend to seek comfort and emotional affinity with each other engaging through in-group communication. When these nurses get together, they adopt their preferred forms of communication – translanguaging in and out of the home and host languages without feeling the authoritative external pressure of using monolingual English language. Establishing in-group translingual space is thus deemed as free of surveillance – a ‘safe house’ for these Zimbabwean nurses as they seek each other out for consolation and a comfortable space to interact. Because they were able to find relief by and among themselves, they are eventually more likely to return to work more efficiently (Canagarajah 2017: 30). Some African background female immigrants in Canada have claimed that they have been the target of systemic use of accent discrimination (Creese and Kambere 2003). They indicate that when they speak English, their ‘African English’ accents create the stereotype ‘African’ and ‘Black,’ meaning, people with low English-language skills. To counter this, these African women use a sort of coping strategy to preserve their vernacular speech and African accents, while seeking to assert their right to pronounce words as they see fit. They also argue for equal validation as both ‘African’ and ‘Canadian.’ By asserting their African accents through translanguaging, they celebrate their African identities and their struggles for respect and dignity for their African heritage (Creese and Kambere 2003: 569). Overall, adopting a translingual strategy and integrating the linguistic and paralinguistic resources into one’s preferred forms of communication, while resisting the dominant language norms and policies, seem to create the convenient space for immigrants to bond with each other, maintain strong relationships, as they create group solidarity around their shared daily struggles and make their daily experiences more harmonious and bearable.

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V.  DISCURSIVE SHADOWING IN LINGUISTIC (N)ETHNOGRAPHY The current study adopts a mixed research method, specifically linguistic ethnography (LE) (Copland and Creese 2015) (face-to-face ethnography), combined with netnography (Varis 2016) (online ethnography), and discursive shadowing (Dewilde and Creese 2016) – something that we call ‘linguistic (n)ethnography.’ Recent studies of ‘trans-’ concepts (e.g., translanguaging) have adopted LE as the main methodological framework because it reveals more precise knowledge about the translingual realities of language users (Maybin and Tusting 2011). In particular, LE provides a qualitative mechanism for interrogating ethnographically and in-context language users’ everyday linguistic practices. It also allows for the fine-grained exploration of sociocultural experiences of diverse communities. LE is, thereby, specifically categorized by the adoption of both ‘linguistic’ and ‘ethnographic’ perspectives, where investigators pay attention to one’s linguistic practices through ethnography (Copland and Creese 2015). As indicated, our approach of linguistic (n)ethnography involves ‘discursive shadowing’ (Dewilde and Creese 2016: 329) which is “the constant and extended company the researcher and key participant keep with one another in the field, shadowing in a linguistic ethnographic approach includes the ubiquitous audio-recording of interactions, which provides opportunities to collect interactional data as they circulate across speech events . . . .” It allows for the formation of mutual partnerships to which the researcher and the critical participant are reciprocally coinvested, allowing the researcher to reflect on his/her own experience consciously and strategically to engage with the participants in a conversation. Their continuous co-presence together provides sustained, engaged, and reflexive discussions between researcher and key participant through co-constructing their ongoing interactions while on the move (Dewilde and Creese 2016). Using discursive shadowing, fifty immigrant background research participants with various lingua-cultural backgrounds living in Western Australia were shadowed from July 2018 until November 2019 in Perth, Western Australia. In this particular chapter, however, the data derived from a specific focus group – eleven Mongolian background female immigrants living in Australia – is presented. These eleven women have been intensively shadowed in both online/offline contexts as we engaged interactively in multiple venues (e.g., social events, cafes, festivals, gatherings, supermarkets, grocery shopping, and night outs). As a result, we have become quite familiar with these women’s daily linguistic behaviors, repertories, histories, and backgrounds. As ethnographers, we played multiple roles: observer, researcher, social activist, and friend. As one of the researchers shared a similar ethnic and linguistic background with these women (Mongolian), some of these different roles were either mutually exclusive or supplemented with each other at other times. Although engaging in these multiple roles was challenging, it allowed us to explore in-depth the participants’ linguistic and cultural practices in relation to their emotional, mental, and psychological well-being. A majority of interactions were audio-recorded, but some interactions were only recorded as written notes because of the request of the research participants who did not want to be audio-recorded. The participants’ direct voices and first-person perspectives were prioritized for analysis. The participants were also interviewed regarding the challenges and opportunities they experienced living in Australia, the reasons for their linguistic choices and practices, and how these aspects linked to their emotional and mental well-being.

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During the data collection, we found that LE on its own was inadequate to thoroughly investigate the participants’ daily linguistic realities. We discovered that it was equally important to also examine their online language practices since, as Stæhr (2015: 44) concludes, spoken and written (online/offline) discursive practices are part of a similar process “because everyday language use on Facebook indicates that the normative orientations and value ascriptions to particular language forms correspond to those found in speech.” This study, thus, expands the existing methodological framework of LE by integrating ‘netnography’ (‘digital ethnography’– a qualitative research method explicitly devised to investigate the multiple interactions and texts across virtual communities, employing a natural and unobtrusive manner) (Varis 2016; Dovchin 2015) into the research approach. We achieved this by establishing a Facebook friendship platform with these women as we were also added to their Facebook messenger chat group. This online friendship platform has further created a favorable environment for observing their online interactions, which were equally important as their offline communications. In this way we were able to develop a written account of our fieldwork that included both the oral language practices and textual accounts of the participants. The data were not only analyzed from the perspective of what we observed of the participants’ linguistic practices, but also what they told us (content) and how they told us (linguistic analysis of translingual practice). This is significant because it offers first hand insights on how translingual practices occur both in terms of their structure and content (Dovchin 2019a). The questions asked during the ethnography were formulated in order to understand what their everyday English practices looked like, documenting which events were critical to these, including a special focus on well-being issues such as those that led to depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. This is illustrated below with examples from the research data.

VI.  DATA PRESENTATIONS The conversation in Extract 1 is retrieved from interactions between the researcher and the informant, Bolor (pseudonym), where they discuss what language they should use for the research interview. Extract 1 Language guide: English – italics; Mongolian – normal font Interview

Translation

1. Bolor: So, should I speak English or Mongolian?

Bolor: Original text

2. Researcher: Up to you, really!

Researcher: Original text

3. Bolor: OK, Angliaar interview ugch uzeegui. I’ll do my best. gehdee er ni bol it feels good not having to speak English because you’re Mongolian too!

Bolor: OK, I have never given an interview in English. I’ll do my best. But, generally speaking, it feels good not having to speak English because you’re Mongolian too!

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4. Researcher: Yeah!

Researcher: Original text

5. Bolor: Kind of relief! Aimar anxious boldiishdee zarimdaa [referring to speaking English with locals]

Bolor: Kind of relief! I get horribly anxious sometimes [referring to speaking English with locals]

It is evident that Bolor finds it challenging to communicate in English in Australia, mostly because she always has to conform to the Australian English norms, to uphold the standard Australian English requirements – speaking, communicating, and writing fluently in English, in both institutional and noninstitutional settings, and on a daily basis. During the shadowing, it became clear that she was quite anxious and stressed by the sudden linguistic change despite her very first exposure to English occurring when she was in Mongolia. Her anxiety in speaking English, is apparent in line 5 where she explains, “Aimar anxious boldiishdee zarimdaa” [“[I] get super anxious sometimes when I [speak English with locals]”; and in line 3, “gehdee er ni bol it feels good not having to speak English because you’re Mongolian too!” [“But, generally speaking, it feels good not having to speak English because you’re Mongolian too!”]. This interpretation of her anxiety is further supported by the following comment, “Of course, when you come to a new country, you will have cultural shock. Everything will be different and new. But one of the things that really bothered me was the ‘linguistic shock’ – the communication breakdown. I thought my English was good enough to communicate because I studied English so many years when I was in Mongolia. As soon as I landed in Australia, my world went upside down. I could not make sense what the locals were saying. I was mocked for my accent. I started getting self-conscious and doubting myself. My self-esteem went from ‘hero to zero.’ I started getting extremely anxious and stressed when I had to speak English. I started suffering from bulimia. I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I was completely isolated and lonely” (Interview, June 1, 2019, Perth, Australia; translation from Mongolian into English by the researcher). These comments highlight how the use of ‘non-standard English’ in the dominant English-speaking society has become one of the leading causes for the psychological issues she experiences, such as an eating disorder, anxiety, and stress (of course, combined with other significant problems such as having difficulty to find jobs, loneliness/isolation, giving birth, etc.). In order to overcome her ‘linguistic shock,’ Bolor started developing specific coping strategies to battle her anxiety and to nurture her mental well-being. One of these coping strategies was to work on her English, “I started watching a lot of Australian TV programs, listening to radios, and I would try to imitate how they speak English. I tried to only mingle with local Australians and speak only English, avoiding my fellow Mongolians. But soon after, I have realized that I was ready to have a mental breakdown” (Bolor, Interview, June 1, 2019, Perth, Australia). Despite her determination to speak English, even during the initial interview (Extract 1) “OK, Angliaar interview ugch uzeegui. I’ll do my best.” [“OK, I have never done an interview in English. I’ll do my best”] (line 1), she still struggled psychologically. Perhaps as a consequence of this, her communicative repertoire demonstrates TE practices, in which she integrates Mongolian into her interactions, for example “gehdee er ni bol [but, generally speaking] it feels good not having to speak English because you’re Mongolian too!” (line 3). The data showed signs of her increasing confidence and assurance when she started adopting a translingual strategy. She became more vocal and started opening up more than before. Note that throughout the rest of the conversation, the evidence of ‘TE’ – the combination of the multiple transgressive layers of English

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and Mongolian linguistic resources – becomes the main lingua franca: There are multiple examples of Anglicized Mongolian phrases and expressions, in which Bolor integrates the examples of English roots within the Mongolian phonetic system: “interview ugch uzeegui” [“never done interview”] (line 1), the incorporation of the English root ‘interview’ within the Mongolian phrase, “ugch uzeegui” [“never done”]; and “aimar anxious boldiishdee” [“becomes awfully anxious”] (line 5), the integration of the English word, ‘anxious’ within the Mongolian phrase, “aimar . . . boldiishdee” [“becomes . . . awfully”]. Note also that she tends to pronounce English expressions with a heavy Mongolian accent. Her initial strong determination of speaking English, but the eventual transition into ‘TE,’ illustrates one of the coping strategies she uses to overcome her anxiety and stress – she mentions several times how “it feels good” (line 3), and how she feels “a kind of relief” (line 5) about not having to speak English constantly. Bolor embraces the opportunity to speak Mongolian with the researcher, who is also Mongolian, while transitioning into the translingual practice. These observations are further supported by comments Bolor makes during her interview, “I started craving to meet the Mongolian people. I missed my country. I felt like I forgot who I was. Once I started hanging out with some Mongolians in Perth, I started feeling better. We didn’t judge each other. We helped each other. My stress level would decrease. I would get so much positive energy. I would generally feel happy and content” (Interview, June 1, 2019, Perth, Australia). Similar accounts were also offered by other Mongolian women in this study. Saruul explains that she feels much better and relieved when she hangs out with her fellow Mongolians and talks to them because their bond is based on their shared daily struggles and problems. As Saruul suggests, “I started going to every event held by Mongolians [when she first arrived in Australia]. Like Mongolian festivals and social meetings. We would hang out, share our problems and struggles. I could speak Mongolian to them as if I was in Mongolia without any self-consciousness. I felt like I was meeting with my family in Mongolia. We used to enjoy speaking Mongolian because I really missed my country. We even use Russian [when we are together] because Russian is also like a native language for many Mongolians” (Interview, September 7, 2018, Perth, Australia). Similar to Forbes-Mewett and Sawyer’s (2016) study, in these situations TE also served as a coping mechanism for some of the research participants when interacting with other newly arrived immigrants of multiethnic backgrounds, such as international students they came across. As Saruul explains, “I often used to bond (I still do) really well with other immigrant background people. I have a good Indian friend and we seem to click really well. We understand each other. We never judge each other’s English. Our problems are the same. I never judge her Indian accent while some Australians would really mock her Indian accent. So, we hung out very often” (Interview, September 7, 2018, Perth, Australia). Such sentiments were also echoed by Urtaa, who describes how she would hang out with students from Russia, Indonesia, China, and so on. “We speak English to each other, but we would also often use a lot of Russian, Chinese and so on for all different reasons. Because I knew how to speak Russian, I could speak Russian to my Russian friend. I made more international friends in Australia than locals. Because locals would simply ignore us. They were so arrogant. Hanging out with international students helped me to improve my English and to learn about different cultures and languages. We would talk about our essays and assignments and trying to console each other. We felt comfortable and safe being at each other’s company” (Dovchin 2019a: 10–11). Overall, these Mongolian women’s linguistic and communicative coping strategies is to establish in-group translingual communicative space that is deemed as free of surveillance.

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As with Canagarajah (2017), these spaces offered ‘safe houses,’ where these Mongolian women can seek each other out for consolation, emotional affinity, and spaces that offer relief. They strategically adopt the translingual strategy, which is not necessarily perceived as desirable by the dominant society, within their in-group interactions, since they are exclusive to external audiences, strengthening the sense of ownership of the language and distancing it from outsiders. Because they were able to find escape from the alienation they perceived, by and among themselves, they eventually would feel ‘happier,’ ‘better,’ and more ‘positive’ about life. Extract 2 It has been noted in recent studies that social media is one of the most important platforms for people to be involved in TE (Dovchin 2015, 2019b) because it offers opportunities for multiple linguistic and semiotic resources to be used, including multimodal images, videos, links, emojis, and other genres (Li and Zhu 2019). The example in Extract 2 is retrieved from the social media account of one of our research participants, Hulan (pseudonym), during our netnographic observation. # 1.

2.

Facebook posts

Translation

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3. X: What does it mean? Hulan: Haha ask your brother

4. TUG​.​mn Psychologist J. Uilst: If the husband dedicates 20 minutes per day to his postpartum wife, she will not be depressed.

Hulan has been living in Western Australia for almost a decade since migrating to Australia from Mongolia. During her time in Australia, her depression has worsened. Currently she suffers from severe mental health issues, including experiencing hallucinations. She tried to self-harm once, and, as a result, was admitted to a mental health institution. According to Hulan, her clinical depression was exacerbated by not being able to communicate efficiently with psychologists and medical practitioners because she could not express herself fully in English. As Hulan explains: My depression was mild when I first migrated to Australia due to reasons such as separation, isolation, missing my family, my country, and so on. However, it got worse

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eventually, and I couldn’t receive enough help to overcome my depression. This is because of my English. My English is pretty good. I have no problems with my English. But English is English. Obviously, I wasn’t able to express myself fully in English because it is not my native language. When I go to psychologists and hospital, it is really hard express myself freely and fully in English because they don’t speak Mongolian. There are so many communication barriers and the psychologists’ sessions that I went to were completely useless. Many therapists expected me to speak fluent English, and it made me feel worse. I knew exactly what I wanted to say in Mongolian, but I just could not express in English. I started doubting myself and started blaming myself for being depressed and not even being able to communicate efficiently. They always asked me to try to put into words what I think or feel. I felt extreme pressure and no connection. (Interview, June 15, 2019, Perth, Australia; translation from Mongolian into English by the researcher) Clearly it is important that depression sufferers are able to express themselves and have meaningful conversations with their therapists. For Hulan, unfortunately, her therapy did not work well due to communication problems. Because the psychologists, therapists, and medical practitioners expected Hulan to explain her condition fully in English, Hulan became increasingly nervous and anxious about getting the help she needed. This example demonstrates some of the psychological damages that the hegemony of English might have caused Hulan, with self-marginalization and self-blame perpetrating Hulan’s overall mental health well-being. The pressure of explaining her condition fluently and fully in English to medical staff, and the expectation of speaking English proficiently worsened her overall mental condition. However, Hulan has started developing a coping strategy to deal with her mental health issues: She does this by sharing and interacting her concerns with others, especially when she is online. As Hulan explains: I started feeling better when I shared my depression with others. Facebook is the main platform because I can directly communicate with other people. I don’t have to worry about my English. I think it helps me share things with someone who actually cares and listens and doesn’t tell me what to say or think. And that helps me think about what and how I’m feeling, too. And for some reason, that’s helping me to feel better. (Interview, June 15, 2019, Perth, Australia; translation from Mongolian into English by the researcher) This statement aligns with Salzmann-Erikson and Hiçdurmaz’s (2017) point that social media interactions may serve as “the occurrence of therapeutic group factors, such as altruism, interpersonal learning, and guidance” (290) for depression sufferers because social media may serve as an alternative way to reveal their stigmatized stories, address their conditions and problems, receive comfort and solace from other people, fight against stigma, and raise public awareness about their conditions. This point is also evident in terms of daily sociolinguistic experiences of gay Mongolian men and their use of TE in relation to social media space (Dovchin 2019b, 2020). Because of their common encounters with daily stigmatization and ostracism, many gay Mongolian men often seem to battle with depression and anxiety. They also search for an alternative space to enact their sexuality, sexual orientation, desire, and identification. Thanks to Facebook and the TE practices, these gay men choose to liberally construct and enact their identities by networking, interacting, and peer bonding (Dovchin, Pennycook and Sultana, 2017).

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So like Hulan, they use Facebook to help cope in their daily lives through multiple communication opportunities that it offers, and the interactive features of Facebookbased online platforms. Thus, the study demonstrates the TE practices of Hulan, who adopts it as her primary lingua franca when online – which is also used in combination with multimodal resources in Extract 2, such as the image of a heart (FB post 1), the usage of emojis – heart kisses and champagne toast by Hulan’s Facebook friends in response to her wall post (FB post 1), the links of the video released by Think Mental Health WA (FB post 2), and the interview with a Mongolian psychologist on depression (FB post 4). Note also that both Hulan and her Facebook friends’ messages (FB posts 1 to 4) are predominantly conveyed through TE resources embedded within the Facebook English default system (i.e., ‘share,’ ‘like,’ ‘comment,’ ‘see translation,’ etc.). In FB post 1, in response to Hulan’s Facebook post, her Facebook friends send the ‘love’ back to Hulan with the emoji of heart kisses to convey the message that Hulan is also ‘not alone’ in this and that she can beat this condition through posting the emoji of champagne toasts. In FB post 3, Hulan’s Facebook friend responds to Hulan’s wall post on depression by using Kazakh, “Недитқудай” [“What does it mean?”]. The integration of Kazakh demonstrates the shared ethnic background of these two as Kazakh-Mongolians – an ethnic minority bilingual group in Mongolia, who can speak both Kazakh and Mongolian. This question is followed by Hulan’s response in Roman Mongolian, “haha duugeesee asuu” [“haha ask your brother”], which also serves to signal Hulan’s Mongolian and Kazakh bilingual skill. The prevalence of Roman over Cyrillic can be found elsewhere from text messaging to other forms of exchanges mediated by new technologies and, in fact, is a common online orthographic practice for many Mongolians. It seems to be a conscious choice insofar as computers in Australia require Roman input; and if Cyrillic is to be used, then the user must use other software or application before entering text. In FB post 4, Hulan shares the video of a Mongolian psychologist advising women who are suffering from postnatal depression. This video is primarily spoken in Mongolian, yet formulated by the Facebook English linguistic default system such as ‘like page,’ ‘shared a video,’ ‘see translation,’ and so on. Overall, the content of Hulan’s Facebook posts is strongly connected to her mental health issues, with links, videos, and inspiring messages for dealing with the depression abundantly provided. For instance, in FB post 1, Hulan publishes a message embedded within a heart to send love to people who quietly suffer from depression. In so doing, Hulan seeks to convey her story and experience, to support others with similar conditions, and to address the message that “you are not alone.” According to Salzmann-Erikson and Hiçdurmaz (2017: 288), the message of “you are not alone” in similar online contexts can be considered as one of emerging therapeutic factors – ‘universality’ – which enables other people with similar conditions to realize that they are not the only ones having this experience and that there are people who are living with similar issues. In FB post 2, Hulan shares the video of mental health organization, Think Mental Health, titled ‘Helping others with mental health issues,’ which shows the importance of why we should care about the people who suffer from depression. By sharing this video, Hulan seeks to raise awareness among her Facebook friends about mental health issues and ‘install hope’ for depression sufferers. In FB post 3, Hulan shares another inspiring message for those who suffer from depression as she reminds these people that their situation will get better. “I know you’re sad, so I won’t tell you to have a good day. Instead, I advise you to simply have a day. Stay alive, feed yourself well, wear comfortable clothes, and don’t give up on

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yourself just yet. It’ll get better. Until then, have a day.” In FB post 4, Hulan shares a video of a Mongolian psychologist providing advice to women who are suffering from postnatal depression. The content of the video conveys a sense to the audience that “there is a hope to women who are suffering from postnatal depression” and “it is not your fault that you are depressed.” It can be seen how, by taking advantage of social media, Hulan’s translingual Facebook posts and her interactions with her Facebook friends have become one of her main coping strategies to battle her depression. Her communication has been transformed from a mere Facebook page into a remedial group, one that offers her and others positive ‘therapeutic’ suggestions around such ideas as universality, instillation of hope, catharsis, self-understanding, and recognition of depression, and existential factors as outlined by Yalom and Leszcz (2005). Within this online context, Hulan and her ‘friends’ are able to console each other, learn from each other, and provide guidance and empathy about depression and other mental health issues.

VII.  CONCLUSION This chapter provides a fine-grained account of how linguistic practices and the hegemony of global English, in particular, can impact the mental health and well-being of immigrants, whose first language is not English. This was achieved by linking the concept of ‘psychological damages and global English’ with instances of TE usage of these immigrant speakers through online (cf. Extract 2) and offline (cf. Extract 1) TE analyses as a way of understanding multiple different everyday linguistic strategies employed by minority language speakers who often face mental health issues such as depression and anxiety tied to a large degree by how they speak English. Drawing on data examples retrieved from the Mongolian immigrant women living in Australia, we argue that the use of ‘TE’ in this context cannot be understood as a discrete entity, detached and delinked from the mental health issues of these language users. Instead, we suggest that an examination of ‘TE’ in tandem with mental health issues would provide a more holistic understanding of the way they are intricately linked, with each complementing an understanding of the other, not only in terms of everyday linguistic practices, but also sociolinguistic realities and the struggles that immigrants encounter. We provided examples of how ‘TE’ are not only their preferred form of communication, but also a coping strategy which provides speakers with an opportunity to experience relief and comfort especially as they deal with their depression, anxiety, and stress. By using TE when they interact informally with a friend or group of friends, they resist dominant linguistic norms and standards of the dominant culture. They do this by drawing on a combination of multiple diverse linguistic, cultural, paralinguistic, and semiotic resources (e.g., Anglicized Mongolian, Mongolianized English, emojis, accents, links, videos, and images), to establish a translingual in-group that creates solidarity, and a feeling of being safe and comfortable. TE also helps them escape from the authoritative external pressure of using only the dominant language in a standard form, which helps them overcome their feelings of inadequacy in formal (normative) English contexts. As such, translingual practices help them to cope with their depression and anxiety. This chapter also reveals other complex but common issues involving the sociolinguistic circumstances of female Mongolian immigrants in Australia. They feel they are under continuous pressure to speak, think, write, and communicate through Standard English in

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both institutional and noninstitutional settings in Australia. This everyday sociolinguistic burden is often met by both implicit and explicit types of assumptions, stereotypes, and discrimination in society. However, we do need more qualitative studies to examine the connections between TE speakers’ affective responses to their everyday lingua-cultural struggles and the apparent characteristics of mental health disorders. In fact, we would go so far as to claim that understanding the socio-emotional and psychological needs of English learners worldwide requires urgent inquiry, as it may help us understand the very many vulnerable TE speakers who are at high risk of mental health issues. Although mental health disorders are common across cultures, medical practitioners and clinicians need to be aware of culturally and linguistically embedded issues that may underlie such problems. The current study highlights, in particular, the experiences of migrant Mongolian women, thus providing a gendered perspective that captures a more holistic understanding of the complex determinants of mental health. However, this does mean that researchers need to expand their considerations of gender, and also the different stages of acculturation achieved when investigating the relationship of TE and mental health. Data comparison would assist in capturing trends and pinpointing patterns (Wohler and Dantas 2016). We conclude this chapter by advocating linguistically and culturally responsive attitudes toward immigrants, including their identity, language, lifelong experience, acculturation, socioeconomic status, gender, power, privilege, social status, and personality (Werkmeister-Rozas and Klein 2009). As such we propose that policy makers and practitioners consider these factors as they design and implement what kind of pedagogical approaches to use with such cohorts. This may lead to improvements in an ongoing relationship between clients and service providers creating meaningful and respectful responses to immigrant needs within the context of their own linguistic and cultural background.

REFERENCES Alim, H. S., A. Ibrahim and A. Pennycook (2008), Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language, New York: Routledge. Aseltine, R. and R. Demartino (2004), ‘An Outcome Evaluation of the SOS Suicide Prevention Program’, American Journal of Public Health, 94 (3): 446–51. Azpitarte, F. (2013), Social Exclusion Monitor Bulletin. Available online: http:​/​/lib​​rary.​​bsl​.o​​rg​.au​​ /jspu​​i​/han​​​dle​/1​​/6056​ (accessed 20 February 2017). Baker, S., E. Irwin, J. Dantas, M. Taiwo, S. Gower and S. Singh (2018), ‘Methodological Diversity as an Asset for Transition-Focused Higher Education Research with Students from Refugee Backgrounds’, British Educational Research Journal, 7 (1): 33–5. Blommaert, J. (2019), ‘Formatting Online Actions:# justsaying on Twitter, International Journal of Multilingualism’, doi​.org​/10​.1080​/14790718​.2019​.​1575832 Canagarajah, S. (2013), Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations, Oxon: Routledge. Canagarajah, S. (2017), Translingual Practices and Neoliberal Policies: Attitudes and Strategies of African Skilled Migrants in Anglophone Workplaces, Cham: Springer. Copland, F. and A. Creese (2015), Linguistic Ethnography: Collecting, Analysing and Presenting Data, London: Sage. Couchman, S. and K. Bagnall (2015), ‘Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance’, in S. Couchman and K. Bagnall (eds), Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance, Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill.

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Li, W. and H. Zhu (2019), ‘Tranßcripting: Playful Subversion with Chinese Characters’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 16 (2): 145–61. Maybin, J. and K. Tusting (2011), ‘Linguistic Ethnography’, in J. Simpson (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics, 515–28, New York: Routledge. Morrice, L. (2011), Being a Refugee: Learning and Identity: A Longitudinal Study of Refugees in the UK, Stoke-on-Trent, UK: Trentham Books. Morrice, L. (2012), ‘Learning and Refugees: Recognizing the Darker Side of Transformative Learning’, Adult Education Quarterly, 63 (3): 251–71. Naidoo, L., J. Wilkinson, K. Langat, M. Adoniou, R. Cuneen and D. Bolger (2015), Case Study Report: Supporting School-University Pathways for Refugee Students’ Access and Participation in Tertiary Education, Penrith: University of Western Sydney. Nguyen, N. H. C. (2005), Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women’s Narratives, Altona, VIC: Common Ground. Pennycook, A. (2007), Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, London: Routledge. Piller, I. (2016), Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Rampton, B., C. Charalambous and P. Charalambous (2018), ‘Crossing of a Different Kind’, Working Papers in Urban Language & Literacies, 2–23. Rishel, T. and P. Miller (2017), ‘English Learners and the Risks of Suicide’, Journal of Thought, 51 (3/4): 3–73. Salzmann-Erikson, M. and D. Hiçdurmaz (2017), ‘Use of Social Media among Individuals Who Suffer from Post-traumatic Stress: A Qualitative Analysis of Narratives’, Qualitative Health Research, 27 (2): 285–94. Stæhr, A. (2015), ‘Reflexivity in Facebook Interaction – Enregisterment across Written and Spoken Language Practices’, Discourse, Context & Media, 8: 30–45. Sultana, S., S. Dovchin and A. Pennycook (2015), ‘Transglossic Language Practices of Young Adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia’, International Journal of Multilingualism, 12 (1): 93–108. Tupas, R. and R. Rubdy (2015), ‘Introduction: From World Englishes to Unequal Englishes’, in R. Tupas (ed.), Unequal Englishes: The Politics of Englishes, 1–21, Palgrave: Macmillan. Varis, P. (2016), ‘Digital Ethnography’, in A. Georgakopoulou and T. Spilioti (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication, 55–68, New York: Routledge. Werkmeister-Rozas, L. and W. C. Klein (2009), ‘Cultural Responsiveness in Long-term-care Case Management: Moving Beyond Competence’, Journal of Case Management, 10 (1): 2. Wohler, Y. and J. A. Dantas (2017), ‘Barriers Accessing Mental Health Services among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) Immigrant Women in Australia: Policy Implications’, Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 19 (3): 697–701. Yalom, I. D. and M. Leszcz (2005), Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, 5th edn, New York: Basic Books.

Chapter 10

Ideological Plurality English in Policy and Practice in India USREE BHATTACHARYA AND AJIT K. MOHANTY

I.  INTRODUCTION With more than 1.3 billion people speaking in many different tongues entwined within socioculturally and politically charged hierarchies, “[l]anguage is the site where, very often, social, cultural, and political battles are fought in India” (Ramakrishnan 2017: 57). The language with the highest stakes, from a socioeconomic, educational, and cultural perspective, is one that arrived on Indian shores via the British colonizers: English. In this chapter, we use the theoretical framework of language ideology (Irvine and Gal 2000), or commonsense ways of constructing languages, to offer a range of perspectives about English within the scholarship on Indian language policy and practice. Specifically, we examine the relevant literature by focusing on ideological plurality, which we construct as multiplex and heterogenous beliefs that characterize notions about languages. In addition to articulating how the story of English in India is witness to contesting and varied narratives, we outline how certain types of ideologies are marginalized within these tellings. English maintains supremacy in the Indian context because of its near-exclusive alignment with conduits to socioeconomic and educational power. Nevertheless – or perhaps this is precisely why – the spread of English remains limited. There is a wide range of estimates on the circulation of English, partly because it is not clear what it means to “speak” or “know” English. The National Knowledge Commission (2000), for example, declared that 1 percent of Indians use English as a second language. Crystal (2003) estimated the same at 20 percent. Hohenthal (2003) pegged the total number of English speakers at 4 percent of the population, while Mishra (2000) claimed it was closer to 5 percent. Mohanty (2006) approximated that less than 2 percent of Indians “knew” English. Sonalde and Vanneman (2005), meanwhile, found that 4 percent of Indians could speak English fluently, and that 16 percent could speak it a little. Ultimately, the only real consensus is that it is spoken by an elite minority: a significant proportion of the population has little or no access to it, even as it functions as the most powerful channel for wielding socioeconomic, educational, and political might in the second most populous country in the world. Despite its role within the language hierarchy, English is not an official language of India. According to Article 343(1) of the Constitution of India, “The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script.” Considering the difficulties in immediate post-independence switch over to Hindi as the sole official

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language, the Constitution in Article 342(2) provided for English “to be used for all official purposes of the Union” in addition to Hindi for a period of fifteen years (i.e., until 25 January, 1965). However, later due to (primarily) South Indian resistance to Hindi, this time limitation was lifted by a Constitutional amendment and, as such, English continues by default to be used as an additional official language. English is also not included in Schedule VIII of the Constitution, which lists twenty-two languages (including Hindi) as “Official Languages” for communication between the states and the Union (Articles 344[1] and 351). In a way, therefore, the Constitution of India reflects the national ideological ambivalence in respect of English. India is renowned for its complex, dynamic, and rich linguistic context. The 2011 Census of India obtained 19,569 mother tongue (MT) declarations which were rationalized to 1,369 MTs after linguistic scrutiny. In addition, 1,474 MT declarations each with less than 10,000 speakers were clubbed under a single “other MT” category. The 1,369 listed MTs were further grouped into 121 languages (broad categories) under each of which several MTs were listed. It must be noted that clubbing of MTs into broad categories is arbitrary, often political and contested. This leads to gross underestimation of India’s linguistic diversity. The recent People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) (Devy 2014) has identified 780 languages (http​:/​/ww​​w​.peo​​plesl​​ingui​​stics​​ur​vey​​.org)​. A large number of languages are used in different domains of activities in Indian society – registered newspapers in 123 languages, All India Radio News service broadcasts in ninety languages and regional news units in seventy-five languages and films produced in thirty-five languages (Mohanty 2019). In this chapter, we employ the theoretical lens of language ideology (Irvine and Gal 2000), or commonsense perceptions about languages, to explore a range of perspectives about English as they are located specifically within the scholarship and Indian linguistic policy and practice. Within this formulation, our work centers on the notion of ideological plurality, as noted previously. We begin by examining ideologies rooted in the oppressive experience and memory of British colonization. Then, we elucidate emancipatory ideologies about English reflected in its deification by the Dalit community (the “oppressed” including the lower castes, earlier known as “untouchable”; the term is also used to include disadvantaged Indigenous Tribal communities). Furthermore, we examine the powerful push for English-medium schooling across different social classes, examining how aspirational ideologies surface in language education and policy. We then turn to the Angrezi Hatoa Andolan (‘Remove English’ Agitations) as well as the multiple efforts to de-Anglicize place names in India. Further, we situate notions about English within the debates about its nativity or foreignness, an enduring topic of discussion in the relevant scholarly literature. Our analysis offers a selective but important glimpse into English ideologies in India from a language policy and practice perspective. We show that like the story of its linguistic landscape, the narrative of language ideologies about English in India is one of complexity and plurality. Our final contribution is to articulate how ideological resistances to English continue to be marginalized within the larger imagination of its role, leading to continued perpetuation of hegemonic voices in the discourse on English.

II.  THEORETICAL FRAMING The theoretical lens grounding our study is that of language ideology, a concept that circulates across multiple disciplines and fields (Ajsic and McGroarty 2015; Vessey 2015).

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What are language ideologies? A classic definition proposed by Silverstein (1979: 193) was that these are “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use.” Language ideologies have also variously been constructed as “orientations” (e.g., Soler and Vihman 2018), “positionings” (e.g., Wortham 2001), or “attitudes” (e.g., Garrett 2007) toward language (see also Woolard and Schieffelin 1994), among others. Piller (2015: 4) lays out some key ideas regarding language ideologies: [these] are . . . best understood as beliefs, feelings, and conceptions about language that are socially shared and relate language and society in a dialectical fashion: Language ideologies undergird language use, which in turn shapes language ideologies; and, together, they serve social ends, in other words the purpose of language ideologies is not really linguistic but social. Like anything social, language ideologies are interested, multiple, and contested. Language ideologies are thus fundamentally socially situated (Woolard 1994), helping “mediate social identity” (Wortham 2001: 8). Importantly, they are heavily influenced by and respond to dominant social forces, and thus beholden to specific groups over others (Piller 2015). According to Vessey (2015), they stabilize over time, eventually appearing as common sense, circulating in explicit or implicit ways (Woolard 1998). They thus become discursively naturalized in everyday contexts. They are critical in multiple ways as they “enact links of language to group and personal identity, to aesthetics, to morality, and to epistemology” (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994: 56). Therefore, they correspond to core social and cultural values. Over time, languages and their speakers become positioned in distinct ways, leading to the circulation of particular kinds of identities, becoming strongly affiliated with them (Wortham 2001). This is not, of course, to characterize them as monolithic; they are fluid and dynamic (Piller 2015). Language ideologies are thus implicated in different languages, institutions, policies, and actors in society, impacting issues of significance such as policy and educational practice (Delarue and De Caluwe 2015; Soler and Vihman 2018). Importantly, ideology as a concept keys into issues of power, authority, and control as they are implicated in social space (Eagleton 2007; Woolard 1998). Scholars using the language ideological framework therefore attend closely to the implication of power within language beliefs (Woolard and Schieffelin 1994). The lens of language ideology, in fact, offers critical insight into how power is processed via “ideological reflection and refraction” (Mertz 1998: 151). Since language ideologies “participate in the semiotic processes through which ideas become naturalized, essentialized, universalized, or commonsensical, ideas about language are implicated in the process by which any cultural ideas gain the discursive authority to become dominant” (Gal 1998: 322). Taken together, these aspects make language ideologies an important site for social and cultural analysis. However, Costa (2019) has pointed out that researching language ideologies is complicated by the fact that the narrow analysis of beliefs or ideas invites structuralist bias. A related critique is offered by Ajsic and McGroarty (2015), who highlight that most analyses in the area tend to concentrate on institutional forces. Our work embraces Costa’s (2019) and Ajsic and McGroarty’s (2015) critiques: we thus focus on underlying events as well as ideas and offer room to noninstitutional voices in our review. The examination of English language ideologies in the Indian context has been of enduring interest to scholars (e.g., Bhattacharya 2017a, b; Dasgupta 1993; Mohanty 2017, 2019; Ramanathan 2005b; Rao 2016; Roy 2015), and we aim to weave different

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strands together through a review of the literature, in order to show how language ideologies about English in India not only respond to local, historical, and political forces, but are also simultaneously influenced by larger neoliberal flows of discourse around Global English (Piller 2015). As Bhattacharya (2017b: 350) has previously noted, the mapping of the ideological backdrop on English has been, “by and large, homogenous and riveted on how it functions as a socioeconomic and educational imperative for power and success.” The linguistic landscape of India is so profoundly complex, and the sociopolitical context so diverse, that broader institutional discourses offer but one perspective. We try to capture this complexity as language ideological plurality, referring to the multiplex and heterogeneous beliefs and their manifestations characterizing conflicting notions about English in India. It is, of course, impossible to capture the full range of ideological positions that may be relevant; we can but offer a focused glimpse.

III.  OPPRESSIVE EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY OF COLONIZATION Given the fact that English is an imperial legacy, we begin by looking at ideologies that relate to India’s colonial past based on Bhattacharya’s (2017a) study, which pits two contesting narratives about English and colonization that elucidate the circulation of conflicting ideologies regarding English at macro- and micro-levels within India. She began by highlighting the perspective of a critical policy piece, one of the government’s Position Papers, “The Teaching of English” (NCERT 2006: 1). This document articulated key English language policies and teaching practices within the educational context in the country. The opening paragraph of the document offers a clear window into its ideological perspective: English is in India today a symbol of people’s aspirations for quality in education and a fuller participation in national and international life. Its colonial origins now forgotten or irrelevant, its initial role in independent India, tailored to higher education (as a “library language”, a “window on the world”), now felt to be insufficiently inclusive socially and linguistically, the current status of English stems from its overwhelming presence on the world stage and the reflection of this in the national arena . . . The visible impact of this presence of English is that it is today being demanded by everyone at the very initial stage of schooling. (Emphases in original) The extract elucidates several significant ideological positionings regarding the circulation of English in India. English is seen to imbibe an aspirational quality when it comes to enabling social, economic, and educational opportunities on a local as well as a global scale. Note how as a national policy document, the Position Paper constructs a collective “Indian”, creating one ideological positioning that purports to glorify English within the country. The Position Paper’s pronouncement is in line with Vaish (2005: 187), who postulated that English was “an agent of decolonization.” It is worth noting, however, that within this larger imaginary, resistances to English are marginalized or rendered invisible. Importantly, Bhattacharya (2017a: 2) discussed the “quick and easy dismissal of the colonial inheritance of English,” contesting the policy pronouncement with ethnographic data at her long-term field site. Providing a strong counterfoil to the Position Paper’s dismissive narrative about people’s ideologies about the colonial connection to English, Bhattacharya (2017a) drew

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on her research with young multilingual boys at an orphanage in suburban New Delhi. The close analysis of data collected therein highlighted the ways in which ideologies about English continue to remain deeply intertwined with India’s colonial past. For example, one young participant, Girish, asked if Bhattacharya (the researcher) was in fact an “English” person because she used to be a teacher of the language. When she clarified that she was not, in fact, “English,” Girish stated that if she were indeed “English,” the boys would have to kill her, “Because we are at war with the English” (Bhattacharya 2017a: 12). The teaching of English was thus strongly connected to the state of being a British colonizer, and the use of present tense (“we are at war”) clearly marked that while India may have gained independence, it remained in a state of war against the British as far as Girish was concerned. Another young boy, Sudheer, claimed during an interview in the same study that “everyone hates the English, all of India” (Bhattacharya 2017a: 13). Here, the English were specifically contrasted against Americans, who were spared the same level of ire – likely because while they are English speakers, they are not viewed as colonizers. Sudheer noted that Indians traveled to America, because “if someone wanted to be a soldier, he or she could learn English in America, and return to India and inform Indians that the English were going to attack again” (Bhattacharya 2017a: 13). Thus, India would be forewarned because the English-speaking soldier would be able to understand England’s current war plans. The processes of globalization, enabling travel to America, thus offer the possibility of acquiring English outside of a colonial frame, in order to defend against the enduring colonial agenda. As Bhattacharya (2017a) highlighted through an analysis of a different boy’s statements, the colonial past still casts a dark shadow, and its link to the English language today remains very much alive, functioning as one of many “forms of resistance or contestation to symbolic domination” by English (De los Heros 2009: 173). What Bhattacharya’s (2017a) study also brought to light was how language policy documents struggle to create one voice in the face of a pluralistic many – a process she categorized under ideological erasure. She argued that “the categorical assertion of . . . homogeneity and the dismissal of alternate and differing perspectives, regrettably, leaves little or no room for the representation of difference” (Bhattacharya 2017a: 16), a difference that is the defining characteristic of India. In the next section, we continue the discussion on English policy, highlighting some of the struggles that remain in unifying a highly pluralistic society.

IV.  EMANCIPATORY PROMISE OF ENGLISH: REFRAMING COLONIZATION One fascinating example of local ideologies around English surfaces in the consecration of a temple to the “Goddess of English,” the foundation stone for which was set down in 2010. The BBC ran this news story, featuring Chandra Bhan Prasad, an author from the Dalit – formerly known as the “untouchable” – community. The creator of the Goddess of English, he was determined to institute a temple in the Goddess’ honor in the village of Banka in Uttar Pradesh, a North Indian state. The Dalit community has struggled for many generations as a result of oppression from castes that are socially ranked higher within a problematic caste system, and restrictions on their ability to access meaningful education has been a key factor in the reproduction of their socioeconomic suppression. Because English is a critical factor in facilitating socioeconomic mobility, for Prasad it held the key to a “Dalit renaissance” (Pandey 2011).

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Worshippers, led by Prasad, congregated annually in celebration of “English Day” (Lord Macaulay’s birthday), praying to the Goddess: “Oh Devi Ma (Oh Goddess Mother), please let us learn English! Even the dogs understand English” (Masani 2012). The association with Macaulay surfaces in a description of this ritual offered by Thomas (2012: 13): “Beside the goddess hangs a portrait of her unlikely messiah, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the British Whig historian and statesman who brought English education to India way back in the 1830s.” Notably, Macaulay is often criticized for his infamous comment that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” (Macaulay 1835: n.p.). According to Rege (2010), Prasad aimed to symbolize the power of English through the Goddess, and by doing so sought to unsettle dominant narratives demonizing Macaulay. He underscored Macaulay’s exasperation “about the British having to give scholarships to children to study in Sanskrit and Arabic even when they were ready to pay for English education” (Macaulay 1835: 91–2). It is important to keep in mind that Prasad’s resistance is embedded within a history that has denied⁠ – through “scriptural injunctions” (Anand 1999: 2053)⁠ – access to Sanskrit, a Hindu “High Language,” for Dalits. In the past, thus, Sanskrit was never culturally or socially framed as “being a democratic language that was accessible to the masses” (Anand 1999: 2053)⁠ – there were powerful forces that constrained its movement across Indian social strata. Caste was a key force that enforced the restrictions. As a point of resistance, then, Prasad reframed English as a democratic language in contrast. English today thus has become a pivotal ally to access to education and socioeconomic mobility. It is thus possible to argue that Prasad’s “rereading [of English] disrupts the ongoing processes of collective remembrance of language and education in colonial India” (Anand 1999: 92). This connects nicely with Mahapatra and Mishra’s (2019: 352) argument about the complexity of ideological positioning within the Indian context: If English was the chief means of constructing colonial modernity and structuring a nationalist identity among the elite, rejecting it in favor of the vernaculars and identifying with common masses was a means of expressing anti-colonial sentiment and structuring an alternative identity. With the growing importance of English globally, and the opening up of India to the global economy, English education is also seen as a means of acquiring a new identity, an identity of resistance to the traditional upper-class, upper-caste hegemony in India and also a Bourdieusian desire. Thus, English is now increasingly constructed among the lower social classes as a way to circumvent older, oppressive hierarchies – even as English renews, reproduces, and participates in a very particular kind of hegemony. In Andhra Pradesh and other states in India, many elected representatives from the indigenous communities (officially recognized as Scheduled Tribes in India) demand English-medium (EM) schools for indigenous tribal children. As we see here, thus, language ideologies can show how access to particular forms of power can help reframe understandings of colonization, particularly in contexts of hierarchized oppression. Some of the highest stakes where these ideologies come into play is education, where we turn to next.

V.  ENGLISH IN LANGUAGE POLICY AND AS MEDIUM OF INSTRUCTION As we have seen earlier, Constitutional recognition in India is restricted to twenty-two languages (Schedule VIII) and English has a special role as an “additional official language.”

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Effectively, this amounts to nonrecognition and neglect of minority languages; this helps further cement linguistic hierarchies (Mohanty 2019). Within the educational context, only thirty-three languages (including the twenty-two official or scheduled languages) function as an instructional medium in schools and the number of languages taught as language subjects in schools stands at forty-one (Panda and Mohanty 2014). Panda and Mohanty also show that the number of languages used in schools has declined over the years. Education of Indian children occurs at the intersection, then, of languages socially, culturally, and economically stratified within a complex space. These kinds of hierarchies naturally impact national and regional language educational policymaking. Articulated in 1956, the most significant policy to shape the national language-in-education context is the Three Language Formula (TLF). It recommended three languages to be taught in schools in both Hindi-speaking and non-Hindi-speaking areas. The three languages included the MT, or regional language (RL), as the first language, Hindi (or any other Indian language in non-Hindi-speaking areas), and English. In attempting to bring in some uniformity in the regional choices of the three languages, the TLF continued to be revised from time to time (see Mohanty 2019, Chapter 7, for an elaborate discussion of TLF). Through various interpretations and applications of TLF, the regional majority languages (and not necessarily the MTs) became the first language and the medium of instruction in the state-sponsored public schools where English became the second language pushing Hindi (or Sanskrit in many cases) to the status of the third language. As Mohanty (2019: 152) noted, “the confusion created by the TLF contributed in many ways to the growing prominence of English in Indian school curricula.” The hegemony of English, in particular, and Hindi within national language educational policy has served to exacerbate local tensions as a result of a complex matrix of regional language ideological politics (Langer and Brown 2008). Moreover, English, because of its association with cultural, economic, and social capital, has been at the center of much scrutiny in these discussions (Chakraborty and Kapur 2016). A key national policy adopted more recently is the Indian government’s Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act (2009). Promulgated a decade ago, it mandated, for the very first time, free and compulsory education for all Indian children between the ages of six and fourteen (Ministry of Human Resource Development 2009). The Act stipulated that the “medium of instruction shall, as far as practicable, be in child’s mother tongue,” but it offered little direction for implementation. Nor did it offer any real insight on how to manage the issue of conflicted language ideologies resulting in charged debates about MOI, which often pits English and vernacular languages on opposing sides (Bhattacharya and Jiang 2018), with parents heavily invested in the former. It is estimated that ninety million children in India are currently being formally schooled in English (Kalia 2007). In fact, over 40 percent of school children in India are in EM schools (mostly private schools), and the number of children in these schools increases by over 10 percent annually (Mohanty 2019). Paradoxically, the rate of growth of students in EM schools is particularly high in Hindi-speaking areas; during the period of five years from 2009, for example, the number of students in EM schools increased by 1000 percent and 4700 percent, respectively, in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the two most populated states in the so-called Hindi belt (Mohanty 2019). English skills are highly coveted, as we previously outlined, because it is believed to be a crucial tool for socioeconomic mobility. Lower-income groups, as Nambissan (2016: 86) argued, draw clear “linkages . . . between the knowledge of English, middle-class jobs, social distinction, and elite status.” In particular, they recognize its role as a gatekeeper to higher education

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and higher paying jobs (Hornberger and Vaish 2009; Kam et. al. 2009; Ramanathan 2005a). There are powerful numbers driving these ideologies, as Azam, Chin, and Prakash (2013: 365) found: There are large, statistically significant returns to English-language skills in India. Hourly wages are on average 34% higher for men who speak fluent English and 13% higher for men who speak a little English relative to men who speak no English. For women, the average returns are 22% for fluent English and 10% for a little English. Unfortunately for the poorer sections of Indian society, government-run primary (elementary) schools, a free option for Indian children, are criticized for the poor Englishlanguage instruction they offer (Thiyagarajan 2008). In such schools, English pedagogy is centered on transmitting ‘scholastic’ English (emphasizing reading and writing) (Gupta 1997), with the acquisition of communicative skills being secondary goals (Vaish 2005). Moreover, English acquisition is almost “entirely dependent on classroom experience” (Gupta 1997: 9) for poorer children, because they have little or no access to the language outside of it (also see Mohanty, Panda and Pal 2010, for a discussion of strategies in teaching English to such children). Poor teacher training, inadequate teacher language skills, emphasis on rote memorization, and minimal allocation of time to language teaching also contribute to form an inferior English language learning experience for a majority of children (Vaish 2005). Thus, disillusioned by English teaching at government schools, many parents enroll their children in private English-medium schools, notwithstanding high costs (Probe 1999). This has contributed to the exponential rise in the number of un- or semi-regulated, private English-medium schools, a large majority of which target the poor in particular (Aggarwal 2000; Annamalai 2005; De et al. 2002; Jhingran 2009; Mohanty 2019; Nambissan 2003). Mohanty (2019: 196–8) drew a direct link between the quality of schooling, English, and social class in India and discussed the range of what he called “from Doon Schools to Doom Schools.” He showed the hierarchy from the very high-cost elite EM private schools (such as the Doon School) exclusively for the extreme rich class down to almost no-cost poor-quality vernacular-medium public schools for the poor class. According to Mohanty (2019: 197): With varied layers of school quality and quality of English teaching, some learn English and other school subjects with proficiency whereas others do not . . . Thus, there are now sub-categories of ‘English-knowing’ people. The EM schools and the role of English in public and private schools have led to a new caste and sub-caste system in India, differentiated on the basis of quality of English proficiency. A key concern is that many such ‘Doom’ schools are what Lin (2005: 48) has referred to in the Hong Kong context as English medium “in name if not in reality.” Mohanty, Panda, and Pal (2010: 214) have criticized the proliferation of such schools based on the “myth of English-medium superiority.” They further noted that such schools aim for cosmetic Anglicization, where, despite the nominal importance of English, vernacular linguistic practices dominate. As Annamalai (2005: 26) has previously noted, the English being acquired at such schools is not “critical, creative and applicable to the problems of real life and the needs of the society.” Students learn ‘bookish’, noncommunicative language skills in English; and what they learn, he noted, is to imitate, not interpret, texts. Crucially, as Rao (2016: 205) has noted, “For the vast majority of Indian students . . . English promises much but delivers little.” In this manner, English as a language of instruction helps reflect,

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maintain, and perpetuate socioeconomic divides (Mohanty 2017). Specifically, “Englishmedium education widens social fractures in Indian society by creating and reinforcing a social, cultural, economic, and discursive divide between the English-educated and the majority” (Faust and Nagar 2001: 2878). Social ideologies in India have thus begun to intervene along linguistic caste lines (Mohanty 2017, 2019).

VI.  ANGREZI HATAO AND ANTI-HINDI MOVEMENTS The politics of languages in India have continued to keep alive a love-hate relationship with English for over seven decades after independence. English is powerfully “contested in political fora, given its visible association with elitism” (Roy 2015: 524). In 1967, Ram Manohar Lohia, a socialist leader opposed to the post-independence dominance by the Congress Party and Nehruvian legacy, started the Agrezi Hatao (remove English) movement, which sought to de-anglicize Indian education and social life and to have public display of English road signs and billboards removed. The move to eradicate English from public spaces was intertwined with his goals for socioeconomic equality and progress for those on the margins in particular (Kumar 2010). However, while the move received attention, ultimately it failed to shape the desired policy goals. This perspective was not a singular one within the Indian political context; there were other similar moves. Communist policies in the early 1980s, for example, led to the removal of English as a mandatory subject from elementary classrooms in West Bengal, an Eastern Indian state. There was fierce resistance to this, and the political move was framed as being in the same vein as the former colonizers (i.e., the British) who also wanted to restrict access to an English education. Those who resisted the move argued that it was motivated by the Communist Party’s fear that English “would spread liberal ideas . . . [because] the Communist Party of India (Marxist) wants to keep the masses uneducated so that they can be manipulated and prevented from questioning the system” (Banerji 1985). Ultimately, the measures were uneven in their impact and met with limited success. The policy was abandoned in 1999. In today’s West Bengal, the medium of education remains a critical discursive focus, and at the center of conflicting ideologies. Chakraborty and Kapur (2016: 21), for example, found in their study that while Bengali-medium instruction “might generate cultural benefits . . . it is generally at the cost of attaining higher economic benefits from liberalization.” The demand for English is greater than ever now at the elementary levels, fueled by aspirations of socioeconomic mobility and greater educational opportunities (Sau, Samanta, and Ghosh 2016). The Communist Party’s attempts to eradicate English ultimately went nowhere. While the movement of “removing English” has remained limited in its impact, it persists today, continuing in a variety of forms in different regions of India. For example, Hindi nationalists seek to promote Hindi dominance over Indian languages leading to the myth of Hindi as a national language1 (the popular reference to Hindi as a rāshtrabhāshā or a “language of the country” has also led to the perpetuation of the myth). Further, attempts to minimize the role of English and promote Hindi through governmental initiatives have met with political resistance to Hindi dominance and anti-Hindi agitations in South India, especially in Tamil Nadu and other states where Indo-Dravidian languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam) are in the majority. In September 2019, for example, on the occasion of Hindi Diwas (Hindi Day), the government’s Union Home Minister Amit Shah noted: “Today, if one language can do the work of uniting the country, then it is the

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most spoken language, Hindi. There is so much influence of English on us that we cannot talk in Hindi without its help” (Dechamma 2019: n.p.). This led to widespread uproar, leading Shah to issue a quick face-saving clarification that his words had been wrongly politicized. Thus, Hindi, a uniting force during India’s freedom struggles, has become a dividing force after independence, leading to the de facto dominance of English in India. It should also be noted that while the resistance to English is often manifested across divergent political movements, individual responses to questions of language choice in education and other domains of social activities are much more pragmatically driven. As parents, for example, people see the benefits of English in education for the future of their children and also the benefits associated with Hindi as a socioeconomic capital because of its majoritarian dominance at a national level. This explains why English as a language of education – as a medium of teaching and learning and as a language subject – is most favored all over the country. In the Hindi-speaking areas of the country, the advantage of Hindi as a language that children know and use is taken as a given and so English is sought after as an added advantage for children’s future. Similarly, in the non-Hindi-speaking areas, education in English is sought after for its benefits while parents are not averse to their children learning Hindi because of its potential significance at a national level. Thus, despite divergent political beliefs in respect of English and Hindi, at the grass-roots level the motivations may be practical rather than purely ideological. One final note: we do not postulate that anti-Hindi sentiment is localized to the South or all-pervasive; as a dominant national-level language, it is wise to note that Hindi also carries significant socioeconomic capital. Importantly, the politically charged discourses and debates around Bengali, Hindi, and English serve to highlight how language ideologies may be as conflicted about what are perceived as “local” languages as opposed to what is often constructed as a “foreign” one (i.e., English).

VII.  NOTIONS OF NATIVITY OR FOREIGNNESS Is English a ‘foreign’ language or a native language in India and in other postcolonial societies? The question of ownership of English in postcolonial societies is significant since it is related to teaching and learning of English as a second or a foreign language in these societies. The positioning and the role of English in the multilingual ecologies of these societies are highly contested. Mohanty (2017, 2019) pointed out that promotion of the notion of “World Englishes” has facilitated the elitist characterization of English as a ‘native language’ in postcolonial societies and the claim to its ownership. Such a claim implies treating English as a second language for the native users of Indian languages and application of second language teaching methodology in teaching English to Indian learners. However, as Phillipson (2009: 89) noted, any declaration by the ‘experts’ that English “now ‘belongs’ to all its users and has become detached from its Anglo-American roots” is misleading since the global use of English continues to be guided by ‘Anglo English’ (Wierzbicka 2006). In his discussion of ‘Indian English,’ Dasgupta (1993: 216) pointed out that the usages and variations in Indian English are always judged with reference to the norms or standards set by the “Anglo-American mint.” The claim of Indianness of English is based on the observation that speakers of many Indian languages and local varieties often use words and expressions which are borrowed from English. This is interpreted by the proponents of Indianness of English as language learners’ familiarity with English. However, such borrowings across contact languages are common to all the languages of the world, including English. The presence or use of a few English words

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and expressions in native Indian languages cannot be taken as ‘evidence’ of knowledge of English since the borrowed expressions are treated by the language users in India not as English, but as a part of the Indian languages (Mohanty 2017). The claim that the ownership of a local or national variety of World Englishes resides with the users of that variety is misleading since, as Dasgupta (1993) has pointed out, the norms are exogenous. Because of prolonged and extensive contact with English, Indian languages have borrowed and adopted many words and expressions from English. This in itself does not make English an Indian language or a language rooted in Indian culture. The foreignness of a language is not just a question of its origin or use: it is dependent on the extent to which the language is rooted in the daily life cultural experiences of the users of that language. In this sense, English as a language is quite alien to Indian life and culture, especially rural and tribal India. (Mohanty 2019: 192–3) Thus, while the position that Indian English can be treated as a “native” language (Agnihotri and Singh 2013) circulates in scholarship, there are conflicting ideological beliefs on that account.

VIII.  CONCLUSION As we outlined it, the story of English in India is one of ideological plurality, that is, without a single, coherent ideological narrative. Of course, our perspective offers but a glimpse of the complexity that characterizes it. The ideological plurality in respect of English in India can be linked to the politics of linguistic identity and dominance reflected in three centrifugal forces in Indian society and polity: (i) surface level extolment of MTs, (ii) glorification of Indianness and Indian cultural traditions leading to rejection of English/ anglicization and, generally, “foreign” ideologies,2 and (iii) rejection of Hindi-dominance by some non-Hindi language users along with subaltern endorsement of English by the disadvantaged Dalit groups,3 and Indigenous/Tribal Minority and Minoritized Linguistic communities. These forces have led to anomalous positions in respect of English in India – widening influence and following of English and yet apparent rejection of and hatred for the language. The 2011 Census of India shows English as a first language for about 256,000 speakers (i.e., only 0.02 percent of the population)4 And, at the same time, as noted earlier, over 40 percent of the school students in India are in English-medium (EM) schools and the annual growth rate of students in the EM schools is 10 percent (Mohanty 2019). The ambivalence in respect of English is evident from the fact that the growth rate of EM students is particularly high in Hindi-speaking states. It bears noting here that not all EM schools are created equal, and many in the Indian context are EM in name alone (see Bhattacharya 2013). Ultimately, the plurality of English ideologies can be traced to the popular ambivalence embedded in the rejection of colonial subjugation, on the one hand, and perception of English as the language of power, opportunity, and mobility, on the other. Similarly, at a political level, the plurality of English ideologies is clearly linked to simultaneous and unreconciled promotion of both MT and English as political imperatives. This results in the gap between the declared and de facto policies; as Panda and Mohanty (2014: 111) pointed out, “while the policy rhetoric is guided by the political compulsions to assert national and indigenous identities, the ground-level decisions in respect of languages in education are influenced by the market forces in favor of English.”

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NOTES 1. The Constitution of India does not recognize any language as the national language. Article 341(1) of the Constitution recognizes Hindi as “the Official language of the Union.” Article 343(2) provides for English “to be used for all official purposes of the Union” in addition to Hindi. English, therefore, is not an ‘official’ language of India; it is usually referred to as an additional or associate official language. 2. These forces are reflected in rightist politics and promotion of Hindutva. 3. This is exemplified by promotion of the English Goddess and English as a language of emancipation for the Dalits or downtrodden communities (see Mohanty 2019: Chapter 9, for discussion). 4. Census of 2011 also shows that English is used as a second language by eighty-three million and as a third language by forty-six million people in India.

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Chapter 11

Challenging the Economic and Cultural Currency of English NATHAN JOHN ALBURY

I.  INTRODUCTION The extensive library of scholarship in sociolinguistics – from language ideology to language practice and language policy – has proven to us in no uncertain terms that English is the world’s current linguistic superpower. People study it as a second language because it promises socio-economic mobility and advancement in the global neoliberal market. Nation states around the world have responded with strategic top-down language policies whereby English is now, across all continents, a compulsory element to some extent in formative education (cf. Jenkins et al. 2011; Ricento 2015; Spolsky 2009). In the Netherlands, for example, where this chapter was written, children as young as five might start to acquire English in the classroom. This early preparation makes sense. In the Netherlands, English holds ongoing prestige as a lingua franca for European integration and cooperation. Outward-looking Dutch commercial interests are often necessarily English medium, and even tertiary education is increasingly provided through English (Gerritsen et al. 2016). The story in other societies – European or otherwise – is similar. Besides English being a linguistic pivot in the global political economy, the omnipresence and popularity of cultural exports that originate from the Anglo world – commonly, but perhaps not affectionately, referred to as the McDonaldization of society (Smart 1999) – mean this is not undesired. The purpose of this chapter, however, is to play the devil’s advocate to this established view of English. It does this by exploring examples of language ideologies at the local level that are posing challenges to the high status and prestige of English in ways contextualized by local histories, socio-economics and politics. Specifically, the chapter takes us to multilingual Malaysia and bicultural New Zealand as two divergent but nonetheless related case studies. Their divergence is perhaps most obvious. Malaysia, at a crossroads in Southeast Asia, hosts a Malay-speaking majority and a plethora of heritage languages spoken by its Chinese, Indian and non-Malay indigenous minorities. However, English is the language of Malaysia’s internationalized free market economy, and the exploitation of multilingual repertories is the norm. New Zealand, on the other hand, is a predominantly English-speaking nation in the South Pacific, but where the

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indigenous te reo Māori language has become so displaced by English that today language revitalization – and with it Māori cultural revitalization more generally – is state policy. While these local sociolinguistic contexts are clearly different, Malaysia and New Zealand are united by the fact they are both former British colonies. In both societies, the English language was – long before it had acquired its current status as the world’s lingua franca – imported and imposed as a language of foreign rule, of administration, and of the elite as part of the broader British colonial enterprise. This chapter will show that in the context of it being the language of both the colonizer and the global neoliberal market economy, the socio-economic and cultural currency of English is in specific cases being challenged. In the case of Malaysia, this results from socio-economic mobility being in dialectic relationship to Mandarin as the language of China’s powerhouse economy, and in New Zealand from a heavy postcolonial conscience coupled with a quest to establish a non-European national identity in the South Pacific. In both cases, these challenges have been identified through an analysis of emic folk linguistic talk about linguistic diversity with youths in those countries, whereby these youths were asked to explain their sociolinguistic environs based on what they claim to know and what they feel. To this end, it firstly pays to elaborate on what a folk linguistic approach can offer such ideological sociolinguistic research.

II.  A FOLK LINGUISTIC APPROACH The epistemology and methods of the folk linguistic research tradition deserve their place in the language ideology research toolkit. This is especially so if we take an expanded view of what counts as language ideology. Language ideology, particularly in the current scholarly context, is by no means confined to “capital I” ideologies that give titles to indexed doctrines such as neoliberalism or nationalism. Such “capital I” ideologies do indeed have their value and much discussion in contemporary sociolinguistics is rightly premised on the enduring impact of “capital I” ideologies. One such example for language is the Western – and often Anglo-American – monolingual assumption. This describes a social psychological bias to assume that humans and societies are inherently monolingual such that multilingual proficiencies and communities are seen to somehow disrupt the natural state of affairs (Blackledge 2000). This ideology contrasts with what I have termed the multilingual assumption that can exist outside the West where individual and societal multilingualism has long been so normative that individuals may struggle to identify their mother tongue and homogeneity is seen as the marked case (think, for example, of India, Nigeria or South Africa). The one nation-one language ideology is another well-traversed “capital I” ideology in sociolinguistic literature. This describes the politics of tying each nation or ethnic group to a single language in the modernist interests of social cohesion, governmentality and ethnolinguistic consistency (Wright 2003). This ideology, albeit it manifests in locally nuanced ways in response to local political interests and pressures, helps to explain for example why the French language is emphatically heralded as a quintessential character of French nationhood, and why China seeks to unite its people – including the thorny case of democratic Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong – though Mandarin. However, language ideologies need not all be “capital I” ideologies that operate at macro-levels nor necessarily assume membership in large numbers. They can also include more localized senses of commonsense about the sociolinguistic world. These “little i” ideologies have consolidated their position in scholarship through theoretical perspectives

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on language ideology, such as from Rumsey (1990), who sees language ideology as “shared bodies of commonsense notions about the nature of language in the world” (346) and Blommaert (2006) who sees it as “the unspoken assumptions that, as some kind of “social cement”, turn groups of people into communities, societies, and cultures” (510). In definitions of language ideology such as these, the focus lies not just on how people feel, in evaluative terms, about the sociolinguistic world around them akin to language attitudes. Instead, the focus also encompasses local truths, claims of logic, commonsense or fact about language, even if these lack empirical basis (think, for example, of parents claiming that bilingualism would impede the cognitive development of their children and in turn avoid raising their children bilingually). Where these claims are shared, even if only by a small collective, and contribute to a common understanding about what is right and what is normal, then they can be considered (part of) an ideology. Crucially, this means that ideology can be explicitly seen as encompassing what is believed to be true about the sociolinguistic world, not just what is believed to be desirable (Albury 2017b). This is where the link between folk linguistic talk and language ideology becomes powerful. Folk linguistics is concerned on the one hand with how the world of language is constructed by people in the community through their own epistemic terms and on the other hand with how they feel about different linguistic phenomena (Preston 2005, 2011). Whereas the latter focus is synonymous with language attitudinal research, the former is a postmodern notion that accepts that knowledge held and articulated by non-experts may be rooted in cultural paradigms and can complement or inform the work of researchers (Canagarajah 2005). The point is not whether what people claim to know as truths or common sense about language is empirically reliable. Instead, the point is Foucauldian (Foucault 1980) whereby knowledge is legitimate if it is deemed as such by those who hold it and rely on it to make sense of the world around them. What people might know about sociolinguistics – even if this knowledge is backed up by science – does after all structure their engagement with the sociolinguistic world. It even informs how people solve local language issues, such as in the home and in classrooms, and this postmodern view on knowledge and decentralized authority on knowledge is the fodder of academic inquiry into, for example, family language policy (cf. King et al. 2008; Li Wei 1994) and educational linguistic anthropology (cf. Hornberger 2002; Johnson 2009). Where knowledge that guides language choices and decisions is shared by some collective, then this folk linguistic knowledge can be considered as contributing to a language ideology. This makes folk linguistic knowledge worth investigating in the name of language ideology. On this epistemological basis, I have investigated – in two distinct but theoretically related projects – how youths in Malaysia and in New Zealand understand and explain in folk linguistic terms their multilingual lives and multilingual societies (with the sociolinguistic background to the cases of Malaysia and New Zealand to be provided later in this chapter). In both contexts, English is the language of the colonizer, but also the language of international connectivity and the globalized market economy. However, in New Zealand this came about through settler colonization, as sociological theory explains (Veracini 2014), whereby the objective was that the people, culture and language of the colonizers would replace their indigenous counterparts. Malaysia, on the other hand, did not see a British population become its majority, nor the uniform imposition of British culture, but colonization especially amounted to the exploitation of Malay land. Nonetheless, the focus in my research lay on identifying and analyzing shared knowledge that may be constitutive of language ideologies, or even of epistemologies if shared

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knowledge contributes to fundamental world-views vis-à-vis the role, place and nature of language. The folk linguistic orientation meant that people who had trained in linguistics – whether academically or through their occupation – were not eligible to participate. In both cases, participants were university students between 18 and 25 years pursuing undergraduate degrees in a range of disciplines, including the natural sciences, medicine, business, literature and law. In the case of New Zealand, 1,297 university students from across New Zealand studying at the University of Otago in Dunedin, including – on the basis of self-identification – 1,090 Pākeha (New Zealanders of European descent), 54 Māori and 153 Māori/Pākeha students, responded to a folk linguistic questionnaire about the Māori language. The questionnaire solicited quantitative and qualitative data to ascertain levels of agreement and disagreement to a range of epistemic claims about the nature, purpose and success of language policy – led by government but advanced in the community – to revitalize the Māori language since its near eradication by British colonial forces and their legacy. This meant proposing key facts about language revitalization – as they have been established in the academic literature but also about Māori in New Zealand – and soliciting and quantifying levels of agreement to epistemic claims, supplemented by qualitative free text whereby the students could explain their (dis)agreement in folk linguistic terms in respect to specific proposed facts. The questionnaire also ascertained the language policy ambitions of New Zealand youth in terms of what the revitalization of the Māori language ought to achieve including in respect to the status and vitality of English as New Zealand’s dominant language (for more detail on methodology and findings, see cf. Albury 2018a, 2016a, 2016b; Albury and Carter 2017; Albury 2015). In the case of Malaysia, I held group discussions with students at universities across the country, including in Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Kota Bharu, Kuala Terengganu on peninsula Malaysia, as well as in Kuching and Miri in the state of Sarawak on Borneo Island. A total of 24 group discussions were held, including 10 with Malay students, 9 with Chinese students and 5 with Indian students, with each group comprising 4 to 6 participants. Grouping along ethnic lines responded to local politics and cultural norms, especially backgrounded by ethnicity being the single most important marker in Malaysian society and a basis for Malaysian social organization (Noor and Leong 2013). In these semi-structured discussions, the students explained multilingual life and society in Malaysia through their own epistemic lenses relying on their own epistemologies of language, their language ideological frameworks, and what they knew as fact and commonsense about their sociolinguistic lives, communities and language policy (for more detail on methodology and findings, see cf. Albury 2018b, 2018c, 2017a, 2019, 2020). In this case, this also included prompting the students from each ethnic group to discuss not only how they feel about Malaysia being a multilingual state, but how their own heritage languages – and multilingualism more generally – are perceived by the other ethnic groups. This meant relying on the social and discursive elements of theory of mind from psychiatry (Sodian and Kristen 2010) and applying them to sociolinguistic research. This helped to clarify the ideological environment with more nuance and complexity by seeing language ideology – as it affects discourses and social relations – as also including how people feel or hypothesize they are positioned by others in that hierarchy (which, in turn, they might rely on when engaging with the outside world). Drawing on data and analysis from these two research projects, this chapter will now show how – through folk linguistic talk and analysis of it – the status of English is being challenged. In particular, the chapter will show that Mandarin is challenging English – in

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ideological terms – as the language of socio-economic mobility in Malaysia. In the case of New Zealand, the chapter will show that postcolonial guilt and the construction of a non-British identity in a former British colony in the Pacific is allowing te reo Māori to equal or surpass English in terms of cultural legitimacy and authenticity.

III.  MALAYSIA: WHERE MANDARIN CHALLENGES THE ECONOMIC CURRENCY OF ENGLISH Nestled at a cultural and linguistic crossroads in Southeast Asia, Malaysia’s international image is one of harmonious multiculturalism and multilingualism. This has been useful fodder in the country’s Malaysia, Simply Asia tourist brand where ethnic Malays, Chinese and Indians form an egalitarian melting pot. In real terms, however, Malaysia’s linguistic and ethnic diversity is plagued by an institutionalized hierarchy. Rather than celebrating cultural egalitarianism, Malaysia is an ethnocratic state that seeks to place power and privilege with ethnic Malays, with Islam as their religion, and with Bahasa Malaysia as their heritage language. This ideology is known as Ketuanan Melayu (Goh et al. 2009). For context, some history is needed. Malaya, as it was formerly known, fell into British colonial hands when the British acquired trading ports in Western Malaya from Dutch imperialists in 1824. British forces gradually superimposed their own administration whereby the Pangkor Treaty of 1874 was a watershed turning point in British-Malayan relations. In response to conflict over the control of tin mines, the treaty saw that a British resident would be attached to each local court and be mandatorily consulted – and whose advice would be mandatorily enacted – on all matters besides Islam and customs (Andaya and Andaya 2016). This, it was argued, would show the local Malays “good government and enlightened policy” (Sadka 1968). And so the expansion of British control of British Malaya took hold. The British welcomed the ongoing arrival of Chinese immigrants who had sought new lives and opportunities in the region, especially in what is now Western Malaysia and Singapore. Whereas the British branded local Malays in racist terms as unable and unwilling to contribute meaningfully to the colonial economy, they saw the Chinese as entrepreneurial and admired their business acumen. Waves of Chinese immigration were therefore largely uninterrupted. The Malays were instead typically relegated to agriculture in impoverished rural areas. The British also facilitated migration from Southern India – especially from Tamil Nadu – as a source of labour for the rubber plantations. These Tamils, the British felt, were accustomed to British rule and were therefore easy to manage, making them ideal labourers (Andaya and Andaya 2016). British colonial rule persisted until independence was declared in 1957. Besides instilling a divide and rule policy whereby these three main ethnic groups were deliberated by socio-economic lines, the British had inadvertently created a plurilingual society. The Chinese had brought a plethora of languages with them, including Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, Foochow and Teochew, and the Indian migrants had brought not just Tamil, but also – to a smaller degree – languages such as Malayalam and Telugu (Zhou and Xiaomei 2017). By the time of independence, and in the absence of the Chinese and Indian diasporas returning home as had been anticipated, Malaysia had become an unexpectedly multilingual society. Leading this plurality in ideological, practical and economic terms was, however, English. Finding the nation’s feet meant reclaiming Malaysia as quintessentially Malay, and therefore doing away with the linguistic heritage of the colonizers. It also meant reminding the now-well-established Chinese and Indian

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minorities – who now make up around 25 per cent and 8 per cent of the population, respectively – that ethnic Malays are the rightful owners of the land (Hamayotsu 2014). This, coupled with Ketuanan Melayu, would be the backbone of Malaysian nation-building and was in large part a political response to the Chinese community having come to dominate the Malaysian economy. That is to say, the Chinese had become the backbone of the Malaysian economy and had surpassed the Malay community in socio-economic development, but the Malays would seek to address this by asserting political power in the absence of holding economic power. Bahasa Malaysia would be the sole national language, and language rights from the Chinese and Indian minorities would be restricted to heritage language-medium primary-level education. From there, students would be expected to assimilate to Bahasa Malaysia. In practice, however, non-Malays have not assimilated. Instead, Malaysia remains intensely multilingual as a society. The Indian and Chinese minorities have largely retained their heritage languages, and shift away from them is sooner to Mandarin, in the case of the Chinese community as a linguistic unifier for an otherwise linguistically heterogeneous ethnic group. The Indian communities, however, sooner shift to English as a language of prestige whereby Indian heritage languages are commonly devalued in local Indian discourse and ideology, much to the lamentations of Indian youth (Albury 2018b). Malaysia has not successfully rid itself of the prestige that became attached to English in the Malaysian psyche, despite fervent political attempts to do so. The English language, and the central position it had assumed in government, the economy, and in education that had been designed and managed by the British, was an unwelcome reminder of colonial oppression. Building the contemporary Malaysian state would on the one hand mean shedding these colonial remnants (Ridge 2004; Noor and Leong 2013). English-medium education would be gradually phased out; however, the rise of English as an international lingua franca also meant that English had become the language of Malaysia’s capitalist free-market and internationalized economy. For pragmatic reasons, nationalist fervour against English needed to be balanced against an instrumental need to maintain high proficiencies in English within Malaysia for the benefit of Malaysian economic development. Recognizing this, the government advanced policy so that mathematics and science would be taught in English at Malaysian schools; however, this has since been subject to an ideological rally between instrumentalists and nationalists leading to ongoing policy back-flips (Gill 2013). Government-funded universities are still generally English medium, despite laws to the contrary, whereby high-level English proficiency is a prerequisite for success in tertiary education (Gill 2005). Added to this, foreign tertiary education providers have established onshore campuses – such as Curtin, Monash, Swinburne (Australia) and Reading, Southampton, Heriot-Watt and Nottingham (United Kingdom) – that offer their foreign, English-medium curricula. Malaysia’s international image vis-à-vis commerce and investment also remains staunchly English in dialectic relationship to its capitalist outlook, whereby even the Malaysian Investment Development Authority advertises Malaysia to potential investors as enjoying “wide use of English, especially in business, legal and accounting practices based on the British system” (2019). English has also firmly cemented its prestige within Malaysian society beyond its economic instrumentality. Coluzzi (2012) has concluded that English holds even greater status than Bahasa Malaysia. For example, social media is by far an English-medium domain, for communication both within and between ethnic groups, and arguably with the vicarious intention to attract an international audience to social media posts (Albury 2018c).

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Offline, if English itself is not being used, then code-switching and mixing with English is more normative than monolingual dialogue in Bahasa Malaysia alone (Coluzzi 2012). In my research with Malaysian youths, English was reported by all ethnicities as a key language for communication with friends, as an important home language for Indians and also as important or more important than other languages among Indians and Chinese when undertaking daily interactions, such as shopping or running errands (Albury 2018c). What is more, a new local variety of English referred to as Manglish has become a default medium for communication in informal domains. Although ‘Manglish’ is the term used by many speakers, it can for many carry connotations of being low status, broken English and a variety to be avoided. Manglish will be used in this chapter, as this is how research participants referred to it. In any case, Manglish can be considered a World English and especially amounts to switching to English at the lexical level. However, some grammatical features also characterize Manglish, such as removing agreement between verbs and their subjects, and rendering non-countable nouns countable through plural suffixes (Govindan and Pillai 2017). My research also showed that participants from across the ethnicities hasten to note that their language repertoires may indeed be multilingual, including Bahasa Malaysia, English and a heritage language in the case of the Chinese and Indians, but that Manglish typifies their daily interactions. This even provides them, from their folk linguistic perspective, essential proof of their contemporary Malaysian linguistic citizenship (Albury 2020). I have found, however, that although the prestige and status of English in Malaysia is well-documented, it does not go unchallenged. Instead, Malaysian youths in the case of my investigations attached prestige and status to Mandarin such that it challenges English as a language of perceived socio-economic mobility. This has to do in large part with the capital associated with proficiency in Mandarin in the context of the booming Chinese economy and of the economic successes of the Chinese community in Malaysia which outperforms its Malay and Indian counterparts (Yow 2017). However, its genesis is also found in the fact, as briefly noted earlier, that the heterogeneous Chinese community has instilled Mandarin as its lingua franca, rather than Bahasa Malaysia. Naturally, unifying the community by way of a single language serves political ends in the face of Malay ethnocratic politics and helps to articulate Chinese resistance to policies and laws based on ethnic privilege rather than on meritocracy. However, a specifically Chinese epistemology of language has also sustained the local status of Mandarin. Although Mandarin is not a language of historic migration to Malaysia, a Chinese world-view sees Mandarin as the single bona fide mother tongue of all ethnic Chinese people, regardless of actual proficiency in the language and regardless of other Chinese varieties being first languages. This leads to culturally situated perceptions that Chinese heritage languages in Malaysia, such as Cantonese and Hokkien, are simply dialects of Mandarin (albeit this is not supported by empirical evidence), and that ethnic Chinese are bounded by a duty to learn Mandarin as their mother tongue, even if later in life (Albury 2020, 2017a). The sociocultural prestige of Mandarin for Chinese is clear, but it is this in combination with the socio-economic independence of the Chinese community that means Mandarin begins to challenge English. The community has acquired sufficient wealth to by-pass Malaysia’s strict language-in-education laws – that see education beyond the primary level as only available in Bahasa Malaysia – by establishing its own private network of Mandarin-medium secondary schools. In response, the government legislated that attending a non-Malay secondary school precludes entry to Malaysian public universities. Again, the Mandarin-speaking community can often sidestep this policy by sending their

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students to private institutions, to foreign universities with local campuses or indeed abroad to universities ranked more highly than Malaysian intuitions (Pyvis and Chapman 2007). Chinese wealth has also established a socio-economic class that is, in large part, Mandarin-speaking given the specific success of the ethnic Chinese community. Indeed, Chinese students in my research reported to predominantly use Mandarin, and to a lesser degree a Chinese heritage language, with their friends, which in turn suggests that their friendships are largely only with other ethnic Chinese (Albury 2018b). Ultimately, this means that many in the Chinese-Malaysia community live in parallel to the rest of Malaysia. Their education is often with other Chinese people, leading to friendships and relationships with other Chinese people, and their socio-economic advantage leads them to enter networks that are populated predominantly by other Chinese that can often be traced to Chinese-medium education (Yow 2017; Phooi-Yan Lee and Ting 2016). In cases where Chinese wealth manifests in business ownership and employment opportunities, or with workplaces that are predominantly Chinese, then the status and instrumentality of Mandarin in Malaysia is elevated and occupies a status otherwise held by English. This is not just speculation, but recognized by local Chinese, Malay and Indian youths. Rather than expressing indignation or being despondent about the hegemonic Malaysian language policy that strips Chinese-Malaysians of their language rights, they argued that Mandarin (and notably not English) is the logical national language, but is not simply because it is “quite tough to read and write”, because “our staff from government is Malay. They can’t speak Mandarin” and because having Bahasa Malaysia as the national language instead of Mandarin is “a way to not let the language [go] extinct”. They do not feel the hegemonic impacts of Malaysian language policy because they are oftentimes not subjected to policy anyway which, as described earlier, results from a Chinese sociology of socio-economic networks and creates a confidence about the indispensability of Mandarin. This wealth, and the preeminence of the Chinese in the Malaysian economy, renders Mandarin – to their minds – the logical national language for Malaysia, all things being equal. Chinese-Malaysians therefore noted that learning Mandarin is popular among non-Chinese Malaysians in order to advance oneself socio-economically in Malaysia and to enjoy the same economic privileges as the Chinese. For example, Chinese students explained, “Malays, actually, they need Mandarin”, and in arguing this they implied that Mandarin is no longer a language in the margins, but an essential element – in direct contradiction to nationalist Malay policy and rhetoric – in the operation and successfully functioning of contemporary Malaysia. This is further elucidated in the following dialogues from group discussions: Researcher: How do you think they [Malays and Indians] feel about Mandarin? Student 3: As an opportunity because most businesses in Malaysia are, like, owned by Chinese, so if you know the Chinese language, you have, like, greater advantage. Researcher: Why do they learn Mandarin? Student 4: Because they are living in Malaysia. These sentiments were indeed reflected by non-Malays. Malay students themselves argued that beyond proficiency in Bahasa Malaysia and English, Mandarin is a new linguistic precursor to socio-economic mobility in the Malaysian economy, precisely because the balance of economic power is in the hands of Mandarin-speakers. Malay youths argued, for example, that “we want the Malay people, Malay students, to learn Mandarin. So at least we won’t have trouble when we work with a Chinese company. And that way the Chinese boss treats us equally”. That is to say, equal opportunity in Malaysia

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was seen as achievable through Mandarin, parallel or perhaps even beyond the existing instrumentality of English, because it is the language of those who provide and regulate access to employment. To this end, the enrolment of non-Chinese students in Mandarinmedium education is indeed increasing (Malaysiadigest​.c​om 2015; Yin 2015). However, it is also the international rise of China in global economics and politics – where Mandarin is the state language – which means English is challenged by Mandarin in ideological terms. Chinese-Malaysian students explained that Malaysians need to learn Mandarin as the language of Malaysia’s future and economic interdependencies. They argued, for example, that “Mandarin is important because the companies that are hiring us want Chinese speaking people. Because Chinese, like China, is becoming a global superpower”. Some added that it is also for this reason that the enrolment of Malay and Indian students in Mandarin-medium education is increasing, suggesting that “their parents think that there is a need for their child to master this language not only as a Malaysian himself, but also for international purposes when you have to work with China in the future”. The students, whether through experience or on the basis of discourse, see an increasing relevance of China to the local economy and the commercial opportunities that are made available with China. Mandarin, not English, is the language of those opportunities. This is not to say that English has been stripped of its prestige. It is to say, however, that economic and political developments in Malaysia – and in the Asian region more generally headed by “China’s spectacular development” (Bishop 2018) – are probably rebalancing language ideologies in Malaysia. English is no longer the single linguistic provider of socio-economic advancement or international mobility for Malaysians. The wealth of the Malaysian-Chinese community, plus the rise of the Chinese economy internationally, means young Malaysians are attaching prestige and instrumentality to Mandarin parallel to English – in a way that potentially rivals English locally – at least in ideology, if not yet in practice.

IV.  NEW ZEALAND: WHERE MĀORI CHALLENGES THE CULTURAL CURRENCY OF ENGLISH In the case of New Zealand, I have found that it is not the socio-economic instrumentality of English that is being challenged, but its local cultural prestige and authenticity in the wake of, and within social consciousness of, British colonial atrocities. By definition, New Zealand is today a bicultural state. Governance is, in theory, subject to negotiation between indigenous Māori tribes and the British Crown. The British Monarch is the official head of state, and the Crown is represented by the New Zealand government (Orange 2011). The Treaty of Waitangi – the founding document that sets out the relationship between Māori and Pakeha (European New Zealanders) – affords Māori self-determination visà-vis Māori taonga (treasures, or cultural and physical possessions) (Toki 2017). Again, this promise has often only been theoretical in its application. Failure of the Crown to comprehensively afford self-determination was a precursor to establishing the Waitangi Tribunal to hear Māori grievances vis-à-vis the Māori governance of Māori affairs that the treaty assures, including of natural resources and the cultural heritage. The relationship between Māori and the Crown has therefore been a defining factor in modern New Zealand history and in building New Zealand as an independent nation within the broader Commonwealth of Nations. In this context, matters of language, and especially

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of the survival and place of the Māori language vis-à-vis English, have been subject to vexed social policy processes. Initially, British colonization of New Zealand, coupled with a sense of European superiority, all but wiped out the indigenous te reo Māori. The story is one that parallels that of other Indigenous languages that were suppressed across the British empire with the intention of assimilating Indigenous peoples to British culture and values. From around the mid-nineteenth century, New Zealand policy was indeed to anglicize the Māori, and this fostered wholesale language shift from te reo Māori monolingualism, to te reo Māori/English bilingualism and eventually to English monolingualism among the indigenous population (Waitangi Tribunal 2011; Albury 2016a). The 1880 Native Schools Code allowed for the physical punishment of Māori children if caught speaking their Indigenous languages on school grounds, and the country’s pepper-pitting policy required that urbanized Māori live in English-speaking neighbourhoods with the objective of interrupting intergenerational transmission of their language (Davey and Kearns 1994). The notion was a modernist European one backed up by racist ideas of social Darwinism whereby the modern nation state needed to be monolingual, and that monolingualism would necessarily be in English as the language of those seen by the British imperialists as the superior of the two groups. By 1979, fewer than 100 children had any high-level proficiency in te reo Māori (Waitangi Tribunal 2011). Parallel to a global shift in consciousness towards minority peoples subsequent to the world wars (Todal 2003), a sense of postcolonial guilt settled in the white New Zealand psyche. This consequently transpired in New Zealand state policy. To cut a long historical story short, a Māori cultural renaissance took place and sought “primarily [to restore] Maori sovereignty over the lives of Maori people” (Van Meijl 2006). White perspectives of the Māori softened when reflecting upon the losses Māori suffered in the first and second world wars in the name of the British Crown (New Zealand History Online 2012). Māori – the very people the British had imperialized by force – had joined the fight against imperialism in Europe and Asia and died for their European peers. A turn in national psyche towards the Māori, although of course not universal, prompted a national policy shift away from suppressing Māoridom. Modern New Zealand would seek to protect and promote Māoridom as a matter of Indigenous self-determination and of postcolonial reconciliation, and to correct previous injustices. This meant seeking to restore what had been eroded by racist social Darwinism, including te reo Māori. The state began funding the grass-roots kurakaupapa Māori-medium education established by Māori community themselves as a protest to Pakeha hegemony, and the language became an official language of the country in 1986. This arose from a Waitangi Tribunal finding that the language is taonga, and therefore must be subject to governance by Māori themselves within the framework of Māori self-determination, whereas Crown management of it – whether through oppression or otherwise – was a constitutional violation (Benton 2017). The Waitangi Tribunal (2011) only further strengthened its position in 2011 when it found that The language is clearly a taonga of quite transcendent importance to Māori, and few other taonga could rival its status . . . the Crown’s protection of it clearly needs to accord with Māori preferences – and, indeed, be determined in large measure by Māori ideas. (442) The point for this chapter is that although the language has been positioned in recent years as a property and responsibility of Māori, my research shows that Pakeha youths reject this. State policy on te reo Māori, guided by Waitangi Tribunal rulings on it, has

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positioned the language in ideologically neotraditional terms whereby the language is for and by ethnic Māori, whereby language revitalization – whether in schools or in communities – does not require Pakeha participation beyond showing goodwill to Māori linguistic endeavours (de Bres 2011). This aligns with sociolinguistic theorizing that suggests that Indigenous languages need to at least be tolerated by the ethnic majority to be successfully revitalized (May 2003). To my mind, this presupposes that an ideology that exceeds tolerance may be unthinkable and that the ethnic majority necessarily sees an Indigenous language as a threat, whether to culture or to social cohesion. This is not unfounded, as it has clearly been the case, for example, in Norway vis-à-vis the Sami languages and in Japan vis-à-vis Ainu (Hiss 2013; Yotsumoto 2019). I argue, however, that this may be the opposite of the ideologies held by Pakeha youth in my research. They instead saw te reo Māori as intrinsic to their sense of New Zealand social citizenship and national identity, and even as authentic New Zealandness in respect to other nations. In my research, they did not attach such legitimacy and authenticity to English in matters of interethnic identity, such that te reo Māori – rather than English – appears to construct a sense of postcolonial national self. Rather, Pakeha youth saw te reo Māori as a matter of biculturalism whereby it constitutes cultural and identity property of Māori and Pakeha alike alongside, but not superseded by, English. In fact, 70 per cent of Pakeha in my research argued that te reo Māori indexes their own New Zealand identity, even if they are not proficient in it, and 95 per cent rejected it as only indexing Māori ethnic identity (Albury 2016a). That is to say, the vast majority did not see English as the single legitimate linguistic index of their collective citizenship as contemporary New Zealanders, even though it is their first language and high-level proficiency in te reo Māori is rare. They explained, for example, that “regardless of ethnicity, I believe New Zealanders collectively have a right to it” whereby English holds no higher ideological status than te reo Māori in terms of identity. This, I believe, in part has its genesis in postcolonial guilt. For example, Pakeha youths argued that Māori language revitalization is simply indispensable. They explained that “if we lose their language, we lose our history” whereby our history includes suppression and te reo Māori ought to be revived for the purposes of contemporary nationhood (Albury 2018a). Others more adamantly argued that the status of English must be reduced on the basis of moral conscience, arguing colonialism has been worse in the last 30 years and in the 100 years previous to it. Furthermore, the passing of native speakers and the loss of traditional communities and identities which fall apart due to financial pressures in an increasingly unequal society contribute to the risk of losing te reo. Around 45 per cent also claimed that English place names ought to be eradicated where Māori place names had existed but were erased by colonialists, arguing, for example, that “places that have a historical or significant relation to Māori should have an official Māori name”. Another 11.5 per cent argued that place-naming should be rebalanced to reflect the biculturalism of the country that arises from the colonial past, but configuring this biculturalism so that English is not superior to te reo Māori (Albury and Carter 2017). Surprisingly, however, only 27 per cent agreed that that te reo Māori should immediately be taught before other foreign languages, and only a few of those students felt that it should be made as compulsory in the school system as English. These students rejected the colonial hegemony of English and the suppressive policy of English monolingualism enacted by their ancestors to explain that “Pakeha should grow up bilingual too” and “I

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find it offensive when people think that as a NZ European I would have no interest in the language initially spoken in the land that I come from”. However, the vast majority of other Pakeha did argue that mandatory te reo Māori study should indeed be introduced, but only once the teacher workforce is adequately trained to implement such policy. This would ensure that the language is taught as effectively as English. Building on this, others even argued that te reo Māori – and not English – represents contemporary New Zealand citizenship and is the bona fide linguistic index of New Zealand on the international stage. This, I believe and drawing on insights from Belich (2001), finds its genesis – although no doubt related to postcolonial guilt – in a quest to establish a unique New Zealand identity that does not rely exclusively or necessarily on the legacy of being British. In doing this, te reo Māori is positioned as just as or more culturally authentic and legitimate than English, including among Pakeha. For example, they argued that the language “helps to invigorate a unique national identity”, “defines national identity” rendering it “good for tourism”, and that “if you consider yourself a New Zealander, whether Māori or Pākeha or other ethnicity, te reo should be considered at least part of your culture”. Ideas such as these generated by Pakeha might, from a political perspective, be seen as dangerous territory. After all, who are Pakeha today, whose forefathers annexed Māori land and colonized Māori minds, to now also annex the Māori language for their own personal identity purposes or to treat their postcolonial guilt? Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) reminds us that “it appalls [Indigenous people] that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce” (1). This sentiment seems to structure the state’s neo-traditionalist language policy discussed earlier. However, it does not seem to be the case that Māori youths were opposed to Pakeha seeking identity in te reo Māori. To the contrary, the vast majority argued that Pakeha have a postcolonial responsibility towards the language in the spirit of interethnic reconciliation, arguing for example that “it is important not to associate the language with only Māori but all citizens/residents of NZ as it is a sign of national pride and an acknowledgment of our history”. However, this is not to say these Pakeha sentiments towards te reo Māori were unanimous. Pockets of neocolonial racist discourse nonetheless emerged, such as when Pakeha claimed that “shoving Māori down everybody’s throats is the absolute worst idea, it is a complete waste of time and resources especially when more important stuff could be taught to a greater extent” and that in respect to a perceived need to revitalize the language, the “Maori are whinging about fuck all”. Nor is this to say that Pakeha have learned te reo Māori to an extent that they are balanced bilinguals. Rather, this is far from the case. The challenge the Māori language poses to English is an ideological, conceptual and esoteric one, and not necessarily an instrumental or practical one. English remained steadfastly at the centre of discourses – among both Pakeha and Māori – about socio-economic mobility and international communication. Accordingly, sufficient language revitalization, Māori and Pakeha both felt, will be achieved once te reo Māori proficiency is distributed across the ethnicities, but only to a low, tokenistic level that might hardly be seen as securing language vitality (Albury 2018a). For these students, this low-level proficiency – as long as it is widespread across ethnicities – is seemingly enough to ensure te reo Māori can inform and index biculturalism and a national identity, while not interrupting their own mobility afforded by the international dominance of English which, coincidently, is their own first language. In other words, while these students did not seek to dismantle the economic currency of English of which they by chance are first-language speakers, they did dismantle the

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cultural currency of it – with reflections on postcolonial atrocities and guilt – for defining contemporary New Zealand.

V.  CONCLUSION Has English had its day? This is perhaps a question that the above case studies prompt us to ask. The answer, in practice, is no. There is by no means any evidence in my research discussed earlier that suggests that English has had its day. The research I have summarized in this chapter does, however, suggest that cracks have emerged in what may otherwise be seen as the ironclad universal status of English. This status, bolstered by assumptions that the status is unchallenged or at least is not challenged successfully, has occupied much of critical sociolinguistic scholarship from language and mobility, globalization and neoliberalism to language in postcolonial context (cf. Jenkins et al. 2011; Piller and Cho 2013; Phillipson 2003; Ramanathan 2005). However, socio-economic developments – locally among the Chinese-Malaysian community, and internationally, as a result of the booming Chinese economy and the commercial opportunities this creates – means English in Malaysia now has to share its ideological socio-economic prestige with Mandarin. Malaysian youths did not see English as the sole linguistic provider of socio-economic advancement. Instead, they were clear in their views that Mandarin is also indispensable in Malaysia’s current and future economy. Perhaps this challenge to English – whereby Mandarin is afforded at least some of the economic status that English previously held independently – is also arising in other societies that are economically intertwined with China. China is, after all, the rising dragon and since the size of the Chinese economy reached over USD 10 trillion, accounting for over 13% of the global GDP, contributing about 25% of global economic growth and becoming the largest nation in international trade of goods and second largest source and destination of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), any influence of the Chinese economy on the rest of the world is significant. (Jin et al. 2016, 272) Sociolinguists should therefore listen to economists. The global economic structure is changing and increasingly finding clout in Mandarin-speaking China. In as far as language is capital and can be commodified, then it only stands to reason that the global linguistic ecology – in terms of language and socio-economic mobility – will respond to these economic changes. This will also be reflected in language ideologies. The case of New Zealand, however, shows us that it is the cultural currency of English – instead of its economic currency – that can be challenged. The dominance of English internationally, and as the linguistic index of globalization, has not just been an economic phenomenon but also a cultural one. Anglo-American cultural products have been exported and appropriated globally. This may take on a bitter taste in the case of ex-British colonies where the English language also indexes annexation of land, forced assimilation and the suppression of Indigenous peoples, cultures and languages. Just as the global economy has evolved, so too has the global conscience in respect to the plight of Indigenous peoples and the atrocities inflicted upon them. For English-speaking Pakeha youth, a sense of postcolonial guilt – coupled with their own quest to identify in non-British terms – meant they afforded te reo Māori greater cultural legitimacy than English for describing and defining contemporary New Zealand. Te reo Māori was upheld as the authentic language of the New Zealand territory and of its Indigenous people. It was by no means upheld as

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economically more instrumental than English, but it had won from English the linguistic index of New Zealand national identity. My guess is that even where postcolonial guilt vis-à-vis the dominance of English is not at play, we may find that the cultural allure of English as an index of Anglo-American culture may wane. The Trump presidency has certainly frayed international perceptions of the United States, from Trump offending the Danish with proposals to purchase Greenland, to launching a trade war with China and calling African states “shitholes” (Watkins and Phillip 2018), all while hurtling democracy – the hallmark of American foreign policy – into crisis. Brexit too will decrease British influence in Europe, and is also viewed by some as a product of arrogant and circumspect British exceptionalism. This means the impacts of these historic events may not be purely political. If the cultural currency of Anglo-American products wanes as a result of shifting global perceptions of dominant English-speaking societies, then so too might the cultural currency of the English language. This is of course speculation. It does, however, open up an intriguing line of research in language ideology studies, and this chapter indeed shows that evolving ideologies may not necessarily or uniformly pedestalize English. One thing is for sure: all world languages have their day. Latin had it. French had it more recently, too. The next to fall from its throne will at some point be English.

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Johnson, D. C. (2009), ‘Ethnography of Language Policy’, Language Policy, 8 (2): 139–59. King, K., L. Fogle and A. Logan‐Terry (2008), ‘Family Language Policy’, Language and Linguistics Compass, 2 (5): 907–22. Li, W. (1994), Three Generations, Two Languages, One Family: Language Choice and Language Shift in a Chinese Community in Britain, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Malaysiadigest​.co​m. A Vernacular School Where Malay Outnumber Chinese Pupils. (2 October 2015), Malaysiadigest​.com​. Malaysian Investment Development Authority (2019). Why Malaysia. http:​/​/www​​.mida​​.gov.​​my​/ ho​​me​/wh​​y​-mal​​ays​ia​​/post​​s/ (accessed 30 April 2016). May, S. (2003), ‘Rearticulating the Case for Minority Language Rights’, Current Issues in Language Planning, 4 (2): 95–125. New Zealand History Online (2012), ‘Impact - Maori and the Second World War’, http:​/​/www​​ .nzhi​​story​​.net.​​nz​/wa​​r​/mao​​ri​-an​​d​-the​​-seco​​nd​-wo​​​rld​-w​​ar​/im​​pact.​ Noor, N. M. and C.-H Leong (2013), ‘Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore: Contesting Models’, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 37 (6): 714–26. Orange, C. (2011), The Treaty of Waitangi, Wellington: Bridget Williams Books. Phillipson, R. (2003), English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy, London and New York: Routledge. Phooi-Yan Lee, D. and S.-H Ting (2016), ‘Tracing Ethnic Socialisation of Chinese in Malaysia to Chinese-medium School’, Global Chinese (vol. 2), 2 (2): 163–87. Piller, I. and J. Cho (2013), ‘Neoliberalism as Language Policy’, Language in Society, 42 (1): 23–44. Preston, D. (2005), ‘What Is Folk Linguistics? Why Should You Care?’, Lingua Posnaniensis: Czasopismo Poświecone Językoznawstwu Porównawczemu i Ogólnemu, 47: 143–62. Preston, D. (2011), ‘Methods in (Applied) Folk Linguistics: Getting into the Minds of the Folk’, AILA Review, 24 (1): 15–39. Pyvis, D. and A. Chapman (2007), ‘Why University Students Choose an International Education: A Case Study in Malaysia’, International Journal of Educational Development, 27 (2): 235–46. Ramanathan, V. (2005), The English-Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice (vol. 49), Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ricento, T. (2015), ‘Political Economy and English as a “Global” Language’, in T. Ricento (ed.), Language Policy and Political Economy: English in a Global Context, 27–47, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Ridge, B. (2004), ‘Bangsa Malaysia and Recent Malaysian English Language Policies’, Current Issues in Language Planning, 5 (4): 407–23. Rumsey, A. (1990), ‘Wording, Meaning, and Linguistic Ideology’, American Anthropologist, 92 (2): 346–61. Sadka, E. (1968), The Protected Malay States, 1874–1895, Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press. Smart, B. (ed.). (1999), Resisting McDonaldization, London: Sage. Smith, L. T. (1999), Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books. Sodian, B. and S. Kristen. (2010), ‘Theory of Mind’, in B. Glatzeder, V. Goel and A. Müller (eds), Towards a Theory of Thinking: Building Blocks for a Conceptual Framework, 189–201, Heilderberg: Springer. Spolsky, B. (2009), Language Management, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Todal, J. (2003), ‘The Sámi School System in Norway and International Cooperation’, Comparative Education, 39 (2): 185–92. Toki, V. (2017), ‘Maori Seeking Self-determination or Tino Rangatiratanga? A Note’. Journal of Maori and Indigenous Issues, 5: 134–44. ‘Trump decries immigrants from “shithole countries” coming to US’ (12 January 2018), CNN. Van Meijl, T. (2006), ‘Multiple Identifications and the Dialogical Self: Urban Maori Youngsters and the Cultural Renaissance’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12 (4): 917–33. Veracini, L. (2014), ‘Understanding Colonialism and Settler Colonialism as Distinct Formations’, Interventions, 16 (5): 615–33. Waitangi Tribunal (2011), ‘Wai 262 Waitangi Tribunal Report 2011′, Wellington: Legislation Direct. Watkins, E. and B. Phillip (2018). https​:/​/ed​​ition​​.cnn.​​com​/2​​018​/0​​1​/11/​​polit​​ics​/i​​mmigr​​ants-​​shith​​ ole​-c​​ountr​​ies​​-t​​rump/​​index​​.html​ “The World Doesn’t Hate Trump’s America as Much as People Think”. (9 July 2019), The Washington Post. Wright, S. (2003), Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalisation, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Yin, J. T. Y. (2015), ‘Malay Parents’ Perspective on Admission of Their Children to Chinese Primary School in Kelantan, Malaysia’, Researchers World, 6 (1): 26–30. Yotsumoto, Y. (2019), ‘Revitalization of the Ainu Language: Japanese Government Efforts’, in S. D. Brunn and R. Kehrein (eds), Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, 1–17, Cham: Springer International Publishing. Yow, C. H. (2017), ‘Ethnic Chinese in Malaysian Citizenship: Gridlocked in Historical Formation and Political Hierarchy’, Asian Ethnicity, 18 (3): 277–95. Zhou, M. and W. Xiaomei (2017), ‘Introduction: Understanding Language Management and Multilingualism in Malaysia’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 244: 1–16.

Chapter 12

“We’re a Nation that Speaks English” Language Ideology and Discrimination in the US English Only Movement RACHELE LAWTON

I.  INTRODUCTION This chapter examines the ideological assumptions and conceptions, both implicit and overtly stated, with symbolic as well as material effects, that inform the English Only movement in the United States.1 English Only is a political movement whose proponents contend that national unity, identity, and the English language are threatened by immigrants and their languages and must be protected (Lawton 2013, 2016). The discourse of the English Only movement is typically dominated by three issues, best described as in opposition to educational policy designed to support language minoritized children (bilingual education), restriction of linguistic access to political and civil rights (e.g., multilingual services for non-English speakers), and support for legislation that would give English official status (Schmidt 2000). These issues overlap and are interrelated, feeding upon and influencing each other (Schmidt 2007). While English Only proponents tend to emphasize the unifying role that English plays in public life, their overarching goal is to restrict the use of other languages in the public sphere. At face value, English Only rhetoric often sounds like linguistic nationalism, but the movement’s real motivation is discrimination and disenfranchisement (Crawford 2001). Though English Only has existed in its current iteration since the 1980s, there has been a resurgence in rhetoric that can be characterized as xenophobic and anti-immigrant, anti-Latino in particular. The increase in discriminatory, dehumanizing discourse around immigrants and language-Latinos and Spanish in particular – has occurred unsurprisingly in conjunction with Donald Trump’s presidency and the white nationalist discourses it has engendered. This phenomenon calls for a critical discursive analysis of the English Only movement and its inherently ideological dimensions, given that arguments about language are essentially about power and ideology and often function as thinly veiled anti-immigrant sentiment. Thus, the overarching goals of this chapter are to illuminate the ideological dimensions of the English Only movement, dispel assertions that the movement’s goal is to reinforce English’s unifying role in the United States, and expose its discriminatory underpinnings

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through examples of English Only discourse within the contemporary US context. Discourse often embodies ideological assumptions that are portrayed as common sense and contribute to sustaining power relations (see, for example, Fairclough 2015; Reisigl and Wodak 2016; Wodak and Meyer 2016). Ideologies influence decisions related to language and, in spite of the linguistic heterogeneity that exists in the United States, prevail on a variety of levels and serve to marginalize, demonize, delegitimize and discriminate. I begin by discussing the recent history of the English Only movement, including an overview of its aims and the citizens’ action groups that fuel its discourse. From there, I examine the historical relationship between language and immigration in the United States and discuss language policy, ideology, and discourse as a form of social practice. Next, I discuss critical discursive approaches to the study of language ideology. I conclude with illustrative examples from recent discourse produced by English Only proponents, drawn from citizens’ action groups, politicians, news media, businesses, and everyday people.

II.  THE MODERN ENGLISH ONLY MOVEMENT: AN OVERVIEW Since its inception in the early 1980s, the English Only movement, a language policy issue, has experienced varying levels of support. Its proponents have been galvanized in recent years, due in part to immigration to the United States from the Spanish-speaking world, the increased use of the Spanish language and the nationalist discourses currently prevalent in the United States. May (2001: 205) categorizes English Only arguments into four specific, problematic areas, which are explored throughout the chapter:

1. Historical inaccuracy about the role of English and other languages in the United States;



2. Explicit links between a lack of English and educational failure and a misrepresentation of bilingual education;



3. Inherent nativism that uses language to maintain racialized distinctions (e.g., Latino/Hispanophobia)2;



4. The assumption that speaking English is unifying while multilingualism is destructive of national unity.

Schmid (2001: 4) notes that “language alone has rarely been the major source of conflict in American society; instead, it has been the proxy for other conditions that have challenged the power relations of the dominant group(s).” Lippi-Green (2012) asserts that since the use of race, ethnicity, national origin, and economic class to exclude others is not officially acceptable, US institutions use accent or language as gatekeepers to entrance into the majority culture.

English Only’s Aims As mentioned, the English Only movement’s specific aims are to make English the official language of the United States, limit services in languages other than English, and restrict or eliminate bilingual education (Schmidt 2000). Though the official status of English has been debated since the founding of the United States, no policy has ever been established at the federal level (Ricento 1996), though almost every session of Congress has seen

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English Language Amendments proposed to the US constitution, the first of which dates to 1981 and was introduced by US Senator S. I. Hayakawa. The movement has seen some success at the state level, however, with Official English laws passed in thirty-two of fifty states. Languages other than English have a precarious status in most states, as the goal of Official English legislation is to prevent government from conducting business and providing services in other languages. In some cases, there are material effects for those targeted by such policies, but they are often symbolic; that is, they have no enforcement mechanism and simply declare that English is the state’s official language (Schmidt 2007). Consequently, the greatest danger of the English Only movement may be its ability to influence public opinion through the propagation of discriminatory, anti-immigrant discourse masked by common sense arguments about language and upward mobility for immigrants (Lawton 2013). Nonetheless, English Only proponents do aim to restrict the political and civil rights of individuals who speak languages other than English. Examples include repealing laws that mandate multilingual voting materials, restricting the translation of drivers’ license examinations into languages other than English, reinforcing English language requirements for citizenship, prohibiting the use of languages other than English in the workplace, and hindering the delivery of adequate medical and social services to undocumented immigrants. Proponents argue that if services are provided only in English, then immigrants will have no choice but to learn the language, yet they rarely mention support for English language learners during transitional periods. Because of the rise in non-English speaking newcomers to the US, “bilingualism” has often been portrayed as a menace to national unity and served as a powerful symbol of the tensions between natives and immigrants (Schmid 2001: 4), particularly those from the Spanish-speaking world. Bilingual education, more specifically, has often figured prominently on the English Only agenda. Fishman (1988) describes bilingual education as “the largest and most omnipresent non-English-language effort of the federal and of various state governments” and expressed concern about feeling “nervous about its future, even when it is explicitly excluded from any particular ‘English Official’ agenda” (128). Since the passage of the Bilingual Education Act in 1968, arguments about its efficacy have abounded, including claims that it was actually “Spanish Only” in practice and would relegate students to second-class citizenship through higher dropout rates (Krashen 1996, 1999). Further, anti-bilingual education legislation has been passed in multiple states, the most restrictive being Propositions 203 (in Arizona in 2000) and 227 (in California 1998).3 Ironically, in many parts of the world, bilingualism is seen as the norm, while in the United States, the dominant view of the world is monolingual (Brutt-Griffler and Varghese 2004). One branch of political opinion sees bilingual education as a failure to foster integration, which produces underachievement, leading to concerns about lack of proficiency in English and social and economic divisions along language lines (Brutt-Griffler and Varghese 2004). To the contrary, scholars have cited studies on well-designed bilingual programs that produce better academic English and provide a more rapid route to literacy development, often in two languages (Krashen 1996). However, there has been little government support for such programs. Baker (2011) summarizes arguments against bilingual education as more about politics than pedagogy, “mythodology” more than effective methodology and prejudice rather than preferable practices, all of which are adopted by English Only proponents who tend to support individual bilingualism but oppose societal bilingualism.

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Citizen’s Action Groups Founded in the 1980s, self-described citizens’ action groups – US English, English First, and Pro-English – have propagated English Only ideologies through their websites, lobbying efforts, media appearances, and public mailings in an attempt to influence public opinion and lobby for Official English legislation. This chapter focuses on US English, the largest and most influential of these groups, which orchestrated the English Only campaign in the 1980s at the national level (Lawton 2013). A mass-based organization and powerful, well-funded right-wing lobby, US English was cofounded in 1983 by John Tanton, a retired ophthalmologist, and former Republican Senator S. I. Hayakawa, who famously said, “bilingualism for the individual is fine, but not for a country,” in support of a common official language.4 Tanton previously had been president of Zero Population Growth and had founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a leading lobby group that supported efforts to limit immigration to the United States.5 US English has garnered significant financial support for its cause, receiving millions of dollars annually from direct mail appeals (Crawford 1992). The organization is selfdescribed as “the nation’s oldest, largest citizens’ action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States.”6 To achieve their objectives and gain supporters, citizens’ action groups, US English in particular, often depict present-day language diversity as a departure from a mythic past in which immigrants quickly learned English and relinquished their native languages in the process (Macias and Wiley 1998). They portray attempts to declare English the official language as a “noble, patriotic cause . . . that grateful Americans (including immigrants) should support with their votes and dollars” (Zentella 1997). Thomas (1996) argues that the efforts of US English and other groups deserve the serious attention of language scholars, who have noted that these groups’ concerns are not based on sociolinguistic expertise (Silverstein 1996). Further, citizens’ action groups have played a role in fueling a sense of insecurity and anger toward Latinos and the Spanish language, though their focus on promoting and protecting the English language avoids racist overtones that might be associated with overt anti-immigration efforts (Zentella 1997).

The Spanish Language and the Latino Population While the English Only movement’s ostensible purpose is to establish English as the official language of the United States, its connections to immigration restriction groups point to a more far-reaching agenda (Draper and Jiménez 1996). Spanish-speaking immigrants in particular are targeted, as evidenced by Hispanophobic discourse, which characterizes the Spanish language, Spanish speakers, and Latino leaders as the antithesis of their English-speaking/US American counterparts (Zentella 1997). Because Latinos figure prominently in the English Only debate, they are often portrayed as ethnic and linguistic separatists who pose a threat to American values, national identity, and the English language. Zentella (1997: 75) points out that English Only resurfaced with vigor at a time of unprecedented emigration from the Spanish-speaking world. The percentage of Hispanics in the United States increased significantly from the 1970s to the end of the 20th century: 61 percent between 1970 and 1980, 53 percent between 1980 and 1990, and 27 percent between 1990 and 1996; this is compared to 9 percent, 7 percent, and 4 percent for the total non-Hispanic population during the same time periods (Schmid 2001: 6). In the 1990 census, Spanish speakers constituted a numerical majority (54.4 percent) of the nearly thirty-two million US residents whose

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language was not English.7 The 2000 census then revealed that nearly thirty-eight million speakers of Spanish lived in the United States, and that the Hispanic population had more than doubled in size from 1980 to 2000.8 The most recent US census data indicates that Hispanics in the United States number nearly sixty million and constitute nearly 20 percent of the population, though ethnicity and country of origin cannot be conflated with language proficiency: only 21.3 percent of the US population speaks a language other than English at home, and only 8.5 percent speak English less than very well.9 In spite of such evidence, English Only discourse often constructs a narrative in which English is threatened by Spanish. Further, the native status of Spanish in multiple regions of the United States, especially the southwest, is often overlooked, even though many Spanish speakers historically were incorporated into the United States through conquest and annexation, not voluntary immigration.

III.  LANGUAGE AND IMMIGRATION IN THE UNITED STATES: THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND BIRTH OF THE ENGLISH ONLY MOVEMENT An understanding of the US historical context, particularly as it relates to language and immigration, is essential to understanding the modern English Only movement and the ideologies it has produced. As is the case with most modern nation-states, the United States’s language history is much more diverse and contested than assertions of English dominance might suggest (May 2003). While the dominant language and culture have been imposed on immigrants throughout US history, the policies and practices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries demonstrate that linguistic and cultural diversity were also viable options (Pavlenko 2002: 167). In the American colonies, Dutch, Swedish and German were widely spoken (Zentella 1997) while Spanish and French predominated outside of them (May 2003). Newspapers were published in multiple languages throughout the United States (Pavlenko 2002: 169), and in the 1830s, there existed small Midwestern towns in which German was used as the de facto public and private language and English was rarely heard; both publicly and privately funded bilingual schools also existed until the early part of the twentieth century (Ricento 2005: 350). At that time, bilingual education in English and German was more widespread than bilingual programs in all languages in the United States in the twenty-first century (Crawford 2008: 118).10 Heath (1992) argues that no language policy was established at the federal level because the new nation’s founders associated an official status for English with European monarchy and aristocracy. A deliberate choice was therefore made not to declare an official language, and though the United States was not a monolingual country at that time, the nation’s leaders were convinced that English would be established as the national tongue in practice (Judd 1987: 115). During the early national period, language was seen as a pragmatic tool rather than an ideological symbol, so the use of languages other than English was encouraged because of advantages and opportunities for the expansion of knowledge; further, other languages were considered to be national assets (Heath 1992: 12–13). In spite of an absence of federal language policy, however, Pac (2012) notes that English was still established as the official language in the public domain and imposed through explicit or implicit policies encountered during the pursuit of Manifest Destiny11 in America, impacting Native Americans and involuntary immigrants (enslaved Africans), territorial minorities (e.g., Mexicans), and voluntary immigrants from many parts of the world (Crawford 1992; Pavlenko 2002).

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The links between language, ideology, and immigration must be understood within the context of immigration patterns throughout US history, particularly the period between the early twentieth century and the 1980s. The United States has a history of regulating immigration, as evidenced in particular by the 1924 National Origins Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which sought overall limits on immigration and favored immigrants from Europe over other regions of the world (Jernegan 2005). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the majority of immigrants were from northern Europe. When countries of origin began to change, language restriction and nativist movements flourished, as newcomers from Italy, Austria-Hungary, Poland and Russia, and Southern and Eastern Europe were a different source of immigration prior to the latter part of the nineteenth century (Martin and Midgley 1994). Between 1880 and 1924, an atmosphere of hatred toward German-Americans and apprehension of the new Southern and Eastern European immigrants in the post–First World War period led to an ideological shift regarding language (Pavlenko 2002). Immigration slowed throughout the First World War and increased again in the early 1920s; however, restrictive legislation and the Great Depression curtailed immigration until the easing of legal restrictions began after the Second World War. Immigration remained relatively low until the mid-1960s, when the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments of 1965 abolished the national origins quota system, which had favored Northwestern Europeans, limited Eastern Europeans, and those from Mediterranean countries and virtually excluded Asians, and raised numerical limits on immigration (Schmid 2001). Family reunification gained precedence over country of origin as a criterion for granting visas (Schmid 2001). The United States then began to experience a change in immigration patterns, fostering the perception, beginning in 1965, that the linguistic hegemony of English was threatened because many non-English speakers were retaining their native tongues due to encouragement by government policies (Schmid 2001: 8). By the end of the twentieth century, over 90 percent of immigrants to the United States were from non-European countries, with Mexico being the top country of origin for new immigrants during the 1980s. The rate of increase in the minority population was nearly twice as fast in the 1980s as in the 1970s, fostering the perception that newcomers were no longer learning English (Schmid 2001). This fostered a sense of insecurity among the majority monolingual English-speaking population and the emergence of a political shift toward a definition of American identity. Over time, this has manifested in several ways, including a push for stricter immigration requirements and an increase in movements supporting restrictive language policies (Lawton 2013), demonstrating the inextricable link that is now perceived between threats to the dominance of English and rising immigration, and resulting in renewed hostility toward language minorities in discourse and in practice. Though restrictive language movements had existed in earlier periods of US history, English Only agitation had been lying dormant for nearly half a century when it suddenly resurfaced in the 1980s (Schmid 2001). Subsequently, ballot initiatives to make English the official language and impose other restrictions favoring English began to emerge, engendering the modern English Only movement (Lawton 2013).

IV.  LANGUAGE POLICY, IDEOLOGY, AND DISCOURSE AS SOCIAL ACTION To demonstrate the link between immigration and arguments about language, this chapter draws on Tollefson’s (1991) conception of “critical” language policy, which locates it

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within social theory, refers to both governmental and nongovernmental activities, and implies a dynamic relationship between social relations and language policy. Through the discourse of the English Only movement, it aims to highlight the inherently ideological, sociopolitical, and often discursive nature of language policy, both in the United States and other countries where different languages coexist within a nation-state context (see Barakos and Unger 2016 for a discussion on why discursive approaches to language policy are necessary). Thus, discourse is described as texts (defined broadly) in their social context or language treated as social action, and the links between discourse, ideology, and language policy are made explicit. Language policy is a multilayered phenomenon that is often constituted and enacted in and through discourse, and a critical approach involves engaging with what goes on “beyond the text” (Barakos and Unger 2016), considering specific social and discursive contexts. Further, language policy is often materially framed by institutions and by economic and social relations (see Fairclough 2010, 2015; Williams 1977). I follow Wodak’s (2006: 170) description of language policy as “every public influence on the communication of languages, the sum of those ‘top-down’ and ‘bottomup’ political initiatives through which a particular language or languages is/are supported in their public validity, their functionality and their dissemination.” Because the English Only movement involves various social actors and impacts the lives and attitudes of those in a position to influence and enact policies as well as ordinary individuals, “top-down” and “bottom-up” initiatives are equally relevant. Language policy is also a mechanism of power, in that it institutionalizes language hierarchies that privilege dominant groups/languages and denies equal access to political power and economic resources (Johnson 2013: 7). Further, language policy agents draw on various ideologies in their discourse, which often relies on the positive presentation of “the self” and the negative presentation of “the other” (Wodak 2006), intersecting with arguments about immigration. According to Reisigl and Wodak (2009), ideology is “an (often) one-sided perspective or world view composed of related mental representations, convictions, opinions, attitudes and evaluations, which is shared by members of a specific social group” (88). In the Gramscian (see Fogacs 1988) sense, the Marxist concept of ideology developed into linguistic hegemony, which can be seen as practices that are built into institutions, reinforcing privilege as a natural condition. Bourdieu (1991), too, claims that the cultural and linguistic capital of dominant and nondominant groups is made unequal by the structure of social institutions. This depends upon the naturalization of ideology as common sense, and ‘in post-Gramscian writings, the term “hegemony” has come to mean the taken-for-granted, almost-invisible discourse practices of symbolic domination’ (Blackledge 2005: 45). Because language is built into the structure of society so deeply, its fundamental importance seems natural, so language policies are often seen as expressions of natural, commonsense assumptions about how language functions in society (Tollefson 1991). Ricento (2006) sees all language discussions as having an inherently ideological nature. Ideologies can be so pervasive and powerful that they become normalized as widely commonsense notions; for example, a nation should have one language, or all immigrants should shift to English in order to be upwardly mobile. As such, ideology can be seen as an underlying issue affecting language policy formation, as it can focus on language as an instrument of control, politically, socially, and economically (Wiley and Lukes 1996: 512). Blackledge and Pavlenko (2002) argue that language ideologies act as gate-keeping practices in order to create, maintain, and reinforce boundaries between people in a broad range of contexts. These ideologies are produced in a variety of areas (such as news

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media, politics, and popular culture) and are present in various discourses (explicit and implicit, visible and invisible, official and unofficial, long term and ephemeral, contested and uncontested, negotiable and nonnegotiable) (Blackledge 2005). Whenever language or languages are discussed, there are always implications for speakers of languages, and these debates, which are about more than language alone, often occur in the context of power relations between groups (Blackledge 2005).

The English Only Ideology The ideology of the English Only movement appears to be one that would require everyone to learn English as the single-dominant language, as this is widely seen as a solution to the communication problems of multilingual societies (Tollefson 1991). Its appeal, explains Tollefson, is in the assumption that monolingualism is a solution to linguistic inequality since linguistic minorities will no longer suffer economic and social inequality if they learn the dominant language (1991: 10). In the United States, understanding of language diversity is shaped by the monolingual [English] ideology, which constructs English monolingualism as normal and even desirable, thereby creating a hegemonic assumption that is widely accepted in popular perceptions of language diversity (Wiley and Lukes 1996: 514). Thus, any public actions that challenge this are experienced as abnormal or illegitimate, serving as cultural power that operates ideologically to legitimate itself (Schmidt 2007: 205). In the English Only context, it is important to examine the construction of English in relation to other languages in US public life and, in doing so, consider how the reproduction of language ideology leads to the valuation of some languages – and thus speakers – over others (Lawton 2016). Language policy scholars often view legislation regulating language as a mechanism of social control, often goaded by racial animus (Pac 2012: 195). The ideology of English monolingualism has been used to rationalize the incorporation and subordination of various groups into the United States, and linguistic assimilation has been regarded as both a panacea and mandate for all groups, since a central tenet of the monolingual ideology is that languages are in competition (Wiley 2000). If only one language can prosper, then that language must conquer all others lest it be conquered itself (Wiley 1999). Consequently, English Only proponents view Spanish as a threat to English that must be conquered. The movement’s ideological underpinnings must be considered when examining the impact of policies derived from dominant ideologies on linguistically diverse populations (Wiley and Lukes 1996: 515), especially as language ideologies are also linked to other social ideologies. Capitalism, US-configured neoliberal capitalism in particular, figures prominently in the ideologies that underscore English Only arguments, as “neoliberalism, as a social system and ideology, is said to have invaded discourse” (Holborow 2012: 14). Language ideologies, which promote English, for example, can be seen as a prop for neoliberalism (28). Immigrants and native-born language minorities are often particularly vulnerable to the ideology of blame as well since language differences have been used as one of the principal means of ascribing a deficit status to them (Wiley and Lukes 1996). Santa Ana (2002) provides a useful example: “When, for example, it is just ‘common sense’ that ‘illegal aliens’ have fewer rights than citizens, or it is only ‘natural’ that students have to disregard or deny their home world in order to be taught things by their teachers, or that only the ‘very best’ students, who happened to be members of a privileged class, go to the best colleges, then we are operating within the ideological assumptions of US social order” (18).

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Further, Pac (2012) argues that the English Only ideology is a primary means of restricting language and imposing the superiority of English. Language ideologies are often intertwined with national identity, which is discursively constructed in myriad ways that consistently relate to setting and history. The idea of one nation-state with one national language, part of what is at the core of the English Only movement, is a relatively recent one, arising from the French Revolution in 1789 and European nationalism (Ricento 2006: 233). May (2001: 58) describes the notion of nations as linguistically determined as essentialist, determinist, and outmoded. Language, however, is not the only factor informing conflicts around national identity; instead, it serves as an element that is invoked in order to assert the legitimacy of the claims of certain groups in the assertion or contestation of power (Ricento 2006: 232). De Cillia, Reisigl, and Wodak (1999: 149) take nations to be “represented in the minds and memories of the nationalized subjects,” and say that they can become influential, guiding ideas. Thus, national identities are discursively produced, reproduced, transformed, and destroyed (1999). Nationalism is of particular relevance to understanding the English Only movement because it provides a useful framework for understanding positive “self” and negative “other” presentation. Billig (1995) notes that the consciousness of national identity presupposes an international context, which needs to be imagined every bit as much as does the national community. For example, when “foreigners” from other nations come to “our” nation, “the imagining of the nation is part of a wider ideological, discursive consciousness” (1995: 94). This ideological consciousness can be seen to be at work in the idea of nationhood, as nation-states can be reproduced by ideological means (Billig 1995: 4). This is evidenced in the surge of nationalism that occurred during the 2016 presidential election campaign and in the years following Trump’s election, which has fueled anti-immigrant sentiment and reinforced the belief that the United States should be a white, anglophone nation.

Critical Discursive Approaches to Language Ideology and Immigration To examine the discursive nature and ideological dimension of language policy in the contemporary United States, I advocate a critical discourse analytic approach which views language as a social practice, considers the sociohistorical conditions of discourse, emphasizes the power and ideology that inform discursive practices (Fairclough 2003; Reisigl and Wodak 2009), and involves diverse theoretical and methodological approaches (Wodak and Meyer 2016). Critical approaches to discourse analysis are also rooted in critique, transformation, and emancipation; thus, Critical Theory, which elucidates the notion of ‘critical’ for CDA and is traced to the influence of the Frankfurt School, features prominently in the theoretical underpinnings of this approach (see Wodak and Myer 2016). It is important to note that within this approach, the analyst is not neutral; this work is explicitly ideological, aimed at the identification and in-depth linguistic analysis of a social problem and geared toward social change. With that said, the researcher’s interpretation of texts is not the only one available, so the analysis should recognize that other interpretations may also be available (Blackledge 2005). Within this particular debate, critique is applied to language and immigration as overlapping topics through the process of interdiscursivity, which signifies that discourses are linked to each other (Reisigl and Wodak 2016), and are intertextual in nature, pointing to a dialectic between discourses, in that texts are “full of snatches of other texts, which may be explicitly demarcated, or merged in . . . and may assimilate, contradict, [and] ironically echo”

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(Fairclough 1992: 84). For example, Official English discourse frequently refers to topics within immigration discourse, and attitudes toward language are often shaped by antiimmigration sentiment. As Musolff and Viola (2019) note, the socio-discursive landscape is characterized by a growing sense of crisis due to [im]migration, at the core of which is the claim that host societies are threatened. Discourses about immigrants are always attempts at reconstructing the threatened “home identity” of the respective host society, and a large body of scholarship exists on the use of metaphor in particular to construct immigration as a problem, particularly in the media (Musolff and Viola (2019); see Lakoff and Johnson 1980 for an in-depth discussion of conceptual metaphor theory). Cisneros (2008) states that rhetoric about immigration often constructs metaphoric representations of immigrants as pollutants, invaders, criminals, diseases, infestations, physical burdens, and destructive floodwaters. Because the human body has long been a metaphor for the nation, immigrants are easily represented as illness, diseases, parasites and plagues that threaten the nation as a body (Chavez 2013). Metaphor also has the potential to be evaluative and ideological, as seen in examples of English Only discourse that portray immigrants and their languages in derogatory and discriminatory terms (Lawton 2013). From a methodological perspective, discourse analysis offers language policy scholars a way to organize and interpret large numbers of texts, facilitating connections between macro, meso, and micro levels of language policy or, in other words, a focus on policy creation, interpretation, appropriation, and recontextualization, or a connection between policy and practice (Johnson 2013: 153). Thus, discourse analytic approaches to language policy research can be useful, given that the discursive dimension of language policy is essential and that language policy involves multiple layers of what Johnson (2013: 105) describes as policy text, discourse and practice, in a dialectical relation with material conditions (Fairclough 2015; Williams 1977). More specifically, a critical discursive framework allows for a close socio-historical and textual analysis of texts (Lawton 2016).12 The Discourse Historical Approach (DHA) (see Reisigl and Wodak 2009; Wodak 2006; Wodak and Meyer 2016) in particular takes a problem-oriented, context-based approach which aims to integrate linguistic, social, and historical data to arrive at in-depth triangulation, to understand language use in its full sociohistorical context and its implied ideological intentions and effects. Wodak (2006: 171) proposes specific discourse analytic methods for analyzing texts that debate, propose, or criticize language policies, which involve establishing connections across levels, layers, and spaces and integrating various theories and methods to interpret the data that represent those connections at each level.13 Discourse analytic research on language and immigration has identified strategies commonly used, including (de)legitimization and (mis)representation, designed to dehumanize immigrants and position them and their languages as the “other,” and coercion, which can manipulate hearers conceptually or emotionally through concealment (Chilton 2004). Metaphor, argumentation, and other linguistic realizations are often used to achieve such strategies. Table 12.1 (adapted from Lawton 2016) captures the DHA’s approach to discourse analysis, including strategies commonly used to discuss language and immigration in the context of the US English Only movement. The purpose of this chapter is not to provide or demonstrate a detailed discourse analytical model but to explore strategies that construct the link between immigration and language, which emphasize a threatened home identity or “self” (Musolff and Viola 2019) and appear as plausible, commonsense arguments. Thus, the following section

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TABLE 12.1  Levels of context for the analysis of the discursive construction of language ideology Levels of context for the analysis of the discursive construction of language ideology The immediate language or text

Discourse topics/themes, arguments, strategies such as (de)legitimization, (mis)representation and coercion, linguistic realizations.

The intertextual and interdiscursive relationship between utterances, texts, genres, and discourses

Past texts and discourses (long and short history of language ideology in the United States); interdiscursivity (discourse on language and immigration); multiple genres and time periods.

The extralinguistic social/ sociological variables and institutional frames of a specific context of situation

Contexts in which “policies” are created, interpreted and appropriated: legislative, lobbying, media, everyday life.

The broader sociopolitical and Sociopolitical and historical contexts, including the historical contexts within which impact of a particular language “policy” on speakers discursive practices are embedded (immigrants), institutions involved, and the beliefs and actions of language policy agents.

provides recent examples of English Only discourse from US president Donald Trump, the media, US English, businesses, and ordinary people in everyday life, underscoring the multilayered nature of language policy and conception of discourse as a form of social practice (Fairclough and Wodak 1997).

V.  ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, examples of the English Only ideology, particularly as it intersects with anti-immigrant sentiment, can be found throughout the public sphere. The examples below are designed to illuminate this ideology and illustrate the links between language and immigration within the English Only movement.14 As Fairclough (2010) notes, discursive practices can have ideological effects because they represent things and people in ways that produce and reproduce unequal power relations. Thus, the English Only movement provides a platform to propagate certain ideologies under the cover of language and unity.

Political Discourse: Donald Trump In a study of speeches delivered by President Donald Trump both before and after the 2016 presidential election, Quinonez (2018) found that Trump engaged in hyperbolic, inflammatory rhetoric, sweeping statements that metaphorically or directly construct immigrants and their languages as threats to the United States and its citizens and normalize claims that immigrants and their languages are threats. She identified rhetorically loaded and inflammatory terms such as “illegal aliens” and “anchor babies” along with more veiled linguistic strategies – metaphorical constructions intended to vilify, dehumanize, and objectify immigrants and further a nationalist agenda. Trump’s claims often relate directly to language in the context of immigration. In a speech during the presidential campaign, he said “we have a country where to assimilate,

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you have to speak English . . . this is a country where we speak English, not Spanish,” promoting historical inaccuracy about the role of non-English languages in the United States (May 2001), as he delegitimizes Spanish, and supporting the assumption that English unifies while multilingualism damages national identity and unity, a common argumentation strategy that relies on misrepresentation.15 Trump then said that speaking English is “more appropriate” and it will help people from other countries “become successful and do great” (Quinonez 2018). This evaluative language constructs English as a commodity and positions immigrants and Spanish derogatorily as the “the other.” During a nationally televised debate, Trump also criticized Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida and fellow Republican presidential candidate, for speaking Spanish, stating that “He should really set an example by speaking English in the United States, “and that “we’re a nation that speaks English” (Quinonez 2018), invoking the “positive self” through nationalist discourse. Further, after Trump took office, the White House’s Spanish language website was removed, underscoring the argument that government business should be conducted in English and negatively affecting Spanish speakers in the United States.16 These examples evidence Trump’s support for the monolingual (English) ideology for public spaces, government in particular. Finally, in July 2019, Trump invoked a metaphor of infestation in a tweet designed to dehumanize and negatively construct individuals who, in his view, do not have a right to be in the United States because they (or their ancestors) are from other countries. CNN’s Victor Blackwell analyzed Trump’s use of the term “infested,” as he suggested that four congresswomen, three of whom were born in the United States and all of whom are Americans, go back to the “totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.”17 Blackwell notes that the term “infested” is usually reserved for references to rodents and insects, though Trump uses it to criticize lawmakers, three of whom were born in the United States but do not represent the dominant white majority.

Business and Ordinary People Numerous examples of ordinary people engaging in anti-immigrant, pro–English Only discourse have been recorded recently. In 2018, a business’s (Dunkin Donuts) sign in Baltimore, Maryland offered free coffee for anyone reporting use of languages other than English by employees, and a Houston, Texas, building posted an “English Speaking Only” requirement for new tenants (Rey Agudo 2018). This wave of pro-English Only, antiimmigrant sentiment has worsened under Trump, says Rey Agudo (2018), and its goal is to push Spanish and other languages out of the public sphere. Also in 2018, an attorney, Aaron Schlossberg, berated a restaurant owner in midtown Manhattan after he heard workers speaking Spanish to each other (Lozano 2018). Yelling that they should be speaking English in “his country,” and that “this is America,” he threatened to call Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).18 This conflates speaking Spanish with being undocumented, and conveys the nationalism that positions other languages as the foreign “other.” That same year in Montana, two US citizens, Ana Suda and Mimi Hernandez, were asked for identification by a US border patrol agent and subsequently detained (Lozano 2018). When they asked why identification was requested, the agent responded that they had been speaking Spanish, which was unheard of in that location. Though Spanish has deep roots in the United States and is a language of the Americas, it is treated as a fringe language (Lozano 2018), often derogatorily positioned, along with its speakers, as inferior to English and US-born speakers.

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Citizens’ Action Groups: US English In 2016, West Virginia became the thirty-second state to recognize English as its official language, which received praise from Mauro Mujica, Chairperson of US English, who said that it will ensure “that state residents are unified through English as the common, shared language; this commonsense law requires that all official government business be conducted in English. In turn, this sends a message to all residents that learning English is essential for success.”19 US English’s website also states that “The United States must discontinue providing multilingual services . . . we must prevent the kind of wasteful government spending on multilingual services, like the ones provided in Canada.”20 In neoliberal discourse, it is a common argumentation strategy to claim that if something is economically wasteful, particularly with regard to financial resources, then it should be eliminated. This argument is often employed in reference to bilingual education or multilingual services, yet the potential consequences of failing to provide such services are concealed. In response to the removal of the White House’s Spanish-language website, mentioned earlier, Mujica also questioned why Spanish should be given a priority and not the 350 languages spoken in the United States, an impractical suggestion which again downplays the important role that Spanish has played in US history, ignores its presence as the most widely spoken language of the Americas, and actively discriminates against the large number of Spanish speakers in the United States, many of whom were born there. In October 2016, US English reposted on its website the text of a speech given by S. I. Hayakawa in 1982 to introduce the first English Language Amendment (ELA) proposed to the US constitution, S.J. Resolution 72, which, if approved, would have banned virtually all use of languages other than English by federal, state, and local governments. In this seminal text for the English Only movement, Hayakawa states: “Mr. President, the United States, a land of immigrants from every corner of the world, has been strengthened and unified because its newcomers have historically chosen ultimately to forgo their native language for the English language. We have all benefited from the sharing of ideas, of cultures and beliefs, made possible by a common language. We have all enriched each other.” Because a critical analysis takes into account absences as well as presences (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001), it is important to note the use of the passive voice in Hayakawa’s aforementioned statement (“the United States . . . has been strengthened and unified”), which results in the absence of immigrants as agents who have strengthened and unified the United States and may deliberately coerce readers/listeners (Lawton 2013). Furthermore, a critical analysis both accounts for what linguistic elements and processes exist in a text, and explains the linguistic choices of producers of texts, bearing in mind that a given language may provide several other options (Baker et al. 2008: 281). Hayakawa chooses not to give immigrants agency in this extract, even after he refers to the United States as a “land of immigrants.” He also endorses an assimilationist ideology (Schmidt 2000), misrepresenting history by assuming that newcomers have chosen to forgo their native language rather than having been forced to assimilate linguistically. Hayakawa went on to say that “all around, we are better Americans because we have all melded our cultures together into this wonderful cultural symphony which is the United States of America.” The verbs mixed and melded serve as linguistic manifestations of the melting pot metaphor, where the United States serves as a container within which cultures blend and Americans are created. Hayakawa also says: “There are those who

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want separatism, who want bilingual balance, who want bilingual education. I am all in favor of bilingual education only insofar as it accelerates the learning of English. I do not believe that the taxpayer should be taxed to promote an enclave of speakers of [other languages] . . . essentially, the taxpayers’ responsibility is to see to it that we all speak English together no matter where we come from. That cultural unity which we ultimately achieve – that is the United States.” Here Hayakawa equates bilingual education with separatism, a common misrepresentation strategy, and supports it only if it accelerates the learning of English, thereby eliminating the opportunity for immigrant children to become bilingual through the educational system. Like Mujica, he draws on the common neoliberal capitalist trope to construct bilingual education as a burden, claiming that taxpayers will have to pay for enclaves of speakers of other languages, presupposing that bilingual education produces students who are unable to learn English and leads to non-English-speaking enclaves without supporting this with evidence. Finally, a survey on US English’s website in July 2019 included the following item: “Driver’s license exams are given in languages other than English in almost 90 percent of the states. Do you believe non-English-speaking people should be given the option of taking this exam in their native tongue?” This is an example of the potential material effects of the English Only ideology. The term “non-English speaking people” is used rather than immigrants, a common strategy and lexical choice that obscures who is actually at the core of the English Only debate and allows for plausible denial that it is anti-immigration or racist.

5.4  Media: Conservative News Outlets The discourse of conservative media outlets often perpetuates the stigmatization of language and reinforces language inequalities (Pac 2012). Though English is not under threat in the United States, it may appear more politically impartial to claim that it is rather than explicitly portray immigrants as threats, though such depictions have become increasingly common since Trump’s presidential campaign and election. In a program on Fox News hosted by Tucker Carlson in 2017, Mauro Mujica served as a guest. Carlson described the United States as an increasingly multilingual country and said that Mujica was “fighting to make English the country’s official language,” using a well-worn political metaphor to imply that we must engage in battle with those who speak other languages, positioning immigrants and languages as a threatening, invading “other.” Mujica then stated that US English is not against people who speak other languages; rather, they are against government functioning in other languages because it divides the country. He referred to S. I. Hayakawa, pointing out that he was an immigrant – a common coercion strategy used by proponents of US English to show that immigrants, too, approve of English’s being the official language – and that he was worried that the country would be divided along linguistic lines. When Carlson asked Mujica why people were opposed to Official English, he defended their efforts as “normal” because they want “the government to teach English to immigrants to help them assimilate,” a seemingly commonsense argument. Next, in the November 4, 2015, edition of Courtside Entertainment Group’s The Laura Ingraham Show, radio host Laura Ingraham discussed the use of other languages in the United States, saying, “I think we should say, look, you want to be here? And it makes sense for our people for you to be here? Fantastic. But you’re only going to be here if you’re speaking our language.”21 By using the possessive pronoun “our” in the

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noun phrases “our people” and “our language,” Ingraham draws on a nativist ideology to create in-groups and out-groups, positioning the language of English-speaking, US-born Americans as the norm – again casting English as a commodity or form of property, owned by some but not all US residents – and ignoring the multilingualism that has always existed in the United States.

VI.  CONCLUSIONS The aforementioned examples demonstrate how the English Only movement’s discourse is fueled by various (language) ideologies, the monolingual (English) and neoliberal ideologies in particular, and constructs immigrants and their languages as threats to national unity and identity, often under the guise of wanting to preserve unity and encourage upward mobility for immigrants. Certain discursive strategies, including (de)legitimization, (mis)representation, and coercion are often employed to construct immigrants and their languages in discriminatory and derogatory terms, which is achieved through various linguistic realizations, including the use of metaphor and argumentation. Moreover, English Only arguments rely on historical and contemporary inaccuracies about English and other languages in the United States, links between a lack of English and a lack of upward mobility, nativism that positions Latinos in particular as “the other,” and depictions of English as unifying and multilingualism as destructive. This chapter has sought to demonstrate that no language policy issue can be adequately addressed without an examination of its ideological and, in many cases, discursive dimensions; accordingly, a critical discursive approach to English Only rhetoric can capture the multilayered and dialectical nature of language policy as discursive and social action (Lawton 2016). While the English Only movement argues for official language laws, its true motivation is arguably to misrepresent, delegitimize, and thus dehumanize immigrants as the “other,” often under the cover of seemingly common sense-based arguments about language. Further, the nationalist discourse engendered by Donald Trump’s rise to political power appears to have fueled those arguments.

NOTES 1. Proponents of English Only typically use the term “Official English,” arguing that they do not object to the use of “foreign” languages privately. However, because they aim to restrict the use of languages other than English in government, education, and the public sphere in general, targeting language minoritized groups in the process, “English Only” is a fair characterization of the movement’s goals regarding public life (Nunberg 1997). 2. While the term “Hispanic” has been used by the US census, “Latino” is used in this chapter apart from references to US Census data or uses of the term “Hispanic” by authors cited. Though space does not permit a full discussion of this complex topic, I follow Alcoff’s (2005: 402) use of the term “Latino” because it “signifies and is itself marked by that moment of crystallization in the colonial relation between, not Spain and Latin America, but the USA and Latin America . . . this latter relationship is of much greater and enduring political and cultural relevance for understanding the concrete conditions of life in the western hemisphere for Latinos or Hispanics” (see also Schmidt 2007). 3. Proposition 227 was later repealed. 4. http://www​.us​-english​.org​/view/6

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5. FAIR has been classified as a hate group. Hate groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, have beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics. http://www​.splcenter​.org/ 6. http://www​.us​-english​.org​/view/2 7. https​:/​/ww​​w​.cen​​sus​.g​​ov​/ma​​in​/ww​​w​/ce​n​​1990.​​html 8. http:​/​/www​​.cens​​us​.go​​v​/pro​​d​/200​​2pubs​​/ce​ns​​r​-4​.p​​df 9. https​:/​/ww​​w​.cen​​sus​.g​​ov​/pr​​ogram​​s​-sur​​veys/​​acs​/t​​echni​​cal​-d​​ocume​​ntati​​on​/ta​​ble​-a​​nd​-ge​​ograp​​ hy​-c​h​​anges​​/2017​​/5​-ye​​ar​.ht​​ml 10. Because of space restrictions, scant examples of language diversity through US history are included. Many other languages, in addition to those mentioned here, also played a significant role. 11. Coined by the American writer John L. O’Sullivan in 1845, the term “Manifest Destiny” describes what most nineteenth-century Americans (in particular, white, male Americans of European descent) believed was their God-given mission to expand throughout and govern the entire North American continent. 12. A detailed overview and systematic analysis of such an approach are beyond the scope of this chapter. See Lawton (2016) for a methodological framework designed to illuminate the discursive, multilayered, and ideological nature of language policy in the United States and Lawton (2013) for an empirical examination of English Only discourse. On method, see also Wodak and Meyer (2015) and Zotzmann and O’Regan (2016). 13. Note that theoretical and methodological frameworks are not meant to be prescriptive; instead, they are often diverse and eclectic, drawing from a range of social theories and analytical “tools” depending on context. 14. The English Only movement captures the various layers of language policy discussed by Johnson (2013). Note that many efforts to oppose English Only ideologies and policies have been made since the movement’s inception, but space does not permit a discussion of such efforts or the actors involved. 15. https​:/​/ww​​w​.hol​​lywoo​​drepo​​rter.​​com​/n​​ews​/d​​onald​​-trum​​p​-spe​​ak​-en​​glish​​​-span​​ish​-8​​20215​ 16. https​:/​/ww​​w​.mia​​miher​​ald​.c​​om​/ne​​ws​/na​​tion-​​world​​/nati​​onal/​​artic​​le128​​23895​​9​.htm​​l​?fb_​​ comme​​nt​_id​​=1318​​21091​​​48886​​65​_13​​18575​​41485​​2215 17. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=zYA​​​NRUos​​8Hg 18. https​:/​/ww​​w​.cnn​​.com/​​2018/​​05​/17​​/us​/a​​aron-​​schlo​​ssber​​g​-att​​orney​​-raci​​st​​-ra​​nt​/in​​dex​.h​​tml 19. https​:/​/ww​​w​.use​​nglis​​h​.org​​/u​-s-​​engli​​sh​-ef​​forts​​-lead​​-west​​-virg​​inia-​​to​-be​​come-​​32nd-​​state​​-to​-r​​ ecogn​​ize​-e​​nglis​​​h​-as-​​offic​​ial​-l​​angua​​ge/ 20. https​:/​/ww​​w​.use​​nglis​​h​.org​​/cana​​dian-​​spend​​ing​-s​​hows-​​cost-​​of​-mu​​ltili​​​ngual​​-poli​​cies/​ 21. https​:/​/ww​​w​.med​​iamat​​ters.​​org​/l​​aura-​​ingra​​ham​/i​​ngrah​​am​-im​​migra​​nts​-y​​oure-​​only-​​going​​-be​-h​​ ere​-i​​f​-you​​​re​-sp​​eakin​​g​-our​​-lang​​uage

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Reisigl, M. and R. Wodak (2016), ‘The Discourse Historical Approach (DHA)’, in R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, 2nd edn, 144–61, Los Angeles: Sage. Rey Agudo, R. (2018), ‘The “English Only” Nativist Movement Comes with a Cost’, The Los Angeles Times. Available online: https​:/​/ww​​w​.lat​​imes.​​com​/o​​pinio​​n​/op-​​ed​/la​​-oe​-a​​gudo-​​engli​​sh​ -on​​ly​-20​​​18082​​7​-sto​​ry​.ht​​ml (accessed on 2 March 2019). Ricento, T. (1996), ‘Language Policy in the United States’, in M. Herriman and B. Burnaby (eds), Language Policies in English-Dominant Countries: Six Case Studies, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ricento, T. (2005), ‘Problems with the “Language-as-Resource” Discourse in the Promotion of Heritage Languages in the USA’, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 9 (3): 348–68. Ricento, T. (2006), ‘Topical Areas in Language Policy: An Overview’, in T. Ricento (ed.), An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Santa Ana, O. (2002), Brown Tide Rising, Austin: University of Texas Press. Schmid, C. (2001), The Politics of Language: Conflict, Identity, and Cultural Pluralism in Comparative Perspective, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, R. Sr. (2000), Language Policy and Identity Politics in the United States, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Schmidt, R. Sr. (2007), ‘Defending English in an English-Dominant World: The Ideology of the Official English Movement in the United States’, in M. Heller and A. Duchene (eds), Discourses of Endangerment: Interest and Ideology in the Defense of Languages, London: Continuum International Publishing Group. Silverstein, M. (1996), ‘Monoglot “Standard” in America: Standardization and Metaphors of Linguistic Hegemony’, in D. Brenneis and R. Macaulay (eds), The Matrix of Language: Contemporary Linguistic Anthropology, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Thomas, L. (1996), ‘Language as Power: A Linguistic Critique of US English’, The Modern Language Journal, 80 (2): 129–40. Tollefson, J. (1991), Planning Language, Planning Inequality, London: Longman. Wiley, T. G. (1999), ‘Comparative Historical Perspectives in the Analysis of US Language Policies’, in T. Heubner and K. Davis (eds), Political Perspectives on Language Planning and Language Policy, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wiley, T. G. (2000), ‘Continuity and Change in the Function of Language Ideologies in the United States’, in T. Ricento (ed.), Ideology, Politics and Language Policies: Focus on English, 18–38, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wiley, T. and M. Lukes (1996), ‘English-Only and Standard English Ideologies in the US’, TESOL Quarterly, 30 (3): 511–33. Williams, R. (1977), Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wodak, R. (2006), ‘Linguistic Analyses in Language Policies’, in T. Ricento (ed.), An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method, 170–93, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Wodak, R. and M. Meyer (2016), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, 3rd edn, London: Sage. Zentella, A. C. (1997), ‘The Hispanophobia of the Official English Movement in the US’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 127: 71–86. Zotzmann, K. and J. P. O’Regan (2016), ‘Critical Discourse Analysis and Identity’, in S. Preece (ed.), The Routledge Handboook of Language and Identity, London: Routledge.

Chapter 13

Conflicting Language Ideologies About What Counts as “English” in the Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum Arenas for Permanences and Disruptions1 PAULA SZUNDY

I.  INTRODUCTION Given its global spread and the role it has assumed as a lingua franca, English has been the most taught additional language in the Brazilian public and private school systems for at least three decades. A study performed by the British Council (2015) covering ten among twenty-six states in all of the five regions of the Brazilian territory depicted that, except for Pará, a state in the north of the country where Spanish represented the most common provision, English has been the most taught language in public schools in the other nine states included in the study. Despite this preference for English, the Brazilian legislation for education (LDB) (Brasil 1996) determined that the modern foreign language to be taught at schools from middle elementary (sixth to ninth grade) to high school (first to third year) should be chosen by local communities, taking into consideration regional and local contingencies. Additionally, a bill signed by President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva in 2005 (Bill no. 11.161/2005) also established Spanish as a compulsory provision in high school. In 2016, after Dilma Roussef was impeached and the vice president, Michel Temer, became the acting president, an amendment to the original 1996 bill made English the only additional language to be taught in Brazilian schools and revoked the effects of the 2005 bill. Assuming that language policies are not merely linguistic, but essentially political in their nature (Rajagopalan 2013), such changes in Brazilian educational legislation are completely intertwined with a political turn from a left-wing political spectrum to an (extreme) conservative right-wing one that has swept the country after Mrs. Roussef’s

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impeachment and reached its apex as Jair Bolsonaro took office as Brazil’s president in January 2019. As English becomes the only additional language to be compulsorily taught at schools, new curriculum frameworks may inhibit many of the creative transidiomatic uses of languages (Jacquemet 2005) that characterize our interactions in the contemporary world in responding more directly to colonial perspectives that ignore South-South alliances and overvalue a globalization process handed down from the more developed North to the less developed South. This comes as a consequence of English being considered a highly valued linguistic commodity, a lingua franca that gives access to the wonders of the global market. Taking as my point of departure this top-down change in legislation which is clearly motivated by neoliberal economic policies, this chapter aims at scrutinizing the language ideologies that undergird what counts as English, as entextualized in the Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) (Brasil 2018), following the modification of the education policy bill introduced during Temer’s government. Based on the notions of ideology (Voloshinov 2017 [1929]), language ideologies (Woolard 1998; Kroskrity 2004), entextualization (Silverstein and Urban 1996; Blommaert 2005), autonomous/ ideological literacy practices (Street 2003, 2009, 2014) and recent conceptualizations of how neoliberal ideologies have been translated into educational policies, I draw upon a critical analysis approach to examine how English is commodified in the BNCC in alignment with ideologies of conservative forces which have dominated the political scenarium in Brazil since 2016. Despite the top-down authoritarian nature of curriculum frameworks such as the BNCC, the reinterpretations of educational policies in daily practice can creatively challenge the colonial mindset. As suggested in the title of this chapter, there are always spaces for permanences and disruptions as curricular policies are resignified by educational actors. In this sense, my analysis aims at emphasizing the conflicting nature of language ideologies. This analysis is presented under three broad sections. In the first section, I present a brief contextualization of the Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) focusing on the kind of dialogues it establishes with previous curriculum frameworks and neoliberal ideologies. Following this contextualization, the next section applies the concepts of entextualization, indexicality, language ideology and ideological literacies to analyze the specific curriculum frameworks for English determined by the BNCC2. By relying on these theoretical tools to deepen the understanding of how neoliberal values such as individual freedom, competitiveness and competence are recontextualized in the ELT frameworks postulated within the BNCC, I aim at accounting for the complex nature of entextualization processes through which neoliberal ideologies can be both reiterated and destabilized. Since permanences and disruptions characterize texts as they travel through contexts, I bring the chapter to a close by reflecting on the spaces for transgression that teachers may find in the BNCC to engage themselves and their students in decolonial literacy practices in English.

II.  THE BRAZILIAN NATIONAL COMMON CORE CURRICULUM: AN ARENA FOR CONFLICTING IDEOLOGIES AND INTERESTS The last Federal Constitution of Brazil, published in 1988 after the redemocratization of the country, established education as a universal right to be provisioned by the state and

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the family with society’s cooperation. In order to grant this right, Article 210 determined that “minimum contents should be fixed for elementary education so as to grant a common basic education and the respect for cultural, artistic, national and regional values” (Brasil 1998). The necessity to establish a national common core curriculum was also predicated eight years later in a specific legislation (LDB) which aimed to fix the basic foundations of Brazilian education. Article 26 of LDB accordingly mandates that “the curricula of child education, elementary school and high school must have a common national base, which must be complemented, in each educational system and school, by a diversified part in face of regional and local characteristics of society, culture, economy and students” (Brasil 1996). Although its implementation was proposed in the constitution and LDB as well as in curriculum frameworks published by the National Council of Education3 (CNE) in 2010 and 2014, a Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) only started to be constructed in 2015. From 2015 to 2017, three different versions of the BNCC were produced and the third version was approved by CNE in December 2017. After its approval, the text went through some changes and a more extended version was provided in March 2018. Since this is the current valid version, it is this version that I use as reference for the analysis in this chapter. The debates around the first version of BNCC took place between September 2015 and March 2016, a period marked by the intensification of the political crisis in Brazil. Micarello (2016) estimates that this turbulent political context played a vital role in these debates, leading to actions and discourses that tried to delegitimize and disqualify the policies of Dilma Roussef’s government. This upheaval in the political climate contributed to the creation of a favorable scenarium for her impeachment, which was considered by many Brazilians a coup against democracy.4 If, on the one hand, the scope of this chapter precludes an in-depth analysis of the complex political scenarium in Brazil, on the other I believe that outlining the political landscapes in which the BNCC was constructed is fundamental to comprehending the ideological arena that characterizes it. This perception is closely related to the view of ideology that has oriented my interpretations on how meanings are constantly (re/de) constructed through processes of (de/re)contextualization of multiple semiotic resources in our interactions with other people in the social world. The dialogic philosophy of language designed by the Circle of Bakhtin (Bakhtin 1986 [1953]; Voloshinov 1986 [1929]) is central to this view. It emphasizes the ideological nature of every utterance, which responds to other past and present utterances and also projects likely future responses in the communicative chain of situated language uses. Viewing ideology as an inherent characteristic of utterances leads to the assumption that there is no escape from ideology and thus no possibility at all of assuming neutral perspectives towards what we perceive and construct as reality and truths. From this perspective, my interpretations concerning the language ideologies (de)legitimized in the BNCC as well as the excerpts I select to corroborate them refract my responsive attitudes to this public policy. As they are (de/re)contextualized in different texts, these interpretations dialetically transform and are transformed by epistemological trajectories in the light of which they are constantly resignified. Voloshinov (1986 [1929]) reminds us that signs do not only reflect reality, they refract other realities: “Everything ideological possesses meaning: it represents, depicts, or stands for something lying outside itself. In other words, it is a sign. Without signs there is no ideology” (9). Being themselves ideological products, educational policies such as common core curricula will refract the many conflicts and tensions involved in

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their production. In this sense, the BNCC echoes the voices of the many social actors engaged in its production, analysis and consumption. Micarello (2016) identifies three significant groups of stakeholders involved in the elaboration of the BNCC: those related to the basic school sphere (teachers, coordinators, headmasters, students); those linked to the academic sphere (researchers, university professors, scientific associations) and those connected to private enterprises (private foundations connected to the educational market in general). Concerning the first two spheres – schools and academia – the numerous conflicts that arise can include different perceptions of what members of the school community consider achievable and what is prescribed by researchers and university professors; disagreements in relation to contents that should be universally defined in the common core and those that should be locally negotiated; different perspectives about the necessity, viability and/ or (dis)advantages of establishing a common core curriculum in a continental country like Brazil (Micarello 2016). For Micarello (2016), the disputes concerning the BNCC are closely connected to the conception of the curriculum. While its enthusiasts do not see it as the curriculum itself, but as a base that will grant access to the basic knowledge that every Brazilian should have and orient the elaboration of local curricula, its critics part from the view of the curriculum as an event in a permanent construction process to defend the autonomy of teachers, schools and community in the definition of what should be taught. Aligned with a wider view of curriculum as “the set of nuclear activities developed by school” (Saviani 2016: 57), researchers and scientific associations who criticize the BNCC also denounce its attachment to (neo)liberal ideologies. They see with suspicious eyes the increasing interlocution between the Ministry of Education and the private sector. This crescent interest of private educational enterprises in a huge public educational system composed of almost forty million students5 is denounced as a marketization process that can hinder the central role education should have in engaging its participants in the construction of critical apparatuses to comprehend and transform the world around them. The ideology that educational praxis should mainly be oriented towards the development of critical thinking is highly influenced by the ideas of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. A harsh critic of what he calls “the banking model of education” (Freire 1970 [2002]), Freire advocates: An education that makes it possible for man [sic] the courageous discussion of his problems. Of his insertion in these problems. Which warns him of the dangers of his time so that his consciousness about them makes him gain force and courage to fight, instead of being dragged by the traps of his own “self ” subdued by alien prescriptions. An education that places him in constant dialogue with others. Which predisposes him to constant reviews. To the critical analysis of his “findings”. To a certain rebelion, in the most human sense of the expression. Which identify him with scientific methods and processes. (Freire 1967 [2015], Kindle Edition, n.p.)6 The perception that common core curricula in general respond to neoliberal market principles such as meritocracy, competitiveness and entrepreneurship which are incompatible with a Freirean critical conception of education is shared by Malerba (2017) for whom “the pedagogical principles of Common Core Curricula are oriented by pragmatic, utilitarian and liberal principles (that emphasizes the construction of individual rather than collective priorities); they also depict an unveiled vocation to prepare labor force contingents for the market, preferably destitute of any critical apparatus”7. Similar

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to Malerba, Del Percio and Flubacher (2017) also argue that neoliberalism constructs the individual as an entrepreneur of herself/himself, completely responsible for her/his choices, victories and failures. He/she is in charge of internalizing the competences and skills that will grant him/her success in the labor market, the sine qua non of access to the material and symbolic commodities of capitalism. As the focus is on the mere development of competences and not on scrutinizing the reasons why some competences are more valued than others, the power relations that the choices of and hierarchy among competences help to maintain and the interests that these choices may serve can work to severely delimit the possibility of constructing curricula oriented towards a Freirean view of critical thinking and liberating education. Malerba (2017) indicates that the utilitarian, pragmatic and (neo)liberal nature of the BNCC is manifested in the general competences it postulates to guide the knowledge construction process in all phases and curricular components of basic education. The lexical choice emphasized in the three competences spelled out in the following list corroborates Malerba’s interpretation: ●●

●●

●●

Value and use historically constructed knowledge about the physical, social, cultural and digital world to understand and explain reality, go on learning and cooperate with the construction of a fair, democratic and inclusive society (competence 1); Value the diversity of cultural knowledge and experiences and internalize knowledge and experiences that lead to the comprehension of relationships that organize the work world so as to carry on choices which are aligned with the exercise of citizenship and to students’ life project, with liberty, autonomy, critical awareness and responsibility (competence 6); Act individually and collectively with autonomy, responsibility, flexibility, resilience and determination, taking decisions based on ethical, democratic, inclusive, sustainable and solidary principles (competence 10) (Brasil 2018: 9–10).8

While some verbal groups (“use knowledge”, “understand and explain reality” and “carry on choices which are aligned”) and nominalizations (“life project”, “freedom”, “autonomy, responsibility, flexibility resilience and determination”) locate the BNCC in “orders of indexicality”9 related to neoliberal ideologies, other lexical choices (“go on learning and cooperate with the construction of a fair democratic and inclusive society”, “critical awareness”, “ethical, democratic, inclusive, sustainable and solidary principles”) point to orders of indexicality related to sociohistorical theories of language and teaching-learning processes. The hybrid indexicalities10 present in the competences cited above corroborate the perception that neoliberalism has a complex and processual character (Flubacher and Del Percio 2017). Besides signaling the influences that sociohistorical theories, especially those of Vygotskian psychology and Bakhtinian philosophy of language, have exercised over curricular public policies in Brazil since the publication of the National Curricular Framework (PCNs) in 1998 (Szundy 2017a; Szundy and Leung 2018), these hybrid indexicalities indicate, as suggested by Gee (2000), that new capitalism11 has quickly incorporated political progressive ideals to add new value to their products, including the educational ones. In this sense, issues related to more progressive agendas identified as post-structuralist, postmodern and postcolonial in the social sciences (cultural diversity,

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social equality, gender and racial issues, etc.), frequently intermingle with clearly instrumental purposes translated into competences to be replicated in diverse areas and contexts. Having outlined the conflicting ideologies that characterize the BNCC and how they are interconnected with neoliberalism, the next section explores the language ideologies entextualized within the English component.

III.  WHICH ENGLISH(ES)? THE CROSSROADS BETWEEN IDEOLOGICAL AND AUTONOMOUS VIEWS OF LITERACIES The fact that in previous curricular frameworks in Brazil, including the first and second versions of the BNCC (available for public consultation in 2015 and 2016), there was no curricular component named English, but one called Foreign Modern Language, indicates a shift from a multilingual language ideology to a monolingual one (Szundy 2019). As I have mentioned earlier, this shift comes from a change in the Brazilian legislation for education (LDB 1996) in 2017, which determines that “in basic education curriculum, from the 6th grade on, English language will be provided”. If, prior to that, the geopolitical status of English already made it the most common provision, it now stands as the only additional language to be compulsorily taught in Brazilian regular schools. This authoritarian topdown change, invested in an evident spirit of colonialism and carried out without a proper debate with school communities and scientific associations, prevents local communities from choosing to teach and learn the additional language which better answers to their local needs. It also seems to ignore the situated language uses in many border regions where Spanish plays a fundamental role in local interactions. Within this unfortunate shift to a monolingual additional language teaching policy, this section aims at discussing which English(es) and which literacy practices in English are legitimated at the BNCC. The curricular component “English” integrates the area more broadly called “Languages” with three other components in the BNCC: Portuguese, Arts and Physical Education. The document conceptualizes languages in its multiple manifestations: corporal, visual, sound and digital, emphasizing the central role played by them in human interaction. In this sense, the four curricular components (Portuguese, English, Arts and Physical Education) that integrate the section of the BNCC titled “Languages” are intended to engage students in heterogenous semiotic practices (verbal and non-verbal) through which meanings are (de/re)constructed in the social world. A sociohistorical approach which emphasizes the historical, cultural and ideological nature of languages can be clearly seen in the six common competences that the BNCC proposes for the four components classified within the umbrella “Languages”, as illustrated in the following two examples: Comprehend languages within their dynamic nature as human, historical, social and cultural constructions, recognizing and valuing them as forms of signifying reality, expressing subjectivities as well as social and cultural identities. [competence 1] Know and explore diverse language practices (artistic, corporal and linguistic) in different fields of human activity to go on learning, to widen students’ possibilities of participation in the social life and to cooperate for the construction of a fair, democratic and inclusive society. [competence 2] (Brasil 2018: 63)

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Based on the notions of language ideologies as responsive attitudes we construct about the uses of languages in the social world (Szundy 2017b), the beliefs and feelings about how languages are used (Kroskrity 2004) and the explicit or implicit representations that construct intersections between people and language (Woolard 1998), it is possible to infer from the aforementioned two competences that school subjects like English, Portuguese, Arts and Physical Education are supposed to develop curricula in which both the plurality of language practices and their social, historical and cultural nature are expected to be emphasized. Despite denying ideologies that assume language as an abstract autonomous neutral system of rules, some lexical choices in the first competence such as “forms of signifying reality” and “expressing subjectivities” point to a more fixed language ideology in which languages are taken as mirrors, clear expressions of reality, rather than semiotic resources that construct possible ‘truths’ and refract (Voloshinov [1986 [1929]) other realities. This fixity gives place to a more fluid conception in the second competence which indexes a language ideology focused on the role of language in enhancing students’ social participation in the construction of “a fair, democratic and inclusive society”. Given that utterances both reiterate and challenge socially shared meanings as they travel through contexts in permanent entextualization processes (Silverstein and Urban 1996; Blommaert 2005), I focus now on analyzing how this social, historical, cultural and ideological approach to languages is reinterpreted in the section of the BNCC devoted to the English component. Aiming at establishing a dialogue with this approach to languages, pedagogical practices in English are situated “in a globalized and plural social world, where the borders between countries and local, regional, national and transnational personal interests become more diffuse day by day” (Brasil 2018: 239). Aligning thus with an ideological perspective which emphasizes the fluid character of languages, the BNCC defends a formative approach to ELT, oriented towards critical reflection on the heterogeneous uses of English in the contemporary world. Under this ideological lens, the pedagogical dimensions of ELT cannot be segregated from political ones. Taking the pedagogical and political dimensions of English as intertwined, the BNCC advocates that the relationship between languages, territories and cultures needs to be reviewed. This review requires a disruption with ideologies that view English as a foreign language to focus on the social and political roles of English as a lingua franca (ELF), as illustrated in the following excerpt: the treatment given to the component at BNCC prioritizes the focus on the social and political function of English and, in this sense, starts addressing it in its status of lingua franca12. The concept is not new and has been recontextualized by scholars in recent studies that analyze the uses of English in the contemporary world. In this proposal, the English language is not anymore that of the “foreigner” coming from hegemonic countries whose speakers serve as the model to be followed; similarly, it cannot be treated as a variety of the English language. In this perspective, the uses that speakers around the world make of English, with their different linguistic and cultural repertoires, are welcome and legitimized. This leads to the questioning of the view which establishes the English spoken by North-American and British native speakers as the only “correct” one. In addition to that, the treatment of English as lingua franca detaches it from the notion it belongs to a single territory and, consequently, to typical cultures and communities, legitimizing the uses of English in its local contexts. This comprehension favors an intercultural linguistic education, aimed at the recognition of (and the respect to) differences, and to the comprehension of how these differences are produced in

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diverse social practices, which leads to a critical reflection about different ways of seeing and analyzing the world, the other(s) and ourselves. (BNCC 2018: 239, 240) The conception of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is criticized for its eurocentric character, the idealization of native speakers as well as for disconsidering the legion of users who use English to interact with other linguaculture speakers around the world. On this basis, English is recontextualized within language ideologies which aver that it belongs to everyone who uses it and that every user has the same prerogative in adapting and/or transforming the language. The focus on the political and ideological nature of ELF within the framework of the BNCC indicates the influence of what Duboc (2019: 10) calls “a made in Brazil ELF” rather than the preoccupation in describing patterns or linguistic-discursive characteristics of ELF (e.g., Jenkins 2000; Seidlhofer 2004, 2011). In this sense, the ideologies on ELF entextualized in the BNCC seem to be aligned with those of Brazilian scholars who view English as a world (Rajagopalan 2004), multinational (Leffa 2002) or border language (Moita Lopes 2008), focusing their attention on the changing roles of English and their pedagogical implications in a space-time conceptualized as postmodern and postcolonial. Retheorizing world, border and/or multinational English in terms of its semiotic potential to resist modernist and colonial values represents the main preoccupation of these scholars. Echoes of such a preoccupation can be noted in the excerpt mentioned earlier. By abandoning the foreign language ideology in favor of that of lingua franca, the BNCC challenges the current commonsense view that the English to be taught should be either British English or American English, the canonical varieties adopted by many ELT textbooks, grammars, dictionaries and proficiency exams. The notion of one nation, one language should then give place to “the uses that speakers around the world make of English, with their different linguistic and cultural repertoires”, uses which should be equally “welcome and legitimized”. This view can contribute to an intercultural linguistic education oriented towards engagements with alterity, “which leads to a critical reflection about different ways of seeing and analyzing the world, the other(s) and ourselves”. A first look at the ELF perspective postulated within the framework of the BNCC in its introduction to the curricular component of English clearly signals that ELT practices are situated in a perspective that Mignolo (2007) classifies as decolonial. This decoloniality is indexed when the document questions native speakers’ prerogative to legitimize the plural uses of English by all those who (inter)act with the language in the social world. Therefore, if, on the one hand, the BNCC’s affiliation to a lingua franca ideology allows us to think of English as “a space for contestation, for claiming the periphery rights, for subversion and not submission” (Rajagopalan 2005: 155),13 on the other, the idea of a common core curriculum as well as the ways this common core is organized and the skills which compose it push us back to coloniality and to a modernist language ideology of a pure and correct English. As I have mentioned in the previous section, the common core curriculum responds to neoliberal principles which bring values established by the market to education, whose main focus becomes the development of competent citizens, able to fulfill the needs of a competitive labor market. In the educational sphere, as emphasized by Koyama (2017), these principles have led to the design of standardized curricula through which skills can be measured, quantified and tested. The BNCC refracts this neoliberal project by determining that skills in English should be developed along five autonomous organizational axes, illustrated in Figure 13.1.

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FIGURE 13.1:  Organizational Axes for English at BNCC.

While language ideologies related to English as a lingua franca inscribe curriculum frameworks like the BNCC in an ideological view of literacies, the five isolated axes illustrated in Figure 13.1 bring it back to an autonomous conception of oral and written comprehension and production. In his studies in the field of New Literacy Studies, Street (2003, 2009, 2014 [1995]) proposes a distinction between autonomous and ideological models of literacies. The author emphatically criticizes the autonomous model for anchoring itself in a pretended neutrality and universality which disguises its ideological orientations. He proposes an alternative and ideological model of literacy that “offers a more culturally sensitive view of literacy practices as they vary from one context to another” (Street 2009: 337). For Street (2014 [1995]), the pretense of neutrality in autonomous models of literacy leads to a universalizing, essentialist and ethnocentric focus on skills and functions in which the reasons why some forms of literacies are hierarchized over others are completely ignored. The functional explanations privileged by autonomous models tend to take literacies for granted without questioning how and why they were produced or whose interests they serve. They also tend to establish a great divide between oral and written genres as if the differences between speaking and writing were not socially and culturally produced. In the ideological model proposed by Street, literacy practices are regarded as embedded in power relations, making it fundamental to comprehend how participants (re/de)construct meanings during and about literacy practices in which they engage from a sociocultural perspective. From this premise, Street (2009: 337) suggests that every literacy program researched in the light of the ideological model should address the following questions: “What is the power relationship between participants? What are the resources? Where are people going if they take on one literacy rather than another literacy?”. In such a model, rather than focusing only on technical linguistic aspects that, in an autonomous perspective, can be replicated to other practices, it is fundamental to raise awareness about how the semiotic forms we use are socially and ideologically constructed (Street 2014 [1995]). It is also fundamental to scrutinize how the literacy practices

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TABLE 13.1  Oral skills for the ninth year SKILLS (EF09LI01) Use English to present points of view, arguments and counterarguments, taking into consideration the context and the linguistic resources aimed at communicative efficacy. (EF09LI02) Compile the key ideas of texts through note taking. (EF09LI03) Analyze positionings defended and refuted in oral texts about themes of social and collective interests. (EF09LI04) Present research or studies result with the support of resources such as notes, graphs, tables and so on, adapting the strategies related to the oral text construction to the communicative goals and context.

associated with schooling came to be more valued than other forms. Street (2014 [1995]) argues that autonomous models of literacies are replicated at schools through the distance that is established between the subject and language, the metalinguistic focus and the greater status attributed to reading and writing than to oral practices. In spite of having an axis dedicated to oral comprehension and production, orality is reduced to a functional approach to language at the BNCC. This functional perspective can be observed in the oral skills stipulated for the ninth year, the final year of elementary school (see Table 13.1). Rather than an ELF perspective focused on the negotiation of meanings by different linguaculture speakers and on an ideological model of literacy which questions issues such as the power relationship between these speakers, their interests, social status, and so on, what we observe in the skills listed earlier is an autonomous perspective which presupposes that general oral skills can be automatically replicated from one context to another. Contexts are thus regarded as fixed, as if they had an existence prior to texts instead of being dialogically and permanently transformed as multiple semiotic resources are (de/re)constextualized. Verbs such as use, present and compile index the argumentative uses of language as replicable autonomous oral functions. By focusing on notions such as communicative efficacy, strategies and goals, the language ideology entextualized is the one that success in expressing one’s point of view depends strictly on the mastery of a number of strategies. Even the idea of analyzing “positionings defended and refuted in oral texts about themes of social and collective interests” established in the third skill seems to erase conflicts from the argumentative process. Since questions like why, how, by whom, with which interests and whose positions were silenced are not problematized in the (re/de)construction of arguments and/or counterarguments as they travel through contexts, language seems to be taken out of its ideological arena. General and regular characteristics concerning the oral uses of English to construct different points of view are prioritized over the hybrid, flexible and culturally sensitive resources to which distinct linguaculture speakers refer when positioning themselves. In the light of this language ideology, points of view are merely expressed/represented, not (de/re)constructed. A pretense autonomous view of literacy can also be noted in the skills established for reading comprehension in the sixth year, as illustrated in Table 13.2. The reading skills for the sixth year seem to be oriented towards the language ideology that texts constitute autonomous units whose meanings can be fully accessed through the use of reading strategies and vocabulary acquisition. The belief that texts represent reality and that this representation can be apprehended through locating information is entextualized in skills such as “formulate hypotheses about the purpose of a text in English

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TABLE 13.2  Reading skills for the sixth year SKILLS (EF06LI07) Formulate hypotheses about the purpose of a text in English based on its structure, textual organization and graphic clues. (EF06LI08) Identify the subject of a text, recognizing its textual organization and cognate words. (EF06LI09) Locate specific pieces of information in a text. (EF06LI10) Know the organization of a bilingual dictionary (printed and/or online) to construct lexical repertoire. (EF06LI11) Explore virtual environments and/or applications to construct lexical repertoire in English. (EF06LI12)Develop interest for the reading text, sharing ideas about what the text informs/ communicates.

based on its structure, textual organization and graphic clues”; “identify the subject of a text, recognizing its textual organization and cognate words”; and “locate specific pieces of information in a text”. The use of verbs like formulate, identify and locate in these three skills statements contradicts both the formative and political character of English as lingua franca defended in the BNCC’s introduction to this curricular component. Although an increase in complexity is observed in the other three skills: knowing how a bilingual dictionary is organized, exploring virtual environments and “sharing ideas about what the text informs/communicates”, reading is still addressed in the light of a structuralist language ideology according to which meanings are informed and communicated. In parallel with the treatment given to orality, the political and often conflicting nature of texts is ignored insofar as power relations, social roles and/or meaning changes in textual trajectories are disconsidered. While the skills that the BNCC establishes to work with orality, reading, writing and grammar rely on an autonomous model of literacy which views language as a set of abstract structures through which reality is expressed rather than (de/re)constructed, the axis called “Intercultural Dimension” prioritizes an ideological approach to literacy practices and thus a politically situated view of texts. As the following three skills statements depict, this axis is aimed at raising awareness about the global spread of English (see Table 13.3). In what concerns the focus given to ELF in the three skill statements which form the Intercultural Dimension axis for the ninth year, we can note the choice of verbs that demand students’ engagement in more complex mental processes – namely, debate, analyze, discuss. However, the debates, analyses and discussions suggested in the three skills statements include neither the political dimensions nor the consequences of the global spread of English. In spite of the possibility of including these dimensions in curricula and pedagogic resources based on the BNCC’s frameworks, the ideology concerning globalization prioritized in the skills seems to be the one entextualized in the global village metaphor (Figueiredo 2018). This view departs from an ELF ideology according to which English, by virtue of being the language of globalization, makes the union between peoples, identities and cultures possible. In this sense, its global spread grants access to the commodities of a global world. Issues such as the consequences of “the expansion of English across the world” (EF09LI17), who has access (or not) to knowledge produced in English (EF09LI18) and which identities are (de)legitimized “in the globalized world” (EF09LI19) are not brought into light. Given the fact that the skills

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TABLE 13.3  Intercultural skills for the ninth year SKILLS (EF09LI17) Debate about the expansion of English across the world due to the colonization process of Americas, Africa and Oceania. (EF09LI18) Analyze the importance of English for the development of science (production, propagation and discussion of new knowledge), economy and politics in the global scenarium. (EF09LI19) Discuss intercultural communication through English as a mechanism for personal valuation and identity construction in the globalized world.

statements mentioned earlier challenge neither the excluding nature of globalization nor what counts as English as it is (de/re)contextualized as a lingua franca in heterogeneous literacy practices, the status of ELF within the framework of the BNCC seems to be in service of neoliberalism. It fulfills the development of competences and skills to transform students into self-entrepreneurs. As such, they will be skilled to participate in this global world without questioning how its macro and micro structures operate to keep a huge contingent of the world population without access to the commodities of this utopic global village. Given the compulsory nature of the BNCC and the influence it intends to exercise in curricular policies, assessment and teacher education, a question that arises is how we can find space for disruption within language ideologies that insist on permanences. This is the challenge I attempt to address in the final section of this chapter.

IV.  REINVENTING LITERACY PRACTICES IN ENGLISH: SPACES FOR POSSIBLE AND DESIRABLE DISRUPTIONS The neoliberalism-education nexus is certainly not a new phenomenon. As Del Percio and Flubacher (2017) remind us, the educational reforms launched by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the beginning of the 1980s were fundamental to laying the foundations for this nexus in the United Kingdom. In Brazil, the application of market logics to education gained considerable strength in the 1990s through the institution of a new education bill (LDB 1996), the implementation of regular assessments and the development of national curriculum frameworks. Almost a quarter of a century went by before a common core curriculum based on the notions of competences and skills was developed to bring this market-education relationship to its highest level. Although BNCC appears as the product of a historical context in which education has been increasingly commodified, the neoliberal agenda to which it responds comes with an especially worrisome element in the political spectrum: a violent turn to the extreme right. In Jair Bolsonaro’s extremist government, education has become an important flag to fight against what his/her supporters call a leftist indoctrination at schools. Guided by imaginary threats such as Brazil becoming communist and the destruction of the traditional family by addressing issues related to gender identities and sexuality in education, extremists defend a school without ideology – a neutral education. Within this mindset, a banking model of education (Freire 1970 [2002]) based on pretense autonomous literacies aimed at developing replicable skills seems to be gaining ground as the ideal. If, on the one hand, the curricular component of English answers to this ideal through skills which are clearly framed on an abstract structural view of language, on the other,

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language ideologies which connect the global spread of English to historical, cultural and political aspects represent important spaces for disruptions and resistances. This arena for conflicting ideologies in the BNCC can be related to the conception of centripetal and centrifugal forces in language proposed by Bakhtin (1975 [1998]). While centripetal forces operate to unify and normalize language, the centrifugal ones insist on the hybrid, creative and plurilingual nature of language. Within this arena, ELF ideology can work as a centrifugal force in the ELT classroom. Relying on the centrifugal forces of language ideologies entextualized in the BNCC, autonomous literacies practices can be reinvented and transformed into ideological ones. Some possible and desirable (inter)actions in ELT to disrupt centripetal forces of language can include the following: ●●

●●

●●

●●

Reinventing practices related to the uses and abuses of semiotic resources in textual trajectories with which we engage in the contemporary world aiming at building more ethical interactions through texts; Selecting and/or preparing activities aimed at educating discourse analysts who are able to comprehend that semiotic resources refract positionings which are always politically oriented and perpassed by power relationships; Engaging in epistemic disobediences (Mignolo 2007) that allow teachers and students to unlearn the colonial West logic as the only legitimate one; Developing ideological literacy practices that problematize issues related to gender identity, sexuality, race, politics and others that extremist groups insist on silencing from education.

In conclusion, I suggest that within the permanences we find in the BNCC, actors in the educational system can always destabilize the notion of pure language in favor of more hybrid and creative uses of multiple semiotic resources to build more inclusive and ethical realities. The more comprehensive ELF language ideology as well as the ideological approach to literacies that frames it represent important spaces for disruptions and thus powerful centrifugal forces to seek for changes in times when the established political power insists on permanences.

NOTES 1. The reflections drawn in this chapter rely largely on previous analysis of three versions of the National Brazilian Curriculum Framework (BNCC) carried out during my participation in conferences, roundtables and the technical committee of the National Program of Textbooks (PNLD), a program which evaluates textbooks that are bought by the federal government and sent to public schools around the country. Two chapters (Szundy 2017b and Szundy 2019) about language ideologies entextualized at BNCC were published recently. I would like to thank my Brazilian colleagues, especially Ana Flávia Gehardt, Glenda Melo, Marcel Amorim, Rogério Tílio and Tiago Cavalcante, as well as my undergraduate and graduate students, for their contributions towards destabilizing my own ideologies in many fruitful debates about language policies and politics in Brazil. I also thank CNPq (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico) for the financial support for this research. 2. The deontic nature of the verb determine emphasizes the compulsory nature of BNCC. Differently from other curriculum frameworks that preceded it, BNCC has a law status. As a result, the competences and skills established in the document must necessarily be implemented in local curricula, textbooks, assessments and teacher education programs.

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3. The National Council of Education (CNE, Conselho Nacional de Educação, in Portuguese) integrates the Ministry of Education (MEC). It is a deliberative and advisory board that assists MEC; its main charges include “formulating and evaluating the national educational policy, grant teaching quality, grant the respect to educational legislation and grant society’s participation in the improvement of Brazilian education”. Source: “http​:/​/po​​rtal.​​ mec​.g​​ov​.br​​/cons​​elho-​​nacio​​nal​-d​​e​-edu​​cacao​​​/apre​​senta​​cao” (accessed on June 1, 2019). 4. This view is far from being unanimous in a very divided country, but it is shared by many scholars, including Micarello (2016) and myself. In the fields related to human and social sciences, several of these scholars have been trying to analyze the causes of this coup as well as its consequences to Brazilian fragile democracy. See, for example, Gallego (2018), Souza (2019), Abranches (2019). 5. This number is based on the 2018 educational census publicized at INEP (National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira) homepage. Available at http:​ /​/por​​tal​.i​​nep​.g​​ov​.br​​/web/​​guest​​/cens​​​o​-esc​​olar (accessed on June 2, 2019). 6. My free translation from the original in Portuguese. 7. My free translation from the original in Portuguese. Available at https​:/​/ww​​w​.caf​​ehist​​oria.​​ com​.b​​r​/uma​​-anal​​ise​-d​​a​-bas​​e​-nac​​ional​​-c​omu​​m​-cur​​ricul​​ar/ (accessed on June 2, 2019). 8. All the excerpts from BNCC analyzed in this chapter are my translations from the original document in Portuguese. BNCC is organized into competences and skills. Competences are divided into general ones (for the whole basic education: children education, elementary school, high school), specific for an area (e.g. Languages, Mathematics, Nature Sciences etc.) and specific for a school subject (Arts, Portuguese, English [in Languages] etc.). Skills refer to more specific knowledge objects to be constructed in each phase of basic education and should be interrelated with the competences. 9. The concept of orders of indexicality refers to the ways indexical meanings which relate language to context are stratified in complex ways. One of the consequences of this stratification is that certain kinds of indexicalities become more legitimate than others. Inspired by Foucault (1982), Blommaert (2005) proposes that orders of indexicalities work as systematized regimes crossed by issues of (non)belonging, inclusion/exclusion, access to semiotic resources, among others. 10. Blommaert (2005: 252) defines indexicality as “Meaning that emerges out of text-context relations. Apart from (often) having a denotational meaning, linguistic and other signs are indexical in that they suggest metapragmatic, metalinguistic, metadiscursive features of meaning. Thus, an utterance may indexically invoke social norms, roles, identities”. 11. For Gee (2000), new capitalism is characterized by changes in the work organization, both in relation to spaces and in what concerns interactions between workers. Largely leveraged by new technologies, this new organization replaces the assembly line of traditional capitalism with principles such as networking, innovative designs and flexibility in adapting to changes. 12. Emphasis kept as in the original text in Portuguese. 13. My translation to “o World English é um espaço de contestação, de reivindicação dos direitos da periferia, de subversão e não de submissão” (Rajagopalan 2005: 155).

REFERENCES Abranches, S. (2019), Democracia em Risco? 22 Ensaios Sobre o Brasil Hoje, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.

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Bakhtin, M. M. (1975 [1998]), Questões de Literatura e Estética: A Teoria do Romance, A. F. Bernadini, J. P. Júnior, A. G. Júnior, H. S. Nazário, H. F. de Andrade (Trad.), 4 ed, São Paulo: Editora UNESP. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986 [1953]), ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, in M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 60–131, trans. Vern W. McGee, Austin: University of Texas Press. Bloomaert, J. (2005), Discourse: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brasil, Constituição Federal de 1988, Promulgada em 5 de Outubro de 1988, Disponível em ht​​ tp://​​www​.p​​lanal​​to​.go​​v​.br/​​ccivi​​l​_03/​​const​​ituic​​ao​/co​​​nstit​​uicao​​.htm (​acess​o em 29 August 2019). Brasil (1996), Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional, Lei nº 9394, de 20 de Dezembro de 1996, Estabelece as Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional, Brasília, DF. Brasil, SEF/MEC (1998), Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais – 3º e 4º ciclos do Ensino Fundamental – Língua Estrangeira, Brasília, DF: SEF/MEC. Brasil (2005), Lei nº 11.161, de 05 de Agosto de 2005, Dispõe sobre o ensino de língua espanhola, Brasília, DF: SEF/MEC. Brasil, SEB/MEC (2018), Base Nacional Comum Curricular, Brasília, DF, SEB/MEC. British Council (2015), O Ensino de Inglês na Educação Pública Brasileira, Elaborado com exclusividade para o British Council pelo Instituto de Pesquisa Plano CDE, São Paulo. Duboc, A. P. M. (2019), ‘Falando Francamente: Uma Leitura Bakhtiniana do Conceito de Inglês como Língua Franca no Componente Curricular Língua Inglesa da BNCC’, Revista da Anpoll, 1 (48): 10–22. Figueiredo, E. (2018), ‘Globalization and the Global Spread of English: Concepts and Implications for Teacher Education’, in T. Gimenez, M. S. El Kadri and L. C. S. Calvo (eds), English as a Lingua Franca in Teacher Education: A Brazilian Perspective, 31–51, De Gruyter Mouton. Flubacher, M. C. and A. Percio (eds) (2017), Language, Education and Neoliberalism. Critical Studies in Sociolinguistics, Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters. Foucault, M. (1982), ‘The Order of Discourse’, in M. Shapiro (ed.), Language and Politics, 108–38, London: Blackwell. Freire, P. (1967 [2015]), Educação como Prática da Liberdade, São Paulo: Paz e Terra, Kindle Edition. Freire, P. (1970 [2002]), Pedagogia do Oprimido, São Paulo: Paz e Terra. Gallego, E. S. (2018), O Ódio como Política: A Reinvenção das Direitas no Brasil, Boitempo Editorial, E-Book. Gee, J. P. (2000), ‘The New Literacy Studies: From “Socially Situated” to the Work of the Social’, in D. Barton, M. Hamilton and R. Ivanic (eds), Situated Literacies: Reading and Writing in Context, 180–96, London: Routledge, chapter 11, Kindle Edition. Jacquemet, M. (2005), ‘Transidiomatic Practices: Language and Power in the Age of Globalization’, Language & Communication, 25: 257–77. Jenkins, J. (2000), The Phonology of English as an International Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koyama, J. (2017), ‘Assembling Language Policy: Challenging Standardization and Quantification in the Education of Refugee Students in US School’, in M. C. Flubacher and A. Percio (eds), Language, Education and Neoliberalism. Critical Studies in Sociolinguistics, Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, Chapter 9, Kindle Edition. Kroskrity, P. V. (2004), ‘Language Ideologies’, in A. Duranti (ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, 496–517, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

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Leffa, V. J. (2002), ‘Teaching English as a Multinational Language’, The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 10 (1): 29–53. Malerba, J, ‘Uma Análise da Base Nacional Comum Curricular’, disponível em https​:/​/ww​​w​.caf​​ ehist​​oria.​​com​.b​​r​/uma​​-anal​​ise​-d​​a​-bas​​e​-nac​​ional​​-c​omu​​m​-cur​​ricul​​ar/ (acesso em 1 December 2018). Micarello, H. A. L. S. (2016), ‘A BNCC no Contexto de Ameaças ao Estado Democrático de Direito’, Ecos – Revista Científica, 41, 61–75, São Paulo. Mignolo, W. D. (2007), ‘Epistemic Disobedience: The De-colonial Option and the Meaning of Identity in Politics’, Gragoatá, 22: 11–41. Moita Lopes, L. P. (2008), ‘Inglês e Globalização em uma Epistemologia de Fronteira: Ideologia Linguística para Tempos Híbridos’, D.E.L.T.A., 24 (2): 309–40.  Percio, A. and Flubacher, M. C. (2017), ‘Language, Education and Neoliberalism’, in M. C. Flubacher and A. Percio (eds), Language, Education and Neoliberalism. Critical Studies in Sociolinguistics, Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, chapter 1, Kindle Edition. Rajagopalan, K. (2004), ‘The Concept of “World English” and Its Implications for ELT’, ELT Journal, 58 (2): 111–17. Rajagopalan, K. (2005), ‘A Geopolítica da Língua Inglesa e Seus Reflexos no Brasil’, in Y. Lacoste and K. Rajagopalan (eds), A Geopolítica do Inglês, 135–59, São Paulo: Parábola Editorial. Rajagopalan, K. (2013), ‘Política Linguística: Do Que é Que se Trata, Afinal?, in C. Nicolaides, K. A. Silva, R. Tilio and C. H. Rocha (eds), Política e Políticas Linguísticas, 19–42, Campinas, SP: Pontes Editores. Saviani, D. (2016), ‘Educação Escolar, Currículo e Sociedade: O Problema da Base Nacional Comum Curricular’, Movimento – Revista de Educação, 4: 54–84. Seidlhofer, B. (2004), ‘Research Perspectives on Teaching English as a Lingua Franca’, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 24: 209–39. Seidlhofer, B. (2011), Understanding English as a Lingua Franca, Oxford: Oxford University Press.  Silverstein, M. and G. Urban (1996), ‘The Natural History of Discourse’, in M. Silverstein and G. Urban (eds), Natural Histories of Discourse, 1–17, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Souza, J. (2019), A Elite do Atraso: Da Escravidão a Bolsonaro, Rio de Janeiro: Estação Brasil. Street, B. (2003), ‘What’s “New” in New Literacy Studies? Critical Approaches to Literacy in Theory and Practice’, Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5 (2): 77–91. Street, B. (2009), ‘Ethnography of Writing and Reading’, in N. Torrance and D. R. Olson (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Literacy, 329–45, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Street, B. (2014 [1995]), Letramentos Sociais: Abordagens Críticas do Letramento no Desenvolvimento, na Etnografia e na Educação, trad. de Marcos Bagno, São Paulo: Parábola Editorial. Szundy, P. T. C. (2017a), ‘A Base Nacional Comum Curricular: Implicações Para a Formação de Professores/as de Línguas(gens)’, in E. Mateusand and J. R. A Tonelli (orgs.), Diálogos (Im) pertinentes Entre Formação de Professores e Aprendizagem de Línguas, 77–98, São Paulo: Blucher, E-Book. Szundy, P. T. C. (2017b), ‘Language Ideologies on English as a Lingua Franca in Brazil: Conflicting Positions Expressed by Undergraduate Students’, The Journal of English as a Lingua Franca, 6: 167–92. Szundy, P. T. C. and C. Leung (2018), ‘Teaching English as an Additional Language in Anglophone and Brazilian Contexts: Different Curriculum Approaches’, in P. Seargent, A.

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Hewings and S. Pihlaja (eds), The Routledge Handbook of English Language Studies, 183–98, London: Routledge. Szundy, P. T. C. (2019), ‘A Base Nacional Comum Curricular e a Lógica Neoliberal: Que Línguas(gens) são (Des)legitimadas’, in A. F. L. M. Gerhardt and M. A. Amorim (orgs.), A BNCC e o Ensino de Línguas e Literaturas, Campinas, SP: Pontes Editores. Voloshinov, V. N. (1929 [1986]), Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  Voloshinov, V. N. (2017 [1929]), Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem: problemas fundamentais do método sociológica na ciência da linguagem, trad. S. Grillo e E. V. Américo, São Paulo: Editora. Woolard, K. A. (1998), ‘Introduction’, in B. B. Schieffelin, K. A. Woolard and P. V. Kroskrity (eds), Language Ideologies:Practice and Theory, 3–47, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Chapter 14

Non-Localizable vs Localizable English New Linguistic Hierarchies in ‘Democratizing’ English in Spanish Education EVA CODÓ

I.  INTRODUCTION Youth unemployment rates in Spain are the second highest in the EU (around 33 per cent), only after Greece (see data in Expansión 2019). The few available jobs are precarious and low paying. Many educated youngsters have come to the realization that they will not be able to reproduce their parents’ status (in the case of the [upper] middle classes), let alone move upwardly. The feelings of insecurity engendered by the 2008 recession have intensified old-standing linguistic anxieties. Discourses of employability focus on developing English proficiency as a key form of self-capitalization (Martín Rojo 2019). This is certainly not new, but what is new is the intensity of the phenomenon. Spanish parents have adopted the role of careful nurturers of their children’s capitals (Park 2016), engaging in fine-grained processes of school selection (Hidalgo McCabe and Fernández-González 2019). Declining birth rates have sharpened competition among schools in an increasingly marketized educational sector. The severe budget cuts imposed during the crisis have aggravated the undermining of public schooling, a process which began in the early twenty-first century with the systematic schooling of newcomer migrant children in state schools1 (Bonal and Zancajo 2018). Over the past decade, both public and private schools have tried hard to find (new) ways of making their offer (more) attractive to families. This has often pivoted on the multilingualization of the curriculum, with English-medium instruction playing a particularly central (although not exclusive) role (see Codó and Patiño-Santos 2018, for the popularity of French-Spanish baccalaureate, and Codó and Sunyol 2019, for the ascendancy of Mandarin in elite education). Based on ethnographic data collected in two educational institutions in Barcelona (Catalonia), that is, a state secondary school and a fully private, elite international school, this chapter aims to uncover what kinds of language ideologies sustain and are generated in and through the process of establishing English as a regular language of instruction; what language ideological connections exist between the two schools explored; how these ideologies are related to the institutional, educational and socio-economic context of

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each school; what is considered ‘good English’ in each school; what role the ideology of native speakerism plays in establishing what is viewed as ‘good English’; and what social inequalities are (potentially) underway. This study will contribute new data and insights to the underexplored area of the sociolinguistics of English (education) in Catalonia and Spain from a critical and a language-ideological perspective (but cf. Maslanka (2019), Relaño-Pastor and Fernández-Barrera (2019), and Sunyol (2019) for recent scholarship on the topic). The following sections will provide the theoretical and methodological grounding for this study before the examination of the empirical data is undertaken.

II.  UNEQUAL ENGLISHES AND HISTORIES OF LOCALIZATION Tupas and Rubdy’s (2015) concept of unequal Englishes delineates the framing of this chapter. This concept problematizes the egalitarian and liberationist claims of pluralization approaches to English(es). For Tupas and Rubdy, linguistic equality is “a thoroughly political and ideological question which therefore cannot be blind to configurations of power and social relations in different societies today” (2015: 3). Researchers are, thus, compelled to attend to the contingent histories and evolving dynamics of English inequality as they play out in specific language policy and socio-economic contexts. The study of the worldliness of English and of its localized forms (or Englishes) has a long trajectory in applied linguistics. Recent scholarship has moved away from the spread and nativization paradigm, which conceptualizes English as an external entity that gets inserted – and eventually appropriated – into a given society, to a performative and practice-based perspective (e.g., Pennycook 2010). In this view, English is a contingent semiotic resource that emerges locally to fulfil certain expressive needs, becoming emmeshed in forms of languaging where the boundaries between named languages get blurred. From this perspective, English is not an alien(ating) linguistic resource, but part and parcel of the process of linguistic transmutation of contemporary (globalized) localities. A somewhat different strand of research in localization studies has focused on the convertibility of English ‘capitals’. Most studies have foregrounded the lack of transferability of ‘placed’ forms of English across different normativity regimes (Blommaert 2010). Although convertibility concerns underlie the present study, this chapter does not address them. Convertibility is an empirical matter and any claims on convertibility (or the lack of it) can only be based on the examination of situated selection processes (e.g., job recruitment). This chapter’s focus on education, by contrast, provides insights into how future convertibility is visualized in contemporary Catalonia. It shows how imaginaries of class and global circulation delineate an emerging contrasting ideological pair, that is, ‘non-localizable’ versus ‘localizable’ English, that supersedes traditional access dichotomies, that is, ‘English haves’ versus ‘English have-nots’. As will be discussed later, the ‘non-localizable English’ desired by the parents and the students of the elite school is a classed linguistic marker hoped to confer distinction to its bearers in a linguistic market viewed as becoming saturated with English-haves. I understand this as a process of ideologizing (Silverstein 1998) by which certain ideas about language, in this case ‘good English’, become naturalized. It is to a brief account of the language ideological paradigm, and in particular the notion of ideological sites (Philips 2000; Silverstein 1998), that this chapter now turns.

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A Language Ideological Approach to Inequalities of English Language ideologies have been defined as conceptualizations about language and its nature, learning and use, “which index the political economic interests of individual speakers” (Kroskrity 2010: 192). In that sense, ideologies are never abstract rationalizations of language use, but are, rather, grounded in and responsive to speakers’ situated experiences of language. Ideologies are not totalizing, but incomplete, multiple and contradictory. For this reason, according to Kroskrity, rather than invoking language ideologies as generalized beliefs, we need to engage in their ethnographic probing as they are produced in specific locales. Silverstein (1998) refers to these spaces as ideological sites, sites where ideologies get (re)produced, exposed or transformed. These sites are typically “centers of powerful metapragmatic commentary” (Rosa and Burdick 2017: 111), spaces where ways of speaking/writing are (de)authorized, (de)legitimized and (de)valued. Philips (2000) emphasizes the importance of investigating the institutional grounding of ideologies to understand their articulation across institutional contexts, but also, crucially, the conditions under which certain ideologies get (re)appropriated, (re) formulated or altogether challenged, as they circulate. To dissect the ideological making of linguistic difference in specific locales, Irvine and Gal (2000) posit three semiotic properties of ideologies, that is, erasure, iconization and fractal recursivity, which, the authors claim, apply universally. In this chapter I am drawing on fractal recursivity for its explanatory value in understanding the contrasting value of different forms of English in the two sites investigated (cf. Irvine and Gal 2000 for definitions of the other two properties). Gal (2012) argues that ideologies are paired systems of differentiation that allocate contrasting values to linguistic forms. These contrasts “are co-constituted: they define each other” (23) and are iterative. She draws on the recursive nature of ideologies to argue that current normative individual multilingualism (as defended by EU bodies) is not a new sociolinguistic regime, but rather a recursion of the old contrast between the national standard (viewed as modern, instrumental, apersonal, placeless and mobile) and regional dialects (presented as authentic, localizing and backward). According to Gal, these contrasting values have now been transferred, respectively, to global lingua francae such as English (embodying modernity and placelessness) and national standards (signifying tradition and localization). Gal herself notes the need for investigating the new inequalities produced by this ideological iteration: “If this multilingual sociolinguistic regime is also a form of standardization, then we may ask, what hierarchies are reproduced or created?” (2012: 35). This is the question this chapter attempts to address. Language ideological research on English is abundant (as this volume attests to). Native speakerism (Holliday 2006) is still a powerful ideology, no doubt reinforced by soft-power institutions, such as the British Council (Codó and McDaid 2019), and the dominance of Inner Circle textbook publishers and the testing industry. However, its relevance is systematically assumed, often based on curricula and language policy statements (see e.g., Saraceni 2015: 173), rather than empirically investigated. In fact, political economy-based scholars of multilingualism have pointed out that globalization and the increasing skillification of language are destabilizing the ideology of the native speaker (henceforth NS); however, the same scholars also argue that processes of skillification exist in tension with processes of authentication, and that “even when language teaching is ‘skilled’ it can draw on ideologies of authentic languages and authentic speakers; English, notably, is most valued when delivered by ‘“native” speakers’” (Heller and McElhinny 2017: 244).

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Scholars of World Englishes often assume that what counts as ‘good English’ is native-like English; yet, what exactly is meant by that category tends not to be scrutinized. Modiano (2009: 66) claims that learners of English aim at “mimicking the idealised native speaker”. This “mimicking” entails, according to him, comparable fluency but “with the understanding that native-like proficiency in phonological terms is not required” (2009: 65). This extract exemplifies the linguistic under-specifications that abound in the literature (e.g., what is comparable fluency?), but also points toward a key dimension of native speakerism: accent. Although Modiano dismisses it, accent is the area where most research on aspirational models of English has been conducted. Generally, it is claimed that non-native speaker (henceforth NNS) accents are stigmatized (see Beinhoff 2014), and that learners aim to adopt either the British or the American standard. However, in an earlier study, Modiano himself claimed that Mid-Atlantic English, “in which decidedly British pronunciations have been neutralised, and of which the vocabulary includes both American and British items” (1999: 207), was gaining ground in many education systems around Europe. A recent study on pronunciation by Rindal and Piercy (2013) goes in a novel direction. A small but significant proportion of the Norwegian youngsters investigated preferred not to speak British or American English but a ‘neutral’ English; they did not aim “towards any recognisable English accent” (2013: 224). This had to do, as they reported in the interviews, with their wish to avoid the indexicalities associated with either standard. We will see similarities with this stance in some of the data presented. Apart from the ideology of the NS just discussed, another key ideology in relation to English is that of linguistic instrumentalism (Wee 2003), that is, the idea that English (alone) will guarantee the socioeconomic advancement of individuals, institutions or countries. In the case of South Korea, Park (2009) identified three further ideologies structuring practices and feelings, namely (a) necessitation, (b) externalization and (c) self-deprecation. Necessitation refers to the assumption that English is a must for everyone irrespective of individuals’ actual need; externalization encapsulates the naturalized idea that English is the language of an essentialized superior foreign Other (with indexicalities of race and social class); and self-deprecation refers to entrenched perceptions of South Koreans being unable to speak English. In later studies, Park (2016) has underlined the importance of the ideology of “language as pure potential” (2016: 457), which holds that acquiring English empowers its acquirers irrespective of other factors, and individualizes the responsibility for one’s success and social position. In what follows I will present some contemporary sociolinguistic sketches of English in Spain/Catalonia to frame the study presented.

III.  THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF ENGLISH IN SPAIN AND CATALONIA Declared knowledge of English among the Spanish population is fairly low (around 20 per cent according to data in Linn [2016] taken from the 2012 Eurobarometer). This places Spain on a par with other Mediterranean countries, such as France and Italy, considered to have moderate proficiency levels – in contrast with Northern European countries. There are a lot of factors that explain these results, among which is the very methodology used in many surveys (self-perceptions),2 but this is hardly ever problematized. Instead, English-knowledge country ranks are systematically scrutinized in search of signs of Spain’s improvement but to no avail (see Zafra 2019). This constant surveillance is grounded on

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the ideology of self-deprecation (Park 2009). Deeply entrenched and regularly animated in informal conversations, discourses of self-deprecation maintain that Spaniards have a collective issue with English that cannot be reverted. This rhetoric builds on many an individual frustration with English and serves to legitimize life-long investments. English was not introduced in Spanish mainstream education until the 1980s, as French was the foreign language traditionally taught. This means that the over-fifty population, even if educated, may not have had access to English through schooling. Of course, many enrolled in private language schools in the 1990s when this industry began to expand (see Codó 2018), but a late beginning was added to the ineffectiveness of traditional grammar-based language instruction in Spain. Recent English proficiency surveys have shown soaring competence levels among the younger generations. The results of the British Council APTIS test among Catalan students (Vicente 2018) indicate that 65.9 per cent of students aged fifteen to sixteen have a B1 level of English or higher (CEFR). The UE sets desirable rates at 50 per cent. So, contrary to the mantra, the situation does seem to be changing. However, on close inspection, significant class-based inequalities are revealed. The Basic Skills Test (proves de competències bàsiques), which all Catalan students must take at ages twelve (end of primary schooling) and sixteen (end of secondary schooling), has uncovered differences among socio-economic groups, which were more marked for English than for maths, Catalan and Spanish, the other skills tested. Students from (upper-)middle-class milieux scored significantly higher in English than those from underprivileged areas. This variance was also apparent when school type was considered, with private schools clearly outperforming public ones (Rodríguez 2015). One of the key ways in which policymakers have tried to remedy the chronic social inequalities associated with and produced by English is through the promotion of Contentand-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) pedagogies in state schooling placing special emphasis on inclusiveness and social justice (Escobar and Evnitskaya 2013). Catalan CLIL has not expanded as quickly or systematically as elsewhere in Spain (education being highly decentralized in the country). Navés and Victori (2010) attribute this to the desire to avoid the top-down imposition of CLIL in a context fraught with numerous language policy tensions. By contrast, the private education sector in Catalonia has in general embraced instruction-through-the medium of English (in its different variants) more eagerly than the public sector owing to more flexible employment practices and a heightened market orientation. CLIL discourse has carefully problematized the glorification of the NS found in commercial ELT. Promoters emphasize that CLIL programmes aim at achieving functional, not native-like proficiency (Marsh 2002), and that learners are not to be treated “as (deficient) novices but as (efficient) users” (Lorenzo and Moore 2010: 24). In general, CLIL implementation has normalized the NNS teacher by moving the focus away from linguistic competence towards content teachers’ expertise in their disciplines. We shall see how this CLIL rhetoric has percolated to the level of policy implementation when we analyse the state school data.

Ideologies of English in Catalonia Available research on English in Catalonia has mostly focused on adolescents or young adults. In a study with high school students (sixteen-year-olds), Flors-Mas (2013) identified the ideology of necessitation as the most prevalent, connected to the ideology

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of linguistic instrumentalism. Contrary to expectations, the ideology of externalization was not present. English was viewed as a language with a wide ownership, which the author analysed along the lines of Woolard’s ideology of anonymity (2008). In line with Comellas (2009), Flors-Mas (2013) also identified class-based differences. While all students adhered to the idea that they must know English, working-class students were more prone to see this as a burden than middle-class students. The author connects this to the generally lower competence of the former, for whom the language feels more remote, but also to the fact that they do not envisage personal or professional futures for which English might be relevant. Focusing on higher education students, Maslanka (2019) observed widespread ideologies of necessitation and linguistic instrumentalism grounded on the “promise of English” (Park 2011: 443), although her informants did not manifest the intense feelings of anxiety or shame reported in South Korea. Speakers identified class-based inequalities, in particular, in relation to study abroad programmes. Finally, they showed nuanced views on the prevalence of the ideology of self-deprecation in Spain. They reported feeling fairly self-confident about their English, although admitted that general proficiency was still low and that most people felt embarrassed when having to speak in English. The combination of age and social class may explain these results, which contradict the findings by Comellas (2009) among secondary school students. Let us now turn to the empirical study reported here with a brief introduction to the schools and the ethnographic approach adopted.

IV.  TWO SCHOOL ETHNOGRAPHIES: SITES, APPROACH AND DATA The data examined in this chapter comes from two simultaneous ethnographies of language policy undertaken between 2015 and 2018 in two schools located in the Barcelona metropolitan area.3 In both cases, instruction through the medium of English was gaining a prominent role in the curriculum and was being showcased to increase enrolment rates.

Els Pins Els Pins (EP)4 is a state secondary school located in a lower-middle-class city on the outskirts of Barcelona. It offers four years of compulsory secondary education and elective baccalaureate (two years). All students at EP must take EFL classes; French is offered as an elective. After a pilot one-year scheme, in 2014 the school joined GEP,5 a government programme to support CLIL in Catalan schools through the provision of staff training (for further details, see Codó and Patiño-Santos 2018). GEP/CLIL was instrumental in consolidating the upward academic trajectory of EP, after a few years of high social disruption and lowering standards in which (lower-)middle-class families had fled the school. Three courses began to be taught using English as the vehicular language: Science Research (twelve- to thirteenyear-olds), Physical Education (thirteen- to fourteen-year-olds) and Technology (fifteen- to sixteen-year-olds). Two further courses were partially taught in English.

Forum International School 6 Forum International School (FIS) encapsulates a totally different reality. FIS is a feepaying, fully private school attended by children of (upper-) middle-class local and expatriate families. It offers education from kindergarten through to baccalaureate, as well as some vocational training options. Founded in 1989 as a Catalan-medium school, it

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was sold in 2008 to a hedge fund. The first decision of the new ownership was to turn it into an ‘international school’, and to implement an officially trilingual policy in which the two local languages, Catalan and Spanish, were to share teaching time with English. The school has a wide multilingual curriculum on offer, with Mandarin being compulsory from age four to age ten and then becoming one of three foreign language electives alongside French and German. The school has recently begun to offer the curricula of the International Baccalaureate Organization (see Sunyol and Codó 2019).

The Corpus As is customary in ethnographic projects, the corpus includes a variety of data types (field notes, group and individual interviews, recordings of sessions and of other school events, visual data, institutional documents, etc.) involving multiple stakeholders (teachers, students, administrators, families, policymakers, trade union leaders, etc.) and spaces, often beyond the school site. Although for reasons of space only a small part of the corpus will be presented in this chapter, the data chosen is representative of the logics in relation to English observed in each school over a period of three years.

V.  DATA ANALYSIS English-as-Communication at Els Pins When asked in a group interview about the goals of English education/CLIL at EP, all the teachers involved agreed that they hoped to bring the language closer to the students (‘make students familiar with it’) and eradicate the feeling of ‘fear’ engendered by English (Anna, the PE teacher, even employed the word ‘panic’ to describe her students’ reaction when they heard her begin to teach in English). The main objective was, thus, to deexceptionalize English as a language of instruction. Pepa, the head teacher, claimed that they hoped to improve students’ oral abilities (understood, as she explained, as the capacity to understand and communicate basic information). Jordi, the fourth-year Technology teacher, summed up the staff’s thinking by saying that they wanted their students ‘to have a better level of English than we had’ to which his colleagues all acquiesced. In an individual interview (see Extract 1), I asked Jordi to be more explicit about his linguistic ambitions for his students. Extract 1 J (Jordi), Technology teacher; E (Eva), researcher 01 J: sempre que parlin (1.3) el més important/ J: if they speak (1.3) the most important 02 (.) ÉS: (.) comunicar\ (.) val/ (.) i que:: thing/ (.) IS: (.) to communicate\ (.) 03 si s’equivoquen amb la paraula que es okay/ (.) and i:f if they make a mistake 04 deixen la essa no sé què coses d’aquestes/ with a word or forget the esses 05 (.) que això és (.) a priori/ secundari\ things like that/ (.) that is a priori/ 06 [. . .] i i que jo en la meva trajectòria secondary\ [. . .] and in my personal 07 personal jo sempre que he parlat en trajectory every time I’ve spoken in 08 anglès/ (.) e:l noranta per cent/ ha estat English/ (.) ninety percent/ has been 09 amb alemanys/ francesos italians no amb with Germans/ French or Italians not 10 anglesos\ (.) llavors\ (.) tots tenim les with English\ so (.) we all have our 11 nostres mancances i limitacions/ en quant weaknesses andlimitations in terms of 12 a l’accent/ la pronunciació/ i no sé què/ accent/ pronunciation/ and whatever/

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13 E: mhm/ (.) i això els hi els hi expliques\ [o::/ 14

E: mhm/ (.) and do you tell them that\ [or/

15 J: [sí intentem-ho fer bé però ja està o sigui J: [yes let’s try to do it well but that’s it let’s 16 no:: no ens obsessionem amb amb: (.) no:t not get obsessed with with (.) with 17 amb coses que:: que no toquen\ [. . .] things that are of no concern\ [. . .] I think 18 jo crec que: ajuda/ el fet de que vegis a it helps to see someone who doesn’t fear 19 algú que no tingui por/ malgrat ho faci speaking in English/ no matter whether 20 (.) millor/ o pitjor\ (1.2) vale/ (.) no sé they’re better or worse at it/ I don’t 21 com a mínim:: A MI em va servir\ no/ know at least it worked for ME\ right/ I 22 ºde:: un professor això\ no::/ m:º (.) had ºa university professor\ uhmº whose 23 profe de la universitat\ (.) que a nivell pronunciation wa::s (.) AWFUL\ (.) but 24 de pronunciació era::: (.) FATAL\ (.) grammatically he was perfect then you 25 però gramaticalment/ era (.) perfecte\ would say jeez (.) everyone understands 26 llavors deies hòstia (.) tothom::\ l’entén him right/ (1.8) so that’s it (.) it’s all 27 perfectament no/ (1.8) pues ja està (.) communication/ so (.) let’s take this 28 com és comunicar/ pues (.) cap a aquí\ direction\

There are a number of issues intertwined in Jordi’s response. We see what I call the ideology of ‘English-as-communication’ emerging right at the beginning (lines 1–2). Jordi draws on his experience in lingua franca contexts to justify a less-than-perfect type of English. Although he initially focuses on morphology (‘forgetting the esses’), it is pronunciation that characterizes the type of English he is trying to legitimize. In lines 16–17, he animates a dialogue with his students in which he encourages them not to ‘get obsessed’ with ‘things of no concern’ and to adopt this same stance towards English, that is, to have no ‘fear’ (line 19). Jordi’s ‘fear’ (and subsequent discourse) points towards EP students’ embodied anxieties, as described by staff, which the GEP programme aimed to overcome, and also reminds us of the long-standing ideology of self-deprecation that, as we discussed, defines Spaniards’ relationship to English. Jordi presents himself as an attitudinal model for his students. Jordi’s own attitudinal model (a university lecturer he once had) is depicted as having an ‘awful’ English, by which Jordi means heavily Spanish-accented, which allegedly did not prevent him from communicating successfully. Clearly, effective communication, which Jordi attributes to grammatical accuracy, is the aspiration for Jordi and his students. This ideology brought with it a devaluing of NS varieties in the school, as we shall see in Extract 2. During the year 2016–2017, EP received an Irish English language assistant, Michael (for further details, see Codó and McDaid 2019). At no time was Michael’s nativeness showcased; rather it was his youth (and thus assumed closeness to the students) that was systematically emphasized as his number one asset. In fact, in one of the Technology sessions in which Michael was present there was a moment of metapragmatic evaluation of the three varieties of English present in the class: Irish (Michael’s), Australian (one of the students had lived in Australia) and Spanish English. Extract 2 J (Jordi), Technology teacher; S (student) 01

J:

02 03

=so::\ is easie::r/ an Australian/ accent\ tha::n\ ((some Ss laugh)

S:

a Spanish accent

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04

J:

than/ Ireland\

05

J:

e:::h/ (.) [Spani:sh/

06

S:

07

J:

 241

[Spanish accent\ [i:s (.) [is better\ [is/

 [the most understandable for all of us\ (.) right\

We see how Jordi and his students transition from ‘easier’ to ‘better’ to ‘most understandable’ in evaluating varieties of English to construct value for their collective Spanish-accented English (line 7), but also how two ‘native’ varieties (Irish and Australian English) are not given the appreciation we often encounter in the literature. Such bold and unproblematic defense of ‘Spanish English’ was observed regularly at EP. This was undoubtedly related to the need to boost some CLIL teachers’ self-confidence in English (they were all not as confident as Jordi). In the CLIL classes, we observed a fair amount of Spanish used by the students and a great deal of translingual practices, such as ‘put the dit’(Cat. finger) instead of ‘put your finger in’ (Science Research lesson, 25/01/2016, twelve-year-olds). The students often playfully subverted English grammar/ lexis to convey their message. Many of those expressions were calqued from Spanish/ Catalan (‘mi computer no function’, ‘my computer does not work’, Science Research lesson, 21/12/2015), and words often had the endings removed or anglicized, for example in the expression ‘in aguanting’ (from the Spanish/Catalanverb aguantar instead of English hold). By and large, these contributions, which were less frequent – but not rare – as students grew older, were tolerated by the teachers, who sometimes reformulated students’ turns in ‘correct’ English but sometimes did not, adhering to the ideology of ‘English-as-communication’ that was prevalent in the school. The students voiced an analogous discourse founded on the same ideology. The following extract comes from a focus group discussion with three academically oriented high-performing students aged sixteen who were attending Jordi’s English-medium Technology course. They respond here to my question ‘how would you characterize a good student of English?’. Extract 3 S (Susanna), Ed (Eduard) and M (Miquel), students; E (Eva), researcher 01 02

S:

capaç de mantenir una conversa estable/

S:

able to maintain a stable conversation

03

E:

mhm/

E:

uhu/

04

Ed:

improvisada\

Ed:

improvised\

05 06 07 08

E:

improvisa:da::/ o sigui\ la improvit- E. la capacitat\ d’improvitza:r/ la capacitat/ de\ la fluïdesa\ no:/ una mica/ (.) què més/ diríeu/

improvi::sed/ so\ improvi- the capacity\ to improvi:se/ the capacity/ of\ fluency\ ri:ght/ a bit/ (.) what else/ would you say/

(2.0)

(2.0)

09 10

Ed:

que tingui vocabulari\

Ed:

that they have vocabulary

11

E:

per expressar-se\ no:/ aha\

E:

to express themselves\ right:/ uhu\

12

M:

que comuniqui bé

M:

that they communicate well

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13

E:

que comuni-un bon comunicador\

E:

that they commu- a good communicator\

14

M:

hm\

M:

hm\

(.)

15

(.)

16 17

E:

vale\ (.) a::::hm::\ (.) tenir un bon accent/ és:\ importa:nt\ o::/

E:

okay\ e:::::rm\ having a good accent/ i:s\ that impo:rtant\ or not/

18

S:

=no\ mentre se t’entengui:/

S:

=no\ as long as you’re understoo:d/.

Through this dialogue we confirm, again, how the NS category is nowhere to be found at EP. The students, like their teachers, identify good English performance with being able to sustain longish (‘stable’) non-scripted (‘improvised’) conversation in English. Note that this ideal(ized) speaker, who is able to quickly (and with apparent ease) produce messages in English, echoes, through contrast, the paralysed prototypical Spaniard discussed earlier. Interestingly, when I ask them to explain the category further, the students seem at a loss for words; only after two seconds does Eduard indicate vocabulary as another key aspect, and then Miquel utters the magic word, ‘communication’ (line 12). I decide to explicitly enquire about the importance of accent, but Susanna immediately (note the latching) responds that accent is not important as long as you are understood. The topic dies after Susanna’s turn. There are various important elements in this extract: the total erasure of grammatical accuracy, the elevation of communication, and the dismissal of accent, presenting intelligibility and good pronunciation as separate processes. Let us now turn to ideologies of English at FIS.

Quality English at Forum International School At FIS, the fully private international school, discourses around English were totally dissimilar. In fact, FIS’ distinctive educational offer pivoted around offering ‘more’ to students than the rest of schools in town (Codó and Sunyol 2019); this ‘more’ was in many ways epitomized by their type of English instruction. The school’s official trilingual policy established that 33 per cent of teaching time was to be in English. In its website, FIS showcased its ‘English language immersion’ programme, which according to the head teacher was radically distinct from (state) CLIL. In practice, immersion meant that pre-school children were taught literacy skills not only in Catalan but also in English. The school had a clear monolingual ethos (De Mejía 2013) grounded on the ideology of multi​lingu​alism​-as-m​ultip​le-pa​ralle​l-mon​oling​ualis​ms. At pre-school, classes were monolingual in one language or the other depending on the day of the week, and at higher levels of education, each subject was taught in one of the three school official languages (see Sunyol 2017 for a fuller discussion). The institution placed a great deal of discursive emphasis on the quality of their English instruction (‘fer anglès molt bé’, lit. ‘to do English very well’, see Sunyol 2019). This expression referred ambivalently to the school’s central concern with English and the way it was taught, but also, very importantly, to how the school was socializing its students in the ideology that not any kind of English was enough. For example, in one of the classrooms there hung a small poster with the following statement: ‘Good English, well spoken and well written will open more doors than a college degree. Bad English will slam doors you didn’t even know existed.’ The quote, by William Raspberry, an American journalist, displayed

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on the wall with no reference to its author, encapsulates FIS’ stance towards English. Not only is the ‘promise of English’ (Park 2011) said to be contingent on ‘good English’, but the argument is buttressed through threats of severe penalties for offenders. However, the question still remains, what was considered ‘good English’ at FIS? To unpack the category we must first review the trajectory of the school. FS was rebranded as an ‘international school’ in 2008 becoming FIS. One of the key traits of FIS’ internationality was its unique educational model, defined in an interview by its head teacher as a ‘Catalan international school’. What this meant was that the local Catalan language/culture retained greater presence than in other international schools, but also that FIS did not aim to imitate British or American school models. In keeping with this distinct school profile, the ideal FIS teacher was not an NS but an ‘international teacher’ (as showcased in the school’s website). An international teacher was defined as a proficient English speaker as well as a well-travelled and cosmopolitan professional with educational experience abroad. According to the head teacher, the international teacher, who could potentially be a national of several countries, was more aligned with the school model fostered than British or American ‘natives’. Despite the ideological defense of the international teacher, there was a pragmatic side to it (as we were able to find out ethnographically). In the past, the school had had unsatisfactory experiences with NS traveller-teachers hopping schools to see the world, as was reported by the school head. In preferring proficient NNS teachers, the school had a larger pool to choose from and was not obliged to hire NSs. In any case, the truth was that the head’s valuation of NNS is rather rare in the field of elite schooling and challenges long-standing native-speakerist ideologies. But the interview also illuminated the multifarious tensions the head teacher had to navigate, countering parents’ expectations that teachers be NSs while at the same time guaranteeing that all teachers had ‘native-like’ English proficiency – later reformulated as ‘correct fluency’ in the language. We witnessed how the NS teacher category, which the head teacher tried hard to erase, kept propping up at different moments. The NS category was rarely present in the school’s daily workings; however, it did structure value for some staff members. Obviously, it was the NS teachers who most fiercely defended the worth of their nativeness, interestingly not in relation to their NNS colleagues, but in opposition to state schooling. We can observe distinction-through-English in the discourse of Kate, a key actor at FIS, given that she was the ‘multilingual’ programme coordinator in charge of the language interviews for teacher recruitment (see Extract 4). Extract 4 K (Kate), multilingual programme coordinator; A (Andrea), researcher 01 02 03

K:

in immersion programs\ or/ I mean/ I think am:/ a lot of:/ schools are possibly using to give a bit more English / ( ) but then of course you need the teaching staff\ (1.5)

04

A:

yeah\ mhm\

05 06 07 08 09

K:

erm:/ I mean I have been on conferences or whatever set up in Barcelona\ (.) and you know/ these are English teachers in state education and I don’t understand when they speak English\ (.) and yet they are teaching\ (.) CHILDREN\ in English\ and THAT’S the difference between/ (.) as it were our kind of school\ (.) and the rest\ (.) em:/ you know/ the English we are giving the children is native English\

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10

A:

yeah yeah that makes a difference\

11

K:

a massive/ massive/ massive difference

Kate starts off by focalizing immersion (as we have discussed, a distinguishing FIS feature) as the method to provide FIS students with enhanced exposure to English, but then immediately adds that simply ‘more’ is not enough; it has to be more AND good English. She presents a polarized dichotomy between FIS NS teachers and state schooling NNS teachers, whose English is unintelligible (to her, of course). She seems preoccupied and at the same time upset (notice her louder voice signaled through capitals in the transcript) that those NNS teachers are passing ‘such English’ on to their students. However, through Kate’s discourse we do not get any insights into what the source of the state teachers’ unintelligibility, hence ‘bad’ English, might be. For this we need to turn to another interview excerpt (see Extract 5), this time featuring Isabella, an ‘NS’ language assistant. Extract 5 I (Isabella), British English language assistant; A (Andrea), researcher 01 I: 02 03 04

[. . .] they have/ (.) quite a few\ (.) not native English teachers/ e:m/ (.) but they have/ teachers with very- with a good level\ (.) em:/ and they do loads of so:ngs/ and it’s quite ( ) ((laughs)) and it (goes the same)/ all the way up/ (.) em:/ [until they leave\

05 A: 06

[so you think- (.) do you think they should hire/ or they should have more native teachers than:/

07 I: 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

((inhales)) MAYBE WHEN THE- when it comes to infanti:l/ (2.0) I don’t know\ (.) it’s a hard a one\ (.) I’d say no but then I’d say yes at the same time/ because if they want it/(.) so:/ they learn naturally like em:/ like as if they were in the country/ then I’d say native because/ (1.5) well that’s how a native learns/ they learn from other natives/ and they learn how to pronounce/ an:d the problem is there is a good amount of teachers that pronunciation is is good/ I mean there’s others that pronounce/ like a typical Spanish person/ they roll the Rs [the letter r] and you know/ (.) obviously they are gonna make mistakes/ and those mistakes are what the kids is gonna- are gonna pick up/ so:/ (.) it’s:/ it’s a hard one\ (.) em:/ (.) but/ (.) maybe from maybe from primary one/ (1.5) I’d say native teachers/ (.) which is basically I think that’s what they do here actually\ (.) thinking well

In lines 01–04, Isabella is discussing English education at FIS pre-school and we see how she praises the English of her NNS colleagues. When prompted by Andrea, the researcher, to explicitly say whether she thinks the school should hire more NS teachers, she hesitates, draws on comparisons with L1 learning contexts and finally focalizes pronunciation. Then, in a rhetorical turn almost identical to Kate’s above, Isabella engages in a discussion of how poor the pronunciation of some Spanish teachers of English is (Isabella does not mention state education but it is hard not to see the parallels with Kate’s discourse), and how those Spanish-sounding features (indexed by rolling their Rs) are going to be passed on to students (again, the same concern expressed by Kate’s as veiled justification of the importance of their nativeness). In her final comment (line 17), Isabella aligns with the school policy of hiring NS teachers for early schooling, engaging, like Kate, in distinctionthrough-English work. Pronunciation/accent seems to be the cornerstone of discourses both in emphasizing the value of NS English (Kate and Isabella at FIS) and in downplaying it (as in the case of

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all teachers at EP). But what are the features of this good/poor accent in English? We have some clues in Isabella’s discourse. Rolling one’s Rs is unacceptable because that is what a ‘typical Spanish person would sound like’ (line 13), that is, a typical Spanish person who speaks English. So, whereas at the state school, teachers’ concern was getting students not to be afraid of English, at FIS the concern is not sounding like a ‘typical Spanish person’. One of the parents we interviewed (Gema) put this across very explicitly (see Extract 6). Gema holds a managerial position in a multinational, US-based IT company located close to FIS. She works almost exclusively in English. At the time of the interview, Gema’s twin daughters were in their final year at FIS. Extract 6 G (Gema), mother; A (Andrea), researcher 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09

G: y de repente resulta que:/ que hablan inglés\ (.) entonces claro tienen un acento/ que nosotros no tenemos\ (.) tienen una capacidad de entender/ que lo pillan y yo no::/ [. . .] gramaticalmente las oyes y algún gajaco hay pero::/(.) pero vaya es un nivel de::/ de inglés que yo no tendré nunca no/

G: and suddently it turns out the:y/ they speak English (.) then of course they have an accent/ that we don’t have\ (.) they have an ability to understand/ that they get it and I do::n’t/ [. . .] grammatically you listen to them and there are some mistakes bu::t/ (.) I mean it’s a level o::f/ of English that I will never have right/

10 11

A:

A:

12 13 14 15 16

G: yo no sé pronunciar/ las palabras que G: I don’t know pronouncing/ the dicen ellas no/ por ejemplo:/ (.) yo words they say right/ for exa:mple/ que sé/ (.) una::/ (.) no te sé decir/ (.) I don’t know (.) o::ne/ (.) I cannot ((laughs)) ninguna\ pero:/ (.) no lo think/ ((laughs)) of a word\ bu:t/ (.) decimos [igual we don’t say them [the same way

17 18

A:

19 20 21 22 23 24

G: o sea no suena como cuando habla su G: okay it does not sound like when his padre/ (.) o como cuando hablo yo/ dad speaks/ (.) or when I speak/ that que se nos nota que somos españoles/ it’s clear we are Spanish/ speaking in hablando en inglés\no/ (.) ellas/ (.) no English\ right/ they/ (.) don’t know (.) sé/ (.) tampoco se llegan a parecer/ they don’t sound completely English inglesas del todo/ pero:/(.) pero sí\ (.) either/ bu:t/ (.) but yes\ (.) they speak hablan:/ (.) hablan así\ sabes / like this\ you know/

y cuando dices lo del acento/ (.) am:/ (.) a qué te refieres/

[pero qué es un buen acento A: para ti/

and when you were talking about accent/ (.) e:rm/ (.) what were you referring to/

[but what is a good accent for you/

We see how Gema focalizes her daughters’ pronunciation to begin with and then their listening abilities, and although she admits they make some grammatical mistakes (line 6), she concludes by saying they have a level of English she will never have. What defines her understanding of an ‘excellent’ level is not grammatical accuracy but advanced oral comprehension skills and a good pronunciation. When Andrea, the researcher, probes Gema’s understanding of what a good accent means to her, Gema finds it difficult to pin it down, searches for examples of words but none come to her mind, and finally finds the answer to that difficult question: ‘to have an accent that does not tell you’re Spanish’. Her daughters do not sound totally ‘English’ but they do not sound Spanish either, like both her and her husband do; their English is ‘non-localizable’.

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Gema’s daughters speak English fluently and with apparent ease, according to their mother. They embody the typical FIS student who is not afraid or embarrassed, but rather, embraces English. FIS students were constantly exposed to English and were encouraged to use it not just in academic activities but also in informal communication, for example in designated class spaces. Sometimes they wrote post-it messages in English (like ‘go hard or go home’, seen in one of the International Baccalaureate (IB) classrooms, Sunyol 2019). IB students created their particular slang, inner jokes and codes, which would very often be in English. Their use of swear words in English and slang that would make them sound authentically English was also evident in their Instagram stories. Students’ playful (but ‘correct’) use of the English language indicated a certain mastery/confidence and desire for self-identification. Marta, one of the IB students we interviewed, explained what speaking good English meant for her. ‘Speaking fluently, without too many grammar mistakes and having a good vocabulary’. When asked about accent, she replied, ‘having a good accent for me is not to have a Spanish accent’. Exactly the same description Gema gave. This coincidence is not anecdotal. In the interview we conducted with Lluïsa (see Extract 7), a long-time Catalan teacher of English and the head of department, she mentioned that her students were ‘highly skilled at imitating accents’ and that this was due to the fact that the school had ‘educated their ear’. The school’s focus on developing students’ awareness of different accents of English, as well as the regular in-class discussions around them, can be seen in Extract 7 (see lines 08–09), where Lluïsa recalls a particularly hurting comment made by the student representatives at the graduation ceremony. Extract 7 L (Lluïsa), English teacher; A (Andrea), researcher 01 L: 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

=vale/ (.) o sigui de fet/ (.) crec que a L: vegades quan em van a mi/ el el dia de la graduació/ ens van fer una brometa que ens va tocar una mica el dallonsis/ (.) perquè les les les delegades van fer un discurs/ (.) i feien una mica de broma amb tothom\ (.) i a nosaltres ens van dir/ “us ah: trobarem a faltar els listenings d’anglès amb els diferents accents/” perquè jo sempre insisteixo si això és/ “look it is Scottish/” o és no sé què\ (.) diu “però ens quedem amb el de les nostres professores/ (.) tot i que/ reconeixeu-ho/ (.) cap de les dues és anglesa\” (.) daf/ (.) daf és una cosa que diu el Miquel que vol dir/ directo al fracaso\ (.)

18 A: =ja:\

=okay/ (.) I mean in fact/ (.) I think sometimes when they did that to me/ on on graduation day/ they played a joke on us that really peeved me off/ (.) because the the the delegates gave a speech/ (.) and were taking the mickey out of everyone\ (.) and when it came to us they said/ ‘we’ll er miss you and the English listenings with the different accents/’ because I’m always like this is/ ‘look this is Scottish’ or whatever\ they said ‘we prefer our teachers’/ (.) even though/ you must admit it/ (.) neither of you are English\’ (.) dtf/ (.) dtf is something Miquel always says that means/ doomed to fail\

A: =uhu:\

This extract takes us back to the question of what kinds of teachers can ensure that ‘good English’ is acquired at FIS. Despite the head teacher’s vindication of the ‘international’ teacher, we see how in actual practice NN staff (Spaniards in particular) are always walking a tightrope. Even though Lluïsa was aware of the light-heartedness of her

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students’ comments, she reports feeling slightly upset by them (line 04). And she had good reasons for that. The school head allegedly went pale when hearing the students’ public remarks. His next decision was to oust Lluïsa as department head and hire a ‘newly-arrived’ NS, as Lluïsa reported. Her and her colleagues’ longer experience, and in some cases credentials (like Judit’s accredited IB examiner status), were superseded by the new head’s nativeness. This excerpt and ensuing actions prove how vulnerable NNS teachers felt, and how sensitive the issue of (non)-nativeness was, traversed by numerous tensions and institutional politics at FIS.

VI.  DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS In his 2011 paper, Park (2011) discusses the recalibration of value to which the TOEIC English exam was subject in South Korean recruitment processes. Echoing Queen’s lyrics, he concludes that “distinction must go on” (453). This is also what I have tried to show in this chapter. The attempts at democratizing English in Catalonia/Spain through its introduction as a vehicular language in state schooling will only partially reach its objectives. Yes, indeed, English will be made more widely available than in the past, and in that sense, the gap between the English haves and the English have-nots will become narrower; however, new forms of linguistic hierarchization seem already underway. As ideological sites, the two educational institutions analysed not only have dissimilar objectives in relation to expected linguistic outcomes, but also different ideas about what constitutes ‘good English’. Ideologies are always situated in speakers’ experiences and imagined possibilities. In that sense, the ideology of English-as-communication that we identified at EP has to be understood in relation to the perceived point of departure and the characteristics of the student and teacher bodies. The objective of EP staff was to bring English into their students’ academic worlds. In the social class and educational milieu of EP, that meant ameliorating students’ communicative abilities, that is, turning passive knowledge into active linguistic competence, emphasizing fluency and de-problematizing accentedness, as this was recurrently identified as the source of students’ ‘fear’. The ideology of English-as-communication, which incidentally reproduces long-standing beliefs in language teaching and is in line with CLIL policymakers and researchers’ discourse, was also a way of, ideologically, granting linguistic authority to the EP CLIL teachers. The ideology of English-as-communication served to get them on board the schoolwide CLIL/GEP project, and legitimize their practice. Elite institutions like FIS, by contrast, attended by the children of the (upper)-middle classes, have a different agenda. They sell ‘good English’ as their distinctive educational offer. This is already an ideologizing move. But their ideologizing work does not stop there. FIS built value for its English through a distinct conceptualization of what ‘good English’ meant. ‘Good English’ was imagined as monolingual, fairly accurate grammatically, fluent and, crucially, non-Spanish-accented. I claim that this was not so much a practical outcome as a new classed, generation-defining, aspirational kind of English. Interestingly, this ideological process drew close attention to pronunciation, unlike in state schooling. FIS practices of distinction echoed wider discourses in Spain that construe accent as the new linguistic frontier (see García 2019). However, contrary to what is often assumed, FIS students did not aim to sound like NSs.

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We have shown how FIS was a space saturated with ideologies in tension. Despite the head teacher’s efforts at enthroning the ‘international teacher’, lay ideologies of nativeness prevailed among (some) families and students. This was not surprising given that in Spain, as in many other places, NS ideologies have typically underpinned (and still do, see Relaño-Pastor and Fernández-Barrera 2019) ideas about linguistic authority and language quality – the ideology of self-deprecation undoubtedly playing a significant role in that respect. The FIS head teacher had, thus, to reconcile regular demands for NS English with his commitment to high-quality education (difficult to achieve with a body of native teachers-on-the-go). The tension between NNS and NS teachers – as quality emblems – surfaced periodically in myriad situations, tipping the scales in favour of one or the other group depending on various intersecting circumstances. However, even if the ideology of native speakerism was present (although disputed) in relation to FIS teacher selection, I want to argue that we should not transpose this into student aspirational models, as it is often done in the literature (see e.g., Cenoz and Gorter 2015: 3). I did not find in the data evidence that the ideal FIS student was modelled after NS performance. Although evidence is not conclusive, there were signs that FIS students (and their families) aimed to become ‘non-localizable’ speakers of English. I understand this new category (and its paired contrast, ‘localized English’) as an iteration of the old ideology of standard and dialect. Gal (2012) claimed that the new linguistic regime endorsed by EU institutions was already a recursion of that ideology. The new ‘standard’, in Gal’s words, was being proficient in at least one global lingua franca – in particular English; the new ‘dialect’ was the mastering of only one’s national language. Gal exhorted researchers to identify what new hierarchies were being created under this new iteration (2012: 35). I argue that the dichotomy ‘non-localizable’ versus ‘localizable’ English may be one such ideological hierarchy. When more and more young people become competent in English under democratization schemes such as CLIL, elite institutions fight hard to distinguish themselves. They do this not only through enabling their students access to ‘more’ English, that is, higher degree of exposure, but, crucially, through engaging in intense ideologizing work centred on the importance of accent. While in the state school Spanish-sounding English was de-problematized, in the elite school it was construed as the source of all ills. The type of English acquired in schools like EP was problematized and stereotyped as sounding too ‘placed’, both socially and geographically, and as indexing particular (national) programmes and teachers; by contrast, FIS English indexed ‘international’ spaces of acquisition, global mobility and cosmopolitanism. Interestingly, although the NS teacher was still an influential category as the ‘source’ of authentic and distinctive quality English, the aspirational English of FIS students (and their families) was not NS English, but a‘neutral’ (Rindal and Piercy 2013) and ‘untraceable’ English that softened their most salient L1 pronunciation features. The practical distinction, that is, higher convertibility, of this type of linguistic capital (as opposed to ‘localizable English’) is to be tested empirically; similarly, the (differential or equal) market value of native-sounding English in relation to non-localizable English is to be determined through the study of processes of gatekeeping (English accreditation, job selection, school admission, etc.). More ethnographic research is needed not only to establish the relevance of the ideological contrast identified in this study, but also to understand how value (present and future) is grounded in ideologizing processes of distinction such as the ones described in this chapter.

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Symbols Used in Transcripts (.)   short pause (up to 1.0 second) (1.5)   timed pause () incomprehensible fragment (guess) best guess AA   louder than surrounding talk a::  lengthening of sound [  beginning of overlap

 self interruption = latching \ falling intonation / rising intonation (( ))   paralinguistic or non-linguistic behaviour [. . .]  omitted talk

NOTES 1. Very few migrant children were schooled in private schools subsidized with public funds (escuelas concertadas). 2. To give an example: when only the working population is considered (under sixty-four), figures of declared knowledge rise to over 40 per cent (Instituto Nacional de Estadística 2017). 3. These two ethnographies were carried out as part of the APINGLO-Cat project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICCIN, ref. FFI2014-54179-C2-1-P), of which I was principal investigator. I would like to acknowledge here the support of Iris Milán and Dani Pujol with data transcription. I would also dearly thank Jessica McDaid and two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. They have helped me refine my arguments significantly. To the three of them, many thanks. My thinking around accent in the field of EFL has continued to develop framed by my current participation in the ENIFALPO I+D project (ref. PID2019-106710GB-I00). 4. In previous publications, we have referred to this school as Pinetree Secondary. 5. GEP stands for Grup d’Experimentació per al Plurilingüisme (Group for Experimenting Toward Plurilingualism). 6. I am most indebted to Andrea Sunyol for allowing me access to her data, and for sharing with me insights about the school and the data.

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Chapter 15

Probing ‘Erasure’ for Transnational Language Policy and Practice English amongst Multilingual Ismaili Muslims in Northern Pakistan and Eastern Tajikistan BROOK BOLANDER

I.  PROBING ‘ERASURE’ FOR LANGUAGE POLICY AS PRACTICE AND IDEOLOGY This chapter explores how ‘erasure’ offers a window onto language policy by highlighting the importance of what is left unsaid, bracketed out and hidden in both explicit language policy and local appropriations of policy in metatalk and practice. To do so, it draws on contemporary and historical data involving the negotiation of and elevated value granted to English amongst multilingual Ismaili Muslims living in Hunza, northern Pakistan, and Khorog, eastern Tajikistan. Erasure is understood here, following Irvine and Gal (2000: 37), as a “semiotic process” of simplification which “renders some persons or activities . . . invisible”. It is entangled with the construction of deep-seated ideas about linguistic difference, which, together with other processes of distinction (‘fractal recursivity’), become viewed as exemplary of particular groups (‘iconization’) (Irvine and Gal 2000). Erasure is hence part of larger sense-making and boundary work involving the drawing of difference between self and other. This underscores that erasure is not an isolated or arbitrary phenomenon, but rather intricately connected to interests (Irvine 1989) held by individuals and groups. Against this backdrop, the analysis of erasure can shed light on the negotiation of language hierarchies involving English in multilingual settings. In focusing on erasure amongst Ismaili Muslims in northern Pakistan and eastern Tajikistan, the chapter aims to contribute to the volume’s focus on ideology and World Englishes by adopting a transnational perspective (see also Bolander 2016a, 2016b, 2017). Data collected during ethnographic fieldwork amongst Ismailis in Hunza and Khorog indicate salient overlaps in English language ideologies. This is noteworthy if one considers the unalike historical and contemporary linguistic landscapes which English has become embedded in, and which are themselves linked to markedly different colonial and Soviet historical precursors to nation-state building of Pakistan and Tajikistan.

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As I demonstrate in the chapter, the analysis of both overt and covert Ismaili language policy underscores the progressive historical and contemporary importance granted to English. In the most explicit example of language policy, the Aga Khan, the community’s spiritual, social and political leader, refers to English as the community’s ‘second language’, selected with the explicit aim of advancing its ‘development potential’ (Aga Khan interview with Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation in 2011, published on NanoWisdoms). In a similar vein, English is labelled the “authoritative language” (Ismailia Constitution 1986: article 20) of the pan-Ismaili global constitution and the Aga Khan encourages Ismailis to learn English in his farmans (‘edicts’). Concurrent with such explicit references, the value of English is underscored in its use across various official and semi-official spaces, including as a (or the) medium of instruction in Aga Khan schools and academies, in the majority of official and semi-official online spaces run by and for Ismailis, and by the Aga Khan himself. Together with other nation-state symbols and structures, including a constitution and flag, a cohesive “development bureaucracy” (Devji 2009: xii), and a centralized “institutional infrastructure” (Steinberg 2011: 1), English has thus become important to the forging of unity and shared identity amongst Ismailis. Indeed, despite being dispersed in over twenty-five countries around the world and diverse, for example, as regards ethnicity, Ismailis share an identity as Ismaili. This is largely due to the Aga Khan, whose lineage is traced back to the Prophet Muhammad: The Aga Khan is conceived of as an “intermediary between the divine and human realms”, and the sole individual who can, via his ta’wil or “interpretation”, “reveal the true, inner meaning, the batin, of religion” (Steinberg 2011: 10). In my attempt to understand how matters of ideology – particularly processes of erasure – become relevant to Ismaili language policy involving English, I align with research that argues for the importance of an extended view of language policy (Shohamy 2006) as comprised of ideology and practice. This widely accepted view posits that there is no necessary relationship between declared and de facto policies. Policies, in this sense, transform and are transformative, because they undergo processes of scaling (Hult 2010; Mortimer and Wortham 2015) and appropriation (Levinson, Sutton and Winstead 2009) across time and space. Whilst this does not mean the relevance of overt policy should be dismissed, it calls for a closer look at practices. At the same time, as suggested earlier, this necessitates engaging with language ideology, because what people do and claim to do is strongly tied to what they think; to their values and beliefs about languages. From this vantage point, “it is not so much language as language ideology that is the object of language policy” (Pennycook 2014: 2). To do justice to this interconnectedness, viewing ‘language policy as ideology’ (Bolander 2016a, emphasis in original) demands considering the structuring and structured beliefs about languages that underlie discourse about languages and their uses in society. To this end, the chapter first engages with the range of data and methodology adopted in Section ‘Data and Methodology’, before considering in some detail the progressive historical emergence of English as important to contemporary Ismaili ideology (Section ‘“Think in English, Speak in English and Dream in English”’). Together with the introduction, these two sections pave the way to the focus in Section ‘Practice and its Erasure’. Beginning first with practice (Section ‘Practice’), I discuss the relative absence of English in day-to-day life in Hunza and Khorog in connection with widespread positive evaluations of the Aga Khan’s language policy, before turning to explore the implications of this finding for processes of erasure (Section ‘Erasure’). As this structure suggests, it is only against the backdrop of historical delineation and discussions of practice that one

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can appreciate what elements of the “sociolinguistic field” (Irvine and Gal 2000: 37) are being simplified and reflect upon possible reasons – that is, interests – behind these acts of erasure.

II.  DATA AND METHODOLOGY The data used in this chapter is threefold. The first and most dominant source comprises ethnographic fieldwork amongst Ismailis in Hunza and Khorog. The second is historical and consists of speeches by the Aga Khan III (Imam from 1885 to 1957) published in books; the Aga Khan III’s memoirs (Aga Khan III 1954); and archival research conducted in the British Library London and the National Archives Kew.1 The third source is Ismaili discourse published online. This mainly includes speeches by the current Aga Khan IV, and quotes taken from Aga Khan Development Network sites (a global development network with mandates in diverse fields, including education). I conceptualize these sites as “digital spaces”, which are “situated not in specific territorial sites but in the virtual reality of mediascapes” (Jacquemet 2010: 58), and as field sites within a multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995; Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce and Taylor 2012). As mentioned in the introduction, Ismailis are dispersed in over twenty-five countries around the world. These include the mass of land bridging northern Pakistan, eastern Tajikistan, western China and eastern Afghanistan. In 2012 and 2013, I conducted seven months of ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. I spent most of this time in a village in Central Hunza, northern Pakistan, and in the city of Khorog, eastern Tajikistan. Both places have majority Ismaili populations (Kreutzmann 1996; Bliss 2006; Steinberg 2011), although Ismailis constitute a minority in the nation-states of Pakistan and Tajikistan (Sunni Muslims form the majority in both Pakistan and Tajikistan); and both have witnessed an upsurge in institutions providing English-medium education and English-language teaching. This is largely a result of efforts of the Aga Khan Education Services (AKES), which runs over 200 schools around the world (Aga Khan Development Network, Aga Khan Education Services), many in areas with sizeable or majority Ismaili populations.2 In Hunza, these institutions began to spread in the early 1990s (Benz 2013, 2014; Harlech-Jones et al. 2005), and in Khorog in the late 1990s and 2000s. While there has been a rise in English in both regions, English is not the first language of the multilingual local populations. It tends to be the third or fourth language. In Central Hunza, the majority of the population speaks Burushaski as its first language, a largely oral and as-yet unclassified variety. Ismailis learn Burushaski at home from their parents, and it is the principal language in day-to-day encounters. Urdu and English – the two official languages of Pakistan – tend to be learned at school. The population in Khorog is also multilingual. The largest ethnic group of Pamiris (the majority of whom are Ismaili) speaks Shughni as their first language, southeastern Iranian language, which is, like Burushaski, learned at home; and which serves as the “lingua franca of this micro region” (Bliss 2006: 98; cf. also Bolander and Mostowlansky 2017a, b). In addition, pupils learn Tajik (Tajikistan’s sole official language) and Russian (Tajikistan’s former language of interethnic communication), with the latter being more popular than the former, despite having been demoted from its status as the language of interethnic communication in 2009 (in connection with Tajik President Emomali Rahmon’s ‘Law on Language’; cf. Kellner-Heinkele and Landau 2012). Schools also typically offer English as a foreign language; and English is one of three languages of instruction (together with Russian and Tajik) in Khorog’s Aga Khan Lycée, the only school of this kind in the area.

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In the course of my fieldwork, I lived with local families, took field notes and was a participant observer. I also conducted qualitative interviews (N=21) and two focus group discussions; and I gave a talk to a mixed audience including a large proportion of Ismailis on the basis of preliminary results at the end of my fieldwork, at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Given that the majority of my interviews were in English3 and I was not able to learn either Burushaski or Shughni, living with local families and attending all kinds of events with these families and their friends provided me with important insight into practice (and hence policy), particularly as regards the relative lack (see Section ‘Practice’) of English outside of official contexts. The people with whom I lived and spoke knew that I was conducting research and that I was interested in the role of English, but in accordance with my understanding of religion as situated, discursive and interactive (see also Bolander and Sultana 2019), I refrained from making links between English and Ismaili identity when talking with Ismailis. This allowed me to see if and how my interlocutors made English relevant to their identity as Ismaili. In the following discussions of language policy and ideology, I draw on data from all three sources, but particularly on my fieldwork data.

III. ‘THINK IN ENGLISH, SPEAK IN ENGLISH AND DREAM IN ENGLISH’ The emphasis placed on English in official Ismaili language policy has its roots in the British Raj, and the 1848 settlement of the Aga Khan I in Bombay, which provides the backdrop for recent Ismaili history. This move marked the emergence of the “modern period in the history of the . . . Ismailis” (Daftary 2007: 473), and led to heightened interaction with the British colonial administration. Of particular relevance is the 1866 Aga Khan Case, which resulted from internal conflict within the community, and which was presided over by a British Justice, Sir Justice Arnould. The case resulted in the confirmation of the Aga Khan I as sole leader of the community, and the codification of the community’s identity and organisational structure (Clarke 1976). Indeed, the Ismailis “came to see themselves as Isma‘ili through the lens of the British construction of legal community” (Steinberg 2011: 39). This cooperation with the British Empire was maintained and intensified under the rule of the Aga Khan III (Imam from 1885–1957),4 and it continued with the British government when the current Aga Khan IV became Imam in 1957. In addition to the close relationship between the Aga Khans and the British Empire/ British elite, and the role played by the British Empire in distinguishing and fortifying a distinctly Ismaili identity, the British Empire was also important because many Ismailis lived within its bounds. Indeed, according to a key tenet of Ismaili ideology, Ismailis are expected to be loyal to the place where they live. By virtue of them having, at that time, largely resided in the British Empire, this translated into a call for them to know English. Hence, in his memoirs, the Aga Khan III underscores attempting having “tr[ied] to vary the advice which I have given to my followers in accordance with the country or state in which they live”, and, as a result, having encouraged Ismailis in British East Africa to “make English their first language” (Aga Khan 1954: 37). Concurrent with an increased use of and emphasis on English, the need for a shared language grew in the second half of the twentieth century. This resulted from the geographical expansion of the community in connection with postcolonial migration, the development of a centralized institutional infrastructure (the Aga Khan Development

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Network) and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The increasing bureaucratic cohesion of the community is epitomized by the introduction of a single, global constitution in 1986. This constitution replaces previous local and regional ones (Asani 2011: 121). Notably, it is written in English, and it makes the value of English explicit in a language article, where English is labelled the constitution’s sole ‘authoritative language’ (Ismailia Constitution 1986, Article 20) (see also Bolander 2016b). It is against the backdrop of these developments that one must contextualize the Aga Khan’s calls to learn English, which are imparted to his followers in various ways, most notably in speeches and farmans disseminated via media (electronic and digital today), in person during visits to Ismaili communities, and in the form of booklets at local jamatkhanas (‘community halls’). As underscored by Asani (2011: 111), “[i]n the eyes of their followers, the farmans embodied the ongoing and infallible guidance of the Imams; hence obedience to them was obligatory”. The first such farmans which encouraged Ismailis to learn English were issued by the Aga Khan III (Imam from 1885 to 1957). In a 1940 farman broadcast in Persian by radio from Delhi to Hunza, he called on his followers to “[t]ry to educate your children and strive to learn European languages and the English language” (quoted in English in Hunzai 2004: 12). Progressively these farmans were also issued in English (Asani 2011). And in 1960, during the Aga Khan IV’s first visit to Hunza, he told his followers to “think in English, speak in English and dream in English”, a farman which has since been resemioticized into the form of a physical sign which hung in Aga Khan schools in the region. This emphasis on English is explained in an interview the Aga Khan IV gave in French5 to the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation in 2011. Responding to the interviewer’s comment that the community is “not completely dissolved in the societies in which you live”, the Aga Khan responds as follows (Example 1): (1) Absolutely not. The vast majority of the community is not in the West, and its first language is not a Western language. We have made English our second language. That yes! Because, in the sixties, in the seventies, we needed to have a language policy. If a community was without a language policy, it would dissociate itself from its development potential. And English is the language that we chose. So today, the Ismaili community speaks Farsi, Arabic, Swahili, English, French, Portuguese, etc. And then, there is a language that is more and more common, it’s their second language, for a large majority it is English. (Aga Khan interview with Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation in 2011, published on NanoWisdoms) As illustrated in this example, what is foregrounded in relation to English is its value as regards economic interests, an attitude which is dispersed throughout official Ismaili discourse. Preliminary analysis of the Aga Khan’s speeches, for instance, makes manifest that the process of constructing English as a valuable resource is intricately connected with an ideology of English as a necessity by virtue of its status as a global language. Typically, English is not the central topic of speeches, but discussed in connection with other themes like development, research and education. Within this discourse, English becomes reified as the language of possibility for the developing world.

IV.  PRACTICE AND ITS ERASURE As suggested earlier, the growing importance of English is linked to an explicit language policy, which suggests that English shall and is emerging alongside other languages, not

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as a first language which supplants, but as a second language which complements. Whilst the languages listed by the Aga Khan in Example 1 are not solely national or official languages (Farsi, Arabic, Swahili, English, French, Portuguese), but also lingua francas of regions where there are sizeable numbers of Ismailis, the scant evidence I have been able to find suggests that English is to be learned in addition to a national language, the idea being that Ismailis know a national and an international language. However, for the majority of my interlocutors in both Hunza and Khorog, their first language is not an official or national language, but Burushaski (Hunza) and Shughni (Khorog) which tend not to be formally taught (see also Section ‘Data and Methodology’). As Shohamy (2006: 47–8) argues, “[i]n a large number of nation-states, LP [language policy] implicitly or explicitly is the main mechanism for manipulating and imposing language behaviors, as it relates to decisions about languages and their uses in education and society”. It is easy to see how complex it is to assess what this might mean for Ismailis whose lives are both local and transnational, who are engrained in such varied infrastructures and institutional fabrics, and for whom the call to adapt to the places where they live means knowing various other languages in addition to English. It is my contention, as explored in this section, that this complexity also has implications for related questions of ideology, and for what is erased, how, by whom and why. For Cooper (1989: 98) language planning means understanding “[w]hat actors, attempt to influence what behaviors, of which people, for what ends, under which conditions, by what means, through what decision making process, with what effect”. Thinking about these questions in relation to Ismaili language policy as ideology, the most relevant for the approach outlined in this chapter and the local/transnational interplay which needs foregrounding here, are questions of ‘ends’ (and how these may variously be framed by the Aga Khan and official policy as compared to by Ismailis in Hunza and Khorog), ‘conditions’ (and what possibilities for language learning are envisaged and provided) and ‘effect’ (since this sheds further insight into the relationship between policymaking at an official transnational scale and potential local appropriations [and hence also transformations] of said policies). These foci are also engendered if we consider Irvine’s (1989: 255) definition of language ideology as “the cultural (or subcultural) system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests”. Indeed, a closer look at one of this definition’s core terms –‘interest’– points to the relevance of “[t]he relation of being concerned or affected in respect of advantage or detriment; esp. an advantageous relation of this kind” (OED online, sense 2a). In exploring erasure in situated appropriations (i.e., practice) of top-down language policy, I am thus particularly interested in why particular sociolinguistic phenomena are being simplified, that is, with regards to what potential advantages and detriments. In discussing issues of ‘practice’ and ‘erasure’ in this section via a series of examples, I thus foreground questions of ‘why’ and ‘how’, whilst also taking into account the extent of access (to English). Whilst I maintain the relevance of ‘erasure’ for this chapter, it is only by first considering issues of language practice from a relational perspective that it becomes possible to reflect upon processes of simplification. I hence begin with a discussion of practice as the foundation to the subsequent deliberation on two more specific examples of erasure.

Practice To start, it must be said that English is not widely used outside of formal learning contexts and institutions in either Hunza and Khorog. The predominance of English in official

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(typically educational) contexts means that there is an age, gender and class stratification, with younger girls and boys, men (more older men as compared with older women know English), and those with the financial means to send their children to private Aga Khan Schools having more access to and greater knowledge of English. This stratification holds for both places. However, access to schooling (and hence also age) plays a larger role in Khorog, given that there is only one Aga Khan school. This difference between Hunza and Khorog is clearly due to the two places’ varying histories, as part of the British Empire and Russian Empire, then Soviet Union. In the case of Hunza, exposure to English in formal learning contexts took place both earlier and in a more widespread fashion as compared to Khorog, which was part of the Soviet Union until 1991 and hence largely disconnected from the Aga Khan’s direct influence and infrastructure. In Hunza, progressive contact with English is largely due to efforts on the part of the Aga Khan III and the Aga Khan IV to promote education in the region more generally. Early attempts can be linked to the establishment of a Diamond Jubilee Investment Trust by the Aga Khan III with funds he had been gifted by his followers for his Diamond Jubilee (i.e., his sixtieth anniversary as Imam, in 1945). In Hunza (and neighbouring areas of Ismaili settlement), funds from this trust were used to found Diamond Jubilee schools, which had the aim of “bring[ing] an end to the restrictive permission system which controlled and limited access to formal education, and to allow school attendance for all children, irrespective of their class and family background” (Benz 2014: 128). By 1960, Diamond Jubilee schools in Gilgit-Baltistan also catered to girls’ education (Benz 2014: 129). Although instruction was originally in Urdu, in 1997 the schools became English-medium schools; and in the same year, the Aga Khan Education Services, Pakistan (AKES, P) also established English-medium secondary schools. These private Aga Khan Higher Secondary Schools are renowned for their “high quality standards” (Benz 2013: 130), and were regularly mentioned during fieldwork with respect to the quality of teaching in English; and exposure to and command of English. While the most reputable English-medium schools in Gilgit-Baltistan at the secondary level are costly and unaffordable for the majority of local residents, “the beginning of the age of mass education in Gilgit-Baltistan” for boys (Benz 2014: 128), and later for girls (Benz 2014: 129; cf. also Benz 2013) is the result of efforts on the part of the Aga Khan III, who used his authority to make local rulers of Ismaili settlement areas, who were themselves Ismaili, open up the educational system to children from various backgrounds. These efforts have been continued by the Aga Khan IV and the Aga Khan Development Network, who have contributed widely both to a general increase in literacy in largely rural Gilgit-Baltistan as well as to an increase in access to English. An example of the centrality of the Aga Khan’s farmans on the importance of English as conjoined with educational infrastructure making English accessible is evident in Example 2, where we hear the voice of Karim, a young man from Hunza: (2) And specially in these areas people . . . ah people are trying, people are trying to learn English. Like they want to have a good ah grip on English and that’s because - ah only because the farman of Hazir Imam, Prince Karim Aga Khan, he has a - a strongly like he strongly wants us to speak English, like on many platforms, on many forums, he has been saying this on his farmans, and you can see the schools here. You don -ah you - you must have seen there is no government school here and there’s not even primary school. Every set up is by ah the Aga Khan AKDN, you can see the Diamond Jubilee schools, and this system in the Hunza again.6

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The situation in Khorog is different. To date there is a lack of empirical fieldwork-based research on the role of English in Tajikistan, although more recent research on post-Soviet language reforms has entered what Pavlenko (2013: 263) has called a “third stage” characterized by a “renewed interest in cross-country comparisons . . . increased attention to language contact phenomena . . . and linguistic landscapes . . . and emerging research on countries like Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, which until recently have been ‘blind spots’”. Such research on language policy and education in Tajikistan has drawn attention to an increase in the importance of English within the country (cf. for example, Dodikhudoeva 2004; Nagzibekova 2008; Landau and Kellner-Heikele 2001; Kellner-Heinkele and Landau 2012; Bolander 2016a). A 2008 cable from the American Embassy, Dushanbe, Tajikistan, published on Wikileaks and entitled ‘Tajikistan – Why American Corners Matter’, describes Khorog as an “ideal location” for a new American Corner. The reasons provided are its “strong traditions of education and self-reliance” and the fact that “the study of English is widespread, due to the excellent education offered by the University of Central Asia (UCA) and the Aga Khan Lycée, where English is a primary language of instruction”. Published only a good decade after the end of civil war in Tajikistan (1992 to 1997), the cable indirectly draws attention to the fact that much has been done to promote English in a very short time, much of this via the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN). In Khorog, English has become important to the AKDN’s educational policy since the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was adopted as one of three languages of instruction, along with Tajik and Russian, in the Aga Khan Lycée in 2001 (The school itself was founded in 1998). Here students compete for entry into a particular language stream (at the time of my fieldwork, there were twenty-five students in each stream in each grade) and they study the other two languages (Tajik and Russian for those in the English stream) as foreign languages for two to three hours per week. English is also taught in Khorog’s University of Central Asia school of professional and continuing development whose town campus opened in 2006, and it used to be taught at KEP, the Khorog English Programme (now discontinued), which was launched in 1999 to facilitate exchange between Khorog and the Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS) in London, by providing English-language training to local pupils who wish to enter MA programmes at the IIS. Whilst English is taught as a foreign language in Tajik schools,7 the heightened emphasis on English is thus predominantly linked to language policy efforts enacted not by the Tajik state but by the Aga Khan IV. As suggested earlier, English is comparatively scant outside of such formal learning contexts. Exceptions suggested during fieldwork include contexts of tourism (in Khorog, for instance, two of my interlocutors were intent on both using and learning English with the aim of going into the tourism industry) and selected businesses. There is some evidence from fieldwork in Hunza that English is, what Zafar, an elderly influential Ismaili man, referred to as the ‘recording language’ in regional and national Ismaili council meetings, meaning the language used in minutes, election plans and papers which are to be read and shared, and that meetings themselves are ‘usually’ in English, too. When I asked whether this is the same in other locations, Zafar specifically referred to Central Asia, and Tajikistan in particular, noting that the expectation is not that council members in these places know English ‘immediately’, but the ‘requirement’ is there; the idea being that one is expected to know English given that it is the official language mentioned in the constitution. A similar point was made in an interview with Bakhtiyor, a young man from

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Khorog who has a firm command of English and attended the private Aga Khan Lycée in Khorog (Example 3): (3) Uh actually like the uh mhm like whatever the - our Imam tells people the society they try at mu-- much uh I would say at what are they are capable of. So if he says that English, you should try to learn English then you put it at your first propriety, but then at the same time if you would not have the same resources [and opportunities, then it's impossible, so you think of an alternative way to survive and to do something that rather than doing nothing. So yeah it will come by time, like it’s very long term in our case. But for now in short term the solution has been found to learn Russian and leave for Russia, for employment, because it’s an objective situation like people can’t do anything about it. You cannot from nowhere create a job for yourself, so yeah. Ismailis will, as suggested by Bakhtiyor, attempt to learn English as a result of the edicts of the Aga Khan, but this will not and cannot happen immediately; it is instead envisaged as ‘very long term’. Thus, in both places other languages are dominant in day-to-day practices. In Hunza, day-to-day affairs are almost solely in Burushaski, a point which was repeatedly emphasized in interviews and made manifest during the time I spent there. Responding to the question of what languages she uses when home with her family, a young female interlocutor of mine underscored the centrality of Burushaski as the main and only language of everyday family life by repeating, with laughter in her voice, the language label three times – ‘Burushaski, Burushaski, Burushaski’. Yet as aforementioned, Burushaski is not formally taught; and it is described on the Burushaski Language Documentation Project website as ‘primarily preserved orally’, with ‘practically nonexistent’ ‘literacy in the first language’, and hence as ‘greatly threatened’ (Munshi 2015). For my largely Pamiri interlocutors in Khorog, Shughni plays an analogous role. Article 3 of the 1989 Law on Language proclaims that “the languages of Gorno-Badakhshan received guarantees of free use in all spheres of society, including official institutions” (Landau and Kellner-Heinkele 2001: 122). Yet “Pamiri languages are still rarely used in primary education” (Bahri 2005: 56), and only taught for two hours a week in grades two to four, because of a lack of an authoritative system of transcription and teaching materials (Kreutzmann 1996: 181). Education in Tajik schools in Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO) (of which Khorog is the capital) is thus predominantly in Tajik (cf. also Dodykhudoeva 2004; Dodikhudoeva 2004), which was made the language of instruction in the 1993 Law on Education (Landau and Kellner-Heinkele 2001: 187). In practice this means students from GBAO learn their subjects in Tajik yet generally receive no language instruction in Tajik (cf. also Niyozov 2001, quoted in Bahri 2005). This causes problems, since many enter school with only limited knowledge of Tajik, which retains the status of a foreign language. These difficulties are further augmented by the co-existence of different varieties of Tajik in the region (Bahri 2005), and more general problems pertaining to a lack of quality textbooks, low teacher salaries and the devastating effects of the Tajik civil war on the national educational system (Kellner-Heinkele and Landau 2012: 187). Despite the relative lack of use of English, my Ismaili interlocutors appropriate the Aga Khan’s language policy in positive terms. This is likely largely due to his status, particularly his standing as spiritual leader, and his own use of English; as well as to the content of his speeches and farmans which frame English as important for prosperity and development, and which create and compound existing ideologies of English as valuable.

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The importance of the Aga Khan’s own use of English is underscored in Example 4, taken from an interview with Gulnoz, a middle-aged woman from Khorog: (4) It was 1995 when the Aga Khan come he -- here and he speech and I really wa- I don’t know what he’s talking about and uh he shouldcome- he say in 1995 he came and he promise to come 98 and in mys-- in my heart I make like a promise that second time when he will be here I will understand whatever he will tell people . . . Yeah. This is the- this is um how uh my English open. For Gulnoz, the Aga Khan’s promise to return to Khorog in 1998 becomes the source of her own promise to understand him when he does. As outlined in Example (4), she wants to belong to the ‘people’ who can understand their spiritual leader when he visits his community, and who does not need to rely on a translation to do so. This same idea is at the heart of the phrase ‘direct access’, used by a young woman from Khorog to explain to me why local people are trying to learn English. English, in other words, is seen to grant these Ismailis direct access to their spiritual leader, the Aga Khan. Desires and wishes to learn English become linked both with attempts to obey the Aga Khan (as underscored by Karim, in Example 2), and attempts to become closer to him. This openness to English is foregrounded as a marker of Ismaili identity. In both Hunza and Khorog, discussions on English and Ismaili openness to and knowledge of English often become a means of drawing a distinction between other non-Ismaili (typically Sunni, but sometimes also, in the case of Hunza, neighbouring communities of Twelver Shia) Muslims. Following is an example taken from an interview with Salma from Hunza (Example 5): (5) I think those n-- you know, other non-Ismailis, they have- they are with the passage of time, they are realising the importance of English as well, but our community, you know, our community h-- has left other communities far behind in this um- in this race of learning. As suggested by Zafar, who was introduced earlier, English has ‘almost become a matter of faith for every Ismaili around the world’. Its ready adoption can, as he explained it to me, be associated with the Ismailis’ ‘intellectual faith’, which emphasizes ‘process’ not ‘product’. A similar point is espoused by Nasir, another elderly man from Hunza, who links a preference for English with the status of English as an international language and the importance of adapting to change in the world. This is foregrounded in Example 6, which also lays bare the aforementioned entanglement between the importance of the Aga Khan as the party who places emphasis on English (and hence the role played by religion) and the perceived value of English: (6) but we prefer more um English, because uh our Hazir Imam Prince Aga Khan in his farmans he- he um- he uh- he uh tell us- um he orders us to speak English, because it’s an international language, and we follow him. So that’s why uh we speak uh English, because it’s international language and our Imam ask us [ uh to go with the change in time um um- according to the world, where it goes, how it works, and um be up to date, so that’s why we are following English.

Simplifying Language Practice through Erasure The exemplification of practice in the preceding section highlights a complex linguistic scenario, which is subject to erasure. As delineated in the introduction, erasure is a process

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whereby particular people, activities or things are bracketed out, and hence one which involves a simplification of the complex that is the relationship between language and society. If, as is the stance taken in this chapter, language policy is seen as appropriated by, emergent in and as practice, and entangled with ideology, then erasure is key to understanding the link between policy and practice. As a result, it can offer insight into gaps between what is made explicit and foregrounded in language policy (consider here the example of English as the official second language of the Ismaili community – see Example 1) and language practice (consider here the fact that English tends not to be used outside of formal contexts, and typically only has third- or fourth-language status in Hunza and Khorog – see preceding section). Once what is bracketed out is rendered apparent, in other words, one can begin to probe possible ideological rationales behind processes of erasure, with regards to questions of interest. To build on the previous discussion of practices, this section thus hones in on two core examples of erasure. The first example of erasure I wish to draw attention to is the multilingualism of Ismaili interlocutors in official top-down Ismaili policy. The majority of official documents suggest the predominance of a bilingual, not multilingual population. The fact that Ismailis in Hunza and Khorog are exposed to, familiar with or expected to be in command of three (Hunza) or four (Khorog) languages has implications for the questions of why particular sociolinguistic phenomena might be being simplified within this multilingual landscape: to what potential advantages and detriments. As underscored by Blommaert (2014: 131), a core characteristic and result of globalization is that English does not occur in isolation, but in “a multilingual environment and as part of multilingual repertoires” – a point which warrants recognizing that “much of what we ought to study has not much to do with English per se, but a lot to do with the multilingual contexts of which English has become a part”. For the contexts of my work, the elevated status of English in policy and the Aga Khan’s practice has implications vis-à-vis other languages of local and regional import, including national and official (or in the case of Russian in Khorog, previously official) languages, that is, Urdu (Hunza) and Tajik and Russian (Khorog), as well as for the heritage languages of Burushaski and Shughni. To consider this point in more detail (see also preceding section), I turn here to the case of Khorog, where there is potential tension between official transnational Ismaili language policy which is typically suggestive of a bilingual reality, official national (state) language policy which is comparatively monolingual, and local multilingual realities (in Shughni, Tajik, Russian and English). Although robust ties between ethnicity and language in Tajikistan were forged during the Soviet Union, post-Soviet nation-building efforts entailed a “turn from official bilingualism [Russian and Tajik] to monolingualism [Tajik]” (Pavlenko 2013: 266). As Pavlenko states, this “monolingual turn was reflected in the language planning objectives” throughout Central Asia. In Tajikistan, this comprised efforts to expand the domains in which Tajik was used; attempts to increase knowledge of Tajik; attempts to remove Russian from official documents and domains; and endeavours to increase English competence as an alternative to Russian. These efforts culminated in President Emomali Rahmon’s 2009 Law on Language, which made Tajik the sole language “in all state documents and official correspondence” (Kellner-Heinkele and Landau 2012: 178), where before Tajik and Russian had been used. The policy was interpreted as demoting Russian from its position as the language of “interethnic communication” (Kellner-Heinkele and Landau 2012: 178), and more generally as an attempt to “bolster Tajik national identity” (Kellner-Heinkele and Landau 2012: 178). Yet despite continued emphasis on ‘Tajikisation’ (Kellner-Heinkele and

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Landau 2012) and ‘de-Russification’ (Pavlenko 2013), Russian still functions as a de facto language of interethnic communication in Tajikistan and in GBAO (Mostowlansky 2017a, b), and remains widely popular and in high demand throughout Tajikistan (Nagzibekova 2008; Kellner-Heinkele and Landau 2012), a status it enjoys at least partially because of the opportunities it provides for labour migration to Russia (Nagzibekova 2008) and other post-Soviet countries (Pavlenko 2008: 299). Furthermore, since 2004 it has been taught from grades two to eleven in Tajik and Uzbek schools throughout the country (Nagzibekova 2008: 504). Thus, while “the sphere of Russian use in most successor states has narrowed . . . the language did not go away nor was it replaced by English. Rather, Russian assumed a place alongside English as the lingua franca of the geopolitical region” (Pavlenko 2013: 268). Thus, within this complex multilingual ecology, Shughni retains the status of first language, yet receives marginal formal instruction. As citizens of Tajikistan, Pamiris are expected to know Tajik, yet typically do not receive language instruction in Tajik; the expectation being that they will learn Tajik at home. Russian, despite being ‘demoted’ at the national level, remains key for labour migration to Russia and retains a popular status. And English is promoted both at national and transnational scales, yet quality education in English is largely lacking. English remains coupled instead with socio-economic background, and is not necessarily valuable for Ismailis who remain in Khorog (see Bolander 2016b). This erasure of complexity though is not only apparent in official language policy. In my second example, I draw on my interview data, where a similar erasure of complexity is evident. Reflecting upon the potential rationale for such simplification, it is probable that erasing differences serves to strengthen the image of a unified community. ‘Regularizing’ (Jaffe 2009) ties between transnationalism and English, in other words, becomes a means to foreground similarity across the community and to thereby create discourses of difference to other communities. The aforementioned examples of Salma (Example 5) and Nasir (Example 6) are insightful here. Both speak in the plural form, suggesting a pan-Ismaili ‘we’ which orients towards and speaks English. Yet, this is not necessarily reflective of reality. Nasir, for instance, whilst speaking in the plural form and hence including himself in the scope of his claims, actually asked to speak to me in Burushaski on the basis of not being proficient enough in English (the interview was simultaneously translated for me by my research assistant). There are many reasons for the steady negotiation of a shared English-orienting and speaking Ismaili image. These likely include the interview context and my role as an outsider; the wish and need to underscore difference in the face of discrimination and political volatility; and the status of the Aga Khan as spiritual leader. Indeed, in one of the few encounters where an interlocutor of mine was critical, I was asked to turn off my recorder. A further core reason is that Ismailis remain agents who “actively interpret and mold Ismaʿilism and Ismaʿili institutions to their own goals and articulate their own set of meanings”, and who thus “make Ismaʿilism their own in a process of active interpretation, contestation, and semiotic production” (Steinberg 2011: 16). Indeed, and as voiced by Bakhtiyor in Example 3, whilst Ismailis try to follow the guidance of the Aga Khan, they do not do so at the expense of what is considered immediately possible or valuable. Language policy is instead appropriated in ways that render it manageable to individual lives. Erasure then serves to suggest obeisance to the Aga Khan regarding his command to learn English, something which is vital given his status as spiritual leader, whilst also allowing other languages to practically remain more important (i.e., English is typically not de facto a second language). At the same time, simplification of the sociolinguistic

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field facilitates the forging of unity within a community vis-à-vis outsiders, myself included. This, too, serves an important purpose, given the transnational distribution of the community and widespread diversity as regards, for instance, ethnicity, first language, dress and food; and in light of the political volatility of the two regions where Ismailis live, and the discrimination faced by many of my Ismaili interlocutors. However, whilst it is perhaps possible to understand the potential ‘interests’ this erasure serves, I wonder whether a core detriment might not also arise. This, it seems, takes the form of preventing the development of resources to facilitate language maintenance of heritage languages, whilst also promoting English and doing justice to the changing role played by Urdu (Hunza), Russian and Tajik (Khorog). Perhaps, in other words, this prevents the struggle to learn, for instance, Tajik in Khorog, and to maintain Burushaski in Hunza from being taken seriously and receiving an official space of concern.

V.  CONCLUSION In this chapter, I reflect upon the importance of erasure to a critical understanding of the appropriation of a transnational Ismaili language policy involving English. Focusing on practice as a means to explore language policy I show that appropriation – like the specification of official, explicit or de jure policies – will be influenced by what people think, believe and feel about language and particular languages. Since erasure highlights the relevance of what is bracketed out, of the unsaid, of processes of simplification, in other words, it encourages a close analysis of ‘interests’, of the potential rationale for erasure and its advantages and detriments. In developing this argument, I draw on Irvine and Gal’s (2000) emphasis on the importance of language ideology for the analysis of linguistic differentiation more generally. For Irvine and Gal (2000: 35), “[t]he significance of linguistic differentiation is embedded in the politics of the region and its observers”, and, hence, in the case of the Ismaili community, in the entanglement of the local, national, regional and transnational, and the situated negotiation of the very meaning of these scales. Via discussion of examples of the historical and contemporary negotiation of the importance of English, I thereby highlight how erasure offers a lens to recognizing what we might describe as a kind of convivial co-existence of gaps, overlaps and tensions between top-down explicit policy, implicit policy and practice in everyday life. This seems an important step given that individuals – whether mobile or immobile – maintain ties across nation-state boundaries and are embedded in various spatial, temporal and social infrastructures. The approach taken here might thus be seen as contributing to an attempt to ‘square the circles’ (Bruthiaux 2003) in World Englishes research on ideology by avoiding a ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2002) which might focus on English (amongst Ismailis) in Pakistan or in Tajikistan. At the same time, the relevance of situated appropriations and hence of local and national scales, highlights that this should not lead to an overemphasizing of the transnational scale at the expense of the force of other immediate scales and the way these involve language ideology in the structuring of everyday lives.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to sincerely thank the many interlocutors who took the time to speak with me about their lives and language, and who so hospitably hosted me during my fieldwork.

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Many thanks, too, to the anonymous reviewers and the volume’s editors Rani Rubdy and Ruanni Tupas for their critique and insightful comments. Any errors and inconsistencies are my own.

NOTES 1. This entailed working with private papers and correspondence between the Aga Khan III and the British colonial administration in British India (cf. van Grondelle 2009), and files on education in East Africa produced during the Imamate of the Aga Khan III, and just after the Aga Khan IV became Imam in 1957. 2. The schools and universities position themselves as nondenominational (i.e. open to all pupils irrespective of their religious background), and during fieldwork in Hunza, for example, I was told about a small minority of non-Ismailis who used to attend school with some of my interlocutors. At the same time, since Central Hunza and Khorog have majority Ismaili populations, in both places English instruction in these institutions is predominantly made available to Ismailis. 3. Two of my interviews in Hunza were held in Burushaski and translated for me on site by my research assistant. 4. The Aga Khan II succeeded his father, Aga Khan I, in 1881, but died three years later (van Grondelle 2009: 22). 5. The Aga Khan IV was born in Geneva to an English mother (Hon. Joan Yarde-Buller, daughter of the third Baron Churston). In a 1958 UK press interview he describes himself as being able to speak both English and French ‘relatively fluently’ (NanoWisdoms); and an entry about him published on Nanowisdoms (NanoWisdoms) claims that he was taught Arabic, Urdu and Islamic history by a private tutor at home, alongside his schooling. In interviews, speeches and writings he uses English, except in places where French is widespread. In such instances he uses French (with official translations into English subsequently being provided). The French original of the interview given to the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation can be accessed at http:​/​/www​​.nano​​wisdo​​ms​.or​​g​/nwb​​log​/6​​073​/#​​ frenc​​h. 6. I use double hyphens (--) when an interlocutor begins but does not complete a word, and single hyphens (-) to indicate a false start at the level of words or phrases. Square brackets indicate overlapping speech. 7. As Pavlenko (2003) highlights, the importance of English in the Soviet Union grew post– Second World War, and English replaced German “as the most widely taught foreign language” (323) of the Soviet Union in 1961.

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Shohamy, E. (2006), Language Policy: Hidden Agendas and New Approaches, London and New York: Routledge. Steinberg, J. (2011), Ismaʽili Modern. Globalization and Identity in a Modern Community, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. van Grondelle, M. (2009), The Ismailis in the Colonial Era. Modernity, Empire and Islam, 1839–1969, London: Hurst and Company. Wikileaks cable ‘Why American Corners Matter’ (2008). Available online: http​:/​/ww​​w​.wik​​ileak​​s​ .org​​/plus​​d​/cab​​les​/0​​8DUSH​​AN​BE6​​34​_a.​​html (accessed 14 July 2019). Wimmer, A. and N. Glick Schiller (2002), ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond. NationState Building, Migration and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks, 2 (4): 301–34.

Chapter 16

Taiwan and MandarinEnglish Bilingualism International Competition and Competing Colonialisms FUNIE HSU

I.  INTRODUCTION In August 2018, William Lai, then premier of the Republic of China (ROC), announced a national objective to establish English as an official language in Taiwan. Mandarin has historically served as the official language, a policy established by Chiang Kai Shek’s mainland Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomingtang (KMT), as part of their postwar occupation of the former Japanese colony. The policy of Mandarin-only aided in the establishment of a new KMT-dominated order and the transformation of Taiwan into the official government of the ROC. English, however, was also incorporated into Taiwan’s social and political landscape during this period, with the KMT implementing English as a foreign language in secondary schools (Chen 2006). English has since maintained a presence in the educational curriculum and broader social backdrop of Taiwan to varying degrees. Recent policy developments have shifted away from the initial objective of establishing English as an official language to focus instead on promoting Mandarin and English bilingualism. In November 2018, the National Development Council, the agency charged with overseeing the bilingualism policy, Bilingual Nation, issued a blueprint proposing initial steps to facilitate bilingualism in schools and society by 2030. One of the government’s main rationales for the intensified integration of English in Taiwan is the enhancement of the nation’s competitive standing in the global market. A December 6, 2018 government press release detailing the policy explains, “[I]n order to further enhance Taiwan’s international competitiveness and then attract more multinational companies to invest in Taiwan, so that younger generations can have better career development in their hometowns, the government plans to turn Taiwan into a bilingual nation” (National Development Council 2018a). English as a tool to foster the nation’s competitiveness speaks to Taiwan’s desire to both advance economic growth through capital accumulation and raise its international profile in the face of increasing military and economic threats from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Thus, while the motivation articulated by the Taiwan government falls within a common framework of a linguistic instrumentalism (Kubota 2011; Tan and Rubdy 2008) inflected by neoliberal globalization, a consideration

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of the embedded, complex, and long-standing history of assorted colonialisms in Taiwan reveals a more nuanced portrait of the varied ideologies entrenched in this campaign for Mandarin-English bilingualism. This chapter situates the decision to establish bilingualism within the larger economic and political contexts of neoliberalism, colonialism, and the ongoing structure (Wolfe 1999: 2) of Han settler colonialism in Taiwan. It takes up Park and Wee’s (2012) call for a “theory of value” in the analysis of global English and applies it to the analysis of World Englishes as advanced through Taiwan’s Bilingual Nation policy and its discourse of “elevating national competitiveness” (National Development Council 2018b: 7). By situating this particular formulation of Taiwan English within a theory of value, this chapter highlights both the neoliberal economic value and ideology of English motivating the directive and the symbolic political value of the Bilingual Nation program in articulating Taiwan’s independent status on a global stage. “[I]n the new economy,” Park and Wee note, “one of the most powerful bases for the hegemony of global English is the discourse of commodification that attributes economic value to English” (2012: 6). A theory of value, therefore, highlights the materialist aspects of bilingualism in Taiwan, linking the Bilingual Nation policy’s urge for a competitive edge in the global market to the historical development of Taiwan’s particular linguistic market. It can also illuminate the ways in which this value is formed: “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” (Park and Wee 2012: 6). Moreover, it illuminates the manner in which English in Taiwan elicits other modes of value, especially political value. As Park and Wee (2012: 6) further explain, “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.” Given Taiwan’s complex colonial history as a set of islands colonized by a series of European and Asian forces – including Han (Hokkien, Hakka, and mainland) Chinese settlers – and China’s continued assertion that the nation is a renegade province (one they have threatened to maintain by force), English provides the independently governed, democratic nation value beyond the economic realm. With the rising economic and political hegemony of China, many nations have terminated their political and economic interests with Taiwan in favor of strengthening relations with China. Such an alignment functions as a tacit endorsement of China’s “one government, two systems” paradigm that relegates Taiwan to a territorial status. It is a contentious and precarious global marginalization that has led Shu-Mei Shih to contend that Taiwan is “all but illegible to most, since knowing Taiwan does not carry ‘value’, either symbolic or material, as the significance required for value production is either missing or not recognized” (Shih 2003: 144).Thus, Taiwan’s bilingualism policy provides a linguistic means to signal Taiwan’s sovereign political status on an international stage, marking the nation as distinct from China by crafting an English and Mandarin bilingual national identity that departs from the Sinitic paradigm of the PRC. English, therefore, is of important political value in establishing the legibility of Taiwan’s independence from China to a global audience. I further argue that while English might afford Taiwan political currency in articulating its status as an independent nation, it can also enhance Han settler colonialism by expressing Taiwan’s future wellbeing through a hegemonic framing of bilingualism

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as fluency in Mandarin and English, despite relying on an interdiscursive framework of multilingualism which appropriates Indigenous languages. Thus, the Bilingual Nation policy’s formation of English also advances the ideological value of Han settler dominance. Taiwan’s postwar democracy has been crafted through a combined paradigm of Han settler colonialism and the hegemony of the KMT institutional framework (hence the country’s continued designation as the Republic of China, ROC), which continues to displace Indigenous populations from their land. Though the current president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-Wen, is of mixed ancestry, which includes Indigenous (Paiwan) and early Han settler heritages (Hokkien and Hakka), the administration of the islands maintains a Han settler framework (a combination of Hokkien, Hakka, and mainland settler interests) that ensures the continued future dominance of settler colonialism, what Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) have termed “settler futurity” (2013: 80). While the Blueprint for the Bilingual Nation policy declares that the bilingual policy will “run in parallel” with “the promotion of native-language culture,” I argue that the complex ideological foundations for the Mandarin-English bilingualism policy relies on a neoliberal multiculturalism that renders Taiwan’s previous proclaimed commitments to Indigenous language development merely a tokenization. The chapter proceeds with an overview of the political and colonial landscape of Taiwan and the hierarchy within the linguistic market that has emerged from these conditions. It examines the Bilingual Nation policy within this landscape to illuminate the compounding ideologies embedded in this particular formation of Taiwan English. It then provides an examination of the policy document, “Blueprint for Developing Taiwan into a Bilingual Nation by 2030,” highlighting the articulated neoliberal economic values and motivations for establishing English in Taiwan. Next, the chapter analyzes the symbolic political value of English within the Bilingual Nation policy, detailing the manner in which English can serve to amplify Taiwan’s independent status on a global scale. Finally, it illuminates how the Bilingual Nation’s iconization of English can subsume other language development policies focusing on “mother tongues” and Indigenous languages under a rhetorical multiculturalism to advance continued Han settler colonial hegemony and futurity.

II.  THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE AND LINGUISTIC MARKET OF TAIWAN “Language, as a type of practice,” Park and Wee (2012: 27) explain, is “located within the market, so language varieties, language practices, and individual utterances all receive their value according to particular systems of price formation prevalent in a particular market, leading certain varieties to be valued more than others.” This focus on value, they note, is useful in that it provides “an attractive way to move beyond the linguistic” (26). Examining “the laws of price formation” in the generation of value illuminates how the process is “grounded in practical relations of social power” (28). The following section provides an overview of the political landscape and colonial context of Taiwan to illustrate the relations of social power that produced a price formation of Mandarin and English which yielded high, hegemonic value. To borrow from Friedman, this section demonstrates how “In Taiwan’s case, the value accorded to languages in the marketplace has been a product of political negotiation and competition over control of the Taiwanese nation-state” (2005: iv).

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Political Overview of Taiwan Taiwan has been constructed through the racial imaginations and linguistic disciplining of both European and Asian empires. In the seventeenth century, Dutch and Spanish powers established settlements in Taiwan, with the Dutch staking imperial claims by formally colonizing parts of Taiwan in 1624. During this period, Han Chinese immigrants, primarily Hokkien and Hakka people/speakers, settled in Taiwan en masse as laborers for the Dutch empire. Though a number of Han settlers had arrived in Taiwan prior, the Dutch colonial enterprise facilitated a wave of Han immigration that would shape the nation’s demographics through a structure of settler colonialism into the current period. By 1622, the Ming loyalist Zheng Chenggong defeated the Dutch, transitioning Taiwan to Chinese rule by Ming and then Qing forces. Following the Sino-Japanese War, the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki resulted in the Qing empire ceding Taiwan to Japan. Under Japanese colonial rule, colonial language policies emphasized Japanese as the national language. In the initial period of occupation, a lax policy allowed for the continued use of local languages in schools and society (Heylen 2005). By the 1930s, however, with Japan’s declaration of war against China, new language policies focused on the expansion of Japanese (Roy 2003). After the surrender of Japan in the Second World War, Taiwan was occupied by Chiang Kai Shek and his KMT forces following their defeat by the Chinese Communist Party in China, ushering a new wave of predominantly mainlander Han Chinese settler colonialism. Chiang declared Taiwan the true government of China (the ROC, which at the time, strived to partner with the United States to retake the Communist mainland) and, under totalitarian martial rule, implemented policies to assert Sino cultural and political ideologies in the islands. The Mandarin-only policy enforced a new language of public discourse and education (Cheng 1993), substantiating Chinese nationalism amongst a diverse population. Under the policy, local languages, or mother tongues, were strictly prohibited in public arenas such as schools, effectively diminishing the value of the Indigenous Austronesian languages and the earlier Han settler languages of Hokkien and Hakka (Dreyer 2003). Under Chiang’s regime, Mandarin-only constructed a new social order and division of labor based on the cultural capital of the KMT ruling class as Mandarin became a requirement for civil service and professional employment. Thus, Mandarin was attributed a higher price formation and valuation in Taiwan’s linguistic market, subjugating Indigenous peoples and the previous Hokkien and Hakka settler populations under the KMT elite (Heylen 2005: 507). Following Chiang’s death in 1975 and ongoing political resistance campaigns, martial law was lifted in 1987, marking the end of what was then the longest period of martial rule in the world and the beginning of new political reforms in Taiwan. The new era of democratization included attempts to rectify the whole-scale imposition of Mandarin monolingualism to develop a more egalitarian Taiwanese national identity which acknowledged the previous Hokkien and Hakka settlers and, to a lesser extent, the Indigenous peoples of the islands. A move toward a political ideology of “de-Chinaisation” emphasized multilingualism and the development of the “Mother Tongues Movement” as a means to articulate a new Taiwan consciousness (Chen 2006: 322-3), which was situated in the construction of a “native”/“local” Taiwanese (as opposed to mainland Chinese) identity. Thus, interdiscursive engagement of indigeneity, multilingualism, and multiculturalism became a marker of distinction that set this new democratic Taiwan identity apart from the authoritarian, Sino-centric regime of Chiang Kai Shek’s KMT.

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Sandel notes that in the first free elections since KMT military rule, both the KMT presidential candidates, the Taiwan-born Lee Teng-hui and the mainland-born James Soong, attempted to capitalize on their use of Hokkien and Hakka to mobilize beyond the KMT ruling class and speak to, literally and politically, the descendants of earlier Hokkien and Hakka Han settlers, who saw themselves as distinctively Taiwanese, or local (2003: 524). Under these conditions, Taiwan transitioned from a Mandarin-only policy to Mandarin plus (Scott and Tiun 2007) and saw the development of the 1993 Local-Language-in-Education (LLE) policy that aimed to revive the use and status of Hokkien, Hakka, and the fourteen identified Austronesian languages in schools and the broader social sphere (Chen 2006). The impetus to incorporate and maintain Taiwan’s Indigenous languages, and Hokkien and Hakka settler languages within the Mandarin plus multicultural framework of inclusion remains today as an aspect of the nation’s distinctly curated “local”/“native” identity. Thus, discourses of indigeneity are utilized to establish the “nativeness” of earlier Han settlers as a juxtaposition to the more recent mainland Chinese, and to assert an Austronesian cultural distinction for Taiwan as an entity uniquely different from Sinistic China. Indeed, post-1987 legislative acts have established protections for Indigenous languages and the promotion of mother tongue instruction in the educational curriculum. Yet, as Wei (2006: 90) observes, “minority languages such as Hakka and the nation’s Austronesian languages are still facing an uphill battle fraught with dilemmas” due to the complexities of “recognizing the rights of minorities and trying to reconcile diversity in the face of mounting pressure for democratization.” Wei’s statement hints at the Han settler colonial premise and hegemony of democracy in Taiwan, which continues to assert higher social and cultural value for Mandarin in the nation’s linguistic market and is structured toward assuring the continued rights of – and domination by – Han settler colonists (both the recent mainland Chinese and the earlier Hokkien and Hakka laborers).

English in Taiwan In the post–martial law period, educational reforms began to integrate English as a component of the core compulsory education curriculum (not simply as a foreign language in secondary schools, as the KMT had initially established). English, alongside local languages, became mandatory in the primary-level curriculum (Scott and Tiun 2007; Wei 2006). An important motivation behind these reforms was the political shift from KMT-dominated governance to the emergence of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) which advanced an ideology of Taiwanization based on combining conceptions of local and Indigenous identity with an international facing character. Just as Hokkien, Hakka, and the Indigenous languages were employed to signal a political ideology of localization/ indigenization, English was upheld as a linguistic marker of internationalization. Within this indigenization and internationalization framework, however, Su Chiao Chen (2006) argues that though the LLE policy and the 2001 English-in-Education (EE) policy were established during overlapping periods, it was English that received more governmental support and resources for implementation. Thus, while the new Taiwan movement of the post-1987 period expressed its identity through a combined espousal of the local/Indigenous and the international, the globalizing forces of the neoliberal economy, which reified the value of English as a language of international business and competitive enterprise, established English as the dominant

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language. “From the 1990s,” Chen (2006: 323) notes, the English movement “was reinforced by the government’s attempt to promote Taiwan as an Asia-Pacific business center. English, particularly in terms of oral proficiency, came to be seen as essential to the internationalisation of Taiwan.” The impetus for Taiwan’s focus on internationalization, and its linguistic alignment with English, is embedded within a complex struggle for value production and recognition in the context of neoliberal globalization. Returning to Shih’s (2003: 144) quote in the introduction, by commenting that “knowing Taiwan does not carry ‘value’,” Shih illustrates the multidimensional function of the concept of value in regards to the particular political and economic place of Taiwan. Here, Taiwan’s perceived lack of value refers to the vulnerable positioning of Taiwan as a nation that was removed from the UN and replaced by China in 1971 and remains unrepresented in most other global bodies as a result of China’s increasing drive for sole recognition. With the rising economic dominance of the PRC, few countries view political association with Taiwan as having ‘value’ in the face of economic backlash from China. Only fifteen nations acknowledge Taiwan as an independent country, many of these being island nations in Oceania and the Caribbean. Accusations of “dollar diplomacy,” attempts to buy allegiances from various nations, have been lodged at both China and Taiwan in the struggle for recognition (Rich 2009; Taylor 2002). In this context, the Bilingual Nation’s articulation of English as international competitiveness is not merely an economic endeavor. Rather, it also incorporates an attempt for political agency in regards to amplifying Taiwan’s global legibility as an independent nation when illegibility can result in Chinese military occupation. It is with this consideration that Shih argues for a more nuanced contextualization of globalization in the Taiwan context: Deploying the idiom of globalisation is a necessary critical framework in several ways. In view of tensions with China, for Taiwan to have an increasingly globalised economy is to keep ahead of the development game, and to have a more globalised culture is to displace Sinocentric influence and invent new forms of trans-culture . . . For Taiwan, globalisation has to be, period. Seen in this light, globalisation may be Taiwan’s survival strategy, and this explains the urgency of globalisation in Taiwan today. (2003: 146) Given the geopolitical complexities that Shih underscores, the rhetoric of globalization and internationalization which motivates the Blueprint alludes to more than economic ambition. It also signals a means to establish political viability for the possibility of sustained sovereignty (at least for the structure of Han settler colonialism). Thus, it would be negligent to read the government’s justification of English “to enhance Taiwan’s international competitiveness” (National Development Council 2018a) as merely a matter of capital accumulation as it would ignore the pressing struggle for the nation’s political survival. This context illuminates the impetus behind the seemingly peculiar desire for a country never formally colonized by the Anglo world, unlike Singapore, the Philippines, and India, to establish English bilingualism and potentially make English an official language. Though Taiwan was not colonized by the United States, the latter once operated military bases in the country and currently maintains arms deals. Within Kachru’s “Three Circles” framework of World Englishes, Taiwan sits in the Expanding Circle (Kachru 1992: 356). While much needed attention has highlighted how the spread of English can function as linguistic imperialism (Canagarajah 1999; Choi 2003; Pennycook 2000; Phillipson 2008), Sommers (2010) argues that given the colonial imposition of Japanese and Mandarin in Taiwan, the European-based framework of English linguistic imperialism does not apply

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as aptly. Due to this, Price (2014) observes, the use of English in the country is framed as a “choice,” a term fraught with neoliberal implications (Phillipson 2008).

III. “BLUEPRINT FOR DEVELOPING TAIWAN INTO A BILINGUAL NATION BY 2030” AND ENGLISH AS NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIC VALUE Situating the rise of English language education in Taiwan within an economic context, Price highlights the explicitly neoliberal contours that have structured English as an imperative rather than simply the choice it is presented as. Sommers also draws attention to the economic factors that have emphasized demand for English in Taiwan, arguing that the private business sector has played more of an influential role than the government in developing English fluency (2010: 210). In framing Taiwan’s interest in elevating English to official language status, Price underlines the nation’s acceptance to the World Trade Organization (WTO) as an integral factor. “In 2002 – the same year that Taiwan was accepted as a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) – then-President Chen Shui-Bian of the DPP suggested that Taiwan should adopt English as a second (or quasi) official language” (2014: 372). The governmental push toward increasing English fluency in Taiwan in the last two decades has thus been shaped by an expressly neoliberal economic ideology. Following Chen’s recommendation, the Executive Yuan declared as part of the Challenge 2008 plan an intention to eventually establish English as a semiofficial language (Huang 2005: 45). The value of English as an international language on the global linguistic market (English is an official language of the WTO) was employed as currency that would raise Taiwan’s international profile as a member of the economic organization – one of the only international bodies which has accepted Taiwan’s participation (under the separate moniker of “Chinese Taipei”). English thus functioned as a commodity that would increase the value of both Taiwan’s economic productivity and its global standing. “Since English is the language that links the world,” a government memo explained, “the government should designate English as a quasi-official language and actively expand the use of English as part of daily life” (as cited in Dupré 2017: 104). The neoliberal logic of English as internationalization in Taiwan, therefore, is rife with political implications as English was mobilized as part of the DPPs efforts to present a globalized brand for Taiwan. Just as the political economic purposes of internationalization shaped the earlier attempt for developing English into a semi-official language, so too does this same ideology continue to drive the 2018 Bilingual Nation policy. The “Blueprint for Developing Taiwan into a Bilingual Nation by 2030” serves as the key policy document. Developed by the National Development Council, it was released on December 10, 2018, and laid out the Mandarin-English bilingualism implementation strategy. The first lines of the Blueprint invoke globalization as an external force that Taiwan must “cope” with by “raising national competitiveness” (National Development Council 2018b: 1). English is positioned as the lever by which Taiwan can lift its international status to remain relevant in the global market. Like other Asian countries, such as Singapore, the value of English on the global linguistic market has driven governmental conversations about establishing English to secure future economic growth (Rubdy 2001). Indeed, “cultivating people’s English proficiency” and “elevating national competitiveness” are the “two main policy objectives” (National Development Council

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2018b: 7). The idea of “national competitiveness” is, in turn, situated within an overt economic framework. “In order to promote our nation’s economic development,” former Premier Lai is quoted as proclaiming, “in the near term we will pursue the policy of developing Taiwan into a bilingual nation, and gradually advance toward the long-term goal of English as our official language” (National Development Council 2018b: 2). The Blueprint paints an urgent need for global competitiveness through English by signaling the future wellbeing of Taiwan’s youth. Building upon the advantage of our country’s industry chains, Taiwan must develop itself into a bilingual nation, to further strengthen our national competitiveness, attract multinational corporations to come to Taiwan to engage in business activity, and enable our young generation to have better development opportunities in their homeland, lifting wage levels as a whole, and spurring the prosperity of our national economy. (National Development Council 2018b: 6) That the Blueprint articulates internationalization as a concern about Taiwan’s youth speaks to economic and political insecurity regarding Taiwan’s future existence as a sovereign nation in the face of China’s mounting threats of military takeover. This future survival, as articulated through the Mandarin-English bilingualism policy, is structured by the combined ideologies of neoliberalism and Han settler colonialism, evidenced by the default positioning of Mandarin as the assumed value partner to English in the bilingualism framework.

“Creating Maximum Benefit at Minimum Cost”: Taiwan’s Mandarin-English Bilingualism and the Neoliberal Paradigm Price (2014) positions English language Education policies in Taiwan from 2000 to 2008 squarely within the ideological trappings of neoliberal globalization. Citing the Challenge 2008 plan, Price (2014: 572) contends “Improved English competence was explicitly rationalized within a neoliberal and globalized framework as central to ‘national adaptation to globalization and internationalization’ and ‘improving [Taiwan’s] international competitiveness’.” Within this paradigm, English functions as social capital to be obtained (often with the aid of privatized after school tutorials or buxiban) (2014: 578), exercised, and exchanged on the global free market. Such neoliberal rationalization of English under the Challenge 2008 plan remains unwavering in the 2018 Blueprint, as the consistent and constant reference to international competitiveness demonstrates. In addition to the imperative of free market competition, the Blueprint is rife with the vocabulary of neoliberalism. It emphasizes implementation strategies that promote efficiency, deregulation, “customer-oriented” approaches (National Development Council 2018b: 3), thus prioritizing the business model as common sense. The policy relies significantly on technology and online resources to provide access across the disparate regions and socio-economic sectors of Taiwan. While this is celebrated as a means to “reduce the urban-rural divide,” thereby enabling “children in remote rural areas” to “enjoy the same English learning resources as their peers in cities enjoy” (National Development Council 2018b: 5), it also exemplifies a hallmark of neoliberal business management: efficiency. An explicit ambition of the implementation plan is to create “maximum benefit at minimum cost” (National Development Council 2018b: 4). Perhaps most indicative of the policy’s strident adherence to the neoliberal business model’s cost-cutting technique

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of efficiency is the assertion that Taiwan will reach bilingualism by 2030 without a budget from the National Development Council (NDC): “No budget will be specially allocated to ministries and commissions by the NDC for this Blueprint. Ministries and commissions are to allocate their respective budget for project execution, and take advantage of available online resources in the private sectors, and partner with enterprises and schools, to vigorously implement the Blueprint” (National Development Council 2018b: 22). Reiterating this resolve, Lai expressed to the Cabinet, “We hope to trigger supply with demand, capitalize on private resources, and create maximum benefit with minimum cost in order to realize the vision of a bilingual nation by 2030” (Shih 2018). A March 2019 slide presentation of the Blueprint lists various online platforms, apps, and radio programs that can help facilitate the implementation of the policy (National Development Council 2019: 8-9). The impetus to roll out the policy without additional fiscal support further entangles the bilingualism program within the logics of neoliberalism through its reliance on the private sphere. Though the Blueprint identifies both publicly sponsored content (BBC News) and private broadcasting (Fox News Radio, Bloomberg Television), it prioritizes the explicit instruction to turn to the “private sector, and partner with enterprises.” Thus, the bilingualism policy and campaign evidences an allegiance to the free market paradigm and structures an embedded competitiveness within the implementation of the Blueprint policy itself.

IV.  ENGLISH, LEGIBILITY, AND POLITICAL VALUE Given the particular realities of multiple colonial occupations in Taiwan, English reflects both a neoliberal impetus for international competition and a liberatory potential for independent political legibility. As Botsis has noted, “although it might appear that in the linguistic market subjects are concerned with ‘struggles and strategies for accumulating capital’, what they might actually be struggling for is recognition that is coded by (takes shape through, becomes legible through) capital accumulation” (2017: 44-45). Shu Mei Shih (2003) situates Taiwan’s increasingly urgent desire for ascension toward a globalized status as a matter of geopolitical and intellectual legibility. “Identity crisis in Taiwan,” Shih argues, “is a crisis of self-representation in English and roman letters” (152). Indeed, as an effect of neoliberal internationalization, English was added to signage in public spaces and institutions to facilitate Taiwan’s legibility to tourists and business investors. Thus, even before the 2018 declaration of the Bilingual Nation policy, English in Taiwan was entrenched in a neoliberal ideology of linguistic instrumentalism and the political discourse of internationalization as legibility. Hence, the globalized price formation of English was viewed as containing high value production for the future of Taiwan’s economic and political status. This dual function of English is displayed by NDC minister Chen Mei-ling, who explained, “Taiwan will prove a more attractive foreign investment destination if people can demonstrate English communication skills, as most are already able to speak Mandarin, another widely used language in the world.” “Furthermore,” she exclaims, “Taiwan has the competitive edge of being a law-abiding and democratic society” (in Hsu 2018: np). Chen’s last remark is a reference to China, intended to draw comparison between Taiwan as a liberal leaning democracy and the communist-ruled PRC. Here, again, the notion of competitiveness in the context of English is at once levied as both an economic and a political distinction. Undoubtedly, English as a feature distinguishing Taiwan from China is a significant component of the Bilingual Nation campaign’s political value. English provides a medium

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to literally articulate Taiwan as separate from China. As a method of de-Sinicization, English allows Taiwan to brand itself as not only the democratic society referenced by Chen, but as a country forging its own identity. Moreover, the political value of marketing the intention to establish Mandarin-English bilingualism enables this juxtaposition between law-abiding Taiwan and authoritarian China to be registered on a global scale. Evidencing this legibility, the Los Angeles Times (Jennings 2018) contextualized Taiwan’s earlier intention to establish English as an official language within the specific backdrop of Taiwan-China relations. “Taiwanese officials say that since Tsai became president in 2016, China has pressured some countries to switch their alliances,” the LA Times noted (Jennings 2018). “The mainland has more sway in world affairs in part because of its $12-trillion-plus economy, compared with Taiwan’s $572-billion economy.” Here, the political value of English in Taiwan functions as effective public relations to draw international attention to the nation’s vulnerable positioning at the hands of China. The move toward embracing English has been noticed by China, who, as the Asia Sentinel reported, is angered by Taiwan’s attempt “to distance the island further from China by ‘decinisizing’ its people” (Kastner 2018: np). Aligned with the DPP and its independence-leaning stance, President Tsai Ing-Wen (whose name can be literally translated as “English language”) has been viewed as a liability by Beijing as well as by the KMT leadership in Taiwan, which fears economic retaliation from China. Moving toward Mandarin-English bilingualism could also serve as the DPP’s indication of a structural departure from the KMT’s long-held Sinistic stronghold on Taiwan (Hioe 2018). English in Taiwan, then, holds powerful political value for contesting both claims of Chinese mainland ownership and KMT hegemonic domination in Taiwan, as well as offers political value for sustaining democratic sovereignty.

V.  ENGLISH AND INTERDISCURSIVE ENGAGEMENTS WITH NEOLIBERAL MULTICULTURALISM AND INDIGENOUS APPROPRIATION In addition to asserting a neoliberal focus on competition, the Blueprint assured that Taiwan would uphold its commitment to previous policies affirming local languages. Here, Park and Wee’s (2012) use of interdiscursive analysis is helpful in highlighting the simultaneous discourses that the English campaign is necessarily engaged with to create a hierarchy in the linguistic market, upon which the prevailing value and economic price formation of English is generated. In developing their theory of value, they explain (137): [A]nalysis that focuses on economic value alone is insufficient for understanding how that economic value comes into being; because economic value of a language variety is about positioning that variety within the linguistic market, and as that positioning is mediated by the semiotic value of the variety, we need a detailed analysis of the processes through which the variety comes to be placed in a hierarchical relationship with other varieties and speakers of those varieties. Given Taiwan’s multiple colonialisms, interdiscursive analysis is essential. Interdiscursivity, as Park and Wee (2012: 39) explain, “refers not just to how discourses are linked together via circulated linguistic forms or structures but to how such interconnectedness serves as the basis for speakers’ construction of meaning.” “The importance of interdiscursivity,” they argue, “suggests that we should pay attention to the interconnectedness of different

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types of discourses and discourses in different sites, as it is through the circulation of linguistic forms through such discourses that those forms accumulate richer and more complex meanings” (2012: 39). Understanding the interdiscursive engagements in the Blueprint, then, illuminates the layered construction of value for English in Taiwan. Through its specific configuration in the Bilingual Nation policy, English in Taiwan is in direct discursive connection with the conception of Mandarin plus as a democratic celebration of Taiwan’s multicultural and multilingual heritage. In so much as that English in Taiwan provides a framework (Mandarin-English bilingualism) to further substantiate the primacy of Mandarin as a default language of value in the islands, it is interdiscursively intertwined with ideas of nativeness – and thus, indigeneity – appropriated by the paradigm of Mandarin plus to bolster a sense of Han settler belonging via the cultivation of a local Hokkien and Hakka minoritized Taiwan identity. “Side by side with implementation of the bilingual nation policy,” the Blueprint declares, “equal importance will also be attached to the promotion of native-language culture” (National Development Council 2018b: 5). It is important to note that “native-language culture,” as framed by local and Indigenous language policies in Taiwan, includes Hokkien and Hakka, as well as the Austronesian Indigenous languages; Hokkien and Hakka Han settler colonialism thus becomes incorporated with notions of nativeness to foster a localized distinction from the Chinese mainland. As Chen (2006) observed, the motivation of internationalization through English policies exists in conjunction with political and linguistic articulations of indigenization through local language policies. Just as English serves as a method for establishing international legibility, indigenization through the Austronesian Indigenous languages functions as a global signifier of the distinct characteristics of Taiwan that separate the nation’s identity from China. While both English and the so-called native languages have symbolic political value, the price formation of English on the global market facilitate a prioritization of English in the policy.

Indigeneity as a Precondition for Mandarin-English Bilingualism Dupré (2017) argues that in the post-1987 period, local language policies are highly politicized through the two-party system in which languages are operationalized to negotiate divergent nationalisms between the DPP and the KMT. Under the DPP, the mobilization of local languages, especially Indigenous languages, serves as a counter to the Mandarin hegemony imposed by the KMT and the decades of systemic local language loss structured under martial law. Since the origins of Austronesian heritage have been traced back to the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan, indigeneity in the islands holds a potent political marker of distinction; one that’s deployed to contest the idea of Taiwan as a Chinese province and to challenge the perceived Sinistic emphasis maintained by the KMT. Hokkien and Hakka Han settlers have aligned their pre–Second World War settlement in the islands by appropriating notions of nativeness through the idea of “local” identity to assert a sense of Taiwan belonging that predates the postwar mainland KMT Chinese occupation. In this context, much like English, indigeneity operates as a political statement for the DPP to signify a Taiwan that is distinct from both China and the KMT. It is through the absorption of Indigenous identity and language – while maintaining Mandarin as the hegemonic language of political and economic power – that the post-1987, “postcolonial” period of Han Taiwanese settler political identity formation has also sought to brand its democracy on a global arena. Since this formation of Mandarin plus (as opposed to the KMT’s previous Mandarin-only policy) serves as

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the partner language to the Bilingual Nation policy, English is enmeshed in the broader interdiscursive entanglements with indigeneity. Substantiating this phenomenon, President Tsai announced the reopening of the Taiwan-led Austronesian Forum in 2018 to increase conversations on Austronesian heritage across countries in the Asia Pacific. As important context, four of the fifteen countries that recognize Taiwan’s independence are in the Pacific and share Austronesian cultures (Blundell 2011; Dupré 2018). In addition to reconvening the Forum, the government also passed the Indigenous Languages Development Act, which established the nation’s Indigenous languages as national languages and afforded them government protection. In publicly recognizing Taiwan’s Austronesian heritage and languages, Tsai signaled to a global audience that Taiwan takes seriously the status of Indigenous peoples. Though Tsai may intend these actions as sincere efforts for addressing histories of colonial oppression, these policies are structured within the ongoing hegemony of Han settler colonialism as they maintain Han settler ownership of indigenous land. Liao notes that many scholars in Taiwan have identified the period after martial law as “a new era of postcoloniality,” yet the Indigenous Taiwaneses’ “concern for cultural autonomy has almost never been addressed in the mainstream nationalism or postcolonialism talks put forth by the Han scholars because of their different ethnic background” (1999: 200). “The Indigenous people,” as Shih points out “have never been postcolonial” (2016: 740). While Wolfe (1999) has argued that settler colonialism is implemented through a “logic of elimination,” Sugimoto argues that in the case of Taiwan the logic of elimination is encased in a “logic of incorporation” (2018: 283). The incorporation of indigeneity and Indigenous languages as a global signifier of democracy, however, is subsumed under claims for value and legibility of Han settler sovereignty. In analyzing Taiwan’s 2007 strategic transition from attempting to be “readmitted” to the UN to asking to “join” as a “determination to be recognized as an independent polity,” Hirano, Veracini, and Roy argue that the “shift has been made possible in part by Han Taiwanese appropriation of Austronesian indigeneity through the promotion of Indigenous festivals, ‘traditional arts’ and surviving languages.” However, they find that “this new self-representation does not signify reconciliation with the country’s settler colonial present” (2018: 20). Dupré’s evaluation of the momentous 2017 Indigenous Languages Development Act (ILDA) finds that the DPP has instrumentalized indigeneity in a manner that “has proven particularly useful in articulating and in connecting Taiwan’s domestic and international identities” (2018: 2). “Despite Taiwan’s lack of membership in the United Nations (UN),” Dupré illuminates, “involvement in Indigenous issues have sometimes given Taiwan representatives some level of access to UN institutions” (2018: 2). Indigeneity through Indigenous language development has similarly been used to advance the Bilingual Nation’s attempt to foster international legibility. Indeed, Indigenous language revitalization policies are an important complementary and contextual condition of the 2018 bilingualism policy. Indigeneity was commodified to express Taiwan’s post-martial law democratic identity based on the ideas of nativeness/localization, diversity, and multilingualism. This particular formation of Han settler “independence” is then advertised on the global market through the bullhorn of Mandarin-English bilingualism. Thus, the current policy for bilingualism could not have existed without interdiscursive engagement with simultaneous policies advocating for Indigenous language development. Furthermore, though the notion of “side by side implementation” may appear as an inclusive move toward post-1987 multiculturalism, the deployment of minoritized and

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Indigenous languages stems from a colonial logic that prioritizes the continued hegemony of the Han settler structure, evidenced in large part by the maintenance of the primacy of Mandarin as common sense. Indeed, that the Bilingual Nation policy discounts that many in Taiwan are already bilingual, if not multilingual, in local languages and Mandarin, and instead frames the official discourse of bilingualism around Mandarin and English, exemplifies this structure. Thus, it is within a settler logic of incorporation that the Bilingual Nation policy should also be analyzed, with special attention paid to its relationship to, and invocation of, indigeneity through ties to the loosely categorized “native-language” development policies.

“Bilingual Policy and Native Language Pol icy Run in Parallel” The 2018 Blueprint reassures that the Bilingual Nation policy will not derail the government’s previous commitment to revitalizing its Indigenous and national languages. “The bilingual policy will be parallel to the pluralistic development of mother tongues, and its implementation will not constrain native language education,” it explains (National Development Council 2018: 5). Again, as part of the appropriation of indigeneity, Hokkien and Hakka are categorized with Indigenous languages as “native language education.” The Blueprint’s assertion of parallel development of English and local languages can be read as a part of a multicultural, inclusionary settler colonial logics expressed through language planning – evidencing the interdiscursive engagement between English and the settler rhetoric of indigenous incorporation as diversity. Kuo (2003) argued that though a popular hallmark of contemporary liberal democracy, multiculturalism in Taiwan can function as a self-serving mechanism to ensure the vitality of a core culture, in this case, Mandarin Chinese culture. Using the language of inclusion, Taiwan’s structure of multiculturalism, Kuo contends, merely interpellates marginalized cultures, especially Indigenous cultures, as peripheries that circle and protect the core culture. Multiculturalism in Taiwan, then, can be “politically coercive and violent,” operating as a form of “cultural imperialism that coercively imposes a dominant grid of reading cultural diversity and concealing cultural difference” (2003: 224). The Blueprint adheres to a neoliberal multilingualism as it asserts, “Taiwan in the future will be a nation of diverse ethnicities and languages” (National Development Council 2018b: 5) and references the Development Act of National Language – legislation passed in 2018 which ensures the preservation, revitalization, and equal development of Hokkien, Hakka, and Indigenous languages as national languages – as evidence of the parallel implementation strategy. “This law,” explains the Blueprint, “will serve to effectuate equal rights of languages and cultures, help to promote the nation’s pluralistic cultural development, and enrich the content of national culture” (National Development Council 2018b: 5). However, the Blueprint lacks any information explaining how this parallel development will be enacted, while detailing how English will be integrated into the Ministry of Education and other specific institutions and social sectors. Without an implementation strategy, past efforts for enacting local language instruction evidence a reality of unequal realization. Liao (1999: 204) argued that the role of mother tongue instruction in the 1990s was inadequate due to a lack of curricular support. Wei (2006) observed that the emphasis on the linguistic instrumentalism of English as social capital precipitated a “grotesquely disproportionate allocation of time, energy, and resources (particularly in the metropolitan areas) to the study of English before children

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have acquired a firm base in their mother tongues” (93). Citing Price (2005), Wei notes how he “rightly points out, some even worry that ethnic equality is a social impossibility as long as economic advantage remains predicated on English language ability” (as cited in Wei 2006:93). Moreover, the Blueprint’s neoliberal insistence that issues of disparity in access to English instruction between rural and urban communities can be solved through online English learning platforms ignores pressing concerns of inequality and resource underdevelopment in rural communities, where many Indigenous buluo (tribes) are located. In fact, Price’s case study of English language Education (ELE) revealed that due to the DPP’s positioning of English as cultural and economic capital, “access to ELE was structured by the neoliberal notion of competition, but on a playing field that was anything but level” (2014: 574). Thus, the Blueprint’s bilingualism plan, though built upon interdiscursive invocations of multiculturalism and indigeneity as part of Taiwan’s international legibility, structures both an uneven language development prioritizing the value of English and an imbalanced English development prioritizing those with access to technology – primarily the elite, recent mainland Chinese immigrant class and the Han settler community. This, coupled with research demonstrating historically unequal support for local language instruction, indicates cause for concern regarding the efficacy of the parallel implementation plan. That only one paragraph of the twenty-three-page document discusses the policy’s relation to “native language education,” and that the Blueprint is devoid of any mention of an implementation strategy for how the two policies will “run in parallel,” evidences a structural erasure of local languages, especially the historically disenfranchised Indigenous Austronesian languages. While the Blueprint’s “Individual strategies” provides initial plans for integrating English more thoroughly in the educational curriculum, details for the protection of Indigenous language revitalization and development are nowhere mentioned. As Calderon demonstrates, the technique of erasure is a curricular mechanism of settler replacement that intends to structure Indigenous absence (2014: 317). Despite the earlier rhetorical promise that the bilingual policy would run in side by side with native language education, the Blueprint effectively sidelines these efforts and structures Indigenous erasure by prioritizing the perceived political economic value of English development for political and economic internationalization. Indeed, roll-out strategies for establishing English include “strengthening international exchanges” through Model United Nations programs (National Development Council 2018: 14) and “requiring that, where government procurement cases are applicable to the Agreement on Government Procurement (GPA) of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the digest of tender notice be published in English” (National Development Council 2018: 15). The very reference to English “bilingualism” exemplifies a mode of coercive multilingualism in the Blueprint’s assertion of “pluralistic cultural development” (National Development Council 2018b: 5). Many of Taiwan’s residents are already bilingual in Mandarin and the Sinitic Han settler languages and/or the Indigenous languages, yet it is only the pairing of English and Mandarin that registers in the Blueprint as bilingualism. This speaks to not only the embedded neoliberal value of English in the global market and the resulting privileging of English in the policy’s promise to develop local language policies in parallel, but also highlights the Han settler hegemony of Mandarin as the default language of power and value in Taiwan. Mandarin’s perceived centrality to the Taiwan nation-state – and the continued subjugation and erasure of Indigenous language presence and value in Taiwan’s linguistic market – thus becomes naturalized as common sense through the very trope of English bilingualism. In this interdiscursive interplay, the

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integration of English through Bilingual Nation serves to reinscribe the default positioning and value of Mandarin as the corollary language of power in Taiwan’s linguistic market, mystifying the settler positioning of Mandarin while cementing its hierarchical status in the seemingly multicultural and multilingual Han settler nation. Friedman (2018) points out that such a multiculturalism is hegemonic in the way it continues to displace Indigenous cultures and languages to ensure continued Han settler domination. Though English “might not itself hasten the demise of Hoklo, Hakka, or aboriginal languages and identities,” Price concludes, “English devalues them as capitals within linguistic and educational markets” (2014: 576), thus structuring the primacy of English and Mandarin as prerequisites for future economic viability in Taiwan and as the nation’s projected languages of legibility in the international political arena. Therefore, the Bilingual Nation policy’s formulation of bilingualism on the naturalized value of Mandarin and English superiority demonstrates an effort to structure Taiwan’s future development through the continued logic of Han settler domination and neoliberal economic expansion. As the Blueprint declares, “promoting bilinguality will enable the nation to look forward,” thus “enabl[ing] Taiwan’s next generation to enter the future with greater competitive advantage” (National Development Council 2018b: 5). As Taiwan’s future is framed through Mandarin-English bilingualism, it is a future that upholds Han settler sovereignty on an international stage.

VI.  CONCLUSION: MANDARIN-ENGLISH BILINGUALISM AND SETTLER FUTURITY The Taipei Times reports, “According to the Cabinet’s blueprint, education is the key to achieving the 2030 goal” (Hsu 2018). In so much as that the Blueprint’s policy relies on the educational system and curricular design to implement the main structures of the proposed bilingualism plan, it evidences what Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013) describe as a curriculum of settler futurity. “Anything that seeks to recuperate and not interrupt settler colonialism, to reform the settlement and incorporate Indigenous peoples into the multicultural settler colonial nation state,” they explain, “is fettered to settler futurity” (2013: 80). Returning to a previous reference from the Blueprint illuminates this aspect of the Bilingual Nation. The argument that “Taiwan must develop itself into a bilingual nation, to further strengthen our national competitiveness, attract multinational corporations to come to Taiwan to engage in business activity” (National Development Council 2018b: 6), is structured on the premise of not simply English internationalization but a bilingual framework that secures Mandarin and Han settler hegemony as essential for Taiwan’s growth. The reference to “national competitiveness” should be understood as not simply an urge for economic viability through capital accumulation, but also as political contention for survival against and increasingly aggressive China. This future survival, however, is predicated on the maintenance of Han settler domination as it is through Mandarin-English bilingualism that Taiwan will “enable our young generation to have better development opportunities in their homeland, lifting wage levels as a whole, and spurring the prosperity of our national economy” (National Development Council 2018b: 6). Moreover, it is the perceived value of the Mandarin-English framework that gets to speak for Taiwan on an international stage, and thus defines – and naturalizes – the nation as a Han settler “homeland.” With its emphasis on English as an urgent skill for ensuring the future economic success and implied political survival of Taiwan’s

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youth, and its embedded interdiscursive logics of indigenous incorporation to maintain Mandarin supremacy, the Bilingual Nation policy serves to sustain Han settler futurity and freedom. What is at stake in not learning English, the policy implies, is the loss of Han settler sovereignty and security, which continues to be predicated on Indigenous elimination through a coercive logic of multicultural, multilingual incorporation. Indeed, the rhetoric of Indigenous language development as a parallel implementation with Mandarin-English bilingualism reifies the foundational absorption of Indigenous peoples through the initial Han settler intermarriage as a measure to secure settler futurity. English in Taiwan thus reveals competing ideologies regarding colonialism: at once enacted in defense of Taiwan’s independence from China, in distinction from occupation by the mainland KMT elite, and in defiance of Indigenous sovereignty. To be clear, I am not arguing that English in Taiwan inevitably evidences colonialism and settler colonialism, as I am aligned with Jerry Won Lee’s (2016: 53) assertion that “decoloniality does not . . . necessarily involve a wholesale rejection of English.” Though the embedded ideologies of the bilingualism campaign structure Indigenous erasure in service of Han settler competition, there exists the possibility for the curriculum to contain decolonial potential for what Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández term “Indigenous futurity,” “which does not foreclose the inhabitation of Indigenous land by non-Indigenous peoples, but does foreclose settler colonialism and settler epistemologies” (2013: 80). A Taiwan English that explicitly deconstructs the continued hegemony of Han settler existence, challenges the interdiscursive supremacy of Mandarin in the framework of bilingualism, and employs English in service of articulating Indigenous land recuperation and sovereignty on a global stage could begin to ensure an internationalization that is decolonial in its prioritization of Indigenous futurity.

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Chapter 17

Exploring Contested Language Ideologies in Kiribati INDIKA LIYANAGE AND TONY WALKER

I. INTRODUCTION The ascendancy of neoliberal ideologies in concert with globalization has elevated English to the status of a ‘hypercentral’ (Aronin 2015) global language that, in the words of Heller (2010: 102), “is not a reflection of the social order but is part of what makes it happen.” Consequently, the language is endowed with rarely challenged universal prestige and desirability as human capital that leverages access to material resources, socio-economic mobility, and global-oriented opportunities. As an object of desire, rather than being valued for its more basic communicative, identity, and cultural uses and functions, English is a commodity with exchange value (Block 2010) in the marketization of the self to achieve economic and social benefits (Park 2011). This instrumental view of a direct relation between acquisition of the commodity of language ability as a technical skill and economic benefit for individuals has been challenged (Pennycook 2007; Kubota 2011b), and language desire associated with more abstract experiences of the globalized present (Kubota 2011a; Takahashi 2013). However, the pervasiveness of free-market doctrines of individual self-development as marketable human capital and the hypercentrality of English have naturalized (Piller and Cho 2013) the use of English as a language valuable above all others, making it “a perfect object of desire (and dispute)” (Canale 2015: 18; see also Kubota 2011a; Takahashi 2013). Motha and Lin (2014), drawing on the work of Ahmed (2010), propose that desires for English are grounded in its association with happiness. This sense that individuals with English proficiency are, or will be, better off – and happier – arguably provides the fundamental ideological base that drives the English language teaching (ELT) enterprise, and sustains the individuals promoting it, in developing economy settings such as Kiribati. The desirability with which this invests English is then the grounds for the discursive construction of the view that an absence or lack of English is an impediment to achieving the object of happiness, and thus undesirable (Motha and Lin 2014). Reconceptualizing motivation to learn language as a social and ideological construct, desire, or lack thereof, we argue, acknowledges the interaction of individual agency and socio-historical and structural circumstances, and the significance of learning and using an additional language for social organization and power relations

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in and between social groups. The affective dimension of English language learning in a setting such as Kiribati is a site of tensions between individual subjectivities, local conventions, and geopolitical imperatives with the potential to disrupt social structures and relations (Park 2015). Our position in this chapter, then, is that neoliberal positioning of (the English) language as nothing more than a neutral technicized and marketable skill ignores the affective dimensions of language and the historical-structural contexts of use. Among I-Kiribati (the people of Kiribati), the status of English as a valuable and thus desirable commodity, that is, as an object of happiness, is contested through practices of shaming. These shaming practices are overt social actions that both mark and constitute an ideological divide in the local population around language, and a contemporary application of a practice that in the past has served to enact fundamental ideologies in order to unify and sustain the stability of local values (Gutiérrez and Rogoff 2003). International aid and development experts, for whom the desirability of English has “become incorporated into the common-sense way we interpret, live in, and understand the world” (Harvey 2005: 23), are confounded by the lack of desire for English, frustrated in their attempts to engender such desire, and disparage the integrity of local norms as contrary to “rational choice and utility maximization” (McElhinny 2010: 315). They denigrate the practices of shaming, which many locals regard as social mechanisms that have served them well in the past, as impeding timely responses to challenges facing the I-Kiribati and access to progress (and happiness) that they believe English represents. In the context of competing desires, we argue that the I-Kiribati have (re)constituted the status of English in more pragmatic terms, accommodated and subordinated amongst more powerful desires around local ideologies of community cohesion rather than self-marketization. In the case of ELT in Kiribati articulated in this chapter, we discuss the ideological bases of the shaming practices that mark division within the local population, and between this element of the local population and outside foreign ELT experts and advisors. The situation in Kiribati, we suggest, offers a local insight into tensions arising in ELT under the influence of neoliberal ideas: “the abandonment of the social and cooperative ethic in favour of individualist and competitive business models” (Block et al. 2012: 6) of the self. We consider whether a balance can be found between competing ideologies that will allow a place for English that aligns with the community values, whether shaming practices can be recognized, deconstructed, reconstructed, and integrated in ELT practices as a positive pathway to negotiation of identities that accommodate a powerful dominant language without threatening local solidarities and community cohesion. We draw on the perspectives of selected locals and foreign experts to foreground the ideological complexities of orientations to shame related to desires for teaching, learning, and using English in Kiribati. These perspectives were gathered using open-ended interviews during a collaborative development project between the governments of Kiribati and Australia that aimed to facilitate employment opportunities for I-Kiribati youth. Interviews with six educationists, part of ongoing observations projected for a larger ethnographic project, are used for purposes highlighted within this chapter. As our focus here is to compare ideological perspectives that complicate and disrupt enactment of the project of ELT in Kiribati, our discussion is based on a balanced representation of local and foreign professionals directly involved in realization of that endeavour – three local teachers (one female and two male) and three foreign experts (two female and one male). We acknowledge that the perspectives on shaming of the three local participants reflect their own positions as locals and as members of an educated English-proficient elite, and that

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this shapes their construction of the actions and attitudes of the locals they describe. That the same applies to the outsiders is assumed. Of the local participants, Zameeta is the principal of a high school and an English teacher who completed her postgraduate studies in Australia. Of the two local males, Wanga, who completed his doctoral studies in Australia, is the director of a University Campus located in Tarawa, whilst Atang is a graduate from a Fijian University, and working as an English teacher at a high school. Of the three foreign experts, John was a senior embassy official-in-charge of overseas aid and cultural affairs. Jill and Elaine were employed as overseas consultants to improve English language and literacy skills in the country. All three foreign experts are first language speakers of English. Each interview lasted between seventy and ninety minutes, and interview questions explored participants’ perceptions of shame and shaming in relation to English language teaching and learning in Kiribati. We adopted selective coding (Clarke 2005) of the interview data for different explanations of the manifestations, causes, and consequences of shaming practices.

II. KIRIBATI After forty years of independence, the Republic of Kiribati is one the least-performing Pacific nations on a range of economic, environmental, and social development indicators (Weber 2016). Given these conditions and Kiribati’s post-colonial historical circumstances, its vulnerability to social and cultural disruption and to economic dependence, and reliance upon the assistance and whims of powerful neighbours and the dictates of international organizations, appears set to continue. Any vulnerability is unarguably accentuated by the inescapable reality of its geography in the context of predicted impacts of climatic changes. The 800 square kilometres of land mass in three island groups that constitutes Kiribati is scattered across more than 3,000,000 square kilometres of the mid-Pacific Ocean (Tisdell 2002). Twelve of Kiribati’s thirty-two coral atolls and reef islands have no permanent inhabitants (Storey and Hunter 2010). Most of the land area on the atolls and reef islands of Kiribati is less than 3 metres above sea level with limited freshwater, and limited arable land with very poor soils (Loughry and McAdam 2008). The most abundant natural resource is fish, and I-Kiribati on the outer islands live subsistence lifestyles (Loughry and McAdam 2008; Storey and Hunter 2010). Initial contacts with European and American traders and whalers led some I-Kiribati, as seafaring people, to join the crews of these vessels (Gheuens 2017), and those that returned had usually learned the language/s of outsiders sufficiently to act as intermediaries for trading activities (Macdonald 1982). These intermittent contacts were followed by the arrivals in the nineteenth century of English and French-speaking missionary organizations that developed written forms of te taetae ni Kiribati (the Kiribati language, hereafter, Kiribati), the local vernacular used throughout Kiribati, although with slight variations in dialect across the islands. Missionaries’ proselytizing activities were conducted in the local language (Burnett 2005), and to this end mission schools pursued language education in the vernacular (Lotherington 1998), despite the reported preferences of locals to whom “the utility of the foreign language was obvious” (Macdonald 1982: 35). As the trade in commodities, such as coconut oil, then copra, and labour, assumed more importance, it became inevitable that a European imperial power claimed ‘ownership’ of

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the islands that constitute modern Kiribati. During Britain’s control of the islands until independence in 1979, English was the official language of colonial activities, but served as a “technology of exclusion” (Burnett 2005: 101), access to formal English language instruction and English-medium education being available initially only to a select few males in one government school established in the 1920s, until another for girls was established post–Second World War. English and Kiribati became markers among locals of socio-economic and ideological division, a manifestation of the “the colonial tension between desiring sameness and difference in the colonised” (Burnett 2005: 100). Since independence in 1948, schooling continues to follow colonial curriculum and organization models; nine years of schooling are free and compulsory through primary and junior secondary schools. Under current policy, Kiribati is the medium of instruction in the early years and English introduced as an additional language, leading to transition to English-medium instruction from the middle years of schooling. The Kiribati Development Plan (2016-2019), supported by the Australian government-sponsored Kiribati Education Improvement Program (see Smith and McNaughton 2018), prioritizes acceleration of the transition into English in primary and junior secondary schools as “the critical foundation for ongoing learning and development” (Republic of Kiribati 2016: 20). Entry to four years of senior secondary schooling is regulated by examinations, in English, and by the levying of fees. The state operates all primary and junior secondary schools, and three senior secondary schools; Christian churches operate fifteen combined junior/senior secondary and senior secondary schools, accounting for 60 percent of senior secondary enrolments (Republic of Kiribati Ministry of Education 2014). Higher education is available at the University of the South Pacific Extension Centre, Kiribati Teachers College, Kiribati Institute of Technology, the Kiribati Nursing College, the Marine Training Centre, the Fisheries Training Centre, and the Police Training Centre, all located in the capital, Tarawa (Liyanage 2009; Republic of Kiribati Ministry of Education 2014; Republic of Kiribati 2016; Smith and McNaughton 2018).

III. LINGUISTIC SHAME AND LANGUAGE LEARNING The relation between desire for (English) language and shame is complex, and shame and shaming practices cannot be theorized simply as the absence or lack of desire. Rather the various manifestations of shame reveal different and sometimes contradictory meanings attributed to language use. In the context of English and English language teaching (ELT), the powerful ideologies that underpin the dominance of English can evoke shame in individuals or groups for use of a first/minority language, spurring the desire for English. Conversely, despite learners’ desires to learn and use English, ideologies that valorize dominant varieties can provoke anticipation of shame, and reluctance to use the target language, based on fears of ridicule from ‘native speakers’ or peers for failing to demonstrate control of language ‘norms’. This dimension of shame can be overlaid with shame and shaming around the complexities of the meanings of language for identity that multilinguals can experience in the tensions between use of dominant and minority languages. Shame as an emotional response has been theorized as both a psychological and a sociological phenomenon (Scheff and Retzinger 2000; Scheff 2001; Shweder 2003; Holodynski and Kronast 2009; Crozier 2014). Here we adopt the view of Scheff (2001: 266 & 268) that shame is “the feeling of a threat to the social bond . . . crucially involved in

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the structure and change of whole societies.” As a means of social control, the anticipation of shame is arguably as powerful as the experience of shame itself (Scheff 2001). The key role of language in constitution of social bonds means language use can have meanings or ideological associations that violate or threaten social bonds and boundaries. Instances of linguistic shame – shame related to language use – include use of both mother tongues and additional languages. In settings where an additional or second language is dominant, first-language use as a source of shame has been observed in the children of migrants (Holodynski and Kronast 2009) and in those who fear stigmatization as uneducated or backward (Lopez Quiroz, 1990, in Coronel-Molina 1999; McCarty et al. 2006). While such examples suggest a desire to acquire and use a dominant/additional language, shame has also been documented in opposing circumstances. For example, it has been documented around use of an additional language, particularly among learners who often avoid target language use because they anticipate or experience shame because of ridicule or rejection if they do meet their own or others’ expectations or standards (Zimbardo and Radl 1981; Miccoli 1997; So and Dominguez 2005; Garrett and Young 2009; Imai 2010). Studies of learners’ willingness to communicate (Aragão 2011; Cao 2014) in language classrooms using the target language generally attribute absence of such willingness, which is widespread in English classrooms in Kiribati, to individual factors that in dominant language pedagogies require remediation if learning is to be successful (Humphreys and Wyatt 2014). Following Park (2015) we explain this as a subjective social condition originating in responses to historical-structural circumstances surrounding the target language in context. Our local participants were explicit in their identification of “mechanisms in society . . . that really affect the way our students are learning English” (Wanga: 48-52). These mechanisms are complex, and their visibility in attitudes and behaviours involving language use are instantiated in the intersection of local conventions, attitudes, and values, and the aftermath and legacies of (British) colonialism. Both local and outsider participants emphasize the very strong determination of I-Kiribati to retain their culture and identity, although their perspectives on the ramifications of this are mixed. A key element of this priority is that they “pride themselves on being egalitarian and not having a class structure. So they don’t want anything that undermines [this]” (Jill: 273274). Wanga explains the implications of violations of cultural boundaries that threaten community solidarity on this issue: one of the most important things in Kiribati life is the avoidance of being shamed, you know . . . And one of the things that brings shame to you is when you try to be different from the rest . . . not only different but also above everyone else . . . We were taught through our socialisation and when we were small that everyone is equal and you cannot be above everyone else . . . So when people ridicule you . . . they are in fact pulling you down to their same level. (Wanga, 38–43, 160–3) The complexity of attitudes to English will become clearer as this chapter progresses, but, in terms of equality, to use a language other than Kiribati is regarded as an instance of trying to be “different from the rest,” and “real pressure to speak Kiribati” (Jill, 126127) across work, social, and family contexts is experienced by even the most Englishproficient locals such as our participants. Following the period of colonial rule, during which English had a significant presence, the reinvigorated pride in the ‘local’ manifested in disparagement of use of language/s other than Kiribati. This was coupled with structural

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changes in public institutions to provide conditions that have, over the forty years since independence, effectively marginalized the use of English. We got into the localization thing, straight after independence, you know . . . there is that thing that we are independent and we don’t have to be like the British any more. And there is that rush to localize things you know, teachers in schools and all that . . . And English was the language of instruction and socialisation and it also was the language outside classroom. And we were encouraged to do that. But after that, when local teachers started to come in they, sort of teach in their . . . in Kiribati and the whole thing is in fact changed almost to be a different school altogether from the one that we knew in those days. (Wanga, 72–83) The structural transformation to local staffing in the Kiribati education system in tandem with the social consequences of the shame of using a language other than Kiribati has produced a teaching cohort that in general lacks the proficiency and the confidence to be successful English language teachers. they don’t have confidence or maybe they’re not well trained or maybe their exposure to English is not very much . . . if you don’t have much exposure to a language then you surely cannot use it. And so, it can affect your teaching or the way of communicate with the students in English. (Atang, 126–130) Although our local participants confirmed that learners and users generally avoid English language use, especially in the presence of other locals, this reluctance to use English is more complicated than mere anticipation of ridicule or rejection. Locals can and do use English when necessary. “With some of them they’re actually embarrassed that their English isn’t better . . . [and] will openly admit it now because we have a strong relationship” (Jill, 100102), but “Kiribati people [who] can operate in meetings, speak to each other in English and things like that, are reluctant to speak in English to each other” (John, 18–20). There is less trepidation about using English with an outsider who cannot use Kiribati because if “the structure of your sentence is not correct, they cannot laugh. They still accept you . . . [but] when you make mistakes in front of Kiribati people they will easily laugh” (Atang, 161–2). The laughter reflects the historical-structural circumstances of British colonial rule that now stigmatize English language use as an attempt to be different from the rest, but accentuated, we surmise, by perceived failure of the attempt to emulate the ways of outsiders, because, as John puts it, they are “pretending to be you know, like me, when they are not. When they are not like me at all. They’re Kiribati” (John, 147–8). There are apparent similarities between the shaming practices of the I-Kiribati and some reported in the literature from other settings in which the use of English in certain contexts is viewed as a threat to social bonds based on identity and membership of peer or community groups. In Singapore, for example, some students report that use of English outside classrooms is scorned as displaying a sense of superiority and as snobbery (Stroud and Wee 2007), and in Sri Lanka, using English in some settings is ridiculed, equated with a ‘sword’ used to cut down the status of interlocutors (Kandiah 1979). In Indonesia, use of English has been equated with “pretending to be a Westerner” (Lamb and Coleman 2008: 199). But in these settings there are other contexts in which there is more generally acknowledged value and status accorded to English, evidenced by the widespread desire of individuals to acquire the language that has resulted in flourishing private English-medium instruction schools and English language colleges in countries such as Sri Lanka (Wettewa 2016; Liyanage 2019) and Indonesia (Manara 2014; Walker et al.

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2019). What sets Kiribati apart is the widespread disdain for English. While many of the local professional class acknowledge the utility of English proficiency, they feel powerless in the face of the reality that for most I-Kiribati ‘the status of English is not as high as Kiribati . . . We have been brought up in a culture where, if you use English, people will laugh at you’ (Atang: 150–2). The attitude of I-Kiribati also differs, we argue, from that in some settings where successful learning and use of a (dominant) additional language is seen as shameful behaviour by those who regard this as a threat to the strength and/or maintenance of a local/heritage language (Gao 2012). Resistance to possibilities of such attrition can be realized as shaming practices, such as denunciation as language traitors or language killers (Constantinidou 1994; Romaine 1999, in Pavlenko 2005). In Kiribati, despite government policy, and the urgings of the administrative and professional class, attitudes are shaped by immediate and everyday needs for interaction: the place of English in our culture is not as important as our own language. If you speak English, you cannot survive outside. What I mean by this is that, Kiribati [language] is very important . . . when you communicate in Kiribati, everyone understands you and then cooperates with you, can give you everything, whereas, if you speak in English, no one will understand you. (Atang. 30–8) The utility of Kiribati is also understandable because, unlike linguistically diverse former colonial states that ensued from imperialist occupations, rivalries, conquests, and the often random drawing of boundaries on maps, Kiribati was and is essentially a monolingual community. English was not utilized as a necessary means of communication between disparate groups, as any type of lingua franca, and once the demands of colonial administration were removed, as Atang observes, ‘without English we can still survive . . . here in Kiribati, we have only one language and everyone understands it . . . we don’t need another language’ (Atang, 51–7). As an outsider, Jill has observed that, among the locals she works with, “in the office, senior public servants, if they’re speaking to each other, they don’t speak in English. There is no sort of chatter over coffee or anything like that in English. It’s always in Kiribati. Always” (Jill, 506–8). When attempting to encourage staff to use English with each other as the default medium at the local campus, Wanga explains that ‘from the facial expressions alone I know . . . they are communicating to you, not verbally, that why are you doing this? You are the same as us” (Wanga, 111–14). It is clear that powerful social conventions with structural-historical origins mitigate the use of English even among the most proficient of local users, and this environment pervades the English language classroom. Unwillingness to use the target language does not stem from possibly remediable individual learner characteristics, or fear of not meeting their own or others’ standards, but local language ideologies that disparage English and constrain those with a desire to learn the language. To complicate this picture of the linguistic environment in Kiribati, it is evident from the data presented so far that there are English-proficient locals, and there are outsiders and some locals who advocate the learning and use of English, not necessarily for day-to-day routine interactions by the population at large, but for its utility across diverse domains. Equally, despite the understandable protestations of locals that they do not need English for their day-to-day interactions in Kiribati, our data suggest they recognize its utility outside that setting. Historically, the linguistic homogeneity of Kiribati has meant that English has not been, as in other settings, a vehicle for one local linguistic group to achieve ascendancy over others. It was, and remains, the language of more powerful outsiders. While that brings the risks of ideological tensions and divisions between locals

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and outsiders, it also risks the unavoidable arguments within a linguistic community about how to respond to and manage new and evolving linguistic circumstances, and it is to these issues that we now turn.

IV. OVERTURNING DOMINANT LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES The background of the complex relationships in Kiribati between English and (the) local language, and between their uses and users, differs little from that of many other decolonized states – language was, as it continues to be, an instrument of power, social position, and knowledge (Gal 1998). The historical circumstances that have shaped present-day Kiribati offer insight into how contemporary local language ideologies reflect the interaction of local social conventions and these circumstances, now further complicated by, and complicating, responses to the ideological framing of the desirability of English by outsiders and locals. Practices around language use that might be considered more essentially as cultural in origin are arguably indicative of more complex responses to current circumstances, shaped by historical structural and geopolitical relations, that we suggest are domain-specific attempts to manage ideological tensions between competing community values. For locals who have both the desire to learn and use English but at the same time affirm their solidarity with the community and sustain respect, avoidance of ridicule and shaming takes precedence. As Wanga explains, opportunities to use English and improve communicative proficiency are correspondingly compromised: when you try to be different from the rest . . . it’s a pity that it’s affecting the way they speak English and their confidence in speaking in English but at the same time I think they are in a (dilemma) because on one hand they realise the importance of acquiring English and communicating English but on the other they try and they allow culture to . . . sort of to control the things and to affect the way they really communicate in English. (Wanga, 163–8) Outsiders, on the other hand, tasked with supporting development and, as an integral element of this, with improving the teaching of English are cognizant of the impact of practices that ridicule English use by locals, but interpret the situation through their own experiences and ideological understandings. John offers another interpretation of obstacles to English learning and use as attributable to factors that arguably reflect the sense-making of his outsider perspective, in this case a policy failure of government: the British left and then what’s the impetus, what’s driving the teachers in outer islands here to continue to speak English to their kids I think and even in South Tarawa, there is perhaps a lack of drive. There’s also . . . I think this place, like many Pacific countries, there is not a significant rigour to enforcement of policy. (John, 86–9) Elaine is less sympathetic to the idea of equality and the value accorded to the local ‘egalitarian myth’ (Elaine, 239) leading to the ridicule of English use, but she applies her outsider (neoliberal) meritocratic thinking to suggest that individuals ‘deserve’ their situation because of choices they make (Bernstein et al. 2015), and concepts of what constitutes egalitarianism to judge local behaviours, and argues it is an excuse for inaction. It’s not (as) people say – generalisation – a very egalitarian society . . . a lot of them are actually (that’s) rubbish, you know, they’re not egalitarian at all . . . to me, that’s not what egalitarian is all about . . . you’ve got to shake some of . . . shake some of these

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cultural things and . . . I’m not saying that we shatter them. They have to address these themselves, you know. It’s easy to say we are a very egalitarian society as an excuse for not actually moving ahead. (Elaine, 218–24) Any English use by locals continues to be mainly restricted to the administrative centre based on Tarawa, while the bulk of the local population use Kiribati, especially in the other islands. Historically, such was the significance of being admitted to the ranks of English users that the goal of an English-medium education was transformation. The English used by a local ‘educated person’ who was selected to join the ranks of the elite was expected to conform to what we think of today as Standard British English, including accent, and as an English user an ‘educated person’ was expected to adopt, or at least emulate, the attitudes, values, behaviours and lifestyle of the British colonizers. Among locals today, the choice of English or Kiribati remains a marker of socio-economic orientation and ideological allegiance, a manifestation of “the colonial tension between desiring sameness and difference in the colonised” (Burnett 2005: 100) captured in the response from Wanga’s staff to his advocacy and use of English: “Why are you doing this? You are the same as us. Why try to be different?” (Wanga, 114–15). At independence, this history of calculated restriction of access to the language of power, privilege, and prosperity positioned a small group of (predominantly male) Anglicized locals as pivotal in negotiations and subsequent political arrangements, and twenty-five years after independence, English continues to sustain an elite class (Burnett 2005). Thus, colonization practices that commodified English in Kiribati disrupted pre-colonial socio-political-economic relations of the I-Kiribati themselves, and continue to do so. The I-Kiribati, although there are complex origins of their reluctance to use the language with outsiders, do not demean or ridicule outsiders for their use of English, but English is one of the visible features that marks someone as an outsider. Ridicule is reserved for locals who use English, and are judged to be trying to behave like an outsider. Use of English, proficient or not, does not elicit admiration accorded such an achievement in many other post-colonial settings, but amusement at the pretension it is interpreted as demonstrating, and the idea of transformation of an I-Kiribati into an outsider; “they’re laughing at the person who is . . . pretending to be you know, like me, when they are not. When they are not like me at all. They’re Kiribati” (John, 146–8). Underneath the laughter, the scorn implies a transgression of a social boundary with the threat of consequent exclusion: when someone speaks in another language, then the people around him will mock him saying that he is from that island, he is from that country, you should go there and live there and why should he come here and live with us when he is not speaking in our language. (Atang, 27–9) Whatever post-colonial resentment towards Europeans that may persist is arguably another issue; they have their language and that is perfectly understandable and acceptable to I-Kiribati. It is English from the mouth of one their own, especially directed to one of their own, that evokes the taunt of okakanimatang: okakanimatang – like to be a – European and, you know, the expats, they speak in -– the white people. Imatang means white people, you know . . . so when you try to speak in English, they will say you, okakanimatang. (Zameeta, 176–8) The historical instalment of selected locals as intermediaries in colonial administration created an elite class in an ostensibly classless community. It is one thing to know the

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English language, and to use it if and when necessary with outsiders, but to choose to use it with another I-Kiribati is to try to be something everyone knows you are not, a white person, and this diminishes status. Achievements that elsewhere can set individuals apart, such as studying hard to develop proficiency in an additional language, and that are generally valued and associated with enhanced social status in Anglophone communities, are viewed very differently by I-Kiribati, as even outsiders such as Jill recognize. So even gaining of qualifications is not a status thing that would make you better than anybody else. And in fact it’s not really a done thing to talk about . . . what your qualifications might be. Your qualifications get you a job and it’s understood that you will have them in order to get the job that you’ve got but it doesn’t make you a better person than anybody else. (Jill, 285–90)

V. RECONSTITUTING THE STATUS OF ENGLISH Our local participants, all educators, are accomplished users of English, and would be regarded in Australia or New Zealand as educated professionals in relatively prestigious occupations. They extoll the advantages of learning English in their positions as educational leaders. They know, however, that their positions, qualifications, and language proficiency count for nothing, and in fact diminish their status in the eyes of others if it intrudes into their lives outside the workplace. The experiences of local professionals like Wanga and Zameeta, and the very fact that they were interviewed using English, is evidence that there is, of course, another dimension to the resistance of I-Kiribati to dominant language ideology. Some I-Kiribati have excellent English proficiency and interaction does take place with outsiders, both within Kiribati and in settings outside the confines of the national boundaries, and the use of English as a lingua franca is indispensable in many of these instances. Locals conduct business, both locally in the official administrative domain of government, in education, and in private transactions, and many I-Kiribati travel and live in places such as Fiji, Australia, and New Zealand for work or academic study. Outsiders who work with locals can see that outside the workplace “people are reluctant to speak in English to each other . . . [but] can operate in meetings, speak to each other in English and things like that” (John: 18–20). Our participants pointed to other indications that there are locals who can perhaps communicate successfully, or at least survive, in English-dominant contexts, although their avoidance of the use of English in their home setting suggests they lack any degree of proficiency. Movements of I-Kiribati outside the country for work or study are an accepted part of contemporary life, and the destinations mean individuals rely upon having at least a survival capacity to use English as a lingua franca. Many locals are to some extent dependent on this movement in the English-dominant world at a more fundamental level; temporary and permanent migration for employment, notably to English-dominant Australia and New Zealand, has established a flow of money and goods back to Kiribati, although this practice is another instance of the priority accorded “the betterment of a collective group. The welfare of the extended family takes precedence and reinforces kinship ties through physical separation and economic dependency” (Roman 2014: 14) rather than individuals focusing on accruing wealth and possessions through their endeavours. Nonetheless, there is a necessary preparedness to use English in these circumstances that is uncontested as an attempt to be higher than everyone else or to behave like an imatang. Atang has lived in New Zealand and observed that

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it’s quite astonished me . . . because I know that some of the people there, I mean, those people that I lived with them, when they were here they cannot speak even a word in English but while they were . . . they now live in New Zealand they can express themselves in English. That’s quite funny, hey? Maybe because they’re away from the culture which always mocked them or . . . I don’t know . . . or maybe because if they don’t speak in English, they won’t survive. (Atang, 292–7) For these I-Kiribati when they return home, however, “it’s a different ball game altogether, because people try not to speak English even if you can speak in English” (Atang, 145–6). Research literature suggests that the proficiency of at least some of those attempting to operate in other settings experience difficulties; the proficiency of graduates of Kiribati’s school education, for example, has been evaluated as among the lowest of students enrolled at the University of the South Pacific (Green 2012; Sameer 2014), which requires students to complete an English language skills assessment test and to achieve specified skill levels in listening, reading, and writing to proceed beyond the first year of study (The University of the South Pacific 2019). The English used by students from Kiribati, incidentally, is characterized by variant features of usage typical of Pacific English (Green 2012), rather than conforming to a standard dominant variety that would no doubt be the target in ELT in Kiribati school classrooms. Elaine (52–3) argues that the most proficient users of (standard) English, apart from older I-Kiribati who were schooled entirely in the language by outsiders before independence, are in fact those who have left the country for a time to work or study in English-dominant settings such as New Zealand or Australia. The seemingly universal disparagement of English that might in turn explain the lack of rigour in enacting language policies, and the inevitable outcome of linguistically illequipped teachers make it too difficult to develop high levels of English proficiency in Kiribati. Locals have a slightly different interpretation, defend the standard of teachers’ English – who “can speak English very well . . . the problem is the proficiency of the students” (Zameeta, 56–9) – and shift the focus to the reluctance of students, and thus to the shaming practices that discourage learning. It is clear that I-Kiribati consider use of English in some domains acceptable, even desirable, but also that use outside these domains elicits ridicule and disparagement of the user, and rejection of the language as unnecessary, unimportant, and not useful. The efforts of individuals to learn and use English can arguably align with community values if the language is not perceived to represent a disruptive dominant superiority, but a strategic choice that does not threaten cohesion. If English is to be available for I-Kiribati to learn effectively for use on their own terms, English language educators need to acknowledge the legitimacy of shaming practices and adapt pedagogy that incorporates linguistic boundaries as integral to knowledge of language practices. As it stands, dominant language ideologies permeate language education policy, and efforts to teach English are frustrated by local resistance. This has resulted in the situation described earlier, of a school education system that, among many problems, produces graduates who then go on to become teachers lacking in the proficiency and confidence to enact language policy in the context of local resistance.

VI. ENGLISH AND ENGLISH TEACHING IN KIRIBATI The quality of English teaching in Kiribati, and of all formal education both state and private, is poor compared to that provided in more developed nations. A policy of

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free and universal education is severely constrained by the lack of trained teachers, of resources and infrastructure, and the inequitable distribution amongst the atolls (United Nations 2002; Burnett 2013; Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade 2016). Locals such as Wanga, Zameeta, and Atang in educational leadership positions with responsibility for enactment of language policies, are situated at the linguistic interface of Kiribati with the world at large. They have to argue for what is currently a socially unacceptable practice, and struggle to convince locals of a need for accommodation of English and of the need for opportunities to learn the language free of shaming and social ostracism that attempts to use it provoke. They are caught in an ideological crossfire between local community conventions and local government policy influenced by discourses of English as dominant language. For Kiribati, post-colonial independence has essentially been a restructuring of dependence, an array of post-colonial relationships informed by dominant ideologies that prioritize development and the ascendancy of the English language for participation in regional and global economic and knowledge activities. Typical of many states decolonized by the British, English retains status as one of the two official languages of Kiribati, used in administration and education, promoted as indispensable for participation in international relations and economic development. Policymakers focused on development are influenced by their dependence on external sources of ‘aid’ – the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Asian Development Bank, and regional ‘partners’ such as Australia and New Zealand, and the advice of foreign ‘experts’ to implement structural adjustments (Liyanage 2009). A successful future for I-Kiribati, the development policy narrative goes, is the colonial vision dressed in new neoliberal clothes – adopt the ways and language of outsiders to become more ‘marketable,’ pursue the private benefit this path promises, and collective good will follow. Given considerations of encouraging preparation for future mobility in response to climatic threats, policymakers are influenced by an ideology dominant in many former colonies that equates success and prosperity with Western-style English language–medium education (Pennycook 2007; Gray 2010). Both English-medium education and English language proficiency are high-demand, profitably tradeable commodities in global markets (Tilak 2008) that offer possibilities for mobility of the I-Kiribati population, not simply as refugees but as skilled English-proficient migrants (Burnett 2013). Opportunities for access to this linguistic capital are promoted by aid agencies, and large numbers of consultants, teachers, and curriculum developers from English-dominant countries are employed, with funding assistance from Western aid and diplomatic missions, to improve English language teacher quality (see Liyanage 2009 for a full discussion). Given the combination of Kiribati’s economic circumstances and uncertain future, local policymakers’ willing acceptance of an English-dominant language-in-education policy is not difficult to understand. The ideological priorities and geopolitical agendas of international aid agencies and development partners are made explicit in policies targeting learning of English as an additional language. For example, the Kiribati Education Improvement Program (KEIP) (Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade 2010; Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade 2016), currently in its third phase (2016-2019) and funded primarily by the Australian government with additional support from UNESCO and UNICEF, prioritizes literacy and numeracy for students by the completion of Year 6. Literacy data cited in Phase 1 KEIP documents (Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade 2010), and the Government of Kiribati’s own annual report (Republic of Kiribati Ministry of Education 2016), always refers first to English, then Kiribati (Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade 2010).

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Program objectives include workforce development through establishment of a professional development framework with the explicit focus of strengthening teachers’ English language abilities via the Language Education Pilot Project (LEPP). The aim of the project was “to improve the capacity of I-Kiribati male and female teachers to teach and assess English as a Second Language and to introduce and use English as the medium of instruction across the curriculum” (Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade 2010: 98). While development of the proficiency of teachers tasked with teaching English as a second (additional) language is unarguably desirable, the expectation that English be used as medium of instruction, given the current state of English language teaching and learning in Kiribati, can be regarded, at best, as a long-term aspiration. Persistence with the ideologically driven policy of English-medium education would, arguably, simply reinforce a linguistic divide between a small English-proficient elite and the bulk of I-Kiribati by excluding the majority of students from effective learning. Outsiders tasked with improving the quality of education and English teaching acknowledge the futility of the policy, and the circumstances that teachers encounter. English is the medium of instruction. The main medium of instruction. English is supposed to be the form one medium of instruction. And yet 70% of the children and that’s 86% of the boys and 66% of girls and that’s a gender thing as well. They are going to form one with a literacy level in English . . . where they can’t basically write a sentence. (Elaine: 377–80) English-medium instruction assumes a universal desire for English and the efficacy of imported pedagogies to achieve it. It not only ignores the advantages of education in the home language (see e.g., Benson 2016; Trudell 2016), the pitfalls of wholesale adoption of English-medium instruction as a shortcut to language learning, especially given the structural and resource inadequacies of education in Kiribati (Clegg 2009), it overlooks the growing appreciation of multilingual approaches to school education. Rather than attempt to exclude students’ home language from the classroom, it can be harnessed to advantage in additional language learning, as well as content learning in bilingual education settings, through “the systematic and judicious use of learners’ L1 (first language) by teachers and of recognition of learners’ L1 knowledge as a resource for learning” (Liyanage and Walker 2019: 16). The frustration expressed by Wanga reflects the view that language choice in learning is a case of either/or, when in fact a both/and approach that assigns English a strategic role might be much more productive in the context of the prevalence of shaming practices. I live next door to a JSS, a junior secondary school. And every time I walk past this school, I can hear teachers teaching maths and teaching history and even English you know, talking to students in Kiribati. It shouldn’t be you know . . . in maths and other things but for English, that’s to be taught in English. (Wanga, 185–9) These educationally oriented arguments aside, prescribing English as the medium of instruction across the curriculum threatens to disrupt the linguistic boundaries that define the local community, and does not acknowledge the determination of the locals to set their own limits on the place of English in their community. An appropriate response to local circumstances would be to concentrate on development of teaching of English as an additional language, without expectations that it be used as medium of instruction. This should comprise an approach oriented to the utility of the language in the contexts determined by the locals, equipping them for further development of proficiency

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directed at study or work as they choose. Pedagogies that explicitly acknowledge the local attitudes to English, target specific domains of use, and aim to position the language as a strategic resource at the command of locals might avoid provoking the ideological conflict manifested in shaming practices that currently present an obstacle to teaching and learning English from the outset, and assign low status to local users.

VII. CONCLUSION The apparent lack of policy success in improving the teaching and learning of English in Kiribati can, we contend, be attributed to a failure to appreciate the ideological complexities of the local context. International policymakers and the local governing elite expect all I-Kiribati to share their views of English as desirable linguistic capital essential to navigation of economic and environmental challenges. Application of the “the global education agenda of the international development community . . . to perceived regional and national education problems regardless of contextual difference” (Coxon and Munce 2008: 147) ignores a vital element of the policy setting. Language ideologies among I-Kiribati are far from unified, but for many of them strong local cultures and traditions mean that learning and use of non-vernacular language among people at the grassroots level is disparaged, and this is manifested in shaming practices. In this chapter, we analysed the perspectives of foreign experts and I-Kiribati on these practices of shaming, discuss how they delineate conflicting ideologies of English, and overturn the ideology of English as prestigious capital through practices that shame and ridicule attempts to use the language, and accord low status to educated English-proficient local users. These practices of shaming illustrate the complexities of engaging productively with change while sustaining community boundaries. We suggest that if local practices are to accommodate the learning and use of English, what is needed is a more nuanced conception of affective dimensions, such as motivation, in English language learning. This conception needs to account for it as context-specific, situated in relations between societal discourses and ideologies, and sociohistorical, structural, and geopolitical circumstances, rather than solely treated as a trait of the individual. Approaching the notion of desire to learn an additional language (Pavlenko 2005; Benesch 2012; Motha and Lin 2014) as a “a complex multifaceted construction that is both internal and external to language learners” (Piller and Takahashi 2006: 59) helps us to understand the ideological tensions evident in social practices observed around the question of learning and use of English in contemporary Kiribati. Competing language desires in dominant/minority language settings can be ideological fault lines that disrupt local structures, and create social and individual tensions and divisions around identity, values, and ways of life. When such circumstances are encountered, ELT providers and practitioners must recognize and take steps to address the ideological issues that underpin desire and shame in English language learning.

REFERENCES Ahmed, S. (2010), The Promise of Happiness, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Aragão, R. (2011), ‘Beliefs and Emotions in Foreign Language Learning’, System, 39 (3): 302–3. Aronin, L. (2015), ‘Current Multilingualism and New Developments in Multilingualism Research’, in M. P. S. Jordà and L. P. Falomir (eds), Learning and Using Multiple Languages:

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306

INDEX

Abranches, S.  226 n.4 accent discrimination and translanguaging  146 accent neutralization  67–8 accents  236, 242, 244–6 Adichie, C. N.  103 Africa  31 Aga Khan, The  254 Aga Khan case (1866)  256 Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN)  260 Aga Khan Education Services (AKES)  255 Aga Khan Education Services, Pakistan (AKES, P)  259 Aga Khan II, The  266 n.4 Aga Khan IV, The  266 nn.1, 5 Ahmed, S.  288 Ajsic, A.  163 Alcoff, L. M.  208 n.2 Alim, H. S.  133 Amadasi, S.  106 Amritavalli, R.  103, 104 analytical autoethnography  101 Anglonormative biases  130 Anglonormative linguistic practices  131–2 Angrezi Hatao and anti-Hindi movements  169–70 Annamalai, E.  168 APINGLO-Cat project  249 n.3 Appleby, R.  18 Arab Human Development Report  48–50 Arabization and decolonization failure  44–5 Arab Mind, The (Patai)  57 n.8 Arab Spring  51, 52 Arnaut, K.  119 Arnould (Sir Justice)  256 Asani, A.  257 Asiento, significance of  33 assemblage  11–12, 21, 47, 49 of commodifiable elements, English as  16–17

the English divide  19 (see also unequal Englishes) of gender, language, and labor  18 logic of  21 semiotic assemblages  11 sociomaterial assemblages  11 tangled wires and  13 Attali, J.  46 audit culture  75–6 Australia  141–2 Australian Bureau of Statistics  141 Autocentrism  38 autonomous model of literacy  221–2. See also Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) comparison with ideological model of literacy  221 Azam, M.  168 Baker, C.  196 Bakhtin, M. M.  120–2 Bangladesh  17 Baumann, G.  106 Belich, J.  188 Bennett, J.  21 Benson, P.  119 Berber Myth  44 Bernaisch, T.  118 Besnier, N.  117 Bhabha, H. K.  102, 119 Bhatt, R. M.  3 Bilingual Education Act (1968) (United States)  196 bilingualism  223, 263, 300 economic and cultural currency of English and  179, 186–8 English Only movement and  194–8, 206, 207 and native language policy  282–4 in Taiwan  270–2, 275, 278, 280, 282, 285 translingual Englishes and  142, 154

308

World Bank and  51, 53–6 Bilingual Nation policy (Taiwan)  5, 270–2, 275–8, 280–2, 284, 285 Billig, M.  202 Blackledge, A.  200 Blackwell, V.  205 Block, D.  20 Blommaert, J.  2, 6, 10, 22, 27, 28, 39, 156, 179, 191, 219, 226 nn.9–10, 227, 234, 249, 263, 267 Bloomfield, L.  129 “Blueprint for Developing Taiwan into a Bilingual Nation by 2030” (document)  272, 282–3 English as neoliberal economic value and  276–8 Bolsonaro, J.  214, 224 Bonfiglio, T. P.  130, 131 Botsis, H.  278 Bourdieu, P.  74, 200 Braine, G.  130 Braudel, F.  29 Brazilian legislation for education (LDB)  213, 215, 224 Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC)  4 competences of  217, 218–19, 226 n.8 hybrid indexicalities  217–18 conflicting ideologies and interests and  214–18 ideological and autonomous literacy views and  218–24 law status of  225 n.2 organizational axes for English at  221–4 intercultural skills  223–4 orality 222 reading skills  222–3 reinventing literacy practices in English and  224–5 British Council  213, 235 APTIS test  237 geopolitical brief of  53 Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) on  52–3 Morocco and  50–2 brownout, notion of  12–13 Burde, A.  120 Burdick, C.  5 Burushaski  255, 261 Bush, J.  205 Butler, J.  9 Cain, P. J.  31, 32, 34, 35

INDEX

Calderon, D.  283 call center industry and language-based labor  67–9 Cameron, D.  65 Campbell, R.  89 Canagarajah, A. S.  116, 121, 142, 146, 151 capital accumulation, of United States  38 capitalist world-system American century of capital expansion and  37–9 capital accumulation and free riding of English and  29 capital flows – from core to historical arena  30–1 empire – formal or informal in  29–30 and global rise of English – seven moments of  31–7 Caribbean  31 Carlson, T.  207 Catalonia  233, 234, 237 English ideologies in  237–8 Cebu City (Philippines)  12, 15, 16 Chakraborty, T.  169 Challenge 2008 plan (Taiwan)  277 Chaparro, S.  128 Chen, S. C.  274, 275, 280 Chenggong, Z.  273 Chiang Kai Shek  273 Chin, A.  168 China  38 Chomsky, N.  129 Circle of Bakhtin  215 Cisneros, J. D.  203 civic monolingualism  120 Classical Arabic  54 Clemente, A.  103 code mixing  183 codeswitching  183 Coke-ification  20–1 Coleman, H.  48 Collins, J.  128 colonialism  2, 3, 82, 116, 208 n.2. See also linguistic coloniality Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum and  214, 218, 220 capitalist world-system and  27, 31–2, 34 economic and cultural currency of English and  178, 180–2, 185, 187 English entanglements and  10, 19 epistemic, and linguicism  46–50 erasure and  253, 256, 266 n.1

INDEX

francophonie and  45–6 global linguistics and  43–5, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57 n.4 hierarchization of  115 India and  164–6, 171 Kiribati and  291–4, 296, 299 Taiwan and  271–5, 277–82, 284, 285 colormuteness  127 Coluzzi, P.  182 Comellas, P.  238 commodification of English  64–5 domains for  67 language as communicative skill  71– 3 language-based labor  67–9 local branding  69–71 issues and future directions of  73 affective regime  73–4 language ideologies that facilitate language commodification  66–7 linguistic markets  74–5 Marxist perspectives  65 role of organizations  75–6 symbolic capital  72 commodification of language  15–16 Communist Party of India (Marxist)  169 conjuncture/conjunctural analysis  10 Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) pedagogies  237 convertibility, of English ‘capitals’  234 Cooper, R. L.  258 Copland, F.  136 cosmetic Anglicization  168 Costa, J.  163 Council for Education, Scientific Research and Training (CSEFRS)  57 n.3 Cowie, C.  68 Crismore, A.  118 critical language policy  199–200 critical thinking and educational praxis  216 Cruz, P. A. T.  17 Crystal, D.  161 cultural boundary violations, implications of  292 culturalism,  49–50 culturally relevant pedagogy  133 culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP)  133– 4. See also translanguaging cultural travel and diversity  102–3 currency seignorage  38 Curtis, A.  131 Curtis, M.  51

 309

Darija  54 Dasgupta, P.  170, 171 Davis, M.  57 n.7 deCentring  101, 108, 110 unexpected English and  106–8 De Cillia, R.  202 decoloniality  3, 43, 57 n.6, 164, 285 Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) and  214, 220 failure, and Arabization  44–5 Kiribati and  295, 299 pluriversalingualism  56 Decolonising the Mind (Ngũgĩ)  115 De Costa, P. I.  128 Del Percio, A.  217, 224 Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) (Taiwan)  274, 279, 280, 281 de-Sinicization, in Taiwan  279 de Soto, H.  50, 57 n.7 Development Act of National Language (2018) (Taiwan)  282 developmentalism, coloniality of  48 Diamond Jubilee Investment Trust (Hunza)  259 digital ethnography  148 diglossia  44, 55 epistemic  50 Discourse Historical Approach (DHA)  203 discourse of English and culture, interrogation of  105–6 discursive formation  117 domestic internationalization  88 Doon and Doom schools  168 Dovchin, S.  116 Duboc, A. P. M.  220 Duchêne, A.  65 Dupré, J. F.  280, 281 Eagleton, T.  2 early-exit language policy  55 East India Company (EIC)  31 East Indies  31 Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE)  57 n.2 economic and cultural currency of English, challenging  177–8 folk linguistic approach and  178–81 Malaysia and  180–5 New Zealand and  185–9 egalitarianism  295–6 Els Pins (EP) school  238 English-as-communication  239–42, 247

310

emotional labor  68 English as a Foreign Language (EFL)  219, 220 English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)  81, 82, 90 BNCC and  219–21, 223, 224, 225 powerful branding of  103–4 vision for multilingual francas including  94 English in policy and practice, in India  161–2 Angrezi Hatao and anti-Hindi movements and  169–70 and as medium of instruction  166–9 nativity and foreignness and  170–1 oppressive experience and colonization memory and  164–5 reframing colonization and  165–6 theoretical framing of language ideologies  162–4 English Language Amendment (ELA)  206 ‘English language immersion’ program  242 English language teaching (ELT)  52, 82, 116, 237, 255 Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum and  214, 219, 220, 225 English, a vector of democracy and development  51–3 English entanglements and  16, 18 in Kiribati  288–91, 298, 300, 301 normative Inner Circle biases in  84–92 overcoming theory-practice divide in  94–5 raciolinguistics, pedagogy and translanguaging and  127, 128, 136 English Only movement in the United States  194–5, 208 n.1 aims of  195–6 citizen’s action groups and  197, 206–7 critical discursive approaches to language ideology and immigration and  202–4 historical context and birth of  198–9 ideology of  201–2 illustrative examples of  204 business and ordinary people  205 conservative news outlets  207–8 Trump’s speech  204–5 language policy, ideology, and discourse as social action and  199–201 Spanish language and Latino population and  197–8 entanglement, notion of  9, 11 entanglements of English  11–12

INDEX

gender and desire linking  17–18 imagining new subjectivities and  21–2 manufacturing English and neoliberal subjects  14–17 tangled wires and brownouts  12–14 unequal resources stratification  18–21 epistemic colonization  116 epistemic diglossia  50 erasure, for transnational language policy  235–5 emphasis on English among Ismailis  256–7 the role of English in practice in Hunza and Khorog  257–62 of Indigenous languages in Taiwan 283 simplification of multilingual complexity 262–5 Evans, S.  119 exceptionalism, rhetoric of  45 Expanding Circle  68, 70, 72, 74, 85, 89, 92, 142, 275 external arena (EA)  30 externalization ideology  236, 238 extraterritoriality, principle of  37 Fairclough, N.  204 Fanon, F.  43 farmans, significance of  257, 259 Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)  197, 209 n.5 Ferguson, C. A  57 n.7 Finland  118 Fishman, J. A.  196 Flores, N.  20, 132 Flors-Mas, A.  237, 238 Flubacher, M. C.  217, 224 folk linguistic approach Malaysia and  180 New Zealand and  180 significance of  178–80 Forbes-Mewett, H.  150 foreignness and nativity, notions of  170–1 formal empire  30 Foucauldian knowledge  179 Foucault, M.  117, 226 n.9 fractal recursivity  235, 253 francophonie  45, 52 and colonial ruination  45–6 Frank, A. G.  27 Fránquiz, M. E.  128 freeriding, of English  29, 31

INDEX

Freire, P.  216 Friedman, P. K.  272, 284 Gal, S.  235, 248, 253, 265 Gallagher, J.  30, 31 Gallego, E. S.  226 n.4 Gallicization  44 Galloway, N.  82, 83 Gao, S.  70–1 García, O.  135 Gately, D. E.  145 Gaztambide-Fernández, R. A.  272, 284 Gee, J. P.  217, 226 n.11 Geertz, C.  109 gentlemanly capitalism  34–5 Gisborne, N.  118 global English  3, 83 global English and psychological damages  144–5 globalization  85 BNCC and  223 of English as hypercentral  288 ideological issues related to  117–18 impact on local identities  115–17 manifestations of  2 significance of  3, 165 in Taiwan  275 global linguistic coloniality  56 Global North  21 Global South  21, 48, 52 “Glorious Revolution”  33 Goh, R.  75 Gorno Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO)  261 Graddol, D.  48 Gramling, D.  120 Gramsci, A.  54 grand narratives approach  101, 109–11 Gray, J.  103 Great Navigation Acts (1651, 1660)  32 Hague, W.  51 Hall, S.  101, 102, 108 Hardt, M.  21 Harris, R.  130 Hawkins, M. R.  143 Hayakawa, S. I.  197, 206–7 Heath, S. B.  198 hegemony  2–4, 18, 74, 92. See also capitalist world-system

 311

economic and cultural currency of English and  184, 186, 187 English Only movement and  199, 200, 201 global linguistic coloniality and pluriversalingualism and  45–7, 51, 54, 56 heteroglossic framework and  115–16 ideological plurality and  162, 166, 167 international competition and competing colonialisms and  271–2, 274, 279–85 raciolinguistics, pedagogy, and translanguaging and  133, 134 translingual Englishes and  144, 153, 155 Heller, M.  65, 288 heritage tourism and language commodification  69–71 Yangshuo County (China)  70–1 Hernandez, M.  205 heteroglossia  4, 114, 123. See also ideology, identity, and World Englishes heteroglossic framework and  115–16 identity and ideology as heteroglossic  120–2 Hiçdurmaz, D.  153, 154 Higgins, M.  103 Hindi  161–2 as national language, myth of  169–70 historical arena (HA)  30 Hohenthal, A.  161 Holliday, A. R.  102, 104–6, 109–10, 128 Holquist, M.  121 Hong Kong English (HKE)  118–19 Hopkins, A. G.  31, 32, 34, 35 Hunza  253, 255, 257–9, 261, 266 n.2 Hyltenstam, K.  11 Hyrkstedt, I.  118 ideal speaker-hearer  129 ideological erasure  165 ideological model of literacy See also Brazilian National Common Core Curriculum (BNCC) comparison with autonomous model of literacy  221 ideological plurality. See English in policy and practice, in India ideological sites  234, 235 ideologizing, process of  234

312

ideology, identity, and World Englishes.  114–16. See also heteroglossia future directions of  122–3 il/legitimate multilingualism  55 issues related to globalization of English and  117–20 performing new identities and  116–17 Immigration and Nationality Act (1952) (United States)  199 Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments (1965) (United States)  199 imperialism  2, 11, 21, 43, 49, 102, 104, 135, 164 capitalist world-system and  30, 31, 34–6 contested language ideologies and  290, 294 economic and cultural currency of English and  181, 186 global linguistic coloniality and pluriversalingualism and  43–5, 47, 49, 51–3, 55, 56 international competition and colonialisms and  273, 275, 282 linguistic imperialism (see linguistic imperialism) Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI)  52–3 indexicality definition of  226 n.10 orders of  217, 226 n.9 India  31, 67, 161–2 Indian English  170 Indianness, of English  170 Indonesia  293 Industrial Training and Technical Internship Program (Japan)  90 informal empire  30 Ingraham, L.  207–8 in-group communication  146, 150–1 Ing-Wen, T.  272, 279, 281 Inner Circle  19, 68, 70, 71, 74, 84–5, 87, 89, 92, 116, 129, 134 biases as realities, normative  84–92 Inoue, M.  132 interdiscursivity  66, 202, 272, 273, 279–85 International Association of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL)  84–5, 127, 135 native speaker fallacy and  129–30 unpacking Whiteness in  130–1

INDEX

International Monetary Fund (IMF)  38, 49 intertextualization  47, 202 Ireland  31 Irvine, J. T.  235, 253, 258, 265 Ismaili language policy  254, 255. See also erasure, for transnational language policy Aga Khans and  256–7 English language importance and  256 Ives, L.  130, 131 Japan  83–5 foreign workers and Japanese language and  89–92 identity and ideology through English in  116–17 The National Achievement Test in  85–8 TV program impact in  88–9 Japanese as a second language (JSL)  87–8 Japan National Tourism Organization  88, 89 Jenkins, S.  128 Jenks, C. J.  128 Jin, X.  189 Johnson, D. C.  203, 209 n.14 Johnson, M.  203 Jook Hair Salon  15 Kachru, B. B.  1, 116, 130 Kachru’s “Three Circles” framework of World Englishes  275 Kalaja, P.  118 Kamal, A.  103 Kapur, S.  169 Kerfoot, C.  11 Ketuanan Melayu, ideology of  181, 182 Khorog  253, 255, 258–60, 263, 266 n.2 Kiribati  288–91 English and English teaching in  298– 301 English status reconstitution in  297–8 importance to mother tongue in  293–4 and linguistics shame and language learning  291–5 overturning dominant language ideologies in  295–7 and shaming practices  289 Kiribati Education Improvement Program (KEIP)  299 Kleyn, T.  135 knowledge economy  48–9, 55, 57 n.4 Koyama, J.  220

INDEX

Krishnaswamy, N.  120 Kroskrity, P. V.  117, 235 Kubota, R.  2, 14, 19, 104, 127, 129, 143, 270, 288 Kuhn, T.  104 Kumaravadivelu, B.  104 Kuo, K. C. H.  282 Kuo, V.  103 Kuomingtang (KMT) (Chinese Nationalist Party)  270, 273, 279, 280 Ladson-Billings, G.  133 Lai, W.  270, 277, 278 Lakoff, G.  203 language, reconceptualization of  65, 66 Language Education Pilot Project (LEPP)  300 language expertise  130 language ideology  65, 81, 117, 118, 162, 163, 177–80, 214, 219, 222, 254, 265 critical discursive approaches to  202 definitions of  179, 258 and discrimination  194 discursive construction of  204 ELF  225 foreign  220 language as  254 modernist  220 one nation-one  178 power of  127 reproduction of  201 language-in-education laws, in Malaysia  183 language-in-education policy  47, 81, 274 language policy  2, 44, 56, 166, 180, 234–5, 237, 253, 257, 263, 298. See also erasure, for transnational language policy among Ismaili Muslims  5, 254, 256, 258, 263, 265 Brazilian National Core Curriculum and  213, 225 n.1 contemporary  43 critical  199–200 discourse and language ideology and  199–204 early-exit  55 economic and cultural currency of English and  177, 180, 188 English Only movement and  195, 198–204, 208, 209 nn.12, 14 ethnographies of  238

 313

family  179 as ideology  254 Indian  161–2, 164–9 in Kiribati  298, 299 Malaysian  184 Moroccan  47, 51, 53–4 neo-traditionalist  188 official  264 prescriptions of  46–7 reform  5 significance of  11, 44, 45, 75 in Taiwan  273, 282–4 of World Bank  51, 53–6 language revitalization  4, 178, 180, 187, 188, 281–3 language test, significance of  14, 94 Japanese  90 Latin America  31–7, 208 Law on Language (2009) (Tajikistan)  263 Lawton, R.  4, 203, 208–9 n.12 Lee, J. S.  116 Lee, J. W.  4, 83, 119, 142, 285 Lee, M. W.  116 Leszcz, M.  155 Leung, C.  130, 217 Leuwen, van  206 Li, W.  3, 10, 28, 73, 134, 135, 179 Li, X-m  130 Liao, P. H.  281–2 Lin, A.  18, 127, 288 Lin, A. M. Y.  168 linguaculture  82, 85, 88, 101, 107–8, 220, 222 linguicism  46, 50 linguistic coloniality  47, 52 francophonie as  46 global  45, 53, 56 linguistic entrepreneurship  66–7, 72–6 affective regime of  74 linguistic (in)equality  134, 201, 234 linguistic imperialism  11, 102, 115–16, 275 English  115 logics of  21 linguistic instrumentalism  66, 69, 76, 236, 238, 270, 282 linguistic market  3, 37, 74–5, 234, 272, 278–9 global  276 postcolonial  44 Taiwan’s  284 linguistic (n)ethnography  147 linguistic plurality  81, 83

314

linguistic regularity  82 linguistic seignorage  35–6, 38 linguistic shock  149 doctrine  51–2 therapy  54 linguistic untransposability  120 Lippi-Green, R.  134, 195 Liu, Z.  145 local language(s)  5, 18, 55, 70, 74, 290 ecologies  46 in education  17, 274, 283 English and  75, 274, 295 and knowledges  56 policies  280, 283 politics  18 teachers’ competence  71 Lohia, R. M.  169 longue durée, notion of  29 Lorente, B.  16–18, 75 Lula da Silva, L. I.  213 Macau  31 Macaulay, T. B.  44, 166 McDonaldization of society  177 McGeown, K.  16 McGroarty, M.  162–3 McKenzie, R. M.  118 McKinney, C.  127 Macron, E.  45 Maghreb  51–2 Bal Al  47 Mahapatra, S.  166 Mahboob, A.  17, 129 Malacca  31 Malaysia  1, 4, 116, 120, 178, 180, 184–5 Bahasa  182 English in  120, 177 Malaysian Investment Development Authority  182 Malerba, J.  216, 217 Mandarin  4, 141, 178, 180–2, 233, 274, 283, 285 in Malaysia  183–5 in Taiwan  270, 277–80, 282 Manglish  183 Manifest Destiny  198, 209 n.11 Māori language  178, 180 challenges to English language  185–9 Pakeha youth and  186–8 as representing New Zealand citizenship  188 Martin, I.  19

INDEX

Marx, K.  29, 30–1, 39 Marxist  15, 169 concept of ideology  200 framework  65 political economy  27 Maslanka, M.  238 Matsumoto, Y.  82 May, S.  187. 195–6, 198, 202 Mazawi, A. E.  49 Mbembe, A.  43 Meyer, M.  195, 202, 203, 209 n.12 Micarello, H. A. L. S.  215–16, 226 n.4 Mignolo, W.  10, 43, 56–7, 220, 225 Miller, E. R.  81 Miller, P.  144, 145 Ministry of Education  109 Brazil  216, 226 n.3 Kiribati  299 Moroccan  45 Taiwan  282 Mirchandani, K.  67–9 Mishra, P. K.  161 Mishra, S.  166 Modern Standard Arabic (MSA)  54 Modiano, M.  236 Mongolia  90, 116, 148–50 Mongolianized English  155 monolingual  55, 121, 129, 134, 183, 196, 198, 218 assumption  178 English  6, 146, 199 ideologies  2, 134, 136, 201, 208 models  55, 142 native speaker  129 (see also native speaker) monolingualism  120, 186, 201 English  186–7 Morgan, B.  2, 127 Mori, J.  142–3 Moroccan Arabic  54 Morocco  44–7, 52, 54–5 British Council in  50 English and development in  48 English in  43, 51 French in  45 language of instruction in  54 Motha, S.  18, 21, 83, 129, 131, 135, 288 mother tongue-based multilingual education (MTBMLE)  17 Mujica, M.  206–7 multiculturalism in Malaysia  134, 141, 181, 285

INDEX

in Taiwan  272–3, 279, 281–4 multilingualism(s)  55, 92, 120, 135, 180–1, 235, 263, 272–3, 281 destructive  195, 205, 208, 283 everyday  5, 17 il/legitimate  47, 55 individual  235 multiple markets  73–5 neoliberal  282 non-hegemonic  3 regressive  47 societal  54, 178 Musolff, A.  203 Nadeem, S.  68, 69 Nakata, M.  9 Nambissan, G. B.  167–8 National Council of Education (CNE) (Brazil)  215, 226 n.3 National Curricular Framework (PCNs) (Brazil)  217 National Development Council (Taiwan)  270–1, 276–8 National Knowledge Commission  161 National Origins Act (1924) (United States)  199 National Program of Textbooks (PNLD) (Brazil)  225 n.1 nativeness  19, 131, 133, 240, 244, 247 concept of  129, 131, 280 functional  37 ideologies of  248 race and  135 native/non-native English-speaking teacher. See NEST/NNEST ideological dichotomy Native Schools Code (1880) (New Zealand)  186 Native speakerism (NS)  128, 234, 236, 248 native speaker fallacy  129, 135 ideologies of  83, 84, 91, 101, 104, 105 native speaker(s)  84, 88, 89, 93, 104–10, 129, 132, 144, 187, 220, 291 Inner-Circle  92, 219 -ist  109, 243 native English speaker  84, 244 norm  84 teachers  85 white  92, 93, 130, 131 nativization  118, 234 Navés, T.  237

 315

Negri, A.  21 neoliberal  14, 21, 46, 47, 50, 57 n.7, 65, 75, 114, 220, 224, 278, 279, 283, 289, 295, 299 discourse  164, 206 economics or capitalism  17, 50, 53, 76, 201, 207, 214, 272, 274, 276, 284 education  50, 86 globalization  275, 277 ideology  52, 85, 208, 214, 217, 271, 278, 288 language  16 markets  4, 17, 178, 216 and neocolonial discourses  46, 47, 48 order  16, 18, 51, 52 subject  16, 72, 73 value of English  283, 289 neoliberalism  46, 48, 52, 66, 67, 71, 73, 75, 85, 123, 178, 201, 214, 217, 218, 271, 277, 278 and capital  5, 72 and commodification  64, 73, 74 and economics  51 globalization and  69, 189 Nero, S. J.  128, 131 NEST/NNEST  132 culturally sustaining pedagogy and  133– 5 ideological dichotomy  127, 129–36 lens  135 raciolinguistics and  130–3 White gaze  131 Netherlands  177 new capitalism  217, 226 n.11 “New Neighborhood Policy”, of EU  53 New Zealand  4, 116, 177–81, 185–90, 297, 298, 299 Ngeow, K. Y.  118 Ngũgĩ waThiong’o  115–16 Nikkei (foreigners of Japanese descent)  90 non-localizable vs. localizable English. See Spanish education non-native speakers (NNS)  85, 104, 129. 131–2 and race  19 Nuttall, S.  11 one nation-one language ideology  108, 178, 202, 220 Ordoñez, E.  17 O’Regan, J. P.  3, 11, 27, 28, 65, 82, 209 n.12

316

INDEX

Ortiz, A. A.  128 O’Sullivan, J. L.  209 n.11 Outer Circle  16, 19, 68, 71, 74, 82, 93, 142

Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)  85

Pac, T.  202 Pakeha (New Zealand)  185, 186, 188 youth (New Zealand)  186, 187, 189 Pakistan  5, 17, 165, 253, 255, 259 Pal, R.  168 Panda, M.  167, 168 Pangkor Treaty (Malaysia)  181 Paris, D.  133 Park, J. S. Y.  3, 16, 27, 55, 64, 66, 70–3, 75, 76, 233, 236, 237, 238, 243, 247, 271, 272, 279, 288, 289, 292 Patai, R.  55, 57 n.8 Pavlenko, A.  73, 119, 198, 199, 200, 260, 263, 266 n.7, 294, 301 Pennycook, A.  2, 3, 9–12, 17, 21, 28, 82, 93, 116, 142–3, 153, 234, 254, 275, 288, 299 People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI)  162 performative  9, 47, 115, 234 Philippines  12, 13, 15–20, 37, 67, 71, 75, 88, 89, 90, 116, 275 Philips, S.  234, 235 Phillipson, R.  11, 27, 28, 37, 38, 52, 53, 102, 115, 116, 129, 170, 189, 275, 276 Piercy, C.  236, 248 Piller, I.  16, 18, 30, 76, 142, 144, 163, 164, 189, 288, 301 Pimentel, C.  128, 131 Plumb, J. H.  33 pluralisation of English  2 pluriversalingualism  3, 43, 56 Pollock, M.  127 postcolonial  3, 18, 44, 130, 178, 181, 186, 217, 220, 256, 280, 281 guilt  181, 186–190 period  43, 280 state  44, 45 subject  20 world or context  142, 170, 189 post-humanist theory  12 Poza, L.  134–5 Prakash, N.  168 Prasad, C. B.  165–6 Price, G.  72, 276, 277, 283, 284

raciolinguistics  4, 68,  127, 131, 133, 135 Rahmon, E.  255, 263 Rajagopalan, K.  104, 213, 220, 226 n.13 Rampton, B.  28, 115, 130, 143 Rao, A. G.  163, 168 Raspberry, W.  242 Rege, S.  166 Reisigl, M.  195, 200, 202, 203 Reyes, A.  19 Ricento, T.  48, 177, 195, 198, 200, 202 Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act (2009) (India)  167 Rindal, U.  236, 248 Risager, K.  106 Rishel, T.  144, 145 Robinson, R.  30, 31, 34, 36 Romney, M.  19, 131 Rosa, J.  2, 3, 5, 19, 68, 83, 117, 131, 132–3, 235 Rose, H.  82, 83 Rose, M.  50–3, 55, 57 Roussef, D.  213, 215 Rubdy, R.  1, 15, 19, 22, 65, 142–3, 234, 266, 270, 276 Ruecker, T.  83, 84, 130, 131 Rumsey, A.  179 Russian  105, 121, 150, 259, 260, 261, 263, 264

Quinonez, E. S.  204, 205

Said, E.  9, 10, 56 Salzmann-Erikson, M.  153, 154 Sandel, T. L.  274 Sanskrit  166–7 Santa Ana, O.  201 Saraceni, M.  1, 70, 102, 104 Sawyer, A. M.  150 Scheff, T. J.  291–2 Schieffelin, B. B.  2, 163 Schlossberg, A.  205 Schmidt Sr., R.  194, 196, 201, 206, 208 n.2 Schneider, E. W.  28, 102, 118 school ethnographies  238, 249 Scollon, R.  10 Scollon, S. W.  10

INDEX

second language acquisition (SLA)  128–9, 131 second language teacher education (SLTE)  128–31 seignorage  35, 36, 38 self-deprecation ideology  236, 237, 238, 248 semiotic assemblages  11, 21 Setter, J.  119 Shah, A.  169–70 Shih, S. M.  271, 275, 278, 281 Shohamy, E.  254, 258 Shughni  255, 256, 258, 261, 263, 264 Shui-Bian, C.  276 Silverstein, M.  117, 163, 197, 214, 219, 234, 235 Singapore  1, 18, 34, 70, 71, 130, 142, 181, 275, 276, 293 Singlish (Singapore English)  70 small culture  4, 101–10 Smith, G.  116 Smith, L.  1, 28 Smith, M.  291 societal multilingualism. See multilingualism sociolinguistics of English, in Spain and Catalonia  236–8 sociomaterial assemblages  11 Solorza, C. R.  132 Sommers, S.  275, 276 Sonalde, D.  161 Soo, K. S.  118 Soong, J.  274 Southern Applied Linguistics  12 South Korea  37, 89, 91, 116 English in  16, 21, 71, 72, 236, 238, 247 Souza, J.  226 n.4 Spain  31, 33, 208 n.2, 233, 234, 236, 237, 238, 247, 248 Spanish  33, 90, 194, 236, 244, 245, 249 education  5, 233, 237 English  240–1, 245–8 language  128, 195, 197, 198, 201, 205, 206, 213, 218, 239 ‘Only’  196 Spivak, G.  105 spread, of English  3, 10, 19, 28, 37, 76, 82, 92, 104, 122, 161, 169, 213, 225, 233, 234, 275 Sri Lanka  91, 118, 293 Stæhr, A.  148 Stanlaw, J.  116 Stibbard, R.  118

 317

Stoler, A. L.  56 strategic essentialism  105 Strategic Vision for Education in Morocco  47 Street, B.  221, 222 subjectivity  22, 110, 120 dimensions of  73–4 Suda, A.  205 Sugimoto, T.  281 Sultana, S.  116, 143, 153, 256 superdiversity  119–20, 136 Suzuki, A.  83–4 Sweezy, P.  27 Szundy, P. T. C.  3, 213, 217, 218, 219, 225 n.1 Tabiola, H.  16 Taglish  19–20 Taiwan Bilingual Nation policy in  270–2, 275, 278, 280, 282, 285 Blueprint document and English language in  276–7 English in  274–6, 278–9 English-in-Education (EE) policy in  274 Mandarin-English bilingualism  277–8, 280–2 Mandarin-only policy in  273 and native language policy  282–4 settler futurity in  284–5 Taiwanization, ideology of  274 Tajik  255, 260, 261, 263, 264, 265 Tajikistan  253, 255, 260, 263–4, 265 Tajima, M.  17 Takahashi, K.  18, 288, 301 Tan, P.  15, 65, 270 Tan, S. I.  116 Tanton, J.  197 taonga  185–6 Teaching of English as a Second Language (TESOL)  4, 12, 16, 107, 141, 161, 300 Temer, M.  213–14 Teng-hui, L.  274 textbooks, English in  12, 18, 83, 93, 103, 104, 105, 108–10, 220, 225 nn.1–2, 235 Thomas, A. J.  166 Thomas, L.  197 Three Language Formula (TLF)  167 Tinio, M. T.  18, 20 Tollefson, J.  115, 199, 200, 201

318

translanguaging  3, 4, 81–3, 127, 131, 133–6, 146–7 transnational  45, 218 academic capitalism  49 call center work  68 language policy and practice (see language policy) linguistic capitalism  49 migration  18 mobility  2 Treaty of Paris  33, 34 Treaty of Waitangi  185 Trump, D.  190, 194, 202, 204–5, 207 Tuck, E.  272, 284 Tuhiwai-Smith, L.  188 Tupas, R.  1, 3, 16, 19–20, 38, 67, 82, 142–3, 234 unequal Englishes  19, 20, 21, 38, 234 Urdu  255, 259, 263, 265, 266 n.5 US English  197, 206–7 US Federal Reserve  38 utterance  Bakhtin on  120–1 ideology and  215 significance of  204, 219, 226 n.10 Vaish, V.  164, 168 van Grondelle, M.  266 nn.1, 4 Vanneman, R.  161 Verspoor, A.  55–6 Vertovec, S.  119 Vessey, R.  162–3 Victori, M.  237 Viola, L.  203 Voloshinov, V. N.  214–15, 219 Waitangi The Treaty of  185

INDEX

Tribunal  185–6 Walelign, A.  129 Wallerstein, I.  27, 29–34 Wee, L.  3, 64, 66, 70, 72–6, 236, 271, 272, 279–80 Wei, J. M.  274, 282–3 Whitaker, B.  57 n.8 White listening subject  19, 132 white normativity  128–9, 134 Wodak, R.  195, 200, 202–3, 209 n.12 Wohler, Y.  146, 156 Wolfe, P.  271, 281 Woolard, K. A.  2, 163, 214, 219, 238 World Bank  38, 49 language policies of  51, 53–6 on linguistic diversity  55 shock therapy of  51, 54 Strategic Vision for Education in Morocco and  47 vernacular endorsement of  54 World Englishes  1, 11, 14, 64, 68, 71, 81, 102, 111, 135, 171, 271 commodification of language and  67 and English as a lingua Franca  21 and heteroglossia  114 paradigm  74, 275 The study of  5, 76, 142 worldliness  22 of English  11, 234 of language  9–10 World Trade Organization (WTO)  38, 276, 283 Yalom, I. D.  155 Zentella, A. C.  197–8 Zhikai Liu  145 Zotzmann, K.  209 n.12

319

320

321

322

323

324