The Handbook of Language and Globalization
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The Handbook of Language and Globalization Edited by
Nikolas Coupland
A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication
This edition first published 2010 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2010 Nikolas Coupland Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www. wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Nikolas Coupland to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The handbook of language and globalization / edited by Nikolas Coupland. p. cm. – (Blackwell handbooks in linguistics) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-7581-4 (hardcover : alk. Paper) 1. Language and languages—Globalization—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Languages in contact—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. Linguistic change—Handbooks, manuals, etc. 4. Sociolinguistics—Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Coupland, Nikolas, 1950P130.5.H358 2010 306.44–dc22 2010003118 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 10 on 12 pt Palatino by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed in Singapore 1
2010
Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Sociolinguistics in the Global Era Nikolas Coupland Part I 1
2 3
4 5 6 7 8
Global Multilingualism, World Languages, and Language Systems
Globalization, Global English, and World English(es): Myths and Facts Salikoko S. Mufwene Language Systems Abram De Swaan The Global Politics of Language: Markets, Maintenance, Marginalization, or Murder? Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson World Languages: Trends and Futures Ulrich Ammon Language Policy and Globalization Thomas Ricento Panlingual Globalization Jonathan Pool The Spread of Global Spanish: From Cervantes to reggaetón Clare Mar-Molinero New National Languages in Eastern Europe Brigitta Busch
Part II Global Discourse in Key Domains and Genres 9
Localizing the Global on the Participatory Web Jannis Androutsopoulos
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29 31 56
77 101 123 142 162 182
201 203
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10 Globalizing the Local: The Case of an Egyptian Superhero Comic Theo van Leeuwen and Usama Suleiman 11 Language and the Globalizing Habitus of Tourism: Toward A Sociolinguistics of Fleeting Relationships Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow 12 Globalization and Language Teaching David Block 13 Discursive Constructions of Global War and Terror Adam Hodges 14 Has God Gone Global? Religion, Language, and Globalization Annabelle Mooney
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Part III Language, Values, and Markets under Globalization
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16 17 18 19 20 21
Language as Resource in the Globalized New Economy Monica Heller Language and Movement in Space Jan Blommaert and Jie Dong Indexing the Local Barbara Johnstone Ecolinguistics and Globalization Arran Stibbe The Chinese Discourse of Human Rights and Glocalization Shi-Xu Meanings of ‘Globalization’: East and West Peter Garrett Languages and Global Marketing Helen Kelly-Holmes
Part IV Language, Distance, and Identities 22
23 24 25 26 27
Shadows of Discourse: Intercultural Communication in Global Contexts Claire Kramsch and Elizabeth Boner Unraveling Post-Colonial Identity through Language Rakesh M. Bhatt At the Intersection of Gender, Language, and Transnationalism Ingrid Piller and Kimie Takahashi Globalization and Gay Language William L. Leap Metroethnicities and Metrolanguages John C. Maher Popular Cultures, Popular Languages, and Global Identities Alastair Pennycook
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28 Global Representations of Distant Suffering Lilie Chouliaraki 29 Global Media and the Regime of Lifestyle David Machin and Theo van Leeuwen
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Index
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Illustrations
4.1 4.2
4.3
6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4
6.5
6.6 6.7 9.1
Studies of German as a foreign language worldwide: Quartiles of density. Data from StADaF 2005: 8–15 Shares of languages in science publications, 1880–2005: overall average percentage for biology, chemistry, medicine, physics, and mathematics. Sources: Tsunoda 1983; Ammon 1998; the author ’s own analysis, with the help of Abdulkadir Topal and Vanessa Gawrisch, of Biological Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, Physics Abstracts and Mathematical Reviews Shares of languages in publications of the social sciences, years 1880–2006: overall average percentage for anthropology, political science, economics, and sociology. Shares of other languages are smaller than 1 percent during entire time span. Sources: International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, IBSS; the author ’s own analysis, with help of Vanessa Gawrisch Globalization and unilingualization. Created by author Low-density language dilemma. Created by author Low-density language dilemma with diversity popular. Created by author Simple lexical resource. Source: http://www.erlang.com.ru/ euskara/?basque. Author: Kirill Panfilov. © Erlang. Data retrieved 26 January 2010. Used with permission Complex lexical resource. Source: Digital South Asia Library. Author: Henry George Raverty, in A Dictionary of the Puk’hto, Pus’hto, or Language of the Afghans: With Remarks on the Originality of the Language, and Its Affinity to Other Oriental Tongues (Williams and Norgate, 1867, p. 146). Used with permission Graphical interpretation of denotations. Created by author Illustration of the need for translation inference. Created by author Screenshot of “Schwappe Productions – An Preller.” Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icmraBAN4ZE
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List of Illustrations Zein, the last pharaoh. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo 10.2 Narrative box. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo 10.3 Graphic prosody substitutes (English version). From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo 10.4 Graphic prosody substitutes (Arabic version). From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo 10.5 Temporal structure of exclamations in English. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo 10.6 Temporal structure of exclamations in Arabic. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo 10.7 Graphic representation of intonation and loudness in English. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo 10.8 Graphic representation of intonation and loudness in Arabic. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo 10.9 The graphic representation of agony in English. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo 10.10 The graphic representation of agony in Arabic. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo 11.1 ‘can you all say Whaka?’ (= Extract 2, line 1); April 2003. Photo © A. Jaworski 11.2 ‘Te Whakarewarewa-tanga-o-te-ope-taua-a-Wahiao’ (= Extract 2, lines 12–13); April 2003. Photo © A. Jaworski 11.3 Postcard from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. John Hinde (UK) Ltd. Photo © C. Underhill 11.4 Hongi photographic studio, Tamaki Maori Village; April 2003. Photo © A. Jaworski 16.1 Posters at an Evangelical church. © Jan Blommaert 16.2 Moroccan bakery. © Jan Blommaert 16.3 Albanian poster. © Jan Blommaert 16.4 Rates at a phone shop. © Jan Blommaert 16.5 Advertisem*nts for money transfer services at a phone shop. © Jan Blommaert 16.6 ‘Liar Channel.’ © Jan Blommaert
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Acknowledgments
This volume found its origins in a research programme titled ‘Language and Global Communication’ funded by the Leverhulme Trust (Grant F/00 407 / D) to the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University, 2001–2007 (see http://www.cf.ac.uk/encap/globalcomm). Colleagues and I are very grateful to the Trust for their support. My former colleague Theo van Leeuwen, coordinated, directed and inspired the programme for four years until a career move took him away form Cardiff, at which point I took on the coordinating role, but with Theo’s continuing guidance and involvement. About 14 Cardiff colleagues played some significant part in the programme’s development and in the dissemination of its findings, although not all of them appear in the pages of the Handbook. Under the aegis of the ‘Language and Global Communication’ programme, one international conference and a regular series of workshops were held, and several of the contributors to the present volume participated in those events. The Leverhulme Trust has therefore supported this volume in more ways than might be initially apparent, which, once again, I very gratefully acknowledge. I am particularly grateful to my colleague Adam Jaworski for the leading role he has played in many aspects of our work on globalisation, and not only in his pioneering research in the sociolinguistics of global tourism. As seems to be inevitable with Handbook-length projects, this volume has been a long time coming. I thank the earliest on-time contributors for their patience, and colleagues at Wiley-Blackwell for theirs too, also for their professional guidance. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. NC July 2009
Introduction: Sociolinguistics in the Global Era NIKOLAS COUPLAND
The End of Globalization? The gestation period of this Handbook has been an interesting time for observers of globalization. The international ‘credit crunch,’ apparently triggered by irresponsible over-lending in the United States but in reality the result of financial laxness on a wider scale, has led to severe economic retrenchment in many parts of the world. Several nation-states have moved to restrict some of the more obvious excesses of global capitalism, initially in the banking and finance sectors. But there are indications of a more general global wariness about flows of money and people, which suggests that national authority and national political initiative are not, after all, in terminal decline. There has also been repeated visible political resistance to fast capitalist globalization: for example the estimated 35,000 people who marched in London in March 2009 in opposition to the agenda of the G20 summit – a meeting of the leaders of the twenty most economically powerful nations – under the slogans “Put people first” and “Jobs, justice, climate.” Should we conclude that, after all, this is not such a “runaway world” (Giddens 2002) of rampant globalization? Academic commentators, including several contributors to this Handbook, observe that, whatever globalization is, it isn’t an altogether new phenomenon. Indeed, ‘it’s nothing new’ proves to be one of the least new things to say about globalization, but it is an important observation. As, for example, Mufwene (this volume) points out, colonization in its various modes has been characteristic of more aggressive and more benign encounters between peoples throughout history. Colonization in different eras and contexts meant transnational expansion of economic, military, and cultural sorts. It certainly reshaped global arrangements, including linguistic ones. We are also historically familiar with ‘empire,’ old and new (Hardt and Negri 2000), in the British case from the mid-seventeenth century, and many have interpreted globalization as latter-day imperialist hegemony, often in the form of westernization or Americanization or McDonaldization (or
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other, even more inventive, neologisms of this kind – see Mooney, this volume). So why all this fuss about globalization now? As Kellner (1989) points out, large-scale shifts to more globally based economic arrangements were predicted and theorized well before our own time. Key voices on both sides of early ideological debates about capitalism predicted an increasing globalization of capitalist markets. Adam Smith, for example, anticipated the emergence of a (beneficial and liberalizing, in his view) world market system, while Karl Marx saw global emancipation for the proletariat in the demise of national interests and frameworks and in the onset of internationally grounded revolution. Transnational interdependencies and influences are, once again then, ‘nothing new.’ So, as we embark on an exploration of language and globalization, do we in fact believe that globalization currently exists as a new social condition, or that it deserves extensive treatment across the disciplines? Is globalization an economic experiment in retreat, or perhaps a faddish academic concept of the 1990s that refers to historical social processes we were already pretty familiar with? In the rest of this section I would like to make a pitch for the social reality of globalization and for its contemporary importance – both as a social mode that we need to keep probing and as a focus for some new ways of understanding language in society. We have to concede that globalization is complex and multi-faceted, and difficult to delimit chronologically. The concept is often over-consolidated, overhyped, and under-interpreted. But I want to argue (drawing on the views of many others) that it is an indispensable concept, particularly if we take it as shorthand reference to a cluster of changed and still fast changing social arrangements and priorities which are indeed distinctive and (despite opinions to the contrary) indeed new. Having done this, I will try to map out, in four sections that outline the four parts of this volume, how the forthcoming chapters inform our understanding of the many productive and necessary links between ‘language’ and ‘globalization.’ What, then, might persuade us to take globalization seriously and to accept that social analysis needs to be framed in relation to an already globalized and increasingly globalizing world? We might start with a quasi-ethnographic appeal to lived experience and perceptions of social change, say, over the last forty or fifty years. What macro-level social changes have impacted on us (or, at least for the purposes of this initial sketch, on the ‘us’ defined by the privileged lives lived in the west or the north, and through British eyes)? Answers will be tropes of lifespan discourse: “Back then, things were different…”; “I remember the days when …” But such autobiographical fragments would point to the sorts of social change that constitute globalization. I venture some of my own fragments below.1 I would say that we have experienced: • • • •
an increasing mediation of culture and greater cultural reflexivity the proliferation and speeding up of communication technologies a large shift to service-sector work, globally dispersed the decline of the (British) Establishment
Introduction
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• failing trust in professional (medical, legal, political) authority • the growth of the middle class but the accentuation of the rich/poor divide • greater subservience to global market economics, in the face of its demerits • an upsurge in consumer culture and many new forms of commodification • more emphasis on individualism and on projects of the self • an upsurge in ecological politics and sensibilities on a world-wide scale • a reduction of the grosser inequalities through gender and sexual orientation • developing ethnic pluralism, especially in urban settings • increasingly familiar cultural landscapes, widely dispersed • national boundaries becoming (perhaps until recently) more permeable • massively increasing demographic mobility, often for economic reasons • a shift towards more globally based risks, threats and conflicts. If a list of this sort were supported by research evidence (and a substantial body of work does support many of these claims), then we could easily recognize three familiar dimensions or application domains of globalization within them: economic, political and cultural globalization (see the discussion of these dimensions in Garrett’s chapter, this volume). There are financial motivations, motivations linked to production and consumption, behind many of the changes we might otherwise assume to be ‘cultural,’ for example in the commodification of history as heritage or in the shaping of globally familiar metropolises. The circulation of global capital is what has hom*ogenized the cities we take to be “world cities” (Friedmann 1986). A sense of local culture often has to be worked up in opposition to, or even within the mechanisms of, globalized systems – for example when ‘the local’ is performed for mass audiences on TV or in tourism (Coupland 2009a). When we observe that people are far more mobile today than in earlier decades (although of course there are severe social class and national restrictions on who actually is more mobile), we are reacting not only to technological developments but to how mass media have allowed us to visualize the world’s ‘distant places’ as being within our reach. When we observe that ecological awareness is a development of recent decades, we are seeing how the risks and threats of global economic upscaling, and of course of mobility as part of that, have come to be resisted in newer oppositional discourses. If we see the British Establishment in decline, this is because of wholesale shifts in global political, economic, and cultural systems, which need to be seen as interwoven dimensions of how the world has come to be. If there has been some emancipation around gender and sexuality, this has been achieved through activity across transnational networks of various sorts, and so on. My point is simply that there are some general principles at work behind our individual perceptions of relatively recent social change, and that the concept of globalization invites us to reflect critically on changes which are significant, not least in their recency, reach, depth and systematicity. As Lechner and Boli (2004) point out, there is the difficulty that the word ‘globalization’ has already become something of a global cliché (and, again, see Garrett’s investigation, in this volume, into the variable inferred meanings and
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associations of the word ‘globalization’). To that extent it is difficult to avoid the objection that subjective generalizations about change may represent a sort of leakage from journalistic or political usage back into personal perceptions and accounts. In fact it is interesting to speculate that, under globalization, massmediation reaches deeper into individual psyches and everyday social practice than we might assume. All the same, it would take an impressive level of cynicism to conclude that there was ‘nothing new’ behind contemporary observations of recent social change and ‘nothing new’ in the contemporary wave of globalization. It is not part of my brief to review objective sociological evidence in support of the fact that the world has changed, although we live in an era when astounding statistics routinely surface, pointing at least to new scales of global interdependencies in contemporary life.2 At some point too, we need to trust the preponderance of informed opinion in academic literatures. After two decades of claim and counter-claim, globalization theory has achieved a relatively stable consensus, agreeing to set aside several more radical and totalizing arguments but holding to a middle ground. The consensus (though probably not in the chapters of this volume) is that, while globalization is certainly not without precedent, its scale and scope are new and detectable in changes over recent decades – and most clearly so since the 1980s. Globalization has certainly has not run its course. In relation to history and the periodization of globalization, Robertson (1992) noted that McLuhan’s idea of ‘the global village’ (a phrase coined in 1960) and some general notion of global ‘shrinkage’ entered public as well as academic consciousness fairly soon after World War II. The war itself was an event which clearly encouraged new ways of conceptualizing world orders and systems. Robertson summarizes his own conception of globalization in exactly these terms: the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole. Some key historical events are most commonly associated with the consolidation of the global (or globalized) era. In the anglophone world, these include the beginning of sustained right-wing/conservative periods of political office (Margaret Thatcher in Britain from 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the USA from 1981) and aggressive shifts towards free market, neo-liberal ideologies and policies.3 In many regions formerly dependent on manufacturing and heavy industry, this period was also associated with rapid and damaging deindustrialization and the outsourcing of manufacturing to cheaper markets in other countries. This shift is in turn linked to a rise in service-sector work and to more emphasis being placed on ‘the knowledge economy’ (see Heller, this volume, on the new economy), which are inherently more globally structured activities. The ending of the Cold War (in the late 1980s) and the dissolution of the USSR (in 1991) provided even more self-evident shifts in ‘world systems’ (in the sense of Wallerstein 1974) and opened up global markets for western cultural and commercial initiatives. Global participation in the internet (from the mid 1990s: see n. 2) and the exponential development of new, globally networked, communication technologies in the same period added to the mix. Therefore, while there are of course historical precursors, over earlier centuries, to most of the general sorts of
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social process we take to define globalization – demographic mobility, transnational interchange, colonial activity, and even the technologizing of communication, most obviously with the advent of printing – there are also compelling arguments that what we have seen, since 1980, has been of quantitatively and qualitatively different orders. It is in the phenomenal expansion of transnational, global mobility and in the massively increased intensity of commercial and cultural exchange and exploitation that we find a warrant for conceiving of globalization as ‘something new,’ and indeed (in the words of Appadurai 1996: 27) as something “strikingly new.” Globalization theory is, however, more convincing when it is more nuanced, more cautious, and more contextually refined. Appadurai and many others nowadays have resisted simple linear accounts of globalization, as encountered for example in the McLuhan type of claim to the effect that the world is becoming culturally smaller or more uniform. As Appadurai says: Most often the hom*ogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization or an argument about commoditization, and very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one way or another: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and constitutions. (Appadurai 1996: 29)
This is a persuasive argument that, under the rubric of globalization, we need to explore the tensions between sameness and difference, between centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, and between consensus and fragmentation. (This perspective is shared by many contributors to the Handbook, and these tensions are as important in relation to linguistic processes as in other domains.) Globalization is non-linear, just as it is not uniformly and (ironically enough) not universally and not globally experienced. It is better theorized as a complex of processes through which difference as well as uniformity is generated, but in relation to each other. Globalization often produces hybridity and multiplicity (Hall 1996, 1997; Kellner 1989), and the multi-directionality of change has been summarized in the awkward but widely used concept of glocalization (Bauman 1998a, 1998b; Robertson 1995; see Shi-xu, this volume) – which expresses the interaction of globalizing and localizing shifts. Importantly, however, it is in the appeal to hybridity and social complexity that we see how it is also necessary to approach globalization from the perspective of late modernity or post-modernity (Bauman 1982), and vice versa. Different views are held about whether late modernity and globalization (or, more accurately, the social condition of globality) can be, or need to be, distinguished theoretically. But many of the key conditions associated with late modernity – heightened cultural reflexivity and social complexity, indeterminacy and hybridity in personal and social identities, changed thresholds of risk and trust, increased emphasis on individual life-projects and responsibilities, detraditionalization and the decline of institutions (see for instance Beck 1992,
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1999; Giddens 1991, 1994; Harvey 1989) – are much easier to appreciate if we situate them in the dynamics of a more globally connected world. As I noted above, mass-mediation, for example, is a powerful factor in the dense representation of cultural difference, and people are more likely to construe alternatives to their inherited selves against this complex backdrop of images and social types. Individualization, in Beck’s thesis, is a demonstrable consequence of heightened levels of global consumption, and so on. So globalization matters in the analysis of the transition from modern to late modern social arrangements, and (as many contributors to this book show), there are many specifically sociolinguistic elements to late modernity; late modernity places new emphases on language, meaning, and social semiotics. Still following an historical track, it is often observed that the earliest tangible evidence of globalization was in economics, where the impact of transnational flows of money and influence became obvious from the 1980s onwards, to some extent challenging the autonomy and authority of states and national governments. Globalization theory has often posited ‘the decline of the nation–state’ (Evans 1997; Hardt and Negri 2000; Ohmae 1995) – again, with the risk of overgeneralization. National governments of course can – and do – continue to dictate swathes of policy within their own confines, and national boundaries and identities remain significant in many social dimensions. But there are increasingly troublesome domains where states have only limited opportunities to act conclusively on their own, for example in relation (as Beck has recently pointed out)4 to transnational terrorism, global warming, or economic globalization itself. These are, once again, issues within our own realms of experience, and the concept of globalization provides a route into the critical assessment of several of the defining characteristics of our lives. Appadurai’s (1996) concept of “financescapes” (or financial landscapes) was an attempt to point to the new global architecture of financial systems – commodity speculation and rapidly shifting global currency markets – in the same way in which he encouraged us to be aware of new global “ethnoscapes,” “mediascapes,” “technoscapes,” and “ideoscapes” (ideational and ideological landscapes: see Block’s discussion of some of these concepts in the present volume). We find a compelling instance of how these ‘scapes’ work together under globalization in Hardt and Negri’s account (2000: 253–4) of the demographic consequences of globalized macroeconomic arrangements: ghettos, favelas, and shantytowns appearing in ‘First World’ cities, and stock exchanges, banks, and large corporations emerging in ‘Third World’ localities. Probably the key insight from the now voluminous literature on globalization is the need to understand socio-cultural arrangements in terms of different forms of mobility and flow. Hannerz (1992, 1996), for example, develops the view that we can no longer conceive of cultures as neatly bounded entities. Cultures diffuse and flow into each other, constructing, and responding to, complex hierarchical relationships that he calls “centres” and “peripheries” (Hannerz 1992: 218; see Blommaert and Dong, this volume). Cultural centers are sources of authority and taste that peripheries often revere and seek to emulate. In Hannerz’s view,
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globally powerful economic and political centers need not always be cultural centers, and vice versa, so that we need a multi-dimensional “world systems” model. France, for example, Hannerz claims, is an authoritative cultural center in many respects, more so than it is a political center. He argues that Japan has tended to keep a lower cultural profile despite its economic successes. Hannerz theorizes a constantly evolving pattern of cultural influence and change which is very unlikely to lead simply to cultural hom*ogenization, although it could include what he calls stable forms of “creolization” or cultural hybridity. Some peripheries develop to become centers, and cultural values and markets themselves evolve and change in the flow of “cultural traffic.” As we shall see, flow has been picked up as an orienting concept by sociolinguists too, and it will be useful to refine the term’s application. Bartelson (2000) tries to distinguish three ways in which global flows have been conceptualized: namely in terms of transference, transformation and transcendence. Transference is the most material and most readily interpretable form of flow – the movement or exchange of things across pre-existing boundaries and between pre-constituted units. Demographic migration and the dissemination of cultural formats and products are straightforward examples of transference. Although transference is very much a characteristic of global social arrangements, it is not different in kind from processes that have been labelled ‘internationalization’ or ‘political/economic/cultural interdependence.’ The ‘nothing new’ comment on globalization seems mostly applicable to globalization seen as transference, notwithstanding the important objection that the scale and intensity of contemporary transference is unprecedented. Globalization as transformation implies a more radical change, whereby flows modify the character of the whole global systems in which they function. Boundaries and units are themselves refashioned, as well as things flowing across and between them. In the third scenario, transcendence, “globalisation is driven forward by a dynamic of its own and is irreducible to singular causes within particular sectors or dimensions” (Bartelson 2000: 189, original emphasis). This abstract, third condition is strongly echoed in Hardt and Negri’s (2000) notion of “empire,” but also (as Bartelson points out) in Lash and Urry’s (1994) argument that contemporary information and communication structures are reconstituting the world as networks of flow rather than (as we might say) as “flows of things” and through signs rather than objects, which of course provides an entrée into linguistics and semiotics. These, then, are some of the concepts and interpretive stances that have emerged from theoretical work on globalization. Many others are picked up and debated in the following chapters, several of which incorporate their own reviews of globalization theory. My intention in this section has been simply to illustrate the resourcefulness of globalization theory and to suggest that, prima facie at least, social changes associated with globalization are perceptually salient for most of us and pose significant contemporary personal and intellectual challenges. Academic disciplines across the social sciences and humanities do need to (continue to) engage with globalization, and of course to (continue to) contribute to its analysis in circ*mstances of rapid social change.
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Globalization theory has reached a point where it is quite widely recognized that we need to distinguish different disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, indeed different discourses, on globalization (Robertson and Khondker 2009). It is in response to this challenge that the contributors have offered their work to the Handbook. In introducing an earlier and much smaller collection of work on sociolinguistics and globalization (Coupland 2003b), I commented that linguists were, at that time, “late getting to the party,” in the sense that commentaries and treatises on globalization were already in full spate across other disciplines,5 but non-existent in sociolinguistics. The present volume is able to demonstrate the considerable distance that sociolinguistics has travelled in just a few years, to the extent that linguistic perspectives on globalization do now constitutes an independent discourse of globalization, albeit one that helps to synthesize and refine many others. In the remainder of this Introduction I shall try to map out the different ways in which ‘language’ and ‘globalization’ are brought together in the four parts of the present volume and to anticipate some of the key insights that emerge from the wealth of new material that follows.
Global Multilingualism, World Languages and Language Systems In Part I of the Handbook we find perspectives that have an impressive history within sociolinguistics. Proponents of ‘nothing new’ can legitimately point to rich traditions in the sociology of language that have dealt extensively with multilingual systems and with language contact processes and cases. These include classic studies by Michael Clyne, Ralph Fasold, Charles Ferguson, Joshua Fishman, Heinz Kloss, William Mackey, William Samarin, William Stewart and others (for a related review, see Ammon 1989; also Ammon, this volume). To pick out just one landmark study, Stewart (1970) reported a succinct but limited notational system designed to capture systemic relationships between languages and a taxonomy of language ‘types’: vernacular, standard, classical, pidgin and Creole. Original conceptualizations like Stewart’s laid the ground for systematic descriptive accounts of languages in communities and languages in contact, and these early initiatives have been massively extended in recent scholarship; see for example Apel and Muysken (1987), Kachru (1992), Myers-Scotton (2002), Pavlenko and Blackledge (2004). The sociology of language has always been interested in the relative vitality of languages and communities, and in language death and attrition internationally. It might be tempting to argue that, even if globalization itself refers to a new and newly important social condition, we can account for ‘language and globalization’ simply by extending the remit of a traditional sociology of language. As we shall see, however, this is to understate significantly what is required. In response to globalization, the most obvious requirement is for a sociology of language that can model relationships among languages on a global scale. In
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his opening paper, Mufwene6 does extremely valuable ground-clearing work, reviewing the concept of globalization and its relationship with earlier processes of colonization and bringing a critical eye to the widely debated concept of ‘global English.’ Mufwene is a strong proponent of the ‘nothing new’ stance, certainly in relation to ‘world languages,’ and perhaps also in relation to ‘language and globalization.’ He is skeptical about the need to defend the concept of ‘world language’ at all, and he argues that, throughout history, we have seen languages expand and fragment. His account of ‘global English,’ as others call it, finds close parallels with Latin, which came to be favored mainly for its association with international trade but then diversified into different Romance varieties. The world, he argues, is not heading towards monolingualism, and English is not a “killer language” (see also Mufwene 1994, 2008). It is therefore useful to assess the orientations that subsequent chapters in Part I take, implicitly or explicitly, to Mufwene’s stance, which will strike some as laissez-faire and as rather apolitical. In fact, however, De Swaan is, rather similarly, matter of fact and certainly not romanticizing in his overview of global language systems (compare De Swaan 2001; also Crystal 2000 and Winford 2003). De Swaan assesses the relative “communication values” of different languages in the “world system,” their “prevalence” and their “centrality,” and proceeds to explain and predict the changing fortunes of languages – what, in the terminology of classical sociology of language, is referred to as ethnolinguistic vitality, language maintenance, and language shift (see Fishman 1991). De Swaan’s top-down model captures the apparently rational and pragmatic decisions people make when they decide to invest in particular languages or to leave them behind. The world’s linguistic system is described as an evolving set of relationships among languages as their utility values change. Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson are far less rationalizing and far more politicized in their assessment of the prospects of the world’s languages (see also Phillipson 1992, 1993; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). They fulminate against “linguistic neo-imperialism,” “linguistic genocide,” and “crimes against humanity in education.” Ammon, again, reviews the concept of ‘world languages’ (and compare Ammon, Mattheier, and Nelde 1994); and, like De Swaan, he attempts a synthesis of the ranking of languages within a global linguistic system by referring to previous accounts. Ammon debates lingua franca uses of English (compare House 2003, Jenkins 2007, Seidlhofer 2004) in which the authentic ‘Englishness’ of English arguably ceases to be an issue. Ricento then asks whether countries can and should protect their national linguistic resources, opposing globalist neo-liberal discourse and assumptions. He reflects on the early linguistic history of North America and on language policies in South Africa, India and elsewhere, concluding that neo-liberal claims – that an ‘open market’ will liberate people to make informed linguistic choices and will lead to more democratic arrangements – are not supported by historical evidence. It is clear, then, that some authors are much more vociferous than others on the topic of how global languages, and English in particular, come to be imposed on an expanding range of territories and on other languages. Ammon and De
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Swaan model global systems in which languages have different capital values and vie for recognition and for speakers, while both Ricento and Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson bring more human and ethical considerations to the fore. Mufwene stresses that linguistic globalization, however we define it, is an historically continuous and rather unexceptional process. Ricento frames his arguments in relation to recent globalization theory more than the others do. Even so, there is consensus across the Part I chapters I have mentioned so far – at the level of theory. All these contributors develop analyses couched in terms of relativities of ethnolinguistic vitality – what we could reductively describe as balance sheets of global linguistic entitlement and opportunity, where world languages (if they can be named so) are shown to be winning out at the expense of others. Similar approaches are found in other important existing accounts, including BruttGriffler ’s World English (2002), Gordon’s Languages of the World (2005), Graddol’s two volumes analyzing future global trends within English and other languages – The Future of English (1997) and English Next (2006) – Maurais and Morris’s Languages in a Globalizing World (2003), Nettle and Romaine’s Vanishing Voices (2000), and Wright’s Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalization (2004). As we will see in later chapters, however, there are authors who want to take issue with the broad orientation found in all these works. For example Blommaert (2006, 2009, and also later in this volume) argues that sociolinguistics has settled into a dominant but reductive mode of describing the spread of linguistic variables over restricted horizontal spaces, in the general manner of Labovian variationism (see Labov 1972 and Coupland 2007 for a review); but he thinks that this is also apparent in the sociolinguistic field of language contact. His objection is that this perspective gives us only a restricted account of space and time, when globalization theory stresses how time and space have themselves been radically reconfigured. Blommaert is concerned that systems approaches pay very little attention to the particular functions of communicative repertoires under conditions of mobility. In her chapter, later in the volume, Heller similarly challenges some of the assumptions underlying rights-based appeals to linguistic ownership and autonomy. Going back to some conceptual distinctions that we considered a little earlier, we might say that contact models in sociolinguistics have tended to deal with flows as transference – as movement of codes and people across predefined and unchanging boundaries – rather than in terms of transformation and transcendence. The underlying issue is whether in fact we need more theory, and different theory, in the sociolinguistic framing of globalization, or whether it is sufficient to widen the scope of existing treatments. These debates come back in the subsequent parts of the book. Still on the theme of global languages, Pool takes us in a different direction. He offers a pro-active vision of “panlingual globalization” in which, through marketing and other strategies, the world’s 7,000 or so existing languages might be protected, offsetting the drift (pace Mufwene) towards global monolingualism through English. He then discusses and illustrates a set of semantic principles according to which panlingual translation might be facilitated. In some ways, a
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brave new world of linguistic engineering sits rather well with the commodification of language that others see as a hallmark of linguistic globalization. But in any account of ‘world languages’ it is crucial to recognize that languages other than English have their own claims to this status (compare the concluding discussion in Block’s chapter). As Mufwene argues, even without the focused global intervention of the sort Pool envisages, it is a mistake to predict a world unilingual in English without close investigation of shifts being experienced by other languages and their users. Part I of the Handbook would ideally contain chapters reflecting on many other languages and national settings, ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ alike, and on their shifting patterns of vitality. Chapters in the other parts of the book do, however, bring in detailed commentaries on many of them – for instance Bhatt’s observations on South Asia and West Africa, Heller ’s observations on La Francophonie, Kramsch and Boner ’s references to Tanzania, Mooney’s analysis of the linguistic bases of global religions, Pennycook’s remarks on popular culture in various global settings, Shi-xu’s commentary on China, van Leeuwen and Suleiman’s reference to Egypt and Arabic. As detailed case studies in Part I, we have Mar-Molinero’s assessment of the spread of global Spanish and Busch’s account of the development of new national languages in eastern Europe, the former Yugoslavia in particular. Each of these two case studies raises issues of general importance. Mar-Molinero points to a mix of centralized language policy initiatives, particularly by Spain, and to grassroots initiatives, particularly centered on popular music, which is helping to promote varieties of Spanish globally. The power of vernacularity has been underestimated in language systems approaches, which mainly seek to map out the status of ‘whole languages.’ Yet one of the themes that emerge strongly in the later parts of the Handbook is the need to attend to the globalization of genres and styles of particular languages, as well as – or in preference to – commentaries on ‘whole languages’ themselves. It can be argued that, under globalization, languages are evolving and spreading less and less as coherent uniform linguistic systems. Mar-Molinero explains that ‘Spanglish’ and Livin’ la vida loca play a key role in the transnational appeal of Spanish, but also in shifting evaluations of what matters as ‘language’ in global communication. Busch describes shifts in the other direction in eastern Europe – shifts whereby codes formerly institutionalized as ‘majority languages’ have been repositioned and decentered as ‘minority languages’ (such as Russian in the Baltic states) and whereby varieties rise to prominence as new ‘national languages.’ Like MarMolinero, she points to the limitations of top-down measures in implementing language planning, even under authoritarian conditions, but again to the importance of understanding the language-ideological basis of demarcating one language from another (see also Gal 2006). Busch quotes Bakhtin’s view that a ‘national language’ is an ideologically saturated object and an expression of a world view, rather than a strictly linguistic category. In Part I, therefore, we are already seeing some significant disputes, both within key contributors’ positions on global multilingualism and between the ways in which that broad area of scholarship and others make sense of ‘the sociolinguistics
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of globalization’. There are different levels of political engagement: Is the global expansion of particular languages something we should regret and oppose, or something inevitable and familiar? There is disagreement over units of analysis: Is linguistic globalization about the fates of languages, regarded as bounded linguistic systems within changing social and sociolinguistic systems, or is it about ways of using language, new repertoires, diffusing genres and styles, and changing ideologies around language use? There is disagreement about the necessary theoretical infrastructure: To what extent should sociolinguistics refashion its own theory in response to the new challenges posed by globalization? Or can we get by with what we have? These are some of the debates around which a sociolinguistics of globalization is being carried forward, and there are many more to come in the volume. The terrain is too challenging and too interesting for us to expect bland consensus.
Global Discourse in Key Domains and Genres Part II of the Handbook shifts focus from language regarded as a system (and from language systems functioning in global systems) to language regarded as social action – or from languages to discourses. In his 2006 book, Fairclough sets out a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) agenda relating to globalization (see also Fairclough 2009). He espouses a realist position, accepting that there are objective facts of globalization to be observed and measured, but he says that these objectivities are generally “much too complex to be fully controlled by any human intervention” (2006: 28). Hence critical attention needs to be given to how the discourses that drive forward the objective changes we associate with globalization are constructed – or selected – and consumed. For Fairclough and for all critical analysts of discourse, discourses do have social consequences. Discursive change, in Fairclough’s view, often presages and facilitates real social change. The key elements for Fairclough are the (pro-globalization) discourse of “globalism” and the way it is impacting on patterns of work, government, politics, and personal identity in different social settings. In fact globalism is, he says, a new order of discourse – a new structured configuration of discourses, genres and styles, based on neo-liberal political assumptions (ibid., p. 29). Related issues concerning markets and values inescapably feature in many chapters; they are dealt with most directly in Part III. In Part II, contributors explore instead some of the key communicative genres and practices that globalization has not only facilitated but brought into being. We might also say that these are some of the key discourses through which globalization has itself been brought into being: discourse practices associated with mass media (Androutsopoulos; van Leeuwen and Suleiman), tourism (Jaworski and Thurlow), language teaching (Block), global terror (Hodges), and global religion (Mooney). Androutsopoulos describes the main characteristics of ‘Web 2.0,’ where the internet becomes more radically interactive via content-sharing and social networking sites and platforms. He shows how engagement with the interactive web
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involves new forms of textual and symbolic manipulation and appreciation. In Androutsopoulos’s chapter we immediately see that a sociolinguistics of new media needs to be elaborated, both descriptively and theoretically. Textual resources, including the ones Androutsopoulos refers to as “spectacles,” are inherently multi-modal rather than strictly linguistic, for example video clips that become a focus for interactive reassessment and critical comment among networks of users. Associated web pages show complexities of visual syntax and trans-modal relations. Androutsopoulos argues that users and analysts alike need to be sensitive to intertextual relationships, because meanings are often made by appropriating pre-existing resources and embed them in new environments (see Johnson and Ensslin’s (2007) concept of “intermediality”). We also have to be alert to heteroglossic relationships, because users often take particular stances, sometimes oppositional or “vari-directional,” to materials that they comment on. Older sociolinguistic themes emerge too, but they require new interpretations. Androutsopoulos traces new ways in which the interactive web positions vernacular varieties such as the Bavarian dialects of German. Van Leeuwen and Suleiman share the view that sociolinguistic analyses of globalized mass media need to be multimodal and focused on local-global tensions. They start from the view that analysis of glocalization processes is often over-generalized, for example in the idea, contrary to the McDonaldization hypothesis, that global mass media are always localized and indigenized. They prefer a case-by-case approach, which can be sensitive to just what is globally uniform and what is locally specific in particular media products, for instance the many national versions of Cosmopolitan magazine (see Machin and van Leeuwen 2007; also Machin and van Leeuwen, this volume). In the case examined in detail here, that of an Egyptian superhero comic, Zein, van Leeuwen and Suleiman find that “becoming global” is not considered legitimate, so that the comic ultimately fails, commercially and in its reception by critics. That is, the clearly USA-sourced genre of superhero comics proves to be “unlocalizable,” even though the Zein data that van Leeuwen and Suleiman analyze are in themselves designed as highly globalized texts. Van Leeuwen and Suleiman’s approach to analysis and their concerns about premature generalization are significant for a sociolinguistics of globalization, as well as for sociolinguistics generally. A specifically linguistic/discursive approach to globalization offers the resource of detailed critical commentary on particular instances, of a sort that is not available to most other social science treatments. As Labov said about the sociolinguistic approach that he pioneered, in the detail of empirical investigation “we encounter the possibility of being right” (Labov 1972: 259), and this is a particularly precious resource in an area of theory that tends towards the grandiose. (Later on in the run of chapters, Mooney makes a similar appeal for sociolinguistics not to set aside its traditional concerns with linguistic detail and specific cases.) Jaworski and Thurlow share the commitment to analytic particularity, and also to analyzing discursive practice – or what we might call the ‘coming to be’ of globally situated communicative interaction. They also show how careful analysis
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of discursive events can illuminate, refine, or challenge some of the more abstract and general claims about global social processes. So this is not empirical particularism as an alternative to social theory, or linguistic analysis in the service of social theory. It is the attempt to understand the general in the context of the particular and to expose the theoretical significance of local discursive practices – the perspective that motivates CDA as a discipline. Jaworski and Thurlow analyze tourism encounters (and see Jaworski and Thurlow 2010; Jaworski et al. 2010; Thurlow and Jaworski 2010), which they see as a focal genre of “banal globalization,” the everyday textual realization of global capitalism. But they also draw attention to the fact that “language,” in many different ways, becomes a central practice in the performance of tourism and comes to be associated with particular exchange values, especially in interactions between tourists and “hosts” or “locals.” They identify particular act-types that are structurally linked to the economic frameworks of global tourism, for instance “tourist teases” and “tourist greetings.” This is language (discourse) constituting globalization. Reflecting, partly autobiographically, on the institutions and priorities of English language teaching around the world, Block argues that a globalized ideoscape dominates contemporary practice (and see Block and Cameron 2002; Canagarajah 1999). This provides an opportunity to assess the implementation of glocalization in language education contexts – how westernized and hom*ogenized teaching materials and approaches are and to what extent they accommodate presumed or actual local cultural context. Block points out that, in the past, English language teaching materials have tended to realize British and American cultural ideologies, while more cosmopolitan and global consumerist values have now started to be represented. Global cultural flows are coming to be incorporated in teaching materials (for instance engagement with global celebrities and lifestyles), and those texts constitute a flow mechanism in its own right. In fact there are interesting resemblances between Block’s description of the social representations found in more cosmopolitan teaching texts and the intuited list of social changes with which I began this introduction. There is no clearer or more chilling instance of a discourse that drives social change and new global relations – Fairclough’s CDA agenda – than the discourse of the George W. Bush administration referring to ‘the war on terror.’ Bush’s rhetoric, as analyzed by Hodges (and compare Hodges and Nilep 2007), forces new global disjunctions between ‘them’ and ‘us,’ between terrorists and victims, and between Islamic fundamentalists and (at least by implication) rational westerners. That discourse, Hodges shows, was a device for constructing different interpretations of global relations – for example when Bush identified the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center as a triggering event for a legitimate ‘war on terror,’ which Bush and others then took as a warrant for military exploits in Iraq and elsewhere. The discourse becomes available for recontextualization or application in other contexts, for example by Serbian intellectuals who rationalize their own conflict with Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims. Discourse is of course not only a means of obscuring and manipulating political processes; it needs to provide means of disambiguating veiled or double-voiced
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meanings – and it can provide them. We might associate this function with CDA itself; but, as Hodges shows, there are many voices, not least voices in the mass media, interested in renegotiating the ‘war on terror ’ discourse and its presuppositions. If we stand back from the detail of Hodges’s commentaries on these processes, it becomes possible to see global international relations and conflict as a series of complex flows of contested meanings. This is arguably where we find the most pressing case for a linguistic perspective on globalization, particularly in the form of critical analyses of discourse. Religion itself is a casualty of the ‘war on terror ’ discourse, in the sense that it looms in the background of contemporary global antagonisms and is non-specifically implicated in conflict discourses (see the attribution ‘fundamentalist,’ mentioned above, and the discussion of fundamentalism in Mooney’s chapter). It is important, then, to review the wider links between language, discourse, place, and religion and to reflect on their changing inter-relationships under globalization. This is what Mooney offers in her chapter: a critical and comparative sociolinguistic reassessment of world religions and of their globalizing forms and functions. Religious systems are discourses, variably amenable to change and to hybridization and with different historical connections to global zones and languages. These discourses are, as Mooney shows, increasingly carried to people via satellite, cable TV, and the internet (which includes virtual reality domains), creating global “religious marketplaces.” Televangelism, for example, is a genre broadcast mainly through English, which shows that religion is not at all immune to the general pressures we saw discussed in Part I. But it is the corporatization and technologization of religion that stand out perhaps as being most significant; the internet, as Mooney suggests at one point, may be in the process of becoming a metaphor for the divine.
Language, Values, and Markets under Globalization Many chapters in Part I and Part II of the Handbook have made reference to the economic basis of contemporary globalization, as I did in my introductory remarks on globalization theory in this chapter. The forces that reconfigure patterns of multilingualism are to a large extent economic, as for example when the ‘value’ of English consists in the access it is often perceived to give to wider markets, and hence to financial advancement of different sorts. International tourism is above all, as Jaworski and Thurlow emphasize, a global economic system, and so is global English language teaching. As we have just seen, even religion is tending that way. Sociolinguists have for some time used Bourdieu’s “symbolic capital” framework (Bourdieu 1991) and his analysis of neo-liberalism as economic fatalism (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1999; Fairclough 2006, 2009). But a sociolinguistic conception of le marché linguistique was established as early as the 1970s (see Sankoff and Laberge 1978).
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In Part III, although sociolinguistic engagement with markets is ‘nothing new,’ we do see many of the new ways in which markets and values have taken on significance in relation to globalization. This involves taking a broader view of ‘values,’ one which spans monetary and material value as well as cultural values of various sorts. Two general issues are addressed in this part of the book. First, how does globalization create new value systems in which language is implicated (including new values for language use and for the language varieties themselves)? Secondly, how are the discourses of globalization valued in different places and under different conditions? Heller critiques the role of language in the globalized new economy. The new economy has come about through the relocation of heavy industry and manufacturing out of former industrialized areas; it is evident in the rise of service-sector and niche markets in their place. Heller ’s research has been extremely influential in pointing out new demands made on language use and new value frameworks around varieties and multilingualism, especially in new economy work practices (Duchêne and Heller 2007; Heller 2007; see also Cameron 2000). In her chapter here, Heller explains how language comes to be commodified, treated as a marketplace skill or as resource that bears little relation to older understandings of the fact that ways of speaking are historically structured into communities through socialization. Sociolinguistics has repeatedly shown the local value of minority linguistic varieties within their own community settings, indexing ingroup allegiance and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness. But in new economy settings, minority varieties can be treated as shortcuts to cultural authenticity, for example in international tourism contexts (see Jaworski and Thurlow). Heller then widens the debate, cycling back to the issues discussed in Part I. She argues that rights-based and ecologically framed arguments against “killer languages” make assumptions which are strongly locked into nationalist assumptions and out of step with changed, globalized social circ*mstances. In fact she argues that we need a new sociolinguistics, one that deals with language as a resource and not with language as a system. A similar case is made by Blommaert and Dong, who urge us to see language as a set of mobile, trans-locally operative resources rather than as localized and “sedentary” sociolinguistic patterns. Blommaert and Dong lobby for a difficult concept of sociolinguistic scales (compare Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck 2005), which superimposes a vertical hierachization of value onto language varieties and uses in their particular ‘horizontal’ (social and geographical) locations. In ways reminiscent of Gumperz’s theory of conversational inferencing (Gumperz 1982), they point to the indexical importance of sociolinguistic fragments or truncated repertoires (alongside the importance of whole varieties, traditionally conceived) as the focus of assessments of linguistic adequacy or acceptability. These theoretical resources are needed, Blommaert and Dong argue, to account for changing and uneven patterns of attributed value when people and ways of speaking and texts “travel.” If we return to Bartelson’s three-way reinterpretation of flow, Blommaert and Dong’s dissatisfaction with distributional sociolinguistic accounts is similar to Bartelson’s comment that contemporary
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globalization entails something more significant than ‘transference.’ Blommaert and Dong insist that global flow disrupts the landscapes over which movement happens, and this is what is implied in Bartelson’s concepts of “transformation” and “transcendence.” Those indexical fragments or ‘bits’ of language, as in the accent-shifts that Blommaert and Dong comment on in their Beijing example, are also the stuff of variationist sociolinguistics, and particularly of approaches to the social meaning of variation referred to under the heading of ‘style’ (Coupland 2007). Johnstone considers the apparent paradox that regional variation at the level of accents or dialect (for example of English) continues to be socially and stylistically meaningful and noteworthy in the contemporary context of globalization, where what others have called ‘superdiversity’ reigns. How can small-scale local meanings be significant in the vast sociolinguistic marketplaces of the globalized world? Johnstone argues that dialect indexicality is actually a consequence of globalization rather than representing a series of fitful attempts to maintain a sense of the local in the face of global hom*ogenization (although one could argue that this is likely too). Johnstone’s point is that, under globalization, very local linguistic forms and styles are resemioticized, given new ideological values and loadings, particularly in stylized usages and in performance frames of different sorts. They become the focus of discourses of differentiation and they are culturally noticed or enregistered (Agha 2006). Johnstone then goes on to discuss dialect “enregistrement” processes and outcomes in Pittsburg, USA, as elements of the process of producing ‘the local,’ much of it mass-mediated. Valuing the local is, from one point of view, an ecological sensitivity, and we saw in relation to arguments about global multilingualism that a general valuing of ‘diversity where it exists’ motivates many language maintenance efforts. There is, however, an important distinction to be drawn between valuing ‘one’s own difference’ (which surfaces in nationalist discourses and in some sorts of language-rights arguments, and which endorses questionable, essentialist claims about linguistic ownership) and valuing diversity for its own sake. The latter position is a far ‘deeper ’ ecological stance, especially when it is applied to the biosphere as a whole rather than to ‘languages’ or ‘language varieties,’ which are social constructs rather than organic entities. Stibbe presents the arguments for bringing a deep ecology framework to sociolinguistics: an ecolinguistics that will expose how particular ways of using language conspire in the destruction of the planet. Language is seen as a barrier to ecological understanding and action. Stibbe reviews the history of ecolinguistics in its different waves before commenting on the spread of discourses he considers hegemonic – including the globalist discourse of progress and consumerism, which Fairclough analyses (see above). But he also comments on how environmental discourses themselves often embed consumerist and anthropocentric attitudes that militate against their authors’ own ambitions. A particular paradox of glocalization is how to reconcile the need to establish universal principles – say, of linguistic self-determination, or of health care entitlement, or of environmental protection – with the need to respect and attune to
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particular global environments with unique histories and cultural values. As Stibbe says, there is a risk of positively intended discourses becoming hegemonic. This is precisely what Shi-xu documents in his analysis of western versus Chinese discourses of human rights. He shows that the historically limited but fast evolving Chinese human rights discourse is based in particular philosophical traditions and colonial experiences. Shi-xu documents the many recent institutional resources established to support such a discourse, but explains that China has not been well placed to engage constructively with strident and culturally hegemonic (and would-be universalist) western demands. In a similar vein, we might expect the precise meanings of the very concept of ‘globalization’ to have different resonances in relation to different domains of global activity (of the sorts we have been discussing), but also in different parts of the world, in different languages, and in culturally specific discourses. In fact Mufwene (in the second endnote to his chapter) discusses semantic non-equivalences between French “mondialization” and English “globalization.” Taking a quantitative empirical (questionnaire-based but open-ended) line on this question, Garrett is able to show some systematic differences in the way university students in Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, the UK, and the USA construe, and react evaluatively to, the term ‘globalization.’ Chinese and New Zealand respondents, for example, give the most positive and most negative reactions, respectively. While Garrett finds globalization to be taken to refer overall to cultural dimensions more than to economic and other ones, cultural issues in globalization are more salient to Japanese and USA respondents than to others – “global unity and cooperation” being uppermost in the way they specify that cultural significance. Americans show a relatively strong awareness of their country being the main force behind globalization, but rather little preoccupation with economic issues and issues of power and exploitation. As well as exposing some very revealing national trends, Garrett’s study is valuable in cautioning against an over-confident use of one of the two core concepts we are debating in this volume. Finally in Part III, Kelly-Holmes explores the processes of global marketing, and she focuses on the brand that has often been taken to represent the apogée (or nadir) of globalized commercialism: McDonald’s. Marketing is the strategic use of image and language text to promote and differentiate a brand; McDonald’s used the slogan “I’m lovin’ it” as their first global advertising theme. The slogan ostensibly conjures up values of harmony and straightforwardness and, as KellyHolmes says, it cleverly manages the tension between McDonald’s being a global corporate giant and the implied intense localness of enjoying a fast hamburger. The vernacularity and informality of the sloganized utterance and the visual style of its textual representation are, as Kelly-Holmes shows, further parts of the brand’s “unique selling proposition.” The slogan has appeared in seven languages other than English, showing a degree of strategic localization (compare KellyHolmes 2005). Most of these languages are, however, easily predicted from De Swaan’s and others’ models of global language systems. As Kelly-Holmes says, global marketing relies on and exploits global language hierarchies in predictable
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ways. But a coherent and ‘clean’ brand image is maintained through the multilingual versions, through McDonald’s consistency of visual design and stylistic manipulations.
Language, Distance, and Identities In the final part of the Handbook we have a series of chapters devoted to the analysis of language and meaning “across distance” and to the effects of distance on the experience of personal and social identities. This work responds to the observation that globalization involves a compression of time and space (Giddens 1994, 2002). Social relations, and even forms of intimacy, become possible across distance, but they still have to be negotiated through complex and sometimes restrictive forms of mediation. This theme is a particular challenge to sociolinguistics, in that the discipline’s founding insights into identity have mainly been linked to ‘community,’ which has in turn been theorized as local, face-to-face mutual engagement (in speech communities, in social networks, or in communities of practice). There have been efforts to retheorize the traditional but unrewarding concept of ‘speech community’ and to move on from the ‘sociolinguistics of community’ that has been built around it (Coupland 2010; Patrick 2002; Pratt 1987; Rampton 2006, 2009). These theoretical developments have been necessary, partly to take account of more mobile trajectories and flows of populations, and partly to build less essentializing models of social identities, premised on ‘authentic’ cultural membership (Bucholtz 2003, Coupland 2003a, Eckert 2003). But the detailed analysis of sociolinguistic identities ‘at distance,’ in specific domains, is a new undertaking. In a contribution that draws together many of the key insights of other chapters of the Handbook, Kramsch and Boner explore a critical, post-modern approach to communication across distance and culture. They alert us to the fact that concepts of flow and transcultural exchange, like the old notion of “intercultural communication” (Kramsch 1998), may conceal global inequalities (compare Blommaert and Dong) and cultural fragmentation. In their empirical study of interactions that were set up between members of an American economic development NGO and local people in order to help establish entrepreneurial projects in Tanzania, they are able to demonstrate the consequences of some fundamental mismatches in the way participants orient to planning processes. It turns out that NGO members and local people have, for example, different understandings of the core linguistic concepts of ‘help’ and ‘need.’ Behind negotiations to establish new forms of partnership there are different, culturally based understandings of other concepts too – such as ‘friend,’ which might imply on the one hand participation in fast moving commercial partnerships and networks, and on the other hand ‘slow-time’ relations of trust with other people in local face-to-face networks. Globalization, Kramsch and Boner explain, tends to instrumentalize relationships in the drive towards new entrepreneurial activity,
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and to set up “imaginary solidarities.” Discursive exchange, they say, comes to involve “shadows” – only fleetingly or marginally detectable assumptions and implications. In his chapter, Bhatt takes a more historical perspective, but similarly critiques the partly veiled assumptions attached to the use of English in India and Nigeria in the colonial era, before going on to discuss the complex implications of language choice for identity negotiation in post-colonial contexts. Bhatt takes us into the classic sociolinguistic controversy – paralleled in discussions of English as a lingua franca (on which see above) – of whether and how it is possible to construct genuinely post-colonial identities and subjectivities through use of ‘the colonial language,’ English. Bhatt takes an interdisciplinary perspective, citing arguments from literary studies and from critical and cultural theory. But he bolsters them with sociolinguistic commentaries on English syntactic and pragmatic features that index “acts of resistance.” This helps to pin down the concept of cultural hybridity, so often appealed to in post-colonial cultural studies, defining it as the transfer of specific features from indigenous local languages into English usage. Gender and sexuality have generally been treated as culturally bound, ‘withincommunity’ issues, both in sociolinguistics and elsewhere. In successive chapters, Piller and Takahashi, then Leap, set out to assess the impact of a globalization perspective on these very well established sociolinguistic fields. Piller and Takahashi consider the way patterns of transnational migration – which, as we have already seen, are prone to leaving important and often troublesome legacies, bound up with language competence and language evaluation – impact on particular groups of migrant women. Relevant groups include care-workers, women employed in catering and tourism sectors, and sex workers. Piller and Takahashi show that variable levels of competence in English have different social consequences for individuals, as for example when Filipina domestic workers in Taiwan are able to use their relatively high competence to renegotiate power differentials with their employers. But the authors also track covert category distinctions, which define some sorts of employment – for example as “white (migrant) women’s work.” Leap reviews the history of “gay language,” noting the urban North Atlantic associations of legitimated gay stances and lifestyles in many parts of the world (compare Leap and Boellstorff 2004). As in the case of ‘migrant women,’ this can lead to a situation where English competence has a particular status within what Leap calls the “global circuit” of same-sex cultures. But local sexual cultures vary in their endorsem*nt of western ‘gay liberation politics,’ as well as in their normative speaking conventions for gay encounters – as is demonstrated for example in the case of ‘Bahasa gay’ in Indonesia, or in a convention, prevalent in French gay practice, of using English lexis for iconic commodities. This variation can lead to unanticipated social hierarchies and patterns of social exclusion as people move through the global circuit. Although globalization theory in its more extreme forms has prematurely declared the demise of the nation-state (a theme I have already touched upon), many people would have reservations about the claim that traditional ethnic
Introduction
21
identities are in terminal decline. We saw some contributors arguing for a position where the grander potential social realignments associated with globalization theory become the focus of empirical sociolinguistic research, and of research that is accountable to its data (as sociolinguistics has always been). In the case of ethnicity, it would seem sensible not to presume that all local ethnic sensibility is ‘impossible’ or ‘naively essentialist’ in a globalizing world, but also not to presume that our cultural provenances ‘naturally’ or even ‘normally’ lock us into particular social identities. At the levels of sociolinguistic theory and analysis, we should expect ‘identity’ to be a more demanding and multi-layered concept – needing to be subdivided at least into the dimensions of ‘feeling,’ ‘knowing,’ and ‘doing’ rather than being treated as some composite form of ‘being.’ (I argue this case in detail in Coupland 2007; but see also the discussion of different identity subprocesses in Machin and van Leeuwen’s chapter, below.) We should expect specifically ethnic identities to interact with, and possibly to compete with, other social dimensions of identification, and we should also expect these relativities to be particularly important under circ*mstances of global flow. In the spirit of these reservations, Maher explores what he calls “metroethnicities” and the linguistic usage associated with them, “metrolanguage.” Drawing theoretical support from Butler (1997), Hall (1997), Pennycook (in this volume) and others, Maher explores some of the complexities of performative identity among young global urbanites. He argues that metroethnicity is characteristic of fast moving and fluid urban spaces in “world cities” like Tokyo. It involves playful and ephemeral signification, sometimes centered on global celebrities like David Beckham, but with eclectic indexical appropriations of ethnic and national styles such as ‘a Thai accent’ or ‘an Irish genealogy.’ Metroethnicity and metrolanguage, says Maher, are performed in the pursuit of what is cool, and to that extent they construct “lite” identities – playful and commodified identities rather than socially fixed or embedded identities. Maher ’s written account is performed within the genre norms of metroethnicity itself, and something of the same feeling of metacultural jouissance (a term which I do not use in its Lacanian – or in any other specific – sense) comes through in Pennycook’s account of global popular culture shifts and appropriations. Pennycook focuses on the cyclical flows associated with hip hop and rap music – a truly globalized set of genres, carried through a different sort of global circuit. He comments, for example, on developments in French language hip hop over the last twenty years, which has spawned distinctive scenes outside of France itself, for example in West Africa and Canada. Hip hop culture proves to be an ideal locus for exploring trajectories of globalization and localization and ways in which linguistic resources are selectively redeployed and freshly coined in the construction of new hybridities (see also Pennycook 2007). Pennycook celebrates the new transcultural relationships and identities that surface and the potential for transgressive and oppositional stances – not least for an opposition to national language norms and policies. Global distance of a very different sort is entailed when people become onlookers, observing mediated spectacles of human tragedy in far-off places. Chouliaraki
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is interested in how these events are mass-mediated and in how they impact on media consumers. Global media bring to us versions of human disasters across geographical distance and across cultural differences, but often there is also a gulf between the context of suffering and the context of observation, between the powerlessness of those who suffer and the privileged circ*mstances of the observers. The power of mediating institutions such as TV news, and the motivational power of the texts themselves, also impinge directly. Chouliaraki analyzes, in relation to six particular instances, these contexts and processes of production and consumption and the public readiness to take action in support of the suffering. There are different types or modes of representation. One is “adventure news,” which is told in classical narrative form, keeping viewers “distant” from the catastrophic event. Chouliaraki then identifies a quite different mode, which she calls “ecstatic” news coverage: this is familiar to most of us from the manner of constructing the television coverage of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. In this mode normal temporal arrangements are suspended, creating a feeling of timelessness. Chouliaraki argues that, in this frame, disaster television creates its own sense of the historical and triggers empathetic engagement from viewers. She is therefore able to show how global publics can be differently positioned by the global media reporting of disasters (compare Chouliaraki 2006); spectators can sometimes be constructed as moral agents who need to judge globally significant events, and to act. In the Handbook’s final chapter we stay in the domain of global media, with Machin and van Leeuwen’s analysis of “lifestyle identities.” They consider the case of Cosmopolitan magazine and comment on the identities that Cosmo constructs for its female readers, across its wide global range of publication contexts. Machin and van Leeuwen then find that young women interviewees in different global settings tend to recycle these values and identities in their responses to researchers who interview them. Lifestyle identities are based on ideologies of choice and consumerism, on the assumption that one can ‘be’ whatever one chooses – namely on the basis of commodities purchased and consumed and by building lifestyles organized around these choices. There are resonances here with the analyses of identity discussed in other chapters of Part IV – not so much in the specific ‘contents’ of those ‘identities’ as in the underlying processes appealed to. Machin and van Leeuwen observe that the way we theorize identity is influenced by the social conditions we experience around us, and therefore by specific judgments of what matters qua ‘identity.’ They draw a fascinating contrast between, for example, the Cosmo-reading women’s repertoire of ‘lifestyle’ categories and distinctions for their own identities and bureaucratic, statist categories and distinctions used in employment and immigration contexts. ‘Functionalist,’ consumption-focused routes into identity, centered on lifestyle and choice, are fully consistent with mass-mediated and globalized discourses, which continually offer us commodified versions of ourselves, if only we make the right choices. As Machin and van Leeuwen conclude, just how much agentive freedom we have in exercising these choices remains a moot point.
Introduction
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NOTES 1 I comment in greater detail on a similar list, and discuss some supporting sociological evidence pertaining to Britain, in Coupland 2009b. 2 We cannot fail to react to statistics like the following: there has been a 342 percent increase in global usage of the internet between 2000 and 2008 (quoted at http://www. internetworldstats.com/stats.htm), and 1.6 billion international tourist arrivals worldwide are forecast by the World Tourism Organization by 2020, compared with 924 million in 2008 (reported at http://www.unwto.org – both sites accessed 8 July 2009). 3 There is the considerable irony that, in Thatcher ’s case, the drive to free-market economics coincided with aggressive nationalistic stances, not least in relation to ‘protecting British sovereignty’ in Falklands War. Hall interprets Thatcher ’s orientation to the Falklands as “living the past entirely through myth” and “reliving the age of the dictators, not just as farce but as myth” (1997: 177), and this once again points to the nonlinearity of globalization processes. 4 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jan/15/politics.eu (consulted 8 July 2009). 5 Important sources that have not come up so far in the present discussion include Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994; Castells 1996; Cohen 1997; Featherstone 1990; Featherstone and Lash 1995; Held et al. 1999; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; McGrew and Lewis 1992; Papastergiadis 2000; and Scott 1997 (although this is still far from being a comprehensive list). 6 In the remainder of this Introduction, authors’ names not accompanied by dates refer to chapter contributions to the present volume.
REFERENCES Agha, A. (2006) Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ammon, U. (ed.) (1989) Status and Function of Languages and Language Varieties. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Ammon, U., Mattheier, K. J., and Nelde, P. H. (eds) (1994) English Only? In Europa In Europe En Europe. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Apel, R., and Muysken, P. (1987) Language Contact and Bilingualism. London: Edward Arnold. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bartelson, J. (2000) Three concepts of globalization. International Sociology 15(2): 180–96. Bauman, Z. (1982) Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Bauman, Z. (1998a) On glocalization: Or globalization for some, localization for some others. Thesis Eleven 54(1): 37–49. Bauman, Z. (1998b) Globalization: The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity. Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage. Beck, U. (1999) What is Globalization? Cambridge: Polity. Beck, U., Giddens, A., and Lash, S. (1994) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition
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and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Oxford: Polity Press. Block, D., and Cameron, D. (eds) (2002) Globalisation and Language Teaching. London: Routledge. Blommaert, J. (2006) Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2009) A Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J., Collins, J., and Slembrouck, S. (2005) Spaces of multilingualism. Language and Communication 25(3): 197–216. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P., and Wacquant, L. (1999) On the cunning of imperialist reason. Theory, Culture and Society 16(1): 41–58. Brutt-Griffler, J. (2002) World English: A Study of Its Development. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Bucholtz, M. (2003) Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3): 398–416. Butler, J. (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York and London: Routledge. Cameron, D. (2000) Styling the worker: Gender and the commodification of language in the globalized service economy. Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(3): 323–47. Canagarajah, S. (1999) Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Networked Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Chouliaraki, L. (2006) The Spectatorship of Suffering. London: Sage. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Coupland, N. (2003a) Sociolinguistic authenticities. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7, 3: 417–31. Coupland, N. (ed.) (2003b) Sociolinguistics and Globalisation (thematic issue of Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4)).
Coupland, N. (2007) Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coupland, N. (2009a) The mediated performance of vernaculars. Journal of English Linguistics 37(3): 284–300. Coupland, N. (2009b) Dialects, standards and social change. In M. Maegaard, F. Gregersen, P. Quist, and J. N. Jørgensen (eds), Language Attitudes, Standardization and Language Change, 25–50. Oslo: Novus. Coupland, N. (2010) The authentic speaker and the speech community. In C. Llamas and D. Watts (eds), Language and Identities, 99–112. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Crystal, D. (2000) Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Swaan, A. (2001) Words of the World: The Global Language System. Cambridge: Polity. Duchêne, A., and Heller, M. (eds) (2007) Discourses of Endangerment: Ideology and Interest in the Defense of Languages. London: Continuum. Eckert, P. (2003) Elephants in the room. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3): 392–7. Evans, P. (1997) The eclipse of the state? Reflections on stateness in an era of globalisation. World Politics 50(1): 62–87. Fairclough, N. (2006) Language and Globalisation. London: Routledge. Fairclough, N. (2009) Language and globalisation. Semiotica 173: 317–42. Featherstone, M. (ed.) (1990) Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalisation and Modernity. London: Sage. Featherstone, M., and Lash, S. (1995) Globalisation, modernity and the spatialization of social theory: An introduction. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash and R. Robertson (eds), Global Modernities, 1–24. London: Sage. Fishman, J. A. (1991) Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Introduction Friedmann, J. (1986) The world city hypothesis. Development and Change 17(1): 69–84. Gal, S. (2006) Migration, minorities and multilingualism: Language ideologies in Europe. In C. Mar-Molinero and P. Stevenson (eds), Language Ideologies, Policies and Practices: Language and Future of Europe, 13–27. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and SelfIdentity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity. Giddens, A. (1994) Living in a posttraditional society. In U. Beck, A. Giddens, and S. Lash (eds) Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, 56–109. Oxford: Polity Press. Giddens, A. (2002) Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Shaping Our Lives. London: Profile Books. Gordon, R. G. (2005) Ethnologue: Languages of the World. Dallas: SIL International. (Available online at http://www. ethnologue.com.) Graddol, D. (1997) The Future of English? London: British Council. Graddol, D. (2006). English Next: Why Global English May Mean the End of ‘English as a Foreign Language.’ London: The British Council. (See also http:// www.britishcouncil.org/files/ documents/learningresearch-englishnext.pdf). Gumperz, J. J. (1982) Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hall, S. (1996) Introduction: Who needs ‘identity’? In S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, 1–17. London: Sage. Hall, S. (1997) The local and the global: Globalization and ethnicity. In A. D. King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World System, 19–40. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hannerz, U. (1992) Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of
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Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press. Hannerz, U. (1996) Transnational Connections. London: Routledge. Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. Held, D., McGrew, A. G., Goldblatt, D., and Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Heller, M. (ed.) (2007) Bilingualism: A Social Approach. London, Palgrave Macmillan. Hobsbawm, E. J., and Ranger, T. O. (eds) (1983) The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodges, D., and Nilep, C. (eds) (2007) Discourse, War and Terrorism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. House, J. (2003) English as a lingua franca: A threat to multilingualism? Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4): 556–78. Jaworski, A., and Thurlow, C. (eds) (2010) Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Continuum. Jaworski, A., Thurlow, C., Ylänne, V., and Lawson, S. (2010) Language, Tourism and Globalization: The Sociolinguistics of Fleeting Relationships. London: Routledge. Jenkins, J. (2007) English as a Lingua Franca: Attitudes and Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, S., and Ensslin, A. (2007) Language in the media: Theory and practice. In S. Johnson and A. Ensslin (eds), Language in the Media, 3–22. London: Continuum. Kachru, B. B. (ed.) (1992) The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kelly-Holmes, H. (2005) Advertising as Multilingual Communication. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kellner, Douglas (1989) Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity. Cambridge, UK
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and Baltimore, MD: Polity Press and Johns Hopkins University Press. (See also http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/ faculty/kellner/papers/theoryglob.htm – consulted 8 July 2009). Kramsch, C. (1998) Language and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Labov, William (1972) Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadephia: Pennsylvania University Press. Lash, S., and Urry, J. (1994) Economies of Signs and Space. London: Sage. Leap, W., and Boellstorff, T. (eds) (2004) Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Lechner, F., and Boli, J. (2004) General introduction. In F. Lechner and J. Boli (eds), The Globalization Reader, 1–4. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Machin, D., and van Leeuwen, T. (2007) Global Media Discourse. London: Routledge. Maurais, J., and Morris, M. A. (eds) (2003) Languages in a Globalizing World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGrew, A. G., and Lewis, P. (eds) (1992) Global Politics: Globalization and the Nation State. Cambridge: Polity. Mufwene, S. (1994) New Englishes and criteria for naming them. World Englishes 13: 21–31. Mufwene, S. (2008) Language Evolution: Contact, Competition and Change. London: Continuum. Myers-Scotton, C. (2002) Contact Linguistics: Bilingual Encounters and Grammatical Outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nettle, D., and Romaine, S. (2000) Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ohmae, K. (1995) The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies. New York: The Free Press. Papastergiadis, N. (2000) The Turbulence of Migration. Cambridge: Polity.
Patrick, P. (2002) The speech community. In J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill and N. Schilling-Estes (eds), The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 573–97. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Pavlenko, A., and Blackledge, A. (2004) Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Pennycook, A. (2007) Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge. Phillipson, R. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, R. (2003) English Only? Challenging Language Policy. London: Routledge. Pratt, M. L. (1987) Linguistic utopias. In N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant, and C. MacCabe (eds), The Linguistics of Writing, 48–66. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rampton, B. (2006) Language in LateModernity: Interaction in an Urban School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rampton, B. (2009) Speech community and beyond. In N. Coupland and A. Jaworski (eds), The New Sociolinguistics Reader, 694–713. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Robertson, R. (1992) Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage. Robertson, R. (1995) Glocalization: Time–space hom*ogeneity–heterogeneity. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson (eds), Global Modernities. 27–44. London: Sage. Robertson, R., and Khondker, H. H. (2009) Discourses of globalization: Preliminary considerations. International Sociology 13(1): 25–40. Sankoff, D., and Laberge, S. (1978) The linguistic market and the statistical explanation of variability. In D. Sankoff (ed.), Linguistic Variation: Models and Methods, 239–50. New York: Academic Press. Scott, A. (ed.) (1997) The Limits of Globalisation: Cases and Arguments. London: Routledge.
Introduction Seidlhofer, B. (2004) Research perspectives on teaching English as a lingua franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 24: 209–39. Skutnabb-Kangas, T. (2000) Linguistic Genocide in Education or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Stewart, W. (1970) A sociolinguistic typology for describing national multilingualism. In J. Fishman (ed.), Readings in the Sociology of Language, 531–45. The Hague: Mouton.
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Thurlow, C., and Jaworski, A. (2010) Tourism Discourse: Language and Global Mobility. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic Press. Winford, D. (2003) Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Wright, S. (2004). Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalisation. London: Palgrave.
Part I Global Multilingualism, World Languages, and Language Systems
1
Globalization, Global English, and World English(es): Myths and Facts SALIKOKO S. MUFWENE
Introduction Today’s world is claimed to be economically and culturally more globalized than ever before, thanks to faster and more reliable means of transportation and communication, which have facilitated greater human traffic and the exchange of larger volumes of information and goods. This concurrent evolution has also led to increased mutual cultural influences across national and regional boundaries, which prompted some experts to claim that the world has been hom*ogenizing by convergence, at the expense of cultural diversity. To be sure, the directions and volumes of traffic are not necessarily symmetrical. The players or partners involved in the relevant world-wide networks of interconnectedness and interdependence do not hold equal economic powers; it is the more powerful who control which populations and commodities (including languages) are transported more freely, and in which directions. Thus, to the eyes of many, globalization is no more than McDonaldization and Americanization (largely through the world-wide diffusion of Hollywood movies); and the spread of English is no less than a part of this trend (for such views, propounded in one form or another, see for instance Crystal 2000, 2004; Nettle and Romaine 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000; Phillipson 2003; Hagège 2006). Some linguists have thus claimed that a ‘global English’ is bound to emerge which should facilitate communication world-wide, alongside – or perhaps superseding – ‘indigenized’ or ‘world Englishes.’ According to the same futurologists, the more widely this ‘global English’ spreads, the more likely it is to drive other languages to extinction, just as has been witnessed in North America and Australia. However, neither economic globalization nor language spread is new in the history of mankind. What is especially striking today is both the scale and the speed at which these processes are evolving. I submit that examining them comparatively, with more historical depth than is exhibited in the current linguistics
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literature, should help us sort out myths and facts about how English is actually spreading and whether it is justified to expect the consequences of the process to be uniform all over the world. I therefore invite the reader to be patient and to review with me a selective, informative history of mankind from the point of view of colonization, which will help us assess more critically the spread of English. This history will explain why we need not fear the emergence of a ‘global English,’ let alone of a time when it might function as the world’s exclusive or dominant vernacular. I will start by articulating from the outset the interpretation of globalization that really bears on language endangerment.
What Is Globalization and What Is New about It? Answers to the above questions vary and depend largely on what particular aspects of the manifold phenomenon called ‘globalization’ a scholar chooses to focus on. If we start with the characterization of globalization both as “the process of becoming global” (Keohane and Nye 2000) and as “the state that results from this process,” then we must also articulate what the word global means. Although most dictionaries privilege its meaning as ‘world-wide’ (as in global warming), we cannot ignore its other interpretation as ‘all-inclusive’ or ‘comprehensive’ (as in global war – which is different from world war – and as in global problem/ solution).1 Thus there can be globalization at the local level, consisting of interdependences which obtain among the different components of the industry or economic structure of a city, or at the regional level, for instance when neighboring countries form economic alliances, such as in the now very successful case of the European Union.2 Globalization need not be thought of exclusively or primarily at the world-wide level. This level differs from the local especially in scale. Although the two may be claimed to differ also in complexity, this is not necessarily the case, unless one conceives of world-wide globalization as an economic system in which all the components of national industries are fully integrated, in complementary ways. The reality is that most of Africa and a great deal of the Pacific Islands remain on the margins of the present world-wide economic system. Moreover, only some industries (such as car and computer manufacture) are distributed complementarily over different parts of the world. However, the relevant trade networks, which should connect the missing links, do not include all parts of the world – especially not those still lagging in transportation infrastructure. Telecommunications, transportation, shipping, and banking are indeed among the handful of industries that can be claimed to instantiate world-wide globalization qua networks of interconnectedness and interdependence. These particular industries also make it obvious that the world is not equally interconnected; countries with the highest globalization index are more centrally connected than others, and the so-called ‘global cities’ are more interconnected than other places. One can likewise argue that world-wide globalization is simply a geographically expanded version of glocalization, although students of multiculturalism discuss the latter as if it were a consequence of world-wide globalization. As cultures, and
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therefore languages, travel primarily and the most naturally with people, these observations prompt us to assess critically claims that English is becoming a global language (see the sections “The Fallacy of ‘Global English’” and “Will there be an English-only Europe?” below). One may also argue that the most primitive forms of globalization in human economic history can be traced back all the way to the beginnings of agriculture, when farmers colonized the hunter–gatherers and some complementarity and interdependence arose in modes and kinds of food production. The evidently monumental differences between, on the one hand, the forms of cooperation and trade that emerged then and, on the other, today’s international industrial conglomerations and networks of trade amount to differences in scale and complexity rather than to differences in kind or spirit. The goal remains for different partners to specialize in what they produce best, or more extensively, and to buy the remaining commodities from other parties, thereby improving and maximizing production through cooperation. That the spirit of this practice has remained fundamentally the same is evident in the asymmetrical power relations which obtain between partners – namely in the tendency for the economically and/or militarily more powerful to dominate the weaker ones. This tendency may entail the adoption of cultural practices, including the language, of the more powerful by the weaker party. However, things have not always proceeded this way in human history (see below). For our purposes, this perspective should help us not only to determine the places where English has spread, but also to assess discriminately the communicative functions it serves and to establish whether its impact on the indigenous languages has been uniform around the world. On the other hand, it is evident that non-local globalization can be related to colonization, as explained below – except where partnership is negotiated between equals. Complexity in local globalization may have started also with the emergence of towns and cities. Life in such larger agglomerations has required a certain amount of interdependence through complementary organization – such as with housing, food and water supplies – and adequate communication and transportation networks in order for the residents to function adequately. The cities’ specialization in industries, as opposed to farming and hunter–gathering, also led to an interdependence between rural and urban environments, although the division of labor and some amount of cooperation in food production varied from one part of the world to another, according to particular times in history. All this anticipated the emergence of nation–states, in which national economies would be coordinated (and even planned, to the extent that this was possible) in ways that can be described as involving globalization. As a matter of fact, we can say that the more globalized a city’s or nation’s economic system is, the higher its globalization or glocalization index is, and the more centrally or significantly it can participate in the world-wide global economic network. The so-called ‘global cities’ (such as New York, London, Paris, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, Chicago, and São Paulo) are those with a high glocalization index, and they function not only as major world financial centers but also as primary ports of entry and as principal diffusion centers in the spread of world-wide trends. They are also
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places that can best highlight differences in the ways English and other major languages have spread around the world, especially through the extent of the contrast between them and the surrounding rural areas. Otherwise the characteristics of interconnectedness and interdependence associated with world-wide globalization are generally extensions of those that apply in glocalization. ‘Global cities’ also remind us that world-wide globalization started with longdistance trading practiced at an early date by, for example, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Chinese (on the Silk Road), and, later, the Greeks and the Romans (Cowen 2001): essentially they remind us that enterprises started from economically and politically powerful cities. Then as now, the size of the world was largely determined by how far technology enabled the traders to go and their respective languages to travel with them. In the Middle Ages the Arabs and the Chinese definitely expanded the size of that world-trade, as the former sailed across the Mediterranean as well as eastwards and southwards along the Indian Ocean, while the latter sailed southwards in the Pacific and westwards in the Indian Ocean. Further improvements in transportation technology would lead to the European Great Explorations of the fifteenth century and to the consequent colonization of most of the rest of the world by Europeans (see for instance Osterhammel and Peterson 2005). Since then, world-wide globalization has changed in respect of how far away the colonizers and traders traveled from their homelands, how fast they journeyed, how much commodity and human traffic actually took place, how much more complex the exchange system has become, and how asymmetrical the share of profits has been between partners.3 Long-distance trade involved not only exchanges of commodities, but also traffic of people and ideas, and hence of cultures. This produced language spread, which sometimes transformed the vernacular a into lingua franca, as has been the case in history with Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Malay, Swahili, Nheengatu (Lingua Geral), Quechua, and Mobilian, to name but a few (see Ostler 2005 for many more examples), before the age of modern European languages. Out of the latter, English has emerged as a pre-eminent world language and, being ‘indicted’ by linguists for the loss of several indigenous languages, especially in North America and Australia, it has been mischaracterized as the ‘killer language’ par excellence. I will return to most of the issues related to this topic from the next section onward. I would just like to conclude this section with some comments on the role of urbanization in language coexistence and competition, which will explain why the impact that the usage of English as a vernacular has exerted, in particular on indigenous languages in North America, may not be replicated in former British exploitation colonies, especially those of Africa. Cities have usually been contact settings, where individuals of different ethnolinguistic backgrounds have migrated either from rural areas or from other cities, typically in search of better economic opportunities. It is probably around them that one can most easily defend the hypothesis that, due to complex webs of interconnectedness and interdependence among residents and among the industries in which they (hope to) function, globalization cum glocalization is hom*ogenizing places culturally, hence linguistically. Cities also happen to be the nodes
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that connect different nations in the world-wide network of interconnectedness and interdependence more commonly associated with globalization. If it is true that globalization as a process is hom*ogenizing the world, cities should be the focus of any serious empirical study. I argue below that, despite similarities in the way the (international) airports and highways of cities are structured, in the way night life is experienced, in the names of major hotels (Hilton, Hyatt, Sheraton, Holiday Inn), or in the fact that cities display McDonald’s eateries – a phenomenon which some scholars have characterized as Americanization – there are still many cultural differences between them, which make it inaccurate to claim or predict the end of cultural diversity (see for instance Tomlinson 1999; Marling 2006; Florida 2005). Cities filter cultural influence from outside and adapt it to local traditions. Even if their cultures change significantly under outside influence, they retain a certain amount of substrate or element that keeps them from becoming replicas of each other. In other words, even ‘global cities’ maintain individualities in the peculiar ways they adapt to changes and outside influences, which keeps world-wide globalization from making our planet culturally uniform. Thus although some ‘global cities’ may be claimed to become anglophone or Americanized, they are not undergoing the process in a uniform way, or to the same extent. One cannot rely to the same extent on the usefulness of English as a lingua franca in Tokyo as in Paris or Amsterdam – at least not yet today.4
Colonization and Globalization As observed by some economic historians (Mignolo 2000; Cowen 2001; Osterhammel and Peterson 2005), modern-day regional and world-wide economic globalization can be associated with, or traced back to, colonization in the sense of political and economic domination of a territory and its population(s) by citizens of another territory. Interestingly, today’s most central players in world-wide globalization include nations that evolved out of settlement colonization – whereby Europeans resettled or founded new homelands in territories outside Europe, eliminated or marginalized indigenous populations, developed highly glocalized economic systems that they intended to be better than in the Europe they emigrated from (Crosby 1986), and imposed socioeconomic world orders that reflect ‘occidentalism’ or westernization. Other players are nations such as the United Kingdom and France, which built powerful economic systems thanks to huge colonial empires, especially through the exploitation of colonies whose production of vital raw materials they controlled exclusively up to the mid-twentieth century. Germany and Japan of course stand out as miraculous developments after World War II. Discussing world-wide globalization in relation to colonization of any kind (trade, settlement, or exploitation) provides an enlightening historical perspective. It makes obvious various layers of human traffic that account for geographic and demographic patterns of language distribution today. To be sure, higher living standards and regional wars have increasingly contributed to population
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movements and contacts, especially through the free relocation of individuals or families, through tourism, deportations, and refugeeism. However, the world is still more heavily marked by the high volumes of human traffic associated with various layers and styles of documented colonization, which may well be claimed to have connected various regions and to have introduced various degrees of interdependence. As I will show below, these migrations have borne on the vitality of languages – both those of the indigenous populations and those the migrants – in various ways, constantly changing the ‘linguascape’ (or the spatial distribution of languages) of the world. Our era cannot be the only time when populations have worried about the impact of the languages of the dominant populations on those of the dominated or marginalized ones. Among the older cases of population dispersal, the Indo-European and Bantu expansions may be the best known ones to date. Both groups dispersed gradually, over millennia, to resettle in new territories, where their languages eventually prevailed over most of the indigenous ones. In both cases, regardless of whether proto-Indo-European or proto-Bantu consisted each of one single language (a dubious assumption) or of a cluster of related language varieties, the cost of the Pyrrhic victory was further diversification, largely triggered, as it seems, by substrate influence from the indigenous languages. This became evident at a later date, in the spread and diversification of one Indo-European language, Latin. As indicated above, trade contributed to the spread of many languages as lingua francas. In other cultural respects, it also facilitated the diffusion of the Phoenician alphabet and of the Arabic graphic representation of numbers. In most cases, the languages of trade hardly replaced those they came in contact with, unless there was a concurrent wave of colonization and settlement that spread a given language as a vernacular, as in the case of Arabic in North Africa – but not in south and southeast Asia. Vernacular shifts have typically resulted from settlement colonization, as I intend to show below regarding the geographic expansion of English. For now, suffice it to mention also the successful spread of varieties of Chinese in China, which was a consequence of the Han settlement colonization of East Asia, although several minority languages have survived the invasion. However, note that the Chinese trade-colonial expansion in Southeast Asia during the period between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries was not matched by a similar language spread. On the contrary, the Peranakan Chinese – an economically powerful group, comparable to that of Creoles of European descent or of mixed ancestry in Latin America – speak now as their vernaculars some indigenous languages of their trade colonies, and chiefly Malay.5 (See Ostler 2005 for similar considerations.) The spread of Latin, which has often been invoked as an earlier example of a ‘global language’ (for example by Crystal 1997), is worth explaining here, as it will help us address the question of whether we can actually speak of a ‘global English.’ While it is true that Latin spread in the world around the Mediterranean and North Sea (including England, Belgium, and Germany) thanks to the Roman Empire (a notorious colonial enterprise), it is also noteworthy that it became a vernacular only in southwestern Europe and in Romania. Actually this vernacular
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shift, which, I maintain, is more typical of settlement colonies, appears to have occurred most significantly after the Romans had left the Western Roman Empire (Polomé 1983; Janson 2004) – which obviously had been neither a settlement nor a typical exploitation colony. As explained in Mufwene (2008), this was an interesting colonization, in a style of its own, fitting typologically just between the two. Unlike settler colonists, the Romans abandoned their western empire when they thought it better to protect Rome against the invading Germanics. However, they had ruled in a manner that rewarded some retired officers by granting them land in the provinces. These former officers continued to speak Latin as an emblem of their status. The Romans had also Romanized the indigenous ruling class, through which they administered their colonies (though they had a few Roman administrators too), and they rewarded quite handsomely some of these natives, who served Rome’s interests, with important offices in the empire – all the way to senatorial and even imperial positions (Garnsey and Saller 1987). It was in fact these indigenous rulers, the emergent Roman-style cities, and to some extent the Christian missions (on which see below) that perpetuated the usage of Latin as a vernacular after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. From the emergent cities, Vulgar Latin gradually spread to the rural areas, along with the Romanstyle economy and culture it was associated with (Landa 2000). This process appears to have occurred over several centuries, during which Latin was influenced by the Celtic and other languages it was displacing. Meanwhile, Classical Latin, used by intellectual elites, remained a lingua franca, a status it has maintained to date at the Vatican. Its life was thus not so different from that of Classical Greek in the Byzantine Empire or in modern Greece, where it is no longer used as a lingua franca today (modern dialects evolved from Dimotiki and Katharevousa varieties are now spoken as vernaculars). The vernacularization of Vulgar Latin in the Romance countries in today’s continental Europe is indeed a geographical and demographic expansion, very similar to that of English, centuries later, in Ireland – where one had to wait until the rule of Oliver Cromwell and the introduction of potato farms in the seventeenth century for English to start spreading as a vernacular. Although it had been introduced to Ireland earlier, in the ninth century, before the change to settlement colonization in the seventeenth, English had remained a lingua franca within a small elite class of traders in and around Dublin and some other towns. (See also Leith 2007 for a discussion of the spread of English in the British Isles from the point of view of colonization.) In the wake of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, Latin was only the language of former Roman administrators and legionaries (most of whom were indigenous) and, later, of scholarship and of Catholic liturgy. It is also debatable whether, by using Classical Latin, the clergy played a more important role – albeit a negligible one – in the vernacularization of the Romans’ language than scholars did. After all, the missionaries proselytized in some of the indigenous vernaculars spoken by the masses of the population. Until the beginning of the second millennium, the Christian/Catholic schools had succeeded
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only in producing an elite class of speakers of Classical Latin (Landa 2000), which makes the history of the vulgarization of Latin, then mostly an urban peculiarity, similar to that of English in Ireland before the seventeenth century. Note also that the school system played a less important role in the spread of English in Ireland as a vernacular than migrant workers on the potato plantations owned by English entrepreneurs did. Although they learned it naturalistically, without the benefit of (much) school education, the migrant workers – and the plantations – gave a lucrative value to English, at least for the common people, just as the Roman-style emergent cities in southwestern Europe did to Latin, the language of their modern economy. I will show below how the spread of English outside Europe is very much correlated to the English colonial expansion, varying in ethnographic functions according to the colonization style applied in different territories.
The European Colonial Expansion since the Fifteenth Century As explained in Mufwene (2005, 2008), the European colonial expansion since the fifteenth century is, in a number of ways, an extension of the Indo-European dispersal since about 6,000 years ago, at least in the way the latter has been explained by Renfrew (1987). The more recent wave of colonization differs from the older one in the following respects: 1 2
3 4 5 6
the role of trade and industrial expansion in triggering massive and often planned population movements; the role played by proprietor companies in the initial peopling of the colonies (including the importation of European indentured servants, of black African slaves, and of Asian and black African contract laborers after the abolition of slavery); the larger size of the colonized territories and the longer distance that separated them from the homelands; the diversity of colonization styles (notably between settlement and exploitation colonies); the speed of the demographic and economic transformation of the colonies; and the complexity and incredible volumes of the new economies.
The linguistic consequences have also been rapid and more extensive, although varying according to colonization styles too (see below). Although nowadays there is more European traffic in search of warm beaches for relaxation, European explorers (similar to our astronauts), traders, and colonists from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century were seeking socioeconomic solutions to European problems (Crosby 1986; Diamond 1997). Some of these entailed settling new territories such as the Americas, the southern tip of Africa,
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Australia, New Zealand, the Falkland Islands, and Algeria, among a host of other, smaller places south of the Mediterranean. Even these solutions had earlier precedents in the colonization, for sugar cane cultivation, of islands closer to continental Europe, such as the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands (Schwartz 1985) – at a time when the only European world powers were the Spaniards and the Portuguese, who competed with the Arabs, the Turks during the early Ottoman Empire, and the Chinese in the Far East. Then Portuguese dominated, as a language of trade and diplomacy, from the western coast of Africa all the way to Japan, and from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century (Ostler 2005). This is a reminder, to those worried about today’s expansion of English as the foremost world-wide language, that we must really figure out what is the same and what is different in this latest wave of demographic expansion of an (Indo-)European language. Even after other European nations, especially England, France, and Holland emerged in the seventeenth century as major maritime powers and engaged themselves in the colonial enterprise, Portuguese remained the primary trade language on the west African coast (Huber 1999); in fact it was replaced (the fastest) only here, where it was not spoken as a vernacular (not counting Cape Verde and the Bight of Biafra Islands, where it would evolve into Creole varieties). Thus Portuguese has been maintained in places such as Diu, Daman, Goa, and Korlai (in India), Batticalhoa (in Sri Lanka), and Macao (in China), where it has served as a vernacular even among the Christianized natives whom the Portuguese lived with, albeit as a ‘creolized variety’ (Clements 1996; Ansaldo 2009). Noteworthy is also the fact that the effects of Portuguese on the vitality of indigenous languages have not been the same from Brazil to Mozambique. The variation is correlated with the fact that Portuguese has functioned as a dominant vernacular only in Brazil, in the Netherlands Antilles, and in the eastern Atlantic islands, as well as in the few settlement concessions on the coast of the Indian Ocean mentioned above and in Macao. Outside Brazil, it evolved into vernaculars identified as Creole varieties, thus displacing the non-European vernaculars among its speakers. In Brazil, its negative impact on the indigenous languages is less extensive than that of English in North America, although it is probably just a matter of time before all native American languages will disappear, as most pre-Indo-European and Celtic languages in Europe have. This evolution is unlike that observed in Asia and in the black African mainland, including Mozambique, where the indigenous languages have generally survived their contacts with the European colonial languages. European exploitation colonies have generally fostered both individual and societal multilingualism, the colonial languages being typically used as lingua francas, but rarely as vernaculars, by the small minorities of natives who speak them fluently. Colonial languages used as vernacular thus function as emblems of socioeconomic achievement and status – privileges enjoyed only by a small minority in the Third World, where the economy has been on the decline for the past half century. Otherwise multilingualism, in forms that clearly associate different languages with different ethnographic functions, is not only the norm in many parts of the world, but also
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a strong protector of the indigenous languages against the spread of colonial languages. (See also Ostler 2005 for a similar observation.)6 European colonization started everywhere with some coastal trade posts and/ or settlement concessions. Gradually, but much faster than with the Indo-European expansion, these initial colonies evolved and expanded into major settlement colonies.7 Where European settlers became majority populations, especially in North America and Australia, their cultures prevailed, albeit in new, indigenized forms. Some of their languages also prevailed as the dominant vernacular, since competition among European settlers often worked to the definitive advantage of one colonial group, for instance the Anglos in North America and the Portuguese in Brazil. The indigenous languages were displaced, be it through the extinction of their speakers – through wars and genocides (such as in the Caribbean), and/or through ills (as in North America; see Crosby 1992, Boyle 2007) – through population mixings (as in Brazil and in European settlements in Asia), through further expansions into lands reserved for the natives (Banner 2005, for the United States), or through the assimilation of the natives. The last process occurred much later than in the case of other European immigrants (Mufwene 2008; Mufwene and Vigouroux 2008). A similar linguistic evolution took place in plantation or slave depot colonies of the Caribbean, to some extent the east Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean, where the European economic system prevailed but the new majority populations were non-European and non-indigenous, and where the new economic regime originally thrived with the help of African slave labor and was sustained later with contract laborers. European languages not only prevailed – at the expense of both indigenous and most other non-indigenous languages – but also evolved into several divergent vernacular varieties, now disfranchised as Creole ones.8 On the other hand, Europeans did not develop an interest in full control of the economic resources of Africa and Asia until the nineteenth century. Due to climatic conditions (at least in the case of Africa, see Diamond 1997), the colonization style then changed to an exploitation regime in which only a handful of European colonial administrators and representatives of relevant companies would live in the colonies, for short terms, to exploit raw materials and have them processed in the metropole (see also Leith 2007). These colonial agents communicated with the indigenous populations through other non-European colonial auxiliaries, many of them recruited locally, to whom scholastic varieties of European languages were taught. The ‘Macaulay doctrine’ (1835) in India, which is fairly representative of European colonial linguistic practices and policies, promoted the education of masses of Indian children in the indigenous languages, reserving education in English only for a privileged few (Brutt-Griffler 2002). We must bear in mind that the spread of a language as a vernacular depends more on its practice in the home and on its genuine ‘transmission’ through interactions with children and immigrants than on teaching a scholastic or standard variety of it as a lingua franca in schools. As explained in Mufwene (2005, 2008), this difference between exploitation and settlement colonies in the ‘transmission’ of European colonial languages
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is correlated with a significant difference between the linguistic consequences of European geographical expansion. In settlement colonies, where some colonial languages have prevailed as vernaculars, these have also driven to extinction not only most of their European competitors, but also the languages brought over by slaves and contract laborers.9 In exploitation colonies, where European languages function as official languages and as lingua francas commanded only by minority socioeconomic elites, most of the indigenous languages continue to be spoken. Unlike in settlement colonies, the norm has been societal and individual multilingualism, with relatively clear geographical and ethnographic divisions of labor in the usage of indigenous vernaculars, indigenous varieties of lingua franca, and European languages. I focus below on the differential evolution of English and on its varying impact on indigenous language outside the British Isles.
The British Empire, the British Commonwealth, and the Emergence of English as a Pre-Eminent ‘World Language’ The colonization of the world entailed fierce competition among Europeans, often engaging them in wars with each other, such as the one between France and England in the Caribbean and in Canada and between both these nations and Spain in the Caribbean. Eventually the Spaniards maintained most of Latin America and the Portuguese settled in Brazil and in their African colonies, aside from minor settlements in Asia. Apart from Lebanon, Cambodia, and the exploitation colonies of Africa, the French kept some of their Caribbean and Indian Ocean Islands, having lost for instance Mauritius, Trinidad, St Kitts, and Grenada to England in the eighteenth century, and Haiti to its Independence in 1804. They faired no better in North America, where they also lost Nova Scotia to the English, and Louisiana to the United States (at that date Louisiana included the whole area bounded by the Rocky Mountains to the west, the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to the east, the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Quebec to the north), managing to keep just a little more than Quebec from today’s Canada. The Dutch traded New Netherland (mostly today’s State of New York) for Surinam in the seventeenth century, and they settled in the Netherlands Antilles and Indonesia, losing today’s South Africa and Sri Lanka to the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century. Having lost the United States in the late eighteenth century, the United Kingdom capitalized on building the British Empire (with the colonization of Australia and New Zealand and the confiscation of territories seized from France at the outcome of the Napoleonic wars in the early nineteenth century). The empire was replaced by the British Commonwealth soon after World War II and the subsequent independence of many former colonies. In the colonies, the change of colonial rule generally entailed a shift of official languages. In settlement colonies, this change also corresponded to a vernacular
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shift up to the Creole varieties, for instance in Trinidad, where the English Creole has driven the French one out. An important exception is Mauritius, where both French and Mauritian Creole have acquired the status of ‘national languages’ and English functions as a statutory official language. Many educated Mauritians are often more fluent in French than they are in English and enjoy socializing in it – which should remind us that language spread and evolution hardly proceed uniformly everywhere, as the ecologies of appropriation and practice vary from one territory to another. Nonetheless, the status of English as the main vernacular and business language in the United States, which emerged as a dominant military and economic power with World War I, just consecrated the hegemony of English as the world-wide language of trade, business, and eventually scholarship and diplomacy (see below). Meanwhile Russian was spreading in eastern Europe and in Siberia as the official language of the emergent Soviet Union. By the middle of the twentieth century, a few European colonial languages had emerged as ‘world languages,’ in the sense of languages spoken as vernaculars or as lingua francas outside their homelands and by populations other than those ethnically or nationally associated with them. These included English, French, Russian, and Spanish. When the demographics include non-native speakers, the majority of whom inhabit former exploitation colonies and who use these languages only as official language or lingua franca, the total number of English speakers, estimated by some to around 1 billion, dwarfs the number of speakers of other European languages. It is noteworthy that French, which had emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as an elite language of ‘high culture’ spoken at royal and imperial courts, even as far as Russia, and as the diplomatic language of Europe in particular, has been losing ground to English since the United States became the dominant economic and military power of the twentieth century – an evolution which has increased its momentum with the new wave of world-wide globalized economy after the collapse of the Soviet Union (in the late 1980s). I submit that, as in the case of that earlier ‘world language,’ Latin, it was the association with trade and (more) lucrative business that favored English over its competitors, both in the United States and around the world. French had the misfortune of being associated with the elite class and with a metropolis that had lost to its anglophone rivals, Britain and the United States, on the colonial scene. Recall that, centuries earlier, Classical Latin, which was used by the European intelligentsia all the way up to the eighteenth century, also lost to its competitor, Vulgar Latin, which was associated with urbanity, trade, and the then ‘modern’ working class. Eventually the indigenized varieties that evolved from this ‘Latin of the people’ were not only hailed as national languages, but also promoted as languages of scholarship. France and Spain in particular went as far as to set up academies that dictated (not always successfully) the best ways in which educated people should express themselves in their respective languages. It is important to emphasize that the status of a language as a ‘world language’ is not determined by demographics alone. Mandarin Chinese, which is the world’s foremost ‘major language’ because it has more native speakers than English or
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Spanish, does not necessarily count as a ‘world language.’ It is just a major language, and maybe the foremost major language. This largely has to do with the fact that its function as a lingua franca is limited to China and the Chinese Diaspora. Similar considerations apply to Hindi, whose total number of native speakers is close to 200 million and which functions as lingua franca in parts of India and, to some extent, in parts of the Indian Diaspora – but not outside the Indian population. On the other hand, overlooking variation across nations, Arabic counts as a ‘world language’ to the extent that it is used as a religious/ritual language wherever Islam is practiced; but it does not have that status of lingua franca associated with English and French as languages of business/trade and scholarship which are also used by non-native speakers. Arabic is thus reduced to the same status as Spanish, which outside Spain is spoken mostly in Latin America, as the dominant vernacular. Arabic has prevailed primarily as a vernacular language in parts of the Middle East and in North Africa, since the settlement colonization of the region by the Arabs from the seventh century onwards. It thus appears that what has made English the foremost ‘world language’ is its function as lingua franca, a status which La Francophonie, as the Organization of Francophone States, wishes French had reached to the same extent, against the odds articulated above (Mufwene 2008). It is this evolution that has led some scholars (see below) to characterize English as a ‘global language,’ that is, as a pre-eminent ‘world language.’ However, it will still be informative to learn more about its expansion as a post-colonial language and about the emergence of the varieties disfranchised as ‘indigenized Englishes.’
World Englishes The heading of this section has to do with (an advocacy for) the recognition of diverse modern English varieties as legitimate, wherever they are spoken, as long as their speakers abide by some local communal norms. The spread of English has proceeded generally at the cost of its structural integrity. Englsh has become assimilated or indigenous – it has ‘indigenized’ – everywhere (Mufwene 2009), changing its features in response to the previous communicative habits of its new speakers, and meeting new communicative needs. The relevant literature has generally made a three-way distinction among the outcomes of the evolution of English since the seventeenth century: 1
2
‘native Englishes,’ spoken in the United Kingdom, North America, Australia, and New Zealand (that is, in its original homeland and in the settlement colonies where populations of European descent have become demographic majorities); ‘Creole/pidgin Englishes,’ which developed especially in the Caribbean and on the islands of the Pacific; and
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The structural differences between various ‘world Englishes’ are due not to the nature of the restructuring processes that led to their emergence but to a number of ecological factors, including: 1 the kinds of input varieties that the new speakers were exposed to: in the case of the varieties disfranchised as ‘indigenized/nativized Englishes,’ scholastic varieties as opposed to vernacular ones; 2 the modes of language ‘transmission’ involved: through teaching in school in the case of indigenized Englishes, through intuitive learning in the other cases; and 3 patterns of interaction with native speakers of the metropolitan kind (of which there was very little in the case of Creole varieties) versus interaction mostly among non-native speakers (as in the incipient stages of Creole varieties and in the post-colonial autonomization of ‘indigenized Englishes’). In sum, the differences are due to the way in which variation in the contact ecologies influenced the appropriation of English by its new speakers. In the case of ‘native Englishes,’ English mostly became a kind of koine – or koine-ized – among its traditional speakers, who found themselves interacting regularly with speakers of other dialects (Mufwene 2001; Schneider 2007). The new, colonial variety was appropriated by other speakers after the critical period in the speciation process, changing little afterwards (Mufwene 2008; Trudgill 2008). Whatever the most accurate account of the speciation process is, the end result is that there are several English varieties spoken around the world today, although some are treated as less legitimate than others. Several varieties are not mutually intelligible, owing to differences both in the particular earlier colonial forms of the koines they have evolved from and to the varying extents to which they have diverged from the relevant initial koines. For instance, as noted above, ‘indigenized Englishes’ generally started from artificial scholastic varieties and diverged under the influence of the indigenous languages spoken by the elite populations who used them (primarily as lingua francas). Creole varieties started from non-standard forms of koine spoken by the indentured servants and early Creole slaves with whom the Bozal slaves – who appropriated colonial vernacular languages as their own – interacted. An important difference between ‘Creole’ and ‘native’ Englishes lies in the fact that the latter evolved in settings where populations of European descent became demographic majorities, whereas the Creole varieties evolved in ecologies where African slaves or non-European contract laborers became overwhelming majorities quite early in the evolution of the colonies and influenced the new vernacular languages by giving them features of the ones they had previously spoken.11 To be sure, even where ‘native Englishes’ evolved, populations of English descent have become minorities, being overwhelmed demographically by populations
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from continental Europe. However, the latter did not shift to English as early as the African slaves on the plantations. By the ‘founder principle’ (Mufwene 1996, 2001), those who shifted later, after the critical period during the divergence process, exerted less influence on the emergent colonial varieties than those who had done it earlier. Since the end of World War II, and even more so after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, English has spread all over the world, so to speak, having become a convenient lingua franca of trade and scholarship in continental Europe and in many places elsewhere that have not been colonized by England or the United Kingdom. Kachru (1983) refers to these new territories as the “Expanding Circle,” where English, identified among teachers as a ‘foreign language,’ is used strictly as lingua franca for communication with outsiders, but is not an official language (see also Swaan 2007). This is set in contrast both with what Kachru calls the “Inner Circle” – a territory corresponding to the United Kingdom and its former settlement colonies, where English is spoken as the (dominant) vernacular – and with what he calls the “Outer Circle” – a territory corresponding to the former exploitation colonies, where English, identified among teachers as ‘second language,’ functions as an official language and serves as lingua franca for communication both among members of the elite class and with the outside world. This world-wide geographical expansion beyond the United States and the British Commonwealth has led some scholars (for instance Crystal 1997; McArthur 1998; McCrum et al. 2002; Pennycook 2007) to characterize English as a ‘global language,’ comparable to Latin after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. As noted above, colonial varieties of the Romans’ language continued to be used as the vernacular of the emergent Roman-style towns and as the lingua franca of international trade (for instance in the Hanseatic League), whereas the standard variety – Classical Latin – functioned as the language of scholarship, but had a less successful ‘story’ from the point of view of language evolution. In any case, an important question is whether it is justified to speak of a ‘global English’ any more than of a ‘global Latin.’
The Fallacy of ‘Global English’ As global as English has been claimed to be, it is not evenly distributed around the world. The average population speaking it fluently in the ‘Outer Circle’ countries hardly exceeds 20 percent. India, the most populous country of the lot, stands out with only 30 percent of English speakers, and the Philippines is rather exceptional with its proportion of 46 percent speakers (Kingsley 2008). The number of those who speak English as a foreign language is even smaller in countries of the ‘Expanding Circle.’ As travelers to places such as Japan and Taiwan must have noticed, one cannot visit just any country around the world and hope to get by with English only, especially in rural areas. Even more striking is the fact that the proportion of confident speakers is way below the expected yield, considering all the energy, time, and money invested in teaching and learning English as a foreign
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language in countries such as Japan and South Korea. Overall, the extent of the spread of English in the ‘Expanding Circle’ correlates more or less with the extent to which particular countries participate in the world-wide globalized economy, which is in turn correlated with each country’s glocalization index. In places that are still on the margins of economic globalization, the presence of English remains scant, especially where the rural population still exceeds the urban one. Although one will always come across peddlers who manage to speak some English at craft markets and in other touristic areas, for commercial purposes, the proportion of educated people who still do not speak English (confidently) is too high to be overlooked. On the other hand, as is well explained by McArthur (1998), the expression ‘English as a global language’ has misled some into speaking of ‘global English,’ analogously to speaking of ‘world English’ (translated from the French anglais mondial). The suggested reference is to what the proponents expect to be a universal standard, used as lingua franca by all speakers of various English varieties (‘native’ and ‘non-native’), some of which are not mutually intelligible. Crystal (1997), who appears to have started the trend, also identifies this variety as “world standard spoken English” (WSSE). He expects it to arise from the will to overcome the diversity that has ensued from the world-wide spread of English, as described above. If WSSE were to arise spontaneously, or could do so at all, it would be the first such evolution toward linguistic uniformity in the history of language spread and contact. The universal trend has been for the prevailing language to diversify, especially in the spoken form, as is made evident by the history of English itself and, before it, by that of Latin. Worse for the wishful thinking, even Standard English itself, which is controlled by several institutions, has diversified. It seems utopian to me to conjecture that speakers of ‘native Englishes’ will be accommodating, midway, all those other populations speaking their language with a foreign element, and will thus contribute to the development of some WSSE, in order to guarantee mutual intelligibility. The conjecture is disconnected from the way English has been spoken (and written/read) in international interactions. Typically, speakers of ‘native Englishes’ have spoken their varieties with some arrogance; the burden has been on speakers of ‘non-native Englishes,’ which are generally treated as ‘deviations’ from the metropolitan norms (see Swaan 2007, citing Quirk 1990), to ‘improve’ their intelligibility – not the other way around. The only time when the accommodation has proceeded in the other direction has been when people from the ‘Inner Circle’ have found themselves residing in the ‘Outer Circle’: especially their children have made most of the adjustments, the way children of (im)migrants normally adjust, in any host setting, even to a stigmatized variety. Crystal completely overlooks the fact that the vast majority of speakers of English world-wide do not speak a standard variety (local or regional). Therefore they have no motivation for, nor would they be particularly invested in, speaking some sort of Standard English in cross-cultural interactions that are normally
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informal.12 However ‘global’ the English language has become – in the sense of being a language that is spoken almost anywhere on our planet and permeates so many diverse domains of modern life (McArthur 1998) – it will continue to ‘indigenize’ everywhere, acquiring local characteristics in the same way it has done to date. To be sure, it is legitimate to speak of ‘English as a global language,’ as this phrase underscores the fact that English has spread geographically so as to serve especially as an international lingua franca in various domains, in a way in which no other world language ever has. On the other hand, the notion of a global English with uniform structural features all over the world is a utopia we may as soon forget about. It is not even consistent with the process of world-wide economic globalization itself, which has speeded the spread of English on a planetary scale. Note that English is not even the only language of the global economy, since manufacturers trade in different languages, making sure that they secure profitable markets everywhere they can. Thus American companies use German to trade with the Germans in Germany and Japanese to trade with the Japanese in Japan. The others do just the opposite in trading with anglophone countries. It just so happens that, thanks to colonial history, there are so many such countries. In a way, one can argue that English has spread as a business language not only because of American military and economic hegemony, but also because almost any country in the world would like to trade with the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other important members of the former British Commonwealth. As much as the British Council has been accused of spreading English, it is responding to demands for the language. The need for this asset is created elsewhere, especially in the way world-wide global economy has evolved. On the other hand, economic globalization has not produced, nor is it producing, socioeconomic uniformity. On the contrary, it has replaced old forms of diversity with new ones, producing several local adaptations in modes of production and consumption (Tomlinson 1999, 2007), along with various forms of economic inequity (Stiglitz 2002; Blommaert 2003; Florida 2005, 2007). The so-called ‘McDonaldization’ of the world has proceeded with adaptations to local tastes and customs, using local major languages rather than English everywhere. (Don’t count on English to order your meal at a McDonald’s in France or Brazil!) The world-wide distribution of Hollywood movies has been more in the interest of profits than in the service of American English and culture. Movies have generally been translated into several major languages, and the plots have often been modified to the tastes of local markets (Marling 2006). The evidence suggests that the practice of English in all the ‘circles’ – ‘inner,’ ‘outer,’ and ‘expanding’ – is always embedded in local cultures and is always influenced by the previous linguistic habits of the new speakers. We may as well brace ourselves for more diversity. Crystal (1997) and McArthur (1998) are not at all mistaken in comparing the spread of this imperial language to that of Latin, which has speciated into the Romance languages – and, I may add (along with Posner 1996 and Trask 1996), further into the Romance Creoles.
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Will there Be an English-Only Europe? A concomitant of the myth of the emergence of a ‘global English’ has been the growing fear that, because it is increasingly being used as the lingua franca of western Europe and of the European Union, English is endangering the vitality of other continental European languages and driving western Europe toward monolingualism (Phillipson 2003,13 Hagège 2006). Noteworthy is also the literature on language endangerment that has painted English as the ‘killer language’ par excellence, likely to displace indigenous languages everywhere. On the example of North America and in Australia, the geographical expansion of English has been feared to eliminate linguistic diversity and to push in the direction of world-wide monolingualism (see for instance Crystal 2000, 2004; Nettle and Romaine 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000). What has been totally ignored in this respect is the political and apparently also ethnographic distinction, which Kachru (1983) so aptly captures, between the ‘Inner Circle,’ the ‘Outer Circle,’ and the ‘Expanding Circle.’ From the point of view of language vitality, the usage of English as a vernacular in the ‘Inner Circle’ must be distinguished from usage as an official language and as an important lingua franca of the intra-national elite in the ‘Outer Circle,’ as well as from its status as a foreign lingua franca, used for communication with outsiders by nationals of the ‘Expanding Circle.’14 It is the vernacular function of English in places where it has also prevailed as the dominant or only language of the economy that has fostered nation-wide monolingualism. Both in the ‘Outer Circle’ and in the ‘Expanding Circle’ multilingualism has been the norm; English is still far from evolving into a lingua franca of the majority; and the fear that it will drive indigenous languages to extinction remains an unsubstantiated myth. Members of the ‘Expanding Circle’ such as Japan and Taiwan, whose highly glocalized economies function in the local vernaculars, appear to have realized that they need English only at the interface with the world-wide globalized economy, in which it is wise to trade in the buyer ’s language (as was also observed by Ostler 2005). This also explains why only those who are likely to interact with the outside world are seriously interested in speaking English (fluently). From an ethnographic perspective, the goal for learners/speakers seems to be the acquisition/command of the foreign language for communication with the foreign market or places one visits as a tourist, rather than the acquisition of a new vernacular in lieu of the current one. Those who emigrate to Anglophone territories make the necessary adjustments after resettling. Depending on whether or not they settle in host communities where they can continue to speak their heritage languages, they may maintain them or they may gradually become less competent in them. Even if the immigrants shift to English as their (dominant) vernacular, they constitute, typically, (small) minorities compared to the populations left behind in their homelands. Thus they, collectively, constitute no threat to the vitality of their heritage languages – and certainly not more so than the massive migrations, free and forced alike, which were associated with the
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European colonization and settlement of parts of the world between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries and with the large ethnic Diasporas that this process has created. It is also noteworthy that the gap between countries of the economic North (including Australia) and countries of the economic South keeps increasing, although polities such as Singapore, Brazil, and China are crossing the divide. Many parts of the world, including large pockets of China, still remain on the margins of world-wide economic and cultural globalization. Even after such countries participate in this complex network, local aspects of their economies will continue to function in their national languages, as is obvious from places such as the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries. More significant is actually the fact that most of the populations in countries that are on the margins of worldwide globalization are still rural, generally outside of tourist traffic routes, and not directly involved in international trade. Even if school children learn a little bit of English, for them the language is just a subject similar to geography and history; it is not necessarily associated with potential personal benefits of with travel abroad and jobs that require competence in this ‘second’ or ‘foreign’ language. The little knowledge acquired is lost as quickly as that of various other subjects learned in school, which lack practical applications to the subjects’ lives. It is ludicrous to suggest that teaching English as a foreign language in Third World schools is endangering the relevant indigenous languages. Even in places such as Japan, which have a high glocalization index, the people who take advantage of English classes are mostly those who wish to visit anglophone countries or to get senior white-collar jobs for which competence in the foreign language is an asset. Because English is not needed as an alternative vernacular or as lingua franca for communication among Japanese in Japan, just as it is not in many other countries of the ‘Expanding Circle,’ the majority of learners are not particularly invested in the language, especially since they can earn a decent living in their heritage language. In countries of the ‘Outer Circle,’ the fact that English is needed only in the small white-collar sector of the industry and the rest of the economy functions in the indigenous languages, compounded by the fact that lucrative white-collar jobs are not likely to increase, has kept in check the spread of English within the overall population. Every person who has gone to high school has undoubtedly learned the (ex-)colonial language, but not everybody feels invested in practicing it, which spells atrophy on the (little) competence acquired in school. Not even call centers in India and the Philippines have contributed to spreading English any further. As large as the number of jobs they provide may sound, one must remember that India and the Philippines are densely populated nations. The market is still very limited, already saturated, and accessible to people who have already invested in English anyway and are apt to learn a stage variety, used only at work but not for socialization with one’s fellow countrymen. As a matter of fact, the call centers of India and of the Philippines are showing that people do not just decide to stop speaking their heritage language, especially while they continue to live with relatives who still function in them (Mufwene
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2005, 2008). Practical multilingualism for professional purposes does not of necessity spell the death of one’s heritage language(s). Such death occurs insidiously, when the socioeconomic structure of the relevant populations forces them to communicate more often in a dominant language other than their ancestral one, without them realizing what the long-term effect of their communicative practices is, namely loss of the capacity to use their respective heritage languages. In many parts of the Anglophone world, English is no more dangerous to the indigenous languages than McDonald’s eateries are to their traditional cuisines. There are certainly endangered languages in the ‘Outer ’ and ‘Expanding Circles’, but (the spread of) English has nothing to do with their condition.
Conclusions The claim that economic globalization has helped spread English as a lingua franca around the world is certainly not groundless. However, it makes more sense when the process is related to colonization, to which globalization is originally connected. Much of the impetus that today’s globalization has given to the spread of English is also largely attributable to the earlier role that colonization played in expanding the language geographically and demographically. It is true that English has become the kind of global language that Latin came to be after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Equally true is the fact that English has evolved in a way similar to Latin, indigenizing into new vernaculars in the settlement colonies (both as ‘Creole’ and as ‘native Englishes’) and speciating into national and international varieties of lingua franca in the ‘Outer ’ and ‘Expanding Circles’ (both as ‘pidgin’ and as ‘indigenized Englishes’). However, just like with Latin, its evolution is not in the direction of a uniform ‘global English’. This is significantly due to variation in the ecologies of its appropriation, which include: 1 2 3
the extent of the interactions the new speakers have had with speakers from the ‘Inner Circle’; the specific languages English has come in contact with; and the particular uses to which it has been put.
Rather than driving the world toward monolingualism, the differential evolution of English appears to be substituting a new form of diversity for an older one.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to Cécile B. Vigouroux for our numerous discussions on globalization and migrations, as well as for her critical and constructive feedback on a draft of this essay. I am solely responsible for the remaining shortcomings.
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NOTES 1 As aptly pointed out by Chaudenson (2008), this evolution of the meaning of ‘global’ as ‘world-wide’ or ‘universal’ is related to that of the word globe in its etymological meaning of ‘round body, ball, sphere,’ is used also to represent ‘planet Earth.’ The persistence of ‘comprehensive’ and ‘globular ’ among the meanings of ‘global’ should remind us that economists may have been mistaken in equating ‘globalization’ almost exclusively with what French linguists call mondialisation (Mufwene 2005) and with what Skutnabb-Kangas (2000) explains as ‘universalization.’ I argue below that what today is more specifically designated, especially by multiculturalists, as ‘glocalization’ – ‘local globalization’ – is perhaps where we all should start in order to make sense of how globalization as a world-wide phenomenon works, albeit in a patchy way. I even go so far as to propose a glocalization index: a measure (however inexplicit at this stage) of the degree of integration and strength of the domestic economic system of a territory. The index largely determines whether or not the territory functions as one of the centers, is on the margins, or is somewhere else on the continuum of interconnectedness and interdependences that characterize the world-wide networks of economic globalization. 2 Other examples include ASEAN (Association of SouthEast Asian Nations, involving Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, and Vietnam), NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement, involving the United States, Canada, and Mexico), and MERCOSUR/MERCOSUL (Mercado Commún/ Commun del Sur/do Sul ‘Southern Common Market’ involving Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay). 3 In a yet unpublished paper, Chaudenson (n.d.) highlights the role that rivers played as the earliest highways of long-distance trade, with canoes serving as the earliest, primitive vehicles for long-distance transportation. As a matter of fact, a closer examination of trade networks in the Hellenistic Empire created by Alexander the Great and in the Roman Empire shows how roads connected with rivers and rivers with seas, to ensure the smooth transportation of humans and commodities between on the one hand Athens and Rome and, on the other, the colonies. Then the saying “all roads lead to Rome” acquires fuller historical meaning. 4 Florida (2007) observes that, even within themselves, cities do not evolve uniformly either, displaying disparities between neighborhoods in their responses to pressures or demands of globalization. 5 This is somewhat reminiscent of the invasions of England by the Scandinavians during the ninth to the thirteenth century – which did not lead to the replacement of English by either Norse or Danish. 6 As explained in Mufwene (2005, 2008) and in Mufwene and Vigouroux (2008), this does not mean that indigenous languages, especially minority ones, are not endangered at all. They are typically threatened by other, major indigenous languages, notably by urban vernaculars and/or by regional lingua francas, which are associated with cash economy and modernity. 7 To be sure, the colonization associated with archaic Greece and then with the Roman Empire was already faster than in the earlier phases of the Indo-European dispersal, a few millennia earlier. As noted in the section on “Colonization and Globalization,” changes in speed are correlated with improvements in technology, especially in modes
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Salikoko S. Mufwene of transportation, and with military differences between the colonists/colonizers and the natives (Cowen 2001; Osterhammel and Peterson 2005). In the case of the Americas, the Europeans were also assisted by the deadly germs they brought with them, to which the natives were not (sufficiently) immune (Crosby 1992). As explained in Mufwene (2001), this disfranchising has had more to do with colonial political ideologies, in which linguists have been trapped, than with any peculiar ways in which language restructuring proceeded in the case of Creole vernaculars, which are clearly new, non-standard varieties of Indo-European languages spoken by non-European majorities who in general have also been marginalized socioeconomically. Hawaii is exceptional because of the particular time when and way in which it was colonized, although the new English varieties now spoken by descendants of the contract laborers are also disenfranchised as Creole or pidgin. Unlike the slaves in the Caribbean and in the Indian Ocean, the Hawaiian contract laborers were not ethnically mixed and their descendants are still identified by their traditional ethnicities, namely as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Filipino. They have also maintained cultural ties with their ‘nations’ of origin. The same literature is also ambivalent about the acrolectal English varieties of the Caribbean, which are the vernaculars adopted by non-negligible proportions of the populations, although these populations constitute minorities. In any case, overlooking them in the present discussion bears little on the accuracy of the position I defend below against the notion of a global English. After all, the typology is essentially sociological, if not political. It contributes little to understanding why and how English has evolved differentially during its spread around the world (Mufwene 2001). Linguists have generally been ill at ease with this explanation, as they had rather not address this racial bias in accounts of the emergence of Creoles. The very fact of arbitrarily isolating ‘Creoles’ or ‘basilectal varieties’ from their ‘acrolects’ in a universe where most of the populations are to be situated somewhere on a continuum between these extreme analytical constructs confirms the bias that these linguists deny. Speakers of ‘native Englishes’ too can be plotted on continua between the ‘standard’ and ‘nonstandard’ varieties. Assuming that colonial ‘native Englishes’ are also contact-based English, ‘Creoles’ are really the counterparts of non-standard ‘Englishes’ in North America, Australia, and the like, except that they are spoken predominantly by populations of non-European descent (Mufwene 2008). This is a phenomenon particularly well grasped by House (2003). Many speakers of English, especially from the ‘Expanding Circle,’ do not see the language as a marker of cultural or social identity, although it is evidently an asset. The reality is that, although speakers normally make adjustments to each other, usage of English as an international lingua franca is not associated with a particular community of practice, which would foster the emergence of a common norm. Television and the radio are not interactive enough to produce it; communication on the Internet is not of the kind that can go beyond simply familiarizing its users with diversity; and professional conferences are not regular enough to fulfill Crystal’s dream. As well pointed out by Florida (2007), world-wide globalization is not eradicating locality. This is precisely where the action of evolution lies. The heading of this section was obviously borrowed from the title of Phillipson’s book, which expresses a fear that I believe to be exaggerated. However, my discussion covers many other parts of the world, to which the same considerations apply. See Mufwene (2005, 2008), and a good deal of the literature on ‘world Englishes’ – particularly Kachru, Kachru, and Neslon (2006), and Schneider (2007).
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Crystal, D. (2000) Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, D. (2004) The Language Revolution. Cambridge: Polity. Diamond, J. (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton. Florida, R. (2005) The world is spiky: Globalization has changed the economic playing field, but hasn’t leveled it. Atlantic Monthly, October, 48–51. Florida, R. (2007) Pity the tri-city Toronto. Globeandmail.com, Opinions. December 22. Garnsey, P., and Saller, R. (1987) The Roman Empire: Economy, Society, and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hagège, C. (2006) Combat pour le français: au nom de la diversité des langues et des cultures. Paris: Odile Jacob. House, J. (2003) English as a lingua franca: A threat to multilingualism? Journal of Sociolinguistics 7: 556–78. Huber, M. (1999) Atlantic Ceoles and the lower Guinea Coast: A case against Afrogenesis. In M. Huber and M. Parkvall (eds), Spreading the Word: The Issue of Diffusion among the Atlantic Creoles, 81–110. London: University of Westminster Press. Janson, T. (2004) A Natural History of Latin: The Story of the World’s Most Successful Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kachru, B. (1983) The Indianization of English: The English Language in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kachru, B., Kachru, Y., and Neslon, C. (eds) (2006) The Handbook of World Englishes. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Keohane, R. O., and Nye, J. S. (2000) Globalization: What’s new? What’s not?
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(And so what?) Foreign Policy 118: 104–19. Kingsley, B. (2008) World Englishes in global contexts. The Braj and Yamuna Kachru Distinguished Lecture in the Linguistics Sciences. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, October 9. Landa, M. de (2000) A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Swerve Editions. Leith, D. (2007) English – Colonial to postcolonial. In D. Graddol, D. Leith, J. Swaan, M. Rhys, and J. Gillen (eds), Changing English, 117–52. London: Routledge. Marling, W. H. (2006) How ‘American’ is Globalization? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. McArthur, T. (1998) The English Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCrum, R., Cran, W., and McNeil, R. (2002) The story of English, 3rd edn. London: Faber and Faber/BBC Books. Mignolo, W. D. (2000) Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mufwene, S. S. (1996) The Founder Principle in creole genesis. Diachronica 13: 83–134. Mufwene, S. S. (2001) The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mufwene, S. S. (2005) Créoles, écologie sociale, évolution linguistique. Paris: L’Harmattan. Mufwene, S. S. (2008) Language Evolution: Contact, Competition, and Change. London: Continuum Press. Mufwene, S. S. (2009) The indigenization of English in North America. T. Hoffmann and L. Siebers (eds), World Englishes: Problems, Properties, Prospects, 335–68. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Mufwene, S. S., and Vigouroux, C. B. (2008) Colonization, globalization, and language vitality in Africa: An
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2 Language Systems ABRAM DE SWAAN
The human species is divided into some 6,000 groups, each one of which speaks a different language and does not understand any of the others. Yet this fragmentation is overcome by people who speak more than one language and thus ensure communication between different groups. Multilingual speakers have kept together humanity, separated as it is by so many language barriers. Accordingly, a language (sub-)system consists of a set of ‘language groups,’ each one being defined by a common language and all being connected to one another through the mediation of multilingual speakers. Such multilingual connections between language groups do not occur haphazardly but constitute a surprisingly efficient, strongly ordered, hierarchical network, which ties together – directly or indirectly – the 6.5 billion inhabitants of the earth at the global level. This ingenious pattern of connections between all language groups on earth constitutes the world language system.1 In addition to the political, economic, ecological, and cultural dimensions of the ‘world system,’ this world-wide constellation of languages constitutes its linguistic dimension, with a periphery, a ‘semi-periphery,’ and a ‘core.’2 The vast majority of the languages in today’s world – some 98 percent of them – survive in quite marginal positions within the global language system: these are the ‘peripheral languages’ and, although there are thousands of them, altogether they are spoken by less than 10 percent of mankind. They are languages of memory; they function almost entirely without script, media, or records. The small, peripheral language groups tended to be connected mostly to adjacent communities, as intermarriage and local trade taught local people to speak the language of the nearby villages. But, since they were increasingly confronted by teachers, policemen, officials, and traders from the nearest city, such people are now more likely to acquire one and the same second language: the medium of government and of the market. This is, in each case, the language which is ‘central’ to a cluster of these peripheral language groups, like a planet surrounded by so many moons. The speakers of Frisian, Papiamento, Limburgish, and Sranan Tongo, for example, only rarely speak each other ’s language and, if they know a
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second language, that tends to be Dutch, which is both the central language in their group and the language of the state. There may be some 150 languages (about 3 percent of the total) that occupy this central or ‘planetary’ position in the global language system. Taken together, they are spoken by 95 percent of mankind. These central languages are used in schools; they appear in print, in newspapers, in textbooks, and in fiction; they are current on the internet; and they are spoken on the radio and on television. Most often they are used in parliament, in the bureaucracy, and in courts. They usually are ‘national’ languages, and quite often such a language constitutes the official language of the state that rules the area. For each central language there exists a standard version, regulated by a standardized grammar, syntax, vocabulary, orthography, and pronunciation. Much of what has been said and written in these languages is recorded and preserved for posterity. Usually there is also a recognized corpus of classical texts, which embody the sediment of the use of the language by preceding generations. Quite a few speakers of a central language are multilingual: first of all, there are those whose native speech is one of the peripheral languages and who in due course have acquired the central language. In fact everywhere in the world the number of this type of bilinguals is on the increase, as a result of the spread of elementary education and of the printed word, as well as of the impact of radio broadcasting. The complementary type – that of native speakers of the central language who have learned one of the peripheral languages – is much less common. Apparently, language learning occurs mostly upward. By the same token, native speakers of a central language tend to acquire a second language, which is usually more widely spread and higher up in the hierarchy. At this level, each cluster of central language groups is connected, through multilingual speakers, to a very widespread language group, which occupies a ‘supercentral’ position within the system – much like planets (each with its own moons) circling around a sun. The supercentral language serves purposes of longdistance and international communication. There are about a dozen of these: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, and Turkish. All these languages, except Swahili, number more than 100 million speakers; Mandarin Chinese (in its written version) and English (including foreign speakers) each number around a billion users. Each supercentral language connects the speakers of a cluster of central languages. Thus La Francophonie consists in the language groups that communicate through French as their supercentral language. If an Arab and a Chinese, or a Spaniard and a Japanese, meet, they will almost certainly make themselves understood in one and the same language – one that connects the supercentral languages with one another and therefore constitutes the pivot of the world language system. This ‘hypercentral’ language, which holds together the entire constellation, is, of course, English, in the hub of the linguistic galaxy – like a black hole devouring all languages that come within its reach. English has not always held that position. It has only done so for little more than the half of a century, and one day it may lose its hypercentral function again.
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However, in the next decades English is only likely to gain many more speakers, on account of the dynamics of language spread.
The Communication Potential of a Language: The Q-Value The relatively autonomous dynamic of a language constellation also results from the interplay of individual expectations. If people anticipate that a language will become current in their section of the world language system, they will not hesitate to adopt it themselves; but if, on the other hand, they suspect that in their environment one language will be abandoned for another, they themselves will use it less, will neglect to teach it to their children, and will favor the new language. Nowadays these expectations may affect not only regional or national languages but also those spoken on a continental or even on a global scale, as is demonstrated by the current fate of French and Russian as second languages – in francophone lands (the lands of La Francophonie) and in the ‘near abroad’ of the former Soviet Union, respectively. Suppose that one person were to choose the language which seemed most useful, the one which offered the greatest possibilities of communication, either directly or through the mediation of an interpreter or translator. The language selected will be the one that is most prevalent in the relevant language constellation, offering an opportunity for direct communication with the largest number of people in it – and all the more if that language has also been acquired as a foreign one by a large number of bilingual individuals; for these can provide an indirect connection with a third language, through interpretation or translation. The constellation will be global, continental, or regional, as the case may be. The utility of a language, i, for a given speaker in a constellation or subconstellation, S, can be expressed in terms of its ‘communication value,’ Qi, which indicates its potential to link this speaker with other speakers in S. The ‘prevalence,’ pi, of language i refers to the number of speakers, Pi, who are competent in i, divided by all the speakers, NS, in constellation S. ‘Centrality,’ ci, refers to the number of multilingual speakers, Ci, who speak language i, divided by all the multilingual speakers in constellation S, MS. The communication or Q-value equals the product of the prevalence (pi) and the centrality (ci) of language i in constellation S. The formula can be written as follows: Qi = pi × ci = ( Pi N S ) × (Ci M S ) A numerical example may illustrate the calculation of Qi. Imagine a system S with four languages: i, j, k, and l. Suppose there are 150 speakers who only know language i, 100 who only speak j, 250 who only speak k, and 200 who only know l. Moreover, 10 speakers are competent in the combination i and j, 30 in i and l, 20 in j and l, 30 in k and l, and 10 in i, j, and l.
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It follows that the total number of speakers (NS) in the constellation S is 800, and the total number of multilingual speakers (MS) in S is 100. The prevalence of language i (pi) is calculated by adding the number of monolingual speakers of i (150) to the number of multilingual speakers of i in i and j, i and l, and i, j and l (50 in all): Pi = 200. The number of multilingual speakers who also speak i (Ci) is 50. Equally, Pj = 140, and Cj is 40; Pk = 280, and Ck is 30; Pl = 290 and Cl is 90. Qi = ( Pi N S ) × (Ci M S ) = ( 200 800 ) × ( 50 100 ) = 0.125 Accordingly, Qj = 0,07; Qk = 0,105; Ql = 0,32625. Language l, with bilinguals from all other three languages, clearly scores highest, due to its high centrality; it is indeed positioned as the central language of the constellation. The Q-value of a repertoire with several languages may be calculated in a similar manner.3 The current scarcity and unreliability of statistics on language competencies do not permit a more elaborate measure. A simpler measure would lack validity. Elsewhere, I have published the Q-values of the official languages of the member states in the European Union/Community since 1975.4 As might be expected, English obtained the highest score. Although German was much more current as a mother-tongue, the large number of multilingual speakers competent in English gave the latter the greatest prevalence and, necessarily, the strongest centrality. The case of French is of special interest, since it had a weaker prevalence than German (and certainly than English), and yet, because so many more Europeans had learned French, not German, as a foreign language, French still obtained a higher Q-value than German until around 1995, when German overtook it. Apparently this measurement reflects the rough assessments based on the rather vague estimates that people make when considering which foreign language to learn. In fact, these estimates also reflect the anticipated decisions of others – in other words, the future state of the constellation. When such expectations reinforce one another, they result in a stampede towards the language expected to win; and the language in question will in fact win because of those very expectations. The world-wide preference for English as a foreign language is the most spectacular example. This touches upon the very core of the political economy of language, a speciality so far hardly developed. Since a language has utility, it constitutes a good in the economic sense. But what sort of good? First, language is not consumed by being used. On the contrary, the more people use it, the better it serves each one of them. Language is freely accessible to all – no price can be exacted for using it. Moreover, it cannot be created by one person alone, and not everyone needs to collaborate in order to create or maintain it (so no one has a veto). These characteristics define a language as a collective good. But there is more: not only does a language not lose its utility when more speakers use it; all users actually gain from an increase in its use. A similar effect also occurs with standards for new products, as in the case of operating systems like Apple or Windows for computers or Blu-ray and HDD for DVD-players: their
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value for each user increases with the number of users – a phenomenon known as ‘external network effect’ and also displayed by languages. However, while technical standards are incorporated in a consumer product that must be purchased and this fact allows for the exclusion of those who will not pay, no one can be excluded from a collective good such as a language. Languages, displaying as they do the properties of collective goods and also producing external network effects, thus constitute a special category: they are ‘hypercollective’ goods. This hypercollective quality can trigger a stampede from one language to another, although the movement can be retarded by the time and the effort required in order to learn the new language and by the impossibility to forget the old tongue quickly. The abandonment of a language can be prevented only when a critical mass of speakers is committed to preserving it, so that a minimal Q-value will be guaranteed. Individual users will of course be tempted to abandon the old language and to adopt the new one as they assign a superior Q-value to the latter. Acting in this way, they procure an advantage for themselves, but simultaneously they reduce the value of the old language for those who continue to use it. A ‘guaranteed’ Q-value therefore requires measures to be taken in order to prevent people from switching languages, and this necessitates either collective action from language speakers of the language or compulsory state intervention (as France briefly imposed in recent times). This argument provides the foundation for an economic theory of language politics – and even for an economic theory of ethnic politics. The hypercollective nature of a language applies also to its past. One might imagine that all communication leaves a sediment in the form of texts, either in human memory or in physical record of one form or another – written or printed on paper, or recorded in digital form. The totality of these memorized, written, or otherwise recorded texts constitutes the cumulative cultural capital of that language – a capital accessible only through the language itself. This capital is hypercollective in nature, for the simple reason that the more people contribute to it and draw from it, the more useful the capital becomes for each one of them. Clearly, with the disappearance of a language, the corresponding cultural capital would lose its value. At this point one might envisage the elaboration of an economic theory of culture – of linguistic culture at the very least. Once again, two issues must be confronted: on the one hand, the individual temptation to switch and, on the other, the need for collective action or public constraint so as to prevent such ‘defections.’ Languages define areas of communication. Beyond these limits, cultural practices and products travel with greater ease the less they depend on language: the visual arts cross much more easily than, say, poetry. For language-bound culture to transcend linguistic barriers, either the services of specialized bilinguals such as translators are required, or a foreign audience that has learned the language of the original version. Language both insulates and protects the language-bound cultural elites in its domain: on the one hand, what they produce does not, on its own, transpire to
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the outside world; on the other hand, cultural production in other languages cannot penetrate that domain and compete there directly – it requires local competence in these foreign languages or translation into the domestic language. This insulation operates more intensely for the less widely spread languages. As a result, the cultural elites concerned are faced with a dilemma: to adopt a more widely spread second language and compete with many more producers, on a much larger market – the ‘cosmopolitan strategy’; or to stick to their less widely spread language and compete with only a few others for a much more restricted public – the ‘local strategy.’ Thus, say, Surinamese, Frisian, or Antillean authors face the dilemma of choosing between, respectively, Sranan, Frisian or Papiamento on the one hand, and Netherlandish5 on the other. At the next system level, Dutch authors, in turn, have had to confront the choice between publishing in Netherlandish or English. The case for remaining with the smaller language is usually better argued for and more explicitly advocated than its opposite – the choice of the larger language. The arguments most commonly presented for the first case are three-fold. First, the small idiom is threatened, it would even disappear as people abandon it in increasing numbers, and it would eventually meet ‘language death.’6 Next, the same argument may be generalized from language to all indigenous verbal practices and products: these are bound to disappear unless the language in which they are embedded continues to be spoken and understood. The phenomenon would erode the sense of personal identity and of identification with the community. Finally, linguistic imperialism and the pursuit of cultural hegemony are only abetted by ‘defectors’ from the smaller language group who adopt the more widely spread language.7 Choosing the larger language, on the other hand, will not just improve career prospects for its new practitioners, it will also open up a larger world with broader knowledge, a more varied culture, and a greater diversity of lifestyles and moral options.
Recorded Language as Collective Cultural Capital The dilemmas of a choice between the local and the cosmopolitan position within the global language system have been clarified through the notions of the hypercollective character of languages and of the Q-value of language repertoires. The next concept to be introduced, that of ‘collective cultural capital’ – that is, the totality of available texts in a given language – allows us to demonstrate the dilemmas of collective action that are involved in the effort to preserve the cultural heritage, embedded as it is in language. First, under what conditions do authors and speakers prefer the free exchange of language-bound products, or texts, and when will they choose to protect their community from the linguistic encroachments that may well result from the free exchange of texts with a larger language community? And, second, under what conditions will they resort to collective measures in order to protect their common language?
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In the international exchange of language-bound culture goods – that is, texts – transport costs play a minor role, decreasing to almost zero for electronic transmission. In this respect, texts are the international commodity par excellence. What can make foreign texts costly is the expense of translation. Interpreters or translators produce a version of a foreign text in the domestic idiom. Many members of the domestic public do not need translation services, being themselves competent in the foreign language. Learning an additional language is comparable to purchasing a second home in another country or opening a branch office there – and saving on transport expenses as a result.8 Acquiring a foreign language allows one to operate on two national markets and to save on translation costs.9 Like transportation costs and import duties, the costs of translation or of foreign language acquisition also function as a barrier protecting indigenous authors – that is, domestic producers of texts in the local language. As a consequence, a community where competence in a foreign language (especially one with a higher Q-value) is relatively scarce provides authors with a natural ‘protective’ barrier. Their captive audience finds itself restricted to domestic or translated texts, very much like consumers who must either buy goods produced domestically or pay transport costs and import duties. A somewhat chauvinistic public may not mind this situation too much, preferring products with a strong couleur locale. Authors who grew up with a peripheral language – one with a low Q-value – may find it to their advantage to write in it, if their (captive) audience is mostly monolingual. Their foreign competitors find themselves hampered by the costs of translation, which are quite forbidding in small language communities. The consumers of language-dependent culture, on their part, are best served by the most varied supply of texts, accessible at the lowest cost. In the smaller language communities, the supply of domestic texts is necessarily limited. Even much larger societies are often unable to produce textual genres that require an extensive infrastructure, a very high investment, or a mass audience – for instance scientific publications, TV series or spectacular films.10 They are dependent on translated imports. An author in a small language community has three options: 1
to accept the limitations of the domestic audience: a low–risk and low-gain proposition; 2 to learn a foreign tongue with a high Q-value well enough to be able to compose texts in it: a major and high-risk investment; 3 to find a foreign publisher who will commission a translation into the high-Q language (this, too, requires a considerable and risky investment – on the part of the publisher). But, in options (2) and (3), the potential gains are proportional: a chance of large circulation on a much larger market.11 However, the two cosmopolitan strategies require good connections with foreign publishers and literati, in other words they demand transnational social capital.12
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The users of texts in the more peripheral languages who want to transcend the limitations of domestic supply equally face two options: either they pay for translation or they learn the language with the higher Q-value. In western Europe and in the US, almost all foreign language learning occurs in secondary school and the vast majority of the relevant age cohort does indeed attend full daytime education at that level.13 As a result, the investment is compulsory, and the effort is made at the very start of one’s career as a consumer of language-bound cultural goods. In other parts of the world, secondary school attendance is much lower. Sending a child to a school where foreign languages are offered is left to the parents who can afford it, or taking private language courses depends on the adult individual’s decision. Whether a foreign language is compulsory in school or not, the motivation to learn it increases when attractive cultural products are unavailable in translation into one’s own peripheral language. On the other hand, the incentive for publishers to translate texts in the more peripheral language decreases if increasing numbers of potential readers and spectators from that language area are also fluent in the more central language.14 In conclusion, restrictions on the translation and dissemination of foreign language-bound products will, paradoxically, increase the public’s motivation to learn a foreign language – an effect that may be much reinforced by the increased prestige of such foreign products.
Protectionism and Free Trade in Cultural Exchange There is, however, one caveat: authors in small languages have some reason to be worried by foreign competition; but so do their readers, who may come to fear that eventually their indigenous authors will be forced out of the field through the impact of translated and imported texts. Concern may grow that in the end this will lead to a general erosion of the mother tongue and of domestic culture in general – or, in the terms of this analysis, to an overall depreciation of the original investment in mastery of the mother tongue. In other words, the shortterm preferences of individual consumers may damage their collectively accumulated cultural capital in the long run. Moreover, given the low marginal costs of translated texts, the arguments from international trade theory about ‘dumping’ may well apply in the case of cultural exchange too.15 Television and movie conglomerates in the very large language communities, such as the USA, can afford to export comedy series and films at negligible rates, preventing the small countries at the receiving end from developing a domestic entertainment industry that can compete – even if only internally – with foreign imports. In fact, producers in Europe have petitioned the European Commission, at times successfully, to impose tariffs or quotas on imported films. Many EU states subsidize the translation of domestic literature for export. Governments may also decide to subsidize domestic production, because they consider certain texts as especially valuable: they are ‘merit goods,’ quite independently of actual demand. Merit goods can be
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defined as commodities that one agrees others should be using. The prestige of high art and high tradition may radiate towards people who themselves have no part in them. Equally, citizens from small countries who find themselves abroad may have a collective interest in the prestige of their national culture, even if they do not particularly care for it themselves, as individuals. The situation is entirely different for the former French and British colonies, especially in Africa, where the erstwhile colonial language remains the most central (but usually not the most prevalent) and the predominance of texts in the ex-colonial language actually hinders the emergence of cultural and scientific production in the indigenous languages. On the other hand, in many countries the former colonial language remains the only medium of exchange at the national level and therefore greatly facilitates communication at the global level. The unequal relations of power and prestige that prevail between different languages in a given constellation – for example between the higher, supercentral language and the central or even peripheral languages that must compete with it – also exist between the different versions of a single language – for instance between the standard version and the dialects of the domestic periphery (the ‘countryside,’ the ‘backwoods,’ the ‘banlieu’). And sometimes ‘local’ authors who write in the ‘dialect,’ or singers and comedians who speak it, occupy a separate niche, being sheltered by the limited intelligibility of their language variety to outsiders, and by its low prestige elsewhere. The users of a language with high Q-value, on the contrary, profit from the position their language occupies in the encompassing constellation of languages. Their advantage is a clear case of what economists would call ‘location rent.’16 Whenever an outsider acquires their mother tongue, they profit, as the ‘communication value’ of their language increases without any effort on their part. The tremendous advantages of this position may be seen when one looks at the exports of language-bound cultural goods from the US and Britain. This privilege is not won by birthright alone, it can also be acquired: quite a few writers, many singers and actors, legions of scientists and scholars have made the effort to acquire fluency in English and reaped the rewards that go with it. Nor does it come solely from a location in the English-speaking heartland, the US and the UK. An astonishing number of writers from peripheral societies where English prevails in some form have gained world-wide stature through their mastery of English prose. Success with the native English public often brings with it recognition from a world-wide audience, which has learned English as a foreign language. Next comes translation into the many languages that are linked to English through interpreters and translators. Not only the rent from linguistic capital enter the equation, but also the rent from the social capital based on a strategic position in the network of international cultural exchange. The authors in the large languages have little to fear from foreign competition: translation costs operate as a protective barrier. The effort demanded from foreign authors who want to write directly in English serves as a formidable barrier, protecting native authors. Moreover, the numbers of people who have learned to understand English grow at a spectacular pace, adding to the audience of
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English-language authors.17 It goes without saying that, under these conditions, the US and the UK are well advised to support free cultural exchange across the globe, even if they must do so unilaterally.18 The position of cultural consumers who learned English as their mother tongue is as privileged as that of the producers, if not more so: competition from abroad brings consumers only more variety in supply, while they need not fear at all for the survival of their own language and culture. On the contrary, all over the world tens of millions of students are busy learning English every day; in the process they improve their own position in the language constellation of the world and, unbeknownst to them, they also improve the value position of all other English speakers. All the while, native English speakers hardly realize what enviable blessing is bestowed upon them through the sheer accident of their having the mother tongue they have and through the learning efforts of a myriad of unknown foreigners. These benefits are almost entirely undeserved and unjustified; but so are most of the advantages and detriments that befall nations as accidents of geography and history: location, climate, natural resources, trade routes … Recently, a movement aiming to right the wrongs of language hegemony has spread across the western world: it advocates the right of all people to speak the language of their choice, to fight ‘language imperialism’ abroad and ‘linguicism’ at home, to strengthen ‘language rights’ in international law. Alas, what decides is not the right of human beings to speak whatever language they wish, but the freedom of everyone else to ignore what one says in the language of one’s own choice.19 If, on the other hand, people wish to communicate beyond the narrow circle of their linguistic peers, they have little choice but to learn the (super)central language that links them to wider circles of communication.
Monoglossia, Polyglossia, and Heteroglossia The users of a language share it as a hypercollective good. Having constituted a language community over the centuries, they have gradually accumulated a collection of texts recorded or memorized in their language.20 Just as every speaker added benefits to all others, every new text increases the collective cultural capital. In principle, a language community should be willing to subsidize new speakers to join its ranks, since these would increase the Q-value of the language for all members. Language courses for recent immigrants are indeed routinely subsidized in Israel and in EU countries such as the Netherlands. For the same reasons, it would be rational for the British or the American government – or for the French or German, for that matter – to sponsor courses abroad in their respective languages. But actually many students who find themselves out there are willing to pay for textbooks and tuition anyway, since they want to improve the Q-value of their repertoire by adding a widely spread language. Most governments subsidize foreign language learning in secondary schools at home. This, too, is rational, both for the individual who acquires a repertoire with
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higher Q-value and for the collectivity, since the domestic language grows in value: its centrality increases through the gain of multilinguals in the ranks of its speakers – namely students who have mastered a foreign language. In other words, all speakers of a language profit from the language learning efforts made only by some among them; they gain opportunities to find interpreters between the foreign language learned and their own, and this is reflected in an increase in centrality, a factor in the Q-value of their language. The same applies to speakers of the foreign language – again, without any activity on their part, since the Qvalue of that language also grows with the increase of its multilingual speakers. Where hypercollectivity prevails, language learning is a win–win game, with benefits for every one. The gain comes at a cost, however: the expense and effort of language learning itself. And there may be a hidden cost in the long run, namely desertion from the language with the smaller Q-value. Polyglossia,21 the coexistence of several languages in one society, often in distinct social domains, may constitute a lasting sociolinguistic equilibrium. But, under certain conditions, people may begin to abandon the language with the lesser Q-value – usually an indigenous language, often their mother tongue. In one domain after another, growing numbers of speakers choose the more central language for their use, commonly a more recent arrival in the area. A slow stampede out of the domestic tongue and toward the dominant language is underway. This is what sociolinguists call ‘language death’ or ‘language extinction.’ It is difficult not to depict the process as a tragic loss. The metaphor of death or extinction conjures up the image of a lost species. A biological species, however, may be saved by conserving the habitat where it finds its niche. For a language to survive, a considerable number of people must maintain their speech, and maybe their ways of life, against the inroads of a changing social and linguistic environment: a rather more precarious task. As speakers in the community of the original language become bilingual in increasing proportion, the added Q-value of being fluent (not only in the exogenous but also) in the indigenous language begins to diminish, since more and more people who speak it can also be reached through the other medium – until no one is left who speaks the domestic language only, and competence in it no longer adds to one’s Q-value.22 Children may now learn the new language at an ever earlier age, with increasing facility, and they may even adopt it as their mother tongue instead of the original language. This is by no means unusual. On the contrary, it is the ‘normal’ course of affairs in processes of nation formation and colonization. A powerful center extends its political, economic and cultural control over the periphery, be it adjacent or overseas, and its language spreads across the new territories. This process has occurred in the French province with Breton, Flemish, and Occitan and throughout the ‘Celtic fringe’ of the British Isles with Welsh, Scots, and Irish; it has also happened all over Latin America, under the impact of Spanish; while the small languages of memory in India and Indonesia, in South Africa and Senegal, in Nigeria and Congo (Zaire) are under the triple impact of the supercentral former colonial languages, of the (super)central domestic languages, and of the popular, vehicular ‘pidgins.’
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From an individual perspective, it is entirely rational for people to opt for the language with the larger Q-value. Only the costs of second-language learning and the emotional costs of abandoning one’s mother tongue will impede the transition to the dominant language. Once the great majority of the original language community has become bilingual and diglossia is well-nigh complete, another stage sets in, one that may well be called ‘heteroglossia’: the original language no longer adds much to the Q-value of individual repertoires (in fact, it adds less than its ‘maintenance’ costs) and it is increasingly being abandoned, as the dominant language takes over. However, at this point other considerations may become predominant: with the surrender of the indigenous language, the corresponding collective cultural capital becomes increasingly inaccessible. Either the texts must be translated into the dominant language, or the collective cultural stock is lost. In this case the individual cultural capital, predicated as it is on the collective capital, must be written off. (Of course, the new speakers of the hegemonic language acquire access to the collective cultural stock of their new language community in the process, and they may well consider this to be an adequate compensation for their loss). Since it usually does not pay for someone to translate endogenous texts into the hegemonic language on one’s own, a collective effort for cultural conservation must be made by the members of the language community in dissolution. But those who speak and act for this disbanding language community will most likely prefer to salvage the language not by translating its heritage, but by preventing the members of the community from deserting it in the first place: they will insist that a collective effort should be made to maintain the idiom, even if only as a second language. There will be pressure upon adults to continue to use it and upon children to go on learning it as their parents did.23 Clearly a community with an effective coordinating agency, for instance a political authority of its own, is in a much better position to impose its policies than a collectivity that must rely on voluntary compliance.24 Authors, as producers of texts, have a larger stake in the original language and in the conservation of its cultural stock than others, because of their costly investment in language skills and in knowledge of the accumulated texts. Moreover, the switch to the dominant language as a full means of expression requires from them a much larger effort than ffrom those who only speak it, hear it, and read it. And, finally, if and when the domestic language is maintained by a sufficiently large audience, this provides the indigenous authors with a protected market for their texts and gives them an added interest in maintaining the original language. Thus, unless they make up their mind to become cosmopolitans, venturing into the high-Q language community, authors will feel compelled to defend the domestic language. Translators and interpreters, too, have a vested interest in slowing down the spread of the dominant language and in preventing desertion from the original language, so as to maintain a clientele for their services. It should therefore come as no surprise that specialized producers and translators of texts are among the first to defend the domestic language, together with politicians, who
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wish to preserve their local support base, and community leaders or clergymen, who do not want to see their congregation disband as its unifying language evaporates. The ‘tipping point’ in the transition from diglossia to heteroglossia comes when those who speak both the indigenous and the exogenous language find that the costs of maintaining the local language begin to outweigh the latter ’s dwindling additional Q-value.25 This occurs when a considerable majority of the community has already become bilingual. Once desertion sets in, parents no longer teach the mother tongue to their children and no longer make an effort to speak it ‘correctly’ themselves. If the language is to survive at all, individual language maintenance is no longer enough. Young adults must be pressured into the much larger effort of learning what has by then become the language of their elders. In general, the gains that speakers may reap from the addition of new users of their language find their counterpart, under obverse conditions, in the increasing losses that the remaining speakers suffer once others begin to desert their language. Since language is a hypercollective good and cultural stock constitutes a collective good for the language community, language maintenance raises problems of collective action and confronts individual language users with its concomitant dilemmas: it would indeed make sense for everyone separately to maintain the original language if many others could be counted on to act likewise. However, since one cannot be sure that the others will do so, in each individual case maintenance of the original language appears not to be worth the effort. In such situations people often profess publicly their allegiance to the collective heritage, while in private they neglect their inherited language and culture and they try to improve their children’s career prospects by securing proficiency in the dominant language.26 On the whole, when the language community also constitutes a state, its government can avert a stampede out of the national language, even when a high degree of diglossia prevails. A government can do so by safeguarding the domains of domestic politics, national culture, education, law, and so forth as the preserve of the indigenous language, and by preventing the exogenous language from usurping all the prestigious functions. In short, it is the state that can keep its official language ‘robust.’ Thus some European countries – like the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Denmark – are rapidly approaching a state of universal multilingualism and pervasive diglossia, where up to 80 percent of the population is more or less competent in English. But at present there are no signs of abandonment or neglect of the national languages in these countries. The domestic language continues to function in a series of distinct social domains, while English dominates in others. Even if switching between the two languages is frequent, the one hardly encroaches upon the other.27 Still, even if there is no reason for alarm, there is sufficient cause to remain alert: English could make inroads into new domains of speech, and the national languages could continue to lose prestigious functions. But, most probably, European languages will prove vital enough to maintain their specific domains under the pressure of English.
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The Case of the European Union In a sociolinguistic perspective, the European Union represents a subsystem of the global language system, but one with a multitude of strongly anchored national traditions. From the outset, the official language of every member state was recognized as an official language of the European Community and, later, of the European Union. In 1956, the six founding members contributed four languages: Dutch, French, German, and Italian – an almost manageable number. Without much discussion, French was accepted as the working language of the Community’s budding bureaucracy, as it had been the language of diplomacy until the end of World War II and the sole language of the European Coal and Steel Community, which preceded the EC. In those post-war years the Germans and the Italians kept a low profile, and the Dutch (even counting in the Dutch-speaking Flemish of Belgium) were not numerous enough to insist upon the use of their language in the administration. The first great expansion of the European Community in 1973 brought in the British, the Irish (almost all of them native English speakers), and the Danes, who for the vast majority had learned English in school. In fact, English quickly became another working language of the Commission’s bureaucracy and an informal lingua franca in the European Parliament. The Germans still did not push their language too much and, being generally more fluent in English than in French, they may have helped to promote English against French.28 Since then, French has been surpassed by English as the language of the European bureaucracy. German comes a far third, and other languages hardly play any role in day-to-day administration.29 With the addition of Greece in 1981, of Portugal and Spain in 1986, and of Austria, Finland, and Sweden in 1995, the set of official languages in the European Union grew to nine, then to eleven – a number that became increasingly difficult to cope with for the translation and interpretation services. On May 1, 2004, ten new states joined the Union: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia; by January 1, 2007, Bulgaria and Romania had also joined. The twelve new members increased the number of EU citizens from 390 million (EU15) to 486 million (EU27) and brought the number of official languages to twenty-three (Irish was belatedly accepted as a language of the Union, and the (Greek) Cypriots did not add a language of their own). From the 1960s on, secondary education had been rapidly expanding throughout Europe. Quite independently of each other, the member states made sweeping reforms of their secondary school systems, and in the process most of them reduced the number of compulsory foreign languages taught, henceforward prescribing only English or leaving the choice entirely to the students, who almost everywhere opted for English anyway.30 As a result of the expansion of secondary education, there are now more citizens in the Union than ever before who have
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studied one or more foreign languages. This situation encompasses French, German, Spanish, and Italian. But of course the numbers of English students have grown most spectacularly. Of all high-school students in the EU25, about 25 percent learn German or French, some 10 percent learn Spanish, and less than 5 percent learn Russian. But almost 90 percent of all pupils in secondary education learn English (Key Data 2005: C8). The accession of so many central and eastern European countries has strengthened the position of German vis-à-vis French, but English also leads in the new member countries, albeit with a slight margin. For the present purposes of our analysis, four levels of communication are to be distinguished within the European Union. In the first place, the official, public level consists mainly of the sessions of the European Parliament and of the external dealings of the European Commission. Here the founding treaty applies, which recognizes all the official languages of the member states as languages of the Union; moreover, the principle holds that decisions by the EU should be published in all these languages, since they affect the laws of the constituent states. In the second place, there is the level of the Commission bureaucracy, where the officials have more or less informally adopted a few ‘working languages’ in their everyday contacts and internal correspondence. Then there is a third level, of transnational communication, which is neither official nor institutional: this is the ‘civic’ level of the citizens of Europe, where several languages compete for predominance in various areas of the Union and in many different domains of communication. English no doubt is paramount at this level too, but French still rivals it in southern Europe, and in central Europe English competes with German. The fourth level is that of domestic communication within each present (and future) member country. There the official language is the mother tongue of a large, if not vast, majority – the language taught in school at all levels and protected by the national state in every way. Nevertheless, these ‘central’ or official national languages increasingly coexist with a supercentral language used for transnational communication; at present this is, in every country, English, which is spoken by a fast growing proportion the population. In fact, while all twenty three official languages of the Union are used at the first level – for public and ceremonial occasions, for important official documents, and in correspondence with the citizens – only two languages, English and French, are used at the second level, of informal communication in the corridors of Parliament and in the meeting rooms of bureaucracy. When it comes to the third level, that of civil Europe, statistics and survey data all concur that English is the first language of transnational communication, while German, French, and maybe Spanish play secondary roles in the corresponding regions and have a limited scope in cultural or commercial exchanges. At the fourth level, within each member country, the national language continues to function at most levels of domestic social interaction, while transnational functions are carried out by the supercentral language(s) ensuring all-European communication. As long as each state continues to act as the protector of its national language, there is no immediate threat from the supercentral language, not even when a large majority of citizens has learned it as a foreign language. A
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state of diglossia, a precarious equilibrium between two languages in one society, will prevail. Either pidginization, for instance with English, or a complete takeover by English seem quite unlikely. This is because the national languages of Europe tend to be quite ‘robust,’ strengthened as they are by the support of the state and its bureaucracy, by the media, by the schools, and by a thorough codification in dictionaries, in grammars and in a literary corpus. Such state languages appear to be as permanent and constant, as completely rule-governed, and as clearly demarcated from adjacent languages as the state itself claims to be. The rise of English as the lingua franca of Europe cannot be understood solely in the context of that subcontinent. This first second language of the European Union is spoken nowhere on the mainland as a first language. It was the position of English as the linking language of the British Empire and as the national language of the United States, the hegemonic power since 1945, that gave it the decisive head start in Europe in1973. French, which had a similar position as a global ex-colonial language in the francophone world (La Francophonie), still could not muster equal prevalence and centrality and was easily surpassed by English in terms of global Q-value. Had the Germans supported the French, their two languages might have become the major media of the EU; but the Germans chose tacitly to support English against the old-time rival, French, and now they protest the neglect of German in the EU. The actual predominance of English as the second language of the member societies, as the lingua franca of international traffic, and as the informal language of choice within the Union’s institutions (with the exception of the French-speaking European Court) is difficult to reconcile with the formal construction of the European Union as a combination of relatively autonomous states. Any recognition of the actual inequality among the languages of the Union clashes with the official precept of equal status for every member state, and thus risks to offend all nations except the UK. This fact has provoked some striking rhetoric about ‘unity in diversity’ and about the need for students to learn as many different languages as possible. But, in the meantime, almost every Union initiative unwittingly tends to promote English, as it increases cultural or commercial exchange between the nations of Europe unavoidably in English. Even the campaign for the promotion of linguistic diversity, by further increasing the confusion of tongues, only serves to profile English as the sole solution: the more languages, the more English. This is the outcome of the mutually reinforcing expectations that people form about the language choices other people will make. The slow stampede towards English as a foreign language has now reached the tipping point not only in Africa, in the Middle East, in India and in China, but, in the same global context, also in Europe.
English as the Hub of the World Language System English, and French too, have survived in former colonies to a surprising degree. Apart from a host of local and contingent factors, this is due to the variety of
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indigenous languages in almost all of these newly independent countries. As a result, the colonizers and the indigenous administrators spoke the colonial language as their common medium. And the liberation movement saw itself forced to adopt the same language, often much against its actors’ will, for the sake of keeping their ranks united. When independence came in countries as diverse as Senegal and India, the victorious nationalist movement insisted on a single, indigenous, national language, and met with vast support among the population. In the ensuing national debate, the question was which indigenous language to select. And the answer invariably was: ‘not yours.’ Even if a language was understood by three quarters of the population, such as Wolof in Senegal, the Wolof speakers who were ethnic Serrer or Malinké would happily continue to use Wolof but refused to recognize it as the language of the land. The speakers of the Dravidian languages of southern India would rather hold on to English than adopt Hindi officially. This ‘language envy’ prevented the adoption and the spread of a common indigenous language and favored the former colonial medium. Moreover, as the ex-colonial language still seemed to offer the best opportunities on the labor market at home and abroad, citizens who could afford it would continue to profess their support for a native language in public, but privately would opt for an English school for their children: a remarkable instance of ‘private subversion of the public good,’ as David Laitin has called it.31 In many of these countries there existed a popular lingua franca, rarely written, but widely spoken all across the land: Wolof in Senegal, Pidgin in Nigeria, Hindustani in India, Malay in Indonesia, Swahili in Tanzania and Kenya […] However, these ‘bazaar languages’ were often considered too lowly to serve as the idiom of the newly independent nation. Only in Tanzania was Swahili adopted as the national language; and, in Indonesia, Malay was transformed into bahasa Indonesia and very successfully introduced throughout the archipelago. In other countries, however, both the indigenous administrators and the liberation fighters had a vested interest in the former colonial language and may have tacitly favored it to secure an advantage for themselves. In South Africa, a dozen languages were officially recognized, but the ensuing fragmentation effectively excluded all of them, leaving just English – the language of the ANC and of the former elite (with the exception of the speakers of Afrikaans, who were white and rural for the most part). The same principle was at work again: the more languages, the more English. In the course of the twentieth century, English has become the hypercentral language of the world language system. Even if there are languages with more speakers, such as (probably) Mandarin and Hindi, English remains the most central one, on account of the many multilinguals who have it in their repertoire. This has nothing to do with the intrinsic characteristics of the English language; on the contrary, its orthography and pronunciation make it quite unsuitable as a world language. It is a consequence of the particular history of the Englishspeaking nations and of reciprocal expectations and predictions about the language choices that prospective learners across the world will make. Even if the hegemonic position of the US were to decline, English would continue to be the
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hub of the world language system for quite some time, if only because so many millions of people have invested so much effort in learning it and for that very reason expect so many millions of other speakers to continue to use it.
NOTES 1 Karl W. Deutsch (1966) pioneered a global and systemic vision of international communication networks. The theoretical perspectives that are presented here are elaborated in De Swaan 2001. 2 Wallerstein 1974. 3 For a detailed discussion, see De Swaan 2001, pp. 33–40. 4 Cf. De Swaan 2001; for the most recent data, see De Swaan 2007. 5 ‘Netherlandish’ and ‘Dutch’ are here used as synonyms, denoting the language spoken in the Netherlands and in Flanders (i.e. the Flemish part of Belgium). In the literature one sometimes also encounters the term ‘Netherlandic.’ The spelling and vocabulary of Dutch are standardized under the auspices of the joint ‘Nederlandse Taalunie.’ 6 See Dorian 1989; Hindley 1990; Uhlenbeck 1994; Hale et al. 1992, Ladefoged 1992. 7 Cf. Phillipson 1992. See also Clayton 1999, who points out that not only the imperialist strategy of imposing the conqueror ’s language, but also the “pragmatic” strategy of mobilizing domestic languages in support of imperial rule may bolster the conqueror ’s position. 8 A similar effect operates in the multinationalization of firms; see Carnoy 1993, p. 71: “The greatest pressure on automobile firms to become global, however, is still protectionism – the power of national political aims imposing themselves on comparative prices.” Since duties and other trade restrictions make it more costly to import or export, “the general effect will be to increase the costs of using external markets relative to multinational control” (p. 60). In other words, it will probably pay to open a branch office or a subsidiary plant in the protectionist country. 9 To readers, the advantage of learning a highly central language may not only reside in the opportunity to read its literature, but also in the opportunity to read the translations that have been made into it from a multitude of other languages. 10 Already in 1980, almost two thirds of all chemical and almost three quarters of all medical articles were published in English, and adding five other languages would account for well over 90 percent of publications in these fields; see Laponce 1987, pp. 66–8. Except in the USA, television entertainment is for a very large part imported, and imports come overwhelmingly from the United States; see Varis 1984; Biltereyst 1992, p. 523. 11 For statistics on translations from Netherlandish, see Heilbron 1995. 12 Heilbron (1995) and Casanova (1999) have applied the notion of a world language system to the network of translations. Casanova has shown how Paris functions as the hub of a network that elevates literary works from peripheral and central languages to the supercentral level of French belles lettres, while Heilbron has demonstrated that literary works from the smaller languages enter world literature by being translated into English and other world languages, and from there they are introduced in smaller languages. Similar movements have been observed in popular music, films, etc.
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13
In 1990, 93 percent of young people in Europe speaking some foreign language had learned it at secondary school; see Eurobarometer 1991. There is a countertendency: as the cultural elites, fluent in the foreign language, are familiar with these foreign texts and performances, their prestige may convince others that these products are indeed desirable, and the demand for translated versions may increase accordingly among those sections of the public that have not learned the foreign language. The relative impact of the two tendencies is a matter of empirical investigation. ‘Dumping’ refers to the practice of selling goods at marginal or lower cost on separate – that is, usually foreign – markets (so that on the home market the full price may still be fetched). See Muth 1968. For brevity’s sake I have limited this discussion to the case of English; however, Arabic and Spanish – both growing international language communities – and French, a stagnant one at best – would provide interesting cases on their own. This, again, is a tenet of classical international trade theory since David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill; see Bhagwati 1988, pp. 24–33. Cf. Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1994. ‘En Afrique, chaque vieillard qui meurt est une bibliothèque qui brûle’ (‘In Africa, when an old person dies, it is as if a library went up in flames’, author ’s translation): Hompate Bâ, quoted in Diongue 1980, p. 53. The term is a variation on an expression coined by Ferguson (1959): ‘diglossia,’ a concept he restricted to the coexistence of two registers of the same language in different domains of one society. Later the term was used in a broader sense, for the coexistence of two languages rather than registers of a single language. The prevalence p{i,j} for a two-language repertoire ρi,j is defined as the proportion of all speakers in the language constellation S who have either language i or language j or both in their repertoire. When all j-speakers have learned the language i, p{i,j} = pi. Equally, c{i,j} is defined as the proportion of multilingual speakers who have either i or j or both in their repertoire. Unless there are speakers of a third language in the constellation who also speak j, but not i, or speakers of j who also speak some third language, but who do not speak i – which is rare in the actual constellations under study – it is the case that c{i,j} = ci. As a result:
14
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18 19 20
21
22
Q{i ,j} = p{i ,j} ⋅ c{i ,j} = pi ⋅ ci = Qi Competence in language j no longer adds to the Q-value of a speaker of i. 23 It is customary to argue that no one is individually motivated to contribute any effort towards this collective objective. However, in this case too, many of the activities required are not just a ‘sacrifice’ but may well be rewarding in themselves: admonition, rebuke, scandalization, ostracization, joining in demonstrations, participating in riots, or even participating in terrorist attacks may generate individual satisfaction. In general, informal negative social sanctions quite often are a pleasure to apply. Cf. De Swaan 1988, p. 5. 24 See Laitin 1987, 1989. 25 See Schelling 1978; Laitin 1993. 26 No one has depicted these dilemmas more starkly than David Laitin (1993). 27 The public is much concerned with the appearance of foreign, mostly English, loan words in the vocabulary. But such additions to the lexicon leave the morphological
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‘hard core’ of the language, its grammar, syntax, and prononciation, mostly unaffected; see Hagège 1987, pp. 27–89. The resilience of many European languages is demonstrated by the adoption of English verbs, such as ‘delete’ or ‘save’ in computer speech, which are then conjugated according to the rules of the borrowing language, e.g. in Dutch: ‘Ik heb de file geseefd’ (‘I saved the file’). Surprisingly, the tense and the word order are also spontaneously transformed into perfectly correct Dutch, a feat that students often fail at in formal translation exercises. See Bellier 1995, esp. p. 245; Ammon 1996, p. 262. Nevertheless, at least since 1991, the German government has regularly insisted on the adoption of German as the third language of the European Commission’s bureaucracy, and in the fall of 1999 it actually collided with the (then) Finnish presidency of the Union on this issue. See Schlossmacher 1994; also Mamadouh 1995. See Van Deth 1979. Laitin 1992, pp. 152–3.
REFERENCES Ammon, U. (1996) The European Union (EU – formerly European Community): Status Change of English during the last fifty years. In J. A. Fishman, A. W. Conrad, and A. Rubal-Lopez (eds), Post-Imperial English: Status change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940–1990, 241–67. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Bellier, I. (1995) Moralité, langue et pouvoirs dans les institutions européennes. Social Anthropology 3(3): 235–50. Bhagwati, J. (1988) Protectionism. Cambrigde, MA: MIT Press. Biltereyst, D. (1992) Language and culture as ultimate barriers? An analysis of the circulation, consumption and popularity of fiction in small European countries. European Journal of Communication 7: 517–40. Carnoy, M. (1993) Whither the nation– state? In M. Carnoy, M. Castells, and S. S. Cohen, The New Global Economy in the Information Age: Reflections on Our Changing World, 1–17. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Casanova, P. (1999) La République mondiale des lettres. Paris: Éditions Du Seuil.
Clayton, T. (1999) Decentering language in world-system inquiry. Language Problems and Language Planning 23(2): 133–56. De Swaan, A. (1988) In Care of the State; Health Care, Education and Welfare in Europe and the United States in the Modern Era. Cambridge: Polity. De Swaan, A. (2001) Words of the World: The Global Language System. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity/ Blackwell. De Swaan, A. (2007) The language predicament of the EU since the enlargements. In U. Ammon, K. J. Mattheier, and P. H. Nelde (eds), Sociolinguistica: International Yearbook of European Sociolinguistics, Vol. 21: Linguistic Consequences of the EUEnlargement, 1–21. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Deutsch, K. W. (1966) Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality [1953]. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Diongue, M. (1980) Francophonie et langues africaines en Sénégal. Dakar: Ecole Normale Supérieure des Bibliothèques.
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Dorian, N. (ed.) (1989) Investigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eurobarometer (1991) Young Europeans in 1990. Brussels: European Coordination Office 34(2). Ferguson, C. A. (1959) ‘Diglossia.’ Word 15(2), 325–40. Hagège, C. (1987) Le Français et les siècles. Paris: Odile Jacob. Hale, K., Krauss, M. Watahomigie, L. J., Yamamoto, A. Y., Craig, C., LaVerne Masayesva, J. and England, N. C. (1992) Endangered languages. Language 68(1): 1–42. Heilbron, J. (1995) Nederlandse vertalingen wereldwijd; Kleine landen en culturele mondialisering. In J. Heilbron, W. de Nooy, and W. Tichelaar (eds), Waarin een klein land … Nederlandse cultuur in internationaal verband. Amsterdam: Prometheus. Hindley, R. (1990) The Death of the Irish Language: A Qualified Obituary. London: Routledge. Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe. [2005] Brussels: Euridice European Unit. Ladefoged, P. (1992) Another view of endangered languages. Language 68(4): 809–11. Laitin, D. D. (1987) Linguistic conflict in Catalonia. Language Problems and Language Planning 11(2): 129–46. Laitin, D. D. (1989) Linguistic revival: Politics and culture in Catalonia. Comparative Studies in Society and History 31(3): 297–317. Laitin, D. D. (1992) Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laitin, D. D. (1993) The game theory of language regimes. International Political Science Review 14(3): 227–40. Laponce, J. A. (1987) Languages and their Territories. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Mamadouh, V. (1995) De talen in het Europese parlement. Amsterdam: Instituut voor sociale geografie, Unversiteit van Amsterdam [Amsterdamse sociaalgeografische studies, 52]. Muth, R. F. (1968) Rent. In D. L. Sills (ed.), International Encylopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 13, 458–9. New York and London: MacMillan/Free Press. Phillipson, Robert (1992) Linguistic imperialism. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Schelling, T. C. (1978) Micromotives and Macrobehavior. New York: Norton. Schlossmacher, M. (1994) Die Arbeitssprachen in den Organen der Europäischen Gemeinschaft. Methoden und Ergebnisse einer empirischen Untersuchung. In U. Ammon, K. J. Mattheier, and P. H. Nelde (eds), Sociolingistica: International Yearbook of European Sociolinguistics, Vol. 8: English only? In Europe, 101–22. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Skutnabb-Kangas, T., and Phillipson, R. (eds) (1994) Linguistic Human Rights: Overcoming Linguistic Discrimination. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Uhlenbeck, E. M. (1994) The threat of rapid language death: A recently acknowledged global problem. In The Low Countries: Arts and Society in Flanders and the Netherlands, 1993–1994, Vol. 1: 25–31. Rekkem, Belgium: Stichting Ons Erfdeel. Van Deth, J.-P. (1979) L’Enseignement scolaire des langues vivantes dans les pays membres de la communauté européenne: Bilan, réflexions et propositions. Bruxelles: Didier. Varis, T. (1984) The international flow of television programs. Journal of Communication 34(1): 143–52. Wallerstein, I. (1974) The Modern WorldSystem: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. San Francisco: Academic Press.
3
The Global Politics of Language: Markets, Maintenance, Marginalization, or Murder? TOVE SKUTNABB-KANGAS AND ROBERT PHILLIPSON
Prospects for the World’s Languages Today’s prospects for the maintenance and further development of all existing spoken and written languages and sign languages in the world have been estimated as bleak. The latest (16th) edition of Ethnologue, the world’s most complete catalogue of languages, lists 6,909 “known living languages” on its website (http://www.ethnologue.org/).1 Most of the world’s languages are very small in terms of numbers of speakers. UNESCO experts (see below) estimate that 96 percent of the world’s languages are spoken by 4 percent of the world’s population (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, chapter 1 on numbers). The languages with the largest numbers of ‘native’ speakers are today (Mandarin) Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, and English, in this order (see Ethnologue, and also resources at http:// www.terralingua.org). At least some 4,500 of the world’s spoken languages are indigenous (Oviedo and Maffi 2000). UNESCO’s Safeguarding Endangered Languages website (www.unesco.org/ culture/en/endangeredlanguages) estimates that “over 50 percent of some 6,700 languages spoken today are in danger of disappearing,” and that “[o]ne language disappears on average every two weeks.” Some of the facts that, UNESCO suggests, may be reasons for this disappearance are that 90 percent of the world’s languages are not represented on the internet, and that 80 percent of African languages have no orthography. According to more pessimistic, but still realistic, estimates, there might be only 300 to 600 oral languages left in 2100 as unthreatened languages, transmitted by the parent generation to children (see Krauss 1992). These would probably include most of the languages that have more than
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one million speakers today (Gunnemark 1991: 169–71 gave their number as 208 languages), and a few others. Almost all languages about to disappear would be indigenous, and most of today’s indigenous languages would disappear, with the exception of very few, which are strong numerically (for example Quechua, Aymara, Bodo, Mapuche) and/or have official status (like Ma¯ ori, some Saami languages). UNESCO’s reaction so far has been mainly to support the listing and documentation of these languages; much more important is to try to influence the conditions that lead to their endangerment in the first place. The poor and powerless economic and political situation of indigenous peoples and minorities (IMs), who often live in the world’s most diverse ecoregions, is one of the important background factors; habitat destruction through logging, the spread of agriculture, the use of pesticides and fertilizers, deforestation, desertification, overfishing, and so on often compel IMs into forced assimilation and/or migration or destitution. Formal education and media in dominant languages are the most important direct factors behind the macroeconomic, techno-military, social and political causes of linguistic genocide. Most of the figures above are about spoken languages. What about sign languages? How many are there? The World Federation of the Deaf ’s Fact Sheet on sign language(s) gives no figures (http://www.wfdeaf.org/documents.html). Ethnologue lists 114 sign languages, but there are many more. Every country in the world has deaf people,2 and they have developed sign languages everywhere. Since the deaf have been much more isolated from each other than oral people, they may have developed even thousands of sign languages. Each country that has so far recognized ‘sign languages’ has recognized one and one only. Since there are somewhat over 200 states in the world, the number of the world’s official sign languages would be over 200 when all states have recognized at least one (see Branson and Miller 1998 for hierarchizing processes among sign languages). Just as official, spoken ‘languages’ are the ones connected to the most powerful dialects, imperilling others, most of the world’s sign languages may also be made to disappear. Using this verbal construction implies agency by something or someone – languages do not ‘just’ disappear by themselves, of old age, or because they are not seen to be fit for a postmodern digitalized age, or because people opt out of them ‘voluntarily.’ Many states actively seek to eliminate or to ‘murder ’ minority languages. Misinformation to the parents of deaf children about cochlear implants may also create the belief that these children would come to ‘hear ’ through implants; therefore many parents mistakenly think that there is no need for sign languages. Most of the figures for speakers/signers and for ‘native speakers,’ second language users, and so on are seriously unreliable for two main reasons: one is conceptual, the other is economic–political. First, the whole concept of ‘a language’ is unclear. What has been seen as one language can ‘become’ several languages, either fast, because of political machinations (‘Serbocroat’ reverted to ‘Serbian’ and ‘Croatian,’ and ‘Bosnian’ was ‘invented’ – all within a decade), or over time (vulgar Latin branched out into Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Romanian, and so on: Janson 2007). The borders between ‘languages’ and ‘dia-
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lects,’ and between one language and another, are sociopolitical constructions. This fact has made some linguists claim that ‘languages’ do not exist (Makoni and Pennycook 2007a; Mühlhäusler 1996; Reagan 2004). Still, even these linguists habitually refer to languages – we cannot in practice manage without the concept. Secondly, census and other data about languages, mother tongues, first languages, competence in various languages, and so on have never been reliably collected except for small sub-samples of various populations. It might be possible to do it, but that would require economic investment, conceptual clarification, and training. Besides, with reliable figures, demands for language-based services from governments might grow considerably, and not all governments are interested in offering them. Chaudenson (2003) states that the official figures for French as a second language world-wide are fraudulent. Of the various figures available for the numbers of native/first/home-language English speakers (compared in Skutnabb-Kangas 2000: 39) and second-language English users, scholars who regard the expansion of English as unproblematic tend to produce the highest ones. For any language planning purposes, and also in education, figures have to be used, and we have tried to find the most reliable ones while admitting their relative unreliability. To analyze the reasons for languages being maintained, marginalized, or murdered requires a situated framework which places languages in the historical, economic, and political context of ‘globalization,’ which we see as entailing linguistic neo-imperialism.
From Colonization to Corporate Globalization The present-day strength of English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese in the Americas, in Africa, in Asia, in Australasia and in the Pacific is a direct consequence of European expansion throughout the world since 1492 and of successive waves of colonization. The languages have accompanied political and economic influence, being invariably backed up by military might. The promotion and hierarchization of languages often dovetailed with missionary activity: Christianity thus accompanied several European languages world-wide, just as Arabic has been an integral part of the spread of Islam, and Russian of Soviet communism. While Europeans were experiencing industrialization and the consolidation of ‘national’ (that is, dominant) languages, they were deeply involved in overseas expansion, which contributed to economic boom in Europe. Many of the features of what is now known as globalization were presciently described by Marx and Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848 (1961). This text stressed global economic markets, class interests, and ideological legitimation of an oppressive world order. The project of global dominance has been articulated since before the USA achieved its independence; for instance George Washington saw the United States as a “rising empire” (Roberts 2008: 68). US national identity was forged through massive violence, the dispossession and extermination of indigenous peoples, the
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myth of unoccupied territory, the surplus value extorted from slave labor, and an active process of national imagination used to form a common identity, one deeply permeated by religion (Hixson 2008). The project of establishing English as the language of power, globally and locally, is central to this empire. The ‘manifest destiny’ that colonial Americans arrogated to themselves has been explicitly linked, since the early nineteenth century, to English being established globally: “English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French in the present age” (John Adams to Congress, 1780, cited in Bailey 1992: 103). “The whole world should adopt the American system. The American system can survive in America only if it becomes a world system.” (President Harry Truman, 1947, cited in Pieterse 2004: 131). The role of scholars in facilitating US empire is explored in Neil Smith’s American Empire. Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003), which traces the shift through territorial, colonial dominance (the invasion of the Philippines in 1898) to the attempt to dominate globally through “a strategic recalibration of geography with economics, a new orchestration of world geography in the pursuit of economic accumulation” (2003: xvii–xviii). Academia services the “global needs of the political project, perpetuating a system in which […] global power is disproportionately wielded by a ruling class that remains tied to the national interests of the United States” (ibid., p. xix). In US colonies and in the British Empire, English was privileged and other languages marginalized. Today’s global ruling classes tend to be proficient in English. In the twenty-first century, ‘empire’ has increasingly figured in the political discourse of advocates and critics. Engler ’s How to Rule the World. The Coming Battle over the Global Economy (2008) distinguishes clearly between the “corporate globalization” of the final decades of the twentieth century and its successor, “imperial globalization” based on military dominance. Alternatives to Economic Globalization (2002: 19) lists the following eight key features of economic/corporate globalization (neo-liberalism): 1 promotion of hypergrowth and unrestricted exploitation of environmental resources to fuel that growth; 2 privatization and commodification of public services and of remaining aspects of the global and community commons; 3 global cultural (and, we would add, linguistic) and economic hom*ogenization and the intense promotion of consumerism; 4 integration and conversion of national economies, including some that were largely self-reliant, to environmentally and socially harmful export-oriented production; 5 corporate deregulation and unrestricted movement of capital across borders; 6 dramatically increased corporate concentration; 7 dismantling of public health, social and environmental programs already in place; 8 replacement of the traditional powers of democratic nation–states and local communities by global corporate bureaucracies.
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Alternatives to Economic Globalization fails to mention language among the features listed under “cultural hom*ogenization,” despite referring to a global monoculture and to the unrestricted flow of production and marketing, “needed” by large multinational corporations. It seems that not even the best globalization experts are aware of the tendencies toward linguistic hom*ogenization and of the threats to linguistic diversity mentioned above. Much of the literature on English as a “global” or “international” language has tended to be celebratory and failed to situate English within the wider language ecology or to explore the causal factors behind its expansion (on these subjects, see Phillipson 1992 and 2008a and Pennycook 1998). Influential work by Crystal, Fishman, and Graddol is critically analyzed in Phillipson 2000, and books on the world language system by De Swaan and Brutt-Griffler are critically analyzed in Phillipson 2004. One of the controversial questions today is to what extent corporate globalization is leading toward greater hom*ogenization or greater diversification (for instance through localization), as some researchers claim. For instance Mufwene (2008: 227) claims that McDonaldization does not lead to uniformity because the “McDonald menu is partly adapted to the local diet.” Even if McDonald’s in India may serve vegetarian burgers in Hindi, this reduction to superficial adaptation disregards completely the structural and process-related aspects of hom*ogenization (see n. 3 for examples; also, for a discussion of McDonaldization, see Hamelink 1994; Ritzer 1996; and Definition Box 6.3 in Skutnabb-Kangas 2000).3 Linguistic glocalization needs to be discussed in a politico-economic framework which relates the hierarchization of languages to global and local power relations. A typical example of special pleading for English can be found in a book by a political scientist who argues for the formation of an EU “super-state” and cites the familiar trope of English as lingua franca, along with young people’s consumerism and global business integration (Morgan 2005: 57). He seems unaware that there are many ‘lingua francas’ in Europe; or that the “common transnational youth culture” is essentially American and that the convergence of “business practices” derives from the US corporate world and from the conceptual universe it embodies. It is false to project English as though it is ‘neutral,’ English as a mere tool that serves all equally well, in whatever society they live. The phrase ‘English as a lingua franca’ generally decontextualizes users and seems to imply symmetrical, equitable communication, which is often not the case. It conceals the actual functions that the language performs, English as a lingua academica, lingua bellica, lingua culturalis, lingua economica, and so on (Phillipson 2008b). It also ignores the Anglo-American semantics and grammar embedded in the language (Wierzbicka 2006; Mühlhäusler 2003). It fails to explore the hegemonic practices of the currently dominant capitalist language or to theorize English linguistic neo-imperialism.
Linguistic Neo-Imperialism Imperialism needs careful definition if it is to be used analytically. This principle guided the definition of linguistic imperialism as a variant of linguicism
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(Skutnabb-Kangas 1988: 13) operating through structures and ideologies and entailing unequal treatment for groups identified by language (Phillipson 1992). For Harvey (2005: 26), capitalist imperialism is a contradictory fusion of ‘the politics of state and empire’ (imperialism as a distinctively political project on the part of the actors whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources towards political, economic, and military ends) and ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’ (imperialism as a diffuse political–economic process in space and time in which command over and use of capital takes primacy). (Emphasis added)
The first of these components of the “contradictory fusion” is the top-down process of what a state, a combination of states, or an institution such as a corporation or a university does to achieve its goals – which includes the way it manages linguistic capital. The second is the way “economic power flows across and through continuous space, toward or away from territorial entities (such as states or regional power blocs) through the daily practices of production, trade, commerce, capital flows, money transfers, labour migration, technology transfer, currency speculation, flows of information, cultural impulses, and the like” (ibid.). Most of these processes are crucially dependent on language, and constituted by language. English can be seen as the capitalist neo-imperial language that serves the interests of the corporate world and of the governments it influences (Phillipson 2008a, 2009). This dovetails with the language being activated through molecular processes of linguistic capital accumulation in space and time, in a dialectic process at the intersection of economics, politics, and discourses. So far as linguistic neo-imperialism is concerned, the ‘political mode of argumentation’ refers to decision-making, language policy, and planning, whereas the ‘economic mode of argumentation’ refers to the working through of such decisions at all levels, to the implementation of language planning decisions, to the actual use of English in myriad contexts. When English increasingly occupies territory that hitherto was the preserve of national languages in Europe or Asia, what is occurring is linguistic capital accumulation, over a period of time and in particular territories, in favor of English. When Singaporean parents gradually shift from an Asian language to the use of English in the home, this represents linguistic capital accumulation. If users of German or Swedish as languages of scholarship shift to using English, similar forces and processes are at work. When considering agency in each of these examples, the individuals concerned opt for the neo-imperial language because they perceive that this linguistic capital will serve their personal interests best, in the false belief that this requires the sacrifice of their own language. When language shift is subtractive, and if this affects a group and not merely individuals, there are serious implications for other languages. If domains such as business, the home, or scholarship are ‘lost,’ what has occurred is in fact linguistic capital dispossession.
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Analysis of the interlocking of language policies with the two constituents of Harvey’s “contradictory fusion” can highlight both the corporate agendas, which serve political, economic, and military purposes, and the multiple flows that make use of English for a range of purposes. New discourses and technologies are adopted and creatively adapted, but in a rigged, so-called ‘free’ global and local market. The active promotion of other major international languages such as Chinese, French, Japanese, and Spanish also aims to strengthen the market forces and the cultures associated with each language; but at present the linguistic capital invested in these languages does not seriously threaten the current pre-eminence of English. A Chinese global empire may be on the way. International language promotion itself needs to be seen in economic terms, dovetailing as it does with media products and many commercial activities. TESOL (the Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) – teaching materials, examinations, know-how, teachers, and so on – is a major commercial enterprise for the British and for the Americans and a vital dimension of English linguistic neo-imperialism. “The English language teaching sector directly earns nearly £1.3 billion for the UK in invisible exports and our other education related exports earn up to £10 billion more” (Lord Neil Kinnock, Chair of the British Council, in the Foreword to Graddol 2006 – a work that charts many variables in the global linguistic mosaic, challenges British monolingual complacency, and aims, as Kinnock stresses, to strengthen “the UK’s providers of English language teaching” and “broader education business sectors”). The major publishing houses are now global. For instance “Pearson Education’s international business has been growing rapidly in recent years, and we now have a presence in over 110 countries” (http://www.pearson.com/index.cfm?pageid=18). The website of Educational Testing Services of Princeton, NJ, which is responsible for the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) for language proficiency, declares as their mission: “Our products and services measure knowledge and skills, promote learning and educational performance, and support education and professional development for all people worldwide” (www.ets.org, About ETS). The entrenchment of English in many countries world-wide and for many cross-national purposes leads Halliday (2006) to make a distinction between indigenized and standardized Englishes, which he categorizes as “international” and “global”: English has become a world language in both senses of the term, international and global: international, as a medium of literary and other forms of cultural life in (mainly) countries of the former British Empire; global, as the co-genitor of the new technological age, the age of information. […] they obviously overlap. […] International English has expanded by becoming world Englishes, evolving so as to adapt to the meanings of other cultures. Global English has expanded – has become ‘global’ – by taking over, or being taken over by, the new information technology, which means everything from email and the internet to mass media advertising, news reporting, and all the other forms of political and commercial propaganda.
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Halliday’s “international” is an unfortunate label, since he is in effect referring to local forms and uses of English, comprehensible within a country, for instance. His terms also elide the anchoring of global English in the English-dominant countries, where this is the primary national language and one that also opens international doors. This terminology is a minefield which obscures power relations and hegemonic practices, nationally and internationally.
Why Are Languages ‘Disappearing’? The Role of Formal Education Having situated language hierarchization and the linguistic capital accumulation enjoyed by speakers of some languages but not of others, we now ask why languages are ‘disappearing’ and what role formal education plays in this linguistic dispossession. An important distinction is between languages and speakers. Some languages live on, especially in a written form, even when there are no native speakers (that is, speakers who have learned the language in early childhood, from parents or other caretakers) or second/foreign-language speakers. Sanskrit and Hebrew in the 1800s and many indigenous languages today in Australia, Canada, and the United States are examples. Secondly, what happens to languages can be analyzed in terms of several interacting continua. In theorizing language policy, many disciplines need to be considered. One continuum describing the status of languages has linguistic genocide at one end and maintenance and further development (including many types of hybridization), with full Linguistic Human Rights (LHRs), at the other end. Often used concepts such as language marginalization, attrition, and extinction would be closer to the genocide end of the continuum. Each of these positions can be the result of open and planned language policy or a side-effect of other policies, intentional or unintentional. In economic terms, for instance, the relative conditions for languages are influenced by factors such as: • the relative isolation of the speakers from speakers of other languages (Fishman 1966); • the self-sufficiency of the group (the extent to which they need to trade with others for basic needs; whether they can grow and collect what they need all year round, and so on: Nettle 1999); • the availability of jobs without the need to migrate; • the existence of material resources of interest to outsiders in the area, and their exploitation (logging, oil, mining, and the like). Negative, stigmatizing attitudes (for instance referring to the languages of ‘Others’ as dialects), the invisibilization of certain languages, even demographically large ones, and a lack both of knowledge and of awareness about languages among those who make decisions – all contribute to marginalization. ‘They’ only have dialects, whereas ‘we’ have languages – just as ‘they’ have tribes, ‘we’ have
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nations, ‘they’ chiefs, ‘we’ presidents, ‘they’ witch doctors, ‘we’ real doctors; ‘they’ still need to be ‘developed,’ ‘civilized,’ and taught democracy, good governance, and human rights – by ‘us’ (Sachs 1992). The availability of (at least primary) formal education without needing to leave the area is decisive for the future of the children. But education through the medium of a dominant foreign language can encourage language shift, triggering language attrition at group level as well as at individual level, especially when secondary education is outside the area and delivered in the dominant language (see Jhingran 2009). The example below, from the education of the Nenets in the Russian Federation, illustrates not only the phenomenon of language shift and some of the connections to the reasons listed above; it also illustrates that education of indigenous/tribal and minority (IM) children in a dominant language can cause linguistic and educational harm (in the UN Genocide Convention’s sense, for which see below). There are thousands of similar examples from all over the world. In the Russian Federation, in Siberia, the Far East and the North of the European part of Russia there are at least 35 endangered languages still in use (Kazakevitch 2004: 9). Tundra Nenets (about 25,000 speakers) is “the strongest” among them, “partly due to the relatively large size of the ethnic group (over 32,000) and partly to the fact that the majority of the Nenets still keep to their traditional occupation – reindeer herding – and hence lead a nomadic or half-nomadic life […]. Up to now in some districts children come to school speaking only Nenets. As soon as the children are able to speak Russian it becomes the only means of school instruction. Nenets is taught as a subject both in primary and in secondary school. Unfortunately, Nenets classes don’t have any significant influence on the language preferences of the pupils who stay at a boarding school for 9–11 years and visit their families only during holidays. After finishing secondary school many of these choose to speak mostly Russian. Luckily for the language, not all Nenets children finish secondary school: some leave school after grade 4, 5 or 6 and return to their families with their traditional occupations. Of course there are exceptions, but on the whole it should be stated that the level of education is in inverse proportion to the degree of mother tongue use (our emphasis). The level of education of a speaker determines if not his/her competence in his/her ethnic language, then the ethnic language competence of his/ her children. As a rule, children of well-educated Nenets parents (even those who are concerned with protection and preservation of the ethnic language – such as school teachers of Nenets, language planners, language and folklore researchers) have poor or no command of Nenets.” (Dunbar and Skutnabb-Kangas 2008)
Linguistic Genocide and Crimes against Humanity in Education It is a fact that mainly dominant-language medium education for IM children •
prevents access to education, because of the linguistic, pedagogical and psychological barriers it creates;
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• • •
may lead to the extinction of indigenous languages; contributes thereby to the disappearance of the world’s linguistic diversity; often curtails the development of the children’s capabilities, perpetuates poverty, and causes serious mental harm; • is organized against solid research evidence about how best to reach high levels of bilingualism or multilingualism and how to enable IM children to achieve academically in school (Magga et al. 2005).
This subtractive education through the medium of a dominant language can have harmful consequences socially, psychologically, economically, and politically. It can (and it does, especially for indigenous/tribal children) cause both serious physical harm: impoverished living conditions – with unemployment and with housing and health problems – and, partially through these conditions, alcoholism, suicide, criminality, including incest, and so on – and very serious mental harm: social dislocation; psychological, cognitive, linguistic, and educational harm; and, partially through it, also economic, social and political marginalization (see Dunbar and Skutnabb-Kangas 2008). This kind of education may thus participate in linguistic and cultural genocide, according to two of the five definitions of genocide – II(b) and II(e) – in the United Nations’ 1948 International Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide (E793, 1948): article 2 In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such […] article II(b): causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group […] article II(e): forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Emphasis added) Most indigenous/tribal students (with some exceptions, for instance Saami, Ma¯ ori), many national minority and most immigrant minority students in the world are being taught through the medium of dominant languages, in submersion programmes. Dominant-language-only submersion programmes “are widely attested as the least effective educationally for minority language students” (May and Hill 2003: 14).4 Sociologically and educationally, submersion models for IM children fit the two UN definitions of genocide quoted above (see Magga et al., 2005) – in particular subtractive submersion models for IM children, where a dominant language is learned at the cost of the mother tongues – but also, to a certain extent, many early-exit transitional weak models (for definitions, see Skutnabb-Kangas and McCarty 2008).5 It is also clear that, even if mother tongues are to some extent used as teaching languages, basic educational and linguistic goals may not be achieved. Kathleen Heugh (2009) shows that, when children have been taught in their own languages
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for only a few years, an early transition to the international language of wider communication (ILWC) across Africa is accompanied by: •
• • •
“poor literacy both in the first and in the second language (L1 and L2; Mothibeli 2005; Alidou et al. 2006; HSRC [Human Sciences Research Council] studies in South Africa 2007); poor numeracy/mathematics and science (HSRC 2005, 2007); high failure and drop-out rates (Obanya 1999, Bamgbose 2000); high costs/wastage of expenditure (Alidou et al. 2006).” If learners switch from an African MT [mother tongue] to FL/L2 [foreign-language/ second-language] medium, they may seem to do well until half way through grade/ year 4. After this, progress slows down and the gap between L1 [first-language] and L2 [second-language] learner achievement steadily widens. We now know from comprehensive studies in Second Language Acquisition […] in Scandinavia, Australia, Russian Federation, India, North America, and especially in Africa that it takes 6–8 years to learn enough L2 to be able to learn through the L2. (From a Power Point presentation leading to Heugh 2009)
Funding for education in the post-colonial period has seen World Bank policies perpetuating the dominance of European languages at the expense of local ones, and generating educational failure. The integration of the linguistic/educational dimension with cultural and economic globalization is insightfully explored in Rassool (2007). The case study of Pakistan (Rassool and Mansoor 2007) shows that the use of English as the sole medium of higher education (for only 2.63 percent of the population) ensures the cultural alienation of the elite from the rest. The global cultural economy is interdependent and, despite the dominant position occupied by English, in practice, it has an organically interactive multilingual base. A narrow monolingual nationalism [a reference to Urdu, TSK and RP], an underresourced educational system as well as unequal access to English as international lingua franca, therefore, [are] counter-productive to national growth. (Ibid., p. 240).
All strong multilingual education models (both for IMs and for linguistic majority children) use mainly an IM language as the main teaching language during the (many) first years. The longer this period is, the better the results are in terms of high levels of bilingualism or multilingualism and general school achievement.6 Part of the conclusion in Dunbar and Skutnabb-Kangas 2008 – an expert paper for the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (PFII)7 – runs as follows: That States persist in such [subtractive] policies, given such knowledge, has been described as a form of linguistic and/or cultural genocide. […] In Dunbar and Skutnabb-Kangas 2008 we consider the possibility that such policies, implemented in the full knowledge of their devastating effects on those who suffer them, constitute
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Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson international crimes, including genocide, within the meaning of the United Nations’ 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the ‘Genocide Convention’), or a crime against humanity. […] [S]ubtractive education […] is now at odds with and in clear violation of a range of human rights standards, and in our view amount[s] to ongoing violations of fundamental rights. It is at odds with contemporary standards of minority protection. In our view, the concept of ‘crime against humanity’ is less restrictive [than genocide], and can also be applied to these forms of education. In our view, the destructive consequences of subtractive education, not only for indigenous languages and cultures but also in terms of the lives of indigenous people/s, are now clear. The concept of ‘crimes against humanity’ provides a good basis for an evolution that will ultimately lead to the stigmatization through law of subtractive educational practices and policies.
Linguistic and Cultural Diversity and Biodiversity: Correlational and Causal Relationships A central argument for the maintenance of all languages is as follows. If we continue as at present, most of the world’s indigenous languages will be gone by 2100. One serious implication for diversity is that most of the world’s linguistic diversity resides in the small languages of indigenous peoples. Most of the world’s mega-biodiversity is in areas under the management or guardianship of indigenous peoples (for example the ‘biodiversity hotspots’). The international organization Terralingua supports the integrated protection, maintenance and restoration of the biocultural diversity of life – the world’s biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity – through an innovative program of research, education, policy-relevant work, and on-theground action. (www.terralingua.org)
Terralingua’s home page of November 27, 2007 states: People who lose their linguistic and cultural identity may lose an essential element in a social process that commonly teaches respect for nature and understanding of the natural environment and its processes. Forcing this cultural and linguistic conversion on indigenous and other traditional peoples not only violates their human rights, but also undermines the health of the world’s ecosystems and the goals of nature conservation.
The World Resources Institute, the World Conservation Union, and the United Nations Environment Programme (1992: 21) also articulate the interconnectedness of diversities: Cultural diversity is closely linked to biodiversity. Humanity’s collective knowledge of biodiversity and its use and management rests in cultural diversity; conversely conserving biodiversity often helps strengthen cultural integrity and values.
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One reason for maintaining all the world’s languages is that linguistic (and cultural) diversity and biodiversity are correlated, and very likely also causally related. Much of the knowledge about how to maintain biodiversity is encoded in the small languages of indigenous and local peoples. By killing them we kill the prerequisites for maintaining biodiversity. (For details, see Harmon 2002, Maffi 2001, Skutnabb-Kangas 2000, 2003, Skutnabb-Kangas et al. 2003, SkutnabbKangas and Phillipson 2008a, 2008b).
Linguistic Human Rights in Market-Oriented Globalization Market and non-market values of languages and diversity How do human rights fare in corporate globalization? In an article entitled “Justice for sale. International law favours market values,” Mireille Delmas-Marty (2003) discusses the dangerous conflict between legal concepts based on the one hand on ‘universal’ market values, on the other hand on genuinely universal non-market values. The latter include individual and collective human rights as a part of the universal common heritage of humanity. The epistemology of human rights law and philosophically oriented political science are now starting to accept that normative rights should be stipulated at least in relation to some parts of this heritage (in their terminology, ‘common public assets’). Still, the legal protection of market values is “incommensurably stronger” than the protection of non-market values. Delmas-Marty exemplifies this with the fact that there is no universal international court individuals could turn to when their (non-market-value-based) human rights have been violated. “Individual rights are entirely a matter for states, and reports are the only form of monitoring” (ibid.). This monitoring does not support educational linguistic human rights strongly.8 On the other hand, laws based on market values, spread by organizations like the WTO (World Trade Organization) and WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization), are being developed extremely rapidly,9 with harsh sanctions for violations. Through his discussion of “market failure,” economist François Grin (2003: 35) offers excellent arguments for resisting market dominance for public or common assets/goods like cultural products: Even mainstream economics acknowledges that there are some cases where the market is not enough. These cases are called ‘market failure.’ When there is ‘market failure,’ the unregulated interplay of supply and demand results in an inappropriate level of production of some commodity.
In Grin’s view, many public goods, including minority language protection, ‘are typically under-supplied by market forces’ (ibid.). The level becomes
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inappropriately low. Therefore it is the duty of the state(s) to take extra measures to increase it. Some researchers disagree that there is such a duty. Edwards, for instance, argues that, for minorities, the communicative and symbolic values of language “are separable, and it is possible for the symbolic to remain in the absence of the communicative” (1984: 289). According to this view, even if minority members no longer know their language and cannot communicate in it, they can still remain, and feel that they are, members of the minority. Since “the symbolic value of language is essentially a private ethnic marker” (ibid.), governments should take no action to enable minorities to maintain their languages, “on the grounds that matters of ethnicity are best left to those directly concerned” (ibid., p. 299); “public institutions” like schools should not “promote private ethnicity” (ibid., p. 300). Grin’s careful opinion is that “this view is probably mistaken, and there are strong analytical reasons for state intervention – unless one were to argue that linguistic diversity is a bad thing in itself” (Grin 2003: 34). Edwards omits to say that schools strongly promote the “private ethnicity” of the linguistic majority by using this majority’s language as teaching language. Can states leave the responsibility for languages and linguistic diversity unconsidered in this way? States can be neutral in relation to religions, but not in relation to languages (see for instance Kymlicka and Grin 2003: 10), because all states must function through the medium of some language or languages. A state or federation that does not actively support minority languages is in fact supporting (the dominance of) the official language(s) unjustly. A European Parliament Resolution of 200310 exemplifies the attempt to build bridges between the market and cultural products, through suggestions for exempting cultural goods and services and education from market laws. According to Point 16 of this resolution, cultures (here including languages) and education have a dual nature, as both economic and cultural goods, and “must therefore be made subject to special conditions.” The market “cannot be the measure of all things, and must guarantee in particular diversity of opinion and pluralism” (ibid.). Point 18 “[c]alls on the European Union to place an unmistakable stress, in the context of the WTO and GATS, on the nature of cultural services and products as cultural goods, and to exempt them from trade liberalization.” Another of Delmas-Marty’s (2003) vital claims is this: “The market is replacing the nation, superseding the state and becoming the law: under the law of the market, law itself becomes a marketable commodity.” With many others (such as Zygmunt Bauman), Delmas-Marty sees this development as a danger, since “the market is replacing the nation, superseding the state and becoming the law”; “the law is ill-equipped to deal with non-market values”; and “the only concepts that apply universally are market-related.” François Grin (2004)11 differentiates between market and non-market values for private and social purposes. Most of the discourse on the worth of linguistic diversity and of knowledge of several languages has been about societal and, to some extent, private market values. The common but misguided claims about the negative correlation between linguistic diversity and economic growth as a causal
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relationship are effectively counteracted by Paulin Djité (2008) among others; multilingualism has social market value, as many studies show. Even Englishdominant countries appreciate this: English is not enough. We are fortunate to speak a global language but, in a smart and competitive world, exclusive reliance on English leaves the UK vulnerable and dependent on the linguistic competence and the goodwill of others […] Young people from the UK are at a growing disadvantage in the recruitment market. (The Nuffield Foundation 2000; emphasis added)
Another social market benefit flows from the relationship between creativity, innovation, and investment, which can be a result of good mother-tongue-based multilingual education (MLE). Creativity precedes innovation, also in commodity production; investment follows creativity. High levels of multilingualism can enhance creativity: high-level multilinguals as a group do better than corresponding monolinguals on tests measuring several aspects of ‘intelligence’ (a contested concept, of course), creativity, divergent thinking, cognitive flexibility, and so on; and good MLE mostly leads to high-level multilingualism. In knowledge societies, diverse knowledges and ideas (meaning results of creativity) give access to markets and produce market value, whereas hom*ogenization of various kinds is a market handicap. Positive globalization means context-sensitive localization, as opposed to corporate McDonaldized one-size-fits-all hom*ogenization. A somewhat similar analysis, which grades European and some other countries in terms of their innovation and creativity potential, is Florida and Tinagli 2004. The chain they present is as follows: tolerance entices diversity/difference, which entices creativity, which develops competitiveness, which brings money. In Singapore, English means money. In today’s Africa, Chinese means money. Using one’s (well-known) mother tongue instead of other languages and thus being more fluent, accurate, efficient, fast in finding the right expressions, is a great advantage for those who are able to do so when negotiating, regardless of whether it is about business or about details of formulation in political meetings at different levels (private market value). Here mother-tongue speakers, especially of English but also of French, are today free-riders at the expense of all of us others (van Parijs 2003: 167–8). In a large-scale Swiss study, Grin concludes that, whereas each additional year of formal education adds on an average 4.5 percent to the net earnings, knowledge of an additional language generally adds more; the additional earnings in the study were between 4 and over 20 percent, depending on “a person’s L1, the L2 considered, L2 skills level, gender, type of job, etc.” (Grin 1999: 194; see also Grin and Sfreddo 1997). Many of the beautiful pronouncements about the historical, aesthetic, philosophical, and other values of linguistic and cultural diversity for the whole of humankind, about languages as the libraries of humankind, and other ‘Unescoese’ statements exemplify social non-market values. Social non-market-value arguments have often been labeled and rejected as romantic, non-realistic, elitist, moralistic, essentializing, and the like (see Skutnabb-Kangas 2009). The enjoyment of feeling
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at ease when using one’s mother tongue reflects private non-market values. Issues around ethnic and linguistic identity are a central aspect of these values. An example of a combination of the values could be a European Union meeting, with interpretation. People might feel more confident (private non-market value) and might be objectively more competent when speaking their own language, without recourse to a ‘dumbed-down,’ less exact Euro-English (private market value). A meeting with really good interpreters avoids costly misunderstandings and is more efficient (social market value) and more just and equal (social non-market value). With the help of these distinctions, it is easier to classify many positivistic and post-modernist arguments against the maintenance of linguistic diversity. It is relatively easy to discuss the private market value of various languages, including the topic of maintaining or not maintaining certain specified mother tongues. But it is difficult to use rational choice theories on issues which are mainly seen as representing private non-market values if these are seen as non-values. Most of those who argue against diversity do not accept that using the mother tongue, or even having competence in several languages, can or should have any private non-market value. As long as a numerically small mother tongue does not give you a better job with a higher salary than shifting to a numerically and politically more powerful language, there are, according to this line of thought, few arguments for maintaining these mother tongues. And bilingualism is often not considered as a real option; the thinking here is often an ‘either/or ’ one: either the IM language or the dominant language (Kond-medium or English-medium schooling in India, not MLE with Kond, Oriya and English: Mohanty et al., Skutnabb-Kangas et al. 2009). It seems to be shortsighted to reject any of the (market or non-market, private or social) arguments for reasons why IM languages should be supported: all of them are useful in various ways.
Moral and Welfare Considerations: Costs of Diversity Many researchers whose mother tongue is a dominant language have never experienced any threat to their language. As a result, they are much less aware than dominated-language speakers of the non-market values of their own languages, and, consequently, of those of other people. At the same time, they are often not aware (or do not want to be aware) of the market benefits that they themselves have access to because of being speakers of dominant languages. Often they take both these benefits and the fact that others are learning their language in a nonreciprocal way, for granted, and they are not willing in any way to compensate for these non-earned benefits; they are linguistic free-riders. To compensate would be fair, even in terms of the types of justice that the legal system accepts. Several researchers have started discussing issues in these terms of economic compensation (for instance Grin 2003, 2004; van Parijs 2003).
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The costs of non-multilingualism and of non-maintenance of languages and linguistic diversity, as well as the enormous human and economic wastage caused by present non-education (for example concerning EFA – Education for All – and Millennium Goals),12 have received too little attention. These costs of non-action and of a ‘business-as-usual’ attitude have not been properly weighed against the costs of maintaining linguistic diversity, partially through MLE and LHRs. The costs issues can be discussed within several paradigms.13 Grin (2003: 24–7) differentiates between moral considerations arguments and welfare considerations arguments in answering the question why anybody, including society as a whole, should bother about maintaining IM languages. Most of the legal discourse, including the considerations about LHRs, refers to moral norms about the right to live in one’s own language, even if the extent of the ensuing rights is debated (ibid., pp. 24–5). In contrast, the emphasis of the welfare-based argument is not on whether something is morally ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but on whether resources are appropriately allocated. The test of an ‘appropriate’ allocation of resources is whether society is better off as a result of a policy (ibid., p. 25).
In a moral discourse, in most cases the question of compensation has not even arisen, and the question of what kind of rights, if any, should be granted to speakers of IM languages, seems to depend on how ‘nice’ the states are. This is a shaky foundation for human rights, as Fernand de Varennes rightly observes (1999: 117): Moral or political principles, even if they are sometimes described as ‘human rights,’ are not necessarily part of international law. They are things that governments ‘should’ do, if they are ‘nice,’ not something they ‘must’ do. Being nice is not a very convincing argument and is less persuasive than rights and freedoms that have the weight of the law behind them.
In a welfare-oriented discourse, one can calculate in much more hard-core terms (often, but not necessarily always, involving cash) who the winners and losers are. Here “the question is whether the winners, who stand to gain from a policy, can compensate the losers and still be better off [than without the policy]” (Grin 2003: 25). This is an empirical question, not a moral one. Many of the issues discussed can be, and have been, labeled in an either/or way, which often seems non-productive – we should rather have continua, or both/and. Both market and non-market values, private and social, have to be considered, among other things because languages are both economic and cultural goods. If markets are to decide, market failure is certain to promote mainly dominant languages; therefore the implementation of strong linguistic human rights in relation to IM languages is a necessary duty of states. It is not a question of protecting individuals, collectivities, or languages – but all of these; it is not a question of having a territoriality or personality principle, but a context-sensitive combination of both (Henrard 2000; see also Skutnabb-Kangas 2006, 2007).
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One can argue for this even within a liberal political philosophy; but it is only within a more critical political and philosophical paradigm that one can use a more proactive argument. If the fate of research-based suggestions for the education of IM children is decided by market-value-based laws, both formalized and non-formalized, then the human rights, including LHRs, of IM people(s) do not stand a chance – unless the rights are formulated in terms of cost–benefit analyses that show the economic market value both of granting these rights and of mothertongue medium education. If even human rights law is a ‘marketable commodity,’ we, as researchers, have to discuss whether and how it is possible to market ‘our commodity’ more effectively and efficiently while keeping our integrity. When assessing the empirical question of why one should maintain minority languages, Grin asks both what the costs and benefits are if minority languages are maintained and promoted, and what the costs (and benefits) are if they are neither maintained nor promoted. Some of his conclusions, which we endorse, are as follows (Grin 2003: 26): •
“diversity seems to be positively, rather than negatively, correlated with welfare”; • “available evidence indicates that the monetary costs of maintaining diversity are remarkably modest”; • “devoting resources to the protection and promotion of minority cultures” (and this includes languages) “may help to stave off political crises whose costs would be considerably higher than that of the policies considered” (namely the peace-and-security argument); • “therefore, there are strong grounds to suppose that protecting and promoting regional and minority languages is a sound idea from a welfare standpoint, not even taking into consideration any moral argument.” Strong research evidence shows that educating IM children mainly through the medium of their mother tongue should last minimally eight years to deliver positive results. Everything else is irrational, costly, and a short-sighted compromise. Experience obviously needs to be contextualized (see Skutnabb-Kangas and Heugh 2010). UNESCO’s project on the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger of Disappearing (www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas) has as its goal “to raise awareness on language endangerment and the need to safeguard the world’s linguistic diversity.” The latest UNESCO plans seem to take this seriously, also in education.14
NOTES 1 All websites are active as of January 2010. 2 The term ‘deaf ’ refers to biological deafness, whereas ‘Deaf ’ (with capital D) is used about conscious cultural deafness.
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4 5 6
7 8 9
10
11
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For Hamelink, McDonaldization involves “aggressive round-the-clock marketing, the controlled information flows that do not confront people with the long-term effects of an ecologically detrimental lifestyle, the competitive advantage against local cultural providers, the obstruction of local initiative” – all of which “converge into a reduction of local cultural space” (1994: 112). In Ritzer ’s definition, the “basic dimensions of McDonaldization” are “efficiency, calculabity (or quantification), predictability, increased control through substitution of nonhuman for human technology, and the seemingly inevitable by-product of rational systems” (rational in the Weberian sense) “– the irrationality of rationality” (1996: 33). This is a study commissioned by the Ma¯ori Section of the Aotearoa/New Zealand Ministry of Education, http://www.minedu.govt.nz/. See Dunbar and Skutnabb-Kangas 2008 for a legal and sociological discussion of the “intention” required in Article 2. See e.g. Ramirez, Yuen, and Ramey 1991; and Thomas and Collier 2002, the largest ever study of various educational alternatives, with over 210,000 children – in this case, Spanish-speaking children in the USA; for summaries of the research, see e.g. Collier 1989 and Cummins 2009 (and the references in it). For the Permanent Forum for Indigenous Issues (PFII), see www.un.org/esa/socdev/ unpfii/. For a detailed discussion and exemplification of this part of the article, see SkutnabbKangas 2004. This happens mainly through the 1994 agreement on TRAPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights). Even primary education is now being treated as a commodity and can come in under TRAPS; the fact that education is for a fee in over 100 countries is an important issue here (Tomaševski 2001; see also http://www. tomasevski.net/). The internationalization of European higher education has gone under the label ‘the Bologna Process’ since 1999. Forty-six European states are committed to it, Australia and the USA acting as observers, out of self-interest, since foreign students in higher education are big business for them and Europe is, potentially, a serious competitor (the increasing use of English in European higher education symbolizes this fact). This European process is a direct result of education being increasingly considered a service that can be traded, under the aegis of the WTO and, more specifically, of GATS – the General Agreement on Trade in Services. Member states have been legally committed to this ‘liberalization’ process since 1995, but there is a fundamental unresolved tension between education as a human right and trading in educational services (Devidal 2004, De Sequira 2005). In the many Bologna policy documents, which are written exclusively in English, language policy is never mentioned – even if the EU has twenty-three official languages (Phillipson 2003). There is nothing on bilingual degrees, or on multilingualism: ‘internationalization’ means ‘English-medium higher education’ (Phillipson 2006). The European Parliament Session document from 15 December 2003 (A5-0477/2003) from the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport contains a “Draft European Parliament Resolution on preserving and promoting cultural diversity: The role of the European regions and international organizations such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe” (2002/2269(INI)), and an Explanatory Statement. The text was adopted by the Parliament. Grin’s home page, http://www.unige.ch/eti/recherches/ecole/organisation/ departements/dfr/dfr-corps-enseignant/pages-personnelles/francois-grin.html, is a goldmine for articles on language economics.
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12
See http://www.unesco.org/education/efa/ed_for_all/ and http://www.un.org/ millenniumgoals/goals.html. 13 One further development of the reasoning of economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has been applied to education, poverty, and the medium of education in Mohanty 2000 and in Magga et al. 2005. 14 See e.g. points 14–18 of the document at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/ 0016/001614/161495e.pdf.
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The Global Politics of Language Devidal, P. (2004) Trading away human rights? The GATS and the right to education: A legal perspective. Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 2(2). Available at: www.jceps.com. Djité, P. G. (2008) From liturgy to technology. Modernizing the languages of Africa. Language Problems and Language Planning 32(2): 133–52. Edwards, J. (1984) Language, diversity and identity. In J. Edwards (ed.), Linguistic Minorities. Policies and Pluralism, 277–310. London: Academic Press. Engler, M. (2008) How to Rule the World. The Coming Battle over the Global Economy. New York: Nation Books. Fishman, J. A. (1966) Language Loyalty in the United States. The Maintenance and Perpetuation of Non-English Mother Tongues by American Ethnic and Religious Groups. London, The Hague and Paris: Mouton and Co. Florida, R., and Tinagli, I. (2004) Europe in the Creative Age. London: Demos. Graddol, D. (2006) English Next. Why Global English May Mean the End of ‘English as a Foreign Language.’ London: British Council. Grin, F. (1999) Compétences et récompenses: La Valeur des langues en Suisse. Fribourg: Editions Universitaires. Grin, F. (2003) Language Planning and Economics. Current Issues in Language Planning 4(11): 1–66. Grin, F. (2004) On the costs of cultural diversity. In P. van Parijs (ed.), Linguistic Diversity and Economic Solidarity, 189–202. Bruxelles: De Boeck-Université. [Also available at: http://www.unige. ch/eti/elf/.] Grin, F., and Sfreddo, C. (1997) Dépenses publiques pour l’enseignement des langues secondes en Suisse. Geneva: CSRE-SKBF. Gunnemark, E. V. (1991) Countries, Peoples and Their Languages. The Geolinguistic Handbook. Gothenburg: Geolingua. Halliday, M. A. K. (2006) Written language, standard language, global language. In B. B. Kachru, Y. Kachru,
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Multilingual Education for Social Justice: Globalising the Local. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan. Morgan, G. (2005) The Idea of a European Super-State. Public Justification and European Integration. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mothibeli, A. (2005) Cross-Country Achievement Results from the SACMEQ 11 Project – 2000 To 2002. A Quantitative Analysis of Education Systems in Southern and Eastern Africa. Edusource Data News No. 49 (October). Johannesburg: The Education Foundation Trust. Mufwene, S. S. (2008) Language Evolution. Contact, Competition and Change. London and New York: Continuum. Mühlhäusler, P. (1996) Linguistic Ecology. Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region. London: Routledge. Mühlhäusler, P. (2003) Language of Environment – Environment of Language. A Course in Ecolinguistics. London: Battlebridge. Nettle, D. (1999) Linguistic Diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. The Nuffield Foundation (2000). Languages: The Next Generation. The Final Report and Recommendations of the Nuffield Languages Inquiry. London: The Nuffield Foundation. Obanya, P. (1999) The Dilemma of Education in Africa. Dakar: UNESCO Regional Office. Oviedo, G., and Maffi, L. (2000) Indigenous and Traditional Peoples of the World and Ecoregion Conservation. An Integrated Approach to Conserving the World’s Biological and Cultural Diversity. Gland, Switzerland: WWF International and Terralingua. Pennycook, A. (1998) English and the Discourses of Colonialism. London and New York: Routledge. Pennycook, A. (2007) The myth of English as an international language. In Makoni and Pennycook (2007b), 90–115.
The Global Politics of Language Phillipson, R. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, R. (2000) English in the new world order: Variations on a theme of linguistic imperialism and ‘world’ English. In T. Ricento (ed.), Ideology, Politics and Language Policies: Focus on English, 87–106. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Phillipson, R. (2003) English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy. London: Routledge. Phillipson, R. (2004) Review article “English in globalization: Three approaches” (books by De Swaan, Block and Cameron, and Brutt-Griffler). Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 3(1): 73–84. Phillipson, R. (2006) English, a cuckoo in the European higher education nest of languages? European Journal of English Studies 10(1): 13–32. Phillipson, R. (2008a) The linguistic imperialism of neoliberal empire. Critical Inquiry in Language Studies 5(1): 1–43. Phillipson, R. (2008b) Lingua franca or lingua frankensteinia? English in European integration and globalisation. World Englishes 27(2): 250–84. [This is a ‘forum’ consisting of the article, responses by seven scholars, and a closing word by Robert Phillipson.] Phillipson, R. (2009) Linguistic Imperialism Continued. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan and New York/London: Routledge. Pieterse, J. N. (2004) Globalization or Empire. New York and London: Routledge. Ramirez, J. D., Yuen, S. D., and Ramey, D. R. (1991) Executive Summary: Final Report: Longitudinal Study of Structured English Immersion Strategy, Early-Exit and Late-Exit Transitional Bilingual Education Programs for Language-Minority Children, Submitted to the U. S. Department of Education. San Mateo, CA: Aguirre International. Rassool, N. (2007) Global Issues in Language, Education and Development: Perspectives from Postcolonial Countries. Clevedon:
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World Languages: Trends and Futures ULRICH AMMON
The Concept of ‘World Language’: Ranks and Degrees There are reasons to underline that the plural in the title is meant seriously. Titles referring to, or dealing with, English only as a world language (for instance Crystal 1997a/2003; but see also Graddol 2006) suggest that no other language deserves this attribute, or at least will no longer in the near future. Some even hint at the possibility that English may suffice, in future, as the only foreign language people have to know. Thus Crystal (1997a: 19), with a touch of enthusiasm, envisions a world in which intelligibility and identity happily coexist. This situation is the familiar one of bilingualism – but a bilingualism where one of the languages within a speaker is the global language [English], providing access to the world community, and the other is the regional language, providing access to the local community [any of the other languages].
In this world every non-anglophone would be bilingual, with English as the additional language, and anglophones could satisfy their communicative as well as their identity needs through their native tongue alone. However, while English is doubtlessly the predominent world language, a few other languages also have a global reach, which their speakers experience when they travel around the world and lecture to audiences in their own language, or communicate with individuals other than emigrants or expatriates. This has been possible with languages like French or German for over a hundred years, and has become true of languages like Spanish, Japanese or Chinese in more recent times. This chapter aims to draw attention to the plurality of ‘world languages’ (or ‘global languages’). This requires an adequate conceptual specification, which allows for ranks or degrees of global reach (or ‘globality’) of languages. For this purpose it seems useful to distinguish ‘global function’ from ‘global status,’ and
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again from ‘factors that influence global function.’ Thus Spanish, for example, is not very different from English in global status, being spread over three or four continents (depending on the delimitation of continents) and over twenty-one countries, in which it is both the official language and the native language of the majority of the population; but is clearly less predominant in global function. It also trails English considerably in factors that influence global function, for example in the economic strength of its speakers – a respect in which Spanish amounts to only about a fourth of what English amonts to, if one measures the two in terms of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of all their respective native speakers (3,204 versus 12,717 billion $ in 2005; see table 4.4 below). We would nevertheless include Spanish into the plurality of world languages with which we deal here, on the grounds that one finds those who speak it as a foreign language in countries around the world. A concept of ‘world language’ which is useful for our purposes would be based on its global function, which means ‘use for global communication’ and can be specified further with respect to the two concepts of ‘international’ and ‘interlingual’ communication. International communication by definition transcends different nations, in other words it occurs between individuals or institutions (or individuals representing institutions) of different nations. If both sides share the same language as native speakers – say, French in the case of a Frenchman and a Quebecois – the choice of this language is natural. The more interesting case for our purposes is the choice of a language for international communication in cases where at least one side consists of native speakers of a different language – for example that of French between a Frenchman and an Italian, or between an Italian and a Greek. Language choice is then ‘interlingual’ – to use an uncommon but self-explanatory term. It seems adequate for our purposes to focus on international and at the same time interlingual communication; and this is what the phrase ‘international communication’ will mean in what follows. It can be specified, if necessary, as international communication in the narrower sense, to be distinguished from international communication in the wider sense, where both sides are native speakers of the same language. The concept of ‘international communication’ requires a decision as to whether to include only the citizens or all the inhabitants of countries; a limitation to the former might be more to the point. The specification of international communication as being ‘in the narrower sense’ requires, in addition, a distinction between native and non-native speakers of languages; in other words it requires us to decide about the in-between category of ‘second-language speakers,’ who – roughly speaking – make everyday use of the language but have acquired it at a later stage in life (usually after puberty). These should probably be counted as native speakers if they claim the language as their (second) mother tongue, especially if they have native-like skills (but discrepancies between claims and skills may need extra consideration). Otherwise they should be classified as foreignlanguage speakers. Again, this category should be distinguished from that of mere language learners (present or previous learners), who have (virtually) no skills in the language. Most of the data available for our purposes do not allow for such
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distinctions; nevertheless, being sensitized to them can at least sharpen our critical judgment. There are, in addition, important further distinctions within interlingual communication. It can either be asymmetrical, if the language is used between native and non-native speakers, or symmetrical. Of the latter, the case most relevant for our purposes is that of using the language as lingua franca, which means that it is non-native to all participants. A symmetric form which is more limited in applicability is that of polyglot dialogue (or passive bilingualism), where participants use actively their different native languages and understand those of the other(s) too. Mixed forms are of course possible among groups of more than two participants. On the basis of these distinctions we can now define a language as being more international the more extensively it is used for international communication (in the narrower sense). In addition, a lingua franca which extends over several languages can be given more weight than a language of bilateral asymmetric use. It is such usage, as lingua franca, that distinguishes English most noticeably from other languages. Quantification can comprise the number of individuals or the number and size of institutions involved, as well as the frequency and length of communicative events. But quantity alone does not fully capture ranks or degrees in a language’s functioning as an ‘international language’ – or, a fortiori, as a ‘world language.’ Geographical distance and the distribution of speakers, institutions, and communicative events are relevant too – or perhaps even linguistic diversity, that is, the linguistic distance between the languages involved. In the face of this complexity of dimensions, it is easy to see that precise operationalization and the measurement of world languages in rank or degree can vary widely. In addition, the available data, including those presented hereafter, often rely on gross simplification and on indicators of dubious validity and reliability, instead of being based on direct observations.
World Languages and Their Ranking Order Heinz Kloss (1974) and William Mackey (1976) have been among the pioneers who suggested indicators and factors of language status in a community, including the global community. David Dalby – who sees the linguasphere, that is, the “languages extended around the planet by humankind,” as “the single most influential layer of the biosphere” – highlights what he calls the “arterial languages” (2002: 1f.). The metaphor suggests their international function, but Dalby defines them only by number of speakers, as spoken by at least 1 percent of mankind, and thus arrives at twenty-nine languages in 2002. Abram De Swaan’s typology (2001: 2–4; compare also Chapter 1 of this volume) comes closer to international function. Within what he calls the “global language system,” he sees all “languages […] connected by multilingual speakers,” in “a strongly ordered, hierarchical pattern.” The higher up languages are in this hierarchy, the greater the number of other languages (and speakers per language) to which they are
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connected through multilingual speakers. English is the “ ‘hypercentral language’ at the hub that holds the entire constellation together.” Following in rank are the “super-central,” the “central” and, finally, the “peripheral languages.” The eleven super-central languages are Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay (specified as bahasa indonesia), Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili (in alphabetic order). “All […], except Swahili, have more than one hundred million speakers and each serves to connect the speakers of a series of central languages.” It is important to stress the directness (or immediacy) of connection, since all languages are, in today’s “globalized” world, connected indirectly, via chains of multilingual speakers. English may be the only language connected to (virtually) all other languages directly, since every language community contains some multilinguals with English in their repertoires. It is important to add that, in De Swaan’s model, the non-native (not the native) languages in multilinguals’ repertoires are crucial for connections. His criterion for the “centrality” of a language refers to the extent to which that language is known (or used) non-natively (though he adds the number of native speakers, which he calls languages’ “prevalence,” as another component of languages’ “communicative value”). The focus on non-nativeness corresponds to our above definition of international communication (in the narrower sense), on which we suggest to base the ranking order, or the degree, of languages’ internationality or globality. Thus a language with no native speakers at all can well be an international or a world language – if it is directly connected to many or to all other languages via multilinguals, as was true for Latin as a European international language during and beyond the Middle Ages, or as was planned for Esperanto. The number of native speakers is, by itself, no valid criterion for the internationality or globality of a language, though it is (as will be shown shortly) a rough indicator of such a status, as well as a factor which influences it. The focus on non-native speakers corresponds to our intuition that French or English are international or world languages rather than Hindi; or rather than Hindi and Urdu, combined as a single language – or even rather than Chinese, in spite of the latter languages’ higher numbers of native speakers (see table 4.3 below). The functional criterion allows for the distinction between written, oral, oral and written, and perhaps other modes of language use (for instance the gestural mode for hearing-impaired persons), and thus for important distinctions between historical and recent international languages – such as between classical Chinese or medieval Latin, which mainly served for written international communication, and modern English, which is written and spoken globally. Also, if function is seen as essential for international or world languages, mere knowledge of a language is, strictly speaking, not sufficient; nor is mere study – which, again, is not identical with knowledge. The extent of knowledge or study of a language as a foreign one can, however, serve as an indicator of internationality or globality, on the basis of assumptions of strong positive correlations with use (which, however, ask for corroboration). Such indicators can be specified as to geographic reach and density, in order to show that languages can be international but regionally restricted, or global but with regional differences in density.
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Non-Native Speakers One of the seemingly best indicators of the internationality or globality of languages is the extent of their study as a foreign language. Assessing it is, however, far from easy, since available data are often flimsy and of dubious quality. Methods of data collection remain unclear in most cases, and there is always the danger of exaggerated figures when they are issued by a country in which the language has official status, because higher figures are assumed to attract more learners. Therefore specifying the languages which are presently studied around the globe in school, at the tertiary level, or in adult education (that is, in formal studies, as opposed to informal studies unaccounted for) remains to a considerable extent speculative, notwithstanding the arbitrariness of delimiting an open-ended ranking order. Table 4.1 contains the likely – though incomplete – ranking order of our choice, with rough estimates of learner numbers added (in million). Languages which could perhaps be added to a more comprehensive list would
Table 4.1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
English French Chinese German Spanish Italian Japanese Russian
Number of non-native learners of major languages world-wide 750 < 1,000, perhaps >1,000a 82.5 30 (with other estimates hardly above 3)b 16.7 14 3 < 14 3 ?c
sources: • English: Crystal 1997a: 61/2003: 68f.; 1997b: 360 • French: http://www.diplomatie.guv.fr… (accessed June 18, 2009) • Chinese: Graddol 2006: 63 • German: StADaF 2005: 15 • Spanish: Enciclopedia del Español en el mundo 2006: 25, 27 • Italian: estimate made by Andrea E. Samà, head of the cultural department of the Italian Embassy in Berlin • Japanese: Japan Foundation 2008: 1 notes a Crystal estimates non-native speakers at 530–830 million (1,200–1,500 million total, minus 670 “native or native-like” speakers) and, respectively, perhaps >1,000 (yet with cautions in 2003: 68). But numbers have most likely increased meanwhile (see Graddol 2006). b Markus Taube in the Chinese Department at the University of Duisburg-Essen, and Fachverband Chinesisch, estimate numbers as hardly above 3 million. c No useful figures could be gathered for Russian.
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Table 4.2 Five countries with the highest number of foreign language students (in thousands) German
Spanish
Japanese
Russia 3,322 Poland 2,208 France 2,261 Ukraine 760 Hungary 604
USA 6,000 France 2,220 Brazil 1,000 Germany 453 Italy 302
Korea 911 China 684 Australia 366 Indonesia 273 Taiwan 191
sources: StADaF 2005: 8–15; Enciclopedia del español en el mundo 2006: 25–7; Japan Foundation 2008: 5.
be Portuguese, Dutch, Korean, Arabic, and Esperanto. The data, which are imprecise for various reasons, refer to the year 2005 and thereabout. Main areas of study can be roughly determined by countries with the highest numbers of students, which are given in table 4.2 for the three languages for which data were available country by country. Numbers of foreign-language learners need to be seen in relation to numbers of native speakers. More native speakers of a language imply that the pool of potential foreign-language learners is smaller. In consequence, same absolute numbers of foreign-language learners do not necessarily mean same density. Same numbers, globally, for Chinese (with a vast number of native speakers) mean a higher density than for other languages. For each language, density varies around the globe. The map below (which is based on data from StADaF 2005: 8–15) illustrates this statement for German, for which formal foreign-language studies have been confirmed for 114 countries in 2005. This map shows the density of studies of German as a foreign language – that is, the number of students in relation to the countries’ total population. Quartiles range from 0–0.008 percent (Guinea; first quartile) to 0.4–6.7 percent (Slovakia; fourth quartile): density of studies is, for example, 838 times higher in Slovakia than in Guinea. In the map, countries are pictured as hom*ogeneous units, which can be misleading in the case of large territories – for instance Russia, where population density varies widely. Density of study as a foreign language and, to a lesser extent, even absolute numbers of students are rough indicators of languages’ degree of international function, as has been confirmed by fragmentary data: for German, in the western part of eastern Europe; for Russian, in the eastern and central parts of Asia; for French, in western Europe and in western and northern Africa; for Spanish, in non-hispanophonic America and in parts of western Europe; or, for Japanese and Chinese, in East Asia and in the Pacific region. While overall numbers for French, German, Italian, and Russian seem to be stagnating or even declining – though with regional differences, and not for
Figure 4.1
Studies of German as a foreign language worldwide: Quartiles of density. Data from StADaF 2005: 8–15
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French as a second language in West Africa – they seem to be on the rise, though on very different scales, for English, Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese. Thus, for example, the figures for German were 20.2 million in 2000, but only 16.7 million in 2005 (StADaF 2005: 15), while the figures for Japanese show the following increase (in million): 1.62 (1993), 2.10 (1998), 2.36 (2003), 2.98 (2006), probably >3 (2008) (Japan Foundation 2008: 1) – if data are reasonably reliable. A look back into history shows that Chinese and Japanese are newcomers among the world languages. They are not even mentioned in studies of world-wide foreign language learning during the first half of the twentieth century, as for example in Fränzel (1939). For similar reasons, especially Portuguese but perhaps also Arabic may show up in the same league in the foreseeable future. English obviously outranks all other languages by far. Numbers are especially hard to pin down, because of the extent and rapidity of change (see Graddol 2006). Even more important is the fact that skills acquired in English are mostly superior to those acquired in other languages, either on account of its privileged place in the curricula or on account of preferential choice for it among learners. Both higher numbers of learners and better skills acquired determine the position of English as the preferred world lingua franca, and even its nativization – its adoption as a native or quasi-native language in certain regions. All other languages, in contrast, serve mainly for bilateral asymmetrical communication and function as a lingua franca only in special situations, for example at conferences of philology, which are attended by exceptionally skilled speakers. In many encounters, these languages are used only for symbolic purposes, such as greetings and other gestures of politeness, while serious work takes place in English. There is a wealth of fractional data, but (to our knowledge) no globally representative ones on these functional differences.
Native Speakers The number of native speakers (often referred to as ‘numerical strength’) is a useful indicator of the internationality of languages only for living or for natural languages, as cases like that of medieval Latin (a dead language) or Esperanto (an artificial language) attest. And even for living natural languages there are obvious exceptions, like Hindi (or Hindi and Urdu), Bengali, and (to a lesser extent) Indonesian – if those who speak it as a second language are included: these languages have great numbers of native speakers but a relatively low rank in terms of internationality. On the whole, however, internationality and numerical strength correlate positively. Table 4.3 lists the twelve numerically strongest languages, or rather language communities, of the world. The ‘second-language’ speakers, who have been added to the native speakers in the second column, do not comprise real foreign-language speakers. The languages are ranked according to native (first) and second-language speakers, with native speakers alone as a subordinate criterion, in 2005.
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Table 4.3 Number of native and native plus second-language speakers of major languages world-wide (in millions; ranking order according to native plus second-language speakers) 2005
1984
Rank
Language
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Chinese Hindi+Urdu English Spanish Russian Arabic Bengali Portuguese Indonesian Japanese German French Italian
Number of speakers 873 425 309 322 145 206 171 177 23 122 95 65 62
1,051 588 508 382 255 246 211 192 163 123 123 115 62
1964
Rank
Number of speakers
Rank
Number of speakers
1 4 2 3 5 8 11 6 10 9 7 12 13
700 194 391 211 154 117 102 120 110 117 119 63 ?
1 3 2 4 5 8 9/10 9/10 ? 7 6 11 12
515 185 265 145 135 90 85 85 95 100 65 55
sources: Ethnologue 1984/2005; Muller 1964.
Comparison of different points in time show that the following languages have overall risen in rank: Hindi and Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, and Portuguese (sometimes declining in-between); the following languages have declined in rank: English, Japanese, French, Italian, and especially German; while the rest have maintained their rank – namely Chinese, Spanish, and Russian. Indonesian remains an unclear case for lack of data.
Economic Strength A large number of native speakers is an indicator and, like other indicators, it is at the same time a factor enhancing a language’s internationality. The reason is that acquisition of such a language promises communicative access to numerous individuals and to their culture. Smaller languages can, however, also appear attractive to learners, especially if their speakers have economic strength, which often correlates positively with scientific or cultural wealth. Therefore the total economic strength of languages is perhaps an even more reliable indicator of their international or global rank than numerical strength. One way of measuring it is by total Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the speakers, usually native or native
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Table 4.4 Economic strength of major languages world-wide, in terms of native speakers’GDP (in billion $) 2005
English Japanese German Spanish Chinese French Italian Arabic Portuguese Russian Hindi + Urdu Bengali Indonesiana
1987
Rank
GDP (billion $)
Rank
GDP (billion $)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
12,717 4,598 3,450 3,204 2,400 2,215 1,207 984 872 584 215 113 38
1 2 3 5 7 6 9 8 10 4 11 13 12
4,271 1,277 1,090 739 448 669 302 359 234 801 102 28 65
sources: Ethnologue 1984/2005; Fischer Weltalmanach 1990/2007. notes a Without second-language speakers.
and second-language speakers – though foreign-language speakers could be considered, too, but have not been so far, probably because calculation is difficult. Table 4.4 contains native speakers’ GDP world-wide, which was calculated for each country in proportion to shares of the language’s native speakers in the country’s population, and then summed up. The table includes, for comparative purposes, the same languages as table 4.3: the numerically strongest languages, not all of which would rank among the economically strongest thirteen. Only the first ten languages in table 4.4 are also the ten economically strongest ones world-wide. The comparison between table 4.4 and table 4.3 reveals that some languages rank considerably higher in economic strength than in number of native speakers, notably Japanese, German, French, and Italian (whose main countries are also members of the G7 group of the world’s economically strongest countries). It seems likely that economic strength is one of the reasons, or rather abstract causes, why these languages keep being studied as foreign languages around the world. Table 4.4 also illustrates the conspicuous distance of English from the following languages. Even Chinese, it seems, hardly has a chance to catch up with English in the foreseeable future, since English can summon the US, Britain, and numerous other countries, including a growing segment of India. This is certainly one
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of the main reasons why China, which is sometimes pictured as the future linguistic competitor of the anglophone countries, has made English a generally obligatory school subject and thus virtually adopted it as its main international language, which no other large country has done with Chinese. Comparison of the numbers for 2005 with those for 1989 shows that the following languages have risen in economic strength: Chinese and Italian (2 ranks), Portuguese and Spanish (1 rank). Russian has declined (4 ranks), while English, Japanese, German, French, Arabic, and Hindi and Urdu have maintained the same rank. Bengali and Indonesian cannot be judged, the latter being a special case, for which the method of counting speakers seems to have changed in the source. For Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish, the function of international languages has probably increased, and for Russian it has decreased, in line with the economic rank. The international function of English, and perhaps also of Japanese, have increased, while that of German, French, and Italian has probably decreased, in spite of unchanged – or, in the last case, even improved – economic rank. Corroboration for these assumptions is, however, fractional. It can be based, among other possibilities, on numbers of non-native speakers and on the role in science communication (on which see below) as indicators.
Official Status Number and geographic distribution of countries with official status of language are other potential indicators. Their reliability is, however, limited, because of the enormous variety in the size of countries; because languages can play an important role in a country without having official status (see for instance Crystal 1997a: 56, for English in Kenya and Tanzania); and because communication between countries with the same official language is often mainly international in the wider sense (see the section on the concept of ‘world language’ above). The number of countries can especially be misleading if it is presented on a global map without indication of differences in population density. Official status in international organizations (rather than countries) takes us closer to international function. The following languages are official and working languages of the United Nations (UN): Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish (all since 1945), and Arabic (since 1973). Most documents appear in all of them. We do not know, however, to what extent they are read by non-native speakers; we can only guess that texts in English are much preferred to others. The status of official and working language of the UN enhances to some extent a language’s desirability in the linguistic training of diplomats. Translation and interpretation in the UN and its various organs are, however, done in a wider array of languages, including all of those we have identified as international in table 4.1 above (for a somewhat dated but still largely valid documentation, see Tabory 1980: 239). Important international communication in the narrower sense, notably oral, takes place in informal meetings and encounters, for which interpretation is unavailable. There English is definitely the preferred language. We can but guess at
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Table 4.5 Number of countries and continents with official language status world-wide Language 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
English French Arabic Spanish Portuguese German Chinese/Italian Bengali Hindi + Urdu Russian Indonesian/Japanese
Countries
Continentsa
50 29 22 21 8 7 3 2 2 2 1
6 5 2 3 3 1 1 1 1 2 1
source: Banks 2007. notes a Counts on continents are based on a division into six: Africa, Asia, Australia and Pacific, North America, South America, and Europe.
frequency of choice in the case of other languages and assume that French comes second – at a distance. Basically the same ranking order can be observed in other international constellations or organizations, the differences between them depending on the respective regional international languages. The European Union, for example, has twenty-three official languages for communication between institutions and member states (they are called ‘official and working languages’), but internal institutional work takes place in the actual working languages (what are called the ‘procedural languages’), which are mainly English, to a considerable but diminishing extent French, at a greater distance German, and very rarely Spanish and Italian.
Economy In the section above we moved to what could be called the ‘terrain’ of diplomacy – to be distinguished from its ‘domain,’ which in sociolinguistics has the meaning of ‘type of situation (with basically same attributes).’ A terrain can comprise a variety of very different domains. We will deal here only with two such terrains, namely economy and science. Unlike in the case of domains, serious attempts at a taxonomy of terrains seem to be missing in sociolinguistics. Other examples of terrains – obviously with considerable overlap among them, and some of them
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being also treated as domains – would be (perhaps) education, culture, religion, sports, holidays, tourism, or the media. In recent years, the most globally distributed companies of any original home country – the so-called ‘global players’ – have adopted English as their official, or at least co-official, company language. This does not mean, however, that other languages are not used internationally for economic purposes. Especially smaller companies continue to use their own national language where it seems possible, either because they try to avoid the additional costs of handling a foreign language or because their economic exchanges are regionally limited. The latter circ*mstance usually allows them to preserve a structure with a continued clear dominance of their home base – in contrast to the global players, whose branches in various countries enjoy considerable autonomy (this is monocentric versus multicentric company structure). As one would expect, international languages other than English are used in trade and other economic exchanges mainly in the regions where they are a preferred subject of study (see table 4.2 and the map in Figure 4.1). In some countries, companies can get explicit advice about the reach of their own language. Thus the Chamber of Commerce in Hamburg regularly issues such advice for Germany on the basis of a survey of German companies and of their linguistic experience. Table 4.6 offers an overview of the languages which can be used by German companies abroad. It should, however, be noted that the data in table 4.6 refer only to business correspondence – as other data do, which come up with great numbers of languages. Still other data, largely fragmentary and anecdotal, reveal that, for business negotiations and treaty texts, English is the generally preferred language. It is also the language which has expanded more than any of the others during the sixteen years period covered by table 4.6. The expansion of the other languages is largely due to the break-up of countries (Soviet Union and Yugoslavia), or, for Portuguese, the exaggerated impression of an expansion is created by the fact that data for a number of countries were missing in 1989.
Science Science is the terrain where English has become, and has been noticed to be, especially prominent – or even dominant, to hint at the possibility of unfavorable implications (see Ammon 2002). Here French and German once ranked on the same level, and the older generation of French and German academics still remember being able to use their respective language regularly, for publishing in international journals or for presentations at international conferences. Now they cannot do it any longer; they have to use English – especially in the natural sciences, but also in the social sciences and in the humanities, even if to a lesser extent. The shares of a language in scientific publications world-wide are a convenient, but of course rough, indicator of that language’s course of development. Figure 4.1 gives a long-term overview of the five major scientific languages’ shares
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Table 4.6 Number of countries for which languages can be used for correspondence by German companies (figures for 1989 in brackets)a
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
English French German Spanish Russian Arabic Portuguese Italian Dutch Chinese Croatian
Sole language or co–language
Sole language
Co–language
137 (122) 58 (57) 37 (26) 28 (26) 23 (1) 17 (12) 13 (8) 9 (4) 7 (8) 3 (–) 2 (–)
52 (64) 18 (25) 1 (1) 16 (17) – (–) – (–) – (–) – (–) – (–) – (–) – (–)
85 (58) 40 (32) 36 (25) 12 (9) 23 (1) 17 (12) 13 (?) 9 (4) 7 (8) 3 (–) 2 (–)
source: Handelskammer Hamburg 2005. notes a Table 4.6 includes only languages which can be used for two or more foreign countries (excluding Germany). Twenty-four more languages are given for single countries. It seems worth stressing in our context that the latter are also used internationally (in the narrower sense defined above, see p. 102), though not globally. The above data have been collected from a source which reflects a German vantage point, and they may suggest an exaggerated reach of German. They show, nevertheless, the international reach of a considerable number of languages – that is, their usefulness beyond their ‘own’ countries (where they have official status). Just compare numbers of countries in tables 4.5 and 4.6. There are various studies of foreign-language needs of companies in different countries which regularly come up with a considerable number of languages, for example twenty-eight for German companies in a comprehensive study (SchöpperGrabe and Weiß 1998: 245).
in natural science publications during a time span of over a hundred years. Chinese is a newcomer, which rose to 1 percent only in 1999 and continued as follows: 1.5 percent in 2000 and 2001; 1.8 percent in 2002; 2 percent in 2003; 2.1 percent in 2004. It should be added that we do not have the real proportions, since data have not been collected directly, but through the most comprehensive periodical bibliographies or bibliographical databanks. Formerly such bibliographies existed in a number of countries with different languages, but now the English-speaking countries pretty much monopolize them. Thus for example German bibliographical databanks like Chemisches Zentralblatt or Physikalische Berichte were absorbed respectively by Chemical Abstracts in 1969 and by Physics Abstracts in 1978.
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100 90 80 70 German English French Japanese Russian
60 50 40 30 20 10
05
96
20
88
19
80
19
70
19
60
19
50
19
40
19
30
19
20
19
10
19
90
19
18
18
80
Figure 4.2 Shares of languages in science publications, 1880–2005: overall average percentage for biology, chemistry, medicine, physics, and mathematics. Sources: Tsunoda 1983; Ammon 1998; the author ’s own analysis, with the help of Abdulkadir Topal and Vanessa Gawrisch, of Biological Abstracts, Chemical Abstracts, Physics Abstracts and Mathematical Reviews
It has been convincingly shown, in the case of citation indexes, that they are skewed in favor of English in the sense that titles in this language are over-represented (Sandelin and Sarafoglou 2004). The same appears to be likely for most of the bibliographical databanks. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that English carries home by far the lion’s share in total scientific publications. The titles included in the Anglo-Saxon databanks might even be better indicators of international and global scientific communication than those excluded, since they focus on publications with the highest ‘impact factor.’ The situation is slightly different in the social sciences, where shares of other languages are more noticeable (see Figure 4.3), and more so for the humanities. For the latter, other languages than English still play a noticeable international role, especially in various branches of archaeology, music, theology, history, philosophy, and in the own subject, i.e. the respective languages’ linguistics, literature and philology (Ammon 1998: 170–9). English also serves as a medium of teaching in non-anglophone countries, mainly in the sciences – especially at tertiary level (Ammon and McConnell 2002), but also, and to a growing extent, at secondary level (for Malaysia, see Gill 2007) – while study programs in other foreign languages, for instance French or German, are scarce. Even countries which are known for their vigorous defence of the own language’s international rank have introduced study programs in English – for example France and Germany had introduced 555 and respectively 674
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74.2 74.7 74.7 73.8 75.5 75.6 74.1 73.6 71.8 73.1 80.8 English German French Russian Spanish Italian 9.0 9.3 8.5 10.0 8.2 7.5 7.8 7.1 6.7 6.2 6.7 6.4 6.1 6.3 6.1 5.9 5.7 5.1 4.9 5.0 6.5 4.0 3.8 5.6 3.4 3.2 3.3 3.3 3.3 2.6 2.9 2.4 2.5 2.2 2.5 2.3 2.2 2.4 2.1 2.9 2.6 1.8 2.3 1.6 1.5 2.2 1.8 1.3 1.3 1.3 1.1 1.1 1.1 1.6 1.5 0.9 1.0 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
Figure 4.3 Shares of languages in publications of the social sciences, years 1880–2006: overall average percentage for anthropology, political science, economics, and sociology. Shares of other languages are smaller than 1 percent during entire time span. Sources: International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, IBSS; the author ’s own analysis, with help of Vanessa Gawrisch
such programs by 2008. (See http://www.campusfrance.org/en/b-agence/ espacedoc_infos.htm#forma_en, and http://www.daad.de/deutschland/studienangebote/internationalprogrammes/07535.de.html, both in October 2008.) In particular, these countries hope that the English-language programs may even have the side-effect of propping up their own language’s international rank by attracting foreigners. Students begin their studies in English and partially continue that way, but they also have to learn the country’s own language – French or German. Skills in that language often are a prerequisite for the degree and are tested at the end of studies. Anyway, rudimentary language skills are nearly unavoidable for the purpose of everyday life in the country. In this way the number of learners and the global reach of other languages may increase through English-language study programs.
The Rise and Stabilization of a Single, World Lingua Franca Although it seems obvious that a number of languages function internationally and globally, especially those whose native communities are numerically and – what is even more important – economically strong or whose languages have had a tradition of being studied abroad, it is necessary not to overlook differences and proportions. There is virtually no descriptive parameter or indicator for the
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international or global rank of a language which, if applied to today’s languages world-wide, does not place English at the top (see Crystal 1997b; De Swaan 2001; Maurais and Morris 2003; Graddol 2006). The overall explanation for this unique position is complex and can here only be hinted at. It is also speculative to a considerable extent, because the weight of factors is largely unknown. It makes sense to distinguish various strands of explanation, especially the socio-economic, the political, the technical (or technological), the communicative (or interactional), and the psychological (or attitudinal and cognitive). Socio-economically, the long-lasting economic superiority of the anglophone countries, with Britain leading in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and the US in the twentieth, has formed the crucial pillar. Politically and ideologically, Britain’s colonialism, driven as it was by economic motives and by ideas of its own cultural superiority and religious zeal, was accompanied and supported by the export and imposition of Britain’s own language (Phillipson 1992). To be fair, it needs to be pointed out that all European countries were prone to act in the same way but they were unable to do so, or less successful at it. In recent times, access to virtually all countries world-wide, the political prerequisite of ‘globalization,’ gave an additional push to the predominance of English, since regions of special protection for other languages were eliminated (for instance eastern Europe for German and Russian). In addition, practically all countries or private institutions world-wide have upgraded English in their curricula for school or tertiary education. English has been made an obligatory subject of study – often the only obligatory foreign language, or the only one offered, or the one to which most study time has been allotted; or it has become the preferred choice for the majority of students, and in quite a few cases the language of instruction. Technologically, growingly efficient means of transport and communication (media, the internet, and the like) have allowed for ever more intensive international and global contacts. Technology has not developed, however, practical machines for automatic translation or interpretation between languages; nor are these in the pipeline for the foreseeable future, in spite of considerable technical progress in this direction. Rules of communication and interaction between individuals of different linguistic background favor the choice of one and the same language (see Crystal 1997a/2003). They discourage exclusion of participants for reasons of communicative efficiency or politeness, and hence they call for the choice of the best and most generally known language (van Parijs 2001). As a consequence of frequent use by non-native speakers, the national connotation of that language – that is, its association with native countries – has worn off, and the language has acquired a touch of neutrality, similar to what was once planned for Esperanto. This tendency has been supported by claims to national neutrality from the side of prominent linguists, especially of anglophone background, or from other sides (see the section on the concept of ‘world language’ above). The question of national neutrality has been raised in the context of studies on ‘world Englishes’ (Jenkins 2003) or on ‘international English’ (Seidlhofer 2003), which focus on the use of English by non-native speakers. These studies, or an
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important subset of them, aim not only at systematically analyzing and describing non-native speakers’ linguistic peculiarities of English but, over and above, at making them generally acceptable, at least for international communication. This perspective may seem forbiddingly utopian in the face of the huge variability among, and difficulty of delimiting, communicatively functional peculiarities from the communicatively dysfunctional ‘anything goes.’ It would, in my view, require codifying these peculiarities, or at least a core set of them, and acknowledging them as variants of a multi-central global language – expanding the idea of pluricentric languages with a variety of norms which diverge regionally or nationally, but only to an extent that does not preclude communication. It seems possible, and also reasonable, to conceive of attempts to acknowledge and upgrade international English as the first steps towards developing a real global lingua franca. This would have to be not just a variety of English but a language in its own right, though certainly one mainly based on English (whose impact on other languages world-wide is noticeable even today: see for instance House, Baumann, and Probst 2004). Only then, and not as a mere variety of English, could such a language be a real lingua franca – that is, a non-native language for all its users (notwithstanding the possibility of re-nativization). Its conceptualization as a “hybrid language” (House 2003: 573) can be understood as leading in the same direction. Then this language should be named, accordingly, not by a compound name with the element ‘English’ in it, but by an independent new name, say, ‘Globalish,’ designed to express its major function (for details, see Ammon 2003). To non-anglophones, such a solution would appear to be fairer not only than ‘global English’ (Crystal 1997a/2003), but also than ‘international English’ or ‘world English,’ and thus it would mitigate resentment by diminishing national inequalities with respect to norm control of the language and to access to it. The costs and hardships of language learning will keep working in favor of a single predominant language. Linguists do not want to hear about these hardships; they insist instead on valuable investment and on satisfaction, or even pleasure – but the growing abstinence of native speakers of English, including linguists, from foreign-language learning tells another story. Because of these costs and hardships, which put limits to human multilingualism, sets of competing languages function, to some extent, like zero-sum games: the rise of one can entail the fall of the others. Thus the rise of English as a world language can cause the fall of competitor languages. But there are also more indirect connections. The upgrading of minority languages can cause the shrinkage of international languages other than English; English is not affected but its predominance can, as a consequence, even increase. If a minority language becomes the language used at school, as has happened in many places, especially within the EU, students still have to learn and use the country’s national official language. Their first real foreign language is then their third language at school, a role for which they choose almost always English – otherwise they would fear that they overstretch their language learning capacity; besides, they feel that skills in English are indispensable. The same regularity applies in the case of second official languages, if
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they are obligatory school subjects. They, too, can have the effect of giving English an indirect extra boost and of causing shrinkage in the study of other international or global languages.
The Rise of New and the Continuation of Traditional Subordinate and Bilateral World Languages Are we heading towards a world with only one single international and world language, all the other languages being confined to their own language communities – that is, a world in which practically none of them is being used for international, let alone global, communication or studied as a foreign language? There are reasons to assume that this is not a realistic scenario for the foreseeable future. Not even David Graddol (2006) goes so far, although his predictions, which extend up to the middle of the twenty-first century, amount to an overall growing predominance of English as a world language. His warning, made to the anglophone world, against abstinence from foreign-language learning implies that he foresees the continuance of other international – or even world – languages. Following demographic and economic prediction, and especially the rise of the BRIC states (Brazil, Russia, India, and China; though CIRB might be the more realistic ranking order), Graddol foresees the growing importance of Chinese, Russian, Portuguese, “Indic” (obviously, and highly questionably, Hindi), and also Spanish, and the “slow relative decline of Japanese and most European languages” (Graddol 2006: 62f.). While especially Chinese and Spanish seem to be indeed on the rise, his predictions about the future of the other languages appear more uncertain. Graddol’s methods are, basically, scenario planning and extrapolation from previous development, about whose reliability he may, in spite of some scepticism, be too confident. The poor predictability of economic developments, for which the recent financial crisis provides an example, and the considerable stability of the economic ranks of language communities (see table 4.4) are reasons to be cautious about predictions concerning language status and function. This said, it seems, first, unlikely that any other language can ‘dethrone’ English as the clearly predominant world language, and as especially the world lingua franca, in the foreseeable future. Secondly, it seems likely that other languages than English will continue to be used internationally or globally, mainly for bilateral contact, for the following reasons (perhaps among others, such as persistent anti-American sentiments): • Because skills of English will spread more slowly and will remain poorer than would be necessary for the substitution of other international languages: numbers of learners should not be equaled with numbers of individuals with skills.
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• Because communication in English only will not be fully accepted in relevant situations by native speakers of other international or world languages, especially from economically powerful communities, even if they have sufficient skills in English. Language use has more functions than communication and cognition, and the choice of a language can be refused or resented even if its use were efficient for the present purpose. The attitudes which mainly come into play here are not only related to the identity function of language. They can, in addition, derive from assumptions of lack of fairness – and not only in communication (van Parijs 2001), but also in establishing international relations. The former kind of assumptions is easy to comprehend. As to the latter, the idea seems to spread in various countries that knowledge of one’s own language abroad enhances the diffusion of one’s own values and of favorable attitudes towards one’s own country, and consequently helps to improve economic and other international relationships. Therefore knowledge of one’s own language abroad should be promoted rather than sacrificed to, or substituted by, use of English as a global language. Vice versa, countries find it easier to establish contacts with another country from the outside if they know that country’s own language than if they try to do it through English as a foreign language. They consider it especially advantageous to follow the rule that, if you want to sell, you had better be as polite as to choose the buyer ’s own language. Thus even British companies are eager to hire personnel with foreign language skills, and students who have acquired them in addition to their professional expertise enjoy excellent job opportunities (Durrell 2004: 29). Recently, since 2005, the number of students of foreign languages, especially French and German, has increased in Britain after years of decline (www.cilt.org/ research/statistics/education, accessed in September 2008). The English-language study programs in France and Germany have yielded to criticism concerning the neglect of one’s own language and have in most cases led to the introduction of demands for its acquisition as an obligatory component. A good many students are eager to expand their knowledge of foreign languages beyond English, because they consider this to be a valuable qualification. For all these reasons, it appears likely that other languages besides English will gain, or maintain, international or global function. The gist of their use will probably be bilateral, but the possibility of multilateral usage, including as a lingua franca in special situations, remains, irrespective of the role of English as the predominant world lingua franca.
REFERENCES Ammon, U. (1998) Ist Deutsch noch internationale Wissenschaftssprache? Englisch auch für die Lehre an den
deutschsprachigen Hochschulen. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
World Languages: Trends and Futures Ammon, U. (2003) Global English and the non-native speaker. Overcoming disadvantage. In H. Tonkins and T. Reagan (eds), Language in the TwentyFirst Century, 23–34. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ammon, U. (ed.) (2002) The Dominance of English as a Language of Science. Effects on the Non-English Languages and Language Communities. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ammon, U., and McConnell, G. (2002) English as an Academic Language in Europe. A Survey of Its Use in Teaching. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, and Vienna: Lang. Banks, A. S. (2007) Political Handbook of the World: 2007. Washington, DC: CQ Press. Biological Abstracts (1927–2005) Philadelphia. Available at: www. campusfrance.org/en/b-agence/ espacedoc_infos.htm#forma_en. Chemical Abstracts (1907–2005). Columbus, OH: Chemical Abstracts. Crystal, D. (1997a) English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [2nd edn: 2003.] Crystal, D. (1997b) World languages. In Crystal, D. (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 2nd edn, 359–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dalby, D. (2002) The Linguasphere Register of the World’s Languages and Speech Communities. Available at: www.linguasphere.org/book.html. De Swaan, A. (2001) Words of the World. The Global Language System. Cambridge: Polity. www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/en/francepriorities_1/francophony-frenchlanguage_1113/french-language_1934/ promoting-french_4450/globalinitiatives_4451/promoting-andteaching-french-abroad_6881. html?var_recherche=french +learners.
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Der Fischer Weltalmanach 1990/2007. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Durrell, M. (2004) Perspektiven für den Deutschunterricht und die Germanistik im Vereinigten Königreich Großbritannien und Nordirland. Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik 35(1): 19–25. Ethnologue. Languages of the World (1984), 10th edn. Dallas, TX: SIL International. [15th edn: 2005.] Enciclopedia del Español en el Mundo (2006). Madrid: Instituto Cervantes (Annuario del Instituto Cervantes 2006–7). Fränzel, W. (1939) Die lebenden Sprachen im Sprachunterricht der Welt. Internationale Zeitschrift für Erziehung 8(2): 104–28. Gill, S. K. (2007) Shift in language policy in Malaysia: Unravelling reasons for change, conflict and compromise in mother-tongue education. AILA Review 20: 106–22. Graddol, D. (2006) English Next. Why Global English May Mean the End of ‘English as a Foreign Language.’ London: British Council. Handelskammer Hamburg (ed.) (2005) Exportnachschlagewerk K und M: Konsularund Mustervorschriften, 36th edn. Hamburg: Dieckmann. House, J. (2003) English as a lingua franca: A threat to multilingualism? Journal of Sociolinguistics 7: 556–78. House, J., Baumann, N., and Probst, J. (2004) English as a lingua franca and its influence on other languages. Translator 10(1): 83–108. International Bibliography of the Social Sciences: Sociology (1951–2005); Economics (1952–2005); Political Science (1953–2005); Social and Cultural Anthropology (1955– 2005). London and Chicago: Tavistock and Aldine. Japan Foundation (2008) Survey Report on Japanese-Language Education abroad 2006: Present Condition of Overseas
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Japanese-Language Education. Summary. Tokyo: The Japan Foundation. Jenkins, J. (ed.) (2003) World Englishes. A Resource Book for Students. London and New York: Routledge. Kloss, H. (1974) Die den internationalen Rang einer Sprache bestimmenden Faktoren. Ein Versuch. In H. Kloss (ed.), Deutsch in der Begegnung mit anderen Sprachen, 7–77. Tübingen: Narr. Mackey, W. F. (1976) Bilinguisme et contact des langues. Paris: Klincksieck. Mathematical Reviews (1940–2005). Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society. Maurais, J., and Morris, M. A. (eds) (2003) Languages in a Globalising World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Muller, S. H. (1964) The World’s Living Languages. Basic Facts of Their Structure, Kinship, Location and Number of Speakers. New York: F. Unger. van Parijs, P. (2001) Linguistic justice. Politics, Philosophy and Economics 1: 59–74. Phillipson, R. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Physics Abstracts (Science Abstracts Series A) (1898–2005) Piscataway, NJ: Institute of Electrical Engineers.
Physikalische Berichte (1920–1978). Braunschweig: Vieweg. Sandelin, B., and Sarafoglou, N. (2004) Language and scientific publication statistics. Language Problems and Language Planning 28(1): 1–10. Schöpper-Grabe, S., and Weiß, R. (1998) Vorsprung durch Fremdsprachentraining. Ergebnisse einer Unternehmensbefragung. Cologne: Deutscher Instituts-Verlag. Seidlhofer, B. (2003) A Concept of International English and Related Issues: From ‘Real English’ to ‘Realistic English’? Strasbourg: Council of Europe. StADaF [Ständige Arbeitsgruppe Deutsch als Fremdsprache] (2005) Deutsch als Fremdsprache weltweit. Datenerhebung 2005. Berlin, Bonn, München, Köln: Auswärtiges Amt, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, Goethe-Institut, Zentralstelle für das Auslandsschulwesen. Tabory, M. (1980) Multilingualism in International Law and Institutions. Alphen aan den Rijn and Rockville, ML: Sijthoff and Noordhoff. Tsunoda, M. (1983) Les Langues internationales dans les publications scientifiques et techniques. Sophia Linguistica 13: 144–5.
5
Language Policy and Globalization THOMAS RICENTO
Introduction The following definition of globalization comes from Scheuerman (2008): Covering a wide range of distinct political, economic, and cultural trends, the term ‘globalization’ has quickly become one of the most fashionable buzzwords of contemporary political and academic debate. In popular discourse, globalization often functions as little more than a synonym for one or more of the following phenomena: the pursuit of classical liberal (or ‘free market’) policies in the world economy (‘economic liberalization’), the growing dominance of western (or even American) forms of political, economic, and cultural life (‘westernization’ or ‘Americanization’), the proliferation of new information technologies (the ‘Internet Revolution’), as well as the notion that humanity stands at the threshold of realizing one single unified community in which major sources of social conflict have vanished (‘global integration’).
While this definition suffices as a general description of a complex bundle of phenomena in political, economic, social, cultural, and technological spheres, how the term is used and understood in public and academic discourse is quite variable. Norman Fairclough (2006), for example, cites the work of Held et al. (1999), who distinguish three approaches to globalization found in the academic literature: ‘hyperglobalist,’ ‘sceptical,’ and ‘transformationalist.’ According to Fairclough, “hyperglobalists see globalization as the emergence of a single global market which is supplanting the nation-state as the primary economic and political unit” (2006: 15). Neo-liberals regard this phenomenon positively, as human progress, while others (such as radicals and neo-Marxists) regard it negatively, as the triumph of global capitalism. In contrast to this perspective stand the skeptics, who believe that the level of global economic integration was higher in the late nineteenth century and “that the contemporary evidence indicates regionalization (with Europe, East Asia, and North America as the main […] economic blocs) rather than globalization, and the continuing economic power of
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nation–states” (ibid., p. 15). Finally, the transformationalists agree with the hyperglobalists that contemporary globalization is unprecedented, but they argue that it is much more complex and multidimensional; that the nation–states have been radically transformed in character, but not supplanted; and that the effects of globalization are contingent and unpredictable (ibid.). Among scholars in language policy studies, all three approaches can be found, although the (critical) hyperglobalist and transformationalist positions tend to dominate current research. Good examples of these approaches in research on English as a global language can be found in Canagarajah (1999) and Pennycook (2007). The mainstream neo-liberal approach is characterized by Fairclough as the “globalist” discourse of globalization, “which represents it in reductive neo-liberal economic terms within a strategy to inflect and re-direct actual processes of globalization in that direction” (2006: 40). Steger (2005; cited in Fairclough 2006: 40) describes six core claims of ‘globalism’: • • • • • •
Globalization is about the liberalization and global integration of markets. Globalization is inevitable and irreversible. Nobody is in charge of globalization. Globalization benefits everyone. Globalization furthers the spread of democracy in the world. Globalization requires a war on terror.
Steger describes globalism as a ‘story’ (or narrative), a discourse and an ideology. This view of globalization has been promoted by influential journalists such as Thomas L. Friedman, who writes for the New York Times. In his best-selling book The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000), Friedman provides a fairly clear explanation of how he understands globalization: The driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism – the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient your economy will be. Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world. Therefore globalization also has its own set of economic rules – rules that revolve around opening, deregulating and privatizing your economy, in order to make it more competitive and attractive to foreign investment.
Fairclough (2006: 9–10) claims that “globalist” discourse “represents the highly complex phenomenon of globalization reductively as purely economic, as a particular form of capitalism and a particular view of what capitalism should – must – be like.” He goes on to point out that the Friedman extract given above is vague about agency: “Who or what ‘spreads’ free-market capitalism? Who produces or enforces the ‘rules’?” (ibid., p. 10). The notion that capitalism is a rule-governed (and, by implication, logical) system that operates independently of “rule-makers” or other powerful agents is just the sort of “hidden” presupposition that characterizes much of the globalist discourse in the mainstream media. To this core
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argument that globalization (as described by Friedman and others) is ‘the only game in town,’ other discourses attach notions such as that it benefits more people than it harms, or that it is somehow a key ingredient in democracy and the best way to improve living standards in poor countries, and so on. The present chapter explores answers to the following questions: To what degree are languages imbricated in the processes of globalization? Can (and should) countries protect their national linguistic resources, or should they ‘open their markets’ and promote languages such as English in order to enhance access to technology, trade, and the like? As Crystal (2003: 9) points out, “a language has traditionally become an international language for one chief reason: the power of its people – especially their political and military power.” The conquests of the British, Greeks, Romans, Moors, Spanish, Portuguese, and French caused English, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, and French to spread across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas; and that history, with its legacy, persists in many guises to the present day. As to whether states can or should ‘protect’ their national language(s) or have an ‘open market’ policy with regard to global languages such as English, history suggests that the attempts by states to control language markets have both succeeded and failed, and to varying degrees. Viewed over the long arc of recorded history, language change may be seen, from one perspective, as a virtually agentless process, restricted and shaped by rules of ‘universal grammar.’ However, if we investigate the political and social dimensions of language spread, we can learn how human agency has accelerated change with regard to the structures, use, relative status and longevity of languages (see Brutt-Griffler 2002). The globalist discourse on the inevitability and progressive nature of globalization is not new. Yet, from Columbus’ plunder and enslavement of the native inhabitants of Hispaniola to the passing of NAFTA (the North America Free Trade Agreement) by the US Congress in 1994, the goal of imperial powers has always been to increase control over markets and to protect the wealth of the monarch or corporation. To demonstrate some of the ways in which globalist discourse has become non-ideological (that is, ‘common sense’ truth), we can look at recent history in the US: NAFTA, of which the Uruguay Round was passed by the US Congress in 1994, has little to do with free trade (since it deals mostly with intracompany transfers); it was opposed by organized labor and by the general population (at least in the US, as measured by contemporary public opinion polls); it led to the loss of millions of unskilled jobs in the US, Canada, and Mexico; and it has resulted in significant environmental degradation. Yet, despite these facts, analyses of mainstream media commentary on NAFTA reflect the globalist values described above by Steger (2005). Here is an extract from an editorial, A35, titled “If Nafta Loses,” written by the liberal New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis on November 5, 1993: The arguments made against Nafta by such significant opponents as the United Auto Workers seem to me to come down to fear of change and fear of foreigners. […] Unions in this country, sad to say, are looking more and more like the British unions
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that have become such a millstone around the neck of the Labor Party: backward, unenlightened […] The crude threatening tactics used by unions to make Democratic members of the House vote against Nafta underline the point.
A corollary to the globalist discourse on globalization (reflected in Lewis’ column) is that, in democracies, the views of the people expressed through collective organizations such as labor unions can be easily dismissed by the liberal mainstream media as ignorant, xenophobic, or uninformed, without the slightest concern for hypocrisy on the part of those who do the dismissing (such as Anthony Lewis). Yet the evidence that NAFTA has been injurious to workers in the US, Canada, and Mexico is by now well documented (for documentation on the negative effects of NAFTA on wages, employment, and the environment in Mexico, the US, and Canada, as well as for a discussion on the contents of NAFTA and on the public and media reaction to it, see Mitchell and Schoeffel (2002), Chapter 8, notes 18–24, at www.understandingpower.com). From a factual (as opposed to globalist rhetorical) perspective, it is impossible to sustain the case that NAFTA has been a net gain in economic, social, and environmental terms for the majority of the population in Canada, the US, or Mexico, unless one subscribes to the (usually implicit) ideology of ‘free market capitalism,’ reflected in globalist discourse, that success – that is, ‘progress’ – is measured by the degree to which the owners of capital – corporations, banks, chief executive officers, share-holders – increase their wealth relative to the general population. For example, according to Barlow and Clarke (1998: 50), Despite robust economic growth, the [Council on International and Public Affairs]’s study reveals that the real wages of US workers have declined by 19.5 percent from their level of twenty-five years ago. Indeed, virtually all of the income gains during the past decade have reportedly gone to the top 5 percent of American families, thereby dramatically increasing inequality and poverty in the country.
As far as wealth is concerned, according to a report by the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University (2006), data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances found that the richest 1 percent of Americans held 32 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2001. (This excludes the billionaires in the Forbes list, who control roughly another 2 percent of the nation’s wealth.) This tops the inequity in every country but Switzerland, among the 20 nations that measure these wealth disparities and are cited in the report. (New York Times, December 6, 2006)
For additional data on the growing gap in wages and wealth in the US, see Mitchell and Schoeffel (2002), Chapter 10, notes 5, 8, 15, 65–9, and 101 (at www. understandingpower.com). If, then, we understand the economic dimension of globalization (which dominates public discourse in the US) as something quite different from an idealized open, equal-access, uncontrolled, ‘market driven’ system – that is, as a system in which decisions about capital flows are not based on principles of participatory
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democracy, in which the interests or desires of the people do not determine (or even influence) policy, and in which ‘efficiency’ comes to mean that some people (not everyone) benefit to an extraordinary degree – then we should be skeptical about laissez-faire claims applied to the trajectories and fates of minority or marginalized languages as if they were simply buffeted about (and marginalized, or made obsolete) by the ‘invisible hand’ of social change, human creativity and desire, and unfettered personal decision-making. I am not arguing for cause and effect between economic systems and the status of languages, or that languages have the same characteristics as commodities. What I am arguing, however, is (1) that globalization has real effects on societies and on their languages, effects which can be measured; and (2) that the globalist discourse identified by Fairclough also affects the way people (including academics, journalists, and politicians) think and talk about language(s) in everyday life, which also has real effects on language policies and practices over time.
The Role of English in Globalization Since English has become (or at least it is argued by many scholars and pundits to be) the pre-eminent ‘global’ language, it is appropriate that we focus on English in considering how it came to be regarded as such, and what it might mean to say that English is a global language. The case of English has perhaps been studied and argued about more than that of any other language over the past several decades (for a discussion of some of the major themes and controversies, see Journal of Language, Identity and Education 2004, Vol. 3, No. 2). When it is often claimed that no other language in history has been so widely used, it is inevitable that the H-word (hegemony) will be invoked, rightly or wrongly. Consider the facts, culled from various sources, which might offer support for the claim of hegemony. Crystal (2003), relying on the latest editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook and Ethnologue: Languages of the World, as well as on census data (where available), makes the following claims: • There are 75 territories in which English has held or continues to hold a special place as an official or co-official language, and where it is used as a first or second language (these territories are listed in Crystal 2003: 62–5). • On the basis of the 2001 census, the total population of these territories is 2.24 billion people (one third of the world’s population). • The number of users of English as a first language totals 329,140,800; the number of users of English as a second language totals 430,614,500. • If the various English-derived pidgins and Creoles are counted in the category of English as a first language (80 million people), then the total number of first-language users of English is about 400 million. • Since far more people use English as a second or foreign language (L2) than as a native or first language (L1), the ratio of native to non-native English speakers is 1:3.
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• The annual population growth rate in countries with large numbers of L2 English users (Cameroon, India, Malaysia, Nigeria, Philippines) is considerably higher than the population growth rate in the principal L1 English users (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, USA); in the period 1996–2001, the average difference was 2.4 percent versus 0.88 percent, respectively. What is particularly interesting about these data is the fact that the world of the future will see a decline in the number of first-language users of English. In a widely cited article, Graddol (1999: 60–1), relying on data from the Sex and Age Quinquennial (United Nations Population Division) dataset for 1950–2050 (1998 revision) and using the (then) current estimates of L1 English speakers in 56 countries with a total population of about 337 million speakers, calculates that, whereas in 1950 over 8 percent of the world’s population spoke English as their first language, by 2050 the proportion will be less than 5 percent. What do these data suggest about the English ‘market’ in global terms? First, languages qua languages have no power, since, if English in and of itself conferred power on its users, there would be far less poverty among the large numbers of L2 English speakers. Rather, the richest and most militarily powerful nation in the world – the US – happens to be home to about 75 percent of the world’s native English speakers. Three out of the seven G7 countries – namely the US, the United Kingdom, and Canada – are predominantly L1 English-speaking countries. (The G7 stands for the ‘Group of Seven’ finance ministers formed in 1976, and the other countries of the group are France, Germany, Italy, and Japan.) This high correlation between economic and military power and the dominance of English plays itself out in virtually all the important sectors of international banking, finance, diplomacy, media, cinema, technology, and in publications in many fields (especially science, economics, and technology). It is an official or working language in virtually all of the major international organizations, including the United Nations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Commonwealth, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. English is the only official language of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the only working language of the European Free Trade Association (Crystal 2003: 87). But this is just the tip of the iceberg. According to Crystal (ibid., pp. 87–8), about one third of the 12,500 international organizations in the world (the number 12,500 comes from the Union of International Associations 1996) list the languages they use in an official or working capacity. Crystal took a sample of 500 from these organizations (from the beginning of the alphabet) and found that 85 per cent of them (424) made official use of English. The next most common language identified was French, which 245 countries (49 percent) used officially. Amazingly, according to Crystal, one third of the sample (169 countries) use only English to carry on their business. The only other languages to be used in more than 10 percent of the organizations were Arabic, Spanish, and German. In addition to its influence in the economic and political arena, English has also had an enormous impact through media in this language (broadcast and print).
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Although, according to the World Association of Newspapers in 2005, the US ranked fourth (behind China, India, and Japan) in daily newspaper circulation (48.3 million, compared to 93.5 million in China), according to a study done by Wallechinsky and colleagues (1977: 114), the top five newspapers in terms of influence on a world scale were all in English: New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, followed by two British newspapers, The Times and The Sunday Times (Crystal 2003: 92–3). In the area of popular culture, English has traveled to virtually every corner of the globe through music, film, sports, and entertainment. Pennycook (2007) rightly notes that English is not a monolithic language, but rather has been (and continues to be) adapted, modified, destabilized, and transformed in the many contexts of its use around the world, including in popular musical idioms such as rap and hip-hop (see for instance Pennycook 2007; the 2007 special issue of the Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 6(2): Glocal Linguistic Flows: Hip-Hop Culture(s), Identities, and the Politics of Language Education). Further, even the construct of ‘world Englishes,’ popularized by Kachru (1986), fails to take into account “all those other Englishes which do not fit the paradigm of an emergent national standard, and in doing so,” it “falls into the trap of mapping centre linguists’ images of language and the world on to the periphery” (Pennycook 2007: 22–3). Canagarajah (1999: 180) argues that Kachru’s attempt to systematize the varieties of English around the world has left out “many eccentric, hybrid forms of local Englishes as too unsystematic.” Yet, despite the admirable postmodern move toward deconstructing the idea that English is ‘one thing’ and toward repositioning its multifarious speakers as adapters, resisters, and transformers of the English imaginary (thereby mitigating the effects of English hegemony), connections of English with technology, economy, education, and culture continue to operate in their numerous diasporic and hybridic manifestations world-wide. Even if we wish to argue that the existence of a global lingua franca (English) in fields such as science has certain advantages, it cannot be denied that the dominant status of English in scientific discourse and publication has coincided with the rise of the US as a (now solitary) superpower and with all that this entails in the economic, political, and military domains. In a detailed analysis of language use in scientific publications over the course of one century in American, German, French, and Russian bibliographies, Hamel (2007) found that, up until about 1925, German was the preferred language of scientific publications. English surpassed German around 1930 (46 percent in English versus 33 percent in German), and it gradually increased its share, so that, by 1996, 90.7 percent of scientific publications were in English, 2.1 percent were in Russian, 1.7 percent were in Japanese, 1.3 percent were in French, and 1.2 percent were in German. In an analysis of publications in several natural sciences – undertaken in 1996, adapted from Ammon (1998), and cited in Hamel (2007: 58) – the disparity between publications in English and eight other languages is even more striking. For example, 94.8 percent of all publications in physics between 1992 and 1997 were in English (the next highest language represented was Japanese, which had 1.7 percent). A similar pattern emerges with regard to publications in social sciences and humanities
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worldwide: between 1974 and 1995, publications in English increased from 66.6 percent to 82.5 percent, and the second most common language was French, which decreased from 6.8 percent to 5.9 percent during this period. The only ‘freemarket’ choice available to scientists has been, essentially, to publish in English (and be read), or not to publish (or to publish in a language few people would read). To paraphrase a famous sentence by Adam Smith, markets are efficient and effective mechanisms in a context of perfect liberty, that is, when people have equal knowledge about their options, access to them, and the unfettered ability to fulfill their needs and human potential. If you are a scientist with limited English proficiency, your choices with regard to fulfilling your needs and desires are clearly constrained (see Flowerdew 2007; Englander 2009). If you desire to become a scientist and have no English proficiency or opportunity to acquire it, your dream will remain a dream. It is more than obvious that, with regard to many domains of human activity, some languages are far more ‘equal’ than others, and that the ‘English market’ (to take one example) is simply not available for the vast majority of the world’s population as a means of social mobility beyond very restricted, (usually) local domains, if at all – even though it is estimated that one third of the world uses English in some fashion.
Spanish and English in the New World Those who see the domination of English in academic publishing as unproblematic argue that language change, including language shift and loss, is always and everywhere natural, inevitable, and necessary, just as globalization (reflected in globalist discourse) is beneficial and necessary. However, acceptance of such a view requires us to examine what is meant by the terms ‘natural,’ ‘inevitable,’ and ‘necessary.’ The process of displacement of people, along with their cultures and languages, has no doubt been a feature of human society for a very long time. Yet, whereas on the subject of how various humanoid sub-groups of the genus hom*o sapiens (Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon, and so on) succeeded each other we can only speculate – and such speculation is based mainly on the analysis of anatomical differences in fossils, for instance variation in cranium size and form, or features of the vocal tract (see Lieberman et al. 1969) – thanks to the development of vernacular literacy 700 years ago, we have written records of how, in much more recent times, certain groups of descendants from our ancestor hom*o sapiens (and of course, their languages), were actually eradicated by other groups of descendants from hom*o sapiens, as technologies of transportation and weaponry provided European explorers with the means to impose their will – and their germs – on the ‘less advanced’ peoples in the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and Asia. Consider the words of Christopher Columbus upon first encountering the Arawak people on October 12, 1492 (Zinn 1980: 1): They […] brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things […] They willingly traded everything they owned […] They do not bear arms, and
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do not know them for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane […] They would make fine servants […] With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.
On the grounds of his exaggerated claims and lies (including the presence of great amounts of gold in Hispaniola), Columbus was given seventeen ships and twelve hundred men for his second expedition. He and his men found no gold, so (having guns and swords, and the will to use them in the name of God and Queen), they settled for filling up their ships with Arawak men, women, and children, all to be sold as slaves in Spain (one third of the first shipment died before reaching Spain). When too many slaves died in captivity, Columbus and his men ordered all persons aged 14 or over to collect a certain amount of gold every three months. Indians who were found without a copper token around their neck which signaled that they had delivered some gold had their hands cut off, and they bled to death (Zinn 1980: 4). In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead. When it was clear that no gold had remained, the Indians were taken as slave labor; they were made to work at a ferocious pace on estates known as encomiendas and died by the thousands. By the year 1515 there were perhaps 50,000 left; by 1550 there were 5,000, and a report of the year 1650 shows that none of the original Arawaks or their descendants remained on the island (Zinn 1980: 4–5). The story of the barbarism of Columbus was reported by the Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas (1971), who chronicled in lavish (and often gruesome) detail the devastation brought by the Spanish onto the Taino and Arawak peoples and their lands. He wrote that, when he arrived on Hispaniola in 1508, “there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it…” (cited in Zinn 1980: 7). Indeed, 450 years later, Samuel Eliot Morison, eminent Harvard historian and expert on Columbus, mentions the enslavement and killing in his 1954 book Christopher Columbus, Mariner – but, as Zinn points out (ibid.), he refers to this important fact only in passing, in one single sentence: “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide” (Morison 1954: 129). Then Morison sums up his view of Columbus in the book’s final paragraph (pp. 198–9): He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great – his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities – his seamanship.
The relevance of this commentary made by Morison on Columbus is to show how the ideology of globalist discourse on globalization tends to omit or trivialize the
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devastating facts of cultural contact initiated by those who come to be known (and to describe themselves) as history’s ‘winners.’ The passage also requires us to ask ourselves whether this history (reproduced many times, on other continents and territories, in ‘modern days’) was ‘inevitable,’ ‘natural,’ and ‘necessary’ (see Mühlhäusler 2003), and, if so, what that might reveal about the implicit (mainstream) beliefs about human nature that attach to the ideology of globalist discourse (for instance social Darwinism). The policies of Columbus were duplicated by other ‘brave explorers’ of the New World: Cortes in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, and the English settlers in Virginia and Massachusetts (Zinn 1980: 11). What was the impact of the European conquest on the languages of North America? At the time when the Spanish arrived on the North American continent, 500 different native American languages may have been spoken by a native population of 30–40 million people (Leap 1981: 129) – a number that was reduced to 400,000 by 1920 (Molesky 1988: 37). This lowering was the result of diseases contracted from the white settlers, wars, massacres, and the ongoing encroachment of European settlers into native lands. In the 1990 census, 26 languages/language families with 1,000 or more speakers were counted (Waggoner 1993). At first, native Americans were given the ‘choice’ between resettling in alien territories, so as to make room for the white settlers, and facing certain slaughter. Later on they were given the ‘choice’ of attending governmentsponsored boarding schools in order that “their barbarous dialects should be blotted out and the English language substituted” (J. D. Atkins, annual report for 1887, cited in J. Crawford 1992: 48). Punishments for native language use continued in the US into the 1940s and 1950s, and effective bilingual programs were dismantled by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, replaced by the imposition of monolingual English instruction at reservation schools, with disastrous results (Crawford 1989: 26). In the absence of this historical perspective, it may seem obvious to some that Native Americans should want to learn English (adapt!) and forgo the learning of their ancestral languages – because this is the ‘smart thing to do,’ because it is more practical, because English is the language of the workplace, and so on. By this reasoning, ‘smart’ laid-off auto-workers in Ohio and Michigan (partly as a result of NAFTA) would do well to learn Spanish, so as to be able to steal across the Mexican border and to find work in maquiladoras, earning $10 a day with no benefits – since their English (apparently) isn’t helping them to find work in the US. (According to the Wikipedia, “A maquiladora or maquila is a factory that imports materials and equipment on a duty-free and tariff-free basis for assembly or manufacturing and then re-exports the assembled product, usually back to the originating country”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maquilladora.) The fact that Columbus continues to be honored in North America with a holiday bearing his name provides powerful evidence that history is written by the victors of ‘globalization.’ “History,” writes Henry Kissinger in his first book, A World Restored (1957), “is the memory of states” (cited in Zinn 1980: 9) – and, I would add, of their collective perspective on what ‘counts’ in terms of the relative worth of human lives, cultures, and their languages. We should never forget how
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both Spanish and English became the dominant languages of the Americas when we engage in academic discussions about whether or not English – or Spanish – is still an imperial or (now) a post-imperial language (see for instance Fishman et al. 1996). The most important point is that the historical record described above has largely disappeared from the dominant narratives about the origins and development of the Americas; what has come down to the present day, in mainstream accounts, is an exclusionary narrative about the ‘American people,’ ‘American values,’ the ‘American ethos,’ ‘American ways of thinking,’ and so on, which reflects a particular and self-serving construction of US ‘Americanism’ (for a fuller analysis, see Ricento 2003). The fact that alternative, more inclusive, accounts (such as Zinn 1980) are labeled ‘critical’ means that these accounts are marginalized as minority, nonmainstream, or ‘ideological’ views. The relatively few aboriginal languages in the Americas that have survived through centuries of oppression and suppression continue to teeter on the brink of extinction, with but a few exceptions (see Ricento 1996 for data on native American languages in the US, and Ricento and Cervatiuc (2010) for data on First Nation languages in Canada). In language policy documents and in academic discourse, native American languages are often referred to as ‘heritage’ languages, along with other languages with long histories in North America, including Spanish, that should more accurately be called American languages, of equal status to that of English – if status is equated with years of presence on the North American continent (see Ricento 2005 for a discussion of ‘heritage’ languages in the US). This is why it has been said that ‘he who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past.’ While there have been notable attempts to reframe the discourse of the American past and present with regard to aboriginal languages (for instance McCarty 2002), in much of the academic discourse concerned with language policy there is a tendency to operate in the present tense, without an understanding of the fact that the past continues to have an effect on the present (see Wiley 2006; Ricento 2005); the ideologies that attach to globalist discourse (described earlier) influence ‘commonsense’ attitudes about the nature of language(s) – that is, attitudes which regard them as commodities with relative (market) value, used by groups with relative (human) value. If languages are reduced to ‘things’ that can be counted and assigned a market value, then their loss can be accounted for by their (apparent) relative worth or worthlessness in defined (and highly controlled) markets. There have been a few notable attempts in the language policy literature to show how and why languages should not be treated as commodities; for example Grin (2006: 84) argues that “linguistic environments exhibit many forms of market failure […] in fact it could be argued that almost every form of market failure occurs when it comes to the provision of linguistic diversity.” It is for this reason, Grin argues, that states and international organizations need to work cooperatively to develop language policies which can level the playing field for speakers of minority or less powerful languages.
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Comparative Case Studies The value of any language depends on who is using it, for what purpose, and in what context. Thus English (or Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic, and so on) has high value for many people who use it (including those for whom it is a first or native language, or those for whom it is a second or third language), and less value for many others, who have limited proficiency in it or little opportunity to use it. State institutions may pay attention to languages to the extent that the latter serve to maintain or enhance the interests of powerful (usually dominant) groups in the state. It is well understood that institutions evolve, and are managed, so as to enhance and maintain the power of particular interests through various instruments of governmentality (Foucault 1991). Rose (1996) describes governmentality as an “array of technologies of government,” which can be analyzed in terms of the various strategies, techniques, and procedures by which programs of government are enacted. States and their governments are not always successful, however, at imposing their will through overt, top-down, centralized approaches to language planning. Let us consider several examples in which the stated goals of states have not fully succeeded in the area of language planning; and let us consider how history and the effects of globalization continue to cast a large shadow on the attempts of newly independent states to regain their pre-imperial linguistic identities. Blommaert (2006: 248) describes the attempt made by the Tanzanian government to establish socialist hegemony in the 1960s through the spread of Swahili – which, it was hoped, would contribute to the marginalization of English. While thirty years of concentrated efforts toward the goal set forth in the 1960s resulted in the generalized spread of Swahili […] neither English nor local languages and ‘impure’ varieties of Swahili disappeared, and in the eyes of language planners, this meant that Tanzanians had still not fully become Ujamaa-socialists but still displayed adherences to bourgeois values (through English) and to pre-socialist modes of life (through local languages).
While Swahili was dominant in the political domain and in primary school education, in other domains, for instance local ones, or post-primary education, “people continued to use local languages or other newly emerged forms of communication” (Msanjila 1999, cited in Blommaert 2006: 248–9). There is no doubt that global pressures in favor of English played a role in its continued use in education. The point here is that, while states can be effective in controlling language use in some domains through governmentality, other pressures and factors may limit their control in other domains. Blommaert (2006: 249–50) uses the example of Tanzania to argue that “language policy […] should be seen as a […] niched ideological activity, necessarily encapsulated in and interacting with many others, regardless of how dominant it may seem at first sight.” What is particularly interesting about the situation in Tanzania is that the hegemony of English in education persisted
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even after national independence was achieved – which indicates the enormous penetrating power associated with English in the domains of economy, politics, technology, and education beyond the borders of Tanzania. In South Africa, as in Tanzania and other African states that achieved political independence from colonial domination, English continues to play an important role in political, cultural, and educational life because of its international power. In South Africa the use of African languages in education has a long history, “but its association with apartheid Bantu Education (BE) from the 1950s has triggered its rejection by the very ones for whom it would appear to be pedagogically beneficial” (Lafon 2008: 37). The western-style formal education introduced by Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century achieved a high level of excellence over time and, according to chief Albert Luthuli (2006: 20, cited in Lafon 2008: 37), “except in the matter of language, there was not much difference between black and white education.” However, after the election of the Nationalist Party in 1948 and the imposition of BE as part of its apartheid policy, education for Africans was separated from ‘mainstream’ education in terms of syllabus and language (Lafon 2008: 39). The curriculum was based on the idea of “an ordained hierarchy of races,” which aimed to “isolate [Africans] and convince [them] of their permanent inferiority” (Luthuli 2006: 35). As Lafon (2008: 39) puts it: Language was becoming a slave of politics: in 1961, the previously united language committees were split into separate boards, and the development of each language was henceforth conducted in an isolated way. The development of African languages as LoL/T [language of learning and teaching] was constrained within a pedagogy that has been characterised as ‘uncreative literacy.’
For nearly fifty years, the system of racially segregated schooling widened the gap between the education of Africans and that of whites; for many Africans, BE meant inferior education and became emblematic of the apartheid regime. As a result of this history, a deeply ingrained negative attitude toward the use of African languages as a medium of instruction has developed – an attitude that persists to the present day. While the unification of the education system in 1991 extended schooling to all children and upgraded the facilities, nonetheless it developed into a bifurcated system, in which dysfunctional and impoverished schools are used by the majority of South African children and “a small number of well resourced schools [are] used by the privileged minority” (Botsis and Cronje 2006–7: 50). This bifurcated system is reflected in the school language policies (Lafon 2008: 45): the use of African languages as LoL/T is restricted to underprivileged schools whilst the privileged schools invariably and regardless of their population will have English (more and more rarely Afrikaans) as LoL/T. The continuing systematic association between these two parameters is crucial. The use of African languages as LoL/T is clearly construed by African parents and the public at large as embodying poor quality education.
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Hence the ‘rush to English’ in the 1990s was not so much an aversion for instruction through the medium of African languages as it was a movement toward higher-quality education, better equipped schools, better trained teachers, and so on. More and more primary schools have moved to English as a medium of instruction, so that, by 2004, out of 25,736 South African schools in the Department of Education, only 6,542 had an African language as their primary medium of instruction, compared to 16,796 having English (cited in Lafon 2008: 46). English represents far more than a ‘language’ among others in South Africa. Rather, English (through European eyes) was the vehicle through which “not only the geographical and political space of Africa […] was constructed […] but also African history, languages and traditions” (Makoni and Pennycook 2007: 4). The two authors argue that, in order truly to begin the process of decolonization, it is necessary to “disinvent” and “reconstitute” languages that were, after all, written and largely constructed, and even named, by Europeans. The elevation of nine African languages as official languages, alongside Afrikaans and English, in the South African Constitution (1996) must be understood within a broader historical context, in which Africa was “a continent without languages” (Samarin 1996: 390): Africans used language in a linguistic sense to communicate with each other, and we have learned that these are beautifully complex and awesomely elegant means of verbal expression, not the primitive jabberings that they were first taken to be. But they were not languages in the socio-cultural sense. There is little in our knowledge of Africa to suggest ethnolinguistic self consciousness. Thus we can say before literacy there were no languages.
While Europeans invented discrete ‘languages’ and projected them as indigenous to putative ‘native speakers,’ such ‘languages’ where often experienced as mixtures of local and foreign discourses (Makoni and Pennycook 2007: 14). “When the constructed languages were introduced into local communities they had the effects of creating, and at times, accentuating, social differences.” As these languages could only be acquired through formal education, “those who acquired them tended to have higher social status” (ibid.). Makoni and Pennycook show similar patterns of construction, followed by social hierarchization, with other languages, for example Fijian, Yoruba, or Tagalog. The attempt to give equal status to African languages, to English, and to Afrikaans (RSA Constitution 1996) perpetuates an idea of ‘language’ which is based on the western construct of discrete scripts, sound systems, and lexical systems. As Makoni and Pennycook point out: “By rendering diversity a quantitative question of language enumeration, such approaches continue to employ the census strategies of colonialism while missing the qualitative question of where diversity lies” (ibid., p. 16). A final example concerns the contemporary roles of English on the Indian subcontinent. The English language assumed a pivotal position during the Raj in India (1858–1947). It separated British rulers from their subjects, but also Indians who spoke English from those who did not. This legacy – of a division between Indians who speak, and are educated in and through, English, and Indians who
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are educated in vernacular languages – persists to the present day in Indian society. According to Crystal (2003), on the basis of data from the 2001 census, only one third of 1 percent of the Indian population are L1 English speakers (that is, 350,000 people out of a total population of 1,029,991,000), while 200,000,000 Indians, a number which represents about 20 percent of the total population, use English as a second language. Yet, even though English is clearly a minority language throughout India, those who are educated in it from primary school have a decisive advantage over those who are educated through the medium of the local vernacular language. This is because the prestigious science-based disciplines at the tertiary level, such as computer science, engineering, the hard sciences, pharmacy, and medicine tend to be available only in English. The English proficiency of students educated through schooling in the vernacular is generally deficient at the level of high-school completion, which prevents these students from entering such professions (Ramanathan 2005: 6). Ramanathan concludes that, by validating the role of English as much as it does at the tertiary realm and beyond, the general socio-educational apparatus is also simultaneously sending out implicit messages about the generally low regard it has for the Vernaculars both within the apparatus as a medium of instruction and in the larger social world to which the apparatus is inextricably tied. (Ibid., p. 35)
There is a clear association between social class and medium of instruction: students schooled in the vernacular in the K-12 years are typically lower-income children, while English-medium instructed children tend to be middle class and have access to better higher education and careers. Thus, as we saw was the case in South Africa, English is associated with higher socio-economic status and a better life, while vernacular languages are devalued – even though all K-12 students in India have the option of being educated either in one of India’s fifteen nationally recognized languages or in English (Gupta et al. 1995; Pattanayak 1981). Thus the English–vernacular divide helps to maintain the class structure in India more than sixty years after India gained independence from British rule.
Globalization and Language Policies: Paradoxes and Possibilities In considering the complex relations between language policies and globalization, I have shown the various roles that English has played as an imperial, national, and indigenized language in North America, Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, especially during the post-World War II period. In all of these settings, English has enjoyed a privileged status vis-à-vis other languages, whether in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where it is a majority language, a national language, or a first/native language, or in South Africa, Tanzania, and India, where it is a minority language with special status. While English is not the only
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imperial language that continues to exert influence in Africa and elsewhere, it is, world-wide, the imperial language that has gained by far the largest number of users as a second or foreign language. From a global perspective, the number of people who use English as their first or native language is decreasing, while the number of people who use it as a second or third language for various purposes – in local, translocal, or transnational contexts – is increasing. Scholars who study English through the lens of cultural studies demonstrate the ways in which English has been taken up, transformed, and incorporated, together with local languages, into the lyrics of popular musical forms such as rap and hip-hop (Pennycook 2007). While to ‘use English’ may mean many things, “to have a command of English sufficient to rap in the language may, in some contexts, imply a very particular class background” (Pennycook 2007: 113). We have seen how in schooling, at the K-12 and tertiary level, proficiency in English serves as a gatekeeper and marker of socio-economic class, not only in developing countries but also in industrialized countries of Asia and Europe. This is particularly the case in the ‘hard’ sciences, economics, business, and technology. When physicians trained in English interact with non-English speaking patients, the resulting miscommunication can have lethal consequences. In a study of communication between patients, nurses, and physicians in Cape Town, South Africa, A. Crawford (1999: 29) found that “it is not possible to isolate the patient disempowered in terms of the language barrier from the whole biomedical discourse in which patients occupy a disempowered position.” The problem in South Africa stems from wide divisions based on social class, race, and gender as much as it stems from language. As was discussed earlier, in South Africa, English as a medium of education is associated with relative economic privilege, while an education delivered through the medium of an African language is usually reserved for the underprivileged. The relatively lower status of African languages harkens back to conditions during apartheid, when Bantu education was institutionalized to maintain racial (and linguistic) segregation. However, despite the ongoing attempts to elevate the status of African languages, most notably by enshrining nine African languages as co-equal official languages, with English and Afrikaans, in the South African Constitution, the legacy of English in South Africa (which pre-dates official apartheid), combined with the perceived benefits of learning English as a language of wider communication, tends to sustain the appeal – and power – of English in contemporary society. The perception that English is the global language will probably continue as long as American economic and military power remain strong in relation to the other powerful economic blocs in Europe and Asia; the benefits of communicating in English will continue to accrue disproportionately for those who have access to education in English at the secondary and tertiary level. For the most part, the notion that a world connected through a common language might foster common understanding and facilitate broad-based cooperation among states, that it would help to reduce the gap between its ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’ that it would reduce the conflict between states – or between ethnolinguistic groups within states – has not been demonstrated. That this is so should not be surprising, if we consider
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the disconnect between the rhetorical promise of the globalist discourse, dominant in the US and in other wealthy states, and the actual policies and practices of these states, which are designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many, including in those wealthy states themselves. A common global language does not entail common values or beliefs, not to mention lending itself to the promotion of progressive values of social justice and equal economic opportunity; to understand the nature and effects of power, we need to investigate the ways in which neoliberal values and beliefs are instantiated, taken up, and rendered influential through language as reflected in societal discourses, and especially in the dominant institutional discourses within a society. As Norman Fairclough has ably demonstrated in Language and Globalization (2006), the critical analysis of texts can be integrated within a political and economic analysis of globalization to show how the (self)-promotion of the economic and political interests of liberal democracies is falsely portrayed as universally beneficial in everyday mainstream media and official political discourse. In order to begin to diminish the pernicious effects of state capitalism on the lives of billions of people in less developed countries, we need first to understand how the interests of large globalized corporations and banks, already protected and promoted by international organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, are also supported and promoted by the neo-liberal mainstream media in wealthy nations. The findings of critical discourse analysis, combined with a critical examination of the real economic effects of globalization, can help us to understand better why the gap between the richest and the poorest countries continues to grow despite claims from proponents of ‘globalist discourse’ that globalization is the best means available to alleviate poverty around the world.
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Controversy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crystal, D. (2003) English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de las Casas, B. (1971) History of the Indies. New York: Harper and Row. Englander, K. (2009) Transformation of the identities of non-native English-speaking scientists as a consequence of the social construction of revision. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 8: 35–53. Fairclough, N. (2006) Language and Globalization. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Fishman, J. A., Conrad, A., and RubalLopez, A. (eds) (1996) Post-Imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940–1990. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Flowerdew, J. (2007) The non-anglophone scholar on the periphery of scholarly publication. AILA Review 20: 14–27. Foucault, M. (1991) Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Graddol, D. (1999) The decline of the native speaker. AILA Review, 13: 57–68. Grin, F. (2006) Economic considerations in language policy. In T. Ricento (ed.), 77–94. Gupta, R., Abbi, A., and Agarwal, K. (eds) (1995) Language and the State: Perspectives on the Eighth Schedule. New Delhi: Creative Books. Hamel, R. E. (2007) The dominance of English in the international scientific periodical literature and the future of language use in science. AILA Review 20: 53–71. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D., and Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge: Polity. Kachru, B. (1986) The Alchemy of English. Oxford: Pergamon.
Lafon, M. (2008) Asikhulume! African languages for all, a powerful strategy for spearheading transformation and improvement of the South African education system. In Les Nouveaux Cahiers de L’IFAS. IFAS Working Paper 11, Chapter 3. Available at: http:// www.africavenir.com/publications/ occasional-papers/LAFON_asikhulume. pdf. Leap, W. L. (1981) American Indian languages. In C. A. Ferguson and S. B. Heath (eds), Language in the USA, 116–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lieberman, P. H., Klatt, D. H., and Wilson, W. H. (1969) Vocal tract limitations on the vowel repertoires of the rhesus monkey and other non human primates. Science 164: 1185–7. Luthuli, A. (2006) Let My People Go: The Autobiography of Albert Luthuli. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Makoni, S., and Pennycook, A. (2007) Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In S. Makoni and A. Pennycook (eds), Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, 1–41. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. McCarty, T. (2002) A Place to Be Navajo: Rough Rock and the Struggle for SelfDetermination in Indigenous Schooling. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Mitchell, P. R., and Schoeffel, J. (eds) (2002) Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. New York: New Press. Molesky, J. (1988) Understanding the American linguistic mosaic: A historical overview of language maintenance and language shift. In S. L. McKay and S. C. Wong (eds), Language Diversity: Problem or Resource, 29–68. Boston, MA: Heinle and Heinle. Morison, S. E. (1955) Christopher Columbus, Mariner. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Msanjila, Y. (1999) The use of Kiswahili in rural areas and its implications for the
Language Policy and Globalization future of ethnic languages in Tanzania. Doctoral dissertation, University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Mühlhäusler, P. (2003) English as an exotic language. In C. Mair (ed.), The Politics of English as a World Language, 67–86. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pattanayak, D. P. (1981) Multilingualism and Mother-Tongue Education. Bombay: Oxford University Press. Pennycook, A. (2007) Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. Oxford: Routledge. Ramanathan, V. (2005) The English– Vernacular Divide: Postcolonial Language Politics and Practice. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ricento, T. (1996) Language policy in the United States. In M. Herriman and B. Burnaby (eds), Language Policies in English-Dominant Countries, 122–58. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ricento, T. (2003) The discursive construction of Americanism. Discourse and Society 14: 611–37. Ricento, T. (2005) Problems with the ‘language-as-resource’ discourse in the promotion of heritage languages in the USA. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9: 348–68. Ricento, T. (ed.) (2006) An Introduction to Language Policy: Theory and Method. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ricento, T., and Cervatiuc, A. (2010) Language minority rights and educational policy in Canada. In J. Petrovic (ed.), International Perspectives on Bilingual Education: Policy, Practice,
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Controversy, 21–42. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing. Rose, N. (1996) Governing ‘advanced’ liberal democracies. In A. Barry, T. Osborne, and N. Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities of Government, 37–64. London: UCL Press. Samarin, W. (1996) Review of Adegbija Efurosibina: Language attitudes in Sub-Saharan Africa: A sociolinguistic overview. Anthropological Linguistics 38: 389–95. Scheuerman, W. (2008) Globalization. In E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: . Steger, M. (2005) Globalism: Market Ideology Meets Terrorism. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Waggoner, D. (1993) Navajo dominant among Native American languages spoken by 331,600. In D. Waggoner (ed.), Numbers and Needs: Ethnic and Linguistic Minorities in the United States, Vol. 3, no. 5, p. 2. Washington, DC. Wallechinsky, D., Wallace, I., and Wallace, A. (eds) (1977) The Book of Lists. London: Cassell. Wiley, T. G. (2006) The lessons of historical investigation: Implications for the study of language policy and planning. In T. Ricento (ed.), 135–52. Zinn, H. (1980) A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper and Row.
6 Panlingual Globalization JONATHAN POOL
Predicting Unilingual Globalization The complex relationship between globalization and linguistic diversity (Mufwene 2004) makes it difficult to predict the changes in the distribution of languages that will accompany future advances in world social integration. Figure 6.1 shows one highly simplified idea of their relationship. Here progress in information and communication technology (ICT) is modeled as promoting global interactivity among communities, and this in turn encourages shifts from low-density (smaller and less resource-endowed) second and native languages to high-density ones. This causal relationship would make one expect a decline in linguistic diversity as globalization proceeds. However, the same technological progress facilitates the development of tools and resources usable for the maintenance and cultivation of low-density languages and the creation of viable communities out of linguistic diasporas. Such progress could allow linguistic diversity and globalization to thrive together. If globalization can both promote and diminish linguistic diversity as shown in Figure 6.1, the net impact of globalization may depend on human motivations. The more the world’s population wants to participate in linguistic diversity and the more the native speakers of low-density languages want to maintain and transmit them, the more they will exploit ICT for these purposes, and thus the more directly globalization and linguistic diversity will co-vary. Most of the evidence seems to predict an inverse relationship, because linguistic diversity, maintenance, and revitalization are not generally popular ideals. Lowdensity languages throughout the world have been dying, only rarely showing resistance (UNESCO 2003: 2–4). Typically, parents do not demand that these languages be transmitted to their children; children do not insist on learning them; and schools do not require pupils to learn them. Often speakers of low-density languages even try to prevent their children from learning and using them, in part because they are under the influence of denigrating opinions held by outsiders
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increases Language hom*ogenization
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Figure 6.1 Globalization and unilingualization. Created by author
(Eidheim 1969; Harrison 2007). The world’s population, as a whole, treats lowdensity languages as inferior, or at best superfluous (Crystal 2000: 27). People decide, given this opinion, that assimilation within and across generations to highdensity languages confers net benefits on those who assimilate, if the cost of assimilation is not excessive. Globalization decreases that cost by creating opportunities for immersive learning of high-density languages. These combined forces have led to predictions that something between half and 90 percent of the world’s living languages will die within the next century (Woodbury 2006; UNESCO 2003: 2). Weaker forms of these forces appear to be reducing the use of medium-density languages in science, diplomacy, business, and other domains (Phillipson 2008). Even if linguistic diversity became much more popular, this change might not suffice to produce a positive globalization–diversity relationship. Suppose that, in general, any benefits conferred by linguistic diversity were dispersed, but all its costs were imposed on those who maintain low-density languages. In other words, suppose that the choice whether to learn, use, document, and enrich low-density languages took the form of a collective action dilemma, each native speaker of such a language finding himself/herself in a situation modeled by Figure 6.2 (see De Swaan 2004: 579). In this dilemma, if everybody cultivates the language everybody is at A, and if nobody does so everybody is at C. Everybody prefers A to C. But any individual at A can reach B, thus enjoying increased benefits, by defecting (not cultivating). If all individuals yielded to that incentive, the outcome would change and everybody would be at C. The language would probably atrophy and die.
Strategies for Panlingual Globalization Those who reluctantly predict linguistic hom*ogenization accompanying globalization need not simply despair; they can try to render their prediction false. Consider the following examples of action strategies.
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High
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Fraction of other speakers of our language investing in it Figure 6.2
Low-density language dilemma. Created by author
Strategy 1: Marketing multilingualism Persuade the world’s population that the existence of about 7,000 languages (Gordon 2005) is a boon rather than a curse. This is the strategy attempted by Nettle and Romaine (2000), Crystal (2000), Abley (2003), and Harrison (2007). When languages die, they argue, the world loses: 1 irreplaceable knowledge of history, medicine, nature, and productive methods encoded in languages’ lexicons; 2 evidence for the scientific understanding of language and the human mind; 3 diverse ideas arising from languages’ differing systems of knowledge representation; and 4 the respect, tolerance, sophistication, and enjoyment that develop (or could develop) from people learning to live in a multilingual world. They further argue that cultural and biological diversity and diverse identities, all of which are already widely appreciated, depend on linguistic diversity, which should therefore be valued for its effects even by those who do not value it intrinsically. This strategy, if effective, would make the world want linguistic diversity; but that want would not by itself stop the erosion of linguistic diversity. An increased popular appreciation of linguistic diversity might merely make the slopes in Figure 6.2 steeper, as in Figure 6.3. In this case the predicted (equilibrium) outcome would be the same, and overcoming the dilemma would require additional strategies.
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B High
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Fraction of other speakers of our language investing in it Figure 6.3 Low-density language dilemma with diversity popular. Created by author
Strategy 2: Ecolinguistic compensation Design mechanisms to internalize the benefits of low-density language cultivation. This strategy would give financial support to those who keep their native languages alive and vibrant. The world could absorb the costs of the analysis, documentation, instruction, and other activities that the cultivators require (UNESCO 2003). Beyond that, the world could treat active native speakers of lowdensity languages as service providers and pay them compensation. Consider a numerical example. Suppose that keeping the 5,000 lowest-density languages alive and vigorous costs $5,000,000,000 per year ($1,000,000 per language per year) and yields benefits (knowledge, identity, tolerance, and so on) worth $30,000,000,000 per year (1/20 of 1 percent of the gross world product). If the native speakers of those languages total 1,000 persons each, or 5,000,000 altogether (a plausible estimate, given that only about 400 languages have 10,000 speakers or more), then each native speaker incurs a cost, on average, of $1,000 per year. Let us assume that they have no special affection for their native language, so they share the benefits of their cultivation equally with all the others in the world. If so, the annual benefit enjoyed by each native speaker is $5 ($30,000,000,000, split among the 6,000,000,000 persons in the world). In this example, without a subsidy, native speakers who cultivated a lowdensity language would incur a cost of $1,000 for a benefit of $5 annually. An ecolinguistic compensation policy could pay the maintainers of a low-density language $2,000 per year each. This would give them 200 percent returns on their investments, while still leaving the rest of the world with a $20,000,000,000 annual net benefit ($30,000,000,000 in gross benefit, minus $10,000,000,000 in compensation costs).
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Compensation mechanisms have been analyzed as a means of making dominant languages more equitable for those who do not speak them natively (Van Parijs 2007) and of making official-language policies fair and efficient (Pool 1991; Ammon 2006: 333–6). A close parallel is that of ecological compensation mechanisms (also known as payments for environmental services, or markets in biodiversity services); these have been in use for about thirty years (Ferraro and Kiss 2002; Jenkins et al. 2004).
Strategy 3: Linguistic subsidiarity Reorganize social life to make linguistic communities more self-governing and socioeconomically autonomous. This strategy would aim to make the world more like a community of language communities than like a community of nation– states, territories, religions, ideologies, or other subpopulations. A self-governing and internally cohesive low-density language community could make its language official and treat it as the main medium of education, commerce, publication, and other social interaction, more easily than is possible where the language is merely that of a minority. With the progress of telecommunications, non-contiguous communities such as those formed by linguistic diasporas become more feasible. The strategy would not only make jurisdictional and transactional boundaries more coincident with language boundaries, but also, as proposed by Bastardas (2002), transfer authority from world bodies to single-language local units of government as much as is practical (the subsidiarity principle), thereby making the languages of those units useful and used. According to Mufwene (2002), utilization, particularly in a person’s work, is the critically necessary condition for the survival of a low-density language.
Strategy 4: Panlingual transparency Create language processing systems that automatically translate utterances among all the languages of the world. This strategy would attempt to produce a realworld counterpart to the fictional “Babel fish” of Adams (1979: 51–2). Such systems would allow anybody who knows any language to understand thoughts and emotions expressed in any other language. In this situation, the incentives for assimilation to high-density languages would be diminished, with the amount of diminution depending on the quality of the translation. Research and development in machine translation have been active for about half a century (Hutchins 2006; Trujillo 1999), the goal almost always being to translate between particular pairs or small sets of (generally high-density) languages. A few systems under current development apply to larger sets of languages, but never to more than about 50 (see for example http://translate.google. com; http://www.langtolang.com). Attempts to realize panlingual – or even massively multilingual – translation have mostly involved human effort rather than automatic processing; these projects have mainly focused on particular bodies of text, such as the Universal
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Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR 2008), and the user interfaces of particular computer application programs, such as search engines (for instance http:// www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=searchguides.html&ctx=prefere nces&hl=en#searchlang). However, some approaches to language modeling, including machine-translation interlinguas (Schubert 1992; Dorr et al. 2006) and typological grammar engineering (Bender and Flickinger 2005), might make automatic translation efficiently extensible to any number of languages. As these four strategies illustrate, panlingual globalization might be pursued in radically diverse ways (see Fettes 2003; Tonkin 2003). At their simplest, Strategy 1 is cultural, Strategy 2 is economic, Strategy 3 is political, and Strategy 4 is technological. It is plausible that the most effective approach to panlingual globalization would combine these and other strategies, rather than relying on only one.
Engineering Panlingual Globalization Any strategy for panlingual globalization is likely to arouse doubts because it aims at an outcome which was never experienced and is far from current reality. For example: 1 How could the world be persuaded to value linguistic diversity highly? 2 If ecolinguistic compensation were paid, how could one know who is eligible for the payments and how much to pay each of them? 3 Aren’t there far too many entrenched interests aligned with existing jurisdictional boundaries to make linguistic subsidiarity achievable? 4 Don’t the still laughable automatic translations between high-density languages, after half a century of effort, show that panlingual translation is simply too difficult? 5 More fundamentally, might efforts to preserve low-density languages inadvertently devalue medium-density ones and thereby hasten global unilingualism (De Swaan 2004)? To best evaluate these doubts, one can attempt to implement each strategy. This brings us from the stage of envisioning panlingual globalization to the stage of engineering it. The following discussion will focus on an actual attempt to begin engineering panlingual transparency (Strategy 4). In late 2006, the University of Washington’s Turing Center (http://turing.cs. washington.edu), with the support and collaboration of Utilika Foundation (http://utilika.org), began investigating the possibility of translation among thousands of languages. Even though, as mentioned above, existing automatic translation systems are limited to about 1 percent of the world’s languages, they have produced results far inferior to expert human translations. As one example, consider the translations of an English sentence into French produced by nine systems currently offered to the public, shown in table 6.1. Ambiguities like those involved
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Table 6.1
Automatic translations from English into French. Created by author
Role
Text
Source
Both speakers stopped talking after the warning light went on Les deux speakers ont arrêté de parler après que la lumière d’avertissem*nt a continué Les deux haut-parleurs ont cessé de parler après que le voyant d’alarme se soit allumé Les deux orateurs ont cessé de parler après le voyant s’est passé Les deux orateurs cessé de parler après que le voyant d’avertissem*nt a Les deux intervenants ont cessé de parler après le voyant d’alerte s’est passé Les deux orateurs ont arrêté de parler après que la lumière d’avertissem*nt a continué Les deux orateurs ont arrêté de parler après que la lumière d’avertissem*nt a continué Les deux orateurs(locuteurs) ont arrêté de parler après que le témoin lumineux a continué Tous les deux interlocuteurs arrêtions parler à la suite les voyant lumineux êtes allé one
Target, PITS (http://translation2. paralink.com) Target, SYSTRANet (http://www. systranet.com) Target, Babylon Online Translator (http://translation.babylon.com) Target, Live Search Translator (http://microsofttranslator.com) Target, Google Translate (http:// translate.google.com) Target, PROMT Translator (http:// www.online-translator.com) Target, SDL FreeTranslation.com (http://ets.freetranslation.com) Target, Reverso Translation (http://www.reverso.net) Target, InterTran (http://www. tranexp.com:2000/Translate/ result.shtml)
in ‘speaker ’ and ‘go on,’ which human translators easily resolve, often defeat machines. (French haut-parleurs refers to amplifying devices. French a continué and s’est passé can be translated ‘went on,’ but this sense is not applicable here.) If automatic translation is difficult for the most richly endowed languages, there is reason to be pessimistic about automatic translation from every language into every other language. After investigating some alternatives, the Turing Center researchers concluded that they could design a system to perform one type of translation more or less panlingually: lexical translation. The system would translate lexemes, the elements of the lexicons (vocabularies) of languages. For example, the system would not translate “Both speakers stopped talking after the warning light went on.”
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Instead it would translate the lexemes “both,” “speaker,” “stop,” “talk,” “after,” “the,” “warn,” “light,” “go,” and “on.” It might also translate “warning,” “warning light,” and “go on,” since they, too, may be considered lexemes (they may appear as entries in dictionaries). This project of panlingual lexical translation (PanLex) was massively multilingual from the beginning and is rapidly extensible to cover all languages (being limited only by the available data). In compensation, PanLex translates lexemes and makes no attempt to translate sentences, paragraphs, or longer discourses. We might describe it as initially wide but shallow; most translation systems, by contrast, begin deep but narrow. Other systems may be asked, “You don’t cover my language, so what good can you do for me?”; PanLex may be asked, “You cover my language, but you translate only lexemes, so what good does that do for me?” The hypothesis underlying PanLex was that lexical translation is more useful than one might imagine. Some utterance types often consist merely of sequences of lexemes. Web search queries, library-style subject headings, entries in book indices, user-interface labels (‘copy,’ ‘undo,’ and the like), social tags on the Web, list entries (places, events, hobbies, interests, etc.), weather-forecast summaries, telegrams, SMS text messages, baby talk, and foreigner talk are among them. Moreover, utterances that generally contain morphology and syntax may be converted to sequences of lexemes, and the sequence and context may make them fully or partly intelligible. Grammatically conveyed information, such as time, number, illocutionary force, or evidentiality, may be expressed with lexemes (such as ‘yesterday,’ ‘many,’ ‘question,’ or ‘allegedly’), and, if not so expressed, may still be successfully inferred. Even in situations where purely lexical translation is insufficient, it may be easily and inexpensively supplemented; this would result in a family of equivalent controlled languages (Pool 2006) with minimalistic syntax, which would avoid the structural ambiguities of natural languages. For example, communicators might supplement ‘man, bite, dog’ with annotations to specify which of the verb’s arguments is the agent and whether the statement is an assertion, a question, or a recommendation. The idea that simple annotation techniques may have great expressive power is akin to one of the assumptions of the Semantic Web Initiative (Berners-Lee et al. 2001): that human communication references massive numbers of things, but only a few relationships among those things. PanLex draws on various lexical resources, including dictionaries, wiktionaries, glossaries, lexicons, word lists, terminologies, thesauri, wordnets, ontologies, vocabulary databases, named-entity resources, and standards. Despite their different names and formats, they all assert facts of the type “Lexemes A, B, C, … , and N share at least one meaning common to them all.” The fact that they share a meaning makes them synonyms if they belong to the same language, or translations if they belong to different languages. There are thousands of these resources in existence, and they report the equivalences of millions of lexemes in thousands of languages. One of the first resources usually bestowed on any low-density language is a dictionary or word list. Such
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Figure 6.4 Simple lexical resource. Source: http://www.erlang.com.ru/euskara/ ?basque. Author: Kirill Panfilov. © Erlang. Data retrieved 26 January 2010. Used with permission
a resource usually translates between that language and some higher-density language, such as English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Hindi, or Tok Pisin. However, any arbitrary pair or larger set of languages might be covered. For example there are resources linking Greek with Catalan, Nepali with Esperanto, and Turkish with Azerbaijani. About 300 multilingual resources are being developed in the Wiktionary project (Wikimedia Foundation 2008); each wiktionary has a single source language and translates lexemes into an unlimited set of other languages. There are also specialized resources, sometimes organized as thesauri with taxonomies of meanings expressed in multiple languages; one example is the Food and Agriculture Organization’s thesaurus (FAO 2008), which expresses about 28,000 meanings related to agriculture and nutrition in Arabic, Czech, Mandarin, German, English, French, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lao, Western Farsi, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, and Thai. Finally, there are monolingual resources (thesauri and wordnets) that identify synonyms. PanLex defines concepts pragmatically. When a resource asserts that some lexemes share a meaning, PanLex assigns a new identifier to that meaning, leaving for later the question whether it is the same meaning as any meaning from any other resource. The simplest bilingual word lists, such as the one shown in Figure 6.4, give no information about a lexeme except its lemma (its dictionary or citation form). PanLex accordingly treats a lemma in a language as a lexeme. While some other systems might analyze English ‘tear ’ (eye water) as one lexeme and ‘tear ’ (rip) as another, PanLex treats ‘tear ’ as a single lexeme. More complex resources, like the one shown in Figure 6.5, provide additional facts about lexemes and meanings. PanLex recognizes four fact types that often appear in complex lexical
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Figure 6.5 Complex lexical resource. Source: Digital South Asia Library. Author: Henry George Raverty, in A Dictionary of the Puk’hto, Pus’hto, or Language of the Afghans: With Remarks on the Originality of the Language, and Its Affinity to Other Oriental Tongues (Williams and Norgate, 1867, p. 146). Used with permission
resources: definition, domain, meaning identifier, and word class. It also recognizes a generic fact type, which consists of an arbitrary attribute–value pair. This can be used for otherwise unrecognized facts such as etymology, argument frame, register, and usage. PanLex recognizes a range of language varieties. Most are ordinary natural languages, such as Burmese and Zulu, but the system can accommodate ethnic dialects, controlled natural languages (Pool 2006), artificial languages (Blanke 1989; Libert 2000 and 2003), and the controlled vocabularies embodied in standards. For example, the ISO 639 standard (SIL 2008) is treated as a language variety in PanLex. This standard identifies nearly 8,000 three-letter codes to represent the human languages of the world; each code is a lexeme in the ISO 639 language variety. Logically, the main facts recorded by PanLex are assignments of meanings to lexemes. These facts, called ‘denotations’ in the PanLex terminology, take the form “authority A asserts that lexeme L has meaning M.” From two or more denotations, one can derive assertions about translations and synonyms. If some authority says that lexeme A has meaning X and also says that lexeme B has meaning X, then that authority considers A and B to be translations or synonyms. The entire collection of the denotations can be interpreted geometrically or tabularly. Geometrically, it has the logical form of an undirected graph, as in Figure 6.6. The graph contains nodes (points) of two types: lexemes and meanings. Edges (lines) represent denotations; each edge connects one lexeme node with one meaning node. If a resource asserts a fact about translations or synonyms, the fact is
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Figure 6.6
Graphical interpretation of denotations. Created by author
Table 6.2
Tabular interpretation of denotations. Created by author
Meaning
Language
Lexeme
1 1 2 2
English Thai English Thai
tear tear
represented as a single meaning node connected to two or more lexeme nodes. Tabularly, the collection of denotations can be viewed as a three-column table, as in table 6.2, with each row representing a denotation. An asserted translation or synonymy is represented as two or more rows with the same meaning and distinct lexemes. The denotations are actually stored in a relational database, so that users can efficiently use the system as a translation engine.
Prototypes, Experiments, and Results In the effort to make PanLex a useful system, its developers have faced three principal challenges. The first challenge has been to collect enough lexical facts from enough language varieties to make PanLex realistically large. About 600 lexical resources have been consulted to date. Although these resources are in machine-readable form, most were created for human readers and rely on the readers’ knowledge and intuitions. For example, dictionaries commonly use symbols such as ‘∼’ to indicate that a part or all of a headword is to be repeated, but the repeated item may vary irregularly. Translations into phrases containing commas, such as ‘there, there,’ are often intermixed in the same resource with translations into multiple synonymous expressions, such as ‘often, frequently,’ and with translations into disjunctions with shared constituents, such as ‘soccer, football field.’ Resources are often constructed over many years, and formats change while the work is in progress.
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Multilingual resources are often collaborations among teams or persons who follow different conventions of punctuation, capitalization, and orthography. Moreover, a world-wide conversion of character encoding from multiple conflicting systems to a single coherent standard, Unicode (Unicode 2007), has been in progress since 1991, but many digitized resources remain encoded under preUnicode standards, some of them poorly defined. Finally, even resources that are consistently organized and well encoded exhibit incompatibilities, for instance in diacritical marks and in other aspects of spelling. Automatically combining facts attested by multiple resources requires that, if two facts refer to the same lexeme, the lexeme be identifiable as the same. All of these problems require that extensive normalization be performed on data contributed by resources. Notwithstanding these obstacles, as of April 2009 (about 2.5 years after the project was launched), the database contains about 27,400,000 denotations. They assign, in total, about 10,100,000 meanings to about 12,300,000 lexemes in about 1,300 language varieties. On the basis of these facts it is possible to perform about 204,500,000 different translations (102,200,000 pairs of lexemes, each translatable in both directions). Here ‘translations’ include intralingual translations (“Lexeme B is a synonym of lexeme A”), which constitute about 5 percent of the total. The second challenge has been to fill gaps in the data with artificial intelligence. The data provide only a small fraction of the translations that users might want, even among the lexemes already in the database. To get translations from any lexeme into any language variety, users require not only attested facts, but also automated inference from those facts. Consider the case in which somebody wants to translate the Icelandic word ‘hnappur’ into Arabic (Figure 6.7). The database currently assigns three meanings to ‘hnappur’; there are other denotations assigning one or more of these meanings to nine other lexemes, but none of those lexemes is in Arabic. So, without automated inference, the system cannot translate ‘hnappur’ into Arabic. Simple two-hop translation, namely translation with only one intermediate lexeme, is one kind of inference, though it is susceptible to errors. We reach five Arabic lexemes by translating in two hops from ‘hnappur.’ The gray disks in Figure 6.7 represent meanings, and the letters labeling them represent lexical resources. Thus, in this example there are five resources participating in two-hop translations from ‘hnappur’ into Arabic. We are translating through some ambiguous lexemes such as ‘stud,’ ‘key,’ and ‘touche,’ and nothing guarantees that the meanings they share with ‘hnappur’ are equivalent to the meanings they share with Arabic lexemes. But some of the Arabic lexemes have more connections to ‘hnappur’ than others do, and inference routines invented at the Turing Center use such path redundancy as evidence of validity. Three-hop connections provide even more evidence. For example, Esperanto ‘klavo’ = Hungarian ‘billentyü’ = Arabic ‘ .’ Experiments were conducted with inference algorithms applied to an early version of the database, containing about 1,300,000 lexemes (Etzioni 2007). One of the simpler algorithms assumed that any hop on any path exhibits a uniform probability of semantic shift. Another assumption was that cliques (sets of three or more lexemes that are all pairwise translations of each other) have a high
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Figure 6.7
Illustration of the need for translation inference. Created by author
probability (about 80 percent, based on tests) of sharing a real meaning. An example of such a clique in Figure 6.7 is ‘hnappur,’ ‘button,’ and ‘Taste,’ where resource F asserts a shared meaning between ‘hnappur’ and ‘button,’ resource D, between ‘hnappur’ and ‘Taste,’ and resource M, between ‘button’ and ‘Taste.’ Two algorithms derived inferred translations beyond the attested ones for three language pairs: English–Russian, English–Hebrew, and Turkish–Russian. Persons who were bilingual in these pairs judged the correctness of all the translations without knowing which ones were attested and which were inferred. On average, the judges considered about 92 percent of the attested translations correct and about 80 percent of the combined attested and inferred translations correct. With this reduction in precision, the system was able to increase the number of translations by 33 percent for English–Russian, 80 percent for English–Hebrew, and 215 percent for Turkish–Russian. Inference can also draw on external data. In one set of experiments (Sammer 2007), the attested translations were supplemented with monolingual corpora of news articles. Given an ambiguous lexeme (such as ‘plant’ in English) and translations from it into two other languages, the system determined what fraction of the words found near the target words in the two languages’ corpora represented translations of each other. This fraction was positively associated with the lexemes in question sharing a meaning.
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Work continues on improved inference algorithms. Initial results on an early version of the data indicate that inference based on redundant paths can expand the sets of translations in a multilingual dictionary by about 50 percent without any increase in error. Given that users reported about 8 percent of attested translations to be erroneous, algorithms that combine translations from multiple sources may be able to discover new translations (increasing ‘recall’) while also eliminating some errors (increasing ‘precision’). One of the main goals for translation inference is making it efficient. As Figure 6.7 suggests, a person might easily want an inference algorithm to consider morethan-two-hop paths when extracting translations. However, experiments conducted at the Turing Center have found multi-hop inference too complex for real time implementation. Solutions being investigated include precomputation of translations, implementation of the system on clusters of several computers operating in parallel, random sampling instead of exhaustive search for some inference operations, and redefining the problem of translation as a problem of discovering universal meanings and their panlingual expressions. The idea behind this last approach is to discover from the data the real meanings that appear to be most universally expressed in the world’s languages and to identify for each meaning an expression in each language. Then users who specify (for instance with an unambiguous lexeme) one of the universal meanings could obtain its expression in any language instantly, because a time-consuming inference process would not be required. The third challenge has been to show that translations derived from PanLex can produce benefits. The project has pursued this goal by means of two main tactics. One is to show that the translations can make searching the Web more effective, and the other is to show that people can exchange intelligible messages with each other using only translated lexemes. The search project involved constructing a special Web search engine for images. Launched in September 2007 (Hickey 2007) and made available for public use (http://www.panimages.org), PanImages helps the user formulate and submit multilingual search queries for images. PanImages guides users to type lemmata, helps them choose meanings for the chosen lexemes, and gives them choices among the attested and inferred translations of those lexemes. Users can thereby discover images whose labels are in languages the users don’t know, but which are nonetheless relevant to them. The service can also help users (1) to improve the precision of their image-search results by avoiding highly ambiguous query words; and (2) to find culturally specific images (Colowick 2008; Etzioni 2007). PanImages is still an experimental prototype, but it has had about 200,000 visitors in its first year of existence. A second project investigated lemmatic communication. This is communication in which one person (the ‘encoder ’) constructs sequences of lexemes that represent the meaning of a message. An automated system translates the lexemes into another language, and another person (the ‘decoder ’) attempts to understand the intended message. The success of this method of communication depends largely on the encoder ’s avoidance of ambiguous lexemes. For example, in table 6.3 the
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Table 6.3
Example of successful lemmatic communication. Created by author
Source sentence
Encoding
Translation
Decoding
Washing hands regularly is effective in the reduction of the spread of infectious diseases
regularly, wash, hand, effectively, reduce, infectious disease, spread
regelmäßig, waschen, Hand, wirkungsvoll, reduzieren, Infektionskrankheit, ausbreiten
Regelmäßiges Händewaschen reduziert wirkungsvoll die Ausbreitung von Infektionskrankheiten
Table 6.4
Example of failed lemmatic communication. Created by author
Source Sentence
Encoding
Translation
Decoding
The trial ended with a lengthy sentence
trial, end, with, lengthy, sentence
essai, fin, avec, long, phrase
L’essai s’est terminé par une longue phrase
encoding and the translation from English into German introduce no major distortion in meaning, so the decoded sentence easily conveys the intended meaning. In table 6.4, however, ambiguous lexemes in the encoding lead to a translation that describes the last sentence of an essay, instead of the outcome of a criminal case. In an experiment on lemmatic communication (Everitt 2010), Spanish and Hungarian-speaking subjects read passages and converted their sentences to sequences of lexemes. Other subjects read the lexeme sequences and converted them back into passages consisting of sentences. There were three conditions: 1 The lexemes were automatically translated from Spanish into Hungarian or vice versa between the encoding and decoding stages; the translation was crude, a given lexeme being always rendered identically, regardless of its context. 2 The lexemes were not translated; encoding and decoding subjects spoke the same language. 3 As with condition 2, the lexemes were not translated, but they were randomly reordered – a simulation of word-order differences among languages. The quality of the decoding was rated by another set of subjects. As expected, both the reordering and the translation interfered with the task. Still, in all conditions, subjects succeeded in producing final sentences that bore close or moderate resemblance to the original sentences almost half the time or more.
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On the basis of the subjects’ errors and comments, the investigators hypothesized that improvements to the system and user interface could further increase the success of lemmatic communication. The contemplated improvements include more intelligent automatic translation, warnings when encoders choose ambiguous lexemes, options for decoders to see alternate translations, and opportunities for decoders to ask encoders to clarify or try again. The experiment and its pretests revealed that a major issue facing encoders is efficiency. It is difficult to design an encoding interface that allows people to select lexemes from a database as rapidly as they can type free text. However, intelligent interfaces might learn to anticipate the next lexeme and accelerate the selection process, perhaps even exceeding the pace of free-text writing. Work continues in an effort to make lemmatic communication practical. The Turing Center is developing an application, PanMail, which will allow people to send messages to each other through the internet across all language boundaries, using lemmatic communication. Additional research is under way for designing graphical and other language-independent expressive methods, which can supplement lemmatic communication. Applications that deliver useful results also create opportunities to collect system-improving knowledge from users. Persons who use systems based on PanLex in order to get translations will sometimes know (or believe) that the translations they get are incorrect, or will be able to perform translations that the system cannot. Experimenting with user-contribution features in the PanImages application, the Turing Center has obtained a few thousand corrections and additions from users. However, these include many jocular, sarcastic, semi-literate, and other low-quality contributions. Obtaining data from many dispersed users requires quality management. As the PanLex project addresses these three major challenges, its system development can be understood as taking place on three corresponding layers. Layer 1 is the database of attested denotations and auxiliary facts. Layer 2 consists of versions of the database that employ various inference routines developed at the Turing Center for the discovery of unattested translations, universal meanings, and expressions of universal meanings. Layer 3 consists of the applications and experiments that build on the other layers to provide practical services, conduct research, collect additional data, and improve the quality of the existing data.
Future and Related Work PanLex began as an in-house database for prototypes and experiments designed by one team. Efforts are now under way to move the database and related tools into an institutional and technical environment suitable for easy access to researchers and end-users world-wide. In the envisioned future, the problem of lexical translation inference and the goal of building applications that rely on it will be treated as objects of collaborative and competitive research at multiple institutions. Users anywhere will be able to access the database, add resources to
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it, and use, evaluate, and improve inference algorithms operating on it. Someone who has constructed a dictionary that translates the words of low-density language A into higher-density language B will, by contributing the dictionary’s data to PanLex, enable the speakers of A to translate words from their language not only into B, but into thousands of other languages. If this capability, in combination with projects implementing other strategies of panlingual globalization, motivates actions that breathe new life into dying languages, the intuitions underlying PanLex will be shown to have been well founded. There appear to be opportunities for mutually beneficial collaboration between PanLex and other projects with similar aims. Collections of digital lexical resources include: Wiktionary (http://www.wiktionary.org/); wordgumbo (http://www.wordgumbo.com/index.htm); FreeLang (http://www.freelang. net/), FreeDict (http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1419); Dicts.info (http://www.dicts.info/); Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (http:// dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/); Majstro Aplikaˆj oj (http://www.majstro.com/ Web/Majstro/sdict.php); Ergane (http://download.travlang.com/Ergane/); Logos (http://www.logos.it/index); OneLook (http://www.onelook.com/); Langtolang (http://www.langtolang.com/); Lingoes (http://www.lingoes.net/ en/translator/index.html); jARGOT (http://www.jargot.com/); EUdict (http:// www.eudict.com/); SensAgent (http://dictionary.sensagent.com/); OmegaWiki (http://www.omegawiki.org/); WinDictionary (http://www.windictionary. com/); LingvoSoft (http://www.lingvozone.com/); and Webster ’s Online Dictionary (http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/). A much larger collection is that of the printed dictionaries in the world’s libraries. Projects that digitize books (including dictionaries), such as Project Gutenberg (http://www. gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) and the Google Books Library Project (http:// books.google.com/googlebooks/library.html), are other potential content contributors. Relevant standards with which PanLex wholly or partly complies include Unicode (Unicode 2007) and OLIF (http://www.olif.net/documentation. htm). The Global WordNet Association (http://www.globalwordnet.org/) and Language Grid (http://langrid.nict.go.jp/en/index.html) are other related initiatives. Mutually beneficial terms of collaboration may be tricky to negotiate with compilers of lexical resources. Many such resources are deployed as advertisingsupported services that seek to maximize human visitors in order to generate revenue. PanLex, by contrast, seeks to achieve panlingual transparency, in which users get efficient translation without spending time personally choosing and using tools on translation Web sites. The two models might be difficult to reconcile (see Kilgarriff 2000). Moreover, the legal rules under which providers of lexical resources operate are obscure (Zhu et al. 2002; Kienle et al. 2008) and globally unharmonized (Fernández Molina 2004). There is little relevant case law, and apparently none on lexical resources. Creators of translingual dictionaries sometimes assert claims that their contents are protected by copyright, even while they borrow liberally from other dictionaries on the theory that lemmatic translations, part-of-speech identifications, and other borrowed facts are inherently ineligible
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for copyright protection. The designers of PanLex hope to avoid disputes while developing forms of mutually rewarding collaboration, which may facilitate panlingual communication.
Conclusion Massive linguistic extinction may not be a necessary consequence of globalization. Several strategies are available for making panlingual rather than unilingual globalization a reality. The PanLex project is an attempt to implement one of those strategies. When several such projects have produced results, work can begin to combine them and to study their interactions. Until then, pronouncements on the inevitable demise of the world’s languages will be premature.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research, suggestions and comments from Susan M. Colowick are gratefully acknowledged.
REFERENCES note Accessibility of all internet resources mentioned below has been confirmed on January 26, 2010. Abley, M. (2003) Spoken Here: Travels among Threatened Languages. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Adams, D. (1979) The Hitchhiker ’s Guide to the Galaxy. London: Pan Books. Ammon, U. (2006) Language conflicts in the European Union. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 16: 319–38. Bastardas i Boada, A. (2002) World language policy in the era of globalization: Diversity and intercommunication from the perspective of ‘complexity.’ Noves SL. Revista de Sociolingüística (Summer issue): 1–9. Available at: http://www6. gencat.cat/llengcat/noves/hm02estiu/ metodologia/a_bastardas1_9.htm.
Bender, E. M., and Flickinger, D. (2005) Rapid prototyping of scalable grammars: Towards modularity in extensions to a language-independent core. In R. Dale, K. F. Wong, J. Su, and O. Y. Kwong (eds), Proceedings of the 2nd International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing IJCNLP-05 (Posters/Demos), 203–8. Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., and Lassila, O. (2001) The semantic Web. Scientific American 284(5): 34–43. Blanke, D. (1989) Planned languages: A survey of some of the main problems. In K. Schubert (ed.), Interlinguistics: Aspects of the Science of Planned Languages, 63–87. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
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Colowick, S. M. (2008) Multilingual search with PanImages. Multilingual 19(2): 61–3. Available at: http://turing.cs. washington.edu/PanImMultilingual.pdf. Crystal, D. (2000) Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. De Swaan, A. (2004) Endangered languages, sociolinguistics, and linguistic sentimentalism. European Review 12: 567–80. Dorr, B. J., Hovy, E. H., and Levin, L. S. (2006) Machine translation: Interlingual methods. In K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Vol. 7, 2nd edn, 383–94. Oxford: Elsevier. Available at: ftp://ftp.umiacs.umd.edu/pub/ bonnie/Interlingual-MT-Dorr-HovyLevin.pdf. Eidheim, H. (1969) When ethnic identity is a social stigma. In F. Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, 39–57. Boston: Little, Brown. Etzioni, O., Reiter, K., Soderland, S., and Sammer, M. (2007) Lexical translation with application to image search on the Web. In B. Maegaard (ed.), Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XI. Available at: http://turing.cs.washington.edu/ papers/EtzioniMTSummit07.pdf. Everitt, K., Lim, C., Etzioni, O., Pool, J., Colowick, S., and Soderland, S. (2010) Evaluating lemmatic communication. trans-kom 3. Available at: http://www. trans-kom.eu (forthcoming). FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] (2008) AGROVOC Thesaurus. Available at: http://www.fao.org/agrovoc. Ferraro, P. J., and Kiss, A. (2002) Direct payments to conserve biodiversity. Science 298: 1718–19. Fernández-Molina, J. C. (2004) The legal protection of databases: Current situation of the international harmonization process. Aslib Proceedings: New Information Perspectives 56: 325–34. Fettes, M. (2003) The geostrategies of interlingualism (=ch. 3). In J. Maurais
and M. A. Morris (eds), Languages in a Globalising World, 37–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, R. G., Jr (ed.) (2005) Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edn. Dallas: SIL International. Available at: http:// www.ethnologue.com/. Harrison, K. D. (2007) When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. Hickey, H. (2007) A rose is a rozsa is a : Image-search tool speaks hundreds of languages. Available at: http:// uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article. asp?articleID=36524. Hutchins, J. (2006) Machine translation: History. In K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edn, Vol. 7, 375–83. Oxford: Elsevier. Available at: http://www.hutchinsweb.me.uk/ EncLangLing-2006.pdf. Jenkins, M., Scherr, S. J., and Inbar, M. (2004) Markets for biodiversity services: Potential roles and challenges. Environment 46: 32–42. Kienle, H., German, D., Tilley, S., and Müller, H. (2008) Managing legal risks associated with intellectual property on the Web. International Journal of Business Information Systems 3: 86–106. Kilgarriff, A. (2000) Business models for dictionaries and NLP. International Journal of Lexicography 13: 107–18. Libert, A. (2000) A Priori Artificial Languages. München: Lincom Europa. Libert, A. (2003) Mixed Artificial Languages. München: Lincom Europa. Mufwene, S. S. (2002) Colonization, globalization and the plight of ‘weak’ languages. Journal of Linguistics 38: 375–95. Mufwene, S. S. (2004) Language birth and death. Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 201–22. Nettle, D., and Romaine, S. (2000) Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Panlingual Globalization Panfilov 2008. , “ .” Available at: http://www.erlang.com.ru/ euskara/?basque-eurus. Phillipson, R. (2008) Lingua franca or lingua Frankensteinia? English in European integration and globalization. World Englishes 27: 250–84. Pool, J. (1991) The official language problem. American Political Science Review 85: 495–514. Pool, J. (2006) Can controlled languages scale to the Web? In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Controlled Language Applications (CLAW 2006). Available at: http://turing.cs. washington.edu/papers/pool-clweb.pdf. Raverty, H. G. (1867) A Dictionary of the Puk’hto, Pus’hto, or Language of the Afghans, 2nd edn. London: Williams and Norgate. Available at: http://dsal. uchicago.edu/dictionaries/raverty/ index.html. Sammer, M., and Soderland, S. (2007) Building a sense-distinguished multilingual lexicon from monolingual corpora and bilingual lexicons. In B. Maegaard (ed.), Proceedings of Machine Translation Summit XI. Available at: http://turing.cs.washington.edu/ papers/SammerMTSummit07.pdf. Schubert, K. (1992) Esperanto as an intermediate language for machine translation. In J. Newton (ed.), Computers in Translation, 78–95. London: Routledge. SIL International (2008) ISO 639–3. Available at: http://www.sil.org/ iso639-3/default.asp.
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Tonkin, H. (2003) The search for a global linguistic strategy. In J. Maurais and M. A. Morris (eds), Languages in a Globalising World, 319–33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trujillo, A. (1999) Translation Engines: Techniques for Machine Translation. London: Springer. UDHR in Unicode (2008) Unicode Consortium. Available at: http:// www.unicode.org/udhr/. UNESCO (2003) Ad hoc expert group on endangered languages. Language Vitality and Endangerment, International Expert Meeting on UNESCO Programme Safeguarding of Endangered Languages. Available at: http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/ doc/src/00120-EN.pdf. Unicode Consortium (2007) The Unicode 5.0 Standard. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley. Van Parijs, P. (2007) Tackling the anglophones’ free ride: Fair linguistic cooperation with a global lingua franca. AILA Review 20: 72–86. Wikimedia Foundation (2008) Wiktionary. Available at: http://www.wiktionary.org. Woodbury, A. C. (2006) What is an endangered language? Linguistic Society of America. Available at: http://www. lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/Endangered_ Languages.pdf. Zhu, H., Madnick, S. E., and Siegel, M. D. (2002) The interplay of Web aggregation and regulations. In Proceedings of Law and Technology, LAWTECH 2002. Track 375–853.
7 The Spread of Global Spanish: From Cervantes to reggaetón CLARE MAR-MOLINERO
Introduction In this chapter I explore the impact of globalization on the Spanish language today and argue that Spanish is indeed a global language in its range of world-wide uses and status. I will begin with a brief explanation of the spread of Spanish, which has led to its wide geographical and demographic extension today. I will show in what ways Spanish merits the description of ‘global’ language within the contemporary global linguistic hierarchy. I will then look at how sociolinguistic processes typical of globalization are impacting on, or being harnessed by, Spanish. I will identify the agents influencing these globalization processes, showing how international ‘pan-Hispanic’ language policies and planning, particularly by Spain, have a major role in these processes, but arguing, also, that there are contrasting – and sometimes counter – grassroots influences which exert authority over the Spanish language in its global spread; these are notably led by US Latinos and transmitted through popular culture such as popular music.
The Spread of Spanish With over 400 million speakers across the world (Gordon 2005), Spanish is obviously a major world language. Spanish is the official or national language of twenty-one states, and it is widely used in international organizations and events. Estimates as to how many people speak Spanish inevitably vary, pointing to the unreliability of many language censuses. Too often censuses simply reflect the population size of a country where Spanish is the official language. When questionnaires or interviews seek to discover more nuanced information, self-reporting can hide very different attitudes and behavior toward a language, from the desire to hide ethnic origins to a wish to exaggerate linguistic competence. Questions about ‘mother tongue,’ ‘language,’ and even ‘speaking a language’ can be misleading and can result in significant differences in the totals produced.
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Bearing in mind these limitations, the SIL International’s publication, Ethnologue, currently in its fifteenth edition (Gordon 2005), is a generally respected source for linguistic data. The latest edition reports a total of 420 million speakers of Spanish, which includes 350 million ‘native’ speakers (see below for further discussion of the marked difference between first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) speakers), placing Spanish among the most widely spoken languages, after Chinese, English, and Hindi for total numbers (and, significantly, before English for native speakers). Importantly, too, with the exception of Spain (as well as of Equatorial Guinea and of the Philippines, where speakers of Spanish are now very reduced), all the principal Spanish-speaking states border on other Spanishspeaking states. This has been important in terms of language spread and of maintaining the presence of the language. In two important studies on the economic significance of the Spanish language, Moreno-Fernández and Otero (2007; 2008) have analyzed national censuses and looked at Spanish-speaking migration and diasporas across the world. They have combined their findings in these areas with statistics about learners of Spanish, to arrive at an even higher number of Spanish-speakers. They suggest that, by including anyone who can communicate in Spanish, from native speakers to mere language learners, they arrived at a number of 438,979,000 speakers world-wide (Moreno-Fernández and Otero 2008: 75). How did the local vernacular of the Castile region become such a widely spoken world language? The history of the development of and domination, in Spain, of a distinct variety called ‘Castilian,’ and then its emergence as ‘Spanish,’ the national language, mirrors very closely the development and consolidation of the Spanish nation–state. Throughout the nation-building process, national identity was closely linked to linguistic identity.1 The spread of the Spanish language was further reinforced by the process of rapid Spanish colonization in Latin America. Language played a significant role in the consolidation of Spain’s American empire. Not only did Castilian/Spanish quickly dominate over the thousands of existing indigenous languages as the language of power, of administration, of public life, and especially of the church, but it was a particularly suitable medium for communication across such enormous geographical distances because of its highly developed literacy. This spread of a print community, albeit from the ruling elites, created an “imagined” community (Anderson 1992) of a Spanish-speaking world in the Americas. The idea of ‘pan-Hispanism,’ Hispanidad, or of a ‘Spanish-speaking world’ can be said to date back to these beginnings. In the same way in which the Spanish language had been the great unifier of a vast Spanish Empire during the colonial days, its total integration and permanence in Latin American society was also assured from the period of independence onward. The presence in Latin America of a ruling elite made up exclusively of people of European descent, unlike in many other ex-colonial situations, ensured the maintenance of Spanish as the language of power. However, the link between Spanish and national identity was very different from the one found in Spain.
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Spanish, of course, was not the unique national language in any of the new independent Latin American republics; and it was not their ‘own,’ as they all used Spanish. Nor was Spanish in any way an original indigenous language of the region. It was, on the contrary, the imposed, imperialist language, of the very enemy whom the wars of independence had just defeated. And yet, despite this, Spanish did indeed serve a nation-forming role in Latin America, as it had done previously in Spain, thereby reinforcing its dramatic spread across the world (Mar-Molinero 2000). Within the new and highly constructed independent republics there was an urgent need to create a sense of national identity – a desired uniqueness that could distinguish Ecuadorians from Peruvians, Argentineans from Uruguayans, Mexicans from Guatemalans, and so on. Most of these new states, such as Mexico, Peru or Venezuela, were in fact highly artificial national entities, containing as they did many different ethnic groups, cultures, and histories. Most also contained many different linguistic groups. For this reason, the role of the Spanish language was seen to be one of unifying the disparate groups under the banner of their new (imposed) national identity. In some of the republics, even a particular form of Spanish was emphasized: Mexican Spanish, Argentinean Spanish, and the like (Sánchez and Dueñas 2002). Spanish was taught in schools and used in all forms of written communication, notably in constitutions, in laws, and in the church. Furthermore, Spanish was the official, and often also the ‘national’ language recognized in the republics’ new constitutions. On the whole, it was not until well into the twentieth century that some of these states began to recognize the existence of other, non-Spanish languages as national, or even as co-official (see Alvar 1986; Hamel 2006). In the twentieth century, urbanization, industrialization, and technological advances led to the rapid decrease, or even death, of indigenous languages in Latin America and to the total consolidation of Spanish in all the independent republics. Education systems and greater access to literacy in general also helped to promote the learning and use of Spanish to the detriment of the indigenous languages, which until recently have scarcely been taught and do not have a tradition of literacy2 (Morales-González and Torres 1992). From the twentieth century on, internal migration from rural areas, where traditionally local indigenous languages are spoken, to many large Latin American cities, where the use of Spanish prevails, had a significant impact on language use and on the spread of Spanish. So, too, had the immigration out of Spanishspeaking Latin America into the United States, which produced an ever growing Spanish-speaking population there. This US Spanish-speaking community has very different features from those of the earlier Spanish colonization. The spreading process of the Spanish language outlined so far was characterized by dominance and elite imposition. In contrast, US Latino communities are frequently characterized by marginalization and discrimination; they are the under-privileged in a dominantly anglophone society. In spite of this, Spanish has nonetheless maintained and reinforced a firm footing in the US since the mid-twentieth century, when large groups of Spanish speakers started to migrate there legally and illegally.3
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The phenomenon highlights the changing nature of language spread in the late twentieth century, since this was the result of greater proximity and accessibility to their homelands offered to immigrant groups by advances in transportation and by sophisticated technological communications. The existence of trains, motorways, aeroplanes, telephones, televisions, and email, some or all of which are now available even to the poorest immigrants, has changed the relationship of the immigrants with their host country and their sense of identity. In particular, a change has been witnessed in the nature of language spread, from its being an imposed, ‘top-down’ colonizing process to its becoming (in many cases) a more ‘bottom-up,’ infiltrating phenomenon. The American ‘melting-pot,’ with its demand for instant integration into American culture, language, and identity, has been greatly challenged by this phenomenon. It is a phenomenon found across the world, to a greater or lesser extent, in places experiencing large influxes of immigration. In particular, many of the member states of the European Union have seen waves of immigrants whose links with their homelands have prevented a total assimilation and who often eventually return to their countries of origin – a pattern with inevitable consequences for language use and behavior. Thus language spread has been affected by many of the forces of globalization, both in terms of how immigrants do or do not integrate themselves into the host societies and in terms of how permanent they perceive their settlement to be. Moreover, globalization has brought with it a role for global languages, which are crossing borders and taking over in domains where local languages were previously used. This process, in turn, has seen an expansion in the role of world languages and a decrease, even death, of a multitude of smaller, more local languages (Crystal 2000; Mühlhäusler 1996).
‘Global’ Spanish I have previously discussed the Spanish language’s status as a global language in detail (Mar-Molinero 2004) and concluded that, in many respects, as a result of its spread, Spanish today meets the essential criteria commonly used to describe a language as ‘global,’ albeit it is in a considerably less dominant position than global English. I will briefly summarize these conclusions below. The size of the population alone is not enough to determine the influence and global role of a language. It is also necessary to ask who the speakers are, and to make distinctions between certain categories which are indeed very different. While the category ‘mother tongue’ proposes a very debated concept, we can acknowledge that the majority of those who live in Spain and in nearly all the Latin American countries where Spanish is the official language, as well as a part of the Spanish-speaking community in the US, acquire Spanish as their first language. The proportion of these people will be lower in some Latin American countries such as in Paraguay, Guatemala, and Bolivia, where there is a strong presence of indigenous languages. In such countries, as in many other parts of
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Latin America and in some parts of Spain, for instance in Catalunya, there are linguistic minority groups, which nonetheless learn Spanish very early on in their lives (usually when they go to school) and speak it to a high level of competence. Together, these two groups make up a very high percentage of the linguistic community referred to as ‘Spanish speakers.’ As we have seen, the vast majority of Spanish speakers speak Spanish as their first language, and relatively few speak it as a second language; however, a significant increase among learners of Spanish as a foreign language has been occurring in recent years (Bugel 2006; Del Valle and Villa 2006; Instituto Cervantes 2000; Marcos Marín 2006).4 Included in this group are those who learn Spanish as part of their education curriculum, or in adult life, for purposes such as business or international communication. It is to this group that we should look when assessing the level of the global role of Spanish, as this is the group that represents those with a perceived need, motivation, and desire to learn Spanish voluntarily and enthusiastically. Such people are led by the need to understand Spanish because this language is used in an increasing range of domains and areas on the international stage. We will examine these in turn below. In terms of the legal, political, and economic significance of Spanish, as we have noted, twenty-one countries recognize it as their official or national language, and Spanish is also an official language in many international bodies such as the United Nations and its offshoots (like UNESCO), or the European Union. Of course, official recognition does not always guarantee actual use in these organizations. Likewise, in judging global political and economic impact, it is important to ask how politically significant the various Spanish-speaking states are in the global pecking order. Many of the Latin American republics are still relatively poor and underdeveloped, with notably high levels of illiteracy. Therefore the economic clout of the users of Spanish varies – from the relatively significant economy of Spain to the expanding markets of, say, Chile, Mexico, and some of the Mercosur countries, and to the very poor and weak economies of countries like the Dominican Republic or Guatemala. In terms of economic power, we should also – increasingly – consider the role and importance of Spanish speakers in the US, which will be discussed below. A particularly clear indicator of the global role of a language is its selection for use in scientific, academic, and technological communications, which by definition aim to reach international audiences. Despite a noticeable increase in the material reported from Spaniards and Latin Americans in academic and scientific publications, and despite strong participation on the internet (see Marcos Marín 2000 and 2006), the pattern for Spanish speakers continues to be to publish and communicate above all in English (and sometimes in French or German) rather than in their mother tongue (Martin Mayorga 2000). In one area which is particularly significant in terms of global communication, the internet, there are signs of increase in the use of Spanish (and, more generally, in the use of languages other than English). Marcos Marín (2006) notes that, according to his statistical sources, between 2000 and 2004 Spanish has risen from a percentage of around 10 among the languages used on the internet to a
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proportion of 15 to 20 percent. He warns that numbers vary widely between sources, hence these data are only approximate; but he is confident that they represent, overall, a situation where Spanish is the third most used language, after English and Chinese. This is an important change from the 1990s, when Spanish lagged behind Japanese and German, in fifth place.5 Another key element in the promotion and spread of the Spanish language and culture is the international media. While these remain predominantly in English, there is a growing number of respected newspapers and radio and television stations in Spanish across the world and, in particular, an increasing number of them is available in the US (Carreira 2002; Morales 2001). Cable and satellite television has increased enormously for Spanish speakers, especially in the US, but also world-wide. Once again, the role of the internet is important in the provision of many on-line media broadcasts, including on-line newspapers, radio, and television. Spanish is the language of the education system in all the countries where it is also an official language; and, as noted, Spanish is widely taught elsewhere as a foreign language, particularly in the US, where it is the first foreign language (see Instituto Cervantes 2000). Increasingly Spanish is offered in other secondary curricula across the world, most notably in the Far East (Japan), Australia, and Europe; and particularly in Brazil (Bugel 2006), although in almost all of these places it is the second foreign language, after English. The active and vigorous work of the Instituto Cervantes across the world has helped to underpin this takeup of Spanish as a foreign language, and it reinforces a Spanish-speaking cultural presence. Indeed, cultural production in Spanish is another area where the profile of the language can be, and is being, raised, both through the activities of such organizations as the Instituto Cervantes and through the current popularity of Latin music and bands, which will be discussed below. Tourism on the one hand and, once again, the US Latino community on the other are partly responsible for this upsurge in awareness of a Hispanic culture. In the Instituto Cervantes’ Centro Virtual El español en el mundo: Annuario 2000, the on-line anuario of the state of the Spanish language across the world, we are given some interesting and revealing data about the increased level of learning and use of Spanish in various countries. The reasons given for this increase in the demand for learning Spanish as a foreign language, it is suggested, are political (for instance the emergence of the southern Latin American ‘Common Market,’ Mercosur), economic (as well as Mercosur, the expanding investment by Spanish companies in Brazil and other parts of Latin America) and cultural (the boom in Hispanic culture world-wide in recent years). This so-called boom in Hispanic culture includes both book and record publishing. It is notable also for the sudden popularity, both in America and in Europe, of Latin-style bands and pop groups and of salsa dance classes and club evenings. While the pop-stars themselves do not, all of them or always, sing in Spanish, the positive attitudes that their connection with a Spanish-speaking world brings certainly increase an interest in Spanish and a desire to learn it among tourists and leisure seekers from the developed world.
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Publishing in Spanish is also an upward-moving trend, reflecting the provision of Spanish teaching on the one hand and better literacy across the Spanishspeaking world on the other – along with a genuine increase in the popularity of reading in Spanish (Carreira 2002). Concerning, more specifically, the Spanishreading market in the US, Carreira reports: [P]ublishing houses like HarperCollins, Random House, Lectorum and others are rushing to translate popular English titles […] Book distributors are also gobbling up titles from Argentina, Spain and Mexico to sell to libraries, universities and retail chains like Wal-Mart and Target. (2002: 42)
The cumulative effect of this spread of published and broadcast Spanish across various media is likely to be a wider sense of identity among Spanish speakers, which the print and the electronic/recorded word would link together to form an ‘imagined,’ shared community.
Spanish and Globalization The rapid growth and presence of Spanish world-wide, beyond the national borders of Spanish-speaking countries, bring the language into contact with processes that typically characterize globalization. Spanish as a product or as a commodity is promoted and enhanced by global media and communications, and the language itself, in all its varieties, is affected by global phenomena. Today the processes involved in globalization bring languages together more frequently, and sometimes unexpectedly. In sociolinguistic terms, the effects on language contact and language spread are also different. Whereas in the past we might have spoken, typically, of the relatively discrete phenomena of language shift, revival, or death, today we should consider such key processes of globalization as those identified by Coupland (2003: 467): “interdependence, compression across time and space, disembedding and commodification.” The spread of Spanish means that the global “interdependence” of Spanishspeaking communities – among themselves and between them and other parts of the world system – has a significant impact on the language itself. These communities share media and cultural production, in particular those available through fast technological forms of communication such as satellite television, film, recorded music, and the internet. Increasingly there are signs that the Spanish-speaking language community responds collectively to new linguistic needs, such as when it operates on the internet by creating and/or borrowing, particularly from English, new words and terms. Associated with the same phenomenon is Coupland’s second concept: the “compression across time and space” experienced by the Spanish-speaking world in spite of its expansive size and territory, as electronic communications (telephones, text messages, emails) make geographical and temporal distances insignificant. Furthermore, the “disembedding” referred to by Coupland arises with the transfer of culturally specific items
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of speech, which originated in one Spanish speech community, to another, and with the consequent adaptation or re-embedding of such items. Coupland (ibid., p. 468) cites Giddens (1991: 18), who explains this concept as “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from their local contexts and their re-articulation across indefinite tracts of time-space.” For example, the language, practices, and social behavior portrayed in telenovelas (TV soaps) produced by Mexicans and performed by Venezuelan actors to scripts written by Colombians can be seen and interpreted, simultaneously, by audiences in Spain, in Puerto Rico, and even in the US. Such processes are the result of phenomena typically associated with globalization: ‘new’ migration (that is, migration patterns which increasingly display a circular movement, frequent contacts with the ‘home’ country, and transnational networks); high tech media and communications (mobile phones, satellite television, emails, and the internet); and modern rapid transportation systems. The concepts of time and space have been altered forever, with inevitable consequences for the basic unit of communication – the language. However, language processes do not happen in a vacuum and are not without agency, as Hamel (2006), Phillipson (1992), and Mar-Molinero (2006a and b) noted (among others). In the rest of this chapter I will examine the contrasting and sometimes conflicting agents that I identify as instrumental in influencing the nature and character of contemporary global Spanish. In so doing I will explore the “language authority” (Gal and Woolard 2001; Woolard, 2007) of Spanish, and I will argue that Spanish operates globally both as an ‘anonymous,’ top-down, public language driven by dominating institutional and government policies, and also as an ‘authentic,’ grassroots, bottom-up language.6
Language Policies and Planning from ‘above’: The Influence of Spain on Global Spanish The clearest illustration of the authority of Spanish as a language imposed from above is that of the various initiatives taken by the current (and previous) Spanish government and by the associated Spanish business ventures. Two overarching aims, in my opinion, guide Madrid’s international policy in matters of language: on the one hand, the desire to maintain a position of leadership in the Spanishspeaking world, as custodian of castellano (‘Castilian’); on the other, a recognition of the growing economic value of ‘selling’ the Spanish language. To underpin these goals, Spain has evolved a ‘pan-Hispanic’ language policy, intended to touch Spanish speakers across the world.7 The principal guardians of the Spanish language (the castellano from Spain) are two powerful institutions funded and fostered by the Spanish government: the Real Academia de la Lengua Española (RAE)8 and the Instituto Cervantes (hereafter referred to as ‘the Cervantes’).9 The former is part of a network of language academies: the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (ASALE). ASALE functions throughout the Spanish-speaking Latin America, yet its main policy guidance derives from the RAE in Spain. Together, these two institutions – the
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RAE and the ASALE – hold regular Congresos de la lengua española, sponsored by the Spanish and, from time to time, by various Latin American governments, at different venues across the Spanish-speaking world, with the purpose of promoting and controlling discussion and debate about the Spanish language. Both the RAE and the Cervantes claim to support a wider concept of ‘Spanish’ than the one corresponding merely to the variety spoken in Spain. The RAE has recently launched various updated publications which explicitly intend to cater for a wider pan-Hispanic community (Paffey and Mar-Molinero 2009). In particular, the RAE has produced in 2005, in conjunction with the ASALE and the Cervantes, the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (DPD). The Cervantes for its part has pledged its commitment to serving the wider Spanish-speaking world and has published yearly Anuarios entitled El español en el mundo. More recently, it has produced the Enciclopedia del español en el mundo. Nonetheless, these institutions remain, I would argue, fundamentally representative of their national government and they resist any real weakening of their own powerful leadership in the Spanish-speaking world – in part by ensuring that they are seen as the authority on Spanish language, and in part by promoting a ‘neutral’ or anonymous variety of Spanish as the norm and standard, yet one which is overwhelmingly based on the variety spoken in central Spain. As Marcos Marín has written: Speaking in Spanish identifies the members of this [Spanish-speaking] community both to themselves and to those outside. It is typical that the sense of linguistic unity, which is very much in the minds of those who come from Spanish America, is constantly reinforced, and that Spanish today has an internal coherence which is indeed superior to that of other world languages. This is not something that has happened by chance; it is the result of a desire for linguistic unity which contemporary media must reinforce.10
The RAE reminds us that: The principal mission of the Academy […] is to ensure that the speakers of the Spanish language, as they subject it to constant adaptation according to their needs, do not break the language’s essential unity, which is maintained throughout the Spanish-speaking world.11
The RAE remains the leader and the hub of initiatives on Spanish language policy and of their direction. This includes the recent move to promote a ‘pan’-Hispanic language policy. Such a policy is shaped on the terms of the RAE – and hence of the Spanish government – and has the ultimate mission of maintaining ‘unity’ and guarding against the perceived threat of fragmentation that many diverse Spanishes represent. Notably, at the most recent Congreso de la lengua española, in Cartagena, Colombia, in 2007, no contributions were invited from the Spanishspeaking community in the US, although there were papers and participants from everywhere else in the Spanish-speaking world – including participants from non-Castilian language communities in Spain, or papers on “Spanish in Brazil.”
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As I will discuss later, for many of these guardians of ‘Standard’ Spanish and Spanish ‘unity,’ the US situation is seen as posing a particularly worrying threat, one that suggests a loss of authority and a loss of neutrality. The Cervantes, too, while in its cultural activities and publications emphasizes its commitment to Spanish across the world and to promoting a corresponding pluralism, in fact seeks to reinforce a single, standard variety of Spanish in its all-important language teaching courses, which are hosted in the Aula Virtual del Español (the AVE). This variety comes from Spain and is proposed as the only model for Spanish language learners. Its choice is described and justified as follows: The principal variety of the AVE, the one which is normative for the corpus presented to the students as a model of the language they should reproduce, is central peninsular Spanish. […] [C]entral peninsular Spanish was chosen because it is not in contact with other languages and has the fewest differentiating characteristics as regards the shared language. […] Its selection as the principal variety is based on the fact that central peninsular Spanish has sufficient demographic importance and status among the Spanish-speaking community through media and cultural expressions.12
Evident from the stated objectives of the RAE and of the Cervantes are the beliefs that a standard single variety of Spanish is a neutral medium of social participation and that language variation would be an impediment to this goal. Moreover, government departments, overseas embassies, language institutions, cultural bodies, and universities also contribute to the intricate, multilateral networks of agents for the effective management of language spread which make up the implicit and explicit language policies in Spain – albeit to a lesser degree than the RAE and the Cervantes. Private business interests in Spain have also woken up to the huge commercial opportunities offered by the Spanish-speaking markets and by the selling of the Spanish language. Business companies also work frequently with governmental agencies, often in order to make their presence visible on major websites, as happened in three recent and particularly highprofile examples, EducaRed, Campusred and Universia, which have the support of Telefónica and the Banco Santander Central Hispano (Marcos Marín 2006: 46). In general, commercial interests, which are often led from Spain, are seizing the opportunities to sell and commodify Latinidad, as an increasing world-wide demand for things perceived as ‘Latino’ make this a very lucrative market. Many top popular tourist locations are Spanish-speaking and ‘Latino’-packaged – for instance Spain itself, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and the Mexican ‘Mayan Riviera.’ Once again, it is often companies from Spain that are promoting and investing heavily in these locations. With this popularity goes the need and desire to have contact with the language and to learn it, at least for basic communicative and popular cultural purposes. As Marcos Marín comments: [Take together] Spanish television channels, video courses, radio, movies in Spanish, and the whole market of dubbing, publishing, newspapers, and magazines, all of the
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production of educational materials, and it will be apparent that the economic volume of Spanish in the United States is greater than that of any other Spanishspeaking country or any other country in the world.13
But he also continues with a very important cautionary comment stressing the interconnectivity of the spread and significance of Spanish across all of the Spanish-speaking world. The claim that nowadays Spanish would continue to exist in the world even if it were only for the United States is, although true, nevertheless dangerous, because, without the rest of the Hispanic world, Spanish in the United States would make little sense. It is the whole that matters. [My emphasis]14
Glocalization and Counter-Spread of Global Spanish As Norman Fairclough (2006) has argued, the processes of globalization not only produce top-down imposition of language spread policies, but also globalization from below. He suggests that this may be the case of “individuals or groups in specific places in many cases defending themselves against negative effects of processes of globalization or taking advantage of new possibilities offered by these processes” (ibid., p. 121). He continues: “Globalization makes available new resources for local action which include new discourses and practices and identities (including genres and styles) in which these discourses are internalized and operationalized” (ibid.). In the present section of the chapter I will explore how the US Latino situation makes a good example of this kind of globalization from below, originating from very local bases and creating new genres and styles, both of Spanish and of its related cultural products. Fairclough further argues: The impetus for globalization from below comes from situated action in particular places, but through the dialectic of place and space these places are ‘glocalized,’ so that resources for situated actors are less and less purely local and increasingly global. (ibid., p. 139)
We find clear examples of such ‘glocalization’ of Spanish with the impact of the US Latinos both within the Spanish-speaking world and beyond. The way in which the Latino communities in the US are marginalized and left on the periphery (geographically, socially, and politically), and yet they increasingly project their voices, especially culturally and linguistically, places them in “contact zones,” as these are defined and developed by Mary Louise Pratt (1987; 1992). Contact zones are, namely, “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt 1999: 6). To understand and analyse them, Pratt argues for a “linguistics of contact,” which “will be deeply interested in processes of appropriation,
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penetration or co-optation of one group’s language by another – and in how or whether to distinguish among those three kinds of contact” (Pratt 1987: 61). The emergence of a powerful external marketing of Spanish in response to world-wide demand for Latinidad and, in particular, to the perceived increasing importance of the US Latino market suggests that, with global Spanish, all three kinds of contact can be identified. Furthermore, I would argue that the three processes are not only on many occasions initiated by dominant Anglo groups from outside the Latino communities, but also that US Latinos have made the reverse contact from within their communities through forms of glocalization, taking their varieties of Spanish into English-speaking domains in the US and beyond.
Spanish in the US: Global versus Local Standards Spanish in the US clearly experiences the struggles and conflicts of existing in contested spaces – ‘contact zones’ – with the result that different language authorities converge. On the one hand, and indisputably, the authority of English is ever-present; but we have also seen how the spread of global Spanish is increasingly brought to the doors of the US Latino communities through media, advertising, commerce, and education by non-Latino agents such as big business or the Spanish government’s language policies. However, the Spanish of these communities is also heard and stimulated in part by the very weight of belonging to a global Spanish-speaking community, in part by the numbers of (constantly renewed) native speakers and their geographical concentrations. Far from making a wholesale shift to English, as happened typically with the languages of US immigrant communities in the past, US Latino communities have preserved Spanish as a significant feature, allowing it to develop particular characteristics in its newly established environments.15 Therefore US ‘Spanishes’ do not necessarily resemble the national varieties used in the places of origin of their speakers, nor are they much influenced by the elitist and distant corpus of Standard Spanish from Spain. On the contrary, they are authentic identity markers of their speakers. US ‘Spanishes’ conflict with the hegemony of English around them, but they also oppose the imposition of an anonymous, neutral Spanish from above and from outside, and they resist attempts from both sides to appropriate them. Apart from the inevitable pressure on the US Latino community to learn English and to shift to an increasing use of it, maintaining any particular, local form of US Spanish is also challenged by the onslaught of other Spanishes, which seek dominance and question the legitimacy and authenticity of any new local variety. This does not occur in discrete, ‘black and white,’ ringfenced ways. The contest takes place in contact zones, where the level of penetration between the languages (different Spanishes and English) or the level of appropriation will vary according to a range of typical sociolinguistic features: gender, generation, networks, social context, and so on. In consequence, a common feature in these US Spanish-speaking communities is, unsurprisingly, a range of types of code-switching and code-mixing. Some label
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this phenomenon as ‘Spanglish,’ intending to signal a totally new code or language. For others, this is a label which deliberately intends to suggest a negative and unacceptable phenomenon, namely a degenerative fragmentation of the cherished norm – as can be seen in the reaction of the ‘guardians’ of Standard Spanish mentioned earlier (see Del Valle 2006). For others still, ‘Spanglish’ is a crusading term, designed to claim autonomy and authority in separation from the imposition of a global anonymous Spanish; this attitude can be seen in the work and campaigning of Ilan Stavans (2003). However, a less ideologically oriented examination of the characteristics that have led to the coining of ‘Spanglish’ is more likely to arrive at the conclusion which Marta Fairclough draws when she argues that ‘Spanglish’ cannot be considered to have experienced “grammaticalization” – which she describes as taking place when languages are in contact and undergo a process whereby they become a new mixed code or language (rather than being merely two languages that alternate; Fairclough 2003: 186). She also suggests that ‘Spanglish’ is a “natural linguistic process that cannot be either imposed or halted” (my emphasis).16 Nonetheless, as Fairclough and many others have noted, varieties of US ‘Spanishes,’ or ‘Spanglish’ in this looser sense, are evident daily, in many walks of life. Fairclough has noted that, in the media in particular, there are examples both of neutral Standard Spanish and of many non-standard or regional varieties and, significantly, of code-switching and ‘Spanglish.’ It comes as no surprise to discover for example that, in the media’s use of Spanish, it is in news items that the language is at its most neutral and standard, while telenovelas, comic strips, women’s magazines and children’s programmes deploy code-switching or Spanglish to the highest degree. The linguistic hierarchy implied here is clear; nonetheless, the diffusion of non-standard US Spanish has a significant impact on an increasingly wide, even global audience. Crucially, it is to the younger generation that much of this kind of language is directed and designed to respond. As Fairclough says, the programmes that choose to incorporate code-switching are those designed for children and young people […] who speak the hybrid language Spanglish […] [and] follow pop culture and their idols, like Ricky Martin and his musical hit Livin’ la vida loca.17
While not everyone would agree that this is in fact a ‘language,’ the significant facts here are that its ownership goes to the younger generation and that the outlets for it are created through mass media. In the examples given above, however, we can still see that what promotes this use of Spanish is large international commercial interests (the Warner brothers, or the pop music industry). In the following section I will explore the very important role that music is currently playing in the spread of Spanish and I will argue that it, too, contests the ownership and authority of global Spanish. With music we have a particularly good example of the wider issues of cultural identity which the US Latino voices struggle to bring out from their local
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communities, and which grapple with the mainstream Anglo norms. This process is resulting in a growing international awareness of a different Spanish, authentic but increasingly authoritative. Latino music operates in the ‘contact zone’ of conflicting communities and cultures, in a postmodern world of globalization where cultural and linguistic authority are being contested.
Popular Music and Counter-Global Spanish Latin music18 of all sorts has of course been popular in the US and in other parts of the western world for a long time, but from at least the early ’90s it has seen a growing popularity, which has led to what may best be called now a ‘boom.’ As Morales writes, Afro-Cuban music thrived in New York, and, to a lesser extent, in Los Angeles, through the ’50s and ’60s, then retreated into the status of an extremely popular ethnic music in the ’70s and ’80s only to reemerge in the ’90s as a bona fide ‘American’ music. (2002: 156)
In all this music there are signs of an intricate linking, crossovers, and even hybridization of forms between the Latino roots (often from the specific countries of origin of various groups) and the Anglo mainstream – a process leading to what Morales describes as musical ‘Spanglish.’ The parallels with linguistic ‘Spanglish’ are strong. Many of the artists themselves show this hyphenated identity and ambivalent relationship with their audiences and sponsors, with the result that their music and its market are characterized by the typical processes of globalization – for instance disembedding from local roots and development of hybrid genres and forms. Much of the best known, mainstream Latin music of recent years which has hit the charts and sold by millions, not only in the US but world-wide – such as music by Ricky Martin, Jennifer López, Enrique Iglesias, Cristina Aguilera, Shakira, or Buena Vista Social Club – is financed and promoted by large international (nonLatino) companies and ‘sanitized’ to suit a non-Spanish/Latino audience. A large part of this music was originally recorded and performed in English, with just the occasional Spanish word thrown in. Interestingly, this tendency has changed; many of the artists named above have also, or mostly – or, in the case of Buena Vista Social Club, even exclusively – sung in Spanish. Many earlier successful recordings in English by Latino artists have been re-released using Spanish or a mixture of Spanish and English. J-Lo is now promoting herself as a ‘Latina’/ Spanish-speaking singer and actress. Shakira is strongly committed to singing and recording in Spanish. Cristina Aguilera has re-positioned herself as a ‘Latina’ (given her Ecuadorian connections) and is learning Spanish. Even Madonna has recently chosen to release some of her music in Spanish (there is for example her Spanish version of “Don’t cry for me Argentina”), clearly wishing to identify with this popular (and lucrative) market.
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Such popularity of the Latino music contributes to the spread of Spanish-based global culture and presents a further problem for language purists, as it rarely contains standard elite Spanish. Typically the lyrics will be colloquial, often specific to the variety spoken in the area, region, or country of the singer; they will bear marks of social class and age; and, increasingly, they will be identifiable with US ‘Spanishes,’ and therefore full of code-switching. And yet this, more than many other forms, is the form of Spanish most often heard and most likely to reach a vast global audience. It reflects the kind of language spoken among many of the music’s followers and fans. It is also the language that many non-Spanishspeaking fans will learn as they listen to the music and will certainly believe to be Spanish. Ironically, it could be agued that this language is instrumental in motivating many, particularly younger people across the world, to want to learn Spanish and to share in this cultural boom (which also includes dance, film, and fashion). Latin music is not limited to the US Latino communities; in fact its success has attracted artists from many ‘Latin’/Spanish-speaking countries, from Mexico in Central America, from the Caribbean Islands, from South America, and from Spain itself, prompting them to engage with it and to make records in the different styles. Nonetheless, the most likely prime audience available to such artists, at least in the first instance, is the US Latino market. As a result, rock en español, hip hop, tropical pop, and reggaetón19 receive further transnational influences, which bring the music and the lyrics to the Spanglish melting-pot.20
Conclusion As we have seen, Spanish is spread widely across the world and is spoken by many millions. The indications are that this pattern is designed to increase, through native speakers (among whom the birth rate is high) and through others’ enthusiasm to learn Spanish. Some of this attraction is the direct product of the kind of Spanish which is heard and marketed through contemporary popular Latino music, with its special varieties of the language. Thus the voice of localized Spanish is globalized, rubbing shoulders with the dominant, elitist standard promoted and protected by the Spanish government and its language agents through pan-Hispanic policies. It would nevertheless be hard to disagree with the claim, made by Moreno-Fernández and Otero (2008): 68), that Spanish is a linguistically hom*ogeneous language. […] The basis of the relative hom*ogeneity is found in the simplicity of its vocalic system (five elements); the range of its consonantal system, which is shared by the entire Hispanic world; the dimension of its shared lexical heritage (basic lexicon); and the elemental syntax community.
Whether the glocalized forms of Spanish being exported from the Latino communities of the US are beginning to challenge this hom*ogeneity and pose a genuine possibility of fragmentation remains to be seen.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Parts of the discussions elaborated here have appeared in different forms and for different purposes previously, particularly in Mar-Molinero 2004, 2006b, and 2008. I am grateful to Nikolas Coupland for the opportunity to bring these different arguments and contentions together as a whole by contributing to this current volume.
NOTES 1 For a fuller discussion of the relationship between the Castilian language and Spanish nation-state building, see Del Valle and Gabriel-Stheeman 2002; Lodares 2001; MarMolinero 2000; Siguan 1992. 2 Quechua and Nahuatl (the languages of the Inca and the Aztec empires respectively), served imperial purposes of their own and developed forms of writing. Indeed, because Quechua evolved as a lingua general, it began to be written in Roman script and taught in the universities. 3 We should also note that this immigration was not in fact the first one to bring Spanish speakers to the US; a small community of Spanish-speakers has lived in parts of the southwest from the times before this territory was US-governed – from the days of the Spanish Empire and of independent Mexico. 4 Moreno-Fernández and Otero (2008: 81) suggest there are around 23 million nonnative Spanish speakers “made up of speakers of Spanish as a second or foreign language and users of various bilingual mixes (7.8 milllion) and foreign residents in Spanish-speaking countries in the process of acquiring Spanish (1.8 million).” 5 See Marcos Marín 2006, ch. 2, for a full discussion of the level of use of Spanish on the internet, both in terms of content and in terms of metalanguage; of data on the volume of ownership over vehicles of electronic communication and on their use in the Spanish-speaking world; and of the impact such use may have on the Spanish language itself. 6 For a fuller discussion of these processes, see Mar-Molinero 2008. 7 For further discussions of this concept, see Del Valle 2007 and 2008, and Paffey and Mar-Molinero 2009. 8 For a fuller discussion of the role of the RAE in Spanish language policy, see Paffey 2007. 9 For a fuller discussion of this institite, see Mar-Molinero 2006a. 10 Hablar en español identifica a los miembros de esa comunidad, entre sí y ante el resto. Es característico que la conciencia de la unidad lingüística, muy viva en el pensamiento de los próceres de la América Hispánica, se haya visto continuamente reforzada y que el español tenga hoy una coherencia interna verdaderamente superior a la de otras lenguas de difusión mundial. No se trata de algo casual, sino del resultado de una voluntad de unidad lingüística, que los medios actuales deben reforzar (Marcos Marín 2006: 46–7). All translations in this chapter are mine.
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Clare Mar-Molinero La Academia […] tiene como misión principal velar porque los cambios que experimente la Lengua Española en su constante adaptación a las necesidades de sus hablantes no quiebren la esencial unidad que mantiene en todo el ámbito hispánico (Real Academia Española 1995, Articulo 1°). La variedad principal del AVE y norma del corpus que se propone al alumno como modelo de lengua para su reproducción es el español peninsular central. […] [S]e optó por el español peninsular central por no estar en interacción con otras lenguas y tener menos elementos diferenciadores con respecto a la lengua común. […] La selección de esta variedad como principal está fundamentada en que el español peninsular central tiene suficiente importancia demográfica y proyección hacia el conjunto de la comunidad hispanohablante a través de manifestaciones culturales y medios de comunicación. […] [E]l español general o estándar recoge los rasgos comunes y compartidos por sus variedades. Available at: http://ave.cervantes.es/trat.htm. … canales de televisión en español, cursos de video, de radio, películas en español, todo el mercado de doblaje, editoriales, periódicos y revistas, toda la producción educativa integral en español, y se verá que el volumen económico del español en los Estados Unidos es superior al de cualquier país hispanohablante o cualquier país del mundo (Marcos Marín 2006: 41). La afirmación de que el español subsistiría hoy en el mundo aunque sólo fuera por los Estados Unidos, aunque sea cierta, con todo, es peligrosa, porque sin el resto del mundo hispánico, el español no tendría sentido en los Estados Unidos tampoco. Es el conjunto el que importa (ibid.). I will not repeat here the well documented and well known debates about the intergenerational transmission of Spanish within the US, nor do I have space to explore the detailed studies of the different and sometimes convergent varieties of US Spanishes here. See e.g. Billis 2005; García et al. 2001; Niño-Murcia et al. 2008; Roca 2000; Zentella 2002. Si bien hay lenguas en contacto que sufren un proceso de gramaticalización y se convierten en un nuevo código mixto, es decir una nueva lengua (no dos idiomas que alternan) el Spanglish en Estados Unidos se encuentra lejos de consumar ese proceso de gramaticalización. El polémico Spanglish parece ser un fenómeno esporádico, cuyo uso resulta muy personal y sumamente difícil de cuantificar; es un proceso lingüístico natural que no se puede ni imponer ni detener (ibid.). Por lo general, son los programas dirigidos principalmente a los niños y a la juventud los que optan por incorporar el CC [cambio de código]. A (…) Son también ellos quienes hablan una lengua híbrida que es el Spanglish. Los jóvenes son los seguidores de la cultura pop y sus ídolos, como Ricky Martin y su éxito musical Livin’ la vida loca (Fairclough 2003: 199). For fuller discussions of the phenomenon of Latino music, and especially of its impact today, see for example Cepeda 2000; Morales 2002; Flores 2000; Glasser 1995; and Rivera 2003. It is claimed that reggaetón is a hybrid product of Jamaican reggae and dance halls which was taken to Panama by Jamaican workers helping to build the Panama Canal. However, it only began to gain popularity in the ’80s and, more significantly, in the ’90s, when it was introduced into Puerto Rico. There it was further mixed with bomba and plena and, finally, with US hip-hop. Importantly, reggaetón normally has raps in Spanish, often exclusively in Spanish. Initially the music was popular in Puerto Rico, and it was soon transported, too – to Colombia and the Dominican Republic, and, of course, to the US. Today it is a global commercial success, with tracks such as Daddy Yankee’s ‘gasolina,’ which are number one hits all over the world. Anglo and mainstream rap and rock artists have also joined the bandwagon.
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20 For a discussion of the impact of popular music – specifically hip hop – on global Englishes which offers both similarities and contrasts with the example of Spanish discussed here, see Pennycook 2007.
REFERENCES Alvar, M. (1986) Hombre, etnia, estado: Actitudes lingüísticas en Hispanoamérica. Madrid: Gredos. Anderson, B. (1992) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn [1983]. London and New York: Verso. Billis, G. D. (2005) Las comunidades lingüísticas y el mantenimiento del español en Estados Unidos. In L. Ortiz López and M. Lacorte (eds), Contactos y contextos lingüísticos: El español en Estados Unidos y en contacto con otras lenguas, 29–55. Madrid: Vervuert. Bugel, T. (2006) A Macro- and MicroSociolinguistic Study of Language Attitudes and Language Contact: MERCOSUR and the Teaching of Spanish in Brazil. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Carreira, M. (2002) The media, marketing, critical mass, and other mechanisms of linguistic maintenance. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 21(2): 37–54. Cepeda, M. E. (2000) “Mucho loco for Ricky Martin”: On the politics of chronology, crossover, and language within the Latin music ‘boom.’ Popular Music and Society 24(3): 55–71. Coupland, N. (2003) Introduction: Sociolinguistics and globalisation. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4): 465–73. Crystal, D. (2000) Language Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Del Valle, J. (2006) US Latinos, la hispanofonía and the language ideologies of high modernity. In C. Mar-Molinero and M. Stewart (eds), Globalization and
Language in the Spanish-Speaking World: Macro and Micro Perspectives, 27–47. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Del Valle, J. (2008) The pan-Hispanic community and the conceptual structure of linguistic nationalism. International Multilingual Research Journal 2(1–2): 5–27. Del Valle, J. (ed) (2007) La Lengua? Patria Común? Ideas e ideologías del español. Madrid: Vervuert–Iberoamericano. Del Valle, J., and Gabriel-Stheeman, L. (eds) (2002) The Battle over Spanish between 1800 and 2000: Language Ideologies and Hispanic Intellectuals. London and New York: Routledge. Del Valle, J., and Villa, L. (2006) Spanish in Brazil: Language policy, business and cultural propaganda. Language Policy 5: 369–92. Fairclough, N. (2003) El (denominado) Spanglish en Estados Unidos: Polémicas y realidades. Revista Internacional de Lingúística Iberoamericana 1(2): 185–284. Fairclough, N. (2006) Language and Globalization. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Flores, J. (2000) From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity. New York: Columbia University Press. Gal, S., and Woolard, K. A. (2001) Constructing languages and publics: Authority and representation. In S. Gal and K. A. Woolard (eds), Languages and Publics, 1–13. Manchester and Northampton, MA: St Jerome. García, O., Morín, J. L., and Rivera, K. (2001) How threatened is the Spanish of New York Puerto Ricans? In J. Fishman
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(ed), Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? 44–73. Clevedon and New York: Multilingual Matters. Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and SelfIdentity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity. Glasser, R. (1995) My Music is My Flag: Puerto Rican Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917–1940. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Gordon, R. G., Jr (ed.) (2005) Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 15th edn. Dallas, TX: SIL International. [Online version available at: http://www.ethnologue. com/; accessed on August 28, 2008.] Hamel, R. E. (2006) The development of language empires. In U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, K. J. Mattheier, and P. Trudgill (eds) (2006), Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, Vol. 3 [Handbucher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft 3], 2240–58. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Instituto Cervantes (2000) El español en el mundo: Anuario 2000. Madrid: Instituto Cervantes, Plaza Janés. Lodares, J. R. (2001) Gente de Cervantes: La historia humana del idioma español. Madrid: Taurus. Marcos Marín, F. (2006) Los retos del español. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana and Vervuert. Marcos Marín, F. (2000) La lengua espanola en internet. In Instituto Cervantes, 299–359. Mar-Molinero, C. (2000) The Politics of Language in the Spanish-Speaking World: From Colonisation to Globalisation. London and New York: Routledge. Mar-Molinero, C. (2004) Spanish as a world language: Language and identity in a global era. Spanish in Context 1(1): 3–20. Mar-Molinero, C. (2006a) The European linguistic legacy in a global era: Linguistic imperialism, Spanish and the
Instituto Cervantes. In C. Mar-Molinero and P. Stevenson (eds) (2006), Language and the Future of Europe: Ideology, Policies and Practice, 76–91. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mar-Molinero, C. (2006b) Forces of globalization in the Spanish-speaking world: Linguistic imperialism or grassroots adaptation? In C. MarMolinero and M. Stewart (eds), Globalization and Language in the SpanishSpeaking World: Macro and Micro Perspectives, 8–27. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mar-Molinero, C. (2008) Subverting Cervantes: Language authority in global Spanish. International Multilingual Research Journal 2(1–2): 27–48. Martin Mayorga, D. (2000) El español en la sociedad de la información. In Instituto Cervantes, 359–75. Morales, A. (2001) El español en Estados Unidos: Medios de comunicación y publicaciones. In Instituto Cervantes, Centro Virtual Cervantes, Anuario 2001. Available at: http://cvc.cervantes.es/ lengua/anuario/anuario_01/morales/ p03.htm (accessed on January 18, 2010). Morales, E. (2002) Living in Spanglish: The Search for Latino Identity in America. New York: St Martin’s Griffin. Morales-Gónzalez, D. and Torres, C. (eds) (1992) Educational Policy and Social Change: Experience from Latin America. Westport and London: Praeger. Moreno-Fernández, F., and Otero, J. (2007) Demografía de la lengua española. Madrid: Instituto Complutense de Estudios Internacionales. Moreno-Fernández, F., and Otero, J. (2008) The status and future of Spanish among the main international languages: Quantitative dimensions. International Multilingual Research Journal 2(1–2): 67–84. Mühlhäusler, P. (1996) Linguistic Ecology: Language Change and Linguistic Imperialism in the Pacific Region. London and New York: Routledge.
The Spread of Global Spanish Niño-Murcia, M., Godenzzi, J. C., and Rothman, J. (2008) Spanish as a world language: The interplay of globalized localization and localized globalization. International Multilingual Research Journal 2(1–2): 48–67. Paffey, D. (2007) Policing the Spanish language debate: Verbal hygiene and the Spanish Language Academy. Language Policy 6(3–4): 313–32. Paffey, D., and Mar-Molinero, C. (2009) Globalisation, linguistic norms and language authorities: Spain and the panhispanic language policy. In M. Lacorte and J. Leeman (eds), Español en Estados Unidos y otros contextos de contacto. Sociolingüística, ideología y pedagogía [Spanish in the United States and Other Contact Environments. Sociolinguistics, Ideology and Pedagogy], 159–73. Madrid: Iberoamericana/ Vervuert (Lengua y Sociedad en el Mundo Hispánico 21). Pennycook, A. (2007) Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Phillipson, R. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pratt, M. L. (1987) Linguistic utopias. In N. Fabb, D., Attridge, A., Durant, and C. McCabe (eds), The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature, 48–66. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge.
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Pratt, M. L. (1999) Arts of the contact zone. Paper delivered to the Modern Languages Association (MLA). Available at: http://web.nwe.ufl. edu/-stripp/2504/pratt.html/. Real Academia Española (1995) Estatutos y reglamento de la Real Academia Española. Madrid: Real Academia Española. Rivera, R. Z. (2003) New York Ricans: From the Hip Hop Zone. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Roca, A. (ed) (2000) Research into Spanish in the United States. Somerville: Cascadilla Press. Stavans, I. (2003) Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. New York: Harper Collins. Sánchez, A., and Dueñas, M. (2002) Language planning in the Spanishspeaking world. Current Issues in Language Planning 3(3): 280–305. Siguan, M. (1992) España plurilingüe. Barcelona: Ariel. Villa, D. (2000) Languages have armies and economies too: The presence of US Spanish in the Spanish-speaking world. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 19: 144–54. Woolard, K. A. (2007) La autoridad lingüística del español y las ideologías de la autenticidad y el anonimato. In Del Valle (ed.), 129–43. Zentella, A. C. (2002) Spanish in New York. In O. Garcia and J. A. Fishman (eds), Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City, 2nd edn, 167–203. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
8 New National Languages in Eastern Europe BRIGITTA BUSCH
Introduction In the transformation process that took place in central and eastern Europe in the 1990s, the taboo of the inviolability of state borders, which had dominated the political post-Wold War II order in Europe, was abandoned and large multilingual entities disintegrated into new states which considered themselves to be nation– states. This disintegration caused new majority–minority relationships and a new definition of status for languages spoken and written in the successor states of entities like the Yugoslav Federation, the Soviet Union, or the Czechoslovak Republic. Languages that had formerly been dominant state languages became minority languages with a low status in certain contexts (for instance Russian in the Baltic states), and former regional or minority languages were raised to the status of official languages (for instance Estonian in the Estonian Republic). Alongside the flag, the code of arms, the national anthem, and other insignia, the state language was considered a central element in the affirmation of ‘new’ national identities. The efforts of imposing a single, uniform language, both at the discursive and at the formal linguistic level, were closely connected with processes of delineation and assertion. The present chapter focusses on the example of former Yugoslavia in order to analyze processes related to the affirmation of new state and national languages in the context of globalization. The example is particularly interesting because there a common multi-variety standard, Serbocroatian, was split into different ‘new’ national languages. This process is characterized by conflicting forces at work. Whereas the political elites in the new nation–states referred to strategies and tools of language policy and language planning traditionally linked to nationbuilding, the process in fact took place in a situation where the role of the nation-state was already being challenged by a group of simultaneous factors – for instance the end of the bipolar world division; the acceleration of European integration, which was accompanied by an accentuation of the center–periphery divide; the dynamics of globalization, with its new configuration of spaces and
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scales; the deregulation of the economic sphere; the multi-directionality of migration and communication flows. While forces centripetal with reference to the nation-state aimed at constructing and imposing a unitary language, centrifugal tendencies were simultaneously working toward the decentering of these national languages.
Unification versus Division: Language Policies in the Space of Former Yugoslavia Linguistically, the southern Slav space is usually described as a language continuum which begins in the Alps in the north and stretches down right to the shores of the Black Sea. Segmentation into different languages was determined by extralinguistic factors and depended on the political centers of these languages (Neweklowsky 2000). Phases of divergence and convergence alternated according to various political parameters (Bugarski 2004). The number of officially recognized languages in the area varied. Until World War II there were three south Slavic languages: Slovenian, Serbocroatian, and Bulgarian. In 1944, when the Federal Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia was founded, the number rose to four. To regroup the varieties spoken in the area of this member republic into an official standard language and to name it ‘Macedonian’ was a compromise between the Serbian side, which claimed that the Macedonian dialects were Serbian, and the Bulgarian side, which insisted on them being Bulgarian (ibid.). The common norms for the standard Serbocroatian (or Croatoserbian) language had already been accepted by Serbs and Croats in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Vuk Karadžic´ (1787–1864), who was active during the rule of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, codified it. From the very beginning of its codification and unification by Vuk Karadžic´, this language was differentiated into two national varieties: an eastern one – Serbian; and a western one – Croatian. In the so-called ‘second Yugoslavia’ (1943–92) – the history of the which can be characterized as a sensitive, sometimes fragile equilibrium between centralistic and federalistic forces – an agreement was signed in 1954 concerning language use in the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrian, and Serbian member republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ). The agreement confirmed that Serbocroatian/Croatoserbian was the official language of these four republics and allowed for variation at the lexical, syntactic, and phonetical level; such variation can be exemplified by the parallel and equal use of ekavian and jekavian variants.1 Within the logic of imagining the space of south Slavic languages as a continuum, ekavian is usually attributed to the eastern parts (mainly Serbia), and jekavian to the western areas (Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro). The notion of a ‘language continuum’ stems from dialectology and opposes the idea of clear-cut language boundaries. It was arrived at through information gathered from carefully chosen informants (mostly elderly people in rural areas who have not left their original settlement). The results would map a network of ‘isoglosses’ (an isogloss being a line marking the limit of use of a specific linguistic
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feature), and these in turn indicate the territorial distribution of particular systemic features (phonological, morphological, lexical); hence isoglosses depict idioms as continua rather than as entities clearly demarcated by borders. Although linguistic theory asserts that borders can be drawn by means of denser bundles of isoglosses, it does not define the density or the degree of difference which may justify the concept of ‘language border.’ The linguistic border is not a clearly demarcated line, but rather a zone of transition (Melis 1996: 177). Chambers and Trudgill (1980) suggested defining the notion of ‘language border ’ within a continuum as the point where total communication breakdown occurs. This is, however, equally problematic, since inter-comprehension is a variable which also depends on language ideologies and on extralinguistic factors such as communication interests. That the ‘language continuum’ was a type of construct ideally designed to promote the socialist notion of unity in diversity became clear in the course of more recent Yugoslav history, when the ‘Croatian Spring’ movement of the 1970s stipulated the recognition of a separate Croatian language and, in support of this claim, emphasized the tradition of a distinct Croatian literary language which went back for centuries. In his historical account of the linguistic situation in the south Slavic space, Škiljan (2001: 96) draws attention to the fact that the notion of a dialect continuum gives only a partial representation of a more complex whole, because, in addition to dialects and synchronically with them, different other idioms were also present throughout history. Migration and social transformations like urbanization produced a local co-presence of different idioms across the south Slavic space. Different successive state administrations – such as those of the Ottoman Empire, of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, or of the kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes – imposed different official and administrative languages. A range of liturgical languages – Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Arabic, Hebrew, each one with its distinct writing system – entered the everyday life of the south Slavic space, which was already linguistically diverse; and so did various languages of literary production, with their systemic features – supradialectal or supra-vernacular. Each of these idioms was linked to a network of speakers, had a certain communicative efficiency, and was attached to different forms of symbolic power. As individuals participated in different networks, considerable mixing and overlapping occurred. The first indications of the disintegration of the Yugoslav state became apparent in the middle of the 1980s, when the centers of the member republics gained political importance over the central state. The communist party split into six ethno-national parties, which were eager to control the public sphere in their relative territories (Puhovski 2000: 42). Borders and their representation on maps became a central topic in political and media discourses (Dragicˇ evic´-Šešic´ 2001: 72). The division of the Yugoslav federation was argued for by emphasizing the existence of different kinds of boundaries: the political, the ethnical, the religious, and the linguistic. Considerable effort was made to construct these different kinds of boundaries as congruent and to reify them as ‘natural’ dividing lines, endowed both with an external dimension – that of separating between states – and with
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an internal dimension – that of excluding ‘others’ from the national consensus (Hodžic´ 2000: 24). At the same time the existence of a standard Serbocroatian language, common yet pluricentric (or multi-various), was questioned; it was postulated instead, in Croatia as well as in Serbia, that separate national languages had ‘always’ existed, and complaints were made that the right to use one’s own language had been denied by the Yugoslav state. The existence of language boundaries and of distinct national speech communities was argued for by pinning down possible linguistic differences between these national languages. In the socialist as well as in the western world the (nation–)state as a bounded unit has been taken for granted as a point of departure in research, and social sciences have largely operated on the assumption of an unproblematic division of space and of ‘naturally’ discontinuous territories (Newman and Paasi 1998: 195). Referring to ethnic conflicts, Bourdieu makes the point (1982: 138) that borders are not to be considered as a “natural” category, but as social and political constructs. He emphasizes that the drawing of borders is linked to constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing social groups. This process, he states, is in turn connected with a particular vision of the world, which is affirmed through demarcation from other world visions; and there is a dialectical relationship between these world visions and social practices. Pushing Bourdieu’s argument a little further, the drawing of borders also has a dimension of discursive constructedness, as discursive acts are socially constitutive in a variety of ways, being largely responsible for the production, the maintenance, and the transformation of social conditions. Discursive acts are socially constitutive in a variety of ways, being largely responsible for the production, the maintenance, and the transformation of social conditions. Or, as Wodak and colleagues put it, “through linguistic representation in various dialogic contexts, discursive practices may influence the formation of groups” (1999: 8). Thus it can be argued that language boundaries are not only social and political constructs, but also discursive ones (Busch and Kelly-Holmes 2004). Similarly, in linguistic theory the assumption of a speech community was for a long time taken for granted as a frame of departure for research. Such an assumption implies that the social, cultural, territorial entities in which people live can be differentiated according to linguistic criteria; it implies therefore some notion of boundedness. There have been different approaches toward a definition of speech community. One approach takes the characterizing feature to be “interaction by means of speech” (Bloomfield 1965: 42) or, more narrowly, direct and indirect communication via the common language. Fishman points out that the notion of speech community is not necessarily tied to the use of a single speech variety, but rather to “density of communication and/or symbolic integration […] regardless of the number of varieties employed” (Fishman 1971: 234). Other approaches are centerd around “shared social attitudes towards language” (Labov 1972: 120) or are based on the self-evaluation of speakers “who regard themselves as using the same language” (Halliday et al. 1964: 140). Authors point out that extralinguistic criteria enter such definitions. For instance Bloomfield concedes that his definition is only of relative value, since cleavages between adjoining
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speech forms can be primarily of political, not linguistic, nature. Furthermore, as the possibility of communication can range from zero to a delicate adjustment (Bloomfield 1965), Fishman mentions social and cultural criteria which enter into the notion of speech community and make the definition problematic (Fishman 1971). In sociolinguistics there is thus a large consensus that the notion of speech community is also – or even primarily – a social and political construct, no less than the notion of language border is. Bringing into play the concept of language ideologies, Woolard (1998: 18) states: “simply using language in particular ways is not what forms social groups, identities or distinctions (nor does the group relation automatically give rise to linguistic distinction); rather ideological interpretations of such uses of language always mediate these effects.” Following this line of thought, the ‘new’ national languages postulated in the process of disintegration of former Yugoslavia cannot be considered to be natural formations, but rather unitary languages in the Bakhtinian sense: A unitary language is not something given [dan] but is always in essence posited [zadan] – and at every moment of its life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. […] We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories, but rather language conceived as ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralization, which develop in vital connection with the process of sociopolitical and cultural centralization. (Bakhtin 1981: 270f.)
Whereas the periods when Serbocroatian was the dominant official language were characterized by pluri-centrism occurring under conditions of changing power relationships, in the post-Yugoslav phase former sub-centers become new poles of centralization working toward linguistic unification vis-à-vis the inside and toward a maximization of difference vis-à-vis the outside. Sociolinguistic approaches differentiate between ethnic languages, national languages, and official languages. In the International Handbook of Sociolinguistics, Barbour (2004: 288) reserves the phrase ‘national language’ for languages which, “whether they are official languages or not, have a clear role in national identity.” This link with constructions of national identity applies to the concept of ‘civic nation’ (Staatsnation), which follows the model of the French Revolution, as well as to the one of ‘ethnic nation’ (Kulturnation), which is to be taken in the Herderian sense. Whereas the notion of official language is necessarily bound up with that of sovereign power within a determined territory and with questions of legal status, the notion of national language is tied to discursive constructions of nationhood and people – demos or ethnos – and to symbolic functions attributed to language. The phrase ‘national language’ is also anchored in the Marxist historical approach to linguistic theory, since it refers to the literary language or to the standard variety which originated in the so-called ‘nationality language’ (jazýk naródnosti), and the latter encompassed all the varieties of a language in the
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pre-standardization phase. In this approach, national language is considered to be not only a means of communication but also a strong means of cohesion.
Constructing/Inventing the National Languages The dissolution, step by step, of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began in 1990 with the outbreak of armed conflicts and led to the formation of new states which declared their independence: Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Bosnia– Herzegovina (BiH), the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (later, Serbia and Montenegro), Montenegro, and Kosovo. For Bosnia and Herzegovina alone, it is estimated that up to 250,000 persons were killed during the war or are reported missing. Approximately half of the population was forced to leave their homes, either seeking refuge in another country or being displaced internally. While most of the newly founded states followed a more or less traditional nation-state model, the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995 left Bosnia–Herzegovina with a rather complex structure. The agreement divided the state into two areas, known as ‘Entities’ – the Federation of Bosnia–Herzegovina (FBiH) and the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska, RS) – both still placed under international administration. Whereas Serbocroatian/Croatoserbian had been the official language in the member republics of Croatia, of Bosnia–Herzegovina, of Serbia and of Montenegro during the period of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the newly founded nation– states declared Croatian (1990) and Serbian (1992) as the official languages of the respective states and Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian (1993) as the official languages of Bosnia–Herzegovina. The ground for the language division was prepared by nationally oriented elites. In Croatia, leading cultural institutions published in 1967 the so called “Declaration on the name and position of the Croatian literary language,” which called for the recognition of Croatian as a separate language. In Serbia, in a Memorandum of 1986, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts expressed concern about Serbian minorities in Croatia being denied the right to “use their own language and script” (Greenberg 2004: 11). In Croatia, a number of handbooks of linguistic advice for the general public had already appeared in the 1980s and were circulated among journalists and school teachers. Differential dictionaries were not an entirely new phenomenon in the area; what was new was their number, and the fact that they did not address a specialized circle (translators, linguists) but targeted a large general public through cheap pocket editions (Okuka 1998: 88). It is interesting to note that there are considerable differences between these dictionaries, not only in the number of lexical items they list, but also in general orientation: some represent an extreme attempt at purism, drawing as they do on lexical items which stem from the language reform introduced by the totalitarian NDH2 state during World War II, others are more “moderate” (ibid.; Langston 1999: 186f.). The aims of such dictionaries and handbooks, as authors formulated them, were “to bear witness to the existence of a separate Croat language” (Brodnjak 1991; compare Langston 1999: 187) and to assist people
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who were “striving to speak good Croatian in daily life to demonstrate their national consciousness also by means of language” (Pavuna 1993; compare Langston 1999: 180). Later on dictionaries and language advice handbooks started to appear in Bosnia in a similar way, emphasizing turcisms as inherently Bosnian and stressing differences in orthography between what is considered the Bosnian language and what is considered the Croatian and the Serbian language. In a Bosnian language handbook which also lists “correct” and “incorrect” words, language is coupled with national duty and loyalty, as expressed in the foreword: “we expect from you that you know your language and care for it” (Halilovic´ 1996: 7). Analyzing the new school dictionary of the Bosnian standard language, Duric´ (2003) estimates that 70 percent of the lexical items listed can be considered as turcisms. Script choice and spelling systems can mark proximity and distance between two speech communities, as they are constitutive parts of language regimes (Coulmas 2005: 7). In Serbia, ‘difference’ was mainly defined through promoting the Cyrillic script. The constitutional amendments adopted in 1989 still allowed the Latin script for ethnically mixed regions, but they prescribed that the official script in Serbia should be Cyrillic. Consequently Latin inscriptions disappeared from public spaces, form state controlled media, and from school manuals. The Latin was reduced, roughly, to the private domain. The defence of the Cyrillic was a topic not only in the media, but also in intellectual circles; for example, at the University of Belgrade a society for the protection of the Cyrillic was founded with the aim to “prevent the annihilation of the Cyrillic script as the first step in the annihilation of the Serbian national identity” (Jakšic´ 2001: 14). The Cyrillic script served as a symbol of proximity to the eastern and orthodox sphere, while the exclusive use of the Latin script and the rejection of turcisms were evoked in an attempt to legitimate Croatian efforts to locate the newly founded state as an integral part of western Europe, on the imaginary geographical map and as part of the centuries old European Schicksalsgemeinschaft – a community determined by historical destiny – based on Christian values (Skopljanac Brunner et al. 2000). Parts of the scientific community in linguistics and slavistics were not immune against the nationalistic virus, and they fueled the debate by supplying arguments that could be used to forge language ideologies. There was a tendency to reify languages or to use metaphors and personifications, by speaking for example of a “cultural and emotional individuality” of languages (Katicˇic´ 2001: 26). In this context, the ongoing debate whether a common language still exists or had ever existed is highly significant. Already in the 1970s, the Croatian linguist Brozovic´ coined the phrase “middle-south-Slavic diasystem,” which was defined as a common linguistic substance. Monnesland (2003) shows that, although the term ‘diasystem’ is not in use in international linguistic terminology, it became popular in the south Slavic space, in an attempt to avoid the term ‘language.’ There seemed to be a larger consensus that ‘something’ was common, but there was a problem of naming it. Some pleaded for ‘Serbo-Croat(ian)’ or ‘Croato-Serb(ian)’ (according to continuity), others for ‘middle-south-Slavonic (according to the geo-geographical position) or for Newshtokavian (according to the dialectal basis; Brboric´ 2003:
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36). A similar debate is taking place around the name of the standard language in use in Bosnia–Herzegovina. The question is whether it should be ‘Bosnian’ – a regional rather than ethnic name – or ‘Bosniac’ – which comes from the self-chosen ethnic name of Muslims, in accordance with the idea of deriving a lingonym from an ethnonym (Brboric´ 2003; Juric´-Kappel 2003).
Designing and Implementing Language Policies With the proclamation of independent states on the territory of former Yugoslavia, the postulated national languages gained official status as dominant state languages within the new territories. The implementation of corpus and acquisition planning could thus rely on the power of legislative and administrative structures. The war situation reinforced the position of the state authorities due to the possibility of imposing emergency regulations and of evoking a firm national consensus. The outbreak of the war interrupted the information and communication flows between the now separated states, and not only in the public domain but also in private sphere, as postal and telecommunication services were cut. This almost total isolation favored the constitution of separate national public spheres with their specific national discourses, in which newly coined terms and changing linguistic and signifying practices gradually become an obstacle to mutual understanding. In implementing language policies and corpus planning, authorities traditionally rely on three main pillars: administration, education, and the media. Administration and education are sectors in which prescriptive language use can be implemented immediately – at least in written communication, which can be easily monitored and controlled. In the case of national languages in the space of former Yugoslavia, numerous examples for such prescriptive implementation efforts can be cited. The following example shows that, even in authoritarian conditions, top-down measures in language planning can hardly be enforced when they do not gain acceptance. In 1993, when the war in Bosnia–Herzegovina was raging, the potentates in Republika Srpska – the Serbian part of BosniaHerzegovina – aligned their efforts at ‘language cleansing’ to the ‘motherland,’ not only by adopting the Cyrillic script but also by prescribing the ekavian variant for public use in 1993. In fact the authorities were well aware that the ekavian variant, which is widely spread in Serbia, was not used in the Serbian part of Bosnia in daily practice. The idea was that the “ekavica should be given back to the people to which it belongs […] in order to liberate it form foreign influences.”3 All media were compelled by law to employ exclusively the ekavica (that is, ekvian) and the Cyrillic script. This enforced ekavization ended in a fiasco, and in 1998 the Republica Srpska authorities had to revise their decision and to reallow the use of the jekavian variant in the public domain. In the state of Bosnia–Herzegovina there are now three emotionally loaded standards in use in the public domain. Although differences are being accentuated – especially at the lexical level and in the script – these differences do not exclude
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mutual comprehension. In the Serbian and Croatian part of Bosnia–Herzegovina, language policies endeavored to fortify the links with the respective ‘motherlands.’ In Republika Srpska, Serbian is prescribed as the medium of instruction. In the Federation, either Bosnian or Croatian is the official language of instruction, depending on the majority population in the respective area. While ‘minority’ children may in principle attend classes in the curriculum and language of the local majority, with all its nationalistic elements, in practice the politics of separation have led to two widespread phenomena in BiH education: the bussing of children to ‘mono-ethnic’ schools outside of their area of residence; and the ‘twoschools-under-one- roof ’ system. The role of the media in the discursive construction of national identities has been widely acknowledged, mainly with reference to the post-World War II media system in western Europe, which is based on a strong public-service broadcasting sector. National radio and television have been understood as playing a “dual role, serving as the political public sphere of the nation–state, and as the focus for national cultural identification. […] Broadcasting has been one of the key institutions through which listeners and viewers have come to imagine themselves as members of the national community” (Morley and Robins 1996: 10). Media have an impact on language policy at different levels: first of all, by using language as one of the semiotic modes in communicating, the media contribute to language change, since they provide linguistic resources; or, as Bourdieu suggests in speaking more generally about the literary field, they “produce means of production,” “word and thought associations,” and, moreover, all the forms of discourse that are seen as “authoritative” and can be cited as examples of “correct language use” (Bourdieu 1982: 35). Secondly, even if media independence has been one of the basic principles of the modern state, state authorities have had a certain possibility of control and intervention through media laws, licensing procedures, frequency and paper allocations, subsidies. National laws and regulations can also intervene at the level of language use. An example of this kind of intervention is the French legislation concerning the limitation of anglicisms in the public domain, which was copied by a number of eastern European countries in the 1990s (Busch 2004: 151). Furthermore, media production depends on available resources; it can be seen as a moment in a chain of communicative events which often revert to national news agency material and to press releases issued by official sources. Finally, the media have always been engaged in metalinguistic discourses. And metalinguistic discourses gain in importance especially at times when language change is being promoted by top-down methods and when the affirmation of language boundaries is at stake. They can contribute to creating an environment for policing language use and for the spread of language purism, linking ‘correct’ language use to national loyalty and stigmatizing ‘wrong’ language use as deviant. Several large international research projects dealt with the role of national broadcasting institutions and of state controlled print media during the war in the propagation of hate speech and in the development of ethnic stereotypes on the territory of former Yugoslavia (Skopljanac Brunner et al. 2000). Okuka (1998),
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Langston (1999), and Langston and Peti-Stantic´ (2003) cite numerous examples of metalinguistic discourses in the political sphere (speeches, declarations, party programs) and in the media – discourses in which strategies of differentiation, of emphasizing language boundaries between Serbian and Croatian and Bosnian, of evoking the idealized past of a ‘pure’ language are apparent. Nevertheless, oppositional voices were also present, especially through the independent media, in which sarcastic comments on language purism were frequent (Busch 2001: 158). In Serbia the mainstream media immediately abandoned the practice of using two alphabets and began to use exclusively the Cyrillic script, for print as well as for subtitling. In the publishing sector subsidies were directly tied to employing the Cyrillic script. An extreme example of an overtly prescriptive language policy aiming at cementing differences via the media was the Croatian Radio and Television (HRTV) in the early1990s. The HRTV produced a handbook that listed desired Croatian and undesired ‘foreign’ words; journalists who opposed it were sacked under the pretext of being unable to speak ‘correct’ Croatian. Language use in war reporting was strictly prescribed; for instance the Jugoslovenska narodna armija (‘the Yugoslav national army,’ JNA) had to be called the “Serbian communist occupator” (Thompson 1999: 159). Temporarily the state TV followed a policy that attempted to make the symbolic boundaries – which had been discursively constructed between the Croatian and the Serbian language – coincide with communication boundaries. Speakers of Serbian were subtitled into Croatian in TV and in films (Škiljan 2002: 278). Language ideology approaches draw attention to the fact that the process of demarcating one language from another – the external demarcation – has a counterpart in the drawing of internal boundaries, in the definition of who the legitimate speakers are (Gal and Woolard 2001). In other words the process of external differentiation is linked to a process of internal hom*ogenization, which results in exclusions. From the perspective of the individual speaker, this means that his/ her linguistic practices function as markers of belonging to a defined group. At all the different levels of linguistic practice – the vocabulary, the phonological system, the syntax, the script, or the orthography – certain characteristics can become shibboleths. Before the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation it was possible to use the allegedly eastern ekavian and the allegedly western jekavian variants, as well as the Cyrillic or the Latin script, throughout the whole Serbocroatian space. Especially in urban environments, one person could even use, say, jekavian in speaking and ekavian in writing. In population censuses, citizens could choose to declare their affiliation to a specific ethnicity (the Serbian, the Croatian, the Roma, the Muslim …) or opt for a Yugoslav identity. In the national hubris of the first years after the proclamation of the new states, it was impossible to avoid the ascription of an unambiguous and exclusive identity on the basis of national belonging. One of the well known markers for ascriptions of ethnic affiliation was the usage of the two variants of the word ‘thousand,’ which had so far functioned as synonyms: whereas tisuc´ a became a marker of belonging to Croatian, that is, the western side, hiljada became a marker of Serbian, on the eastern side. But
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neither is inherently characteristic for one side or the other. Such linguistic practices, which function as a kind of shibboleth, are in fact pragmatic phenomena, patterns of language use that are interpreted by speakers and listeners through ideologies about pragmatics (Gal 2006: 17). In political and media discourses, an environment was created that propagated linguistic purism and linguistic loyalty toward the nation. Against the ongoing processes of differentiation due to the heteroglossic nature of linguistic practice, the unitary language – in this case, the national language – needs to be policed in order to be kept distinct and ‘pure.’ Although ‘wrong’ language usage could entail severe consequences such as loss of employment, there were also strategies for undermining purism and policing – for instance reverting to vernaculars or local dialects, or naming one’s own language ‘naš jezik’ (‘our language’). To summarize: in their concepts, the new states followed the ‘old’ models of (nation–)state building – models based on a (discursively) constructed unity between territory, people, and language. An important factor in this process was the construction of language boundaries and of the language community by means of ideologies, myths, and metalinguistic discourses which emphasize differences. In this national paradigm the standard language and its ‘purity’ were considered to be means of creating a sense of belonging and of proving loyalty. Also, in their choice of instruments for the implementation of national language policies, the new nation–states drew on traditional repertoires such as the status definition in the legal system, or on the language used in administration, in education, and in the media. These factors contributed to a centripetal movement, which anchored the new national languages or re-emphasized established state languages. The national language is, in the Bakhtinian sense, “ideologically saturated,” “a world view,” “a unitary language” giving “expression to forces working towards concrete verbal and ideological unification and centralisation” (Bakhtin 1981: 74).
Challenging the National Languages Whereas centralizing forces, firmly rooted in the paradigm of the monolingual nation–state, viewed language as hom*ogenous, counter-moves acting toward the affirmation of heteroglossia were present right from the beginning in the process of affirmation of national sovereignty. Three types of discourse linked to particular imaginations of society, as Heller and Labrie (2003: 16) described them in Canada’s case, can be discerned in different phases of history, but are also simultaneously present today: the traditionalist (traditionaliste), the modernizing (modernisant) and the globalizing (mondialisant). The traditionalist discourse propagated by elites is based on the construction of belonging to a socially hom*ogeneous group, which is the legitimate bearer of religious and moral values expressed through a linguistic conservatism and purism. The modernizing discourse is oriented toward the modern nation–state, in which language severs as a factor of national unity and cohesion. The emergent globalizing discourse considers the
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economy as a key factor in the valorization of linguistic practices and promotes multilingualism, cultural and linguistic diversity, and the commercialization of cultural and linguistic resources. In the south Slavic space these three strands of discourse can be identified as co-present; thereby the globalizing is strongly oriented toward Europe and expressed as affiliation to the European economic and cultural space (Busch 2001). hom*ogenization in language use is much more difficult to implement today, under the conditions of globalization, where communication and media flows have become more diverse and multi-directional than in previous times, when communication was organized around a national public sphere, as described by Habermas (1990). In social science globalization is interpreted as changes in the scales on which social activities take place (Jessop 2002). The nation-state looses its central position as a reference point in the economic and political order. Not only global, but also regional economic blocks, cross-border regions, regions within states, cities, and so on gain in importance in the actual process of the re-scaling of particular spatial entities. The notion of interlocked scales and of rescaling has been introduced into linguistics, for instance by Fairclough (2006) in reference to orders of discourse, or by Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck (2005). These different, socially constructed spaces develop their own language regimes, characterized by sets of norms and expectations about communicative interactions, by orders of indexicality. The central position of states in the formulation and implementation of language policy and language planning is being challenged by the different levels of scale, and the number of potential actors in the field is thus being multiplied. At a supranational level, European and international institutions have increasingly integrated language policy in their agenda – the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) mainly with regard to minority languages; the Council of Europe (CoE) principally in connection with education policies and human rights; and most recently the European Union in relation to the comprehensive language plan that also encompasses the languages of migration and of the Union’s trade partners. The two main legal instruments guaranteeing linguistic rights, the Council of Europe’s Charter for Regional and Minority Languages and the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, were finalized precisely with a view to counteracting nationalism in the transition process across eastern Europe. Signing both documents was seen as a precondition for entry into the Council of Europe and obliged the candidate countries to recognize in their legislation that they were not constituted in a purely monolingual and mono-national way. The introduction of market economy accelerated a power shift from state institutions to the private sector. In the media and communication sector, this reconfiguration became obvious particularly fast. Corporate mergers, strategic alliances, and the convergence of the media and of communication and entertainment industries changed ownership structures and contributed to altering information and communication flows and to intensifying the spread of globalized cultural products in the countries of eastern Europe. In parallel, a globalized terminology
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is integrated into institutional and individual linguistic practices, as Fairclough (2006) demonstrates in the case of Romania, and becomes a marker of belonging to a global elite. Other factors in the decentering of unitary language are the products provided by globalized language learning industries, software enterprises, communication and media industries. What software is available in what languages and scripts, and to what linguistic norms the most widely spread text processing programs comply, is mainly driven by market interests. In parallel with the efforts toward linguistic demarcation made by the national media in the successor states of former Yugoslavia, there emerge developments that re-group the Serbocroatian speaking realm into one. Such developments are not motivated by nostalgia as much as by market considerations which aim at maximizing audiences, at creating a public for advertising, and at avoiding language marked as a particular national standard. Commercial interests guide for instance the policy of the Novi Sad-based (Serbian) yellow press magazine Svet plus, a magazine featuring mainly celebrity gossip, which claims to be the diaspora magazine with the highest circulation rate between Athens and Stockholm. A similar strategy of maximizing audiences by addressing the whole south Slavic space can be observed in the case of the Belgrad-based company Pink TV. Pink TV, sometimes referred to as ‘Balkan MTV,’ could profit from the large Serbian home market and build a media empire that reaches now even beyond former Yugoslavia. Pink TV advertises specific cultural practices and values; it promotes new trends in fashion and music; it reaches audiences from Slovenia to Bulgaria, also covering Bosnia–Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Serbia; and it is highly popular in the diaspora. Emphasis on the local can also contribute to undermining aspirations of imposing a unitary language. Using regional vernaculars or local dialects is no longer necessarily indexical of a traditionalist orientation, but it can represent a rejection of national categorizations, especially when communication flows develop a trans-local dimension that transgresses state borders. This change in connotation is linked to the fact that language has become a tradeable commodity – at the local level, in the form of a commercialization of authenticity (Heller 2003). Similarly, regional multilingualism can become an asset in opening spaces beyond the national. Media in the successor states of the former Yugoslavia have become both more local – a process which includes the use of local varieties on the Slavic continuum – and more trans-local. In the sector of civic media, this strategy of addressing and linking audiences within the entire (virtual) linguistic space as a heterogeneous trans-local public is understood as a possibility of ‘dis-enclaving’ the space culturally. Linguistically this is achieved through the direct representation of different voices and discourses by means of their own modes of expression. The rise of multilingual formats in the media was a response to processes of ethnicization. Such formats make visible the co-presence of different languages, which also has a transformative effect on the discourse itself. In the multilingual area of Vojvodina as well as in the regions around Skopje or Istria, several multilingual media initiatives have been active at least for some time (Karlsreiter 2003). In the multilingual radio programs different languages
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alternate, often within one time slot; speakers use the language they prefer to speak in; and the moderators take care that the program can be followed by listeners with different language backgrounds. In multilingual areas like the Vojvodina or Skopje it can be assumed that part of the population has at least some understanding of more than one language. Bilingual and multilingual media products address simultaneously audiences which are usually separated; journalists have to keep in mind the interests and needs of both – the positions which are being negotiated have to be acceptable to both. In the past years there has been a growing number of media which address the otherwise fragmented audiences across the Balkan area, in a trans-local move. One of these is Cross Radio, a project which promotes program exchange both between different radio stations in the space of the former Yugoslavia and between stations that produce programs in urban centers with a significant diaspora. Cross Radio focuses on culture, with the idea of promoting a transnational – and thus ‘deprovincialized’ – cultural space. Consequently different codes and registers can be heard in the programs, which are re-broadcast by stations from Pristina, via Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana, to Zurich, and are also directly accessible to a wider public through the internet. In the print sector there is a range of cultural magazines and periodical publications which run along similar lines. Finally, communication flows have become more multi-directional, in the public as well as in the private domain. Satellite technologies and the internet render media products more easily and more rapidly accessible to de-territorialized audiences on a global scale. Mobile phones, computer-mediated communication and increased travel facilities enhance interpersonal communication even across long distances. This reconfiguration of communication flows contributes to the emergence of new spaces of identity beyond the national one (Morley and Robins 1996) and allows people to engage in transidiomatic practices (Jacquemet 2005). In migration research, a diaspora is no longer primarily seen as a hom*ogenous group depending on a motherland, but as a socially differentiated nexus of persons living in a variety of complex lifeworlds (Lebenswelten). In linguistics, research was mainly framed in terms of language loss and language change, whereas since the 1990s there has been a distinct focus on questions of lingocultural hybridity, language crossing, and linguistic liminality (Rampton 1995).
National Languages and Language Change The centripetal forces working toward the unitary national language and the centrifugal forces tending toward heteroglossia, reinforced by the processes of glocalization, represent the framework in which change in linguistic practices takes place. There are only a very few empirical studies dedicated to the change of language use in the space of former Yugoslavia, and it is difficult to say how much the effort to promote unitary languages has actually brought about changes in daily language practices. Langston (1999) presents a study based on a corpus which he obtained from text samples taken in 1996/97 from different Croatian
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media, which he compares to samples taken in 1985. He concludes: “Noticeable changes in lexical usage in the Croatian media have indeed taken place since the break-up of the Yugoslav state, but on whole they are relatively minor. […] Differences may also be observed in the usage of the state-controlled or more nationalistic media versus that of the independent press” (Langston 1999: 188f.). Jahn (1999: 353), investigating language attitudes in the Istrian peninsula, observed considerable differences according to political attitudes, and generally concluded that “people feel linguistically insecure” and tend to avoid the standard variety whenever possible. From their questionnaire-based survey, Langston and PetiStantic´ (2003) draw the preliminary conclusion that the survey indicates “a significant level of resistance towards change” and that “Croatian language reform is still a work in progress, and it will be some time before we see what will become part of the standard language and what will be rejected” (p. 56). Most of the work on language change focuses, however, on the lexicon, which reacts in a seismographic and intense way because of changing practices and needs of naming. Kunzmann-Müller (2003) compares language change at the lexical level in different south Slavic languages, on the basis of corpuses derived from media texts. She concludes that changes in the language of the media are more noticeable in Bulgaria than in the space of former Yugoslavia; and she attributes this state of things to the fact that, in the latter, the media enjoyed a higher degree of freedom in the times of socialism. In terms of linguistic practices, this means that an ideologically less loaded media language was closer to the spoken language. Concerning changes in grammar, Kunzmann-Müller concludes that elements from non-standard varieties brought into the ‘new’ national language are more likely to find acceptance than historical forms reactivated in topdown corpus planning. Gustavsson (2003) compares three grammars actually in use in Bosnia–Herzegovina, in Croatia, and in Serbia. According to his summary, the most noticeable differences can be found in grammatical terminology, in the choice of script, and in the use of the old Slavonic phoneme jat (which separates between ekavian and jekavian); as far as the description of the linguistic system is concerned, differences are minor. Generally speaking, the topic of language change is one of the research foci in Slavistics today. Zybatow (1995) criticizes research on this topic on the grounds that is mainly based on the analysis of lexical changes and does not pay heed to changes in connotations, in communication practices, in text genres and their discursive location, or in meta-linguistic attitudes. He pleads for a pragmatics-based concept of analyzing linguistic change. What Sue Wright (2004: 53), referring to Bakhtin, claims for standard languages in general applies well to the new national languages of eastern Europe: “Standardisation is in part a fiction. We have imagined languages in the same way that we have imagined communities. […] There is a perpetual tension as centripetal forces of convergence compete with centrifugal forces of differentiation.” The work on language change, still scarce as it is, suggests that imposing national languages was successful to some extent, at a symbolic level, which is visible for instance in practices of naming and in the use of highly marked lexical items. Linguistic practice shows that the heteroglossia of daily life works effectively
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toward decentering any kind of unitary language, even in ideologically saturated contexts of policing. Under the condition of globalization, the process of decentering possibly gains in momentum, as daily life is influenced by processes of rescaling that foreground the supranational, subnational, and transnational levels with their corresponding linguistic practices. One could summarize the recent developments in eastern Europe by subsuming them to a struggle between different concepts: at the level of national policies, the traditional concept of the connection between language and territory – in which space is conceived as bounded, as a static ‘container ’ for social relations, for communication, and for language practices – has been prevailing, while economic players and the lifeworlds reflect the globalized practices. From this perspective, language is linked to another notion of space and place: space defined by common social and linguistic practices, and place defined as an intersection of different practices and different networks in which small-scale language regimes develop.
NOTES 1
The distinction between ‘ekavian’ and ‘jekavian’ relates to the notation of the old Slavonic sound ‘jat,’ which can be reproduced either as ‘e’ or as ‘je’ – as e.g. in the variants of the word for ‘river ’: rijeka (jekavian) and reka (ekavian). 2 The fascist NDH state (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska/Independent Croatian State) introduced a language reform which aimed at marking the difference between a Serbian and a Croatian language. In the course of this reform an etymological orthography was propagated and internationalisms were labelled ‘serbisms.’ 3 Alternativna informativna mreža (AIM), September 13, 1993. For the AIM archive see: http://www.aimpress.ch/. This example is also discussed in Bugarski 1995.
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Brodnjak, V. (1991) Razlikovni rjecˇnik srpskog I hrvatskog jezika. Zagreb: Hrvatska sveucˇ ilišna naklada. Bugarski, R. (1995) Jezik od mira do rata. Beograd: Slovograph. Bugarski, R. (2004) Language and boundaries in the Yugoslav context. In B. Busch and H. Kelly-Holmes (eds), Language, Discourse and Borders, 21–38. Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto, and Sydney: Multilingual Matters. Busch, B. (2001) Grenzvermessungen: Sprachen und Medien in Zentral-, Südost- und Osteuropa. In B. Busch, B. Hipfl, and K. Robins (eds), Bewegte Identitäten – Medien in transkulturellen Kontexten, 145–73. Klagenfurt: Drava. Busch, B. (2004) Sprachen im Disput. Medien und Öffentlichkeit in multilingualen Gesellschaften, Klagenfurt: Drava. Busch, B., and Kelly-Holmes, H. (eds) (2004) Language, Discourse and Borders in the Yugoslav Successor States. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters (Current Issues in Language and Society series). Chambers, J. K., and Trudgill, P. (1980) Dialectology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coulmas, F. (2005) Changing language regimes in globalizing environments. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 175(6): 3–15. Dragicˇ evic´-Šešic´, M. (2001) Borders and maps in contemporary Yugoslav art. In N. Švob-Ðokic´ (ed.), Redefining Cultural Identities, 71–87. Zagreb: Institute for International Relations. Duric´, R. (2003) Školski Rjecˇ nik bosanskog jezika Dž. Jahic´a i standardizacija leksike u bosanskom jeziku na opc´ekomunikacijskoj razini. Wiener Slawistischer Almanach (special issue) 57: 65–85. Fairclough, N. (2006) Language and Globalization. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Fishman, J. (1971) Sociolinguistics. A Brief Introduction. Rowley, MA: Newbury.
Gal, S. (2006) Migration, minorities and multilingualism: Language ideologies in Europe. In C. Mar-Molinero and P. Stevenson (eds), Language Ideologies, Policies and Practices: Language and the Future of Europe, 13–28. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gal, S. (2001) Linguistic theories and national images in nineteenth-century Hungary. In Gal and Woolard (eds), 30–46. Gal, S., and Woolard, K. (2001) Constructing languages and publics. Authority and representation. In Gal and Woolard (eds), 1–13. Gal, S., and Woolard, K. (eds) (2001) Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing. Greenberg, R. D. (2004) Language and Identity in the Balkans. Serbo-Croatian and its Disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gustavsson, S. (2003) O trima “srednjejužnoslavenskim” gramatikama. Wiener Slawistischer Almanach (special issue) 57: 87–95. Habermas, J. (1990) Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit [1962]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Halilovic´, S. (1996) Gnijezdo lijepih rijec´i: pravilno – Nepravilno u bosanskome jeziku. Sarajevo: Baština. Halliday, M. A. K., McIntosh, A., and Strevens, P. (1964) The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching. London: Longman. Heller, M. (2003) Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7: 473–92. Heller, M., and Labrie, N. (2003) Langage, pouvoir et identité: Une étude de cas, une approche théorique, une méthodologie. In M. Heller and N. Labrie (eds), Discours et identité. La Francité canadienne entre modernité et mondialisation, 9–41. Cortil-Wodon: Editions Modulaires Euopénnes (EME).
New National Languages in Eastern Europe Hodžic´, A. (2000) Preoccupation with the ‘other.’ In N. S. Brunner, S. Gredelj, A. Hodžic´, and B. Krištofic´ (eds), Media and War, 19–41. Belgrad: Argument. Jacquemet, M. (2005) Transidiomatic practices: Language and power in the age of globalization. Language and Communication 25: 257–77. Jahn, J.-E. (1999) New Croatian language planning and its consequences for language attitude and linguistic behavior – The Istrian case. Language and Communication 19: 329–54. Jakšic´, B. (2001) The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the division of language. Unpublished paper presented at the International Conference “Language– Society–History: The Balkans,” Thessaloniki, 11–12 November 2001. Jessop, B. (2002) The Furtue of the Capitalist State. Cambridge: Polity. Juric´-Kappel, J. (2003) Bosanki ili bošnjacˇ ki? Wiener Slawistischer Almanach (special issue) 57: 95–101. Karlsreiter, A. (2003) Media in Multilingual Societies: Freedom and Responsibility, Wien: Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media (OSCE). Katicˇ ic´, R. (2001) Croatian linguistic loyalty. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 147: 17–29. Kunzmann-Müller, B. (2003) Syntaktischer Wandel in den südslawischen Sprachen. Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 52: 129–44. Labov, W. (1972) Sociolinguistic Patterns. Oxford: Blackwell. Langston, K. (1999) Linguistic cleansing: Language purism in Croatia after the Yugoslav break-up. International Politics 36: 179–201. Langston, K., and Peti-Stantic´, A. (2003) Attitudes towards linguistic purism in Croatia: Evaluating efforts at language reform. In M. Dedaic and D. N. Nelson (eds), At War with Words, 247–83. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Melis, L. (1996) Frontière linguistique. In H. Goebl, P. H. Nelde, Z. Stary, and W.
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Wölk (eds), Kontaktlinguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung, Vol. 1/2, 175–180. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Monnesland, S. (2003) O pojmu “dijasistem.” Wiener slawistischer Almanach (special issue) 57: 153–61. Morley, D., and Robins, K. (1996) Spaces of Identity. Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London and New York: Routledge. Neweklowsky, G. (2000) Soziolinguistische Forschung zum Serbokroatischen und seinen Nachfolgesprachen. In Sociolinguistica 14: 192–6. Neweklowsky, G. (2006) Die südlsavische Region. In U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, and K. J. Mattheier (eds), Soziolinguistik. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Wissenschaft von Sprache und Gesellschaft, Vol. 3, 1824–36. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Newman, D., and Paasi, A. (1998) Fences and neighbours in the postmodern world: Boundary narratives in political geography. Progress in Human Geography 22: 186–207. Okuka, M. (1998) Eine Sprache, viele Erben. Sprachenpolitik als Nationalisierungsinstrument in ExJugoslawien. Klagenfurt: Wieser. Pavuna, S. (1993) Govorimo li ispravno hrvatski? Mali razlikovni rjecˇ nik. Zagreb: Integra. Puhovski, Ž. (2000) Hate silence. In Brunner, Gredelj, Hodžic´, and Krištofic´ (eds), 41–53. Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman. Škiljan, D. (2001) Languages with(out) frontiers. In N. Švob-Ðokic´ (ed.), Redefining Cultural Identities, 87–101. Zagreb: Institute for International Relations. Škiljan, D. (2002) Govor nacije. Jezik, nacija, Hrvati. Zagreb: Golden Marketing. Skopljanac Brunner, N., Gredelj, S., Hodižic´, A., and Krištofic´, B. (2000)
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Media and War. Zagreb and Belgrade: Centre for Transition and Civil Society Research, Agency Argument. Thompson, M. (1999) Forging the War. The Media in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. London: University of Luton Press. Wodak, R., de Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., Liebhart, K., Hofstätter, K., and Kargl, M. (1998) Zur diskursiven Konstruktion nationaler Identität. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Woolard, K. (1998) Introduction. Language ideology as a field of inquiry. In B. Schieffelin, K. Woolard, and P. Kroskrity (eds), Language Ideologies. Practice and Theory, 3–51. New York: Oxford University Press. Wright, S. (2004) Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalization. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Zybatow, L. (1995) Russisch im Wandel. Die russische Sprache seit der Perestrojka. Berlin: Harrasowitz Verlag.
Part II Global Discourse in Key Domains and Genres
9
Localizing the Global on the Participatory Web JANNIS ANDROUTSOPOULOS
Introduction Given the importance of digital communications technologies as backbone of the network society (Castells 2000), the WorldWideWeb no doubt constitutes one of the “key social domains for language use in a globalizing world” (Coupland 2003: 466). Yet research on language and globalization has not systematically addressed the web, just as the emerging scholarship on computer-mediated discourse has paid little attention to the relationship of globalization and language online. Situating itself at the interface of these two fields, the present chapter draws attention to some linguistic practices that can be observed on the contemporary spaces of computer-mediated discourse that are commonly labelled ‘web 2.0.’1 The main objects of analysis are ‘vernacular spectacles’ – that is, multimedia content that is produced outside media institutions and uploaded, displayed, and discussed on media-sharing websites such as YouTube. Focusing on spectacles that rely on, and modify, textual material from popular culture, I argue that spectacles provide new opportunities to engage with global media flows from a local perspective. This engagement is both receptive and productive, in other words it is not limited to viewing and commenting online but extends to producing spectacles and displaying them to web audiences. I shall argue that spectacles create novel opportunities for the public staging of vernacular speech in the digital age. Yet vernacular spectacles are not made of language alone. Their meaning emerges through language and other semiotic modes, in a tension between appropriated material and its local recontextualization. The framework and findings presented in this chapter are part of a broader engagement with the study of computer-mediated discourse (CMD). My approach advocates a combination of sociolinguistic and discourse analysis with ethnographic procedures, and it encompasses both screen and user-based data – that is, systematic observation of online discourse activities as well as direct contact with internet users (Androutsopoulos 2008). Empirically, the first part of this chapter draws on extended observation of web 2.0 environments, and the second
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part focuses on two videos and their online comments. Such limitation to online data is the norm in CMD research (Herring 2004), but it is not uncontested from a broader methodological perspective. Jones (2004) argues that understanding the context of computer-mediated communication requires shifting attention from the screen to the social activities in which CMD is embedded. At the crossroads of sociolinguistics and popular culture, Pennycook (2007) advocates complementing textual analysis by the study of discourse production and reception practices. While I in principle endorse such a combination, I also make a case for the legitimacy of ‘plain’ textual analysis combined with ethnographic observation of online activities. While providing little insight into social life in front of the screen, a screen-based approach focuses on the contexts that emerge through ongoing online activities and layers of digital text. I begin this chapter by situating my approach in language and globalization research and by introducing concepts that are central to my analysis. The following two sections outline some concepts and distinctions I find useful for the language-focused study of web 2.0 environments.2 I proceed in three steps: First I outline characteristics of contemporary web communication that I consider consequential for language and discourse online, namely participation and convergence. I then identify four dimensions of language in contemporary web environments: organization, self-presentation, interaction, and spectacle. Subsequently I focus on three concepts for the analysis of discourse in these environments: multimodality, intertextuality, and heteroglossia. These form a background against which to examine the dialogue and the tension between globally available texts and their local recontextualizations. Two Bavarian versions of US American popular culture texts are then analyzed in order to illustrate how global content is locally treated in media productions ‘from below,’ and what role dialect has to play in this process.
Localization, Recontextualization, and Vernacularity Scholars across disciplines have argued that globalization is not a unidirectional process by which linguistic or cultural elements are diffused and uncritically adopted (Crane 2002; Fairclough 2006: 32–6; Machin and van Leeuwen 2007, ch. 2; Pathania-Jain 2008: 132–42). An equally important aspect is how the global is localized, that is, appropriated and productively used as a medium of local expression, providing a resource for local negotiations of identities and relationships. From a sociolinguistic angle, instead of just thinking of a ‘global’ language and its impact on ‘local’ ones, attention is directed to the circulation of linguistic resources and their re-embedding in new sociocultural environments (Blommaert 2003, 2005; Pennycook 2007). According to one account, globalization creates a reorganization of norms in which ‘mobile’ codes “become local resources, embedded in local patterns of value-attributions” (Blommaert 2005: 139).
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The aspect of global/local interdependence I focus on is ‘semiotic mobility’: the circulation of signs across time and space, their disembedding from and reembedding into social and semiotic contexts (Blommaert 2003: 611, 2004: 128; Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999: 83; Coupland 2003). From this angle, cultural globalization is an increased circulation of cultural artefacts across national and ethnolinguistic borders (Crane 2002), sometimes leading to “transnational globalized art forms” (Blommaert 2004: 131) such as reggae or hip hop (Alim et al. 2009). Semiotic mobility and local adaptation involve, by definition, a (usually complex and extensive) process of mediation, and they are situated within some form of popular culture such as radio talk, popular music, or lifestyle magazines. This goes to reinforce the suggestion that “it is hard to see how we can proceed with any study of language, culture, globalization and engagement without dealing comprehensively with popular culture” (Pennycook 2007: 81). In formal terms, globally circulating signs are theorized at two levels of granularity. New genres or discourse patterns are situated at a broader level, for instance in news discourse, in the communications and service industry, or in popular music. At a microlinguistic level we have linguistic features, usually (but not exclusively) lexical items that spread across dialects or languages. In one typical case of late modern linguistic globalization, lexis and discourse markers of English origin are ‘borrowed’ and structurally integrated into the grammar and the pragmatics of recipient languages up to the point of becoming indecipherable to the original speakers. There is an implicational relationship between the two levels, such that locally adapted lexis is often found in adapted genres or discourse styles, as for instance with English borrowings and code-mixing in African hip hop (see Higgins 2009 for a recent discussion). In my analysis, semiotic mobility is situated within the web, regarded as ‘mediascape’ – that is, a large and complex repository of images and narratives (Appadurai 1996). This repository enables those with adequate technological access and competence to actively appropriate signs and texts, thereby acting as mediators between global resources and local audiences. Indeed, a novelty of the web 2.0 era (which is discussed in greater detail in the next section) is the capacity it creates for a large number of people to become ‘intertextual operators’ who digitally modify multi-modal text, for instance by adding subtitles, by replacing the original audio track, and so on. These media practices are closely related to localization and recontextualization in my data. The term ‘localization’ has different meanings in the academic and professional literature, in translation studies among other domains (Cronin 2003). I use it here as a generic counterpart to globalization. By localization I mean a discourse process by which globally available media content is modified in a (more or less salient) local manner, involving some linguistic transformation to a local code and an orientation to a specific audience, defined by means of language choice. Localization in this sense is a specific type of construction of ‘linguistic locality’ as a response to globalized popular culture. Semiotic material from ‘elsewhere’ is made to speak ‘from here’ and ‘to here,’ drawing on a range of semiotic resources for its new indexical grounding. Localness is a scalar construct, its scope
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depending on situated contrast; it usually indexes a space below the nation-state level, but this can range from a large region to a small locality (Johnstone et al. 2006; Androutsopoulos 2010). On content-sharing sites such as YouTube, localization often takes the shape of the recontextualization of popular texts. At home in a range of disciplines, the concept of recontextualization signifies the fit, into a new setting, of social practices that have been lifted from a previous, perhaps ‘original’ context. With regard to globalization, the terms ‘decontextualization’ and ‘recontextualization’ (alongside ‘disembedding’ and ‘re-embedding’) are widely used to signify relations of “colonization and appropriation” (Fairclough 2006: 33–5) or the adaptation of mediated cultural patterns to new reception communities (Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2002, with regard to hip hop). I also draw on the theorizing of recontextualization undertaken by Bauman and Briggs (1990) in performance studies, which offers useful analytical options. They understand recontextualization as the reembedding of text in a (new) situational context, and they identify six dimensions of that transformation which I will draw on in the analysis of recontextualized spectacles: framing; form; function; indexical grounding; translation; emergent structure of a new context. In the web environments I focus on, recontextualization means that globally available media material is given new form, function, and meaning while still bearing traces “from its earlier context” (Bauman and Briggs 1990: 75). Vernacularity is a key aspect of this process. I discuss vernacularity here in two senses. The first is offered by the notion of vernacular literacies, classically defined as literacy practices that are not part of educational or professional institutions but are relatively free from institutional control, rooted in everyday practice, serving everyday purposes, and drawing on vernacular knowledge (Barton and Hamilton 1998). A lot of literacy practices in the new media among young people in the western world are vernacular in that sense (see for instance Snyder 2002). I argue that vernacular digital literacies are ‘landing points’ of globally circulating signs and texts; they are the sites where these signs and texts are locally reworked, drawing on the affordances of contemporary digital media to manipulate and publish content – music, speech, and video. Secondly, in a sense familiar to sociolinguists, ‘vernacular ’ refers to local varieties of language, those that are the first to be acquired: the most local and informal, uncodified, and often classified as non-standard (Coupland 2009). The relevant relation between the two is that vernacular practices of digital literacy can be a site of vernacular linguistic expression. The well documented role of the new media as a site of written and public usage of vernaculars (for overviews, see Androutsopoulos 2006a, 2010) is explored in this chapter on the terrain of spectacles and their comments. This sketches out an exploratory framework for the forthcoming discussion. As this discussion suggests, my concern is less with global semiotic flows as such than with the local recontextualization of globally available signs. From this angle, the relevance of content-sharing platforms to the relationship between language and globalization is not (just) that they facilitate the global circulation and
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availability of semiotic material, but that they constitute playgrounds for the display and negotiation of local responses to such material.
Web 2.0: Participation, Convergence, and the Rise of Vernacular Spectacles A phrase often used for convenience rather than for its explanatory potential, ‘web 2.0’ lacks a widely accepted definition (Scholz 2008). It is often exemplified by lists of characteristics such as “rich user experience,” “user participation,” “dynamic content,” “scalability” (Wikipedia 2009). Hinchcliffe (2006) posits as “key aspects” of web 2.0 its “rich and interactive user interfaces,” “data consumption and remixing from all sources, particularly user generated data,” and an “architecture of participation that encourages user contribution.” Another way of exemplifying web 2.0 is by a juxtaposition to ‘web 1.0,’ a post-hoc label for the condition of the WorldWideWeb until the turn of the century (O’Reilly 2005). In that early era, the web was predominantly a medium of information retrieval. Content was professionally produced for consumption by users who could not do much more than surf, read, and print out. Interpersonal communication was carried out on applications that predated the web and operated separately from it, such as e-mail, newsgroups and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), to which much early scholarship on language on the internet was devoted. Thus a broad distinction between internet applications for interpersonal communication and the web as a unidirectional, information-oriented medium persisted throughout the 1990s. This dichotomy collapses during the 2000s, as a new generation of websites integrate applications for interpersonal communication and tools for the management of user-generated content. Typical web 2.0 environments such as social networking and mediasharing sites3 offer an infrastructure to be appropriated and ‘filled in’ by users who generate almost all the content (excluding online advertisem*nt and commercial banners): users edit and upload new texts, comment on or modify texts by other users, and create links between different kinds of texts (on condition of having adequate hardware and software and access to the internet). In that sense, the web developed from “publishing” to “participation” (O’Reilly 2005), and web 2.0 environments are indeed shaped by an “architecture of participation that encourages user contribution” (Hinchcliffe 2006). Such accounts might be useful points of departure for a language and discoursecentered approach; indeed the emphasis on user participation ties in well with the sociolinguistic interest in the public visibility of vernaculars, with the increased informality of public discourse, and with sociolinguistic change generally. The boost of vernacular multi-literacies in web 2.0 environments exemplifies what the participatory web is all about. However, the tendency to mingle technology and society makes these accounts less useful. Moreover, a sociolinguistic angle may uncover characteristics that are less pronounced in broader discussion, yet potentially more consequential for language use.
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Research on computer-mediated discourse has not yet engaged systematically with web 2.0 environments, referencing them, if at all, as sites of future scholarship (Baron 2008, Thimm 2008, Rowe and Wyss 2009; but see Boyd 2008). Besides participation, contemporary web environments are characterized by processes of convergence between formerly separate applications, modes, and activities. Drawing on media studies (Jenkins 2006), I use ‘convergence’ as a broad cover term that encompasses more specific processes of integration, embedding, and modularity. By ‘integration’ I mean the co-existence of various communication modes on a single platform (as in personal messages, instant messaging (IM), wall posts, and groups on facebook). By ‘embedding’ I mean the ability to place digital content, especially videos, on a web page. Multimedia texts are combined with other texts (such as blog entries) and commented upon by users, and thus constantly recycled. ‘Modularity’ refers to the way in which web pages are composed of a number of different elements – different in terms of origin, authorship, affordances, conditions of production and so on – which are puzzled together within a design template.4 These processes complicate the media and semiotic composition of web environments. As a result of integration, what used to be isolated modes of computermediated communication (CMC) is now replicated on multi-mode platforms. Embedding and modularity make web pages multi-layered and multi-authored. These processes have in common a blurring of boundaries between genres and participation roles: professional and user-generated discourse may now appear side by side, and the blend sometimes leads to informal writing styles being positioned as voices of expertise. For instance, commercial web services position user contributions such as reviews and ratings as a complement to, or even substitute for, professionally authored content. Processes of convergence thus lead to increasingly heterogeneous discourse spaces, in which different language styles, genres, and voices co-exist. However, rather than thinking of web 2.0 as something entirely new (as the label might misleadingly suggest), it is more productive to assess its novel aspects against previous stages of CMD. I organize this assessment around four dimensions of language in contemporary web environments: organization, interaction, self-presentation, and spectacle. A considerable part of user activity on the ‘participatory web’ sets forth linguistic (and semiotic) practices of self-presentation and interaction that are fundamental to all CMD. Profile pages on social networking sites may be viewed as a continuation of personal homepages, which initiated the practice of selfpresentation on the early Web (Döring 2002), and interactive written discourse in newsgroups and Internet Relay Chat sets a yardstick for current modes of webbased interpersonal communication. However, there are differences within this continuity. Self-presentation on today’s profile pages is more serialized and standardized in terms of design than on earlier homepages. Standardization is understood here as the imposition of uniformity on design. The design options available to blog authors and profile makers are limited to a few alternative layouts, a fixed number of background colors and typefaces, and so on. Templates enable the
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creation of blogs and profile pages in a few simple steps. Likewise, contemporary forms of online talk largely share with their predecessors in web forums and newsgroups a relative lack of institutional regulation and a proliferation of the features that have come to characterize informal written language online: spokenlike and vernacular features, traces of spontaneous production, innovative spelling choices, emoticons (signs that represent a facial expression by means of punctuation marks), and the like. But new patterns of discourse organization emerge as well, for instance comments on published content, which were popularized on blogs and are now ubiquitous on content-sharing sites. Online interaction today also seems more densely interspersed with multimedia than at earlier stages of CMD. Embedded videos that prompt short exchanges among ‘friends’ on social networking sites are an example. A further dimension of language that has always been fundamental to the web is the organization of web interfaces through hypertext links. Its neglect in CMD scholarship reflects researchers’ focus on interpersonal communication rather than on edited websites, but it is also symptomatic of a broader lack of attention to visual communication (van Leeuwen 2004). Website interfaces consist in large part of multiple navigation bars, which are composed of bare nouns or verbs, or of nominal or verbal phrases. On YouTube for instance, the navigation bar above the video screen reads Home, Videos, Channels, Community. These are set in blue lettering against a light grey background. At the top right, we find Sign Up, Quick List, Help, Sign In; below the video are placed the items Rate, Share, Favorite, Playlists, Flag. Each of these clickable items links the video page to another video, a specific user activity, or another area of the website. The organizational dimension of language on web interfaces consists of isolated lexical items, and coherence is constituted within “visual syntax” (van Leeuwen 2004: 17), together with choices in typography and color. However, the design of web interfaces also raises some important sociolinguistic issues, such as the choice of languages for localized versions of global corporate websites (Kelly-Holmes 2006) and the language style of emblematic items in web design (Androutsopoulos 2006b). The main innovation in web 2.0 environments are the ‘spectacles’: multi-modal content that is uploaded by users on media-sharing sites and often embedded in other web pages. My interest is primarily in video, but the concept is meant to encompass other types of digital content such as music or photography, which may not involve language at all. The spectacle metaphor suggests that these items are displayed to an audience; are viewed rather than read; are mainly perceived and consumed as entertainment; and prompt responses, which are usually expressed in comments. With their video-sharing platforms in operation since 2005, spectacles are relatively new to the web, because their production, circulation, and consumption require technological standards that were not available on a large scale until very recently. On today’s content-sharing sites, each spectacle is hosted on a dedicated web page, which features usage statistics (views, geographical spread of web hits), lists of similar content, a commenting option, and other elements such as video responses. This page is the immediate textual
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environment of a spectacle and therefore an integral part of the analysis that follows.5 The significance of web 2.0 spectacles to a sociolinguistics of globalization is grounded in a number of facts. First, spectacles extend the dimensions of language online. While spoken language was marginal so far in CMD, being limited to video conferencing and online phone calls, it now gains a much wider presence. Spectacles don’t simply feature spoken language, but language that is digitally edited, generically diverse, and often a hybrid drawing on different sources. More importantly, vernacular spectacles are at the core of a flourishing culture of media production from below. They are a site of grassroots media creativity that takes different shapes in terms of originality, reworking, and appropriation: people’s own, amateur footage, pirated material (for example stretches of broadcast, snatches of concerts filmed on mobile phones), and, not least, vernacular productions which capitalize on the digital appropriation and manipulation of mass media resources.6 Spectacles are embeddable and can be combined with other textual elements on virtually any web page. They therefore have a high potential for constant circulation and recycling. Even though vernacular spectacles are mostly of lowbudget quality, some become very popular, occasionally leading to mainstream broadcasting. In my observations of YouTube I have come across several cases of (German, Greek, or English) spectacles with millions of views and thousands of comments, which provide hints to the offline dissemination or broadcast of these videos. Drawing on the concept of ‘primary texts,’ introduced by John Fiske (1987) in the analysis of television discourse, we may say that the participatory web is a site for the extra-institutional emergence of new primary texts of vernacular origin. Becoming a primary text on a media-sharing website depends on popularity, not on a specific semiotic make-up. Spectacles of any type – original footage, pirated material, or intertextual modification – may in principle develop into a focal point of attention for millions of users in one particular country, or even world-wide. Such popularity is sociolinguistically significant, considering that spectacles may provide a site for the unregulated mediation of vernacular speech, thereby extending the prevalence of vernacular language in computer-mediated discourse (Androutsopoulos 2006b, 2007, 2010). However, primary vernacular spectacles lack the contextualization devices usually available to the broadcast program. In Fiske’s framework, primary texts are accompanied by an array of ‘secondary’ texts such as announcements, advertisem*nts, and reviews, which market a primary text and suggest preferred readings (in other words, interpretations). With vernacular spectacles, the absence of such secondary texts is partially compensated for by the adjacent comments. In quantitative terms, comments can be understood as indicators of attention to, and engagement with, a spectacle on the part of the users. In qualitative terms, comment authors may provide background information, engage in identity debates triggered by the spectacle, or ‘echo’ scenes and voices of the spectacle in a manner reminiscent of audience practices during or after reception. Comments can be thought of as “encasing events” (Goffman 1986: 262) which contextualize
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Table 9.1 Four dimensions of language in social networking sites (SNS) and content sharing sites (CSS). Compiled by author Dimension
Main characteristic
Agency
Typical site
Organization
Constitutes web interfaces as part of web design Resource for profile pages and other sites of user presentation Part of multimedia material people upload and make available Means for interpersonal communication and comments on ‘prompts’
Site designer
SNS and CSS
Individual user
SNS
User
CSS (and embedded in SNS)
Multi-authored
SNS and CSS
Self-presentation
Spectacle
Interaction
the ‘encased’ video clip. I argue below that comments do a diverse discursive work, which contributes to the recontextualization of a spectacle. Key characteristics of these four dimensions of language in web 2.0 environments are summarized in table 9.1.7 While I suggest that spectacles are central to the current stage of digital discourse, what characterizes contemporary web environments is the co-existence of and interplay between all four dimensions of language. Organization, self-presentation, spectacle, and interaction are constantly interrelated in practice, and it is therefore useful to think of processes of globalization and localization as involving in principle all four dimensions.
Exploring Spectacles: Analytical Concepts for Web 2.0 Research I approach the web as a ‘sociolinguistic ecology,’ in which participants use available linguistic resources, across different modes of computer-mediated communication, to accomplish social activities (Androutsopoulos 2006b). While rejecting technological determinism, namely the assumption that communications technologies determine language production (Hutchby 2001), this approach does take into account the constraints of different technologies of mediation. Linguistic
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practices in CMD are therefore theorized as the outcome of the relation between media constraints and user agency within specific socio-cultural settings. This approach challenges two principles explicitly or implicitly shared by many studies of language and new media. The first is the analytical restriction to a single communication mode such as email or instant messaging. This practice entails a risk of technological determinism, as it implicitly foregrounds the impact of that mode on language usage. It also hinders an understanding of how multiple modes are coordinated by individual users within a web environment. The second is the decontextualization of written language from its digital surroundings. This is common practice in studies of language variation, linguistic economy, and language change in CMC, in which the multi-modal embedding of linguistic data is usually not considered; indeed, the relative ‘modal poverty’ of frequently used data from IRC or IM favors this analytical disembedding. However, in view of the semiotically rich environments and of the co-existence of language styles in web 2.0, an analysis is required that contextualizes the microlinguistic level in its multi-modal context and does not reduce that context to the communications technology used, but rather treats it as assembled and emergent. This, in turn, calls for analytical concepts which “can be applied cross-modally” (van Leeuwen 2004: 15) to both language and image (and sound), and which address relations between modes, texts, and codes. Three such concepts, I argue, are multi-modality, intertextuality, and heteroglossia. Even though not systematically used in CMD research, these concepts are familiar ground in sociolinguistics and discourse studies. My understanding of multi-modality is shaped by the framework created by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001); my understanding of heteroglossia, by the framework created by Bakhtin (1981) and by his reception in sociolinguistics – for instance Rampton (1995) and Bailey (2007); and my understanding of intertextuality, by Bakhtin again, and by text linguistics. I briefly introduce them below, focusing on their application to spectacles. Figure 9.1, featuring the video screen of one of the two German recontextualized spectacles to be analysed below (see section 6), shall accompany the discussion. Multimodality – broadly defined as the combination of semiotic modes in the production of meaning (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001) – operates across different components of a spectacle page. Spectacles consist of rich combinations of image, spoken and written language, music and sound. The video depicted in the screenshot consists of the following layers: the music of a global pop song, new German lyrics, a sequence of still images, and superimposed subtitles of the lyrics. The rest of this web page is made up of different modules (for instance the list of “related videos” to the right), featuring distinct combinations of language, image, color, and typography. Spectacles are complex multi-modal texts within a complex multi-modal environment, and the way they work the tension between the global and the local will often rely on multi-modal combinations rather than on language alone. On a second level of analysis, spectacles and spectacle pages can be viewed as webs of intertextual relations. YouTube videos are frequently intertextual in that they rely on, and modify, existing texts (antecedent, or referenced texts). The
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Figure 9.1 Screenshot of “Schwappe Productions – An Preller.” Source: http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=icmraBAN4ZE
spectacle in Figure 9.1 brings together elements of different antecedent texts of recognizable origin: a pop tune, a collage of pictures and graphics found on the web. The intertextuality of spectacles implies decomposability into separate parts or layers, each of a different provenance, each bringing its own connotations. At the same time, videos are part of a network of intertextual relations on the spectacle page. Its most obvious aspect is the relation of the video to its video responses (if available) and to its comments. Other elements on the page, such as the channel information box on the top left and the sets of “related” and “promoted videos” on the right, are also intertextually linked to the video. Video-sharing sites therefore require a detailed intertextual analysis of relations constituted within a spectacle, between it and its antecedent texts, as well as among various components of the spectacle page. An analysis of spectacle pages as composites of intertextually fabricated videos, multi-authored comments, and a professionally designed user interface implies that these pages will be quite heterogeneous in sociolinguistic terms. The norms
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that govern the language of the website interface have nothing to do with the linguistic and stylistic choices of spectacles, and these in turn are independent from the linguistic choices of the comments. Analytical concepts commonly used in CMD studies, such as language variation or code-switching, are in my view insufficient to address such heterogeneity. While language variation analysis has been used to study relations between standard and dialect or written and spoken usage in CMD, web 2.0 environments also confront us with unexpected co-occurrences and juxtapositions of language styles that result from media convergence and are interwoven with their multi-modal environment.8 I therefore find it more useful to think of web 2.0 environments as heteroglossic. In a recent paper, Bailey (2007: 257) defines heteroglossia as “(a) the simultaneous use of different kinds of forms or signs, and (b) the tension and conflicts among those signs, based on the sociohistorical associations they carry with them.” Unlike variation and codeswitching, heteroglossia encompasses all kinds of linguistic difference across all levels of linguistic and discourse structure. Moreover, as the concept is socially not formally defined, it “directs the analyst to historical social relations, rather than just details of surface form” (Bailey 2007: 269). Using heteroglossia, we may look at web 2.0 platforms as sites of tension and contrast between linguistic resources that represent different social identities and ideologies. In particular, a number of potential sites of heteroglossic articulations can be identified in and around spectacles. The intertextuality that characterizes some vernacular spectacles involves a tension between voices or perspectives. In the example (Figure 9.1), this tension comes about between the female AfricanAmerican voice of the original pop song and the male, dialect-speaking voice of the Bavarian recontextualization (see below). A contrast between spectacle and comments in terms of linguistic choices may reflect the tension between globally circulating content and its local consumption, or between a local performance and equally local responses to it. While the style choices of spectacles are fixed and displayed to an audience, those of comments are emergent and interactively shaped. Comment authors may style-shift to align themselves with – or to distance themselves from – the language styles of the local spectacle; and, within a stretch of comments, participants will sometimes mobilize heteroglossic contrasts to contextualize conflicting views and stances (Androutsopoulos 2007). On a different level, spectacle and comments may contrast with the linguistic design of the web interface, reflecting the tension between user-generated discourse and professional choices of website localization. Heteroglossia offers considerable analytical versatility, which suits the multi-layered co-existence of language styles and voices in web environments.
Recontextualized Spectacles: Local Responses to Global Media Content Spectacles, then, are shaped by multimodal, intertextual, and heteroglossic relations, and these can be seen as forming a nexus within which recontextualization
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is situated. Recontextualization involves the appropriation and reworking of globally circulating media material into a local code for a local audience. In the case of spectacles, this involves the manipulation of different media and modes, intertextual tensions within popular culture, and heteroglossic contrasts of revoicing and re-imaging. Even though some of these processes have long preceded digital culture, their workings with spectacles crucially draw on the affordance of contemporary digital media to manipulate and publish music, speech, and video. One example I documented in a recent case study (Androutsopoulos 2009) is a Greek YouTube spectacle entitled “To krasaki tou Tsou” (“Choo’s little wine”). Originally an entry to an amateur video clip competition, it consists of three layers of digital text: first, a Japanese song from the soundtrack of a Hollywood movie (Kill Bill II); second, new video footage, namely an amateur parody of Chinese martial arts movies (of the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon type); finally, Greek subtitles with a phonetically approximate, ‘surface translation’ of the Japanese lyrics. To the Greek-speaking viewers for whom this is intended, the subtitles make the (undecipherable) Japanese lyrics to be heard as a sort of ‘Japanese Greek.’ For example the song’s refrain, in transliterated Japanese: Janomeno kasa hitotsu, is subtitled in Greek as: , τo τoυ Tσoυ – jenoméno to krasáki tu Tsu (“ripe, Choo’s little wine”). In the corresponding movie frame, a group of comically ‘oriental’ characters fondle a bottle of wine. Unlike in usual subtitling, the Japanese lyrics and the Greek subtitles lack a semantic or pragmatic relationship. The coherence of the multi-modal text is constituted in the relation between the moving image and the Greek subtitles, on a frame-to-frame, verse-to-verse basis. The heteroglossic contrast between the language heard and the language read is at the core of the trash humor of this spectacle. This is one example of how a globally known pop-culture text is recontextualized in a vernacular spectacle. The Greek makers of that video are not alone in this practice. My YouTube observation uncovered thousands of videos that go by the label ‘misheard lyrics,’ and a culture of ‘fake’ subtitles seems to have been one of YouTube’s trends in the last two years.9 Not all of these are so elaborate as to feature their own video footage. A popular technique is the phonetic subtitling of video excerpts (music video clips, Bollywood movies) or of songs (often with a cartoon figure voicing the subtitles in a speech bubble). This procedure always involves phonetic subtitling and maintains the original sound and voice, but is not dependent on a particular language pair: some ‘misheard lyrics’ appropriate Bollywood films or German rock music and localize them for an English-speaking audience, others even take English-language pop songs and allocate them fake (that is, phonetically similar but semantically divergent) English subtitles. Phonetic subtitling (with or without new video footage) is one among several semiotic techniques that can be used to recontextualize media material, for a new audience and to a new purpose. Another technique is dubbing or re-dubbing, that is, superimposing a new voice over the original footage. This is popular with German YouTube users, who are fond of re-dubbing snatches of Hollywood films in Bavarian or Swabian dialect.10 A third option is a cover version or a restaging involving a translation of the antecedent together with new footage. Yet another
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option is to maintain the original tune, replacing the lyrics and adding new footage. All these different options offer glimpses into what one could term ‘techniques of guerrilla double-voicing in the digital age.’ Vernacular spectacle makers appropriate conventional techniques of localizing media content, such as dubbing, translating, and subtitling, in order to stage a dialogue between the voices of the original material and their own reworkings.11 Interpreting these productions is often quite complex, as their heteroglossic ambiguities and multimedia layers may raise questions of humor, parody, ethnic representation, and stereotyping (see Jenkins 2006: 292–3). Discussing the importance of YouTube “as a key site for the production and distribution of grassroots media” (Jenkins 2006: 274), Henry Jenkins draws attention to parody as a key mode “for reworking mass media materials for alternative purposes” (2006: 282). Localization is one such purpose, and the workings of parody in recontextualized spectacles may involve techniques of intertextuality and language play which look back to local pre-digital traditions. For example, the Japanese–Greek video echoes traditional vernacular practices of jocular appropriation of ‘foreign’ linguistic material by the Greek-speaking community, and elaborates this tradition, by means of digital technology, into a multimedia text, which, despite (or perhaps thanks to) its ‘trash’ aesthetic, gained mass popularity in Greece during 2008. This popularity is indicated by the statistics available on the spectacle page (in terms of numbers of views and comments), but also by the comments unfolding underneath the spectacle. In that case study I found that comments contextualize the spectacle by offering a range of insights into its production, reception, and subsequent offline dissemination: the local video was apparently screened on nation-wide television programs, and the Japanese song, heard afresh through the lenses of the YouTube parody, was played in cafés. As a consequence, in the analysis of the transformations involved in recontextualization, I consider (with Bauman and Briggs 1990) how comments contribute to the emergence of local framing, indexical grounding, and a new function of recontextualized spectacles.
Two ‘Bavarian’ Recontextualizations on YouTube12 Against this backdrop, the present section offers a detailed analysis of two local transformations of globally available semiotic material. Both examples are Germanlanguage videos that appropriate US American antecedents. They were initially selected from a larger set of YouTube videos, tagged (or self-categorized) as ‘Bavarian.’ The first example is a local adaptation of a so-called “fast food freestyle” (see Appendix for sources). The original version is apparently a YouTube classic, online since November 2006 and available in different copies, the most popular approximating 6 million views at the time of writing.13 In this amateur video we see a young man rapping a fast-food order through a drive-thru intercom, accompanied by human beatbox. The local version is entitled “Mc Donalds
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rap (bayerisch).” The second example is a cover version of “Umbrella” by Rihanna, a pop song released in late March 2007. The local version, online since August 2007, is entitled “An Preller” (a Bavarian dialect expression). It combines a karaoke version of the original tune with new lyrics and a video that consists of a sequence of still images. All video material tagged as ‘Bavarian’ can be understood as claiming some relation to that region, culture, or language.14 By focusing on these recontextualized videos, we examine how this relation is established in a dialogue between the original and the local version, as well as between spectacle and comments. Both examples could be lumped together as local appropriations of US American popular music, but they are in fact quite different in terms of the provenience and status of the antecedent texts. “Umbrella,” with numerous top positions in singles charts around the world during 2007, epitomizes the global circulation of US American pop music.15 Its presence on YouTube, in various amateur videos rather than in the official video clip, is secondary to its dissemination via broadcast channels. The fast-food freestyle exemplifies a different pattern of global circulation. The original vernacular spectacle gained international popularity on YouTube (including in Germany, as is evidenced by the video’s audience map), and the Bavarian response is also posted and consumed on that platform. This raises questions concerning the global status of different spectacles, which will be taken up in my concluding discussion. The two cases also differ in terms of popularity, as expressed in views, comments, and video responses. On all counts, “An Preller” is much more popular than the Bavarian freestyle.16 The following discussion moves from the textual correspondences of the lyrics to the multi-modal composition of the spectacles, then to the linguistic resources used in the local versions, and finally to the contextualization work of the comments. To begin with, the Bavarian fast-food freestyle is a translation that remains quite faithful to the propositional content of the referenced text, with some stylistic allowance for context and rhyme (see Excerpt 1).17 Excerpt 1
Versions of “Fast food freestyle” lyrics: original text followed by an English gloss, for ease of comparison
Original text (as posted on the spectacle page): 1 2 3 4
I need a double cheeseburger and hold the lettuce don’t be frontin’ son no seeds on the bun we be up in this drive thru order for two i got the cravin’ for a number nine like my shoe
Gloss of ‘Bavarian’ version (author ’s translation): 1 2 3 4
I want a double cheeseburger but without salad don’t feel fooled no sesame on the bread we’re sitting in the drive through order for two the craving for a size nine chicken is there
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I mog an dobblkäsburger aber ohne zalood fühl di ned veroarschd kan sesam aufm brot mir höggn in der durchfahrt bestelln für zwaa die begierde nach am neuner chickn is da
Line 2 of the translation omits the original address term and selects a different verb. Line 4 omits the simile (“like my shoe”) but maintains the numerical size of the order. Consider also line 7, “dr pepper for my brother, another for your mother,” translated as “coca cola für mei Buu, noch eins für ma kuh.” Here a soft drink not available in Germany is substituted by a different brand; the recipient of the soft drink is rendered as Buu /’bu:/, a dialect word for ‘boy’ or ‘mate’ that also happens to facilitate rhyme; in the same line, “mother” is rendered by Kuh (‘cow’), a substitution apparently dictated by rhyme. However, the original wording – “your mother” – echoes (in my reading) the African-American tradition of the sounds and dozens, an allusion lost in the translation. Nonetheless, the translation basically maintains the same semantic line; it tells the same story in the same genre, injecting some local flavor by means of referential choices and use of dialect. However, the two versions do not show the same story as far as their multimodal composition is concerned. Table 9.2 displays the sequential organization of the two videos, following the segmentation of the lyrics. In the original version we only see the driver rapping his order at the intercom. We hear the human beatbox and the voices of two (invisible) service personnel, their responses apparently prompting the rapper to repeat his order slower and then again faster. These short dialogic sequences separate the four takes of the freestyle stanza. In the Bavarian version we see the two youngsters, identified in the opening credits as “Peter and Eggi,” in front of the camera, in a living-room. The cover version maintains the rhythmic structure of the beatbox and the repetition of the stanza at different speeds, but the last two segments of the original are omitted and the interludes are designed differently, with the rapper giving instructions (lifted from the original) to the beatboxer. The brackets18 of the Bavarian version are more elaborated than those of the original. The opening bracket features a sequence of title images (the Bavarian flag and the fast food company logo, with a German slogan) which contextualize the version’s local anchoring and its relation to a pretext. The closing bracket features a farewell to the camera and a list of end credits. Thus the local version lacks a naturalistic setting, but elaborates its framing by introducing its own contextualization elements. In the case of “Schwappe Productions – An Preller”, the music is the only common semiotic mode between the original song and the local video. The lyrics are now delivered by a male voice, and the visual part consists of a sequence of still images cut together to the music. The recontextualized song maintains the original’s pop-song structure (intro–stanza–chorus–stanza–chorus–bridge– chorus–outro), but its content and delivery are of poor quality by professional standards. In terms of verbal content, “An Preller,” which roughly translates into
Localizing the Global on the Participatory Web Table 9.2 Segment
opening bracket
Versions of “Fast food freestyle” video clips. Compiled by author Original version
Bavarian version
Time
Time
–
–
0.00
0.05
0.09 freestyle
219
Image: Bavarian flag + title: Mc Donald’s – bayerisch Peter and Eggi Image: McDonalds logo with German slogan, ich liebe es Both boys: Bolero!
0:01
Big mac! + beatbox
0.11
0.10
1st take
0.20
Beatbox + hunger! (‘hunger ’) 1st take
interlude
0.31 0.34 0.38
Rapper: That’s about it! Reply by personnel Rapper: We’ll slow it down for you Reply by personnel
0.39 0.41
Both: Knusper! (‘crispy’) Rapper: Slow down Peter
freestyle
0.44 0.55
Big mac! + beatbox 2nd take
0.43 0.52
Beatbox 2nd take
interlude
1.22 1.25
Request by personnel Rapper: Speed this one up
1.15 1.16
Both: Knusper! (‘crispy’) Rapper: Speed up Peter
freestyle
1.28 1.35
Big mac! + beatbox 3rd take
1.18 1.26
Beatbox 3rd take
interlude
1.44
Interruption and dialogue with personnel
–
–
freestyle
2.01 2.08
Big mac! + beatbox 4th take
–
–
closing bracket
2.26 2.25
End titles Beatboxer to rapper: say crispy! Rapper: Crispy –
1.42 1.45
Both: knusper! (‘crispy’) Beatboxer: yippie
1.46 1.47
Rapper: Bolero! End titles
2.27
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‘being pissed,’ is probably best described as a narrative of binge-drinking culture (see Excerpt 2). Delivered from a first-person perspective, it explicitly claims collective regional validity by narrating what people do “at the weekend in Bavaria” (line 1). The story and the accompanying images abound in emblems of localness, such as the Mass, the Bavarian beer mug. Excerpt 2
“An Preller,” first stanza and chorus (as seen in subtitles):
1 2 3 4 5
Am Wochenend in Bayern / gengan die Leid gern feiern I mach des a recht gern / Noch ist der Absturz fern Aber dann kaffst da a Mass / Und scho steigt der Spaß Nach Nummer 8 jedoch / Hat der Spaß boid a Loch I hob / scho wieder an Rausch in der Fotzn / Hearst des is doch echt zum Kotzen 6 Koaner versteht mi wei i so lall / Zefix bin I scho wieder prall 7 Draußt werds scho langsam wieder heller / Aber mi drahts nur oibe schneller 8 Wei i hob scho wieder an so an Preller! / i hob scho wieder an so an Preller!
Gloss: 1 2 3 4 5 6
At the weekend in Bavaria / People like to have a party I like that too / the crash is still far away But then you buy a Mass / And the good times are rising high But after number 8 / Soon there’s a hole in good times I’ve got / Once again a buzz in my face / Can you hear, this really sucks Nobody understands me because I’m babbling / Darn, I’m so full once again 7 Outside it gets lighter / But my head’s spinning around ever quicker 8 Because I’m pissed again / I’m pissed again
In its visual dimension, “An Preller” (henceforth AP) is a bricolage (Chandler 1998) that incorporates visual bits and pieces of very different origin, which gain new meaning in their dialogic relationship to the lyrics. A number of bracketing elements offer explicit local cues. The opening bracket and the first stanza are visualized by Bavaria’s chequered blue–white flag and the Mass. The split screen at 0:06,19 also seen in Figure 9.1, uses the spatial opposition between ‘given’ and ‘new’ (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996) to visualize the contrast between the original song and the recontextualized version: an umbrella to the left, its lining in the colors of the Bavarian flag, is juxtaposed to the Bavarian Mass. Visual references to binge drinking and its consequences draw on different sources, such as animated emoticons, a staple feature of web discussion forums (for instance at 0:17, 0:20, 0:27, 0:33), but also images from German mainstream and popular culture20 and, not least, an image of Mickey Mouse (0:51). Rather than a purist local representation, the video’s visual part is an intertextual amalgam of materials from regional, national and transnational digital culture, sequentially arranged and cut to the lyrics.
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Both local versions claim to be ‘Bavarian,’ most obviously so through their titles and tags; however, from a social dialectological perspective, they do not feature the same dialect. AP is cast in a levelled, urban Bavarian, and the local freestyle is in Franconian dialect, as many commentators point out. In both cases, the singing voice is markedly different from Standard German, and its dialect features in phonology, lexicon, and – partially – syntax are regular enough to constitute it as dialect voice. Bavarian dialect is made even more prominent in AP through the title, which is a dialectal pun on Umbrella, and through the subtitles.21 Both videos feature additional little moments of heteroglossia. In the local freestyle, the rapper ’s instructions to the human beatbox (“slow down Peter, speed up Peter”) come in English, taking up the responses of the original rapper to the service personnel, but also echoing a broader convention of English code-switching at skeletal points of German rap songs. AP features bits of written Standard German on displayed signs and image captions (for instance at 3:31, 3:36, and in the end credits). It also features English (a “do not disturb” sign at 2:36), and ‘Bavarian English’ on a comic strip sign that reads “pardy ends” (i.e. ‘party ends’, 1:23), the spelling pardy reflecting the voicing of the alveolar plosive in Bavarian. Rather than being neatly separated from the linguistic text, these images contribute to the overall linguistic make-up of the video; and, while the lyrics of AP come in a hom*ogenous dialectal voice, its footage constructs the entire video as a heteroglossic ensemble. Commenting on YouTube is, by default, open to anyone. However, the comments to these two videos come entirely in German and, as the page’s audience statistics indicate, they originate in the German-speaking countries. Many comments index a relation to the Bavarian region and/or dialect, through propositional content, intertextual reference or dialect choice.22 I focus here on the way local language ideologies are brought to bear on the evaluation of the videos. Metalinguistic commentary is most pronounced in the local freestyle, where 40 percent of all comments counter the clip’s claim to being Bavarian and suggest another dialect label, namely Franconian (fränkisch). Users draw on specific examples to illustrate differences between the two dialects, in a manner reminiscent of dialect norming debates online (Johnstone and Baumgardt 2004). For example it is pointed out that the video uses kuh – monophthongal [khu:] – instead of kuah – diphthongal [khua:], which is the Bavarian pronunciation for ‘cow.’ Commentators also debate the regional boundaries between Bavarian and Franconian dialect (both are spoken in the federal state of Bavaria), thereby evoking distinct regional histories and traditions. The link between dialectal and regional identity is paramount, whereas the clip’s relation to the original fast-food freestyle is hardly addressed in the comments. In the comments to AP, metalinguistic discourse hardly occurs. Instead, statements of the type “that’s how we Bavarians/we in Bavaria are” express regional pride and ratify the clip’s claims. These comments tend to be cast in dialect, displaying an alliance to the clip’s dialect voice. The relation of AP to its original is evoked frequently, and in an antagonistic way. In my sample I identified some fifteen comparisons to the original, all expressing praise for the parody and/or
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criticism of the original, some alluding to being fed up with the heavy rotation of “Umbrella” in mainstream media (see Excerpt 3). Excerpt 3 Selection of comments to “An Preller” with reference to its pretext: • so sehr wie ich das original hasse, liebe ich diese version “as much as I hate the original, so do I love this version” • Also des is die viel bessere Version von Umbrella “Well this is a much better version of Umbrella” • von wegen parodie das hier is das original; umbrella is eh en scheiß lied aber das hier wird bald kult sein “by no means a parody, this is the original; umbrella is a crap song anyway but this one will be cult soon” A further technique by which comments give local grounding to this video consists in referencing its local circulation (Excerpt 4). Some commentators ask how to download the song, implying a wish to use it in other contexts; others want to play it at the next party, others report such usage or its circulation on mobile phones at schools, or discuss its perceived suitability for wider circulation. Some comments set the song prospectively and retrospectively in the context of the Wiesn, that is, Munich’s Oktoberfest. Predictions such as Wiesnhit 2007! (that the song is bound to become a hit at the Wiesn’s party tents) are expressed, then followed later on by reports that AP was indeed played by Wiesn DJs. Excerpt 4 • •
•
Selection of comments to “An Preller” with reference to its local circulation:
seit tagen singen wir den song an jeder party! “for days now we’re singing this song at every party” in unsana niederbayerischen schui kursiert des scho lang wieder auf de handys… [spelling includes dialect features] “in our lower bavarian school it’s been circulating across mobiles” will ich im Radio hören! “I want to hear it on the radio!”
Using the spectacle page as unit of analysis, my analysis develops a view of localization as a discursive process carried out in a two-fold dialogue: between an antecedent text and its local recontextualization, as well as between the recontextualized spectacle and the publicly displayed reactions to it. Comments indicate whether a video is accepted by local spectators; how it speaks to local concerns; and what opportunities of identity negotiation it offers. I identified three ways in which comments contribute to the local grounding of recontextualized spectacles: by doing local ‘folk linguistics’; by comparison (or even antagonism) to the original’ and by offering hints to their local circulation.
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Discussion: Vernacular Spectacles as ‘Localization from Below’ Contemporary video-sharing platforms on the participatory web facilitate a culture of vernacular media productions, which circulate outside mainstream media yet interrelate with it in various ways. Spectacles that involve the appropriation and modification of mainstream antecedents can be markedly local in terms of their new indexical grounding, their circulation, and their discursive uptake; however, my examples and observations suggest that the delight people find in making and viewing vernacular spectacles is not limited to a particular country or region. I suggest that recontextualized spectacles illustrate a distinct interplay between global media content and local responses that is broader, more fluid, and less predictable than other, more familiar types of interdependence between the global and the local. In order to contextualize this claim, consider how processes of globalization and localization have been discussed in sociolinguistics and discourse studies. These accounts often involve some kind of transnationally invariant backdrop, against which mechanisms of localization in discourse are examined. Well documented examples are local appropriations of global hip hop across the world (Alim, Ibrahim, and Pennycook 2009; Higgins 2009; Androutsopoulos and Scholz 2002; Pennycook, this volume). Despite cross-linguistic differences, some crucial aspects of cultural and linguistic practice are deemed to be relatively constant across local instantiations. Be it rap’s rhyme principle, a thematic canon, a set of rhetorical resources, or the local anchoring of poetic discourse (“keeping it real”) – certain creative principles constitute the global identity of rap as a genre system, and are at the same time available to variable local interpretation and appropriation, facilitating the relation of global and local in discursive practice as well as in analysis (see Pennycook 2007: 92–3). This invariant backdrop is even more pronounced in practices of ‘top-down globalization,’ in which corporate media are launched in a series of national versions that operate independently of each other, yet under a common policy, format, and agenda (Machin and van Leeuwen 2007; Fairclough 2006: 108–11). In Cosmopolitan magazine, the image of the ‘fun fearless female’ is globally constant, yet each national version is adapted to local influences and references. The publishing corporation sets style principles, and the local editors “must somehow translate the Cosmo style into their own languages” (Machin and van Leeuwen 2007: 139). As a result, “although local versions adopt it in their own specific ways, overall it is a global style” (ibid., p. 48). Cosmopolitan is not the only instance of what I would call ‘localization from above’ – a corporatively driven tailoring of global patterns to local conditions and audiences (Fiske 1997). In the field of technical translation, localization is the issuing of products (interface design, software, reference manuals) by global corporations in the languages of their target markets (Cronin 2003). In media
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marketing, localization signifies the strategies by which international media companies adapt their programming to local audiences. Discussing such strategies in India, Pathania-Jain (2008: 132–3) distinguishes between localization of content and “cosmetic localization.” In the latter, local vernacular speech is one element – alongside local cultural iconography and humor – through which a program’s local orientation is constituted. Against that backdrop, vernacular spectacles appear to be a practice that is unregulated, individualized, and in control of recontextualization. The label ‘localization from below,’ coined here in analogy to the notion of “globalization from below” (Fairclough 2006, ch. 6), emphasizes the difference from corporative, topdown localization or ‘localization from above.’ Vernacular spectacle producers are no doubt influenced by transnational trends in digital vernacular culture. But there is no single blueprint behind their multimedia practices, no binding institutional guideline or common generic framework. Vernacular spectacles are the outcome of individual activity with regard to their resources and outcomes. Their circuit – that is, the selection of globally circulating materials, their modification, the local resources they draw on, and the ways they are interpreted in the comments – might be similar across different spectacles, but is not preconfigured by a common antecedent. Recontextualized spectacles obviously differ from top-down corporate localization (of the Cosmopolitan type) by the lack of an overarching policy, and from the local appropriation of pop music culture (the global hip hop type) by the lack of guiding generic traditions and principles. Recontextualization in vernacular spectacles is driven by playful, creative activity rather than by corporate planning or collective fan productivity, and it maintains control over the recontextualization process. Consider the four factors of control and power over recontextualization – access, legitimacy, competence, values – as postulated by Bauman and Briggs (1990). Vernacular spectacle makers have access to the web mediascape, a vast repository of semiotic materials that can be recycled and endlessly recombined; they obviously circumvent or ignore institutional regulations of legitimate usage, such as copyright; they are competent in using digital technologies to sample, modify, and publish their productions; and, by publishing them, they invite valuation by web audiences. Responses by these audiences are not always positive, but they often indicate an intense local circulation of the recontextualized spectacles and little interest in the globally available antecedent text. Taking these responses seriously would invite us to reverse the directionality of the global to local relationship: here the global diffusion and availability of digital content are a given. What is at stake is their recontextualization and subsequent responses – in other words, the local end of the globalization process. Of course there are limits to this lack of regulation. YouTube and the commercial field in which it operates impose certain limitations in terms of content and copyright on the kind of video material that may be uploaded. Moreover, some types of global material seem more likely to be appropriated than others, in particular film and music – and indeed sometimes film music. The reasons for this presumably include the traditional role of film and music as sites of audience responses
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of echoing, modifying, and parodying, and the potential of these genres for popular circulation, which creates more opportunities of audience reaction to vernacular spectacles. The examples suggest that the distinction between global antecedents and local versions must in principle be distinguished from the one between English and ‘other ’ languages. Vernacular recontextualizations do not always appropriate English-language content; we just as well find Japanese songs given Greek, Bollywood ‘misheard lyrics’ given English phonetic subtitles. Such appropriated material is defined as ‘global’ through its corporate dissemination, which is often contextualized in the English-language media (as in the Greek case, where the Japanese song is part of the soundtrack to a Hollywood movie). While any YouTube video is potentially globally available, its factual global diffusion depends on a number of factors beside language choice. Being on YouTube makes the original fast-food freestyle globally accessible, and being in English facilitates its global consumption more than being in other languages. But its topic lends itself to local appropriation, and, as is evidenced by the regional breakdown of views, having reached a degree of international popularity increases the likelihood of such appropriation. Moreover, multimodal localizing does not necessarily imply a critical position towards the antecedent text. The two examples represent two strikingly different responses to globally available material and the staging of localness. The distinction between two types of Bakhtinian double-voicing (as elaborated by Rampton 1995) seems useful here. The Bavarian fast food freestyle stands to the original US freestyle in a relation of unidirectional double-voicing: it is a response that agrees and aligns with that of the original and uses it as a backdrop to demonstrate the actors’ own creative skills (regardless of the fact that these are contested by the commenting audience). With “An Preller,” there is sufficient contrast between the narrative worlds and the aesthetic means of the song and of the video to view the local adaptation as an instance of varidirectional double-voicing: an appropriation that challenges the original voice by superimposing a different intention. To the professional, sensual, feminine, romantic image of “Umbrella,” it juxtaposes a male, amateur, trash aesthetic.23 At the same time, the two recontextualizations differ in the way they constitute their own localness. Both feature a variety of local indices in the use of dialect and imagery and the design of bracketing sequences. But they do not stylize localness in equal terms. The fast food freestyle contextualizes itself as local (through dialect, a new title, a Bavarian hat worn by the rapper), but does not foreground localness in a reflexive, metapragmatic manner. By contrast, AP plays out ‘Bavarian’ stereotypes at many levels (in propositional content, imagery, linguistic choice), resulting in a kitsch celebration of local clichés. Linking these observations to the origin and status of the two antecedents, we see how scales of globalness tie in with a differential intensity of local responses. The original fast food freestyle, a rather obscure vernacular production with some degree of YouTube popularity, gives rise to a friendly imitation, whose receptive commentary unfolds around the legitimate use of local indexicality rather than around its appropriation of a global
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antecedent. By contrast, we can view the Bavarian binge drinking video as a voice of resistance to a globally popular, and therefore discursively powerful cultural commodity, and its exaggerated stylization of localness is part of that resistance. In any case, a generalizing assumption that items from “American” pop culture will receive similar intertextual responses due to their mere origin is clearly not supported by these examples. Finally, the two examples show how the localization of globally circulating media material creates novel opportunities for the staging of vernaculars in the digital age. This is not to suggest an automatic, as it were, link between vernacular spectacles and vernacular speech, even though it can be observed that vernacular spectacles on YouTube are frequently sites of vernacular linguistic expression. Rather, the point is that recontextualization processes such as the ones discussed in this chapter offer a niche where, paraphrasing Coupland and colleagues (2003), vernaculars establish a presence in contemporary sociolinguistic ecologies. It is tempting to view spectacles, and web 2.0 environments generally, as extending the scope of vernaculars in computer-mediated discourse. On the internet, discourse spaces emerge where vernacular speech gains legitimacy and vernacular voices may be established as predominant and authoritative (Androutsopoulos 2006a, 2010). However, it remains to be seen whether video-sharing sites offer opportunities of public representation of vernacular speech that go beyond its staging in mainstream broadcasting, where vernaculars are often framed as noninstitutional speech and turned into icons of traditional localness (Androutsopoulos 2010). One could argue that, even though dialects and other vernacular varieties may be established as dominant voices within spectacles, their surrounding web interfaces, which are available only in standard varieties, constitute an encasing frame of standardness that is roughly analogous to the framing of, say, a dialect show within the flow of broadcast program. Whether spectacles extend the restrictive positions allocated to vernaculars in mainstream media is open to further scrutiny.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing this chapter has benefited from presentations in Mannheim, Jyväskylä, Cardiff and Seattle during 2009, and by research cooperation with Horst Simon. I am grateful to Nik Coupland and Adam Jaworski for their constructive and insightful feedback. The usual caveats apply.
NOTES 1
Following the practice by Markham and Baym 2009, I spell ‘web’ with lower case, to indicate that it is neither a proper noun nor a specific place.
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I use the term ‘environment’ as a generic designation for websites which enable a range of user activities, and the term ‘platform’ for websites of a specific type; e.g. facebook is a web 2.0 environment and a platform for social networking. The characteristics of social networking sites are profile pages and networks of ‘friends’ (Boyd and Ellison 2007; Boyd 2008). Media-sharing sites enable people to upload digital content such as photos, videos, and music. For example a MySpace page can be thought of as composition of a number of ‘modules,’ some obligatory (such as the owner ’s ‘calling card’), others optional (e.g. a testimonial, or embedding videos or photos). What is known as ‘mash-up,’ i.e. the individual composition of content from different sources on a personal webpage, is another instance of modularity. The spectacle metaphor ties in with Goffman’s distinction between “game” and “spectacle,” i.e. “between a dramatic play or contest or wedding or trial and the social occasion or affair in which these proceedings are encased” (Goffman 1986: 261). On this analogy, a YouTube video could be likened to Goffman’s “game,” while the page hosting the video and the comments to it is the spectacle, i.e. the (virtual) social occasion in which the video is “encased.” Note that this view presupposes a screen-based approach. From a user-based perspective, we can think of web pages in their entirety as ‘game,’ with a ‘spectacle’ constituted on each instance of reception. Thanks to Adam Jaworski for insightful comments on this issue. Even though this table was put together with web 2.0 in mind, the four dimensions bear similarities to typologies of the functions of language generally. Taking Halliday’s “macro-functions” into consideration, my ‘interaction’ resembles the interpersonal, my ‘organization,’ the textual function, while ‘self-presentation’ and ‘spectacle’ carry ideational as well as interpersonal ones. Thanks to Nik Coupland for drawing my attention to these parallels. On language variation and other facets of linguistic heterogeneity in CMC, see Paolillo 1999, Androutsopoulos 2006a, Siebenhaar 2006, Tagliamonte and Denis 2008, Tsiplakou (2009); on the limits of variationism, see Coupland (2001). A YouTube search for that phrase yielded “about 6,270” results in August 2009. The most popular (and apparently the first) of these goes by the title Buffalaxed, a stretch of Bollywood musical with English phonetic subtitles that had over 13 million views during that period. Dialect dubbing is sometimes screened in southern German public television, which might have served as a model to YouTube practices; thanks to Jana Tereick for bringing this to my attention. An antecedent of these practices is the tradition of ‘fansubbing’ in grass-roots cultural productions (discussed by Jenkins 2006: 161–4). This section draws on ideas developed in collaboration with Horst Simon (King’s College London). As of 24/07/2009, this copy (as quoted in sources) has 5,864,682 views, 4 video responses and 14,039 comments. The relevant German tags (with counts as of June 12, 2009) are bairisch (206 items), bayrisch (912) and boarisch (262). The variant bairisch refers specifically to the AustroBavarian group of dialects; bayrisch refers to the region, but de facto to the dialect as well; boarisch is a phonetic spelling indexing a broader dialect. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umbrella_(song). As of 12/06/2009, “An Preller” had 1,362,584 views, 1,235 comments and 2 video responses; the local freestyle had 85,275 views, 163 comments and no video responses.
228 17 18
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23
Jannis Androutsopoulos For all examples, the lyrics are quoted as seen in subtitles, channel information boxes, or comments; all English glosses are translated by the author. I follow Goffman’s understanding of brackets as a process by which social activity “is often marked off from the ongoing flow of surrounding events by a special set of boundary markers or brackets of a conventionalized kind” (Goffman 1986: 251). I use time stamps to refer to screen positions of the YouTube video. Readers may move the video’s time shifter up and down in order to access a specific screen position. These include former German chancellor Kohl, shown on a reference to his corpulent size (2: 29); comic strip figure Sandmännchen, shown on the line “now I’m going to sleep” (3: 44); and a banner on German beer, shown on a line praising its taste (2: 33). These display a wide range of dialect features (see Excerpt 2), but not all dialect features are orthographically represented, and there are a few instances of eye dialect. I have analyzed all 163 comments to Bavarian fast-food freestyle (as of 12/6/2009) and a sample of 500 comments to “An Preller” (approximately 40% of the grand total of comments at the time of sampling). Significantly, “An Preller” is labelled a ‘parody’ by some commentators, even though it lacks an overt element of parody on the semantic or formal plane. Without knowledge of the original, it appears to be a bland parody of local beer culture.
APPENDIX: SOURCES OF EXCERPTS (ALL ACCESSED ON JANUARY 24, 2010) •
• • • •
“Fast food freestyle” or “Mc Donalds rap” is available in different copies. The earliest attested version is “Fast food freestyle at the drive thru” (http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=MFIAGmnWnzE); the one with most views is “Mcdonald’s rap” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sw2OvIgoO8). “Mc Donalds rap (bayerisch)”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= DQP5QShpDR8 “Umbrella” (one of several amateur clips): http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=_iQRXuAo6Eg “Schwappe Productions – An Preller”: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=icmraBAN4ZE “To krasaki tou Tsou”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-wF3pHpEt8
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10 Globalizing the Local: The Case of an Egyptian Superhero Comic THEO VAN LEEUWEN AND USAMA SULEIMAN
Introduction Much of the literature on global media has sought either to critique (American) ‘cultural imperialism,’ or to minimize its impact by arguing that American (and other) global cultural imports are localized and indigenized, so that there is no need to fear increasing cultural and linguistic ‘McDonaldization’ (Ritzer 2000). In our view, the relation between the global and the local is more complex and more diverse. Case studies are needed rather than sweeping generalizations, studies of just what is global and what local in the media of countries and regions with different recent histories – in the northern European countries, which have been so wide open to globalization while at the same time seeking to become exporters of global media themselves; in the ex-communist countries of eastern Europe and the still communist countries that are now engaging in market reform; in those developing countries that are increasingly prosperous – and in those that are not. In the past few years we have published a number of such case studies.1 In our studies of Cosmopolitan magazine, for instance, we looked at “top down localization” (Machin and Van Leeuwen 2003, 2004, 2005a, 2007). This magazine appears in forty-three different languages and is produced by local editors, but remains under tight control from the Hearst Corporation in New York. We translated and analyzed articles on sexuality and women’s careers; we interviewed local editors and readers in ten countries; and we found that the local versions of the magazine followed much the same agenda – all propagate the independent, freedom-loving ‘fun, fearless’ Cosmo woman. The visual style and generic structure of the articles (and of the magazine as a whole) were also near-identical in all the versions we studied (only the Japanese version had a different format). There were nevertheless local differences – for instance in the way editors sought to bend their ‘local’ languages to the informal and tongue-in-cheek style prescribed by the magazine or to resist that informality; or in the solutions suggested in advice columns to what, in essence, was a set of problems of very much the same kind – related to
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‘relationships,’ sex, and work. In another study (Machin and Van Leeuwen 2007: 30ff.) we tracked the history of women’s magazines in the Netherlands, where such magazines were initially local, though influenced by American models, and local versions of American magazines entered the market only much later. This contrasted with our studies of computer war games and comic strips in the Middle East (Machin and Suleiman 2006; Machin and Van Leeuwen 2007: 36ff.), where markets were initially flooded by American products, whereas local products emerged only later, being motivated by political or religious considerations. We also looked at local media produced by less developed countries not – or not only – for local consumption, but also in order for them to have a voice in the wider world: for instance the Vietnam News, an English-language newspaper produced in Vietnam (Van Leeuwen 2006), and the comic strips we will discuss in this paper. In all these studies we focused on specific cases, combining linguistically informed text analysis with interviews and/or focus groups with producers and readers (or, in the case of computer games, players) and with close attention to the relevant social, historical, and political contexts. Just as in these earlier papers we looked at particular computer war games, newspapers, and magazines, we will, in this paper, analyze a particular Egyptian superhero comic. This comic, Zein, is one out of four superhero comics produced by AK Comics in Cairo. It is published in Arabic as well as in English, and the two versions have distinct purposes. The Arab version has a ‘local’ purpose: according to the inside cover of the magazine, it seeks to create a “genuine Middle Eastern superhero,” a role model for young people in the Middle East that will give them “pride and optimism.” The English version has a ‘global’ purpose, seeking to act as a “global ambassador, spreading peace and good will” (again, according to the inside cover of the magazine) – and seeking also, of course, to be globally marketable, especially in the US, and also in the UK (where it is mostly read by learners of Arabic). This is the reverse of the process of localization which we investigated in our studies of Cosmopolitan magazine. The ‘local’ is globalized here, rather than that the global being localized. To realize these different purposes, the English translation is not literal, but an adaptation rather than a translation (see Van Leeuwen 2006). As is often the case in global media, the same visuals are used in the two Arabic and English versions, and only the linguistic elements and the ‘sound effects,’ the onomatopoeic words, are translated. However, these ‘sound effects’ (which include human and animal sounds such as menacing growls and cries of fear or pain as well as non-human sounds such as gun shots, punches, and so on) make extensive use of the synaesthetic potential of typography, and so they introduce a visual element in the translation, as we will discuss below at some length. In this paper we will therefore attempt a detailed analysis of the differences between the Arabic text and its English translation, and we will seek to relate these differences, interpretatively, to the different purposes of the two versions and to the views of the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ that underlie them.2 Supplementary evidence for our interpretations comes from interviews we conducted with comic strip publishers, writers, and artists in Cairo, Beirut, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait.3
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Comic strips are not new to the Middle East. Some of the Egyptian artists we spoke to referred to the scrolls of the Pharaonic era as a distant predecessor. Superheroes have a long history too, as is discussed in Eco’s celebrated essay on Superman (1976). But, whatever its antecedents and whatever has happened to them since antiquity, it is perhaps fair to say that the modern superhero comic strip is an American invention. As Jeremy Tunstall (1977: 17) has said, the most important influence of American imported media has been in “the styles and patterns which most other countries in the world have adopted and copied. This influence includes the very definition of what a newspaper, or a feature film, or a television set is.” This undoubtedly applies to superhero comics as well. America began to export comic strips to the Middle East in the late 1930s. From 1937 on Micky Mouse (‘Miki’) was published, in a fairly literal translation, in the Cairo magazine Samir, which also published Tarzan, The Phantom, Tin Tin, and others, as well as some locally produced content. Superman began publication in 1964, also in Cairo, under license from Diamond Comic Distributors (DC). Later both magazines moved to Beirut, where conditions were a little more liberal, and Superman continued there until 1995. Leila Shaheen Da Cruz, former managing director of the Lebanese Superman from shortly after its inception till 1995, told us that she replaced the Egyptian dialect with high Arabic and employed a teacher of Arabic as translator in order to increase the educational value of the comic. While she found the older Superman comics educationally valuable because of the scientific and technical knowledge they contained, later Superman comics had become too violent, she said, and therefore she often resorted to reprinting old material until DC ordered her to print the newer, more violent material; after this she decided to pull out. Initially, then, Middle Eastern comics were American (and French) imports, translated literally, though with some censorship (such as ensuring that dogs are only seen in the garden and not in the house), but recontextualized as educational publications, modeling ‘proper ’ Arabic and omitting content that was considered too violent or lacking in educational value. Even Zein still includes “Challenge your mind” and “Fun facts” educational features. As the Arab world became oil-rich, locally produced comics emerged. They were produced by highly respected visual artists and serious writers and journalists, who traveled across the Arab world and had a pan-Arabic outlook, and they were published (and censored) by governments as educational material for children. These comics had themes of pan-Arab solidarity, anti-imperialism, antiZionism, and the glory of Arab history and heritage, and they frequently dealt with political–historical themes. The mission statement of Lebanon’s Samer magazine proclaimed itself to be “proud of Arab values,” to “raise the child proud with his homeland and Pan-Arab belonging,” and to “bring the proper Arabic closer to children.” Some Cairo comic strip artists mourn the passing of this period. Golo, a French comic strip artist who has lived and worked in Cairo for thirteen years, resents AK Comics’ commercial approach and contrasts it to that of the revolutionary artists of the 1960s. Many of the comic strips of the earlier period are discussed in Douglas and Malti-Douglas’ excellent book about comics in the Middle East (1994).
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Most recently, two new trends emerged. On the one hand, more and more Islamic comic strips were produced, in the beginning mostly by the religious wings of government ministries, for example by the Egyptian Council of Islamic Affairs, but from the late 1980s onwards also by non-governmental organizations, some with connections to Islamic oppositional groups, for instance the Egyptian Al-Muslim al-Saghîr (‘The Little Muslim’). As Douglas and Malti-Douglas (1994) document, some of these Islamicized comics are quite political. In one, a group of children are heroes in the Intifada, collecting dynamite to be used against the Israelis; in another, morality and patriotism go hand in hand as a little girl finds a box with a letter from a soldier to his mother and takes the box to the mother. At the same time commercial ventures such as AK Comics began to ‘globalize the local’ instead of ‘localizing the global,’ and to translate from Arabic into English instead of doing it the other way round. Started in 2002 by Ayman Kandeel, a graduate of the American University Cairo with an American PhD in economics and finance, the company is global also in the sense that the artwork is outsourced to Brazil’s PopArt Comics Studio. The verbal elements and the sound effects are then added in Cairo, for both the Arabic and the English version, and the color is also adjusted in Cairo, where it is made more ‘Egyptian,’ with dusky desert-like yellows and browns dominating. Another similar venture, Teshkeel Comics, started in 2006 in Kuwait. It partnered with Marvel Comics in order to publish the Marvel Comics titles in Arabic, but it also published its own action comic, The 99, both in English and in Arabic. At Teshkeel, production is even more globalized than at AK Comics, penciling and inking being outsourced to the UK and coloring to the US, while writing is divided between the US and Kuwait. The company’s ‘chief operations officer ’ is Canadian. In short, the situation is complex. The importing and translation of the globally most dominant Marvel and DC superhero comics continue, as does the production of comic strips for purely local consumption – often in the much less realistic, much more cartoon-like style which many in the Middle East prefer. At the same time local products are now recontextualized for global consumption. The story premises of AK Comics’ superhero series reveal some of the adaptations that this process requires. Almost all the plots are set in the future, in a time when the ‘fifty-five-year war ’ in the Middle East has finally come to an end and all the inhabitants live peacefully together. But while, as Eco has observed, in Superman “civil conscience” becomes completely separated from “political conscience” (Eco 1976: 38), in the AK Comics politics has only gone underground. In Jalila, for instance, the action takes place in “the City of All Faiths” (Jerusalem?), where both the “Zios Army” (Zionist?) and the “United Liberation Force” (Palestine Liberation Organization?) fight sinister terrorists with names like Jose Darion (Moshe Dayan?) and Aton (Ariel Sharon?).
Narrative Adaptation Zein is a superhero in the mould of Superman, with hints of Batman and Zorro thrown in (see Figure 10.1). But he is also the last descendant of the Pharaohs. His
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Figure 10.1 Cairo
Zein, the last pharaoh. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4,
parents had put him in a special capsule that allowed him to live forever, and now he is the protector of “the Ancient Land of the River” and “Origin City,” seeking to rebuild the ancient civilization, aided by the “Jewel of the River” (Zein’s equivalent of Superman’s “kryptonite”; AK Comics 2005: 2). Like Superman, Zein takes on the guise of a modest, unassuming citizen. In The Year of the Beast (AK Comics 2005), the story on which we will focus in this chapter, he is a medical assistant, Ashraf Kabil, working in the colonial army hospital with a British doctor, Dr Livingstone, “observing his enemies and learning from them.” There is a mysterious monster about, an “Adamic Beast,” as the Arabic has it (“the Beast” in the English translation), whose victims have strange wounds for which there is no easy medical explanation. After another attack by this Beast has been reported, Doctor Livingstone cursorily dismisses the possibility of a mythical beast and burns the report. There must be a scientific explanation, he says. But, while he is not in the lab, Ashraf examines the victims’ bodies and suspects an “animal like no other animal,” as the Arabic version describes it. Suddenly an alarm sounds. Zein quickly dons his superhero outfit and attacks the Beast, being helped by the British soldiers. With a gunshot wound in his arm, the Beast retreats. Afterwards Ashraf finds Livingstone in the hospital with a bandaged arm. He is suspicious now: “There was uneasiness in the air, but it had not come to the surface, because we did not want to express it. On the face a smile, but inside suspicion”4 (p. 19, Arabic version; in English this becomes: “There was a strange tension in the air. Though our conscious minds did not want to admit it, something was subliminally wrong. Call it a sneaking suspicion”):
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In the next scene, Ashraf and Dr Livingstone, his arm still in a sling, attend a reception by the colonial Secretary-General. Ashraf watches Livingstone leave the room, ostensibly to go to the toilet. He follows him and finds a syringe. Quickly he transforms himself into Zein and is only just in time to save the SecretaryGeneral from the Beast’s deadly grip by injecting it with the syringe, which “overloads the creature’s tissues” and “reaches toxic levels,” causing the Beast to flee. Ashraf now confronts Livingstone, who confesses that he is the Beast. He had “experimented with cell generation” to help the victims of war, but, after injecting himself with the serum he had developed, had turned into a monster. What is, at first sight, peculiar about this story is that Zein, the noble superhero who seeks to revive the glory of Pharaonic Egypt, protects the British soldiers and the Secretary-General, while Dr Livingstone, the evil Beast, attacks the colonizers, his own people. This at least is what unfolds in the pictures, and the question is now whether, and if so how, the verbal text puts this in perspective, or, perhaps, in two different perspectives, one for local and one for global consumption. Comparing the Arabic and the English introductions, some changes became immediately obvious: ‘colonizers’ become ‘imperialists from the continent beyond our own’; ‘the land of my ancestors’ becomes ‘the sacred homeland of my forefathers’; ‘their largest colonies’ become ‘their most cherished of imperial possessions.’ These are relatively small changes, but there is a difference between being a colony and being part of an empire. The latter, at least in principle, leaves open the possibility of equality between the parts of the empire and of a pax romana, a “peaceful coexistence,” while the former always involves subjugation and exploitation. Yet later the “imperialists” become “occupiers,” whose “burdens we bore.” The English translation also adds new material. The “imperialists” become “a people as different in way of life as the animal must have been to primitive man,” which (though very obliquely) suggests that the invaders were less civilized than the Egyptians, but they also become “a permanent and familiar fixture,” with which Egyptians can “peacefully coexist” and from which they gain “valuable insights.” In other words, there is an ambivalence in the English text which does not exist in the original Arabic. The British are imperialists as well as occupiers, motivated by greed and less civilized, yet also advanced. In the Arabic version, on the other hand, they are simply “colonizers” and “the enemy.” The translation also adds some ‘local color ’ (the camels). Such touches of local color for global consumption can be found in other Zein stories as well. In The Game, for instance, a character exclaims: “Praise Allah! Could this be a treasure?!! Is it finally my lucky day out here in this dry barren land?” – and later on an armed robber shouts: “Everybody complies or they end up as fertilizer for my date palms” (AK Comics 2004). In table 10.1 below we show a literal translation of the Arabic text of the introduction to The Year of the Beast (AK Comics 2005) side by side with the English translation produced by AK Comics: On the next two pages, the relationship between Dr Livingstone and Ashraf/ Zein is introduced – a relationship which, in this story, personifies the relation between colonizer and colonized. The Arabic version uses footnotes to introduce
Table 10.1
Introducing The Year of the Beast
Arabic
English
In the second half of the nineteenth century, colonizers from the continent beyond our own began to occupy the land of my ancestors.
Through the second half of the nineteenth century, Imperialists from the continent beyond our own, a people as different in way of life as the animal must have been to primitive man, began to occupy the sacred homeland of my forefathers.
Their major motivation was greed … and control of the canal that would open trade to the largest colonies in the East.
Their major motivation was greed … and control of the canal that would open trade routes to their most cherished of imperial possessions in the East.
We are in the year 1889, the year when many frightening events took place that no-one understood. This was the year of the appearance of the Adamic Beast.
The year was 1889, the year the Beast struck.
The colonizers stayed for a long time in our land … and their presence was imposed on us night and day.
The Imperialists were firmly entrenched in our land … a fixture as permanent and familiar as the camels which bore our burdens.
People resisted and rejected their presence. And I worked in a medical department of the Army barracks to observe them closely, and convinced of my father ’s wisdom, “Keep your friends close so they can know you and your enemies closer, so you can know them.”
We bore theirs … Though many resented their presence I decided early on that peaceful coexistence was the best course of action … causing the least friction while learning what valuable insights I could from our occupiers. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” as my father would say.
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Introducing Dr Livingstone
Arabic
English
I spoke with Dr Livingstone about politics, philosophy and medicine. He is a knowledgeable doctor and he was interested when I told him about ancient Pharaonic medicine and revealed some of its secrets to him.
Dr Livingstone was considered a pioneer in his field and a pillar of imperial society. During his time here we had established mutual respect and rapport […] more than just a professional courtesy. We shared beliefs and ideas, debated philosophy and politics. From Dr Livingstone I learned the special knowledge of Western medicine. And from me, he discovered the secrets of our culture’s traditional practice. We were colleagues, yes, but more than that, we were friends.
the two formally, in the one case “Dr Livingstone, the Head of the Medical Department of the Occupying Army,” in the other “Dr Ashraf Kabil is Zein’s name in this story.” In the English version, ‘Ashraf Kabil’ is not revealed as Zein until much later, when, during his first fight with the Beast, he muses: “I was a doctor, yes. But that was just a façade. Truly I am son of Greatest Pharaoh, the last of my bloodline,” and Dr Livingstone is introduced as follows. The “secrets of “ancient Pharaonic medicine” here become “the secrets of our culture’s traditional medicine,” and Livingstone’s knowledgeability becomes “the special knowledge of Western medicine.” Although both versions leave it open to what extent Dr Livingstone’s ‘serum,’ with its healing as well as its destructive powers, is of Egyptian origin or a product of western science, in the English version the balance shifts towards the latter. Dr Livingstone also becomes more than just “knowledgeable”: he is “a pioneer in his field and a pillar of imperial society,” and the relationship between him and Ashraf becomes one of “mutual respect” and friendship, in which Ashraf learns “special knowledge” from the good doctor. Ashraf ’s friendly attitude to the colonizers also extends to the British soldiers, as shown, for instance, in the following dialogue, which appears only in the English version: Soldier: Zein: Soldier:
We’d be dead if it hadn’t been for you. Who are you? A friend … Well, friend, it went that way.
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In the Arabic version, Zein helps the soldiers not out of friendship, but out of compassion: “The screams and entreaties of the soldiers compelled me to protect them. Despite the fact that they were occupying my country I felt sorry for them”
Clearly, in the ‘local’ version, the West can remain an enemy, protected, if necessary, by a noble local hero, while in the ‘global’ version West and East co-exist peacefully, with the East ‘learning’ from the West. How are these ambivalences resolved in the two versions? In table 10.3 below we reproduce the final scene in full. In the Arabic version, the western colonizers’ intentions to “help” the colonized are unmasked and lead to self-destruction. Dr Livingstone has to pay the price and Zein shows no compassion, even though the doctor begs his forgiveness. His only question is why Livingstone kept repeating the experiment. At most we can say that Livingstone is recognized as a worthy opponent, an opponent who “is able to face the truth.” The English version first of all needs to make explicit what needs no explanation in the Arabic version: the exploitative nature of colonization and the ultimate duplicity of the colonial missionaries and good doctors. It also makes much more of the doctor ’s good work, expanding the story of how he cured a “native boy” (in Arabic he is just a “little boy”) and allowing him to retain his conscience to the end. Even his “madness,” “subconsciously,” had the good intention of avenging “your people.” And in the end he is willing to face the consequences of his deeds and to “give himself up.” Zein acknowledges all this: “You’ve always meant well doctor,” and in the end he “doesn’t know what to say.”
Translating Narrative and Dialogue In a sense, the pictures are also a translation – the translation, or rather adaptation, from a verbal script to a visual story. As we have no access to the script of The Year of the Beast, we cannot study it in detail here, but it is clear that mistakes have occurred. The ‘visual language’ of Brazil clearly has not provided the artists with adequate cognitive schemata for drawing camels, as the camels in the Zein stories look more like llamas than like camels (this is particularly evident in The Game). They also seem unaware of the significance of various aspects of dress and grooming as markers of identity. Ashraf ’s fez is a mixture of Middle Eastern and Chinese headwear, and at the colonial Secretary-General’s gala reception he wears the costume of a hotel doorman. Given that the story is set in the late nineteenth century, it is inappropriate that the hero should not have a moustache (which would have been shameful for Arab men of the period) while Dr Livingstone has one. However, as we are focusing here on differences between the Arabic and English versions, we will leave these interesting issues for another occasion.
Table 10.3
Final scene of The Year of the Beast
Arabic
English
“I beg you, all I want is for you to listen to me one last time. I came here motivated by noble intentions. I wanted to help humanity and not just my nation’s army, but your people too. I beg you, my friend.
“Oh! I came here with such high ideals, Ashraf! I thought that the work we were doing would advance not only the empire, but your people too!” “You’ve always meant well, doctor.” “Ah! Meaning well and doing well are two entirely different things. We invaded your land, Ashraf! We exploited your resources and oppressed your people! We rationalized that our own needs were superior to your own! Those actions have more meaning than a lifetime of good intentions.
I have been working with the army for a long time. I have seen a lot of wars and victims. The screams of the victims used to shake me up. I stood there unable to help them. I began doing some research experiments with a new treatment, I took some genes from an Egyptian lizard that renews its limbs. I experimented on people, I began with a little boy who had an atrophied arm. I injected him with the genetic serum. Immediately his arm began to develop quickly.
I felt helpless, like I should be doing more. As a doctor of science I wanted to heal the people who were brutalized by this occupation. Somehow I felt responsible. So I forged ahead with my research. I sampled materials from countless sources, experimenting on cell regeneration wit the indigenous spiny-tailed lizards. They possess the uncanny ability to regenerate their limb once amputated. I isolated a chemical from their very unique biology, and was able to synthesize it in the lab. It was the equivalent of a growth hormone, or so I thought. The first human trial was on a native boy whose arm had been severed by an imperial shell. There was little I could do surgically for him, so I made an ethical decision, risk his life through conventional means, or … take a chance on the serum. I took the chance, Ashraf and it worked! The boy’s arm regenerated literally before my eyes!!!
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Table 10.3
(Cont’d)
Arabic
English
I began to think, what if I used the medicine on someone in good health? And in a moment of madness I injected myself, There was an amazing transformation. I became bigger, broader and stronger, until I became an uncompassionate beast.
Imagine the serum’s reaction to an intact body … I introduced it to my own bloodstream. My cells replicated insanely, as if they couldn’t grown fast enough. My body was transforming into something more than human. In each trial I lost consciousness, but the monster within me emerged with the ferocity you saw today, as if my subconscious rage adopted such a shape that I might make a change … that I might avenge your people.
“When you were transformed into this violent beast for the first time, why did you keep repeating it?”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“I was behaving unconsciously. I was blinded by the madness and the control of the beast inside me over my thinking soundly. I was his prisoner. I would do what he wanted without wanting to. Take these, my friend. They are my experimental notes and the formula. Destroy them or keep them. Do whatever you want with them.
“Don’t say anything. I’ve betrayed your trust, Ashraf. I truly am a Monster. Here, here, take them … burn them … Do what you want with them. Just take them! I’ve caused enough destruction already. “Where are you going, Dr Livingstone”
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(Cont’d)
Arabic
English
Do you think this is enough? I haven’t told you the rest of the story. Because you injected me with the excess dose, my circulation will keep increasing, and I will explode in a few hours. I am going to drink from the same cup that I made others drink from. Goodbye my friend, I beg you to forgive me.”
“To give myself up … I have to pay for my crimes, faithful friend …”
A lot of people know the truth but only a few are able to face it.
The doctor might have become the deadly giant of his inner mind, but in the end, he succumbed to the greatest giant of them all […] his own conscience …
Three kinds of visual containers frame the verbal text: narrative boxes, which take the form of faded documents with frayed edges (see Figure 10.2); speech balloons; and thought bubbles. It is immediately obvious that the Arabic and English versions distribute content differently across these different types of container, as for instance on page 7, where most of the Arabic thought bubbles become narrative boxes in the English text (see table 10.4). The English also adds colloquialisms such as “Hmmm” and emotive terms such as “ghastly.” Lebanese comic strip artist Jad Khoury told us that he would like to abolish the use of high Arabic and imitate the liveliness of American comic strip dialogue by using local dialects in speech balloons. However, the English version also uses formal language, especially in the narrative boxes, for instance to introduce medical ‘technicality’ and to give the boxes the flavor of an ‘objective’ historical document, a detached and truthful ‘report.’
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Figure 10.2
Narrative box. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo
Narrative boxes Narrative boxes are used a great deal more in the English version, where there are forty-nine of them, as opposed to nineteen in the Arabic version. There is also more text in the English boxes: 4.5 lines on average – whereas the Arabic boxes contain on average 3 lines. It is primarily through these boxes that the English version adds the explanations which the Arabic version takes for granted, the kind of ‘orientalisms’ we have already mentioned (camels, date palms, and so on), and the ‘export’ version of the history of colonialism.
Thought bubbles (see tables 10.5 and 10.6) Thought bubbles, on the other hand, are more frequent in the Arabic version – there are twenty-two of them, as opposed to fourteen in the English text. Occasionally they also contain the thoughts of characters other than Zein, which is not the case in the English version. Although some reveal reactions of the characters (“My God, it is worse than I imagined”; “Unbelievable!”), most of them function as ‘suspense devices,’ throwing seeds of suspicion (“Where is this man going?”) or uncertainty (“The emergency alarm?!”), or prompting readers to anticipate further events on the basis of what they have seen (“What? A syringe?!”). Sometimes they combine the two functions. “Hmm … most peculiar,” for instance, is at once a reaction and a clue which tells readers that there is a mystery attached to the wounds of the victims which will keep them in suspense until it is solved.
Dialogue The English version contains more speech balloon dialogue than the Arabic version (113, as opposed to 74 in the Arabic version), but most of the additional
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Table 10.4 Distribution of content into different types of container in the Arabic and in the (original) English version Frame
Arabic
English
1
Thought bubble My God, it is worse than I imagined
Narrative box The Officer was right …
2
Thought bubble These wounds are deep and the internal organs are ruptured
Narrative box The bodies were a ghastly sight.
3
Thought bubble It is the work of some wild animal, but not of any known animal
Thought bubble Hmmm … most peculiar
4
Thought bubble It appears as though what has befallen these victims is some sort of explosion, yet there is no gunpowder residue and there are no burns on their bodies
Narrative boxes It appeared as if they were torn apart by some tremendous blunt force. I instantly ruled out animal attack, due to the absence of puncture wounds from fangs or claw! And for the life of me I could not locate any powder burns from explosive devices, though it seemed only such a force could have produced the trauma
dialogue does not contain much narrative information and serves merely to add realism, to have people speak where you might expect them to ‘in reality’ – as in this scene, which in the Arabic version has no dialogue at all: Soldier: Eh-?! Egyptian worker: Look! Do you see it?!
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Table 10.5
Thought bubbles, example 1
English
I don’t know what you’re up to, Dr Livingstone, but your actions lately have been out of character
Arabic
Where is this man going? Indeed, all his actions are frightening
Table 10.6
Thought bubbles, example 2
English
Wha-?! A syringe?! In the General’s Estate?!
Arabic
What is this? The same syringe we use in the hospital? What is inside?
Table 10.7
Dialogue, example 1
English Arabic
Table 10.8
Ungh!! Oh how terrible
Dialogue, example 2
English Arabic
Table 10.9
Noooooo!! Help me!! Salvation!
Dialogue, example 3
English Arabic
Soldier: Other soldier: Third soldier:
Got him! Indeed, I got him.
In the name of the Queen, what is that –?! Ohhhh!! Agggggh!!!
In the Arabic version this kind of dialogue is mostly restricted to the action scenes, and even there it is a good deal more formal than in the English version, as the following examples show (tables 10.7–10.10).
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Dialogue, example 4 Please … Gasp! I beg you, please help me
Figure 10.3 Graphic prosody substitutes (English version). From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo
Figure 10.4 Graphic prosody substitutes (Arabic version). From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo
Both the Arabic and the English version use graphic devices to indicate prosodic elements such as intonation, loudness, and voice quality. Dialogue balloons may have jagged edges (for loudness), wavy edges (for pain), red edges (for fear), and letters may vary in size or color (see Figures 10.3 and 10.4). Different as the two versions may be in the use of language, in the use of these graphic devices they are not very different. However, the typical comic strip use of bold and cursive font for emphasis (“THE OFFICER WAS RIGHT … THE BODIES WERE
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A GHASTLY SIGHT!”) does not have an equivalent in the Arabic speech balloons.
Multi-modality Non-human ‘sound effect’ words, such as ‘clack clack’ for horse’s hooves, ‘bang bang’ for guns, and so on are relatively rare in Zein, though they occur somewhat more in the English text (sixteen times) than in the Arabic text (eleven times), where they are mainly confined to the attacks of the Beast. It has long been a commonplace in linguistic literature on onomatopoeia (see Ullman 1982: 82 ff.) that the same meanings have somewhat different onomatopoeic signifiers in different languages – which demonstrates that even relatively ‘motivated’ signs still have a significant element of arbitrariness. A gun goes ‘bang’ or ‘crack’ in English, but ‘pum’ or ‘paf ’ in Spanish. Dogs go ‘bow-wow’ in English, ‘gnaf-gnaf ’ in French, ‘guau-guau’ in Spanish, and ‘won-won’ in Japanese. In Zein, however, some of the Arabic ‘sound effect’ words are anglicisms transposed into Arabic script (“scratch,” “crack”), and other onomatopoeic words, too, are quite similar in the two languages. Onomatopoeic words signifying speed, for instance, have an extended vowel ending in ‘-sh’ in both languages, for example “Whoosh!” in English and “Woooooosh!” in Arabic. Of course, examples can be found in which the onomatopoeic words are quite different in the two languages; thus a kick of the foot is “Takh” in English and “Deeb!” in Arabic. But this may stem, not so much from the difference between the two phonological systems (as ‘Takh’ would be quite possible in Arabic), but from the fact that sound effects are complex, so that different onomatopoeic signifiers may be motivated by different aspects of the sound they stand for (or of the way in which that sound is produced): in the one case, the sharpness of the foot that kicks (“Takh”) – in the other, the softness of the flesh on which it makes its impact (“Deeb”); in the one case, the speed of the thump (“Fooooosh”), in the other, the impact it makes (“Pooow”). The following table (10.11) shows some comparisons between the Arabic original and the English translation. The amount of ‘sound effects’ produced by humans – threatening roars of the Beast, cries of fear or pain, and so on – is more or less the same in the two versions. We counted thirty in English and twenty-nine in Arabic. Yet there are some subtle differences. Vocalizations of puzzlement (“Hmmm”) or surprise (“Eh”) are absent from the Arabic original, and the English Beast more often wails of pain than the Arab Beast. When the his claw grips the throat of a soldier in the Arabic version, the Beast utters a muffled “Ummmm.” In English, this becomes a loud “Aghghgh!” All these ‘sound effects’ are synaesthetically enhanced through color and typographic expression. The temporal unfolding of a word may be shown by a gradual increase in the size of the letters and a widening of the space between them (see Figures 10.5 and 10.6); loudness may be suggested through size, through high color saturation, and through the use of salient colors such as red and yellow;
Globalizing the Local: An Egyptian Superhero Comic Table 10.11 version
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Onomatopoeic sounds in the Arabic and in the (original) English
Sound effect
English
Arabic
Kick from Zein’s foot
Takh! Dip! Scratch! Krack! Bam bam! Whoosh! Flousssh! Thwank! Crash!
Deeb! Dush! Scratch! Crash! Bam! Bam! Woooooosh! Slaaaaaaash! Tashak! Craaaack! Traaaakh!
Trakh! Pooow!
Trakh! Foooosh!
Beast’s claw Thump Gunshots Speed of Beast’s arm Gunshot hitting Beast’s arm Structures breaking as Beast crashes through them (?) Thump from Zein
Table 10.12 The sounds of menace and pain in the Arabic and in the (original) English version Sound
English
Arabic
The Beast’s menacing growls The Beast’s cry as it is hit by a bullet The Beast in pain The Beast when it is injected with the serum The Beast as it flees after having been injected with the serum Soldiers as the Beast grabs them by the throat Soldiers as the Beast punches them
Graaaowr!!! Graaamph!!! Graaaaaaaa!!!
Graaaaaaaa!!! Graaooww!!!
Grmmph! Arghghgh?!
Grmmmph! Grrrrrr!
Orghghghhhhh!!!!
Graaaaaaaa!!!
Aghghgh!
Ummmm
Aieee!!
Ayyyy!
intonation, through rising, falling, and undulating baselines (see Figures 10.7 and 10.8) – not unlike those used by the intonation theorist Bolinger (1972) in his representations of intonation contours. The illustrations show that the graphic representation of intonation, loudness, and temporal structure does not differ much in the two versions. Both make use of the international language of comic strips developed in the 1930s by American
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Figure 10.5 Temporal structure of exclamations in English. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo
Figure 10.6 Temporal structure of exclamations in Arabic. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo
Figure 10.7 Graphic representation of intonation and loudness in English. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo
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Figure 10.8 Graphic representation of intonation and loudness in Arabic. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo
comic strip artists and well described by the French semiotician René Lindekens, who compiled a lexicon of 120 onomatopées that demonstrates that French comics, too, contain many anglicisms (‘crunch,’ ‘crackle,’ ‘knock knock,’ ‘ouch,’ ‘sniff,’ to mention just a few), as well as many of the onomatopées we encountered in Zein – for instance ‘Arrgrr ’ for the sound of a ‘savage beast,’ ‘tak’ for ‘dry impact,’ and ‘woossh’ for the “explosive departure of a missile” (Lindekens 1976: 173–6). But there are subtle differences. The typography emphasizes fear, pain, and agony more strongly in the English version, humanizing the Beast to some extent, while in the Arabic version the Beast is unambiguously evil to the very end. The threatening growl of the Beast (‘Graaaaowr!!’) is large, colored in yellow with red edges (hence loud and intense), and has a rise–fall intonation contour in both versions. But, while in Arabic the Beast’s howl of pain looks much the same as his threatening roar (Figure 10.10), in English the typography changes: as the Beast flees after having been injected with the ‘serum,’ his cry is blue and decreases in size (Figure 10.9).
Conclusion For a time, AK Comics seemed to get a foothold in the US market, selling some 5,000 copies of each issue. But the reactions of critics and readers in American web magazines such as Comic Bulletin and Comic World News were critical: A strong concept is underlined by mediocre writing, the art is stiff with a dull ink line. Unfortunately the creators have chosen the path of least resistance and served up what amounts to another brain-dead superhero book that’s not even visually appealing. (Watson 2009)
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Figure 10.9 The graphic representation of agony in English. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo
Figure 10.10 The graphic representation of agony in Arabic. From AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo
And their critique was not restricted to technical issues. Above all, they lambasted Zein for the very thing which AK Comics had hoped would sell it, its global orientation: Lacking details to distinguish the environment of Egypt and Algeria from Metropolis and Gotham, the heroes and their adventures come off as near clones of their American counterparts. (Manning 2008) I am greatly disappointed that the titles do not reflect the diversity of the Middle Eastern people […] There is not enough suggestion of local culture […] It does not feel genuine. […] These books were a great letdown. I’m convinced we do not need more superhero comics in general, but if we have to have more, then they need to blow Marvel and DC out of the water, or at least be able to provide a new twist to the superhero genre. If AK Comics were to embrace its cultural heritage more fully,
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they might have a chance. As it is now, they’re poised to get dumped in the quarter bins with Malibu, Defiant, Tekno and a dozen other wanna-bees. (Watson 2008)
The same critique played out in Cairo as well. Golo, a French comic strip artist living in Cairo, told us of a workshop he co-organized at Cairo’s American University. The sixteen participants were encouraged to develop a local story, the traditional story of Saif bin Zi Yazin, a Yemeni prince, and to make it “contemporary” while “keeping the local spirit.” Yet, he reported, the participants wanted to master the American style. They “only wanted to imitate,” and they “could not see their surroundings.” Clearly, in the matter of superhero comics, the Middle East in supposed to remain ‘local.’ Trying to become global is crossing a line that should not be crossed. Not long after we started this research, AK Comics announced they were giving up comic strips and moving into graphic novels. It will not have surprised the comic strip artists we interviewed. Jad Khoury, a comic strip artist from Beirut, saw no way out of this dilemma. Defeated nations cannot produce superheroes, he said, this requires a nation on the offensive. In defeated nations, people turn back to heritage and history. We will leave it to our readers to consider whether this is an all-too pessimistic view, but it seems clear that some locals are more local than other and experience global pressure to ‘act local,’ to stick to local heritage, and to desist from aspiring to more.
NOTES 1
The research for all these publications, including the present one, formed part of the research programme Language and Global Communication, conducted at Cardiff University’s Centre for Language and Communication Research, and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. 2 Literal translations of the Arabic version were provided by Kais Al-Momani and Nour Dados. 3 All in all, thirty-eight interviews were conducted by Usama Suleiman in May–June 2006. 4 Literal translations of the Arab text will be italicized throughout.
REFERENCES AK Comics (2004) The Game, Zein 2, Cairo: AK Comics. AK Comics (2005) The Year of the Beast, Zein 4, Cairo: AK Comics. Bolinger, D. (1972) Intonation. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Douglas, A. and Malti-Douglas, F. (1994) Arab Comic Strips: Politics of an Emerging Mass Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Eco, U. (1976) Le Mythe de Superman. Communications 24: 24–40.
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Lindekens, R. (1976) Analyse structurale de la Stripsody de Cathy Berberian. Communications 24: 140–76. Machin, D. (2004) Building the world’s visual language: The increasing global importance of image banks. Visual Communications 3: 316–36. Machin, D., and Suleiman, U. (2006) Arab and American computer war games: The influence of a global technology on discourse. Critical Discourse Studies 3(1): 1–22. Machin, D., and Van Leeuwen, T. (2003) Global schemas and local discourses in Cosmopolitan. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4): 493–513. Machin, D., and Van Leeuwen, T. (2004) Global media: Generic hom*ogeneity and discursive diversity. Continuum 18(1): 99–120. Machin, D., and Van Leeuwen, T. (2005a) Language style and lifestyle: The case of a global magazine. Media, Culture and Society 27(4): 577–600. Machin, D., and Van Leeuwen, T. (2005b) Computer games as political discourse:
The case of Blackhawk Down. Journal of Language and Politics 4: 119–41. Machin, D., and Van Leeuwen, T. (2007) Global Media Discourse: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge. Manning, S. (2008) Special AK: AK Comics and heroes of the Middle East. Available at: http://www.comicsbulletin.com/ sopabox/114895569441667.htm (accessed on January 20, 2010). Ritzer, G. (2000) The McDonaldization of Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Tunstall, J. (1977) The Media Are American. London: Constable. Ullman, S. (1982) Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell. Van Leeuwen, T. (2006) Translation, adaptation, globalization: The Vietnam news. Journalism 7(2): 217–37. Watson, Rich (2009) Review spotlight: AK Comics. Available at: http://www. comicworldnews.com/cgi-bin/index. cgi?column=chick (accessed on January 29, 2010).
11
Language and the Globalizing Habitus of Tourism: Toward a Sociolinguistics of Fleeting Relationships ADAM JAWORSKI AND CRISPIN THURLOW
In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. Hardt and Negri 2000: xiii We start this chapter from the premise that sociolinguistics is on the move. This is partly in response to the reorderings of contemporary social life under global capitalism, partly in keeping with the reconceptualizing of key ideas in social theory – both of which are exemplified in the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri quoted above. We are living and researching at a time when power is no longer so neatly centered or easily tracked (see also Deleuze and Guattari 2000; Harvey 2006) and when people’s lives and identities are no longer so neatly bounded or easily located (cf. also Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007; Bauman 2000). As scholars of language-in-society, we are therefore necessarily obliged to review the bread-and-butter material of our work. Specifically, we need to rethink – and, in some cases, to ditch altogether – some of the central tropes of our field such as ‘community,’ ‘authenticity,’ ‘identity’ – and indeed ‘language’ and ‘society’ themselves. In this regard, Jan Blommaert (2005), Nikolas Coupland (2007), and Ben Rampton (2009) – among others – have written about the need for a sociolinguistics or discourse analysis that is better able to account for the hybrid, the trans-local, the spectacular, the idiosyncratic, the creative, and the multi-modal (on this last point, see Kress and van Leeuwen 2001). Following the lead of Richard
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Bauman and Charles Briggs (1990), Blommaert, Coupland, and Rampton make a special point of promoting the importance nowadays of attending to processes of entextualization and recontentextualization, as well as to situated, local practices and to the linguistic reflexivity and metapragmatic awareness of language users (compare Jaworski, Coupland and Galasin´ ski 2004). Tourism, we think, offers itself as an ideal – and surprisingly overlooked – context for studying precisely the kinds of theoretical issues and social processes Blommaert, Coupland, Rampton, Hardt, Negri, and others address. In its pursuit and endless production of difference, tourism is a past master at recontextualization, lifting the everyday into the realm of the fantastical, transforming the banal into the exotic, and converting use-value into exchange-value. Tourism, however, not only demands a rethinking of certain sociolinguistic truisms; it also helps to moderate any tendency to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Not all of our old notions are defunct, just as contemporary life continues to be shaped by many of the disciplining, colonizing, determining habits of the past (Hardt and Negri 2000; Deleuze and Guattari 2000). We have shown this to be the case in our own work, for example with regards the tenacious influence of nationality and national identity in tourism discourse (Thurlow and Jaworski 2003; Jaworski and Thurlow 2004; for a broader discussion, see also Heller 2008). In the current chapter we want to explore this old–new tension a little further, with particular reference to some of the ways in which we see language and other semiotic material to be commonly moved and exchanged in tourism. (It is by no means only the English language that is on the move under global capitalism, but also a wide range of genres, discourses, styles, and so on.) We start by reconsidering the general significance of tourism for sociolinguistics, and then we look at two fundamental principles shaping language in tourism: its commodification and its dislocation under global capitalism. We turn next to several examples of what we take to be common language exchanges in tourism, which we illustrate with data collected as part of our larger programme of work on language and tourism as a global cultural industry (see Jaworski and Pritchard 2005; Thurlow and Jaworski 2010a; Jaworski, Thurlow, and Ylänne, in preparation). We see these habituating, normative practices as instantiating, together, an often playful performance of contact which, in turn, establishes a globalizing habitus, both for tourists and for their hosts.1
Tourism under/as Global Capitalism Whether one thinks of people privileged enough to tour or people who are ‘toured,’ there is no one whose life remains unaffected by tourism – the single largest international trade in the world and a hallmark of globalization (Appadurai 1996; Bauman 1998). Indeed, social theorists argue that tourism not only reflects socioeconomic relations but is actually instrumental in organizing them (see Lash and Urry 1994). Nor is tourism simply an economic activity. A large body of work in anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies has produced detailed analyses of the social and cultural practices by which tourism is realized, demonstrating
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its role in establishing ideologies of difference and relations of inequality. This view is consistent with Hardt and Negri’s (2000) observation that, in the world order organized by global capitalism, economic power and social power have come to coincide increasingly. As a once quintessentially modernist project of ‘organized’ or industrial capitalism (Lash and Urry 1994), tourism continues unabated as a powerful agent of, and channel for, capital. In the age of “liquid modernity,” argues Zygmunt Bauman (in Franklin 2003), tourism is both a vast movement of specific people (the tourists) and a metaphor for much of contemporary (Western) life: the “tourist syndrome,” which is characterized by temporariness, a looseness of attachment to places and people, and an endless “grazing” (or consumption) of sensations and interactions. Although tourism is not something Hardt and Negri address, it is surely one of the “national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule” (ibid., p. xii) by which sovereignty and power are networked and sustained under global capitalism. In many respects tourism is the ideal industry for global capitalism, because it is highly flexible, deeply semiotic, and constantly reflexive (compare Urry 2002). Tourism exemplifies a semiotically embedded service because, like advertising and marketing, a key part of what is actually produced and consumed in tourism is the semiotic context of the service. Not only does tourism involve face-to-face (or more mediated) forms of visitor–host interaction, like in many other types of service encounters, but the ultimate goods purchased by tourists during their travels are images, lifestyles, memories, and their narrative enactments. Material goods such as souvenirs and other artefacts, not unlike snippets of language formulae brought back from foreign trips, are themselves (re-)packaged and promoted as useful props in the enactment of these performances, and they serve as an extension of the tourist gaze – the socially organized, systematized and ‘disciplining’ ways in which tourism is structured and learned (Urry 2002; after Foucault 1976). Especially given this global or, more accurately, globalizing context, it seems obvious that sociolinguists and discourse analysts would want to engage with tourism and mobility more broadly. It is here that the encounter between host and tourist (and between tourist and tourist) manifests itself as one key site articulating the “human consequences” (Bauman 1998) of globalization, with all its concomitant privileges and inequalities. Indeed, tourism discourse reveals nicely what we call ‘banal globalization,’ the everyday textual realization and interactional enactment of global capitalism (Thurlow and Jaworski 2010a; see Billig 1995 and Beck 2002). If the functioning of Empire is dependent on the agentic subjectivities of its ‘citizens,’ as Hardt and Negri propose, then tourists, with their desire to consume movement, places, bodies, images, and information (Urry 2007) are the perfect exponents of Empire and the perfect agents for its assertion and reproduction. And it is in the singular interpersonal, intercultural exchanges between the touring and the toured that we find the most forceful manifestations of the internalized, global order. This is where language and communication become both commodities and the vehicle for their exchange. It is also where the traditional places of language are dislocated.
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Language as Commodity The expansion of tourism as a dominant cultural industry is one of the major areas of economic activity under globalization which have highlighted the significance of language commodification in the study of shifting identities, interpersonal relations, and group structures. The political economy of language has long been recognized (Bourdieu 1991; Irvine 1989; Tan and Rubdy 2008), and so have the general processes of commodification and appropriation of language in the new economic order of flexible accumulation and of time–space compression (Harvey 1989; Lash and Urry 1994; Cameron 2000). For example, in her work on bilingual areas of francophone Canada, Heller (2003; see also her chapter in the present volume and Budach, Roy, and Heller 2003) demonstrates how the collapse of traditional industries (cod-fishing, mining, logging, and so on) in the second half of the twentieth century and their substitution with new, information and servicebased industries (most notably, call centers and tourism), have led to the commodification of language (understood as a measurable skill) and identity (especially in relation to other forms of cultural practice such as dance and music in tourism). In these domains of economic practice based on contact between different linguistic markets through advances in communication technology (call centers) or mobility (tourism), linguistic and other symbolic resources become highly marketable commodities. Deregulation of national economies and welfare provision, for example privatization and outsourcing of large segments of education, healthcare, penitentiary services, or warfare (a process arguably being halted or even reversed as witnessed by the nationalization of significant parts of the banking system in the global economic downturn begun in 2008) has led to a shifting of national and regional points of reference among ethnolinguistic majority and minority groups globally. Often re-orientating to tourism as their main economic activity, these groups engender a new sense of community and authenticity, invoke new place-identities predicated on the (re)invention of tradition, heritage, and heavy policing of language boundaries (as in francophone Canada and Catalonia, for example, see Heller 2003; Pujolar, 2006; Pujolar and Heller, in press). However, due to the new conditions for its commodification, language and other forms of cultural practice can now be more easily detached from ‘identity,’ used as strategic styling resources (Bell 2009; Cameron 2000; Coupland 2007; Thurlow and Jaworski 2006), and marketed and traded as metonyms of places to be consumed by tourists (Urry 2007). Of course, in Bourdieu’s (1991) terms, all linguistic exchanges are also economic exchanges; however, under the new economic conditions of globalization, existing language forms and configurations (for example bilingualism) are put to new uses, gain new values, and become objects of intense scrutiny as well as vehicles and sites of ideological struggle, contestation, legitimation, and authentication of ethnic, national, and other subject positions. In the context of tourism this is especially clear in the proliferation of theme parks, open-air museums, festivals, and spectacles laying out displays of ethnicity, nationality, culture, and urban or
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industrial heritage through the (re-)invented narratives of group origins, history, and present-day lives (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998; Bruner 2005; Coupland, Garrett, and Bishop, 2005; Heller 2008, 2010). These are also the most obvious areas of tourism-driven activity, where language and other semiotic codes become vehicles of explicit staging (Edensor 2001) or of “high performance” (Coupland 2007); in them, gathered (rather than simply co-present) participants overtly orient themselves to the formal properties of the code, through metapragmatic commentary and evaluation, translation, and labelling of linguistic items. Such performances are heavily marked by claims to ownership, belonging, and authenticity; or, conversely, by pragmatic instrumentalism, playfulness, and appropriation; and, not infrequently, by a mixture of all these positions, dynamically and dialectically negotiated in the process of staged, ritualized enactments and interactions. The role of language in identity formation is crucial, then, but not as straightforward and clear-cut as might be assumed – there is no one-to-one correspondence between linguistic units and ethnic, social, or cultural formations (Le Page and Tabouret-Keller 1985; for discussion, see Coupland 2006). Sociolinguistic items, be they language codes or subtle phonological variants, may be strategically deployed as indexes of specific identities, but their projection and interpretations are always filtered through a plethora of objective and subjective dimensions of self- and other-perception, uptake, interpretive frames and communicative goals (Coupland 2006), and the political economy of difference (Heller 2008). For example, as observed by Rampton (1995), traditional conceptions of what it is to be a native speaker break down when instrumental language use is separated from the symbolic value of language as a means of manifesting and asserting one’s ethnic or national allegiances or loyalties, or when language inheritance is separated from language allegiance and from the degree of linguistic expertise. As David Block also notes in the context of the discourses surrounding language shift within specific communities, “what ultimately galvanizes people around a language is probably not a question of either/or: either the more emotive cultural/ national identification with the language or the more practical instrumental uses of language” (Block 2008: 201; and see his chapter in this volume). Likewise, in the context of tourism, we see speakers deploying ‘old’ linguistic resources in novel forms, styling self and other in new, often surprising ways, playing with social norms and establishing new regimes of truth, and unexpectedly conflating instrumental and emotive uses of language, or shifting between use-value and exchange-value. All of these sociolinguistic processes have a profound effect on the reordering of space, creating new senses of place, be it in private, public, commercial, or media contexts. Blommaert, Collins, and Slembrouck (2005) develop the idea of space as organized along different hierarchically ordered scales of social structures (local, national, transnational, global, ethnic, political, and so on). These spaces are filled with various sorts of material and symbolic attributes and constitute an active, contextualizing (Gumperz 1982; Duranti and Goodwin 1992) semiotic source of indexical meaning; while people move between differently ordered spaces, their linguistic repertoires give rise to new indexicalities. The
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movement through space of linguistic and communicative resources affects the value of the linguistic skills and repertoires of speakers such that, for example, a bilingual migrant from eastern to western Europe (that is, from the ‘periphery’ to one of the ‘centers’ of the continent) who cannot communicate in one of the ‘host’ languages may be described as having ‘no language.’ (As some of our examples below demonstrate, similar, if more subtle and superficially innocuous ‘play’ with linguistic repertoires is present in tourist–host interactions.) In consequence, Blommaert and colleagues (2005: 203) argue that: [e]ntering such spaces involves the imposition of the sets of norms and rules as well as the invoking of potentially meaningful relations between one scale and another (e.g., the local versus the national or the global). This has effect on (a)
what people can or cannot do (it legitimizes some forms of behavior while disqualifying or constraining other forms); (b) the value and function of their sociolinguistic repertoires; (c) their identities, both self-constructed (inhabited) and ascribed by others.
Certainly space is also modified by people’s semiotic behavior (Jaworski and Thurlow 2010), and linguistic signs will also bear indexical values involving scalar relations (Blommaert and colleagues link these ideas with Goffman 1974 and his frame analysis). For example shifts in accent, topic, or communicative event may invoke (or index) different scales: local, national, private, public, and so on. In sum, people have varying language abilities – repertoires and skills with languages – but […] the function and value of those repertoires and skills can change as the space of language contact changes. (Blommaert et al. 2005: 211, original emphasis)
It is with these general remarks in mind that we turn to present some of our data from the domain of tourism, in which borrowing, appropriation, and re-valuing of language are part and parcel of face-to-face interactions. In doing so we want to tease out some of the key sociolinguistic processes typical of the fleeting relationships that characterize the language exchanges of those people who are privileged enough to criss-cross the planet by choice – those who ordinarily get to come home at the end of their travels.
Turning to Tourism: Language on the Move One of the inevitable consequences of tourism is that language in the shape of codes, discourses, styles, genres, voices, or repertoires participates in the global flows of tourists and of their hosts – those people who are the recipients and/or targets of the stream of tourists. The language that accompanies, facilitates, or results in these flows is also ‘on the move,’ as people bring into new spaces their
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ways of speaking, singing (see Excerpt 1 below), and writing, alongside their clothes, accessories (again, see Excerpt 1), and bodies, which are unavoidably recontextualized and resemioticized in the process and often breed scorn and resentment from hosts and other tourists (Boissevain 1996; Jaworski and Thurlow 2009) – notwithstanding numerous rewarding, enriching, and hospitable encounters between friendly locals and courteous tourists. To stay with somewhat more problematic instances of tourists’ insertions of semiotic repertoires and skills into their destinations, let us quote just one example – random but illustrative – of a metapragmatic comment on (from a rather middle-class perspective) non-normative behavior in a fleeting encounter between British tourists on an apparently up-market, family-oriented camping holiday. After the first day of blissful rural idyll, just as advertised in the camp’s brochure, the unsuspecting author could not imagine anything going ‘wrong.’ But, as it turned out, something did – and, according to the report, in no small measure: Excerpt 1
Inflatable penis and that godawful Umber-ella song (Source: Stephen Bleach, Don’t believe the hype. The Sunday Times Travel, May 3, 2009, p. 4)
They’d booked out two of the tents to a hen party: the first giveaway was the huge inflatable penis being carried across the site, which certainly wasn’t in the brochure. Nice enough girls, but tent walls did nothing to muffle the racket of that godawful Umber-ella song at 11.30 p.m. As the above example demonstrates, when people travel, their semiotic worlds clash in uncontrollable ways. Silence and quietude rather than loud singing are commonly associated with ‘up-market’ or ‘luxury’ holidays (Thurlow and Jaworski 2010b; see also Clifford 1997: 233), and huge inflatable toys are certainly common signifiers of the presence of children on the beach, or even on a camping site – as long as they are not penis-shaped. Excerpt 1 makes it plain that forced or accidental contact does not always lead to understanding, so, rather than thinking of globalization generally and of tourism in particular as introducing markedly or necessarily new ways of speaking and writing into people’s repertoires, we prefer to focus our attention on how the ‘meaning’ or symbolic and economic value of what is said (or sung or written) changes (or not) when tourists (or any other travelers, including migrants, business people, politicians, or academics) move around the globe (see Blommaert 2003, 2005, 2009), or when space is re-scaled and re-imagined, say, from ‘national’ to ‘local’/’regional’ (as has been the case in parts of francophone Ontario; see Heller 2003, 2010). As we suggested above, tourist–host interactions embody core globalizing processes. It is in communication with each other, in every instant of contact, that hosts and tourists negotiate the nature of their experience, the meanings of culture and place, as well as their own relationships and identities. It is here, too, that many of the meanings of globalization are realized. Shaped by a mythology of contact (the encounter with the exotic Other) and by an ideology of leisure, pleasure, and entertainment, the kind of linguistic exchanges that take place between
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tourists and hosts are also often very playful. And, to be sure, the fun usually starts at home, as tourists are first schooled (or disciplined) into a global tourist habitus, learning the dispositions and ways of touring. In the excerpts which follow, however, we focus on the actual moment of contact and on some of the exchanges of linguistic material which, performatively, establish the host–tourist encounter and, in large part, the raison d’être of tourism (at least among the more ‘ambitious’ tourists), alongside other tourist pursuits such as authenticity, adventure, self-discovery, education (the Grand Tour) – or plain, unadulterated pleasure (MacCannell 1999; Löfgren 1999; McCabe 2005).
The tourist linguascape Like any other landscape, the tourist landscape is a way of seeing (Cosgrove 1984; Favero 2007). Expressed through the powerful metaphor of the tourist gaze, tourist consumption is organized around the recognition and interpretation of various signs – symbols, icons, and metonyms of place – emplaced and displayed for tourists, noticed, objectified, appropriated, and discarded by them (see Culler 1981; Urry 2002). These signs are frequently linguistic. In search of picture postcard views, breathtaking landscapes and cityscapes, exotic peoples and artefacts, the tourist also consumes textualized histories, mythologies, facts, and information. Embedded in tour guides’ narratives of place, for example, are jokes, personal anecdotes, and trivia of all sorts. While wandering round foreign cities, tourists gaze with more or less understanding at linguistic inscriptions. At times, the linguistic inscription itself becomes the object of tourist gaze and consumption. In Excerpt 2, which comes from a guided tour in the Maori village of Whakarewarewa, Rotorua, New Zealand, the guide stops with a group of tourists in front of a sign explaining the name of the village. This is one of many such stops, which include accounts of local customs, traditions, way of life, nature, and material culture. The guide stands next to the sign, facing a small group of tourists (Figure 11.1) and occasionally turning toward the sign and pointing to various parts of the name of the village as he speaks (Figure 11.2). Excerpt 2
Whakarewarewa. From Adam’s fieldwork, April 2003
G = Guide A = Audience, a small group of tourists 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
g but firstly folk can you all say Whaka? a (different voices) Whaka g Whaka yeah that is the name of this valley (.) and the village (.) and that’s been the name for a long long time the common name [drop out] true name folks (.) is a lot longer (1.5) (Guide points to name on the sign with tip of his umbrella) Te Whakarewarewa-tanga-ote-ope-taua-a-Wahiao
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‘can you all say Whaka?’ (Extract 2, line 1); April 2003. Photo © A. Jaworski
Figure 11.2 ‘Te Whakarewarewa-tanga-o-te-ope-taua-a-Wahiao’ (Extract 2, lines 12–13); April 2003. Photo © A. Jaworski
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
a (laughter) g very very long name, isn’t it folks? (.) Whaka W-H-AK-A (.) (uses hands to frame the first five letters) is the shortened version (.) but folks the long version (.) Te Whakarewarewa-tanga-o-te-ope-taua-a-Wahiao (.) Wahiao the great chief (.) Ope-taua war party (.) Te Whakarewarewa-tanga the uprising of the war party of Wahiao (.) and uh folks (.) how you get that name actually comes about by the actions of a haka and the surrounding activities so you saw the haka on stage? a yes= g =three or four men on there just imagine three or four hundred? doing a haka folks (.) when kicking their feet up and making all the dust rise around the place (.)
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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
an:d the dust rising was likened to the steam all over the valley (.) now out of the dust rising the men would leap as high as they could (.) and the men leaping all over the place folks was likened (.) to the steam (.) oh sorry to the geysers shooting out of the ground (.) up to two hundred years ago thirty-six geysers in this valley so that would’ve been [drop out] so folks by the action of that haka (.) the rising dust (.) jumping men (.) likened to the rising steam (.) geysers shooting out (.) and all the action over the valley that is how you get the name the uprising war party of Wahiao (.) shortened to Te Whakarewarewa (.) shortened even more folks to W-H-A-K-A (.) when we shorten it to this version we try not to pronounce the W-H as F (2.0) (smiles and looks across the crowd) for obvious reasons [ a (laughter) g we don’t want anyone getting the wrong ideas (.) especially (unclear) so um that’s why we just say (unclear) anyway let’s go and have a look at these geysers folks
39 40 41 42 43
What is offered for tourist consumption here is the place name of the destination itself. This act of consumption is couched in terms of a multi-modal and interactive performance. The place name is displayed and described on a written sign, it is repeatedly produced by the guide (lines 7–8, 12–13, 15, 35), and the tourists are invited to say it as well (lines 1–2), albeit in a shortened version. The significance of the name lies partly in its length. The tourists respond to the guide’s fast rendition of the name in lines 7–8 with laughter. No doubt the source of humor is the ‘unimaginable’ complexity of the name, which the guide confirms with his rhetorical question ‘very, very long name, isn’t it folks’ in line 10. Long place names are not infrequently turned into tourist attractions in other parts of the world, especially if they happen to belong to lesser spoken languages and thus they help to ‘exoticize’ the destination. Figure 11.3 reproduces a postcard from North Wales with a photograph of “The railway station with the longest name in Great Britain”: ‘Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllanty siliogogogoch.’ (This name was apparently fabricated in the nineteenth century precisely in order to draw attention to the village – an act of pure “tourism reflexivity” in itself: Urry 2002). The Welsh place name on the station’s sign is clearly framed as a tourist attraction by appearing in white block letters against the red background (which is rather unusual for other railway signs in Britain). A guide to the name’s ‘pronunciation’ appears underneath, and a separate sign to the left provides the ‘translation’ of its constituent parts. The iconizing of the place name is completed through the act of recontextualizing that name on the postcard – one out of many that can be bought in the area. Returning to Excerpt 2, the guide explains the meaning of the name of the village by weaving into it the military past of Maori people, the actions of the ritu-
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Figure 11.3 Postcard from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllanty siliogogogoch. John Hinde (UK) Ltd. Photo © C. Underhill
alistic dance of Maori men (the haka), and evocative scenery – the rising steam of the geysers (lines 12–36). This long section, which introduces profound imagery based on Maori heroic history, old heritage, and unique landscape, is delivered in a rather solemn, even poetic tone. The text in lines 31–3, in particular, is marked by slower tempo, level intonation throughout, and pauses reminiscent of poetry recitation. There is also frequent lexical and phonological repetition introducing internal rhyme and creating coherence – for example “dust rise” (l. 23), “dust rising” (ll. 24, 25), “the rising dust” (l. 31), “rising steam” (l. 32), “uprising” (ll. 15, 34); “men would leap” (l. 25), “men leaping” (l. 26), “jumping men” (l. 31); and the repetition of “likened” (ll. 24, 27, 32). These are formal features of “public oral poetry” (Tannen 1989: 82; see Bauman 2001), used in conversational discourse to communicate ideas in a vivid and moving manner. Clearly the guide engages here in more than a bit of metalinguistic translation and explanation; he puts on a poetic performance of place to create an aesthetically pleasing and emotionally involving performance. The use of visual repetition, or visual rhyming, to create a verse-like effect can also be found in our postcard example (Figure 11.3). The four key linguistic elements seen on the postcard – the place name, its ‘pronunciation,’ the
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‘translation,’ and the English gloss at the bottom of the card – are roughly equal in length and can be seen as four verses in a stanza. The composition of the postcard, with some visual, phonological, and semantic repetition, aspires then to the status of a poetic text rather than being simply the image of a sign emplaced at a railway station. Considering Excerpt 2 again, in line 36 the key (Hymes 1974) of the guide’s speech changes. After a short pause, the guide says in fast tempo, “when we shorten it to this version we try not to pronounce the W-H as F,” and then he pauses for about two seconds, looking at the tourists with a broad smile. However, it seems to take a while for the tourists to realize that the guide has now shifted from a serious to a playful key, jokingly suggesting a possible obscene version of the name ‘Whaka.’ He even finds himself in need of filling up the ensuing pause with the comment “for obvious reasons” (l. 38), by which time the tourists finally get the joke and respond with some laughter. The funniness of the joke is not the main issue here. What we find more interesting is that the guide shifts so freely and rapidly from the lofty and poetic key to a ribald, frivolous one. Although the two performances seemingly occupy opposite sides of the rhetorical spectrum, they are both unmistakably deliberate, scripted with the aim of creating a degree of spectacle, drama, and audience participation. And in both examples referred to in this section, the source and object of the tourist gaze is the place name of the tourist destination, used not as an index of place but as part of the place’s linguascape. As we shall see in the next excerpt, this commodification and strategic–playful deployment of language is prevalent in a number of other types of exchange.
Tourist small talk For all its mythologies and ideologies, visiting a tourist destination is, at core, a business transaction – or series of transactions – in which tourists consume (or graze on: see Bauman 2001) performances of local scenery, heritage, customs, stories, and so on, alongside the purchases of even more tangible goods and services such as meals, souvenirs, and postcards. Not unlike in other types of service encounters, business transactions in tourism are replete with instances of small talk, or relationally oriented acts of verbal sociability (see J. Coupland 2000). We explore some relational aspects of specifically ‘selling and buying’ discourse elsewhere (see Jaworski et al. in preparation). Here we focus on just one instance of phatic talk (Malinowski 1923) taking place between a tour guide and tourists visiting the PheZulu ‘cultural village’ in the province of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In Excerpt 3, a group of tourists gather at a ‘cooking hut,’ where a demonstration of traditional Zulu food preparation is about to take place. The tourists and the guide (Patrick) are sitting in a circle and, while waiting for the demonstration to start, Patrick feels compelled to fill the time by initiating a phatic sequence with the tourists. This is a typical example of a group of relative strangers gathered temporarily in close proximity in a small, confined space – a ‘with,’ to use
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Goffman’s terms (1971) – where substantial stretches of time are filled with talk aimed at avoiding silence (McCarthy 2000 refers to such participants as “each others’ captive audience”). Relying on the repertoire of stock formulaic phrases typically used in small talk sequences, the guide settles on the question “Where are you from?” – found in a wide range of similar contexts in our data, as well as in many other conversational encounters (see Myers 2006). Excerpt 3
The cooking hut – “Where are you from?” (The personnel listed below is common to Excerpts 3, 5, and 6 which all derive from the same episode in the cooking hut). From Crispin’s fieldwork, April 2003
Patrick = Guide TZW = ‘Traditional Zulu Woman’ PT1 = Tourist from Poland (mother) PT2 = Tourist from Poland (son) PT3 = Tourist from Poland (father) ET1 = Tourist from England (father, husband) ET2 = Tourist from England (son) ET3 = Tourist from England (son) ET4 = Tourist from England (wife, mother) HT = Tourist from Hilcrest (grandmother of ET5) ET5 = Tourist from England (grandson of HT) ZT1 = Tourist from KwaZulu (1, female) ZT2 = Tourist from KwaZulu (2, female) ZT3 = Tourist from KwaZulu (3, female) CT = Tourist from Cape Town (female) RT = Researcher/tourist (male) Patrick is sitting at the entrance to the hut while the tourists enter and settle down. As the cooking demonstration is getting delayed due to one of the performers’ absence, he has just initiated a series of getting-to-know-you questions amidst general laughter. TZW, visibly uninterested in what’s going on around her, sits among the tourists waiting for her colleague to come in and start the show. 1
patrick
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(to PT1 and PT2) niphumaphi? phuma kuyiphi icountry? where are you from? from which country? (2) (looks quizzically) (translating) where have you come from? ah Poland ah: now (points at ET1) wena? and you? UK England OK (points at ET1’s sons) nina bafana? what about you boys? all of us
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UK (.) nalomfazi? UK? and this woman? [is she from the UK?] England as well OK umfazi wkhe this is his woman we are all together wena ma? (.) niqhamukapi? and you, mother? where do you come from? er Hilcrest [=a town nearby] ah (.) just around the corner ja (general laughter) yena (indicating her grandson) yena England (1) yes he comes he comes from [England] five minutes from here driving (general laughter) (laughing) you see you lucky (looking at PT4) wena ughamukaphi mfowethu? where do you come from brother? from Poland ah: OK wena? and you? KwaZulu (laughs loudly and with others laughing too) ah khona la (turning to ZT2) nawe futhi? just here and you too? ja Maritzburg yes Maritzburg [‘Pietermaritzburg’] OK eMugungundlovu? [Zulu name for Pietermaritzburg] eMugungundlovu ja wean? (.) nawe futhi eMugungundlovu? and you? are you also from eMugungundlovu? ja u: gogo ke yena a:nd the granny here? from Cape Town ah so uyapraata Afrikaans you speak Afrikaans?
Although the working language of the guide is English, he unexpectedly starts the conversation in Excerpt 3 by asking two of the Polish tourists the ‘Where are you from?’ question in Zulu. This clearly baffles PT1 (PT2 looks rather worried throughout the entire episode; see Excerpt 5, line 9, below), and her quizzical facial expression and a two-second silence in response to Patrick’s question elicit a translation from ZT1 (“where have you come from?” in l. 3). Visibly relieved, PT1 responds “Poland” (l. 4), and this is preceded by the discourse marker “ah,” which indicates a change in the state of knowledge (see Heritage 1984; Schiffrin 1987). Setting the tone for the tourists’ self-identification through their country of origin, Patrick moves on to the next person (ET1), who infers (correctly) that Patrick’s turn in line 5 is a request for the same information from him. This pattern of codeswitched interrogation of the tourists continues throughout, until Patrick addresses
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tourists from South Africa, who speak Zulu partially (HT) or as their first language (ZT1, ZT2, ZT3). The self-identification of these tourists as ‘locals’ creates much laughter and further banter, which partly suggests the non-normativity of the local residents’ visiting tourist attractions in ‘their ’ area. Interestingly, Patrick ignores RT (Crispin), to whom he had talked to before entering the cooking hut; he already knows that Crispin is British but had lived in South Africa for twelve years. What is interesting for us here, however, is not the nature of the ostensibly sociable talk initiated by Patrick to kill the time. As we said earlier, small talk generally and “Where are you from?” questions specifically are unremarkable in the context of tourist–host encounters – albeit the latter is often organized around a common repertoire of topics (“Is this your first time here?”; “How are you liking it here?”; “Where else have you been?”). What is remarkable and noteworthy is Patrick’s use of Zulu with the tourists whom he knew (or whom he should expect) would not to be able to understand him. We suggest that, as a sequence outside of the transactional part of Patrick’s performance in the cooking hut (which is to explain the meal preparation), his code-switching to Zulu is a playful, if somewhat teasing act of language (dis)play. Because of its relational rather than instrumental focus, the “Where are you from?” question in Zulu does not carry much propositional weight. However, it visibly unsettles PT1, who may have felt marginalized by Patrick’s use of Zulu, having her entire linguistic repertoire disqualified (see Blommaert et al. 2005, quoted above). PT1 is positioned almost as an intruder toward the local space, which requires at least a rudimentary knowledge of Zulu to claim legitimacy. She is then ‘rescued’ from sociolinguistic oblivion by ZT1 and responds in English – the lingua franca of international guides and tourists in many destinations – redefining the cooking hut as part of a global, transnational tourist playground. The fact that Patrick may expect some of the tourists not to understand the propositional contents and pragmatic force of his questioning in Zulu is compounded by his apparently impertinent – or at least cheeky – forms of address and reference used throughout: “nalomfazi” (“this woman”) in line 9, “umfazi wkhe” (“this is his woman”) in line 11, and “gogo” (“granny”) in line 30. Such usage of (or even insult in) a local language by guides/performers in addressing foreign tourists is not uncommon (see for instance Senft 1999). It appears to be an effective strategy for disempowering tourists who may be perceived as disproportionally wealthy, privileged, and disrespectful to their hosts (Abbink 2000), while being relatively harmless if the tourists, through their linguistic ignorance, remain oblivious to such verbal attacks (see, again, Senft quoted above; also Löfgren 1999: 124–8 on ‘meeting the locals’). What makes Patrick’s behavior even more ‘daring’ is that some of his addressees are fluent Zulu speakers. Just the same, the sequence in Excerpt 3 demonstrates that social banter and verbal play in the context of tourism appear to assume positions of familiarity (teasing, mild insults) normally reserved for intimates, for whom the safety of their close relationship overrides the threatening nature of such verbal attacks (such baneter and play constitute positive politeness acts according to Brown and Levinson 1987).
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Image not available in the electronic edition
Figure 11.4 Jaworski
Hongi photographic studio, Tamaki Maori Village; April 2003. Photo © A.
In part, these exchanges merely add to the linguascape; they are, however, also instances of quintessential tourist talk – banal, familiar exchanges which can be easily transposed and exotically reframed for the ‘safe adventure’ of tourism. Another such example is the ‘greeting game.’
Tourist greetings Jaworski (2009) suggests that, viewed sociolinguistically, the speech act of the greeting has become one of the most typical resources for the enactment and mediation of the tourist experience. Functioning in the liminal space of tourism, greetings are recontextualized and commodified in ways that violate their ‘normal’ felicity conditions (Duranti 1997). In New Zealand, for example, one of the key resources for packaging Maori heritage for tourists has been the commodification of the Maori greeting, the hongi, which involves two people pressing their noses against one another. In Tamaki Maori Village in Rotorua, tourists can have a picture of themselves taken in a makeshift photographic studio while they do a hongi with an actor against the photographic backdrop of an idyllic rural scenery and a wooden carved totem pole (Figure 11.4). Images of Maori people performing a hongi can be bought on postcards and posters in numerous souvenir shops across New Zealand. The blog NZ Tramping explains hongi as follows: Hongi is a traditional Maori greeting, which literally means ‘to share breath.’ Hongi is done by pressing one’s nose to the other person when they meet each other. It is believed that when the two noses meet, people exchange their breath and the visitor becomes one of the local people (tangata whenua).
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The beginning of this ceremony is believed to be in one of Maori legends, in which gods made a woman from earth, and god Tane (in translation from Maori Tane means Male) breathed life into her through the nostrils. She then sneezed and came to life. Her name was Hineahuone, which means ‘earth formed woman.’ After the visitor is greeted, and for the remainder of his stay, he is obliged to share in all the responsibilities of the hosts. What a beautiful and tender greeting! It says a lot about the whole Maori nation. (http://www.nztramping.com/new-zealand-history/hongi-in-new-zealand%E2% 80%99s-traditions/; last accessed September 12, 2009; used by kind permission of Steve Brave; )
However, despite what the tourist guides and websites may suggest, it is virtually impossible for a tourist to perform a hongi with a Maori person other than in the context of a paid performance. Our next example is in fact an instance of a commodified greeting exchange (involving a hongi) between a Maori guide/coach driver and an American tourist en route for a night’s entertainment at Tamaki Maori Village at Rotorua, New Zealand. The tourists are collected by several coaches from hotels in the area. Once all the tourists are on board their designated bus (waka, ‘boat,’ ‘vessel’), the guide/driver welcomes everyone and announces that the tourists will not only experience Maori song, dance, food, and so on, but will also ‘become’ Maori for the night. Each busload of tourists is branded a ‘tribe’ (iwi), with a ‘chief ’ (rangatira) ‘elected’ from among the tourists (the chief seems usually to end up being white, male, American), and the driver offers to ‘teach’ the tourists some Maori language – typically just one phrase: the greeting formula Kia Ora, ‘Hello/ Good luck/ Good health/ Thank you’ (see Auger 2002), which may be emically more significant than the category ‘greeting’ usually implies, although we surmise that more international tourists will not easily access all these possible meanings of the phrase in the short span of the night’s performances. Kia Ora is, then, to be repeated in unison by the tourists following a prompting from the guides and other performers. The ‘chiefs’ become privileged participants in representing their ‘tribes’ in the Village Welcome, ‘gift’ presentation, various speeches throughout the night, and so on. One such privilege includes the performance of a hongi with the guide/ driver in front of all the other tourists on the bus. The following excerpt presents one sequence of this kind of performance aboard the bus, before its departure for Tamaki Maori Village, some twelve kilometres away from town. Excerpt 4
The Maori Greeting
G = Guide (Driver) K = Kenny, the ‘chief ’ tourist T = Unidentified tourists 1 2 3
g
for you people from different tribes (.) this is how we the Maori people will usually greet each other (.) grab my right hand Kenny (.) (off mike) stand up stand up
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t g t g
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(Kenny stands; he towers over the driver) (light laughter) (1) now go down on the step (Kenny goes one step down) (laughter) (2) ok we- (.) put your left hand on my shoulder Kenny (1) ok (.) now what we do, we press our noses together twice (.) and then we say kia ora ok (.) nice and gentle (.) don’t go (thrusts his head forward quickly towards Kenny’s face; Kenny tilts his head backwards in a reflex) (light laughter) (2) and whatever you do: (.) don’t kiss me. [ (inaudible speech to Guide) (continued laughter) (2) (Guide and Kenny perform a hongi, cameras flash) kia ora: didn’t he do well (.) how-bout a big round= (applause 4 sec.; loud female voice) yeeeahh =of applause for Kenny (.) my people interpret the hongi like this when the two noses come together (.) it’s the sharing of common breath creating a legion of friendship (1) as a point of interest for you, we the Maori tribe here in Te Arawa are familiar to all this area of Rotorua and Bay of Plenty (.) we are the only Maori tribe in New Zealand that hongi twice (.) all other tribes do it once (.) that’s our trade mark. (.) we’re now gonna pull out rangatira our big kahuna, the big chief Ken here to the entrance way (.) I’ll make the official welcome the challenge you’re gonna have a wonderful evening (.) kia ora (loud voices) kia ora
Although the hongi is framed as a typical Maori greeting (lines 1–2) and as a way of establishing “a legion of friendship” (line 22) between two people, the guide’s display and ‘lesson’ in Maori etiquette has an undercurrent of cultural subversion and resistance to dominant ideologies of tourism. The guide does not adopt unambiguously the stance of a friendly, deferential, and subservient host. Under the guise of humor – reminiscent of genres where mock-aggression and mild humiliation are part of the participation ritual (for example TV quiz-shows) – he positions Kenny, the archetypal powerful and wealthy westerner about to be exposed to “Pre-European lifestyle experience of customs and traditions” (http://www. maoriculture.co.nz/Maori%20Village/Home), as a relatively powerless and ignorant ‘foreigner.’ In order to ‘teach’ Kenny the hongi ritual, the guide instructs him to adopt the appropriate body posture. When Kenny comes to the front of the coach and faces the guide, the guide unceremoniously orders Kenny to go one step down, to reduce the difference in their height – having their faces at the same level is more amenable to hongi and symbolically maintains a proxemic equilibrium between the two men. The driver uses unmitigated directives, “stand up stand up” (l. 3), “now go down on the step” (l. 6), reminiscent of an adult
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disciplining a child, and his ‘bossing’ Kenny around elicits outbursts of laughter from the onlookers on the coach. In lines 10–11 the guide teases Kenny, implying that he is likely to hongi inappropriately: “nice and gentle (.) don’t go (thrusts his head forward …).” The guide’s hyperbolic mock head-butt is clearly an exaggeration for comic effect, as he cannot realistically expect Kenny to act in such a foolish manner. The guide also seems to frighten Kenny intentionally with his head gesture, but only to elicit a reaction of slight panic from Kenny and more laughter from the other tourists. Another ridiculing turn at Kenny’s expense is the guide’s teasing, heteronormative joke “and whatever you do:? don’t kiss me” (line 14). The guide then proceeds with the hongi (l. 17), and positions Kenny again as a child-like figure who deserves a round of applause as a reward for his performance (another game show-like feature). The guide then appears to be in total control of the situation – a knowledgeable expert as well as a mocking director–choreographer of the scene, blatantly ‘othering’ Kenny by adopting the key of teasing and ridicule. Indeed the guide’s control over this intercultural exchange is also manifested in his artful management of the theme of tourists ‘crossing’ into Maori, which he achieves through his constant pronominal ingrouping/outgrouping; visitors are reminded that they (“you people”) are outsiders who merely play at being Maori (“we”; see ll. 1–2 ). Excerpt 5 demonstrates another example of the ‘tourist greeting,’ this time turning tourists into performers for other tourists and their guide (Edensor 2000, 2001). At the end of the “Where are you from?” sequence in Excerpt 3, the PheZulu group is threatened by another silence, and one of the tourists from South Africa (as if assuming the role of ‘host’) suggests that some of the other tourists show their foreignness through the verbal display of their native language.
Excerpt 5 1
ct
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The cooking hut – “Say hello in Polish” (this excerpt starts a few turns after the end of Excerpt 3). they (indicating Polish family) should say hello in Po:lish [ in Po:lish that’s just what I’m looking for ja (laugh) (to Polish mother and son) how do you say hello in Polish? (2) (quietly to PT2) no powiedz (.) pan sie˛ (unclear) chce . z ebys´ powiedział czes´c´ po polsku powiedz czes´c´= well say it (.) the gentleman (unclear) wants you to say hello in Polish say hello (turns towards his mother and hides his face) =how do you say hello in your language?= (to Patrick, softly) =czes´c´ hello
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sorry? czes´c´ (looks at other tourists, smiles) I can’t say it (general laughter) nothing ((for)) easy (general laughter) czes´c´ (to RT) can you say it? czes´c´ czes´c´ czes´c´ (surprised tone) have you heard it before? [ czes´c´ I have a friend who is Polish I know dzie˛kuje˛ and that’s it thank you (nods and smiles, outburst of general laughter)
In an instance of ‘reverse crossing,’ PT1 is made to demonstrate one of the Polish greeting formulae to the guide and the other tourists. This situation is a mirror image of that in Excerpt 4, where the guide was the one ‘teaching’ the tourists how to use local greetings. The initial move made by CT toward ethnotyping the Polish tourists as ‘Polish’ is premised on her request to hear a sample of the Polish language, and a greeting formula is chosen as a token Polish expression. The request appears to be unexpected and does not trigger immediate compliance. There is a pause of two seconds (l. 6), followed by PT1’s request for her son (PT2) to say czes´c´ (‘hello’) in Polish (ll. 7–8), rather than a spontaneous offer to demonstrate it herself. CT’s and KT2’s eliciting the Polish greeting seems like a childish game – it sounds more like requesting a small, pre-literate child at a family gathering to recite a poem, spell his or her name, or ‘count to 100’ than like requesting expert advice on the use of a second language (which is not known to CT and KT2). The embarrassed boy struggles not to have to perform (l. 9), and finally his mother utters the first, soft instance of ‘czes´c´’ (l. 11). Patrick does not quite grasp the pronunciation of the word and asks for a repetition (l. 12), but even after he hears it again (l. 13) he still appears confused and uncertain as to how to pronounce the greeting. Two participants try to rescue Patrick from his embarrassment. The father (PT3) declares that the Polish greeting is rather hard to pronounce (l. 16), possibly in the hope of closing off further attempts for anyone to say it, and this is followed by RT’s demonstration of his ability to do so (l. 18). This triggers four more repetitions of ‘czes´c´’ – by RT, HT, and PT1. Most of the ‘universal’ criteria for identifying greetings (Duranti 1997) are violated here (see Jaworski 2009). The greeting crops up as part of an ongoing (though faltering) interaction, rather than in the liminal moment of the conversational opening; the perceptual field among the participants is already established, rather than in need of being established; there is no adjacency pair format (the greeting
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is displayed by various participants rather than inviting a response in kind); the form and content are not predictable to non-Polish language speakers (except for RT’s snippets), which diminishes the ‘safety’ of its formulaicity; and so on. Thus the use of the greeting formula czes´c´ does not constitute a greeting in terms of Duranti’s criteria – a fact seemingly recognized and acted on through PT2’s refusal to take part in the ‘show.’ In the fleeting context of tourism, the recontextualized greeting – or its performance, representation, learning, repetition, and metapragmatic commentary – may constitute the focal and exclusive orientation of talk, as is the case in Excerpts 4 and 5: a form of (dis-)play through which national and ethnic identities are elicited, enacted, and appropriated.
Tourist teasing The light-hearted tenor of touristic encounters has been clearly manifested in Excerpts 2–5 above. Humor is, unsurprisingly, a common element of tourist texts and interactions, frequently with insulting overtones (see Pritchard and Morgan 2005) due to the preoccupation of tourism with hedonistc pleasure, unrestrained consumption, and the oxymorinic promise of ‘safe adventures.’ Excerpt 6 is the last episode in our PheZulu cooking hut sequence, leading up to the cooking demonstration everyone has gathered to watch. Excerpt 6 The cooking hut: “You don’t cook in UK do you?” (following on directly from Excerpt 5) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
patrick (laughs) OK well so (.) I’m- (3) I forgot my name (everyone laughs) I’m stupid (3) (leans out of the entrance way; to a group outside) come here guys tell me my name? rt (laughs) could be Patrick but- (laughs) patrick ja: ja: I’m Patrick er (.) Angigquize Qakala (= ‘Mr EasyGo-Lucky’; pronounced with two loud clicks) is my African name and (looks at his watch) this is now the kitchen hut where you ladies (points at some of the female tourists) do all the cooking because only ladies must cook men just relax (1.0) (turns to ET1) you don’t cook in UK do you? et1 er (looking at other tourists) yeh I do (laughter from others) patrick hum (.) your wife’s a lazy cook= [ ABEZE (to people outside) let them come et1 =yeh yeh I enjoy cooking= patrick =but you don’t have to= [ patrick ABEZE (even louder) et1 =no I do have to (.) (wife laughs loudly) she’ll (pointing to his wife and looking at everyone else with a smile) she’ll
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patrick
tell me off if I don’t (laughs) (2.0) (playfully) shame (pointing at ET4) you are naughty (2.0) don’t let your husband cook (general laughter)
When the ‘Polish greeting’ exchange fizzles out in fits of laughter, Patrick decides to start the core part of the event, focusing on the cooking demonstration. He begins by introducing himself, but after a three-second pause in line 1 he quips that he has forgotten his name. Whether he really forgot his name or not, his faltering start becomes a pretext for creating a humorous situation at his own expense when he positions himself as the butt of his joke (see “I’m stupid,” l. 2). Once RT (who has met him already) reminds the guide that his name is “Patrick,” Patrick recovers from his lapse and declares that he also has an African name, “Angigquize Qakala,” which he over-pronounces with two loud clicks for ‘qu’ and ‘q’ (l. 5). In fact, Angigquize Qakala appears to be a nickname or a pseudonym, a type of self-naming behavior of tour guides we have observed on numerous other occasions (for example the guide/driver featured in Excerpt 4 introduced himself at the beginning of the tour as ‘Dennis the Menace’). Angigquize Qakala, glossed in Excerpt 6 as “Mr Easy-Go-Lucky” (ll. 5–6), can be literally translated as ‘I don’t care type.’ The nickname serves, then, as another display of an ‘exotic’ feature of the local language (the clicks), and it signals the relaxed, even irreverent disposition of Patrick toward tourists, or toward life more generally – whether the tourist gets this or not. What is even more significant in this excerpt is Patrick’s overtly sexist but, again, playful framing of the cooking hut as the female domain (“this is now the kitchen hut where you ladies […] do all the cooking because only ladies must cook men just relax,” ll. 8–10). We do not know whether Patrick here unreflexively perpetuates the entrenched patriarchal ideology permeating much of Zulu society, or whether he plays another trick on the unsuspecting tourists. The latter interpretation seems more plausible (despite the Zulu machismo underlying his gambit), as in line 10 he turns to ET1 in an act of male collusion and solidarity, asking him “you don’t cook in UK do you?.” Perplexed (by comparison with PT1 in l. 2 of Excerpt 2 and with PT2 in l. 9 of Excerpt 4), ET1 looks around as if in search of a bailout from answering an awkward question. With no help arriving, he confronts Patrick by admitting to taking on this ‘unmanly’ activity, which produces bursts of laughter from the group, as his shaky masculinity gets exposed. Continuing with his sexist jibe, Patrick mockingly insults ET1 (as well as ET4, by treating her as a non-present or, at best, as a ratified overhearer): he teases the husband about his lack of control over his ‘lazy’ wife (“your wife’s a lazy cook,” l. 13). This exchange continues for another four extended turns (line 15–16, 18–22), in which ET1 first tries to save face by maintaining that he enjoys cooking (l. 15), and then falls prey to Patrick and colludes in the sexist tenor of the banter by stating “she’ll tell me off if I don’t [do the cooking]” (ll. 19–20). Even when this sequence comes to an end, Patrick does not relent; he insists that ET1 does not “have to cook” (l. 16), that ET4 is “naughty” (l. 21), and that she should not allow her husband to cook (l. 22).
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Throughout lines 10–22, when Patrick targets ET1 and ET4 as the butts of his jokes, there is much laughter and Patrick delivers his lines with a ‘smiley’ voice, although his tone is also ambiguously stern and reproachful. On the part of ET1, ET4, and the other tourists, laughter may then be a good-natured reaction to the perceived humor of Patrick’s comments; but the loud laughter from ET1 and ET4 (especially in lines 18 and 20) may also be a display of their vulnerability to Patrick’s ridicule and of their inability to defend themselves – two highly salient threats to their ‘positive face’ (Brown and Levinson 1987), as Patrick blatantly questions and rejects the value of sharing domestic chores in their marital arrangements, and they lose self-control, which is manifested by the outbursts of laughter. Finally, what also strikes us about this particular exchange is that, as with the heteronormative hongi jesting in Excerpt 3, a shared frame of reference is clearly assumed: specifically, the deployment of gendered cultural practices and interactional norms (or stereotypes) as a kind of global – or at least intercultural – common ground for play. This is what alerts us to the globalizing habitus of tourism.
Being a Tourist, Doing Tourism: The Performance of Contact Whenever discourses travel across the globe, what is carried with them is their shape, but their value, meaning, or function do not often travel along. Value, meaning, and function are a matter of uptake, they have to be granted by others on the basis of the prevailing orders of indexicality, and increasingly also on the basis of their real or potential ‘market value’ as a cultural commodity. (Blommaert 2005: 72)
Each of the exchanges presented here constitutes a series of language games, playful moments which help to realize the performance of contact between hosts and tourists (and elsewhere between tourists and tourists). Each demonstrates the particular – but not unique – ways in which language and other semiotic material are entextualized and recontextualized for touristic purposes. They also show how certain values, meanings, and functions are not necessarily reinvented or refashioned, as Blommaert (quoted above) suggests; often the values, meanings, and functions endure over time and extend across space – were it not for this, the staging of tourism and the stylizing of tourist or host identities would not be possible. Tourism demands a ritualized familiarity or recognizablity. In other words, each of these language games, while being specifically situated and locally meaningful, also has a transposable, generic significance, which plays out more generally. Each game is a stock-in-trade of tourism discourse; this is how we know that we are doing tourism and being tourists (or hosts). These language games are ubiquitous, although no doubt they vary across different sub-genres of tourism. Here we have dealt with individual tourists visiting cultural–ethnic villages (they are organized into groups for the purpose of specific guided tours). These ‘mainstream’ holiday-makers fall somewhere between the extremes: independent
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tourists and budget package holiday-makers, who may, respectively, either be sheltered from or not seek such staged encounters with the hosts. The encounters are also inherently normative, structuring (or determining) creative acts and/or acts of resistance. It is in this way that tourism discourse – the globalizing tourist gaze (Urry 2002) – still tends to flatten and hom*ogenize other people’s spaces. The specifics of tourist–host interactions inevitably emerge from, and are dictated to a large extent by, the centers of power – often those at the ‘global core.’ Typically, tourists are the ones who set the agenda and hosts are the ones who must fashion themselves in the image (or imagination) of the tourists. Host dwelling places become place names, and these place names in turn become tonguetwisters (see Excerpt 1 and Figure 11.3); host languages become impenetrable codes and ciphers of local communities (Excerpt 2); greetings become trademarks of ethnic identity (Excerpt 3); names become nicknames (Excerpt 5) – and so on. The “global semioscape” (Thurlow and Aiello 2007) is clearly not an equal playing field; while there is always a huge potential for speakers or designers to rework semiotic repertoires in circulation (symbols, sign systems, and meaning-making practices), some people’s ways of speaking, design practices, and aesthetic preferences dominate and set ‘the standard.’ In the context of tourism, this type of semiotic agenda setting is evidenced in, for example, the fashioning of traditional Zulu craftwork into ‘curios’ for touristic consumption, which must also be constantly refashioned in accordance with the changing tastes and, indeed, fashions of western consumers – as is the case with the Zulu beadwork, whose design nowadays reflects the utilitarian/lifestyle demands of a westernized market (key chains, place mats, napkin rings, mobile phone pockets). One aspect of most tourist interactions is that they are also typically one-offs. While we were doing our fleeting ethnographies of Whakarewarewa and PheZulu, our repeated visits to these sites appeared quite inexplicable and rather amusing to the guides, who recognized us from previous days. Of course, tourists visiting theme parks and other attractions are not ‘regulars.’ In their global flow, they reappear as types, not tokens – which means that these encounters are also singular for the hosts, allowing each of their performances to maintain the aura of spontaneity and uniqueness – a paradox, given the meaning of performance as ‘never for the first time’ (Schechner 1985: 36, cited in Bauman 2004: 9). The inherent fleetingness of tourist–host encounters creates a further paradox of instant and short-lived ‘friendships’ – another, if extreme, example of Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000) “liquid” (as opposed to lasting) and “adiaphoric” (exempt from moral judgement or moral significance) relationships (Bauman 1995), of human life being driven predominantly by enjoyment and seeking aesthetic pleasure rather than responsibility and commitment. In this vein, identities become fragmented and somewhat schizophrenic, as blending them into cohesive lifestyles poses an obstacle. One of the obstacles, certainly, must be the short duration of some of these relationships – especially when they last for no longer than a day or a onehour guided walk around a ‘cultural village.’ This is why the performance of a hongi between the guide and Kenny in Excerpt 4 may be glossed as “the sharing of common breath creating a legion of friendship” (l. 22); but, however
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good-willed and meaningful it may be, its chances of establishing between the two men, in the liminal space of the tourist encounter, anything more enduring than a passing, spontaneous “communitas” (Turner 1974) are destined to be terminated once the evening is over. In this sense, therefore, a transient experience or feeling of togetherness is produced which, as Eade (2000: xiii) explains, expresses itself as “an ideological programme that is only partially and fleetingly realized in practice.” In this sense, too, communitas is akin to Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of habitus, mediating between structured, hegemonic ‘givens’ of tourism and the everyday, agentful actions of individual tourists (and hosts). So, however one-off and however fleeting, these reiterated performances of contact also work performatively (Butler 1990), to secure the mythologies of interpersonal and intercultural exchange that run central to tourism discourse (Thurlow and Jaworski 2010a). Much tourism is, for example, premised on the idea of tourists being instantly welcomed by the hosting community as ‘friends’ (see Jaworski et al. 2003; Jaworski and Lawson 2005; Lawson and Jaworski 2007), and even finding romance (on sexualizing travel spaces and sex tourism, see Piller 2010; Ryan and Hall 2001). The fact of the matter is that most of these relationships, at least the ones exemplified in our data here, terminate as rapidly as they begin. Sociolinguistically, they manifest a number of familiar but recontextualized strategies, typical of intimate behavior. While many of these strategies are commonly associated with threats to the social actors’ positive face (Brown and Levinson 1987), Sifianou (1992) suggests that what may be perceived as a positive threat of this kind in one community or context may constitute a positive politeness strategy (one which assumes closeness and intimacy) in another: •
nicknames, terms of endearment, and downright derogatory terms of address (see Patrick’s “mfowethu” (‘brother”), “ma” (short for ‘mama’ ‘mother ’), and “gogo” (‘granny’) in Excerpt 2; “Angigquize Qakala” (“Mr Easy-Go-Lucky”) in Excerpt 5); • bald-on-the-record, unmitigated directives and personal questions (see Patrick’s eliciting the tourists’ place of origin in Zulu; the inquiry about CT’s ability to speak Afrikaans in Excerpt 2; the question about the ‘Polish hello’ in Excerpt 4; the guide’s ‘bossing around’ of Kenny in Excerpt 3; the inference about ET1’s undertaking of the domestic chores in Excerpt 5); • risqué humor and (suggestion of) obscenities (see Patrick’s heteronormative ‘jokes’ in Excerpt 6 and the guide’s hom*ophobic tease in Excerpt 4; also, the guide’s play with the pronunciation of ‘Whaka’ in Excerpt 2); • teasing, ridicule, and insults (see Excerpts 4 and 6). Tourists’ behavior often displays ambivalence in such situations. Kenny, in Extract 4, appears not only obedient but quite meek, and not particularly amused (unlike his host and fellow tourists) in following the guide’s instructions; PT1 draws a blank when addressed in Zulu by Patrick in Extract 3; PT2 refuses to “say hello in Polish” in Extract 5; and ET1 shifts from claiming to draw pleasure from cooking to complaining that his wife would “tell him off” if he did not cook in
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Extract 6. Perhaps such hesitation, tentativeness, or inconsistency in behavior is partly due to tourists’ uncertainty of their roles in moments when they are drawn from the relative safety of ‘gazing onlookers’ to being ‘speaking participants,’ singled out, put on the spot as individuals, unable to ‘hide’ in the safety of a group and group response, lacking a clear script or not knowing the language in which they are being addressed. These are examples of Jaquemet’s (2005) transidiomatic practices, instances of deterritorialized and reterritorialized sociolinguistic disorder, possibly well rehearsed and strategically deployed by hosts as part of their routine encounters with tourists, while they are completely novel, hence disorienting and disempowering for the latter. Nearly a billion people a year engage in international tourism of one sort of another, and many will face encounters of the type described above, out of countless other interactions which we may never gain access to. Many tourists joining daily guided tours will remain strangers, maintaining a convenient silence and avoiding eye contact (Löfgren 1999). In their fleeting encounters with guides, they will be largely addressed en masse and talked at rather than talked to. They may end up being photographed with their guides or other local performers, or they may ask each other personal questions; but ultimately they will only do so having bought their holidays, having paid for their guided tours, meals and souvenirs, and having left their tips. The more the tourists pay, the more service and interaction their money will buy (Sherman 2007). In such cases, then, any sense of ‘community’ or ‘friendship’ is often a function and a result of economic exchange. Which is not to dismiss these exchanges as simply ‘synthetic’ or without basis (compare Fairclough 1989 on synthetic personalization). Within tourism’s theatrical framework of ‘suspended disbelief,’ the apparently “inauthentic” or “fake” are not necessarily obstacles to exchange; indeed they invariably become the substance of exchange, in a discourse which readily entertains the notions of “safe adventures,” “planned spontaneity,” “exotic familiarity,” “contemporary tradition,” and “genuine fakes” (Thurlow and Jaworski 2010a; see also Brown 1996). It is this quality of the oxymoronic/paradoxical that often makes the moments and meanings of contact in tourism so hard to read or predict. Our intention is certainly not to dismiss touristic communitas as necessarily shallow or disingenuous; the tourist experience is invariably pleasurable and always meaningful (Gottlieb 1982; Harrison 2003). This does not, however, absolve tourism (or tourists) of its ideological and political consequence. The sociolinguistic characteristics of the discursive practices described in this chapter – the commodified framing of the interactions; the recontextualized displays of poetic language, stories, place names, formulaic expressions, and other snippets of verbal banter; instances of addressing interlocutors in languages they may not understand; code-crossing; language learning; reliance on the competence of others (interpreters); explicit evaluation of linguistic and non-verbal performances (namely the applause for Kenny in Excerpt 3, l. 19) – all point to an increasing need to theorize encounters occasioned by global mobility in terms of spatially heterogeneous, transcultural contact zones between people with distinctive, often conflicting social, geographic, historical, and economic trajectories
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(Pratt 1992). These are Rampton’s (2009) “communities of contact” operating in re-scaled, hybrid spaces, where familiar repertoires, styles of speaking, and genres often – but, as we have seen, not always – change their meaning and value. Where languages are intermixed, hybridized and syncretized, recontextualized words and expressions acquire indexical functions independent of their denotational meanings, transforming identities and becoming emblematic of spatial stratification in the political and economic local–global order (Silverstein 1998). Tourists go ‘native’ by mastering only minimal amounts of the ‘native’ language; tourists become interpreters for other tourists; speakers lose their confidence (Blommaert et al. 2005: 203) or claim power by subverting the dominant patterns of authority and privilege – as in ‘playful’ moments when wealthy tourists in former colonial spaces have their self-assured status put into question and undermined. Echoing Heller (2008), we find these discursive formations to be part of the processes and practices which establish fleeting identities, relationships, and communities existing in the moment, working across national and ethnic boundaries, refocusing social difference and social inequality, and redefining power relations through the negotiation and definition of meaning.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We are grateful to Nik Coupland for his very useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, to Smangele Mkhwanazi for her help with translating our PheZulu data, and to Lauren Wagner and Ody Constantinou for their help with transcribing our Maori data. Research for this paper was supported by funding from the Leverhulme Trust (Grant No. F/00407/D) made to the Centre for Language and Communication Research, Cardiff University.
TRANSCRIPTION CONVENTIONS [ (word) ((word)) word wo:rd wo(.) (1) ? = hello [drop out] [word]
= start of overlapping talk = nonverbal, paralinguistic and other contextual information = best approximation of talk = perceptible additional emphasis = perceptible lengthening = truncated word/utterance = pause shorter than one second = length of pause in seconds = utterance interpreted as carrying the pragmatic force of a question = contiguous, latched talk = translation/gloss = temporary loss of audio track = additional explanation of non-English material
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NOTES 1 We tend to use the term ‘hosts’ in an effort to avoid the disparaging connotation of ‘locals.’ We do recognize, however, that ‘hosts’ risks making assumptions about the relative power status of local people, about their motivation to entertain, and about the hom*ogeneity of inhabitants who may or may not be native/local and whose roleidentities will inevitably vary.
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Sheller, M., and Urry, J. (2006) The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A 38: 207–26. Sherman, R. (2007) Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sifianou, M. (1992) Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Silverstein, M. (1998) Contemporary transformations of local linguistic communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 27: 401–26. Tan, P. K. W., and Rubdy R. (eds) (2008) Language as Commodity: Global Structures, Local Marketplaces. London: Continuum. Tannen, D. (1989) Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thurlow, C., and Aiello, G. (2007) National pride, global capital: A social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry. Visual Communication 6: 305–44. Thurlow, C., and Jaworski, A. (2003) Communicating a global reach: Inflight
magazines as a globalising genre in tourism. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7: 581–608. Thurlow, C., and Jaworski, A. (2006) The alchemy of the upwardly mobile: Symbolic capital and the stylization of elites in frequent-flyer programs. Discourse and Society 17: 131–67. Thurlow, C., and Jaworski, A. (2010a) Silence is golden: Elitism, linguascaping and ‘anti-communication’ in luxury tourism discourse. In A. Jaworski and C. Thurlow (eds) Semiotic Landscapes: Text, Space, Globalization, 187–218. London: Continuum. Thurlow, C. and A. Jaworski. (2010b) Tourism Discourse: Language and Global Mobility. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Turner, V. (1974) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Urry, J. (2002) The Tourist Gaze, 2nd edn [1990]. London: Sage. Urry, J. (2007) Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity.
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Globalization and Language Teaching DAVID BLOCK
Introduction In 1981 I began a one-year RSA (Royal Society of Arts) diploma course in teaching English as a foreign language at the British Council Institute in Barcelona. Having spent some two years as an unqualified teacher struggling to do my job in nonetoo-prestigious language teaching academies, I was seeking professional development or, in simpler terms, looking for someone to tell me how to teach. The course did not disappoint me, as I finished it with very clear ideas about how to plan and deliver English lessons. What I did not really think about at the time, however, was how I had been trained as a mediator and spreader of the emergent official approach to language teaching – communicative language teaching (CLT). I was a convert, a zealous proponent of all things CLT, and I was these things independently of whether or not CLT was appropriate to my context or consistent with local language and language teaching ideologies. There was not at this time a fully developed public discourse around globalization in Spain (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter), but, looking back, it is easy to see how I was mediating what today might be understood as an “ideoscape” (Appadurai 1990) or a global flow of ideas about language teaching pedagogy. I also now realize that I was entering the profession of language teaching at a key and pivotal point when CLT had begun to gather force on its way to becoming the globalized approach to language teaching that it is today. This chapter is my personal reflection on CLT as a global approach to language teaching. Although CLT applies to the teaching of all languages, I will focus here almost exclusively on the teaching of English as an international language (hereafter TEIL). I do so for three reasons. First, English is the most globally taught language today, as David Crystal has argued (Crystal 2003; see also McKay and BokhorstHeng 2008), and it is the one accorded privileged status in the national curricula of countries around the world (see for instance Kubota 2002 on Japan; McKay 2003 on Chile; Tupas 2008 on the Phillipines; Phillipson 2003 on European Union member states). In effect, English is the prime mediator of the economic, political,
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cultural, and social relations and flows that constitute globalization. Secondly, it is the language which I have taught in my lifetime, and therefore the language with reference to which I can discuss globalization and language teaching with the greatest authority. Thirdly and finally, space does not allow a broader consideration, which would include the teaching of other languages taught extensively – such as French, Spanish, Mandarin, and Arabic. I begin in the next section with an examination of the rise of CLT as well as with an examination of the approach it has evolved into in recent years – task based language teaching (TBLT) – as global methods. I then briefly discuss the ongoing struggle in English language teaching as regards attempts to reconcile the global and the local, the center and the periphery, and the western and nonwestern. This done, I move on to consider the global TEIL textbook as the mediator of CLT in English language teaching. In particular, I focus on how publishers in recent years have come to position learners as cosmopolitan consumers and have set up branded identities for them to aspire to.
The Rise of CLT/TBLT As authors such as Richards and Rodgers (2001) and Howatt (2004) argue, there has been a shift in many (if not most) parts of the world over the past three to four decades, from well established approaches to language teaching such as audiolingualism and grammar translation, to communicative language teaching (CLT) and its more recent incarnation, task-based language teaching. This shift has not been sudden, and it has not by any means been the same where it has taken place. However, a perusal of the current national curricula for language teaching in North and South America, Europe and East Asia reveals that official discourses on language teaching are remarkably similar, based as they are on an assemblage of ideas originating for the most part in the work carried out in the late 1960s and early 1970s the by Council of Europe.1 In this work there were recommendations for changes in language teaching which involved radical breaks with the past, calling into question the basic premises of approaches such as audiolingualism and grammar translation. These recommendations concerned views on education in general, in an era of cooperation across nation-state borders in post-World War II Europe; what constituted language as the goal of language teaching; what was to be the organizing principle of language teaching as regards its content; and, finally, the methodology to be employed in language teaching. First, CLT was very much about new ways of viewing language education in modern societies. It was a development of its time, as it emerged out of the socially tumultuous 1960s, during which the respective roles of institutions and of the individual in society had begun to be questioned and reformulated in many parts of the world, most notably in western Europe and in the anglophone world. Legutke and Thomas (1991) discuss changes in approaches to education during this period which contributed to what they believe to have been a move towards “humanistic language teaching”:
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In the aftermath of anti-establishment movements with explicit anti-institutional implications […] educational approaches which called for the de-schooling of society […] or, in its less radical forms, for a basic humanizing of technocratic and dehumanizing schools, had gained ground. To humanize schools would require an orientation towards ‘holistic’ education, which aimed to promote growth in intrapersonal awareness and interpersonal sharing as well as intellectual development. (Legutke and Thomas 1991: 36)
This humanist side of language teaching was not generally articulated in an overt manner in early discussions of CLT, although it was arguably fundamental to understanding the new attitudes toward language and communication which were incorporated into discussions about education. In addition, over the past three decades this humanist aspect has dropped out of discussions somewhat, particularly in cases where language educators have moved in the direction of more technical task-based approaches (more on these below). A second component of the Council of Europe work on language teaching was a change in the way language was conceived. The object of language teaching – the competence to be developed in learners – shifted from an exclusive focus on grammar (syntax, morphology, and phonology) and lexis to communicative competence (Hymes 1971). Language user competence was conceptualized not only in relation to grammar and lexis, but also in relation to the way a language is used by members of a speech community to accomplish their purposes (in terms of culturally bound discursive organization and function) and in relation to the interactional skills necessary to communicate effectively and appropriately in that language (in terms of culturally shaped pragmatic knowledge). In addition, Michael Halliday’s (1973) early form of functional linguistics was influential at the time. In particular, Council of Europe scholars were interested in his outline of the basic functions of language for children during the early period of development, when these begin to engage in the acquisition of their first language; in short, scholars were interested in how children use language to obtain things, to acquire control over the behavior of others, to initiate and maintain interaction, to express personal feelings and meanings, to learn and discover, to create imaginary worlds, and to convey information. Finally, there was an interest in the work of John Austin (1962) and John Searle (1965) and the development of ‘speech act theory.’ Speech act theory moved beyond an exclusive focus on the meaning of the words uttered by speakers, to a consideration of the constituents of communicative events; and these included the social contexts in which the events take place as well as the intentions of speakers. Intentions in effect give life to utterances, making them ‘illocutionary acts’ – for instance offering, refusing, asserting, describing, promising, suggesting, or complaining. It was speech act theory that most directly informed what Council of Europe scholars recommended as regards the organization of the content of language teaching (Wilkins 1976; Munby 1978). In particular, functions – which derived directly from speech act theory and from the concept of illocutionary acts – became by the early 1980s the staple of language teaching syllabuses and the backbone of commercially produced materials in Europe and North America. It
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became hard to conceive of the contents page of a syllabus or coursebook which was not, first and foremost, a list of functions – such as asking for information, asking to receive directions, making and responding to suggestions, or making and responding to requests. On the RSA course which I attended in 1981 in Barcelona, functions formed the basis of all the activities designed by teachers, as they were easily convertible into behavioral goals to work toward (for example, by the end of the lesson students will be able to request information in a shop). In terms of the actual practices adopted by teachers, CLT involved an emphasis on interaction-based activities carried out exclusively in the target language. These activities were often conducted on the principle of the information gap, whereby students working in pairs or groups ask for and provide information which is needed for the completion of a task. However, in CLT there was also room for more student-focused work which involves the sharing of personal experiences, for instance exchange of opinions about real or imagined events or talking about one’s job or holidays. Above all, two interrelated notions became axiomatic to CLT: (a) that it is necessarily and inherently good to speak, and to do so as frequently as possible; and (b) that one learns to speak by speaking. In recent years CLT has been transformed in different ways; currently, as a label for language teaching practices, it is used synonymously with – or in any case alongside – task-based language teaching (hereafter TBLT), an approach which, as the name suggests, puts tasks at its center. Much has been written about different ways of defining tasks, and there has been an evolution of sorts, from an insistence on tasks being replicas of real world activities to a broadened view, which includes classroom activities that resemble more traditional exercises, focusing explicitly on form and lexis, for example. At present, there seems to be a general consensus around the idea that that tasks are goal-directed pedagogical activities involving a primary focus on meaning (although a focus on linguistic form is also important), during which participants choose and implement the linguistic resources they need as they work towards a clearly defined outcome (Ellis 2003). Task, defined in Ellis’s goal-oriented, instrumental terms, has served as a key construct both in language teaching and in second-language acquisition research (SLA), which has come to support it (Block 2003). Over the past thirty years, SLA researchers have built a considerable body of findings, an important one being that tasks act as triggers for language learning due to the way in which their meaning-centeredness and goal-directedness activate the type of languageprocessing cognition that leads to learning (see Gass and Selinker 2008 and Ellis 2008 for a thorough account of current SLA research). This cognitive activity is thought to begin with the process of negotiation for meaning, whereby, “in an effort to communicate, learners and competent speakers provide and interpret signals of their own and their interlocutor ’s perceived comprehension, thus provoking adjustments to linguistic form, conversational structure, message content, or all three, until an acceptable level of understanding is achieved” (Long 1996: 418). For Long and many other researchers (see for instance the contributions to
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Doughty and Long 2003), negotiation for meaning “facilitates acquisition because it connects input, internal learner capacities, particularly selective attention, and output in productive ways” (Long 1996: 451–2). Because cognitive processes are theorized, as is characteristic of the human mind, and hence they are not idiosyncratic to each individual, tasks and the negotiation for meaning that they elicit are deemed to be applicable to all language learners in all contexts, even if their exact and specific content and focus would depend on locally executed needs analyses (Long 2005). And this notion, universalist as regards learning, has become a global notion as regards how teaching should take place in all the parts of the world – as I explain in the next section.
CLT/TBLT as a Globalized Phenomenon Arjun Appadurai (1990) has famously described globalization as a “complex, overlapping and disjunctive order” made up of five types of forces and flows, which he calls “scapes.” These five scapes are: 1 2 3 4 5
ethnoscapes or flows of people (e.g. migrants, asylum seekers, exiles, tourists); technoscapes or flows of technology (e.g. hardware components, technical know-how); financescapes or flows of money (e.g. national stock exchanges, commodity speculations); mediascapes or flows of information (e.g. newspapers, magazines, satellite television channels, websites); and ideoscapes or flows of ideas (e.g. human rights, environmentalism, free trade movements, fear of terrorism).
CLT/TBLT, as discussed thus far, seems to be an ideoscape, that is, a global flow of ideas about language teaching and learning. At first glance, this description of CLT/TBLT might seem relatively innocuous and devoid of negative connotations. However, ideoscapes are not freestanding sets of ideas that just emerge in one context and then flow freely around the world. Rather, as authors such as Pennycook (1994) and Canagarajah (1999) have noted, they are ideologically loaded, in that they are related to sets of values, beliefs, and feelings about the best way to conceptualize particular domains – in the present case language, communication, and language teaching and learning. As for ideologies, it is worth noting that they are, always and necessarily, constructed in the interest of a particular group or groups (here, the academic and educational communities propagating CLT/TBLT) and that they serve both as shapers of larger discourses (here, discourses about communication and language teaching and learning) and as justifications for practices adopted (here, pedagogical practices).
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Numerous authors have noted clashes of ideologies, as the spread of communicative approaches to language teaching has not been as smooth as many in the language teaching profession might have hoped. For example, Canagarajah (1999 and 2002) has criticized the spread of CLT, lamenting that, “[j]ust as the technologically and economically developed nations of the West (or center) hold an unfair monopoly over less developed (or periphery) communities in industrial products, similar relations characterize the marketing of language teaching methods” (Canagarajah 2002: 135). For Canagarajah, both the academic and the educational practitioners of CLT are able to take advantage of the prestige and power associated with all things ‘western’ as they export new methods, CLT being the most recent example. While methodological novelties tend be accepted with “awe,” they are also met with “bewilderment” (ibid.), and the latter is due to several factors. First, new approaches to language teaching are disembedded – that is, lifted out from the context of their sources, for example the US or UK – and then taken up elsewhere in the world, as if their form and content transcended spatio-temporal contexts (Giddens 1990). Secondly, there is seldom (if ever) any dialogue between the exporters of new approaches and those who import them; and there is no discussion of the form and content of approaches, or even of their ideological underpinnings. For those local teachers who follow pedagogical practices imported from the West or center in a relatively unquestioning manner, lessons may be of limited use to their students, who are asked to conform to procedures and practices toward which neither they nor their teachers feel any sense of ownership. By contrast, where teachers appropriate and reconfigure imported pedagogical practices, combining the global with the local, the results are far more optimal (Canagarajah 1999). Such a process may be conceptualized in terms of what many globalization theorists refer to as ‘glocalization’ – a word taken from the world of business in Japan, where it means marketing goods and services on a global basis by catering to local particularities. For globalization theorists, however, it conveys the idea that the global does not merely overwhelm or swallow the local; rather, syntheses emerge from contacts between the global and the local via a processes involving the “interpenetrating” of the “particular” and the “universal” (Robertson 1995: 30). In the spread of CLT, glocalizing processes have emerged due to the need to develop approaches to language teaching at the crossroads between western/ center practices and local knowledge. In addition, a good number of applied linguists have made proposals for the resolution of conflicts arising when the global meets the local and educational ideologies come into conflict (Kumaravadivelu 2003, 2008; Holliday 1994, 2005; Canagarajah 1999, 2005). While the proposals of these authors vary considerably, they all involve a call for local teachers to work out their own solutions, appropriating from globally circulating ideas about language education, what they deem to be suitable in the development of locally generated pedagogical practices. However, in books where concrete examples are provided (Hall and Eggington 2000; Norton and Toohey 2004), there seems to be
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a near-exclusive focus on anglophone countries or on English-dominant educational environments. An exception of sorts – that is, an example of glocalized TEIL – is Cheiron McMahill’s account of how she set up and ran “grass-roots feminist English classes,” which were organized by the learners themselves and taught via a “feminist second language pedagogy” (1997: 612; see also McMahill 2001). This pedagogy was a combination of explicit teaching of morphology, syntax, phonology, and pragmatics and so on, and feminist concerns such as women’s rights in Japan and elsewhere. Activities organized by McMahill included preparing to give presentations in English at, for example, the United Nations conference for women, […] working on a translation of a feminist book from English into Japanese while seeking help from native-speaking English feminists, […] simply taking part in a discussion of women’s issues with women from other countries. (McMahill 1997: 613)
The chief aim of such classes was to create an English-medium alternative “female discourse community of resistance to sexism” in Japan and in the world. In McMahill (2001), the author focuses on one particular course theme, “Colors of English,” which is aimed to empower Japanese women through the learning of English as a means of communication with women around the world. Sessions are generally organized around topics such as ethnic identities, discrimination in employment, problems with the learning of English, personal histories, and so on. McMahill argues that, through their discussions of such topics, the women came to be more confident as users of English, since they positioned themselves as global feminists. Impressive as it is, McMahill’s teaching comes across as a unique example of resistance to the global hegemony of CLT/TBLT in TEIL. Among other things, McMahill seemed to have carte blanche as regards the selection and implementation of teaching materials, and apparently she did not have to use a standard text. This situation seems to make an exception of sorts in the world of TEIL, given the dominance of global textbooks as mediators of most TEIL around the world (Gray 2002). It is to the topic of the global TEIL textbook that I now turn.
The Global TEIL Textbook and Commodified Identities At the heart of debates about TEIL methodology are the language teaching materials which mediate them. And one key question that arises in the market of global language teaching materials concerns the cultural content of textbooks, normally published in the US or the UK, for export around the world. On the one hand, there has been a growing awareness among publishers in recent years that content which is appropriate in one part of the world might not be appropriate in another.
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One example, cited by John Gray (in preparation), is the inclusion of hom*osexuality, either as a topic of discussion or as the lifestyle option of individuals portrayed in textbooks. When he interviewed publishers about the cultural content of the books they published, Gray was told that it was easier to leave out references to hom*osexuality, and indeed to sexual practices in general. Elsewhere Gray (2002) talks about lists of taboo topics, which can assist publishers in their attempt to avoid anything that might offend local sensitivities and lead to cancelled contracts or low sales: Some publishers provide lists of proscribed topics, while others rely informally on the acronym PARSNIP (politics, alcohol, religion, sex, narcotics, isms, and pork) as a rule of thumb. One publisher ’s list I saw contained some thirty items to be avoided or handled only with extreme care. This included alcohol, anarchy, Aids, Israel and six pointed stars, politics, religion, racism, sex, science when it involves altering nature, e.g. genetic engineering, terrorism, and violence. (Gray 2002: 159)
By contrast, what does seem to be allowed, as regards content, is the sanitized presentation of various aspects of national cultures (their geography, social norms, history, iconography, and so on) – in effect the traditional content of foreign language textbooks. However, as Gray notes, in recent years there has been a shift in content, as new textbooks and new editions of older textbooks include more and more references to an emergent global culture. Thus, if in the past the idea of culture in the global TEIL textbook was linked to nation–states such as Britain and the US, in more recent books an altogether different kind of culture – cosmopolitan and consumerist – is the glue that holds together the language concerns. Foundational to this shift in emphasis has been the commodification of the English language and – as I will argue – the concomitant branding of English-speaking identities, which learners can aspire to as cosmopolitan consumers on the global stage. In Marxist economic theory (Marx 1990), commodities are objects which have two types of value. They have exchange-value in a market, which means that they can be exchanged for other objects or for money. The framing of objects in terms of their exchange-value was essential to the development of early capitalist economies, which arose as part of the industrial revolution in Europe beginning in the early part of the nineteenth century, and this framing remains fundamental in capitalism today. However, it is worth remembering that the move to commodities seen in terms of exchange-value represented a major historical shift, away from the centrality of the use-value of objects – that is, the more utilitarian and qualitative valuing of objects according to their ability to satisfy basic human needs. In the work of Monica Heller (for instance Heller 2003) and other sociolinguists, the commodification of language has been a focal theme for some time. For Heller, the commodification of language means a shift from a valuing of language for its basic communicative function and more emotive associations – national identity, cultural identity, the authentic spirit of a people and so on – to valuing it for what it means in the globalized, deregulated, hyper-competitive,
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post-industrial “new work order” in which we now live (see also Gee, Hull and Lankshear 1996; Cameron 2002). In other words, it means a shift from language as use-value to language as exchange-value. However, as Lash and Lury (2007: 6) note, commodities “have no relationships” and “they only have value in the way that they resemble every other commodity.” Thus English, as the consumer good called ‘global English,’ is understood to be vaguely the same thing in different educational contexts around the world. It is the language for communication in business and leisure settings that everyone needs to know in the age of globalization. This implies, among other things, that the English offered as a skill by a language school or global textbook in one context is fundamentally the same as the English offered as a skill by a language school or global textbook in another context. And the English required as a job qualification in one context is pretty much the same as the English required in another context. There arises therefore a need to bring English alive, to make it more attractive and ultimately more saleable. In short, it needs to be presented and wrapped in some form of content which in effect carries it to learners. To understand how this process works, it is useful to frame matters in terms of ‘brand.’ In order to inject commodities with life, advertisers brand them; that is, they link them to particular world views, behaviors, and artefacts, developing narratives in the process and what Banet-Weiser and Lapansky (2008: 1249) call “whole environments of meaning,” which over time become recognizable to the public as ways of life and lifestyle options that can be opted into or abandoned, depending on circ*mstances. To understand how branding works, one need only look as far as television commercials, which run in series over months and sometimes years. One such example is the series of BT (British Telephone) commercials which began to run in the UK in 2007. Actors Kris Marshall and Esther Hall play a couple in the process of negotiating each partner ’s degree of commitment to the relationship, and each commercial provides a piece of this ongoing story. Thus, for example, the selling of a service commodity such as broadband service is packaged in an argument between the two protagonists which is being resolved at a distance, via e-mail. A broadband service is obviously very different from a language. And a television commercial is a very different medium from a global textbook. However, in both cases there occurs the branding of a commodity. The issue here is how the global textbook links the English language into particular world views, behaviors, and artefacts – in short, into lifestyle options that learners can aspire to. One lifestyle option which has become prevalent in recent years revolves around the idea of cosmopolitan global citizens who embody an ideology of global capitalism and consumerism in the different activities that textbooks show them engaging in. Cosmopolitanism has been written about a great deal over the years (Hannerz 1996; Tomlinson 1999; Vertovec and Cohen 2002; Beck 2006), and one finds a kind of sliding scale at work, in discussions. At one extreme, there is cosmopolitanism as the very superficial contact and engagement with cultures encountered
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via physical movement from one place to another (or, progressively in recent years, via electronically mediated experiences). This cosmopolitanism is usually associated with tourist travel, and it is often what Hannerz (1996) has called “home plus”: the individual wants the place he/she is visiting to have one or two exotic attractions, yet for the most part he/she wants everything else – the standard of accommodation, the transportation facilities, the nature and quality of services, and in some cases even the food – to be the same as it would be at home. At the other extreme is a higher-minded cosmopolitanism, construed as the positive disposition to engage and mix with other cultures. David Held describes what he calls “cultural cosmopolitanism” as follows: Cultural cosmopolitanism should be understood as the capacity to mediate between national cultures, communities of [faith] and alternative styles of life. It encompasses the possibility of dialogue with traditions and discourses of others with the aim of expanding horizons of one’s own framework of meaning and prejudice. (Held 2002: 57–8)
The global citizens envisaged by TEIL textbooks today are cultural cosmopolitans to the extent that they are willing to engage with and embrace the ever-increasing interconnectedness, time–space compression, and multiple forces and flows (for instance Appadurai’s scapes), which are both constitutive of globalization and consequences of it. They are not afraid of the brave new world of the global age, and they revel in the diversity and hybridity that characterize it. As a result, they manifest solidarity toward those who are in effect their fellow global citizens above and beyond nation-state loyalties. In the world of TEIL, these global citizens need English as the mediator of communications with the peoples of the world and not, as might have been the case until recently in some contexts, as the mediator of American culture, or British culture, or Australian culture, and so on. However, there is an aspect to this cultural cosmopolitanism which is probably not what Held and others have in mind, one which appears to fall somewhere between the tourist and cultural types outlined above. Urry (1995) uses the phrase “aesthetic cosmopolitanism” to describe an engagement with the ‘Other ’ which goes deeper than the superficiality of Hannerz’s home-plus, but does not attain the moral high ground implied in Held’s “cultural cosmopolitanism.” This cosmopolitanism is driven by a desire to consume the ‘Other ’ – cuisine, sight-seeing, music, cinema, and so on – and it is the domain of those members of society with sufficient economic capital to afford to act on it. While the current era of cheap air travel has brought this type of aesthetic cosmopolitanism to a larger proportion of the population, particularly in wealthier European countries, it nevertheless remains primarily a middle-class enterprise. This is the case not least because being an aesthetic cosmopolitan requires sustained and relatively high levels of economic, social, and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984, 1991). In short, one needs money, social networks, knowledge, and taste to be a consistent aesthetic cosmopolitan. In addition, aesthetic cosmopolitans may be seen to affiliate to what
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Garcia Canclini (2001) describes as a global consumer citizenship, built around common tastes and commodity consumption. In the global textbook, this primarily middle-class global consumer–citizen is presented as a competent individual who is either successful or on the way to becoming successful. In this context, success may be defined in different ways. First, there is success associated with celebrity and with being famous, and textbooks now include a good number of activities with photos of highly recognizable global figures, past and present, such as Mahatma Ghandi or Bill Gates. Thus, if I examine a current fairly typical global textbook, Cutting Edge Intermediate (Cunningham and Moor 2005; hereafter CEI), I find an activity entitled “Talk about someone you admire” (pp. 42–3), in which learners are shown photographs of figures deemed to be global celebrities from different domains of activities: from sport, David Beckham and Serena Williams; from politics, Nelson Mandela; from literature, J. K. Rowling; from art, Pablo Picasso. Learners are asked to “work in small groups” and answer the following questions: “How many of the people in the photos do you recognize?” and “What do you think people admire in them?” (p. 42). In fairness to the authors, it should be noted that this initial activity leads eventually to others, which allow learners the option of talking about noncelebrities whom they admire, for example family members. It is nevertheless interesting that their way into this more personalized activity involves a kind of recognition based above all on the global flow of information via globalized media (cinema, magazines, websites, and so on). There is therefore an appeal to a certain cult of the celebrity, to an affiliation to individuals who “provide a sort of glue that brings and holds together otherwise diffuse and scattered aggregates of people” (Bauman 2005: 50). As regards the functioning of non-celebrities as examples of successful people, it is important to examine how these are presented. In CEI there is a procession of physically attractive young men and women from a range of national, racial, and ethnic backgrounds, engaging with a world of work, technology, the media, and leisure (travel, eating, socializing, and so on). Thus in the opening unit, entitled “All about you,” there are photographs of no fewer than seventeen different people in the first three pages (Cunningham and Moor 2005: 6–8). The people span a broad range of ages, racial phenotypes, and dress, and they are engaged in an array of encounters and activities in different physical settings, such as “a businesswoman meeting a colleague from abroad for the first time” or “some students on an English course getting to know each other during a break” (p. 6). In a unit entitled “Success,” the topic is dealt with via the ambitions of young graduates, the theme of having the right profile for a job – there is for instance a questionnaire headed “Have you got what it takes?” (pp. 48–9) – and the details of getting a job (including initial contacts and eventually a job interview). Zygmunt Bauman’s assessment of the current state of work is that “[a] steady, durable and continuous, logically coherent and tightly structured working career is […] no longer a widely available option” (Bauman 2005: 27). In what is perhaps a nod towards this view, there is a listening activity in which young men and women explain how they have abandoned more traditional employment and now
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feel more fulfilled in their new means of employment. Thus we are introduced to people like “Clare Davis, 26, [who] resigned from her job as a geography teacher in secondary school and started retraining as plumber” and “Lorna Whitwort, 29, and husband Ian [who] gave up their jobs in the city of London […] and moved to the country to run a small hotel …” (Cunningham and Moor 2005: 52). These individuals represent the spirit of a global age of flexible employment: they have what is known as ‘low drag time,’ that is, they are not tied down by narrow career aspirations or limitations on their ability to move from one geographical location to another. Thus they can change careers and/or move freely, as the dictates of the job market change. In addition, they embody the spirit of the individual consumer pursuing and attaining what he/she wants (Bauman 2007). Apart from the success motif, there is another important current running throughout CEI as well as throughout other global textbooks: the conflation of the private and the public – such that what was once private and personal is now deemed to be public and treatable in public. Frank Furedi (2004) has noted how in countries like the US and the UK it has become acceptable, far more than was the case in the past, for individuals to ‘emote’ in public, to display their inner feelings, and to disclose what are often very private matters in public fora. Somewhat following this trend, textbooks now contain a good number of activities which involve personal disclosure, thus affording learners of English greater opportunities to talk about their families, their relationships, and every detail of the activities that they engage in every day (Kullman 2003). Here are some examples of CEI activities in which learners are asked to talk about themselves: Work in pairs. Have you got any brothers or sisters? In what ways are you similar/ different? Which of your parents/grandparents do you take after? […] (Cunningham and Moor 2005: 36, under the heading “Life stories”) You go out to a restaurant for dinner. Do you: a. dress up? b. wear smart casual clothes? c. wear traditional dress of your country? d. wear whatever you feel like? (Ibid., p. 74, under the heading “Social behaviour”) Would you […] hand in a wallet that you found in the street? […] park in a disabled parking space? […] drop litter? […] (Ibid., p. 96, under the heading “How socially responsible are you?”)
Lastly, running through TEIL textbooks today are representations of cosmopolitan capital: this is a variation on Bourdieusian cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984), which may be defined as the behavioral patterns, value systems, and cultural knowledge of the well educated and well travelled, offered up as resources or assets to which the English language learner can aspire. The behavioral patterns in question are about activities such as doing sport, reading, and going to the cinema, and they include the two most common ones: shopping and travelling. The value systems conveyed are eminently capitalist, consumerist, and ultimately conformist as regards the current version of demand-led capitalism, which dominates in most parts of the world today. Finally, the cultural knowledge of cosmopolitan capital is about technological skills – with reference to the internet, the
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worldwide web, and emailing – and includes an appreciation of cinema, literature, music, art and so on. The positioning of learners as possessors of cosmopolitan capital is, at a minimum, a flattering entry point, and it could be argued that it has the advantage of lifting English from the mundaneness of the low-level service encounter to the status of a potential mediator in meaningful communication. Following Bauman (2007), one can easily see these global textbooks in Althusserian terms (see also Althusser 2001), as ‘interpellating’ (hailing, recruiting) individuals to become English speakers in the global consumerist culture, even if, as Gray (in preparation) suggests, teachers and students are not always heeding such interpellation, as they adapt and reshape published material according to local contexts. One needs to examine, however, whether in such cases the consumer culture is being resisted in form or in substance. Thus to replace the American film stars and other globally recognizable celebrities with local ones, in a textbook, is merely to engage in superficial substitution, since the change does not alter the substantial affiliation to celebrity and success. And to move shopping venues from generic international scenes such as airports or from concrete geographical locations such as New York to more local environments is, once again, merely a superficial change, as long as the centrality of the consumerist activity of shopping is still retained. McMahill’s feminist TEIL class in Japan, cited above, offers perhaps a way forward in this regard, as it does mean an abandonment of mainstream textbooks in favor of materials catering directly for the interests of students. However, there is also scope for transnational alternatives to global ELT, as is witnessed by the establishment of the website TESOL Islamia (http://www.tesolislamia.org/). This site presents itself as an alternative source of language teaching materials for Muslim teachers and students around the world. According to its ‘About us’ section, TESOL Islamia is, among other things, “committed to promoting and safeguarding Islamic precepts and values in the teaching of English as a second or foreign language in the Muslim World,” as well as to “ ‘empowering’ Muslim learners to use the English language in ways that best serve the socio-cultural, socio-political and socio-economic interests of Muslim communities worldwide.” It is difficult to know how influential, or even how effective this website has been since its establishment in 2003. In addition, some of the teaching ideas made available thus far (for example straightforward readings of religious texts translated into English) show the website to be somewhat conservative in its political aims, as it wishes to safeguard essentialized views of culture and identity on the basis of strong religious views instead of challenging the current state of global capitalism, or even taking on more specific issues in Muslim and non-Muslim countries, such as workers’ rights and feminism. Nevertheless, the website does provide an extra dimension to debates about the complexities and problematicities of TEIL; and the attempt to create an alternative to the hegemony of the global textbook is, in general, to be applauded. Otherwise life goes on in the world of TEIL. CLT, in its various permutations, continues to dominate as a default approach to teaching, and so does the global TEIL textbook, albeit often with local adaptations (Gray 2002; Gray in
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preparation). And, in the midst of the global imperative toward making consumption the dominant ideology, both in general and in more specifically TEIL, there is a continued need for the critical approaches outlined by the authors cited above to be taken up in the multitude of TEIL contexts around the world.
Conclusion I began this chapter with an anecdote about my first contact with the approach to language teaching known as ‘communicative language teaching’ (CLT) and about my experience as an unwitting mediator and spreader of this approach to all parts of the world, or at least to the part in which I was living in the 1980s. I then went on to discuss the origins of CLT and how it is an ‘ideoscape’ – that is, a global flow of ideas about language teaching. Here I made the point that CLT is ideologically loaded, like all ideoscapes, and that there is at present an ongoing struggle in TEIL, as local educators adopt, adapt, and resist CLT in an attempt to reconcile global flows with local cultures and educational traditions. However, I noted that most of the literature which deals with resistance to currently dominant discourses of global capitalism has been situated in contexts where English is the official language. An exception I cited is McMahill (1997, 2001), who points to the possibility of developing a grassroots pedagogy in Japan around international feminist discourses. Of course, language teaching methodology is but one part of language education, and it is often language teaching materials that are the most salient mediators of what goes on in classrooms – including TEIL classrooms. Thus, after considering CLT as an approach to language teaching, I shifted my attention to the ‘global textbook.’ I examined how, through TEIL textbooks currently used around the world, CLT is wrapped up in processes of language commodification. Specifically, these processes are the commodification of English as a necessary skill in the global age and the positioning of learners as global citizens/cosmopolitan consumers. I concluded, once again, with a call for more critical approaches to TEIL, in particular in relation to the language teaching materials used. The ever-increasing interconnectedness of the world – one of the most cited characteristics of globalization – means that the uptake of CLT/TBLT, the commodification of English as a necessary skill, and the positioning of learners as cosmopolitan global citizens/consumers are likely to continue, and even increase, in coming years. Or, at any rate, one would come to this conclusion if one made two key assumptions: first, that English will remain the global language; and, secondly, that the anglophone countries, the United States in particular, will continue to exercise a considerable (though by no means complete) dominance over the global flows of technology, the media, and finance – that is, over Appadurai’s technoscapes, mediascapes, and financescapes, respectively. However, as authors such as David Harvey (2005) and Samir Amin (2006) have noted, American cultural, economic, and political hegemony in the world could be on the wane,
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along with many of the assumptions which people around the world have made over the past sixty years. On the one hand, at the nation-state level, the new neo-liberal economy has led the US to ever greater budget deficits, and US citizens are the most indebted in the world today. At the same time, in geopolitical terms, the power of the US in the world – above all, its capacity to influence events – may well be declining. Among other things, China has emerged as a rival for oil and other commodities; Russia has recently re-surfaced as a world player, through the dependence of many European powers on its energy resources; and, finally, Brazil and India are developing as economic powers. In addition, the current crisis of capitalism, in which we are all immersed, may yet have a great effect on any directorship of the world economy that the US might wish to assume. As a result of such real and emergent developments, there is now the prospect of a multi-polar new world order, along the lines of what Hardt and Negri (2000) envisaged a decade ago (though it is by no means identical to what they envisaged). Such a new order would replace the US-dominated ‘new world order ’ of George Bush Sr and might lead to changes in language teaching worldwide, such as the following: 1 What languages are most studied globally English may no longer be the global language; it could be supplanted in many contexts by Mandarin, Arabic, or Spanish. 2 How languages are taught As authors like Shi-xu (2005) have suggested, there are different ways of conceptualizing and framing any number of sociocultural phenomena; and, as seen in Phan Le Ha (2008) and Sharifian (2009), approaches to language teaching must follow such different ways. 3 The kinds of teaching materials employed in instruction, including the carrier content of these materials There could be, for example, changes in the carrier content, as we enter a post-neo-liberal era. On the other hand, it may well be that no such changes will occur, at least not to a significant degree, and that someone writing a chapter like this one in twentyfive years time will still be discussing the teaching of English as a global language, according to the latest permutation of CLT and via consumerist-driven global textbooks. After all, as Harvey (2005) and Callinicos (2009) argue convincingly, economic and political imperialism, as practiced and enforced by the US over the last century, shows itself to be amazingly resilient and adaptable to circ*mstances. Far more likely, however, is a future falling somewhere in-between these alternatives: a more recognizably multi-polar world than exists at present, but one in which the English language and the influence of anglophone nation–states will continue to be important. And in that case grassroots language teaching methodologies such McMahill’s “feminist second language pedagogy,” and transnational materials in the spirit of TESOL Islamia, may well be more common than they are at present.
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NOTES 1 The Council of Europe is an organization of European states established in May 1949 with the purpose of developing social, cultural, and economic ties among the member states.
REFERENCES Althusser, L. (2001) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays [1971]. New York: Monthly Review. Amin, S. (2006) Beyond US Hegemony? Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World. London: Zed Books. Austin, J. L. (1962) How to Do Things With Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Appadurai, A. (1990) Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. In M. Featherstone (ed.), Global culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, 295–310. London: Sage. Banet-Weiser, S., and Lapansky, C. (2008) RED is the new black: Brand culture, consumer citizenship and political possibility. International Journal of Communication 2: 1248–68. Bauman, Z. (2005) Liquid Life. Oxford: Polity. Bauman, Z. (2007) Consuming Life. Oxford: Polity. Beck, U. (2006) Cosmopolitan Vision. Oxford: Polity. Block, D. (2003) The Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Block, D., and Cameron, D. (eds) (2002) Globalization and Language Teaching. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Callinicos, A. (2009) Imperialism and Global Political Economy. Cambridge: Polity. Cameron, D. (2002) Globalization and the teaching of ‘communication skills.’ In Block and Cameron (eds), 67–82. Canagarajah, S. A. (1999) Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Canagarajah, S. A. (2002) Globalization, methods, and practice in periphery classrooms. In Block and Cameron (eds), 134–50. Canagarajah, S. A. (2005) Introduction. In S. Canagarajah (ed.), Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, xiii–xxx. Crystal, D. (2003) English as a Global Language, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cunningham, S., and Moor, P. (2005) New Cutting Edge Intermediate. Harlow, UK: Longman. Doughty, C., and Long, M. (eds) (2003) The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell. Ellis, R. (2003) Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellis, R. (2008) The Study of Second Language Acquisition, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Featherstone, M. (1995) Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity. London: Sage. Furedi, F. (2004) Therapy Culture. London: Routledge.
Globalization and Language Teaching Garcia Canclini, N. (1999) La globalización imaginada. México: Paidós. Garcia Canclini, N. (2001) Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Gass, S., and Selinker, L. (2008) Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course 3rd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Gee, J. P., Hull, G., and Lankshear, C. (1996) The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Giddens, A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. Gray, J. (2002) The global coursebook in English language teaching. In Block and Cameron (eds), 151–67. Gray, J. (in preparation) The Construction of English. London: Palgrave. Hall, J. K., and Eggington, W. G. (eds) (2000) The Sociopolitics of English Language Teaching. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Halliday, M. A. K. (1973) Explorations in the Functions of Language. London: Edward Arnold. Hannerz, U. (1996) Transnational Connections. London: Routledge. Hardt, M., and Negri, A. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (2005) The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Held, D. (2002) Culture and political community: National, global, and cosmopolitan. In S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice, 48–58. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heller, M. (2003) Globalization, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(4): 473–92. Holliday, A. (1994) Appropriate Methodology and Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Holliday, A. (2005) The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Howatt, A. (2004) A History of English Language Teaching, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hymes, D. (1971) On Communicative Competence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kubota, R. (2002) The impact of globalization on language teaching in Japan. In Block and Cameron (eds), 13–28. Kullman, J. (2003) The Social Construction of Learner Identity in the UK–Published ELT Coursebook. Unpublished PhD thesis, Canterbury, Christ Church University College. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2003) Macrostrategies for Language Teaching. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kumaravadivelu, B. (2008) Cultural Globalization and Language Education. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lash, S., and Lury, C. (2007) Global Culture Industry. Cambridge: Polity. Legutke, M., and Thomas, H. (1991) Process and experience in the language classroom. London: Longman. Long, M. (1996) The role of linguistic environment in second language acquisition.’ In W. Ritchie and T. Bhatia (eds), Approaches to Second Language Acquisition, 413–68. London: Academic Press. Long, M. (ed.) (2005) Second Language Needs Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKay, S. (2003) Teaching English as an international language: The Chilean context. ELT. Journal 57(2): 139–48. McKay, S. L., and Bokhorst-Heng, W. D. (2008) International English in Its Sociolinguistic Contexts: Towards a Socially Sensitive EIL Pedagogy. London: Routledge. McMahill, C. (1997) Communities of resistance: A case study of two feminist
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English classes in Japan. TESOL Quarterly 31(4), 612–22. McMahill, C. (2001) Self-expression, gender, and community: A Japanese feminist English class. In A. Pavlenko, A. Blackledge, I. Piller, and M. TeutschDwyer (eds), Multilingualism, Second Language Learning and Gender, 307–44. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Marx, K. (1990) Capital: Critique of Political Economy [1867], Vol. 1. Hammondsworth: Penguin. Munby, H. (1978) Communicative Syllabus Design: A Sociolinguistic Model for Designing the Content of Purpose-Specific Language Programmes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norton, B.,and Toohey, K. (eds) (2004) Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pennycook, A. (1994) The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. London: Longman. Phan Le Ha (2008) Teaching English as an International Language: Identity, Resistance and Negotiation. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Phillipson, R. (1992) Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Phillipson, R. (2003) English-Only Europe? Challenging Language Policy. London: Routledge. Richards, J., and Rodgers, T. (2001) Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Robertson, R. (1995) Glocalization: Time–space and hom*ogeniety– heterogenity. In M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson (eds), Global Modernities, 25–44. London: Sage Publications. Searle, J. (1965) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sharifian, F. (ed.) (2009) English as an International Language: Perspectives and Pedagogical Issues. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. Shi-Xu (2005) A Cultural Approach to Discourse. London: Palgrave. Tomlinson, J. (1999) Globalization and Culture. Oxford: Polity. Tupas, T. R. F. (2008) Anatomies of linguistic commodification: The case of English in the Philippines vis-à-vis other languages in the multilingual marketplace. In R. Rubdy and P. Tan (eds), Language as Commodity: Global Structures and Local Market Places, 89–105. London: Continuum. Urry, J. (1995) Consuming Places. London: Routledge. Van Ek, J. (1975) The Threshold Level. Strasbourg: Council of Europe. Vertovec, S. and R. Cohen (eds) (2002) Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wilkins, D. (1976) Notional Syllabuses. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Discursive Constructions of Global War and Terror ADAM HODGES
Introduction As globalization scholars widely acknowledge, we live in a world of cultural flows (Appadurai 1996). National borders no longer tightly constrain the movement of “ideas and ideologies, people and goods, images and messages” (Appadurai 2001: 5). Of particular importance for discourse scholars is the “flows of representations, narratives and discourses,” as Fairclough (2006: 3) emphasizes (emphasis in the original). In his discussion of “mediascapes,” Appadurai (1990) points out how the interconnectedness of the world’s media plays an important role in disseminating messages and discourses around the world. As these representations enter local contexts, they may be reworked and reshaped in line with local assumptions and conventions. In the study of language and globalization, we therefore need to pay close attention to the way discourse travels around the world and is taken up and reshaped by actors in local situations. To these ends, the Bakhtinian perspective on language provides a useful framework for exploring the global interconnectedness of discourse. Bakhtin (1981, 1986) emphasizes that language use does not take place in a vacuum; rather, all language use is fundamentally dialogic in nature. In their examination of political discourse in the media, Leudar and colleagues (2004) adapt these ideas in their notion of a “dialogical network.” As they explain, “media events, such as television and radio programs, press conferences and newspaper articles are networked: connected interactively, thematically and argumentatively” (Leudar et al. 2004: 245; see also Nekvapil and Leudar 2002). At the global level, we can observe how political discourse that emanates from Washington shapes and is shaped by discussions that take place in Europe, in the Middle East, and elsewhere. Against the backdrop of the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror,’ to what extent does such a dialogical network impact on the way war is justified and understood around the world? In this chapter I examine the dialogic connections involved in the global interchange of ideas about terrorism and the ‘war on terror.’ Discourse moves across
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national boundaries in a manner that shapes global relations and actions, and reshapes the dialogue that takes place within local contexts. To explore these processes, I discuss three contexts in detail. In the first, I examine recent work by Zala Volcic and Karmen Erjavec on the appropriation of the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror ’ discourse by Serbian intellectuals (Volcic and Erjavec 2007, Erjavec and Volcic 2007). These young Serbs incorporate this discourse into their own project of imagining and shaping contemporary war and politics, as well as geography and history. The second context discusses research undertaken by Becky Schulthies and Aomar Boum on the recontextualization of terrorism discourses on Al-Jazeera (Schulthies and Boum 2007). Their work underscores both the importance of discourse emanating from Washington and the way in which Middle Eastern commentators rework its language in light of their own cultural assumptions. For the third context, I provide my own analysis of the dialogic connections found in George W. Bush’s speeches where he uses reported speech frames to recontextualize the words of Osama bin Laden as part of his discursive construction of the ‘enemy’ in the ‘war on terror.’ As Bush provides his own preferred reading of bin Laden’s words, he reshapes these words in a way that works to justify his administration’s ‘war on terror ’ and war in Iraq. Before exploring each of these contexts, however, I begin with a theoretical overview of the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, contextualized within the framework of global cultural flows.
Dialogism and Global Interchange Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) notion of dialogism, which Kristeva (1980) rearticulates with the notion of intertextuality, is useful in the analysis of global discursive interchange because it emphasizes the connections across multiple discursive encounters where issues are contested. Intertextual relations are implicated in a process whereby the discourse is lifted from one setting – in other words, decontextualized – and brought into another discursive encounter, or recontextualized (Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs and Bauman 1992). Entextualization, the act of turning a piece of discourse into a text and of moving it from one context to another, allows social actors to bring with the text, to varying degrees, its earlier context, while also transforming the text in the new setting. The interconnectivity of discourse appears in different guises. The incorporation of previously uttered quotations into a current context is one way in which discourse connects across situations of use. Yet the concept of dialogism, as expressed by Bakhtin (1981, 1986), holds that any use of language is effectively implicated in a wider dialogue. Within the context of a political speech, for example, where the role of the audience is limited to non-verbal responses (applause, cheers, jeers), the speaker must account both for the immediate audience and for “an indefinite, unconcretized other” (Bakhtin 1986: 95), or for what Bakhtin calls “a higher superaddressee” (ibid., p. 126). Such political speeches build upon what has already been said (perhaps in a previous speech or media
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commentary), anticipate potential responses (both from the present audience and from a wider public), and formulate arguments in an attempt to overcome possible objections (which may follow at a subsequent time and in another place). In this way discourse enters into a speech chain (Agha 2003) where “the utterance is related not only to preceding, but also to subsequent links in the chain of speech communion” (Bakhtin 1986: 94). In the “natural histories of discourse” (the title of Silverstein and Urban 1996), the repetition of texts across discursive encounters inevitably involves reshaping those texts to some degree. As it was expressed by Becker, any use of language – what he calls languaging – consists in “taking old language […] and pushing […] it into new contexts” (Becker 1995: 185). In this process, prior text is not just repeated but reworked. The reshaping of prior text may occur with varying degrees of fidelity toward its meaning in the ‘original’ context. As Kristeva points out, repetition may be done “seriously, claiming and appropriating it [prior text] without relativizing it” – or the process of recontextualization may introduce “a signification opposed to that of the other ’s word” (Kristeva 1980: 73). Bakhtin (1981) speaks of a “double-voiced discourse,” which “serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author” (p. 324). Double-voiced discourse may be uni-directional when another voice is sympathetically represented, or vari-directional when the representing voice is critical toward the one represented (Morson and Emerson 1990: 149ff.; see also Rampton 1995 and 2006 on stylization). In its extreme form, resignification may move into the realm of parody (Bakhtin 1981: 340; Coupland 2007: 175; ÁlvarezCáccamo 1996: 38). Previously uttered discourse commonly enters new contexts as reported speech. The importance of reported speech in the Bakhtinian perspective is underscored by the significant discussion of the phenomenon by Voloshinov, who characterizes reported speech as “speech within speech, utterance within utterance, and at the same time also speech about speech, utterance about utterance” (Voloshinov 1973: 115; original emphasis). Voloshinov’s comments highlight the capacity of reported speech not just to represent pieces of previously uttered discourse, but to re-present what has been said elsewhere by others – that is, to recontextualize a prior utterance with different shades of meaning (Voloshinov 1971). As Buttny reminds us, “Reporting speech is not a neutral, disinterested activity” (Buttny 1997: 484). The contextualization of prior words within the reporting context imbues them with new connotations and interpretations, as will be illustrated later in the chapter. Dialogic interchange at the global level can be seen operating in recent sociolinguistic research that examines the impact of global linguistic flows on local communities of interaction. As the language of hip-hop spreads, for example, it is taken up in local contexts, where it is refashioned or ‘glocalized’ (Alim and Pennycook 2007; Pennycook 2003, 2007; Sarkar and Allen 2007). The forms of language associated with English and hip-hop therefore become hybridized (Bakhtin 1981) or indigenized (Appadurai 1990) as they mix with local languages.
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As a result, hip-hop language may not only act as an index of transnational identity, but it becomes a fluid resource for shaping new local identities. In the realm of media advertising, Piller (2001) shows how the insertion of English into German advertisem*nts does symbolic work by constructing a cosmopolitan identity for the product’s targeted consumers. While the advertisem*nts often draw upon the hegemonic influence of English as a global language to achieve an authoritative voice, Piller (2001) notes that, “as people appropriate the discourses of multilingual consumerism for their own ends, the ways in which they do so are no longer controlled by the original advertisers” (p. 181). English is symbolically reworked by local actors in such instances. Also looking at the symbolics of global English in local interaction, Bucholtz and Hall illustrate the use of the English language by self-identified lesbians in New Delhi, India, where these women view English “as the appropriate medium for the expression of a progressive sexuality, rejecting Hindi as indexical of backwards and discriminatory attitudes about sex” (Bucholtz and Hall 2008: 419). In this setting, English possesses what the authors call “sociosexual capital” in the construction of local sexual identities. These examples provide glimpses into the way transnational linguistic flows enter new contexts. As Blommaert (2008) summarizes in his own work on transnational flows of English and literacy skills, ‘glocalization’ involves the flow of resources into a local symbolic economy, where those global resources are transformed accordingly. At bottom, global discourse flows are enabled by the global media landscape, which connects myriad texts and voices together in a dialogical network. It is against this backdrop that I examine the global circulation of discourse about war and terror. Even widely circulated discourses, like those associated with the Bush administration’s representation of the ‘war on terror,’ are subject to reshaping as they enter new settings; and the discourse of the Bush administration is itself embedded within the global dialogic connections that exist on the global level. I now turn to three case studies that examine these issues in more detail.
The ‘War on Terror ’ Discourse in Serbia Zala Volcic and Karmen Erjavec’s examination of the discourse of young Serbian intellectuals offers a glimpse into how a widely recognized global discourse may be taken up and reshaped within a local context (Volcic and Erjavec 2007, Erjavec and Volcic 2007). In their studies, Volcic and Erjavec conducted ethnographic interviews with Serbian intellectuals aged 23 to 40. Their pool of interviewees included journalists, writers, artists, and politicians; and the interviews took place between October 2001 and the end of 2002, with follow-ups conducted in 2003 and 2004. Questions focused on the Yugoslav wars of the prior decade, as well as on the events of 9/11. As Volcic and Erjavec illustrate, the “anti-terrorism discourse” emanating from the George W. Bush administration in Washington after the events of 9/11 becomes the basis for the articulation of a “Serbian war on terrorism” in the accounts of these young intellectuals.
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Volcic and Erjavec summarize the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror ’ discourse as follows: “War has been proclaimed; the enemy is Islamic terrorism, personified by bin Laden; and the West has to unite in a war against terrorism” (Volcic and Erjavec 2007: 187). In the renegotiation of Serbian intellectuals’ global cultural and political position after the collapse of the Miloševic´ regime, Serbian intellectuals adapt this discourse within their own national context, in order to redefine the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. In effect, the ‘war on terror ’ discourse provides a ready-made template for young Serbians to re-imagine their identity on the world stage, as well as the identity of the ‘enemy’ they faced at home. Volcic and Erjavec (2007) note: “In the light of the global ‘war on terror ’ discourse, the enthusiastic attempts of the Balkan countries themselves to borrow and exploit the global ‘war on terror ’ in order to remain in the center of global attention are significant and remarkable” (p. 190). Volcic and Erjavec’s role as scholars positioned them as representatives of the West in the eyes of many of the interviewees. Accordingly, the Serbian intellectuals couched their political claims in a language that would be likely to resonate with a Western audience – the language of the ‘war on terror ’ – and to allow them to position their situation “in the center of global [or at least Western] attention.” In Bakhtinian terms, the Serbians were speaking to multiple audiences at once: the interviewers in particular, and the West in general. As Volcic and Erjavec illustrate, the young Serbians discursively equate the terrorism of 9/11 with the violence perpetrated by Muslims in the former Yugoslav wars. As summarized in the subtitle to Volcic and Erjavec’s article, the sentiment conveyed by these Serbians is that “we were fighting the terrorists already in Bosnia.” Notably, the Serbians do not merely refer here to terrorists in a general sense; rather they specifically point to the antagonists of the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror ’ to define the enemy they faced. This point is underscored by one informant, who remarks: “It is very tragic, what has happened in the former Yugoslav republics […] we were fighting the Osama terrorists by ourselves already then” (Volcic and Erjavec 2007: 196). Here the name of al Qaeda’s leader is used as an adjective, to personify the concept of ‘terrorists’ within the Serbian’s characterization of his nation’s ‘enemy.’ This allows the informants to paint a picture of themselves as astutely aware of, and involved in, the ‘war on terror ’ long before the USA woke up to the reality of Islamic terrorism on 9/11. As noted by another informant, Serbia’s fight in the ‘war on terror ’ stretches back to the 1980s: “Just see what is going on around the world today […] Some people in Serbia recognized the danger of fundamentalism and terrorism in the 1980s […]” (ibid.). As the authors explain, “The analogy, ‘Serbia is to Muslims as USA is to terrorists,’ starts to serve as a strategy of legitimizing the Serbian war against Muslims in the former Yugoslavia” (ibid.). As the young Serbians describe their own experience, they adopt the language of the ‘war on terror ’ to do so. As the Bush administration uses the term “terrorism” to describe not just the actions of the perpetrators of 9/11 but also those of the enemy faced in Iraq, in the Serbians’ accounts the term “terrorism” has also become a catch-all label for any acts carried out by their enemy. That is, the term “terrorism” extends “to all
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the violent acts – historical and contemporary – committed against them, the Serbs” (ibid.). In this way Serbian intellectuals rework the ‘war on terror ’ discourse so as to represent themselves as positive figures, on the right side of the line drawn by President Bush in the ‘war on terror.’ In the “with us or against us” binary formulated by Bush in his speeches after 9/11, the Serbians discursively position themselves in the former category. They opt into one side of the highly contested ideological divide represented in Bush’s vision of the world. Thus, “in contemporary Serbian discourse, expressions such as ‘war on terror ’ or ‘fighting Muslim terrorists’ are turned into legitimate terms designating political wishes of belonging and even legitimizing the violent former-Yugoslav wars” (ibid., p. 187). Notably, the ‘war on terror ’ discourse becomes an important element for the accomplishment of identity work. The ‘us’ versus ‘them’ binary in the Bush administration’s ‘war on terror ’ plays upon geographical, racial, and religious differences to distinguish the United States and its allies from Islamic terrorists. The negative images of Islam that underlie this discourse are easily exploited in the Serbians’ own discourse. “By denoting Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims as terrorists, Islamic fundamentalists, and Islamic radicals, the informants reduce all Muslims to a monolithic and irrationally violent ‘Other,’ and in that sense, recycle the Western stereotype about Muslims and Islam (Karim 1997; Said 1978, 1997)” (ibid., p. 193). The Serbians position themselves as the “victims” of actions perpetrated by what they term the “terrorist religion.” Through the use of ‘commonsense’ markers such as “everybody knows” or “we all know,” Volcic and Erjavec’s informants formulate essentialist claims about Muslims – for instance that they are “violent by nature” (p. 194). Another informant remarks: “They do not share the European manners, they are not developed in such a way” (p. 195). The authors note that their informants use the descriptors ‘terrorists’ and ‘Muslims’ interchangeably in talking about the ‘enemy.’ In contrast, in talking about themselves, they use ‘Serbs’ and ‘Europeans’ synonymously. The global identity categories that underlie the ‘war on terror ’ discourse provide a type of template to be applied to the local context of Serbia. Irvine and Gal’s (2000) concept of “fractal recursivity” is useful for thinking through this application of a global discourse to a local context. As these authors explain, “Fractal recursivity involves the projection of an opposition, salient at some level of relationship, onto some other level” (p. 38). In the case of the Serbian intellectuals, the dichotomy between the West/Europe/Christianity and the East/non-Europe/ Islam is applied within Serbia itself. This allows the Serbians to draw from the negative conceptions of the Muslim ‘Other ’ and to align themselves with the West. In this way the Serbians “present themselves as those (misunderstood and betrayed) heroes that have been long fighting the terrorists in Kosovo and Bosnia, which are Muslim countries, in order to defend the Christian West” (Volcic and Erjavec 2007: 187). The mimetic oppositions provide the Serbians with cultural resources to use in the discursive construction of identities in their regional landscape. Volcic and Erjavec argue that the use of the ‘war on terror ’ discourse by Serbian intellectuals works to naturalize and reproduce “a hegemonic global order of
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discourse” (p. 197). They illustrate this reproduction by pointing to the overlap of key words used both by Bush and by the Serbian intellectuals in their talk about ‘terrorism.’ As Bush describes the events of 9/11 so do the Serbians describe their war against Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. In particular, Erjavec and Volcic highlight descriptors that refer to “a crusade against Muslim terrorists” and to “a fight for our freedom and civilization” (Erjavec and Volcic 2007: 129). Volcic and Erjavec therefore argue that the language of the ‘war on terror ’ put forth by the Bush administration becomes further entrenched as a dominant discourse in world affairs. To be sure, although it may be considered ‘dominant’ in the sense of being widely circulated and recognized, it has also been highly resisted. Nevertheless, where accepted and taken up, as in the case highlighted by Volcic and Erjavec, it provides local actors with a ready-made framework for articulating their own political and militaristic struggles. Serbia is not the only context in which the ‘war on terror ’ has become reconfigured. Russia provides another interesting example (Volcic and Erjavec 2007: 199; Tishkov 2004). Where convenient, the Russians’ war against Muslim separatists in Chechnya has discursively morphed into a fight against terrorism. The connection between Russia’s actions in Chechnya and the ‘war on terror ’ has been embraced and reified by President Bush. In speeches delivered in October 2005, for example, Bush cites the school hostage crisis that took place in Beslan in 2004 as evidence of a widespread global ‘war on terror ’ situated on numerous “fronts,” including Chechnya. Bush states: Some have argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001, and al Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse. ((applause)) The government of Russia did not support Operation Iraqi Freedom, and yet the militants killed more than 150 Russian schoolchildren in Beslan. (Bush 2005)
Here Bush responds to critics who argue that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with 9/11 and the ‘war on terror.’ In his retort, the president lumps together all acts of violence waged by Muslims as instances of actions of the ‘enemy’ in the ‘war on terror.’ Like with the Serbian intellectuals’ recontextualization of the ‘war on terror ’ discourse, which is made in order to explain the former Yugoslav wars, Bush applies the ‘war on terror ’ rubric to the Russians’ fight in Chechnya. Not surprisingly, in the 2008 conflict between Russia and Georgia, where the United States adopted a decidedly anti-Russian and pro-Georgian stance, the language of the ‘war on terror ’ was conspicuously absent from the Bush administration’s descriptions of the situation. The adoption and adaptation of the ‘war on terror ’ discourse has little to do with socio-political realities and everything to do with the discursive framing of those realities. Global actors constantly position themselves in a world marked by widely circulating discourses – like the one about the ‘war on terror,’ which acts “as a common reservoir and reference point”
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(Spitulnik 2001: 112) for interpreting socio-political realities. As Volcic and Erjavec (2007: 199) summarize, “[w]hat one sees globally is the ongoing appropriation of this discourse into local contexts.”
Recontextualization of Terrorism Discourses on Al-Jazeera Discourse, according to Bakhtin, “cannot fail to be oriented toward the ‘already uttered,’ the ‘already known,’ the ‘common opinion’ and so forth” (1981: 279). Becky Schulthies and Aomar Boum (2007) illustrate this point in their work on the recontextualization of western terrorism discourses on the Arab media station Al Jazeera. As in the Serbian context described earlier, political discourse on Al Jazeera television is in a dialogical network (Leudar et al. 2004) with the Bush administration’s representation of the ‘war on terror.’ Al Jazeera was established in 1996, with the help of Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, Qatar ’s British-trained emir. Hamad, interested in introducing democratic reforms in Qatar, provided the financial backing for Al Jazeera throughout the first five years of its existence. Both popular and controversial, Al Jazeera provides an Arab–Islamic perspective on regional and world events, much as CNN provides an American perspective (Schulthies and Boum 2007: 147). Al Jazeera’s importance in the global media’s dialogical network is underscored by its launching of an English-language website, and, more recently, by the affiliated Al Jazeera English broadcast station. Although Al Jazeera’s primary audience consists of Arabic speakers in the Middle East, the broadcast station engages directly with discourse emanating from American and European contexts, often by providing direct responses to, or discussion on, statements made by President Bush in the American media. In their study, Schulthies and Boum (2007) draw from two programs featured on Al Jazeera: min washington (“From Washington”) and al-shar¯ı ’a wa al-haya¯t (“Islamic Law and Life”). In particular, min washington offers an important glimpse on the way the Bush administration’s discourse about terrorism is taken up and reshaped by social actors in the Middle East. This Arabic-language program, which broadcasts from Washington, DC, focuses on American policy that impacts the Middle East. Discussions are often framed with clips from President Bush’s speeches. Thus the insertion of the American president’s words into the show is part of the global speech chain that amplifies and multiplies the Bush administration’s discourse worldwide (Leudar et al. 2004: 245, 251). Although Bush himself has never appeared on the show, his words “are appropriated and then debated by third party representatives or critics” (Schulthies and Boum 2007: 147). As the show’s participants recontextualize these words, the discourse from Washington is refracted and reshaped through the lens of a cultural position decidedly different from the American perspective. As Schulthies and Boum (2007) emphasize in discussing the global dialogic context, “Al-Jazeera, and specifically min washington, is an intersecting node of ideas, images, people, and voices that is constantly
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being negotiated and reshaped in the dialogic interchange between circulating cultures: Western, Arab, Islamic, American, Arab Nationalist, Secularist, Qatari, Israeli” (p. 154). Notably, the key phrase forwarded by Bush in the wake of 9/11 to characterize America’s response to terrorism, ‘war on terror,’ is represented on min washington not as harb al-irhab, ‘war on terror,’ but rather as mukafaha al-irhab, ‘terrorism battle’ or ‘struggle’ (Schulthies and Boum 2007: 154). As critical linguists have widely pointed out, language use is never neutral. The metaphorical characterization of the struggle against terrorism as a war carries certain ideological attachments. As Fairclough notes, “Different metaphors imply different ways of dealing with things: one does not arrive at a negotiated settlement with cancer, though one might with an opponent in an argument. Cancer has to be eliminated, cut out” (Fairclough 1989: 120). The Bush administration’s conceptualization of America’s response to terrorism as a ‘war on terror ’ is a discursive achievement that forwards a set of assumptions on how to deal with terrorism – namely by engaging in real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Hodges 2008). The alternative designation on min washington reshapes the Bush administration’s metaphor for Middle Eastern discussants. It lessens the militaristic connotations associated with a war and characterizes the situation as a struggle. Also on min Washington, the word ‘terrorist’ is qualified as the ‘so-called terrorist,’ ‘ma yusama bil-irhab. Schulthies and Boum (2007) explain that this tactic provides distance “from the meaning this term has accrued in Western contexts by visualizing it in quotes, while at the same time indicating [the speaker ’s] epistemic stance toward the truth-value of its usage by others” (p. 154). In my own focus group interviews with politically involved college students in the USA about terrorism and war, I have found similar tactics used by critics of the Bush administration when they cannot help but use a phrase in widespread circulation (for instance the ‘war on terror ’) despite their non-acceptance of its validity (Hodges 2008). In these discussions, several critics of the Bush administration’s policy put the ‘war on terror ’ in verbal quote marks. One participant, for example, remarked for my audio-recorder that he was using (in his own words) “the little finger quotes thing” to qualify the phrase. These verbal scare quotes achieve the same effect as the marker ‘so-called.’ Critical voices within American media discourse, such as Anderson Cooper on CNN or Amy Goodman on the independent radio program Democracy Now, also use the ‘so-called’ marker to qualify the Bush administration’s phrase and challenge the ‘war on terror ’ designation. In contrast to these discursive contestations of what might be termed the dominant discourse, the website of Fox News – a media outlet that is generally supportive of the Bush administration’s ideological position – represents the ‘war on terror ’ in its reportage, orthographically, with capital letters, as the War on Terror. The turning of the ‘war on terror ’ into a proper name through the stylistics of capitalization legitimizes the concept. Whereas this capitalization of the War on Terror on FoxNews.com represents one end of the ideological spectrum, the use of the phrase ‘the so-called war on terror ’ by critical voices like Amy Goodman
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represents the other end. As discourse is recontextualized in different milieux, it can be reshaped in ways such as these to challenge dominant understandings (Hodges 2008). As Schulthies and Boum point out, the participants on min washington “use words that reflect the meanings of previous uses and contexts and yet each new use alters the meaning” (2007: 154). The concept of indexicality is useful for understanding this ongoing dialogic process of meaning-making. As developed by Charles Peirce (1932) and further refined by Silverstein (1976, 1985, inter alia), Ochs (1992, inter alia), and others, indexicality “is the semiotic operation of juxtaposition” (Bucholtz and Hall 2004: 378) whereby contiguity is established between a sign and its meaning. Bauman (2005: 145) reminds us that “Bakhtin’s abiding concern was with dimensions and dynamics of speech indexicality – ways that the now-said reaches back to and somehow incorporates or resonates with the already-said and reaches ahead to, anticipates, and somehow incorporates the to-be-said.” While the indexical associations between words and their contextual significance may draw on already established meanings – what Silverstein (2003) terms “presupposed indexicality” – new indexical links may also be created – what Silverstein calls “creative or entailed indexicality.” In other words, the nondenotational social meanings associated with a text are both partly pre-established and partly recalibrated when that text is brought into a new setting. In this way, as words – for example the key phrase ‘war on terror,’ or the label ‘terrorists’ – are presented and re-presented across differing contexts, social actors draw upon the use of those words in prior contexts as well as on their refraction in the current context, to arrive at larger social meanings. As Schulthies and Boum (2007) illustrate, the struggle over the meaning of words used to discuss political issues is subject to this ongoing dialogic revision. The negotiation of meaning sometimes takes place at a metadiscursive level. For example, Schulthies and Boum (2007) point to the discursive struggle over the definitions and meanings of al-irhab (‘terrorism’) and al-jihad (‘jihad’) on Al Jazeera. The designation ‘ma yusama bil-irhab, ‘so-called terrorist,’ discussed earlier, points to the problematic nature of characterizing the concept of terrorism and of establishing who constitutes a terrorist. In debating the distinction between ‘terrorism,’ ‘martyrdom,’ and ‘resistance,’ the guests on min washington call into question the manner of applying ‘terrorism’ in the global discourse dominated by the American ‘war on terror.’ In one exchange, reproduced below, the host (Al-Mirazi) and a guest (Musa) extend the notion of terrorism to actions conducted by state actors. That is, whereas the concept of terrorism has traditionally been used to refer to actions carried out by non-state organizations (for instance al Qaeda or Hamas), they agree to expand the term so as to make it include similarly destructive actions carried out by the governments of nation–states. Al-Mirazi:
In other words, then, if a bombing of a bus occurs, whether a Palestinian or non-Palestinian blows it up, or civilians and innocents are killed in a residence, whether with an F16 plane or even a hand grenade, this is terrorism. Is there agreement on this?
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Everything that harms civilians and targets civilians is terrorism, [whether] it is undertaken by a state or an organization, this … (min washington episode aired on July 22, 2004, cited in Schulthies and Boum 2007: 155)
As Schulthies and Boum point out, exchanges such as this one illustrate the collaborative nature of meaning construction. The show’s participants jointly endeavor to “move away from unequivocal designations” and bring more nuanced understandings to the meaning of terrorism (2007: 155). As participants on these Al Jazeera programs dialogically respond to the discourse about terrorism emanating from Washington, they revise the meanings found in the Bush administration’s representation of the issue. In short, they reshape the discourse to give it meaning within their own cultural context.
Construction of the Terrorist ‘Enemy’ through Their Own Words As Leudar and colleagues (2004: 245) note in their discussion of dialogical networks, “even the talk of enemies is intricately networked.” Notably, the words of an ‘enemy’ can be integral to the construction of the binary relation between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in times of war. In this way, the global circulation of discourse plays into the tactic of distinction involved in the construction of identities (Bucholtz and Hall 2004). In the ‘war on terror ’ discourse, Bush builds a narrative that details the terrorist threat embodied in the personage of Osama bin Laden and in his al Qaeda network. In the narrative, Bush often draws upon the words of bin Laden himself to construct a representation of the ‘enemy.’ The numerous tapes released by bin Laden, which are broadcast on Al Jazeera and translated into English for global consumption, provide not only a dialogic retort to Bush’s discourse, but also fodder for Bush’s representation of bin Laden. Therefore the dialogic connections between Bush and bin Laden through the global media produce what Stocchetti (2007) refers to as mutually constitutive identities. That is, “each of the antagonists depends on the other for the legitimacy of its [sic] own actions” (Stocchetti 2007: 237). Bush depends upon bin Laden and bin Laden depends upon Bush as they weave their narratives about the ‘war on terror.’ As Buttny (1997) and Buttny and Williams (2000) point out, reporting the words of others is often done in order to construct representations of those who are quoted. In his speeches, Bush makes good use of quotations to build a picture of the terrorists against which the United States is fighting in the ‘war on terror.’ The examples that follow are taken from a speech delivered by Bush on September 5, 2006. In the speech, he focuses on, as he describes, “the terrorists’ own words, what they believe, what they hope to accomplish, and how they intend to accomplish it” (Bush 2006). Through the use of reported speech frames, he contextualizes and metapragmatically evaluates the prior discourse attributed to the ‘enemy,’ to remind Americans: “Five years after our nation was attacked, the terrorist
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danger remains. We’re a nation at war” (ibid.). Bush’s discursive construction of this “terrorist danger” squares firmly with his administration’s aims in the ‘war on terror ’ and provides justification for his administration’s militarized foreign policy. A great deal of discursive work in Bush’s speech is dedicated to building a case for the seriousness of the terrorist threat and to backing up that case with strong evidence. Knowledge must be distinguished from mere belief or opinion in presenting this case. Bush therefore works to present ‘facts’ to back up the truth claims he forwards. As seen in the extracts that follow, he emphasizes the source of this evidence, which validates what “we know.” We know what the terrorists intend to do because they’ve told us, and we need to take their words seriously. (Bush 2006) We know this because al Qaeda has told us. (Ibid.)
Reported speech works toward providing evidence and corroborating accounts (Hill and Irvine 1993). The belief in the objectivity of quoted words lends much of the corroborative power of reported speech. In his analysis of courtroom discourse, for example, Matoesian (2000) shows how the referential function of language (on which see Silverstein 1976 and 1979) is privileged. As a result, reported speech is treated as the transparent conveyor of the meaning of prior words (see also Blommaert 2005: 185ff. on the “ideology of a fixed text,” and Álvarez-Cáccamo 1996: 55 on the verisimilitude of reported speech). By repeatedly emphasizing that the information he lays out is known “because al Qaeda has told us,” Bush sets up an authoritative source, to offer outside corroboration for his depiction of the ‘enemy.’ In the courtroom, the words of a defendant can be the most damning evidence against him. Likewise, one need not merely believe Bush, the implied reasoning goes, but “hear the words of Osama bin Laden,” as Bush emphasizes in the extracts that follow. They reject the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the free world. Again, hear the words of Osama bin Laden earlier this year, “Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us.” (Bush 2006) Despite these strategic setbacks, the enemy will continue to fight freedom’s advance in Iraq, because they understand the stakes in this war. Again, hear the words of bin Laden, in a message to the American people earlier this year. He says, “The war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever.” (Ibid.) But they’ve made clear that the most important front in their struggle against America is Iraq, the nation bin Laden has declared the “capital of the Caliphate.” Hear the words of bin Laden, “I now address the whole Islamic nation. Listen and understand. The most serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War that is raging in Iraq.” He calls it “a war of destiny between infidelity and Islam.” He says, “The whole world is watching this war,” and that it will end in “victory and glory, or misery and humiliation.” For al Qaeda, Iraq is not a distraction from their war on
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America. It is the central battlefield where the outcome of this struggle will be decided. (Ibid.)
In these extracts, the reported speech attributed to bin Laden does more to convey Bush’s perspective on the world than anything else. The “words of bin Laden” effectively forward several key tenets of Bush’s own narrative about the ‘war on terror.’ Namely, Bush reinforces the notion that Iraq is “the central battlefield” of the ‘war on terror.’ In other speeches, Bush makes ubiquitous reference to Iraq as the “central front in the war on terror” (Hodges 2008). The conflation of the war in Iraq with the struggle against al Qaeda has perhaps become one of the most contested elements of Bush’s ‘war on terror ’ narrative. Under dialogic pressure from administration critics and from the American public, Bush attempts here to solidify the notion that the war in Iraq is part and parcel of the ‘war on terror.’ Rather than mere belief or opinion, Bush discursively positions his claims about the connection between Iraq and al Qaeda as an objectively verifiable ‘truth.’ The direct quotations of bin Laden’s words provide evidence to back up Bush’s assertion. Bin Laden’s words therefore work to authenticate Bush’s perspective from a position seemingly untainted by his own ideological bias. As Sacks (1992) points out, the reported speech frame works to convey to listeners “how to read what they’re being told” (p. 274). Through metapragmatic comments that accompany the direct quotations from bin Laden, Bush works to “assimilate, rework, and re-accentuate” those words (Bakhtin 1986: 89). In short, he reshapes the words through his own interpretive lens. In introducing the enemy’s words, Bush notes that “they’ve made clear that the most important front in their struggle against America is Iraq.” After he cites several direct quotations from bin Laden, Bush concludes with another evaluation of the quoted words, “For al Qaeda, Iraq is not a distraction from their war on America. It is the central battlefield where the outcome of this struggle will be decided.” Not surprisingly, the evaluations that frame the reported speech mirror directly Bush’s own claims. Where Bush recognizes Iraq as the “central front in the war on terror,” we are told that bin Laden affirms this vision of reality. This view, however, is not presented as Bush’s personal belief, but as a view that holds “for al Qaeda.” Through the words of bin Laden, Bush therefore provides his own dialogical retort to administration critics who see the war in Iraq as a ‘distraction’ from the struggle against al Qaeda. Bush reinforces the notion of objectivity in his depiction of the ‘enemy’ in the extract that follows. Now, I know some of our country hear the terrorists’ words, and hope that they will not, or cannot, do what they say. History teaches that underestimating the words of evil and ambitious men is a terrible mistake. In the early 1900s, an exiled lawyer in Europe published a pamphlet called “What Is To Be Done?” in which he laid out his plan to launch a communist revolution in Russia. The world did not heed Lenin’s words, and paid a terrible price. The Soviet Empire he established killed tens of millions, and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war. In the 1920s, a failed Austrian painter published a book in which he explained his intention to build an
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Aryan super-state in Germany and take revenge on Europe and eradicate the Jews. The world ignored Hitler ’s words, and paid a terrible price. His Nazi regime killed millions in the gas chambers, and set the world aflame in war, before it was finally defeated at a terrible cost in lives. Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say? (Bush 2006)
The comparisons in this extract are represented not as interpretations provided by the narrator but as lessons that “history teaches,” and as events that were foretold in the “words” of the protagonists named in those lessons (Lenin, Hitler, and bin Laden). In his examination of the discursive construction of reality, Potter discusses how the personification of facts in descriptions obscures “the work of interpretation and construction done by the description’s producer” (Potter 1996: 158). Here the personification of history gives history an agency its own, to “teach” us lessons. Rather than Bush discursively positioning himself as the teacher, “history teaches,” and the historical facts that follow “do their own showing” (ibid.). The expression “history teaches” works to remove the narrator ’s own subject position as a historical interpreter. Bush, as a politician, could be accused of drawing biased interpretations; but the lessons that “history teaches” provide an air of objectivity. As Bush builds an image of the terrorists as “evil men,” he juxtaposes the “terrorists’ words” with those of the nation’s historical enemies – namely Lenin and Hitler. Bush sets up an historical analogy, so that the current threat posed by bin Laden’s al Qaeda appears to be analogous to the threat posed by Lenin’s Communist Russia and Hitler ’s Nazi Germany. In what Bucholtz and Hall (2004) would term the “adequation” of these disparate figures from the canon of American history, “potentially salient differences are set aside in favor of perceived or asserted similarities that are taken to be more situationally relevant” (383). Bush constructs a rogues gallery of personages who are linked together through their embodiment of “evil.” Importantly, Bush does not merely present this depiction as his own interpretation; he constructs it rather through “what these evil men say” – through their own words. In a rhetorical question posed to the American people, Bush implores, “Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?” As Bakhtin (1986) notes, others’ “utterances can be repeated with varying degrees of reinterpretation” (p. 91). In constructing the ‘Other ’ in the ‘war on terror,’ Bush draws on bin Laden’s words, but replaces the accounts and motives behind those words with his own interpretations. The recontextualization of bin Laden’s words within the framework of Bush’s speech allows Bush to supply his own preferred reading of those words and to reshape them so as to help justify his administration’s ‘war on terror ’ and war in Iraq.
Conclusion In this chapter I have presented three case studies that illustrate the dialogic connections involved in the global interchange of ideas about terrorism and about
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the ‘war on terror.’ An underlying premise of much of the chapter has been the prominent position of the Bush administration’s representation of terrorism in the global media’s dialogical network. In a sense, the Bush administration’s voice from Washington establishes a dominant, hegemonic discourse in global talk about war and terror. Yet, as Williams (1977: 133) notes, “[t]he reality of any hegemony, in the extended political and cultural sense, is that, while by definition it is always dominant, it is never either total or exclusive.” The examination of the ‘war on terror ’ discourse in this chapter has therefore focused on the fluidity and malleability of this discourse as it enters into a web of dialogic interconnections. Rather than being a matter of cultural hegemony and imposition in a world of global discourse flows, the ‘war on terror ’ discourse is subject to what Appadurai (1990) terms “indigenization,” as it enters into different cultural milieux, where it is adapted according to local experiences and aims. While the power of the Bush administration’s voice in world affairs may be to establish an agenda and to provide a macro-level discourse for talking about war and terror, how that discourse is taken up and rearticulated can only be understood by examining the way it enters local contexts of interaction. As Bakhtin (1981) notes, “in real life people talk most of all about what others talk about – they transmit, recall, weigh and pass judgment on other people’s words, opinions, assertions, information; people are upset by others’ words, or agree with them, contest them, refer to them and so forth” (p. 338). In global talk of war and terror, it is difficult even for critics and opponents of the Bush administration’s foreign policy to avoid the language of the ‘war on terror.’ As seen in the case study of Al Jazeera, resistance to the terms and actions associated with the American ‘war on terror ’ begins by reanimating its language. As Al Jazeera commentators respond to the discourse from Washington, they reshape it. As seen in the case study from Serbia, more sympathetic voices can also be seen reworking an influential discourse in line with their own aims. Insofar as the young Serbs interviewed by Volcic and Erjavec side with the Bush administration’s vision of the world, they still rework the language of the ‘war on terror ’ in line with their own nationalistic aims. And, as seen in the analysis of Bush’s own speech, even the ‘dominant’ perspective is itself stitched together from the words of other actors involved in the global interchange about war and terror. The dialogic connections in the global interchange about war and terror provide a common framework that allows social actors to discuss and debate the topic. Even as social actors resist the discourse or put it to different aims, they must appropriate its language if they are to be listened to and understood. It is through this agentive act of speaking that social actors make a discourse “vulnerable to unpredictable futures” and open to “the possibility of resignification” (Inoue 2006: 21). As they speak within the ‘war on terror ’ discourse, the possibilities for reshaping it are not always foreseen or consciously pursued. Nevertheless, the possibilities are there. As was posed in the introduction: to what extent do the dialogic connections involved in global interchange about war and terror impact the way war is justified and understood around the world? This chapter has suggested that the answer lies in the close examination of global discourse flows as they are taken
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up and reshaped in local contexts, since it is in these contexts that meanings are ultimately worked out.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I owe special thanks to Chad Nilep for feedback on earlier versions of this chapter. Moreover, this chapter could not have taken shape without the thoughtful input of Nikolas Coupland. Any shortcomings that remain are my sole responsibility.
REFERENCES Agha, A. (2003) The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication 23: 231–73. Alim, H. S., and Pennycook, A. (2007) Glocal linguistic flows: Hip-hop culture(s), identities, and the politics of language education. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 6(2): 80–100. Álvarez-Cáccamo, C. (1996) The power of reflexive language(s): Code displacement in reported speech. Journal of Pragmatics 25: 33–59. Appadurai, A. (1990) Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Theory, Culture and Society 7: 295–310. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, A. (2001) Grassroots globalization and the research imagination. In A. Appadurai (ed.), Globalization, 1–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by C. Emerson and
M. Holquist, translated by V. W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bauman, R. (2005) Commentary: Indirect indexicality, identity, performance: Dialogic observations. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 145–50. Bauman, R., and Briggs, C. L. (1990) Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59–88. Becker, A. L. (1995) Beyond Translation: Essays Towards a Modern Philology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Blommaert, J. (2005) Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blommaert, J. (2008) Bernstein and poetics revisited: Voice, globalization and education. Discourse and Society 19(4): 425–52. Briggs, C., and Bauman, R. (1992) Genre, intertextuality, and social power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2(2): 131–72. Bucholtz, M., and Hall, K. (2004) Language and identity. In A. Duranti (ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, 369–94. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Bucholtz, M., and Hall, K. (2008) All of the above: New coalitions in sociocultural linguistics. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4): 401–31.
Discursive Constructions of Global War and Terror Bush, G. W. (2005) Speech at Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, DC. October 25. Available at: http://www.whitehouse. gov/news/releases/2005/10/20051025. html. Bush, G. W. (2006) Speech at Capital Hilton Hotel, Washington, DC. September 5. Available at: http://www. whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2006/09/20060905-4.html. Buttny, R. (1997) Reported speech in talking race on campus. Human Communication Research 23(4): 477–506. Buttny, R., and Williams, P. L. (2000) Demanding respect: The uses of reported speech in discursive constructions of interracial contact. Discourse and Society 11(1): 109–33. Coupland, N. (2007) Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Erjavec, K., and Volcic, Z. (2007) ‘War on terrorism’ as a discursive battleground: Serbian recontextualization of G. W. Bush’s discourse. Discourse and Society 18(2): 123–37. Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and Power. London: Longman. Fairclough, N. (2006) Language and Globalization. London: Routledge. Hill, J., and Irvine, J. (1993) Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodges, A. (2008) The ‘War on Terror ’ Discourse: The (Inter)Textual Construction and Contestation of Sociopolitical Reality. Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Colorado at Boulder. Hodges, A., and Nilep, C. (eds) (2007), Discourse, War and Terrorism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Inoue, M. (2006) Vicarious Language: Gender and Linguistic Modernity in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Irvine, J., and Gal, S. (2000) Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. Kroskrity (ed.), Regimes of Language,
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35–84. Santa Fe: School of American Research. Karim, K. H. (1997) The historical resilience of primary stereotypes: Core images of the muslim other. In S. H. Riggins (ed.), The Language and Politics of Exclusion: Others in Discourse, 153–82. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Kristeva, J. (1980) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, edited by L. S. Roudiez, translated by T. Gora, A. Jardine, and L. S. Roudie. New York: Columbia University Press. Leudar, I., Marsland, V., and Nekvapil, J. (2004) On membership categorization: ‘Us,’ ‘them’ and ‘doing violence’ in political discourse. Discourse and Society 15(2–3): 243–66. Matoesian, G. (2000) Intertextual authority in reported speech: Production media in the Kennedy Smith rape trial. Journal of Pragmatics 32: 879–914. Morson, G. S., and Emerson, C. (1990) Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of Proaics. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Nekvapil, J., and Leudar, I. (2002) On dialogical networks: Arguments about the migration law in Czech mass media in 1993. In Language, Interaction and National Identity, Stephen Hester and William Housley (eds), 60–101. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company. Ochs, E. (1992) Indexing gender. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds), Rethinking Context: Language as Interactive Phenomenon, 335–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peirce, C. (1932) Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by C. Hartshorne and P. Weiss. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pennycook, A. (2003) Global englishes, rip slyme, and peformativity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7: 513–33. Pennycook, A. (2007) Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge.
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Piller, I. (2001) Identity constructions in multilingual advertising. Language in Society 30(2): 153–86. Potter, J. (1996) Representing Reality: Discourse, Rhetoric and Social Construction. London: Sage. Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London and New York: Longman. Rampton, B. (2006) Language in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sacks, H. (1992) Lectures on Conversation. Cambridge: Blackwell. Sarkar, M., and Allen, D. (2007) Hybrid identities in Quebec hip-hop: Language, territory, and ethnicity in the mix. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 6(2): 117–30. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Said, E. (1997) Covering Islam. New York: Vintage Books. Schulthies, B., and Boum, A. (2007) ‘Martyrs and terrorists, resistance and insurgency’: Contextualizing the exchange of terrorism discourses on Al-Jazeera. In Hodges and Nilep (eds), 143–60. Silverstein, M. (1976) Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In K. Basso and H. Selby (eds), Meaning in Anthropology, 11–55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 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: Chicago Linguistic Society. Silverstein, M. (1985) Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of structure, usage, and ideology. In
Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives, E. Mertz and R. J. Parmentier (eds), 219–59. Orlando: Academic Press. Silverstein, M. (2003) Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23: 193–229. Silverstein, M., and Urban, G. (eds) (1996) Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Spitulnik, D. (2001) The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. In A. Duranti (ed.), Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader, 95–118. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Stocchetti, M. (2007) The politics of fear: A critical inquiry into the role of violence in 21st century politics. In Hodges and Nilep (eds), 223–41. Tannen, D. (1989) Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tishkov, V. (2004) Chechnya: Life in a War-Torn Society. San Francisco: University of California Press. Volcic, Z., and Erjavec, K. (2007) Discourse of war and terrorism in Serbia: ‘We were fighting the terrorists already in Bosnia …’ ” In Hodges and Nilep (eds), 185–204. Voloshinov, V. N. (1971) Reported speech. In L. Matejka and K. Promorska (eds), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, 149–75. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Voloshinov, V. N. (1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik. New York: Seminar Press. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Has God Gone Global? Religion, Language, and Globalization ANNABELLE MOONEY
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1:1 (King James’ Bible) Placing the study of religion within the context of language and globalization is a multi-faceted task. The body of relevant work is diverse and comes from a variety of areas. There has been significant work in the field of linguistics and religion, for example on sociolinguistic engagement (Webster 1988; Szuchewycz 1994), on the ethnography of language (Bauman 1989), on theo-linguistics (Crystal 1965, 1966; van Noppen 1995, 2006), and on the sociology of language and religion (Omoniyi and Fishman 2006). However, it is only in other disciplines that there has been an explicit engagement with globalization. The attention given to this area in the media (Mitchell and Marriage 2003), mass communication (Stout and Buddenbaum 1996), and sociology (Kurtz 1995) is valuable in that it may help to guide and frame future work in linguistics by providing context, organization information, and theoretical schemata. In this chapter I suggest and outline four emerging areas which may be of particular interest to linguists. The importance of linguistics in understanding religion has long been recognized. Crystal’s early work (1965) can be seen as the starting point for theo-linguistics, a field which did not have a name until more than ten years later. Research in the field covered the stylistics – in its full linguistic sense – of religious language, as well as the social situatedness of language in religion – which included context, register, and genre and extended to debates about language in particular religions, especially with respect to sacred texts, their translation, and altering their register to bring it ‘up to date.’ Moreover, dealing with religious texts (spoken and written) will always have to address the status of particular languages in particular religions. Thus the status of Arabic in Islam (on which see Suleiman 2004 and Miller 2008), or that of Hebrew in Judaism, are examples of the sacred relationships between language and religion. Not all denominations have singular relationships with language, and this will naturally have an effect
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on the spread of both. These relationships are also subject to shift. Fishman notes that “in premodern times […] there was no ‘commandment’ to speak or safeguard (or even pray in) Hebrew” (2001: 179). Some changes are more recent; Turner for instance notes: “While Arabic retains its orthodox authority, the Islamic masses are encountering religion in their native languages often for the first time” (2007: 133; see also Eickelman and Piscatori 1996). The spread of religion is intimately bound up with the spread of language. As is well known, the move to the vernacular in Christianity opened up sacred texts to lay populations and “ended the interpretative monopoly of the institutional church” (O’Leary 1996: 785). Thus the link between religion and language contact is important (Spolsky 2003). Missionaries, for example, are able to convert the linguistic and religious ‘Other,’ and often also to influence local language development (through the development of orthographies, for example). Close connections between language and liturgy persist, and may be found not only in religions with a particular language allegiance, but also where language and religion are used as central tools in the construction and maintenance of ethnicity and national identity (Omoniyi and Fishman 2006; Rosowsky 2008). This may occur in many ways, from preserving community languages through religion (Woods 2004) to constructing and projecting identity by retaining traditional practices in the choice of personal names (Jayaraman 2005: 476). Despite the importance of the local, religion has always had an international – or even global – face, if only because religion pre-exists the very concept of nation (see Yates 2002: 70). If we take the global face of religion as a prompt, it is possible to see economic globalization in terms of what, traditionally, counts as theological or religious categories. On such a reading, neo-liberalism becomes the religion; discourses of economic free trade, democratization, and human rights become the dogma; and the developed world becomes the missionary force, which sends institutional representatives to spread the good global word. In the words of Salomon Nahmad of the National Indigenist Institute of Mexico, “Those [mobile] Americans are the Franciscans and the Dominicans of our time. They may not see it that way, but they are the religious arm of an economic, political, and cultural system.” (Yates 2002: 89)
At the same time it is important to remember that flows in the global world do not move in only one way. Crucially, religion is also an important resource for the oppressed (Hatem 2006). In all cases, ‘traditional’ identity categories should also be explored. It is essential, for example, for gender to be central in analysis (see Jule 2005), especially because this feature can be linked (either in a theoretical or in an activist mode) to feminism, which is an important and positive global force (Walby 2002). In the same way in which ‘globalization’ is a contested or, at least, polysemic term, ‘religion’ is multifaceted. In what follows I conceive of religion broadly, so as to include: self-identifying communities already recognized as ‘religions’ (for example Christianity, Islam, or Judaism) as well as less accepted ones (new
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religious movements or New Age groups); religion as cultural practice, distinct from formal membership and worship; religion as ideology, especially of the kind deployed in political contexts; and commitment to religion as a central element in conceptions of identity. Certainly these aspects are not mutually exclusive; and, in order to take proper account of the existing work and of the emerging opportunities in the field, it is necessary to have a broad conception of religion. This means, of course, that the present chapter cannot be exhaustive. The forthcoming linguistic analysis is largely discourse analysis. This is not to suggest that other kinds of analysis are impossible or unproductive. Rather, in trying to describe the four strands I identify below, uncovering ideology through discourse analysis is an economic way forward. As well as being amenable to analysis, each piece of data presented here will serve to provide material from the area under discussion and thus to furnish context. Further, the field of globalization invites an ideological examination of discourses. Regarding religion, Heather argues that “Christ sometimes in effect practises CDA [critical discourse analysis]” (2008: 472). Moreover, in general, religious affiliation is directly related to textual affiliation. The texts, practices, interpretations, and hermeneutic systems that are considered sacred are determined by the religious group one belongs to. Naturally, the syntactic and phonetic levels of these texts are amenable to linguistic and hermeneutic analysis. However, the shibboleth is more often at the level of discourse and ideology than at the level of the phoneme. Arguments that globalization is merely a new phase of imperialism and colonization are common in globalization literature and in popular opinion. This position is based on evidence to the effect that the flow of cultural and material goods runs largely from the North to the South – which is positive for the North but not always for the South. While flows of religion from the East to the West have received attention, especially because of fears of fundamentalism, little attention has been paid to the influence of the global South, notably on Christian denominations. The influence of the global South will be addressed first, and particular arguments, both from the North and from the South, will be examined concerning this influence. In the next section I turn to one of the richest areas of research: that of hybridity, relocalization and re-territorialization. This strand is most apparent in the attention accorded by researchers to popular music and to its transformation and use by religious groups. Hybridity is also evident in the dual spread of language and religion. Here communicative function, genre, and speech act theory are directly relevant. Given the wide variety of texts that are hybridized, multi-modal analysis is also appropriate. The values which language, genres, and styles signal are important here, especially in the ‘missionary’ TESOL material examined in this section. The third section examines the opportunities that technology, especially the internet, has provided for religion. Just as the internet and television are used by established religions to connect with their members and to recruit new ones, virtual spaces create new possibilities for ways of thinking and communicating about religion, as well as new ways of practicing and creating it. Thus, the speech community needs to be considered in this new context. This area also offers a rich scope for concepts such as communities of
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practice, ethnography of communication, and conversation analysis. As for the fourth section, given that one of the paradigmatic emblems of globalization is neo-liberal capitalism, it is important to track some of the incorporation of consumer discourses and practices into religious doctrine and activity. Here Bourdieu’s concept of social capital is useful – and most appropriate, in view of the real capital involved. Some well known new religious movements are particularly adept at fusing these domains; however, such practices are not linked only to ‘newcomers.’ Ideology is central here, as is argument theory, especially when warrants are required for behavior related to wealth accumulation – something which is not normally considered in the religious frame. By way of conclusion, I briefly address the fundamentalism of the new atheism and link it to the challenges that the field holds for linguistics. What needs to be considered, specifically, is the kind of text and identity to which religious experience is often connected.
The Southern Shift As mentioned, those who understand globalization as a second period of imperialism stake their claims on directionality of flow. Neo-imperialism, neo-colonialisim, McDonaldization (Ritzer 1997) and coca-colonization (Wagnleitner 1994), Westoxification (Juergensmeyer 2005: 136), and even globalatinization (Derrida 1998) are some of the terms used in this broad and diverse area. These views are more nuanced than might first be apparent, and the focus they can give to inequality, poverty, patterns of trade, and ethical dimensions of the global order should not be dismissed. That is to say, ‘imperialism’ is always locally imposed, realized and resisted. Thus Beyer argues for the importance of glocalization in understanding contemporary religion, while recognizing that a core/periphery, “great tradition”/“little tradition” prevailed in the past (Beyer 2003: 363). He argues that the existence of “globalized localizations at the same time as localized globalizations” means that there is only a “symbolic priority of authenticity or authority” (p. 376): in other words, because of the multiplicity of origins and flows, there can be no prioritization of a singular authority. At the same time authenticity and authority are important concepts, and they are nevertheless deployed. Far from threatening to colonize religions, localization has often provided new impetus and productive resources for religions colonizing from the North. Perhaps ironically, resistance and reinvention are possible in part because of the “semantic slippage entailed in translation” – namely the translation of sacred texts (where translation is allowed, as some sacred texts are only considered sacred/correct in the original language: Cole 2001: 485) and because of the religions’ symbolic vocabulary (Meyer 1999; Rey 2004). This means that religious flows are never unidirectional; rather, today continued missionary activity contains important cross-flows and reverseflows, from previously missionized areas to the European heartlands and to other previously missionized areas. (Beyer 2003: 367–8)
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More specifically, James and Shoesmith argue that “the centre of gravity of Christianity is moving from the North to the South and from the West to the East” (2008: 5; see also Yates 2002 and Jenkins 2002). Religious commitment, in global demographic terms, is clearly located in the South. While the Pew Research Centre (2001) reports that religion is more important to people in the US than to people in other “wealthy nations,” religion there is still only rated as very important by 59 percent. In African countries, by contrast, values range from 80 percent (Angola) to 97 percent (Senegal). In Asia, too, Indonesia and India rate the importance of religion at over 90 percent (95 and 92 respectively), and the Philippines and Bangladesh follow closely (88 percent for both). It would seem that patterns of conversion and allegiance in world religions such as Christianity and Islam mean that the global ‘South’ has religious significance, if only in terms of numbers. I suggest that there is more than a demographic religious influence flowing from the South. Here I take Anglicanism as an example of this shift in flow. While to my knowledge there has not been any recent linguistic work on the topic, an examination of current press material in terms of argument, stylistic choices, and discourse suggests that the importance of the religious South has been recognized, but not always in geographic terms. A comment column in one newspaper conceives of the distinction as between liberal Anglicanism and evangelical orthodoxy. The issue was construed as a game of numbers: “Surely most British Anglicans were committed to gay rights and would not compromise? It seemed axiomatic that the evangelicals were a minority movement – a pushy and growing one, but still a minority” (Hobson 2008: 27). The Pew report figures suggest that, globally, the evangelicals are probably not a minority; but only the British congregation is considered here when the author makes the ‘commonsense’ claim (“Surely”). Nevertheless, there is a realization that something has changed and that power is involved. “The nature of liberal Anglicanism quietly shifted. It became meek before the rise of evangelical orthodoxy” (ibid.). Here the numerical majority of liberal Anglicans appears to be taken for granted, even though the global picture questions this assumption. Moreover, the distinction made between liberalism and orthodoxy maps onto a North/South distinction. While Hobson’s comment frames the issue largely in terms of a political spectrum, other members of the Anglican church are explicitly religious in their language, adopting traditional militant tropes in areas of conflict. A pressing issue for the church is the discord created by the admission of hom*osexual clergy. One senior English bishop compares “the consecration of a gay bishop in America to the invasion of Iraq” (quoted in Gledhill and Combe 2008). He then deploys an argument recently used by Bush: “Either the rest of the world caves in or someone has to stand up to them” (ibid.), returning this figure of speech to its original religious field. The argument is conceived of as a holy war (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) with mutually exclusive sides – a clear and false polarization of argument positions. Others, from the South, interpret liberal attitudes in the church as selfish “personal dissent” (rather than theological diversity), which “severs” “the grace of Christ from his moral commandments” (quoted in Gledhill 2005: 16). Thus the
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global South claims orthodoxy for its collective self, stressing historical continuity, unity, and faithfulness to the Word of God (see Vanguard 2003). This orthodoxy is opposed to personal opinion, taken in isolation from the group and from tradition. The position of the South is, however, consistent with national laws in countries of the global South, where hom*osexuality is illegal. The Primates of the Global South are clear in their condemnation of the liberalization of the Anglican church. “The overwhelming majority of the Primates of the Global South cannot and will not recognize the office or ministry of Canon Gene Robinson [American hom*osexual] as a bishop” (Akinola 2003). This is articulated not as a choice, but as the only possible option; they ‘cannot’ recognize the decision. Further, they “deplore the act of those bishops who have taken part in the consecration which has now divided the Church in violation of their obligation to guard the faith and unity of the church” (ibid.). This is the voice of southern orthodoxy making claims to truth, unity, and authenticity. The split has left the bishops of the Anglican North in a precarious position. However, the influence of the South is such that the North does not overrule them, but rather becomes “meek before the rise of evangelical orthodoxy” (Hobson 2008: 27). Authenticity is a central concern here. It is one of the recurring themes and core challenges in the field, and I return to it in my conclusion.
Mixing It Up: Hybridity in Form and Function One of the central analytic terms in language and globalization is hybridity. This is not an altogether new concept in linguistics (see Coupland 2003: 423); however, the specific term which conveys it may offer new opportunities for analyzing language as well as associated visual and material culture (Omoniyi 2006; Shinhee Lee 2007; Pennycook 2003). Certainly hybridity in religion is nothing new. As Stewart (1999) points out, syncretism has always been a part of religion, though distinguishing between the syncretic and the heretic is not straightforward. While some will accept innovative hybrid forms as syncretic, for others, the introduction of new elements will take the hybrid texts and practices outside orthodoxy and into the domain of heresy. In the field of music, for example, separating the sacred from the secular is a difficult task. From the religious music of the Renaissance to the spiritual lyrics of the later Beatles’ work, there has always been exchange, colonization, and communication between the two. In a contemporary frame, James and Shoesmith refer to the “ ‘rock concert’ flavour of Hillsong,” an Australian Charismatic group attempting to break into Asian popular music markets (2008: 33). Across the globe, Jelbert (2003) reports on the cross-over of Christian pop groups to the mainstream, from “the American rock quartet Evanescence” topping the UK charts to “[t]he Arkansas band’s ‘Bring Me Life,’ a polite slab of heaven metal” appealing to an older demographic. While the British band “Delirious?” was “originally” made up of “the house musicians at a Sussex ‘worship session’ ” (Jelbert 2003), not all
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music with religious underpinnings originates from formal religious organizations; Nick Cave, Belle and Sebastian, U2, Johnny Cash are, argues Jelbert, not identified as religious, since “such seriousness [of belief] just doesn’t go with their image” (ibid.). That is not to say that such seriousness is not retrieved by listeners. U2’s Bono has long enjoyed enthusiastic support in Christian circles. This hybrid religious music is far from conservative; it may even be heard as radical. Howard argues that Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) is committed to “pointing out the contradictions of modern society and rejecting its values and norms” and to challenging “the Church itself to resist conformity to modern society” (1992: 125). Similarly, rap music has been used especially to reach the young, with lucid meta-arguments made about the connections of the music and the lyrical content to scripture (Gooch 1996: 234). These “hybrid” forms, whether hybridized by author or audience, “call into question the artificial boundaries that historically have separated religious and secular styles, their performers, and their audiences” (Maultsby 1992: 32, cited in Gooch 1996: 231; see also Pennycook and Coutand-Marin 2003). This signals, I suggest, a hybridity of communicative function as well as of musical form. While the latter is more or less obvious, in that two musical traditions are brought together and fused, the former depends more on audience and uptake. Naturally, the two are related, although in complex ways. This is clear from Pennycook’s discussion of hip hop with Koranic lyrics (2006: 124–5). Thus “British band Fun-Da-Mental’s engagement with Islam is ‘central to its multipronged intervention […]’ ” (ibid., p. 124, citing Swedenburg 2001: 62; my emphasis). The multiplicity can be seen in the band’s punning name, fusing as it does recreation and entertainment (‘Fun-’, retrievable most easily in the written form of the name) with religious values, indexed by the full name (and linked with the oral/aural realization of the name). Hybridity is not just about innovation of form, but also about joining traditionally separate communicative domains, so that more than one illocutionary effect is produced. It is not only in music that such hybridity of form and function occurs. While literacy development and practice is often bound closely to religious instruction (especially where religious institutions are among the few opportunities for literacy), there has also been some concern about the relationship between TESOL and Christianity, the former being portrayed as a missionary arm of the latter – as well as of neo-liberal western values generally (Pennycook and Makoni 2005). While Purgason (2004) rightly cautions against hom*ogenizing either the TESOL or the Christian community, particular texts that can be understood in this frame are worthy of analysis. Indeed there has already been discussion about the cultural and religious values that may accompany English-language teaching, especially in Muslim contexts (Mohd-Asraf 2005). Thus Karmani notes the “astonishing formula that has emerged […] to promote ‘more English, less Islam’ ” (2005: 263) – a formula which understands English as vehicle for a set of religious and cultural values (see Phillipson 1992). This is clearly a zero-sum game, as Karmani draws attention to imperatives issued by the US government to fight terrorism with English (2005: 263; see also Karmani and Pennycook 2005), thus pointing to an explicit framing of linguistic export as soft power and hybridity in the domain of
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function as well as in that of form. Such texts and practices need not come from governments, or even from large organizations, as the following example demonstrates. Soon! is a printed pamphlet/magazine with an online version (www.soon.org. uk), which is formatted differently, although it has similar content. Produced by an evangelical Christian group in Derby, England, it claims to be inter-denominational and not interested in recruiting for any particular religious group (http:// www.soon.org.uk/info/who.htm). The magazine is listed on various Englishlanguage learning resource websites, and it presents itself as a tool for students of English. But, as its name and explanatory phrases placed next to it indicate, Soon! is also a text for a Christian movement. The phrase above the name, at the top of the pamphlet – “things that must happen” – and the phrase beneath it – “helping to make sense of life” – pick up clearly two meanings of ‘soon.’ It refers both to the advancement in the world facilitated by learning English and to the second coming of the Lord. The cultural capital that may accrue on account of the former meaning is clear when one considers the international audience and circulation network of the pamphlet – offices in Asia, eastern Europe, and Africa. The pamphlet contains explicit tools for learning English – tools in the form of glossaries entitled “Words for English learners” and placed at the end of short news-style stories, or in the form of “Easy English exercise(s)” dealing with hom*ophones and tackling English spelling. While the stories report current events, they are framed in terms of Christian faith and experience. Thus a story entitled “Boris Yeltsin pardons murderer” is in fact an account of how the imprisoned man found God by listening to Russian Christian Radio while he was in prison (Soon Magazine 163, n.d.). In addition, a slip that can be returned in exchange for “Free papers and study course” is printed with instructions for “Filling in the coupon” and with samples of letters and numbers, showing clearly how these should be constructed with a single pen stroke and thus providing literacy instruction in a functional domain. This fusion of the pedagogic with the religious is not uncommon. However, the opportunities that the internet provides for Soon! in terms of dissemination are significant. Further, the implications for the spread of English are also worth considering. If English comes to be used in the religious domain, there are consequences for identity construction, for the allegiance to cultural and linguistic values, and for the influence of English as a global language (Crystal 1997; Graddol 1997). Offering valuable cultural capital (in the form of English tuition) in tandem with enculturation into a religious group may be problematic in a number of ways. That is not to say that the internet is an evil force; the virtual world is at least as complex as the real.
Virtually Everywhere Multi-modality, visual semiotics, and work in computer-mediated communication provide a firm base for linguistics to explore the nuances of religion as it is
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present in the technology associated with globalization (Herring 1996; LeVine and Scollon 2004). While television has had religious programs for a long time, audiences in the past were confined to countries of origin or nations in which there was linguistic commonality and/or a strong diaspora. Thus US television evangelists (televangelists) had access to markets in the UK, Australia, and North America for the past few decades. More recently, satellite and cable television, access to programs via the internet, and the advent of virtual reality (VR) spaces such as Second Life have provided a readily accessible global audience. As will be discussed, the religious ‘marketplace,’ with its commercial and consumerist connotations, is an appropriate label, if only because it captures “the economic logic at the structural heart of the religious field” (Rey 2004: 341). The relationship of religion with commerce and consumption has historical precedent (see McDannell 1995: 12), but continues in different forms. James and Shoesmith, for example, describe the influence of Charismatic evangelism in India. They argue that colonial models of ministry are being displaced by an American model, which thus constitutes a second phase of colonization. In language terms, “[s]eventy-five percent of all programmes are produced in the English language” (James and Shoesmith 2008: 25), which arguably competes with local and national languages in this important domain. Meanwhile other televangelists localize their product. American Joyce Meyer “is heard in seven Indian languages several times a day on Indian television” (ibid., p. 42). Even though the product is adapted, it nevertheless originates in the North. There is ample evidence of localization for such ministries, especially in respect of mega-churches. The “Fountain of Wisdom Ministries” began in Kano, Nigeria, and now has churches in Ghana, the United States, and the United Kingdom – each with its own presence on the web. The Nigerian homepage is dominated by a large photograph of the founders, “Rev. Kola and Rev. (Mrs) Funke Ewosho” (http:// www.wofcc.org/). The British site (http://www.fowm.org/), on the other hand, foregrounds its virtual presence, providing direct links to video on demand, an online shop, an online donation site, as well as a link to the archive of cyber messages. The contrast between the domestic and the digital is clear. Further, on the British site, Rev. Mrs Ewosho is given no title at all, which suggests independence from the marital and religious units. The self-description of the church also differs: the Nigerian site provides a page on “Identity,” with an historical account of the church’s development, while the British site’s equivalent is “Our statement of faith” – a numbered list of doctrinal statements. The kind of community these two sites evoke may thus be conceptualized in terms of prioritizing corporeal versus digital community and narrative versus propositional meaning. Global organizations have local faces, influenced by the direction of flow. The configuration of flows made possible by the internet means that, while the internet is itself a religious marketplace, it is also “a place rather than just a tool for communication” (Helland 2002: 298). This does not mean that the “tool” itself, the technology, is uninteresting. Karaflogka reports a rumor that monks from the technologically isolated Monastery of Christ in New Mexico (a community with
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no electricity or phone) designed the Vatican’s web page (2002: 281). This suggests possible rich comparisons with writing technology that pre-dates Gutenberg, such as illuminated manuscripts (see O’Leary 1996). The internet provides even more varied opportunities for religious communication and experience than have hitherto been possible (Wertheim 2000). MacWilliams argues that, unlike radio and television, “the Internet is interactive” and “provides a dynamic multimedia environment for communing with the sacred” (2002: 319). Where exactly the sacred is to be found, and what kind of communion occurs, varies. A distinction which may be useful in coming to terms with this variation is the one between religion online and online religion (Helland 2002; Karaflogka 2002; Maxwell 2002). While religions with a centralized hierarchy and power structure use the internet to disseminate and confirm doctrinal information – religion online, in Helland’s terms (2002: 294) – the internet also allows for more active and fluid religious activity (online religion). The former creates a “controlled environment” as it communicates “in a one-to-many” fashion (ibid.). As for the latter, the “form of participation closely mirrors the ideal interactive environment of the web itself and allows for many to many communication” (ibid., p. 294). When “many to many communication” takes place, it may also be controlled by conventions borrowed from the non-virtual world. Second Life, the largest of the virtual reality domains, gestures towards the religious in its very name (see Hill 2008). Though not limited to religious communities, it does host them. Schroeder, Heather, and Lee (1998) provide important insight into how traditional religious genres are accommodated in the virtual reality environment. The liturgical structure, prayer genres, openings and closings familiar from ‘real’ services are all transposed into the E-church investigated (one of the first of its kind). One of the services examined “contains much more joking around than real world services [–] not only verbal clowning but also chasing each other around after the service or ‘flying’ and going through walls and the like” (Schroeder, Heather, and Lee 1998). However, during the service proper “a serious tone is generally maintained,” and indeed enforced (ibid.). The conventions of actual churches, in this case at least, are thus translated into the virtual space. Exciting as it is, and even democratic in the case of online religion, the ‘virtual’ nature of such spaces is problematic for some. Buchanan compares the efficacy of a virtual church in “provid[ing] nourishment for the soul” to “relying on a wax banana to provide nourishment for your body” (Buchanan 1996). This binary division between the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ is difficult to maintain, however, given the available evidence on how people ‘do religion’ on the internet. O’Leary reports that, even though religious gathering spaces may be virtual, members can use “real” objects in their online worship (O’Leary 1996: 799). Further, the ‘virtual’ may not be as distant from the ‘transcendent’ as Buchanan’s wax banana analogy suggests. Indeed a “virtual prayer” (Karaflogka 2002: 283) may be difficult for a non-believer to distinguish from an “authentic one,” inasmuch as prayers are quintessentially personal, interior communications with the divine. The only difference appears to be that the virtual prayer is mediated by technology, and thus
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more material than an ‘ordinary’ prayer. It is important to note that some exclude sacraments from the virtual world, as they are considered “personal, even physical, encounters” (Hill 2008). One might have thought that virtual worship space was typical only of new religious movements, such as the First Church of Cyberspace (Buchanan 1996). This is clearly not the case, as Karaflogka notes the existence of cyber-churches, cyber-sanghas, cyber-synagogues, and cyber-mosques, each giving the opportunity to its followers to be part of the ‘community’ when physical contact, for whatever reason, is not possible or desirable. (Karaflogka 2002: 283)
This proliferation is not surprising, as such spaces may be particularly useful to the new breed of mobile elite and the digital nomads that the globalized economy produces. While these new ways of connecting and building ‘local’ communities provide continuity for dispersed individuals, they do not always lead to continuity of the religious tradition. Turner, commenting on Islam, argues that the “intellectual elites [have] come to depart radically from tradition, building up their own internal notions of authority, authenticity and community” (2007: 127). The internet, in the same way as any communication technology, provides opportunities but does not dictate outcomes. Certainly the concept of a ‘speech community,’ or indeed of a ‘community’ of any sort, is radically refigured in the global age (see Rampton 2000). As Silverstein reminds us, “ ‘[l]ocality’ of language community is only a relationally produced state in a cultural–ideological order” (1998: 404). It is, however, possible to deal with this shifting order because of “the power of language to bring about wish fulfilment through the verbal act of declaring the wish within the ritual circle” (O’Leary 1996: 803), whether that is the virtual religious space or the internet generally. Further, given that the internet is “organized laterally rather than vertically or radially, with no central authority and no chain of command” (Zalenski 1997: 111), it seems particularly suited to social network analysis (Paolillo 2001). (Indeed, intelligence gathering in cyberspace by government intelligence agencies works on exactly such principles.) That the “Internet was designed to allow for one-to-many communication as well as many-to-many communication” (Helland 2002: 293) means that existing linguistic models of bystanders, eavesdroppers and the “several varieties of overhearers in between” (Clark 1996: 14) are particularly suitable for analyzing the different kinds of communicative relationships the internet allows. The transfer of liturgical structures and frames in the VR religious environment has been mentioned (Schroeder et al. 1998). While it might not be the same as a corporeal encounter, “[a] prayer meeting in the virtual world […] certainly reproduces some of the essential features” of traditional worship (ibid.). The internet not only provides places for communicating religiously with others, it also allows individuals to ‘do religion’ by taking complex journeys – specifically, virtual pilgrimages (MacWilliams 2002). While this might again be thought to be limited to new ‘technology-friendly’ religions, the late Pope John Paul II embarked on a virtual journey when an actual visit to Iraq became
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impossible (ibid., p. 319). As a response to the geopolitical realities of the globalized world, traveling virtually was in this instance a logical solution in an unstable world. Moreover, understanding these virtual journeys (whether the trajectory is geographic or spiritual) can be analyzed in terms of mythscapes (along Appadurai’s lines). Work in the field of tourism and globalization is also useful, reminding us that even “physical travel is largely an imaginative act” (ibid., p. 321). Thus religious and secular journeys follow the same theoretical trajectories, in that the same tools and theories can be used to understand them. These examples may suggest a permissive and radical freedom, which is not always tolerated by central religious authorities. The medium provides constraints and affordance to messages, but authors position themselves differently in relation to policing such freedoms. While O’ Leary argues that “[i]n computer networks the global village has found its public square” (1996: 786), the public square is often subject to controls and surveillance. The best example is perhaps that of the Church of Scientology (Kent 1999). This organization (recognized legally as a religion by some nations, but prohibited by others) has a significant official internet presence (http://www.scientology.org/home.html). However, the organization has been vigilant in policing access to its official texts, invoking copyright regimes to prosecute individuals who disseminate material intended only for members. Because of the cost sometimes involved in membership and thus in access to these materials, one might draw an analogy with systems of protection against pirated articles devised by prestige brands and global media organizations. Analyzed in this way, a religion starts to look like a corporation. However, it is also possible to see the protection of texts as being related to a hermeneutic strategy, similar to that of any religious organization with non-negotiable articles of faith. Given broad conceptions of ‘religion,’ it is also possible to see the internet itself in a different light. The mundane experience of technology (mundane because of the opaqueness of the systems driving it) can itself be transposed to a religious mode. Thus the internet becomes a metaphor for, or even a new mode of presence of, the divine (Henderson 2000). Indeed, such a conception of technology – as creating, rather than merely mediating or allowing, the religious experience – is captured by Arthur C. Clarke’s third “law” of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (1962: 36). The line between religion and magic (or superstition) is arguably an ideological one (Chidester 1996: 748). Seeing the internet and the technology required to access it as objects of worship can be explained in terms of fetishes (ibid., p. 749), and linked to identity construction. A small lexical shift, coupled with an intense commitment, transforms these technological objects, from mere ‘fetishes,’ into objects of religious devotion. As a specific example at the level of brand and identity, many people see a clear distinction between the Mac and the PC as objects and as sites of identity construction. Recent Apple advertising campaigns in the UK and US (with similarly dubbed and localized versions across the world) personified the brands explicitly: in one of the series the PC ‘nerd’ sneezes and has a ‘virus,’ while the Apple
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‘hipster ’ claims never to get sick. The British version of the virus advertisem*nt differed from the one used in the American campaign with respect to two lexemes. Whereas the former described the virus as a “humdinger,” the American version used “doozy”; and when the PC sneezes the British Mac says “bless you,” while the American offers “gesundheit.” Some of the advertisem*nts do not lend themselves to direct UK/US comparison; while the messages are broadly similar, their realization differs greatly. The most significant difference is that the comedians in the American version, not generally known in the UK, are replaced with a more recognizable British comic ‘couple.’ Cultural commentator Charlie Brooker, in a scathing commentary of the British campaign, writes: “Ultimately the campaign’s biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow ‘define themselves’ with the technology they choose” (Brooker 2007: 262). In this way he ironically describes the self-reflexive, postmodern, social constructionist identity project as “essentially” empty. Brooker portrays the Mac user as fundamentally alienated, with a “dark fear haunting their feeble quivering soul – that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging …” (ibid.). But this idea – that consumer habits construct, and are constructed by, identity projects and membership of a tribe – clearly has some currency in advertising discourse, as it is used so frequently; and certainly it enjoys a level of academic respect in the postmodern climate (see Thomas 2002: 60). In this mode, but subverting this underlying premise, Think Christian (2006) has created a series of spoof advertisem*nts, contrasting “Christians” (PCs) with “Christ Followers” (Macs). The “Christian” places emphasis on external markings of religious affiliation (books, smart clothes, explicitly Christian music, bumper stickers), while a “Christ Follower” demonstrates his faith with a calm, “laid back” claim to authenticity. If nothing else, the virtual world and the tools it provides allow such rewriting of texts, and question the possibility of pinning down both authenticity and origin-ality. Seeing religion, whether o