Unequal Englishes

Also by Ruanni Tupas

LANGUAGE EDUCATION AND NATION-BUILDING

Assimilation and Shift in Southeast Asia (co-edited)

(RE)MAKING SOCIETY
The Politics of Language, Discourse and Identity in the Philippines (sole-edited)
Unequal Englishes
The Politics of Englishes Today

Edited by

Ruanni Tupas
National Institute of Education, Singapore
Selection and editorial content © Ruanni Tupas 2015
Individual chapters © Respective authors 2015
Foreword © Arjuna Parakrama 2015
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FOR MILD, RUSH, RAM, AND RAIN—my inspiration,
my real world
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

List of Figures and Tables ix

Foreword by Arjuna Parakrama x
Acknowledgments xiii
Notes on Contributors xiv

Introduction: From World Englishes to Unequal Englishes 1

Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy
Part I Approaches to Unequal Englishes
1 Inequalities of Englishes, English Speakers,
and Languages: A Critical Perspective on
Pluralist Approaches to English 21
Ryuko Kubota
2 Unequal Englishes, the Native Speaker,
and Decolonization in TESOL 42
Rani Rubdy
3 Structures of Feeling in Unequal Englishes 59
Joseph Sung-Yul Park
4 Global English and Inequality: The Contested
Ground of Linguistic Power 74
Peter Ives
Part II Englishes in Nexuses of Power and Inequality
5 ‘Just an Old Joke’: Chinglish, Narrative, and Linguistic
Inequality in the Chinese English Classroom 95
Eric S. Henry
6 English in Japan: Indecisions, Inequalities, and
Practices of Relocalization 111
Glenn Toh
7 Performing Gayness and English in an Offshore
Call Center Industry 130
Aileen O. Salonga

vii
viii Contents

Part III Englishes in Changing Multilingual Spaces

8 Earning Capital in Hawai’i’s Linguistic Landscape 145
Christina Higgins
9 Glocalization and the Spread of Unequal Englishes:
Vernacular Signs in the Center of Beijing 163
Lin Pan
10 Singlish Strikes Back in Singapore 185
Catherine Chua Siew Kheng
Part IV Englishes in Unequal Learning Spaces
11 Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and Rule’ Policies:
Linguistic Apartheid, Unequal Englishes, and
the Postcolonial Framework 203
Vaidehi Ramanathan
12 Unequal Englishes in Imagined Intercultural Interactions 223
Phan Le Ha
13 Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal Englishes’:
The D-TEIL Experience in Cuba 244
Ian Martin and Brian Morgan

Index 265
List of Figures and Tables

Figures

8.1 Bus stop 200’ makai 151

8.2 Sign posted in a restroom 151
8.3 Keiki menu 152
8.4 Sterile puka sheet 153
8.5 Carex for sale at Home Depot 155
8.6 No get my back, no get my vote 157
9.1 Geographical location of Dashilan 169
9.2 Refurbishment and reintroduction of Dashilan
before the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games 170
9.3 Jui Fu Hsiang Hsi Huang Ghi: a ‘time-honoured’ silk shop 172
9.4 Xinli Xinfu silk shop 175
9.5 ‘U.K. Royal Sungre’ men’s clothing store 178
9.6 Gallery 180
10.1 The changing social and linguistic landscape
of Singapore 197
11.1 Local vernacular content in English language
textbooks used in Gujarati-medium classes 208
11.2 Local vernacular content in English language
textbooks used in Gujarati-medium classes 209
11.3 Excerpts 210
11.4 Translation exercise 212

Tables

8.1 Raining on my parade 159

10.1 Speak Good English Movement themes 195
11.1 Divergent MLLS for Gujarati- and
English-medium students 216

ix
Foreword

At last a book that grasps the thuththiri1 of our unequally globalized

Englishes problem without being defensive or apologizing for itself!
I’m proud to be associated, even in so small a way, with this radical
academic-interventionist enterprise that examines a wide range of key
issues and implications surrounding the systemic and extra-systemic
inequalities enforced against non-dominant Englishes. All credit to
Ruanni Tupas who has succeeded in bringing together a remarkably
diverse yet cohesive set of studies, which take as their starting point the
unequal exchange between linguistic centers and peripheries.
More importantly, perhaps, the scholarship here not only documents
such ‘inequality’, it also identifies and demonstrates local resistance to
the various inter-connected strands of dominance and hegemony that
non-elite users must face—locally, sub-nationally, nationally, regionally,
internationally, globally—every day, whether in China, Cuba, Hawai’i,
India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, or elsewhere.
Moreover, pre-empting the inevitable quasi-scholarly attempts at ghet-
toization that these are merely empirical and/or ‘special cases’ of no
more than nuisance value, broader conceptual studies complement
these filigreed accounts from the ground.
The conceptual problems created by over a century of colonialist
and neo-colonialist ‘scholarship’ in Applied Linguistics, whose not-
so-hidden agendas are given great license even today in ESL ‘studies’,
are so pervasive and entrenched that counter-hegemonic analyses
such as these are forced to re-present the ubiquitous as exceptions.
Hence, though we all know that every linguistic context is multilin-
gual, and all spaces are unequal, in order to be heard we must present
ourselves as speaking to non-typical and fundamentally non-normative
case studies.
Elsewhere, I diffidently propose the notion of ‘extra-linguistic value’
attached to [White] English (and other contextually dominant lan-
guages/varieties) as a means of explaining the hegemony it enjoys, as
well as to understand as (hidden) resistance the plethora of persistent
‘errors’ and ‘deviations’ that characterize non-elite use. The attempt
is to theorize a more inclusive yet nuanced (anti-)paradigm than the

x
 Foreword xi

binary between ‘individual’ and ‘community’ language use (and, of

course, national/international/global vs. local/specific) which Ives so
brilliantly unravels here.
The ‘local’ neither replaces nor reinvents (nor even seriously ques-
tions) the ‘global’, but is appropriated within it in the most troubling
ways. Thus, celebrating our special difference is one way of validating
(by default and non-contestation) the old hegemonies in language. Yet,
we must, in the grossly unequal spaces we occupy, establish (over and
over again) that the ‘local’ is even worthy of study, and that we’re not
doing this only because we happen to belong there.
For my own work, even ‘local’ has become too broad a category, and it
is in sub-local (anti-)language use and abuse that I am beginning to rec-
ognize complex resistance as a form of subaltern agency which is viable
only when misrecognized as imitation gone wrong. Subalternity that is
characterized as the prevalence of ‘dominance without hegemony’ has
become for me the space where ‘dominance is (deliberately) misrepre-
sented as hegemony’ by recalcitrant users. This insight has been rein-
forced for me by the essays in this book that demonstrate the subtlety
and suppleness with which ordinary bi/multi-lingual users of English
stake and re-stake their claims in defiance of real-world consequences,
and by the essays that advocate the fundamental questioning of cher-
ished first-worldist paradigms in favor of a more inclusive understand-
ing that has greater explanatory power.
The first part of the challenge is, therefore, to continue to demon-
strate that there is radical difference alive and well in the interstices
of the everyday outside of the mainstream (whether this be locational,
classed, historical, ethnicized, gendered, age-based, or more likely in
combinations of these demographies). It seems that only then will we
be taken seriously when we argue that the same problematic obtains
inside the mothership(s) of English. Ours are not special cases, but better
gauges of how language works as a site of the heterogeneous struggles
of class, race/ethnicity, gender, age, region/location, sexual orientation
etc., because such struggles take place before our eyes and ears now,
refusing to be covered over as in the past.2
This larger battle remains unwaged as yet, but it is worth reminding
ourselves that the opposition to even such localized critique is that they/
we know what’s ultimately at stake here.
Arjuna Parakrama
Peradeniya, Sri Lanka
xii Foreword

Notes
1. If you as reader are unfamiliar with this term and this worries you, please look
it up, check it out, research it, spend time discovering what it is, feeling just
a little annoyed (and I hope abashed too), just as you would when looking
up an obscure Old English word or an unfamiliar White-English expression.
When we are able to treat all such words as equal, irrespective of their origin,
then we have begun travelling the impossible road to addressing linguistic
inequality.
2. I use the phrase ‘fast-forward change, but which takes place in slow-motion’
to attempt to capture the paradox where hitherto long-drawn out changes
in/of language are accelerated through (post)colonial language-contact, but
at the same time since different stakeholders are more articulate than before,
these changes are also tangibly contested at each stage. Thus, the gradual
transformations that took place in England over a 500-year period can be seen
to take place in post-colonial Englishes in 50 years, and hidden struggles that
we can only speculate upon in the former case are fought out in public in the
former colonies!
Acknowledgments

Figure 8.1—Bus stop 200’ makai. Reproduced with permission of

Toshiaki Furukawa
Figure 8.3—Keiki menu. Reproduced with permission of Bill Tobin
Figure 8.4—Sterile puka sheet. Reproduced with permission of Marissa
Hanada
Figure 8.6—No get my back, no get my vote. Reproduced with permis-
sion of Fellen Kelemente

We thank Gujarat State Board of Textbooks for the use of pages from
English textbooks used in Gujarati-medium classes.

xiii
Notes on Contributors

Catherine Chua Siew Kheng has a PhD from the School of Education,
University of Queensland. She is currently Assistant Professor in the
Policy and Leadership Studies Group, NIE/NTU, Singapore. Her research
activities focus on the areas of twenty-first-century education, globaliza-
tion and education, educational policy, language planning and policy.
Her other areas of interests include culture and education, education and
economy, leadership practices in school, and the role of media in edu-
cational reform. She is currently an editorial board member of Language,
Culture and Curriculum, and a series editor of Language Planning and Policy.

Eric S. Henry is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology

at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. Based on ethnographic
fieldwork in Shenyang, China, his research concerns the role of con-
temporary speech practices and foreign languages in China’s develop-
ing sense of itself as a modern, cosmopolitan nation. His work has
been published in journals such as City & Society, Language in Society,
and Anthropological Quarterly. His teaching is in the areas of linguistic
anthropology, sociolinguistics, Asian studies and semiotics.

Christina Higgins is Associate Professor in the Department of Second

Language Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where she
teaches graduate courses in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, inter-
cultural communication, and English as a global language. Her research
explores the local–global interface of language and identity in East
Africa and Hawai’i. She is the author of English as a local language: Post-
colonial identities and multilingual practices (2009), co-editor (with Bonny
Norton) of Language and HIV/AIDS (2010), and editor of Identity forma-
tion in globalizing contexts: Language learning in the new millennium (2011).

Peter Ives is Professor of Political Science at the University of Winnipeg,

Canada, where he primarily teaches political theory. He is the author of
Gramsci’s politics of language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt
School (2004), Language and Hegemony in Gramsci (2004) and co-editor
(with Rocco Lacorte) of Gramsci, Language and Translation (2010), and,
with Thomas Ricento and Yael Peled, of Language Policy and Political
Theory (2015). His articles on ‘global English’ have been published in
Political Studies, Educational Philosophy and Theory, and Language Policy. 

xiv
 Notes on Contributors xv

Ryuko Kubota is Professor of Language and Literacy Education at

the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on criti-
cal approaches to applied linguistics by drawing various inquiry
approaches from cultural studies, multiculturalism, critical race theory,
and critical pedagogy. She is a co-editor of Race, culture, and identities in
second language: Exploring critically engaged practice (2009). Her publica-
tions also appear in such academic journals as Applied Linguistics, Critical
Inquiry in Language Studies, International Journal of Bilingualism and
Bilingual Education, Journal of Journal of Second Language Writing, Journal
of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Linguistics and Education,
and TESOL Quarterly.

Ian Martin is Associate Professor in the English Department, Collège

universitaire Glendon College, York University, Toronto, Ontario,
Canada, where he coordinates the Certificate Program in the Discipline
of Teaching English as an International Language (Cert D-TEIL) and
teaches courses related to the Certificate as well as courses on language
policy, especially for indigenous peoples of the Americas. Recently, his
research has been on bilingual education policy in Nunavut Territory in
the Canadian Arctic, as well as ‘new literacies’ and English pedagogy in
a project linking Glendon with the State University of Mato Grosso do
Sul, Campo Grande, Brazil.

Brian Morgan is Associate Professor in the English Department, Collège

universitaire Glendon College, York University, in Toronto, Ontario,
Canada, where he teaches in the Certificate Program in the Discipline
of Teaching English as an International Language (Cert D-TEIL), as
well as courses in content-based EAP, and graduate courses in Applied
Linguistics. His primary research area is in critical theories and their
potential implementation across English Language Teaching contexts.
Recently, Brian has collaborated in several projects linking Glendon
with Brazilian universities and scholars. Brian is also a co-editor of the
Critical Language and Literacy Series.

Lin Pan is Associate Professor at the Beijing Language and Culture

University (BLCU) and is a research fellow at University College London
(UCL) Institute of Education. Her research interests are language
ideologies, globalization, teacher education and multilingualism. Lin
has publications in Language Policy, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Visual
Communication, Applied Linguistic Review, Language Learning Journal, and
English Today. She is the author of the book entitled English as a Global
Language in China: Ideologies in language education.
xvi Notes on Contributors

Phan Le Ha is Associate Professor in the Department of Educational

Foundations, College of Education, University of Hawaii at Manoa,
USA. She also holds adjunct appointments at universities in Vietnam
and Australia. Her expertise include identity studies, language-culture-
pedagogy, TESOL, postcolonial studies, sociology of education, and
international education. Dr. Phan has published widely in these areas.
Her latest book is Desiring TESOL and international education: Market
abuse and exploitation (co-authored with Raqib Chowdhury, 2014).
Her forthcoming authored book offers to theorize various aspects and
phenomena of transnational education in Asia and the Middle East.

Arjuna Parakrama is Professor of English at the University of Peradeniya.

Before this he was Dean/Arts at Colombo University where he taught for
over 15 years. He has published widely on language standardization and
the politics of language, subaltern studies, Lankan English and teaching
English in Sri Lanka, conflict transformation and discourse theory. He has
been awarded a Guggenheim research grant, as well as senior fellowships
from the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, and the
US Institute of Peace. He was a Fulbright New Century Scholar in 2007/8.

Joseph Sung-Yul Park is Associate Professor in the Department of

English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. He
works in the areas of language and globalization, English as a global
language, and language ideology. His recent work has focused on the
role of English in transnationalism and neoliberalism, with a focus on
the context of South Korea. He is the author of The Local Construction of
a Global Language and co-author, with Lionel Wee, of Markets of English.

Vaidehi Ramanathan is Professor of Applied Sociolinguistics in the

Linguistics Department at the University of California, Davis. Her
research interests span all domains of literacy, including teacher-edu-
cation, minority languages, and language policies as well as concerns
about aging, health, and disability studies. Her publications include:
Language, body and health (co-edited, 2011), Bodies and language: Health,
ailments, disabilities (2010), The English-vernacular divide: Postcolonial lan-
guage politics and practice (2005), The politics of TESOL education: Writing,
knowledge, critical pedagogy (2002), and Alzheimer’s discourse: Some socio-
linguistic dimensions (1997).

Rani Rubdy has taught at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang

Technological University and the National University of Singapore. Her
research interests include World Englishes, globalization and its social,
sociolinguistic and educational consequences, language planning and
 Notes on Contributors xvii

policy and linguistic landscapes. Her edited volumes are English in the
world: Global rules, global roles (with Mario Saraceni, 2006), Language
as commodity: Global structures and local marketplaces (with Peter K. W.
Tan, 2008), The global-local interface and hybridity: Exploring language and
identity (with Lubna Alsagoff, 2014) and Conflict, exclusion and dissent in
the linguistic landscape (with Selim Ben Said, 2015).

Aileen O. Salonga is Associate Professor at the Department of English

and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines (UP)
in Diliman. She has a PhD in English Language from the National
University of Singapore, and an MA in English from Virginia Tech. She
writes in the areas of sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, gender and dis-
course studies, and translation studies, and has published on gendered
spaces of globalization, gender and technology in the Philippines, and
problems of rhetoric.

Glenn Toh has been an English teacher for nearly 30 years. He has
taught EFL, EAP, ESP and TESOL teacher-training courses in Australia,
Hong Kong, Japan, Laos, New Zealand, Singapore, and Thailand. He
now teaches at the Center of English as a Lingua Franca (CELF) and
the Graduate School of Humanities at Tamagawa University in Tokyo.
He has written for journals in applied linguistics and maintains a keen
and watchful eye on developments in language, ideology, and power.

Ruanni Tupas is Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education

(NIE), Singapore. Prior to his NIE appointment, he was Senior Lecturer at
the Centre for English Language Communication (CELC) of the National
University of Singapore (NUS) where he taught for ten years from 2002
to 2012. He was the 2009 Andrew Gonzalez Distinguished Professorial
Chair in Linguistics and Language Education, awarded by the Linguistic
Society of the Philippines (LSP) which recently has also elevated him
to honorary membership. His edited book, (Re)making society: Language,
discourse and identity in the Philippines, was a 2008 Philippine National
Book Awards Finalist.
Introduction: From World Englishes
to Unequal Englishes
Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy

‘The functional equality of all languages’, according to Hymes (1985,

p. v), ‘has been a tenet of the faith from the founders of structural lin-
guistics to most practitioners of linguistics today’. This faith has been
‘the progressive force’ that has resulted in ‘the appreciation of the mar-
velous variety of forms taken by human linguistic creativity’ (p. v). This
volume argues that it is the same faith in linguistic equality that has
served as political and ideological anchor for much of the work on the
development and spread of the English language around the world. It
is ‘progressive’ in the sense that it has repudiated and unmasked practi-
cally all deep-seated beliefs about what constitutes the nature of English
today. There is no one English, but many Englishes. No one has exclu-
sive rights to the language; anyone who speaks it has the right to own
it. The norms of use are multilingual norms and the strategies to teach
English are also multilingual in nature. The English language is deeply
embedded in the multilingual and multicultural lives of its speakers—
so who are the native speakers of English today? To insist that those
who can be called native speakers are only those who come from Inner
Circle countries, especially the United States and the United Kingdom
(where users of English are typically described as ‘native speakers’),
is to disenfranchise the majority of English speakers today. In other
words, the tenet of linguistic equality has provided language scholars
(e.g. Kachru 1986; Labov 1969) with the intellectual ammunition to
question unjust and destructive discourses and practices which govern
and saturate the teaching, learning, development, and spread of the
English language.
The same tenet, however, has also served to create political and ideo-
logical blinkers to the way the English language and its role in the world
today have been understood. The so-called ‘non-native’ speakers of

1
2 Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy

English have mangled and ‘destroyed’ the language for their own uses
(Ashcroft et al. 1989), so it is, supposedly, wrong to assume that English
continues to subjugate people’s minds and perpetuate various forms of
social inequality. Consequently, embracing the idea of linguistic equal-
ity has become a double-edged sword in scholarly investigations into
the pluralization or indigenization of English: on the one hand, it has
demolished the idea of the supremacy of a monolithic English language
(Kachru 1986); on the other hand, it has divested the language of its
colonial moorings, thus subtly affirming and perpetuating the hegem-
onic power of English today (Tupas 2004). The artificially constructed
dichotomy has been stark: the English of the past is no longer the
English of the present. The English of the past was a colonial language
while the English of the present is a postcolonial one. The tenet of lin-
guistic equality in this sense has helped pave the way for the de-linking
of the past from the present, and the de-linking of discourses about
English then from discourses about English now (Kumaravadivelu 2006;
Phillipson 1992; Tupas 2001).
The implications are massive, and one of the major ones is the the-
oretically-forked and simplistic understanding of the English language
today: English is a powerful language, but speakers of the language,
including those linguistically disempowered and subjugated through
various infrastructures of control (e.g. colonialism, capitalist globaliza-
tion), have demonstrated their ability to resist the power of English as
well (Bisong 1995; Brutt-Griffler 2002). Certain inequalities resulting
from the dominance of English in societies around the world may have
existed, but instead of being confronted, these inequalities are brushed
aside in the theorization of the nature of English language use today.
In other words, we have been seduced into celebrating our victories
over English but forgetting the massive inequities sustained and per-
petuated by the unbridled dominance of English today. The rhetorical
packaging of this position goes something like this: This is not to dis-
count the divisive nature of English. However … But what actually happens
next is that the divisive nature of the language is ignored or forgotten
in the analysis. In more sophisticated renderings of this position, the
strategy is to accord equal weight to the two opposing ends of the
debate. Thus, English should be seen as ‘a simultaneous instrument for
liberation and continued oppression’ (Lee & Norton 2009, p. 282). This
is supported theoretically by a particularly enticing view of language:
‘language is as much a site as it is a means for struggle’ (Pennycook 1994,
p. 267). In the end, however, the focus on struggle and liberation draws
attention away from questions about how our lives are conditioned by
 Introduction 3

forces largely beyond our control. We need alternative ways of concep-

tualizing the role of English today in which our victories are recognized
and apprehended (this must be emphasized) but must be set against
the backdrop of what Gregory (2004) refers to as the colonial present
where English continues to be deployed across unequal learning and
multilingual spaces.
Thus, this volume proposes the notion of unequal Englishes as a way
to understand English today. The spotlight is on the unequal ways and
situations in which Englishes are arranged, configured, and contested. It
does not repudiate the notion of linguistic equality; it remains a ‘tenet of
the faith’. However, linguistic equality is viewed as a thoroughly political
and ideological question which therefore cannot be blind to configura-
tions of power and social relations in different societies today. In other
words, linguistic equality is both the start and the end point of the
notion of unequal Englishes. On the one hand, it assumes that Englishes
are all linguistically equal but their political legitimacies are uneven;
it does not romanticize equality of Englishes. On the other hand, it
highlights various forms of inequality between them in the hope of
clearing social and ideological spaces from which to mount mobiliza-
tions towards linguistic equality. Unequal Englishes begins with the same
assumption as most everybody else’s—languages and linguistic varieties
are equal—but then asks, ‘But are they really?’ Unequal Englishes refuses
to join the party; the celebration is a work-in-progress, not a given. It
aims to probe deep into the structures, contexts, and configurations of
inequalities of Englishes, and then seeks to find ways to address them.
All chapters in this volume deal with the notion of unequal Englishes.
Although questions about inequalities between Englishes are not
new (Canagarajah 2006; Parakrama 1995; Pennycook 2008; Rubdy &
Saraceni 2006; Saxena & Omoniyi 2010; Tupas 2001), there is a need for
a volume that trains its lens primarily on unequal Englishes, and in a sus-
tained and systematic way unpacks this notion in broader geopolitical,
sociocultural, and theoretical contexts. Parakrama’s (1995) book almost
two decades ago focused on class-based inequalities of Englishes in Sri
Lanka. Phan’s (2008) more recent work features a case study of day-to-
day struggles in identity formation of Vietnamese teachers of English
as an International Language. This volume’s geopolitical trajectory
includes the Philippines, Cuba, China, Canada, India, Malaysia, the
United States, Singapore, and South Korea, and its specific social and
ideological contexts of analyses are wide-ranging, including textbooks
and classrooms; teachers, would-be teachers and students; call centers;
linguistic landscapes; stories, narratives and jokes. More importantly,
4 Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy

several chapters propose various ways to unpack and engage with

inequality in unequal Englishes. It is not enough to say that Englishes are
unequal. It is also important to begin asking about the very nature of
inequalities of Englishes. It goes without saying that this volume is an
exploration of various ways we can understand, examine, and trans-
form inequalities of Englishes.

The problem with Englishes

But first, how did our notion of unequal Englishes come about? Over the
last four decades or so, Braj Kachru and the proponents of the World
Englishes (WE) paradigm have contested monolithic and ethnocentric
visions of English, not least on account of their inadequacy in meeting
the goals and needs of speakers in the Outer Circle (within Kachru’s
concentric circles model) but also for their undemocratic implications,
emanating as they do from an Anglo-American global hegemony. In
particular, the assumption that British (in some contexts American)
English is the only valid standard of English, and the notion that the
‘native speaker’ is the only model that all learners should aspire to
has been put to question. Indeed, Kachru has been at the forefront
of overtly opposing conservatively purist views of English (e.g. his
response to Prator 1968; the debate with Quirk in Kachru 1991) and
has long advocated the use of local varieties as educational models in
regions of the Outer Circle.
The WE analytical framework was developed primarily in relation
to contexts where English arrived as a colonial language and subse-
quently became established as an additional language within national
linguistic repertoires. In those settings, English often has official status
and is used intra-nationally in various domains such as administration,
education, and the media (Saraceni 2009). Countries such as India,
Singapore, and parts of West, South, and East Africa are examples of
former British colonies where English has had a long history of naturali-
zation, nativization, and indigenization that has resulted in the exist-
ence of regional varieties of the language which some scholars also now
call New Englishes. The penetration of English into the sociocultural
landscape has made it possible for its users to appropriate the language
and construct hybrid and multiple cultural identities for themselves.
The localization and appropriation of English in these communities
evidence the many ways that users of English index their ownership
of the language (Higgins 2009; Widdowson 1994) through altering it to
fit their local contexts and purposes. Ownership of English, in this case,
 Introduction 5

signals the emergence of native speakers for each of the new varieties
that have emerged from the expansion of the language.
However, as Modiano (1999) points out, in such communities where
‘near-native’ proficiency in British or American English is juxtaposed
with a local variety, ‘which has traditionally been defined as a sub-
standard variety, the use of a “prestige” variety can serve to establish
class stratification and social division’ (p. 23). Because it effectively mar-
ginalizes speakers of local varieties, an insistence on Inner Circle models
is exclusionary and not in keeping with the democratic ideology of
linguistic diversity. Proponents of WE, on the other hand, promote the
notion of a pluricentric model—and the legitimacy of multi-canons—to
redress the inequality that necessarily results from privileging any one
model as ‘superior’ or ‘the best’. Pluricentrism as an ideology proposes
that global appropriation of English has occurred and that recognized
varieties of English have emerged around the world which are not sub-
ordinate forms to ‘native speaker’ varieties of the language. McArthur’s
(1987, p. 334, cited in Saraceni 2009) comment in referring to the jour-
nal World Englishes, that the acronym WE represents a ‘club of equals’,
reflects the conscious efforts of WE to create this ethos behind the aca-
demic endeavor. Bhatt (2001) reiterates this point in noting that ‘World
Englishes, in its most ambitious interpretation, attempts to decolonize
and democratize applied linguistics’ (p. 544).
However, while WE research has challenged the monolithic nature
of English in significant ways, it has been critiqued for not going far
enough, for reproducing the same normative linguistic framework and
thus contributing to an exclusionary paradigm. A major shortcoming
pointed out is that the Englishes of the post-colonial world are often
described along the lines of monolingual models, by comparing their
grammatical structures with those of center Englishes, thus reinforc-
ing centrist views on language while ignoring eccentric, hybrid forms
of local Englishes. Thus, this paradigm ‘follows the logic of the pre-
scriptive and elitist tendencies of the centre linguists’ (Canagarajah
1999, p. 180).
Moreover, WE has also been severely critiqued for its mapping
of English varieties along national borders, whereas from a linguistic
point of view the identification and description of these country-based
varieties have been rendered highly problematic, particularly in light
of the effects of globalization and transcultural flows. Saraceni (2009)
notes that national borders have become ever more porous and perme-
able allowing for border crossings and the mixing of global and local
norms freely, precipitated by pop music, the Internet, online chatting,
6 Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy

and email, especially among modern youth. These developments clearly

indicate that, ‘pluralization of English into Englishes around the world
goes well beyond national borders and is a phenomenon far more com-
plex than country-based labels suggest’ (Saraceni 2009, p. 181).
More importantly, however, another point concerning the inad-
equacy of Kachru’s concentric circles model in capturing the complexity
of Englishes that relates to discussions of unequal Englishes is its failure
‘to take adequate account of social factors and social differences within
the circles’ (Holborow 1999, pp. 59–60). In arguing for the legitimacy of
New Englishes on a national basis, it tends to focus on a narrow selec-
tion of standardized forms in particular communities and overlooks
difference within regions as well as those that may accrue with reference
to social class, ethnicity, education, and so on. As Parakrama (1995)
argues, ‘The smoothing out of struggle within and without language is
replicated in the homogenizing of the varieties of English on the basis
of “upper class” forms. Kachru is thus able to theorise on the nature of
a monolithic Indian English’ (pp. 25–26).
These points are as much a reflection of the measure of the power
and persistence of the linguistic assumptions and ideologies linked to
discourses about English as a global language in mainstream applied
linguistics as of the limitations of WE to fully supplant monolithic
understandings of the global spread of English. Ideologies such as
those to do with Standard English, the nation state, the native speaker,
the myth of the monolithic nature of English, and the attendant eth-
nocentric attitudes were all forged during the period of the colonial
enterprise—the period when English’s unquestioned status over other
languages was established—and have gone unchallenged since. Such
ideologies have tremendous continuity over time and form part of the
prevailing colonial legacy, undercutting attempts at more symmetrical
understandings of the pluricentricity of English, despite the efforts of
scholars like Kachru and his followers to replace them with more demo-
cratic alternatives. This is evident also from the fact that the impact of
such academic debate on language teaching practice in many of the
Outer Circle countries has been marginal.
Thus, in spite of efforts by proponents of WE to introduce viable alter-
natives to Inner Circle Englishes as educational models, clearly, their
uptake is hindered by ideologies and discourses about Standard English
and native speakerism (Holliday 2005, 2006) that have been deeply
entrenched and sustained since colonial times, thus perpetuating
inequalities related to language heirarchization. The following section
tackles such inequalities by introducing key ideas from each of the
chapters in this volume about how unequal Englishes may be investigated.
 Introduction 7

Part I: Approaches to Unequal Englishes

The focus of Part I of the volume is how to approach inequalities of

Englishes theoretically. As mentioned earlier, it is important that we ask
what it means to investigate linguistic inequality as opposed to linguis-
tic equality. The chapters in this volume train their theoretical lenses
on the notion of inequality but they frame their understanding of this
sociolinguistic idea in overlapping yet also different ways.
For example, in the opening chapter of the book, Inequalities of
Englishes, English Speakers, and Languages: A Critical Perspective of Pluralist
Approaches to English, Ryuko Kubota proposes a critical approach to
examining the plural nature of English. The chapter first unpacks the
hidden ideological underpinnings of pluralist approaches to English
and argues that their common respect for cultural difference is essen-
tialist in nature. These pluralist approaches fail to account for complex
diversities of Englishes as shaped, for example, by people or groups’
racialized subjectivities and ideologies. For Kubota, Pennycook’s notion
of postcolonial performativity also belongs to this group of pluralist
approaches; although far more nuanced because of its focus on fluid
global linguistic flows and local practices of language, nevertheless it
sidesteps questions about structural inequalities between and within
nations and across injustices shaped by race, gender, class, and other
categories. Thus, a critical alternative to pluralist approaches must look
at inequalities that mediate relations between Englishes, English users,
and other languages.
In Unequal Englishes and Decolonization in TESOL, Rani Rubdy takes
up many issues raised by Kubota but develops the concept of unequal
Englishes along the lines of continuities between past and present ide-
ologies of English. She argues that the supremacy of ideologies about
Standard English and the native speaker of English is at the root of
unequal Englishes, and these ideologies have much to do with globali-
zation and colonization processes. Therefore, to address the problem
of inequalities of Englishes is to engage in the dynamics of these
broader processes and not simply be tied down to questions about
Englishes as linguistic phenomena alone. Drawing upon the work of
Kumaravadivelu (2003), Rubdy differentiates between nativization and
decolonization, arguing that the problem of unequal Englishes is best
addressed by practices and processes of decolonization where speakers
of English take control of the language and decide on their own how
best to learn and teach it.
On the other hand, in Structures of Feeling in Unequal Englishes, Joseph
Park approaches inequalities of English through the lens of ‘structures
8 Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy

of feeling’ (Williams 1997), which help frame linguistic inequalities as

both structural and subjective, political and personal. To illustrate these
inequalities theoretically, Park probes into the complex phenomenon of
yeongeo yeolpung, or the English frenzy in South Korea, and then demon-
strates how, first, it is not enough to link the power of English simply
with macrostructures of globalization, neo-imperialism, transnational
capital, rigid social class divisions, and educational reproduction; and
second, that inequalities of English are deeply subjective as well, felt by
individuals as anxiety, frustration, and uneasiness. This fear of English
can be traced back to an emerging Korean subjectivity in the early twen-
tieth century when Korea needed to break away from its so-called deca-
dent dynastic past and become part of the dynamic and modern group
of nations. Throughout the twentieth century, Korea’s increasingly
unequal relationship with the United States in practically all spheres
of life (economic, political, cultural) has thus shaped the affective rela-
tionship between the two countries, from which can be drawn such
feelings of anxiety over English, especially over perceived inabilities of
the ‘illegitimate Korean English learner’ to speak like ‘the authoritative
American native speaker’ (Park, this volume). Such feelings have taken
on newer forms of linguistic inequality as Korea upgrades and expands
its human capital in the service of globalization, making learning
English an individual moral imperative. Therefore, unequal Englishes
are deeply affective in nature, not in the simple sense of the individual
psychological insecurities of English language learners, but in the sense
of internalized structures of feeling through which speakers of English
experience—and potentially transform—English-induced inequalities.
Peter Ives, in his chapter, Global English and Inequality: The Contested
Ground of Linguistic Power, closes Part I of the volume. Unlike the first
three chapters, Ives initially steps back from engaging with the notion
of unequal Englishes and, instead, aims to unpack the polemics of the
political idea of inequality itself. Thus, he asks whether ‘inequality
should be understood as existing between and among languages and
language varieties themselves, or is the real issue of social justice to be
located exclusively in relations among users of language?’ (Ives, this
volume). According to him, many studies, like that of Pennycook and
Canagarajah, relate questions of inequality to speakers rather than
languages themselves, in a sense saying that it is relationships between
individual speakers, rather than their languages and language varieties,
that are unequal. For Ives, inequality is located in structural relation-
ships between languages and language varieties themselves. In other
words, individual speech practices within which unequal Englishes are
 Introduction 9

located may be best examined through concepts that relate these prac-
tices to larger but shifting structures of power in society.

Part II: Englishes in Nexuses of Power and Inequality

Part II of this volume is composed of chapters situated in different

sociocultural contexts—China, Japan, and the Philippines—thus locat-
ing unequal Englishes in unique configurations of power and inequality.
In other words, while inequalities of Englishes are shaped broadly by
processes of globalization, specific social and ideological phenomena
constitute these inequalities. In the first chapter of this part, ‘Just an Old
Joke’: Chinglish, Narratives, and Linguistic Inequality in the Chinese English
Classroom, Eric S. Henry unpacks joke narratives on English in China,
arguing that such talk about language is an effective dominant practice
of producing English linguistic inequality in the country. Focusing on
joke narratives about Chinglish in the classroom, the chapter shows
how this evolving variety of English as a substandard form (Dongbei
English) indexes a typical Chinese English learner who uses the language
inappropriately and who takes on an identity associated with cultural
backwardness. Moreover, by locating the Chinese speaker’s experience
abroad (or specifically in the United States), where the Chinese speaker
is perpetually involved in usually humorous inappropriate uses of
English with ‘native’ speakers, the narratives participate in the modern
imaginings of a desirable ‘foreign’ culture in China, while stigmatizing
one that is a local and supposedly inward-looking regional culture. In
the process, teachers, as the narrators of these stories who have had
experience using English abroad, legitimize popular desires to study
the standard form of English in order to participate in China’s march
towards modernization through its globally-oriented market economy.
In the classroom, the narratives unremittingly view English language
acquisition in China with suspicion, implicitly addressing students as
non-experts and backward, and thus remind students to continue pay-
ing for English lessons in order to become the ideal speaker of English.
Writing about Japan, on the other hand, Glenn Toh reconfigures
socio-historical and structural inequalities inherent in the understand-
ings, practices, and realizations of the use and presence of English in the
country. Entitled English in Japan: Traumas, Inequalities and Practices of
Locality, Relocalization and Localism, the chapter argues that the various
realizations and enactments of English in Japan are closely tied in to
the intricacies and traumas of Japan’s post-war occupation by English-
speaking Allied powers led by the forces of the United States. Mediated
10 Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy

by nationalist ideologies predicated upon questions concerning the

uniqueness of Japanese identity, Toh surfaces the dualistic attitude of
the Japanese society towards (American) English. On the one hand,
American English is revered while, on the other hand, it is viewed with
suspicion. Consequently, local language practices in Japan which inte-
grate English blur the line between being ‘Japanese’ and being ‘foreign’,
thus making these practices unacceptable to many. The matter of English
and Englishes is one that the Japanese are not entirely comfortable with
and structural and ideological inequalities and prejudices linked to the
appropriation of English in Japan are not easily surmountable.
This time writing about the Philippines, Aileen O. Salonga in
Performing Gayness and English in the Offshore Call Center Industry, high-
lights the intricate embeddedness of sexuality and class in the making
of inequalities of Englishes. According to her, there is a phenomenon
that is taking place only in the Philippine call center industry: the sig-
nificant number and success of gay men. She shows how some of the
sociolinguistic practices in the industry—for instance, the ‘feminized’
call center speech style and the emphasis on performance—make it
conducive for gay identities to flourish, especially where performing
acceptable Englishes is concerned. This allows for possibilities of lin-
guistic agency among gay men in a workplace known for its systems
of control. In the end, however, sexuality is only one of the social
categories that relate to success in the industry. English proficiency, or
the ability to switch between desirable or acceptable Englishes, is deter-
mined by intersecting class-induced subject positions, and is thus the
more crucial determiner of success. In other words, to perform gayness
in the industry is not enough for gay men to be successful; their success
is mediated by their ability to perform Englishes deemed desirable by
the industry. By and large, the industry is still closed to Filipino gay men
who are poor and have not gone to the ‘right’ schools.

Part III: Englishes in Changing Multilingual Spaces

Part III of the volume is composed of chapters which locate unequal

Englishes at the heart of massive and dynamic twenty-first century
transformations of societies. The focus is on the role of inequalities of
Englishes in these social changes and how such inequalities are being
transformed by speakers themselves, who are multidialectal and mul-
tilingual users of English. Thus, dominant concepts in the chapters
in this part of the volume are globalization, cosmopolitanism, mod-
ernization, and migration, and the authors seek to account for how
 Introduction 11

these broad social forces impact the formation and transformation of

Englishes and their speakers.
In Earning Capital in Hawai’i’s Linguistic Landscape, Christina Higgins
examines the place of Hawai’ian English in the symbolic economy of
the state, accounting for its transformations from being an unremark-
able lingua franca on plantation fields to being an ‘unequal language’
vis-à-vis the more standard US mainland English propagated through
racially and socially discriminating structures of schooling. In more
recent years, pidgin has taken on more positive meanings and valua-
tions, as evidenced in public signs where people’s voices are increasingly
being articulated through this local use of English. Such prestige shifts
are especially seen through the use of pidgin as both local commodity
and local politics, thus making Hawai’i a curious case for the study of
globalism and cosmopolitanism. Pidgin on signs reflects the local peo-
ple’s attempts to resist the consuming power of a cosmopolitan sophis-
ticated identity, including their opposition to governmental activities
that are difficult to trust.
The second chapter in this section of the volume, Glocalization on
Display: Vernacular English Signs in the Center of Beijing, analyzes the use
of language of public signs on Dashilan, a six-century old commercial
street in the center of Beijing in China undergoing changes due to
modernization and globalization. Lin Pan frames her analysis within
an understanding of globalization as glocalization, where both ‘global’
and ‘local’ actors shape each other’s actions and practices. Such interac-
tion and intermeshing of forces are unequally distributed across people
and institutions with varying access to symbolic and material resources
of capital and cosmopolitanism. The signs analyzed in the chapter
show how ‘global English’ or ‘Standard English’ has relocated from the
English-speaking world to other parts of the world and transformed
into different manifestations of English largely due to local people’s dif-
ferentiated access to such a translocal linguistic resource. The glocaliza-
tion of English in this sense points to unequal spread of the language,
thus the Englishes on signs are rooted in unique cultural, political, and
socioeconomic circumstances.
Catherine Chua Siew Kheng, in her chapter, Singlish Strikes Back
in Singapore, describes the colorful contemporary politics of English
in Singapore, arguing that years of demonizing Singlish, the local col-
loquial English which functions as the country’s inter-ethnic lingua
franca, has failed to uproot the language from its sociocultural moor-
ings. In fact, with Singapore’s increasingly super-diverse cosmopolitan
society, due mainly to the phenomena of migration and globalization,
12 Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy

Singlish is not only expected to widen its linguistic and functional

reach among new citizens, permanent residents, and foreigners work-
ing in the country but, more crucially, also renders the deep-rooted,
state-sanctioned beliefs about English progressively outdated. Vigorous
policies and initiatives aimed at perpetuating inequalities between
Singlish and Standard Singapore English are increasingly under pressure
to validate the relevance and currency of these language policies and
campaigns in the midst of Singlish becoming an undeniably inextrica-
ble part of a ‘new’ Singapore.

Part IV: Englishes in Unequal Learning Spaces

Part IV of this volume examines Englishes in unequal learning spaces.

Although there is no intrinsic or natural link between the study of
unequal Englishes and the study of learning contexts, the reality is that
sociolinguistic renditions of the pluralization of English around the
world will be viewed by many as hugely important in the context of
education (Canagarajah 2006; Jenkins 2000; Kirkpatrick 2010; Matsuda
2012; McKay 2002). Thus, in these chapters the discussion revolves
around issues relevant to TESOL (the Teaching of English to Speakers
of Other Languages) and is based on textbooks, students, and teachers.
Vaidehi Ramanathan, in Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and Rule’ Policies:
Linguistic Apartheid, Unequal Englishes, and the Postcolonial Framework,
provides a situated postcolonial account of how teachers and students
on the ground contest divisive language policies in India by localizing
English and deploying vernacular pedagogical practices in vernacular-
medium classroom settings. These postcolonial linguistic practices help
us examine the appropriateness of concepts propagated by West-based
TESOL, such as ‘communicative competence’, ‘appropriate teaching
methods’, and ‘English-only’ policies. In the process, they can also
potentially inform West-based TESOL teacher education by sensitizing
teachers to the dangers of their being complicit with socially divisive
language policies. Vernacularizing English both through content and
ways of teaching the language exposes the divergent social realities
from which TESOL emerges in situated practice.
On the other hand, Phan Le Ha, in Unequal Englishes in Imagined
Intercultural Interactions, probes into how international students in
English-medium schools in Malaysia privilege native English-speaking
lecturers and ‘foreign’ students in imagined intercultural interactions.
In the process of doing so, the students reproduce colonial dichoto-
mies of self and other, where the ‘West’ continues to be the source of
 Introduction 13

knowledge and authority over questions of standards in the English

language. Such imagined interactions, where ‘native’ English is the
desired standard and going ‘abroad’ is the final destination of English
language learning for many of the students, affirm unequal ownership
of the English language despite its having spread across practically all
parts of the world. In broader terms, this phenomenon is embedded in
processes involving the internationalization of English-medium educa-
tion, along with the legitimization of other forms of knowledge coming
from the English-speaking West.
The last chapter of this section, Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal
Englishes’: The D-TEIL Experience in Cuba, is a strategically important
closing chapter for this volume. The authors, Ian Martin and Brian
Morgan, tackle a practical yet profound question: what do we do with
unequal Englishes? They describe the theory and practice of an under-
graduate EIL program in Canada whose key feature is a three-week
practicum held at a university in Cuba. The program aims at providing
students with a critical space to reflect on and engage with dominant
concepts and ideologies in the teaching of English, such as the endur-
ing belief in the supremacy of the native speaker. Student reflections
show an emerging critical EIL teacher identity through their grounded
understanding of local classroom practices and a deeper appreciation
of the non-native English teacher advantage. The authors highlight
the fact that preparing students (who would be teachers) for unequal
Englishes actually also prepares students for various forms of inequalities
as well, including linguistic and varietal inequalities, as well as gender,
economic, and social development inequalities.

Conclusion

‘Critical linguists’, according to Jenkins (2006, p. 165), ‘can be divided

into anti-imperialists such as Phillipson, who would prefer English(es)
not to be the most widely used world language, and those such as
Canagarajah and Parakrama, whose concern, like Kachru’s, is more
with resisting the hegemony of native speaker standards and appro-
priating English for their own local use’ (p. 165). It is not clear how
well this dichotomy holds politically and ideologically. Does this make
Canagarajah (1999) not anti-imperialist in his widely acclaimed book,
Resisting linguistic imperialism? Similarly, does this make Parakrama
(1995) not anti-imperialist in his stirring critique of the Kachruvian
paradigm in order to advance his agenda in De-hegemonizing language
standards—learning from (post)colonial Englishes about ‘English’? This is a
14 Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy

curious dichotomization of the work of ‘critical linguists’ since appar-

ently those engaged in ‘resistance’ and ‘de-hegemonizing’ standards
cannot be ‘anti-imperialist’.
This positioning perhaps becomes more intelligible if we read
Jenkins’ complete statement about how she and scholars associated
with English as a Lingua Franca or ELF view themselves vis-à-vis the
‘critical linguists’: ‘Taking a very different approach, though one
which shares some common ground with that of the latter group
of critical linguists, is Brutt-Griffler (2002), who presents the spread of
WEs [World Englishes] as resulting from the agency of its non-mother
tongue speakers rather than from their passivity and exploitation. This
is a position that she shares with ELF researchers’ (p. 165, italics added).
In other words, Jenkins associates her politics with those who resist
linguistic imperialism because of their valorization of individual agency
and resistance, but nevertheless distances herself and her group from them
by refusing to acknowledge the crucial role of linguistic imperialism
in the spread of English around the world. That is, what we think she
wants to say is that in advancing the agenda of ELF, what matters is the
agency of speakers, and talk about passivity and exploitation is irrel-
evant. If we are to take her position as the position of other scholars in
the same research area, then ELF rejects any possibility of the English
language and its speakers being located in structures or conditions of
inequality in society today. Pushed to its logical conclusion, modern
society is romanticized as a congregation of individual speakers whose
choices are completely free of social influences.
As this whole introduction, hopefully, has shown, this is what happens
if ‘agency’ and ‘exploitation’ are not viewed conceptually as constituting
each other. Again, our point is ‘simple’, although admittedly theoretically
complex to operationalize: a focus on agency does not mean exploitation
is gone and a focus on exploitation does not mean there is no agency.
Practically all fields in the social sciences have fiercely debated the rela-
tionship between agency and exploitation, between agency and struc-
ture, between colonialism and postcolonialism, or between imperialism
and political action (Dirlik 2002; Hays 1994; Hobson & Ramesh 2002;
Larsen 2005). But between Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, for example,
who advance theoretical treatises in favor of one over the other, none
reject the importance of the other (Elder-Vass 2010); between Giddens
and Bourdieu, and Mouzelis and Archer, on the other hand, theoreti-
cal attempts have been made to reconcile both sides of the dichotomy
(Elder-Vass 2010; Parker 2000). The ELF position seems not-of-this-world
because of its insistence or covert belief that one part of the equation
 Introduction 15

either does not exist at all, or at least should be ignored. Whatever our
theoretical persuasions are, it is important to begin with the assumption
that ‘we cannot successfully theorize the social world without recogniz-
ing and reconciling the roles of both structure and agency’ (Elder-Vass
2010, pp. 3–4). One cannot choose between agency and exploitation,
between freedom and unfreedom; to do so is politically naive.
Interestingly, despite the ‘far reaching’ (2006, p. 170) implica-
tions of EFL research for teaching, Jenkins gives a sobering—and yes,
correct—account of why, despite reflecting ‘the sociolinguistic reality
of the largest group of English users, that is, the majority of those in
the expanding circle, it [ELF] may prove difficult to put it into practice’
(p. 170). Some of these deep-rooted challenges are the following: (1)
‘the belief in native speaker ownership persists among both native and
nonnative speakers—teachers, teacher educators and linguists alike’
(p. 171); (2) ‘With standard American or British English being the only
varieties considered worth learning in many parts of the world, then
equally, those considered best-placed to teach English in those places
are its native speakers’ (p. 172); (3) ‘the examination boards are unlikely
to be spurred into action by much of what is written on testing, which
tends to fall back on acceptance of a native-speaker standard’ (p. 175);
and (4) ‘it is gratifying to observe that the study of the subject World
Englishes is growing around the world … although the paradigm shift
has not yet started to filter though into language teaching itself, where
much more needs to be done to raise learners’ awareness of the diversity
of English’ (pp. 173–174). From our perspective, Jenkins is giving an
account of inequalities of Englishes.
Our volume, however, diverges from the ELF position in a profound
way because while in many ELF scholars’ formulation ‘the intercon-
nections between structure and agency are lost’ (Hays 1994, p. 57), we
assume that inequalities and Englishes are inextricably linked and must
be theorized together. Our position is that the focus on inequalities could
bring our attention back to why Englishes and agency can empower
us only if we locate them in the colonial present (Gregory 2004). Why
do those challenges to ELF, above, continue to persist today? We can,
of course, rely on different frameworks to answer this question, but
if we continue to purge exploitation from our academic and intellec-
tual vocabulary, we might as well count ourselves implicated in what
Jenkins (2006) refers to as the ‘counter discourse’ (p. 172) in the acad-
emy which frustrates genuine efforts to revise, change, and transform
the teaching and learning of English around the world. The refusal
to acknowledge the fact that the ‘forces of globalization, empire and
16 Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy

English are intricately interconnected’ (Kumaravadivelu 2006, p. 1) is

unfortunate but understandable because it is, after all, symptomatic of
‘the entrenched nature of empire’ (p. 1).

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 Introduction 17

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Part I
Approaches to Unequal Englishes
1
Inequalities of Englishes, English
Speakers, and Languages: A Critical
Perspective on Pluralist Approaches
to English
Ryuko Kubota

In scholarly discussions about the English language in the world, the

traditional view of language as a bound, unified, and fixed system
has been replaced by a pluralist understanding of language as diverse,
fluid, and multifaceted. This is observed in such inquiries as world
Englishes (Kachru et al. 2006), English as a lingua franca (Jenkins
2000; Seidlhofer 2011), English as an international language (McKay &
Bokhorst-Heng 2008), and interactions across Englishes (Meierkord
2012). Furthermore, research focused on local practices of English use
has demonstrated hybrid and agentive appropriation of language in
selecting, mixing, stylizing, truncating, and bending linguistic codes
and expectations (e.g. Blommaert 2010; Canagarajah 2011; Pennycook
2007, 2012; Rampton 2006). Despite some significant conceptual dif-
ferences, these scholarly trends have pluralized our understandings
about the forms and uses of English, its speakers, and the contexts in
which English is used, destabilizing the normative idea of who owns
English and which English is legitimate. Not only have they plural-
ized English and English speakers, they have also dislocated existing
linguistic boundaries and related categories, conceptualizing linguistic
practices as dynamic performativity. Applied to pedagogy, the plural-
ist perspectives have called into question the perceived superiority
of mainstream American or British English and its native speakers
that constitutes traditional linguistic conventions. In this chapter,
I call these perspectives, which highlight the diverse, dynamic, and
heterogeneous nature of English and English use, pluralist approaches
to English.
Paralleling this scholarly trend, teaching and learning English has
been emphasized in various segments in our society. This is seen in the

21
22 Ryuko Kubota

global popularity of early learning of English, English-medium educa-

tion programs, use of standardized English tests, learning English for
work purposes, and so on. While such a trend reflects the increased
global mobility of people, goods, and information, it is also influenced
by a neoliberal belief that English is today’s predominant mode of inter-
national communication and that developing competence in English is
essential for individual and national economic success (Kubota 2011a;
Park 2011). At the same time, the neoliberal socioeconomic system
has created unequal economic outcomes for individuals, as evidenced
in income disparities and unemployment. In teaching and learning,
what is still prevalent is a traditional approach that privileges standard
varieties of English, native English-speaking teachers, and white teach-
ers of English (Curtis & Romney 2006; Motha 2014). Furthermore,
the perceived omnipresence and usefulness of English in the world
is paradoxically contrasted with the local expectation for immigrants
to acquire the locally dominant language rather than English in non-
English-dominant nations.
Clearly, there are points of disjuncture between the pluralist
approaches to English, which by and large project romanticized apoliti-
cal images of diverse global communication, and pragmatic responses
to English or other languages in the world, which indicate normatism
and inequalities. Some may argue that the pluralist approaches have
not yet influenced educational practices or language policies. Others
may argue that scholarly inquiries of English primarily describe socio-
linguistic phenomena and do not necessarily need to inform practice.
However, I argue that the scholarly interest in the plurality of English is
inevitably linked to broader ideological forces, requiring critical reflec-
tion. One conceptual lens that can inform this critical exploration is
multiculturalism. This chapter examines the ideologies underlying plu-
ralist approaches to English by drawing on critiques of liberal and neo-
liberal multiculturalism discussed mainly in the United States. I argue
that the pluralist approaches to English share with liberal and neoliberal
multiculturalism the propensity to celebrate diversity but simultane-
ously reinforce a certain global/local commonality (e.g. English in the
world), which is further propagated by neoliberal academic activities.
This tendency overlooks inequalities and power hierarchies that exist
among Englishes, diverse English speakers, and languages. Before
presenting a critical analysis, I will provide a brief review of pluralist
approaches to English, followed by a summary of liberal and neoliberal
multiculturalism.
 Inequalities of Englishes, English Speakers, and Languages 23

Pluralist approaches to English

Pluralist views of English—broadly identified with world Englishes

(WE), English as a lingua franca (ELF), and English use as postcolonial
performativity (Pennycook 2001)—are consistent with postmodern,
poststructuralist, or postcolonial inquiries. These perspectives call into
question the linguistic and pragmatic norms of English that have tra-
ditionally been taken for granted and conceptually pluralize the forms
and uses of English (see Kubota 2012).
The paradigm of WE (e.g. Kachru et al. 2006) raises skepticism about
the view that regards traditional norms of Standard English—mainstream
American and British English—as the sole frame of reference in linguistic
studies. It identifies such Inner Circle norms as colonial embodiment
and instead focuses on and describes postcolonial Englishes used in
Outer Circle countries as well as international Englishes taught and
learned in Expanding Circle countries. Thus, research on WE recognizes
multiple Englishes in their own right, providing new meaning and
vocabulary to describe Englishes that have been marginalized.
While WE is concerned with varieties of English, research on ELF (e.g.
Jenkins 2000; Seidlhofer 2011) calls into question the common beliefs
about who uses English as a global lingua franca and investigates what
linguistic and pragmatic forms are actually used. Paying specific atten-
tion to communication in English that takes place between non-native
speakers of English rather than between native and non-native speakers
of English, ELF scholars have investigated linguistic and pragmatic uses of
diverse speakers of English and how intelligibility is negotiated and
established. Like WE, ELF research recognizes linguistic heterogene-
ity observed in speech situations involving traditionally marginalized
speakers. These inquiries problematize the superiority of Standard
English and the native speaker in research and teaching, legitimating
multiple linguistic codes used by diverse speakers of English.
Other scholars problematize the Standard English, native-speaker
norm, and the concept of language itself by drawing on postcolonial
resistance and poststructuralist performativity (cf. Butler 1990). Scholars,
such as Canagarajah (2013) and Otsuji and Pennycook (2010), criti-
cally evaluate WE research as an effort merely to describe the linguistic
system of national varieties and to ‘pluralise languages and cultures
rather than complexify them’ (Otsuji & Pennycook 2010, p. 243). They
instead explore how English is appropriated, altered, or reformulated in
local practices by focusing on agency and resistance. In this framework,
24 Ryuko Kubota

diverse users of English are not bound by fixed linguistic expectations,

no matter how multiple they are. Rather, they use English in fluid
and hybrid ways to express and construct their identity. Interactions
involve mixing different codes and unpredictable semiotic expres-
sions. Linguistic codes no longer index certain speaker traits (e.g. Black
English for black people); they can be used across ethnic and other
social boundaries and taken up as identity markers. These perspectives
underpin such phenomena such as language crossing (Rampton 2006),
code meshing in writing (Canagarajah 2011), appropriation of academic
English as postcolonial resistance (Canagarajah 1999), multiple ways in
which global hip hop language and culture are appropriated in local
contexts (Alim et al. 2009), and metrolingualism, which denotes ‘crea-
tive linguistic conditions across space and borders of culture, history
and politics’ with a dialectic existence of fluidity and fixity (Otsuji &
Pennycook 2010, p. 244).
While these ideas have made a significant contribution to transform-
ing our understanding by pluralizing English (and other languages), its
users, and linguistic practices, and by exploring complexities existing
in the pluralized linguistic forms and practices, they seem to be con-
sistent with a liberal intellectual tradition that celebrates diversity but
insufficiently addresses issues of power that produce and perpetuate
inequalities and injustices among Englishes, groups of English users,
and different languages. This is where WE, ELF, and postcolonial per-
formativity merge despite conceptual differences and tensions among
them. The pluralist approaches to English can be compared with liberal
and neoliberal approaches to multicultural education, to which I will
turn now.

Liberal multiculturalism

In the field of education, multiculturalism has been a popular topic of

scholarly discussion since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and
70s in the United States as well as other nations like Canada, the United
Kingdom, and Australia (Banks 2009). While multiculturalism has been
conceptualized in diverse ways, scholars agree that the current domi-
nant approach is liberal multiculturalism, which has stemmed from a
necessity to understand diverse populations of students in desegregated
societies. Liberal multiculturalism in education has been concerned
with the recognition and understanding of ethnically, culturally, and
linguistically diverse groups of students and their families though
respecting difference (May & Sleeter 2010). Such a well-intentioned
 Inequalities of Englishes, English Speakers, and Languages 25

approach has, however, been criticized in the political left (McLaren

1995; Nieto 1995; see Kubota 2004 in relation to language education).
First, in celebrating the superficial four Fs—food, fashion, festival, and
folkdance, cultures in liberal multiculturalism tend to be essentialized as
homogeneous entities. In an attempt to understand diverse groups such
as blacks, Latinos, Asians, Arabs, and so on, these groups are character-
ized with unitary cultural traits, despite diversity within each group in
terms of ethnicity, language, religion, and class, and so on. Moreover,
such difference is sometimes exoticized or romanticized, leading to
binarism and Othering. For example, Asian culture is often described
as having such values as respect for authorities, discipline, and collec-
tivism, whereas American culture is defined in terms of individualism,
freedom, and self-reliance (e.g. Ariza 2006). In education, cultural essen-
tialism is linked to a pedagogical urge to compromise the complexity
of culture to facilitate understanding. Once an essentialist framework is
established, culturally diverse students’ behaviors are understood in a
prescriptive way.
Second, liberal multiculturalism displays a contradictory stance of
respecting difference on the one hand and acknowledging sameness
on the other. While cultural difference is celebrated in decontextual-
ized ways, a typical reaction to difference encountered in everyday life
is color-blindness that downplays difference, as seen in the following
comments: ‘They are students to me not Hispanic, Mexican American,
White, Black or other. I do not care about the color of their skin,
I respect them and they respect me, that is what is important’ (Herrera &
Morales 2009, p. 202). ‘You have to treat all kids the same, white, black,
red, purple; you can’t have different rules for different kids’ (Larson &
Ovando 2001, p. 65). Conceptually uniting commonality and difference
is more proactively promoted in the discourse of cosmopolitanism in
education (Hansen 2010). However, the focus on sameness or universal-
ity can easily slip into assimilation.
Third, liberal multiculturalism typically eschews explicit discussions
about unequal relations of power among groups or injustices among
social groups identified in terms of race, gender, class, sexuality, and
other categories, which shape the everyday experiences of people.
The above-mentioned color-blind discourse sees people from different
backgrounds as individuals, while obscuring group-based struggles. The
liberal stance to recognize and respect cultural difference further places
all cultures on the level playing field, obscuring unequal relations of
power among them and making the domination of white middle-class
Christian culture invisible. The purpose of multicultural understanding
26 Ryuko Kubota

tends to become simply appreciating diversity rather than recognizing

and critiquing relations of domination and subordination that coexist
with diversity.
Finally, from a political, economic, and historical perspective, liberal
multiculturalism in the United States has been undergirded by a post-
World War II US ideology of making the nation appear to embrace
liberal antiracism as a national culture while establishing a capitalist
hegemony in the world economy. Melamed (2006) calls this ideol-
ogy racial liberalism and argues that it has functioned as a vehicle for
establishing the capitalist hegemony and national identity as a world
leader of an antiracist liberal nation. In other words, the United States
deployed the ideology of racial liberalism in order to establish the
moral legitimacy of its global leadership through such liberal projects
as racial desegregation and the establishment of legal rights. However,
under racial liberalism, which denies white racial domination, racial
inequalities, as seen in poor social and economic conditions of African
Americans for instance, are viewed as pathology rather than structural
injustice. In this way, racial liberalism evades socialist engagement to
ensure social and economic equity and justice for marginalized people.
The ideology of racial liberalism, which echoes liberal multicultur-
alism, has merged into neoliberal multiculturalism since the 1990s
(Darder 2012; Lentin & Titley 2011; Melamed 2006). Neoliberalism has
indeed become a powerful ideological tool to justify new forms of social
and educational structures and practices, including the current strong
emphasis on teaching and learning English worldwide. I now turn to
neoliberalism and neoliberal multiculturalism.

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism has recently been a topic of discussion in the field

of applied linguistics with an inquiry focus on issues of language,
nation, ethnicity, identity, and language teaching and learning (Block
et al. 2012; Chun 2009; Heller 2011; Kubota 2011a; Park 2011).
Neoliberalism, originally an economic theory, has functioned as an
ideology and constituted social structures and practices since the global
economic downturn in the 1970s. To build a stronger economy, a free
market principle has promoted small government with fewer state
restrictions to facilitate the private sector to control economic activities.
Economy has been strengthened also by means of reducing labor costs
through introducing flexible employment systems, such as outsourcing
and increasing non-regular jobs. Not only are nations in competition
 Inequalities of Englishes, English Speakers, and Languages 27

for larger capital, each individual worker is expected to demonstrate

a competitive edge. Thus, neoliberal individuals are held accountable
for developing and maintaining their employability on their own. This
accountability extends to public institutions whose effectiveness is
scrutinized by selected evidence, as seen in the school accountability
movement (Hursch 2005) and quantitative measures used for tenure/
promotion reviews in higher education. Social welfare has been reduced
based on the principle that individuals, rather than the government, are
responsible for their own quality life. Here, individual workers are given
the sole onus of remaining employable while independent businesses
are given freedom to pursue their profit. Indeed, the principle of capi-
talism is supported by individualism, absolving the government from
ensuring equitable distribution of wealth or solving collective problems
(Lentin & Titley 2011). This social, political, and economic system has
created disparities between the rich and the poor, triggering the recent
worldwide Occupy Movement.
Neoliberalism posits that individual economic success is predicated
on the development of human capital—knowledge and skills necessary for
the so-called knowledge economy. A core component of human capital
is communication skills, including language competency. The discourse
of human capital is clearly aligned with the global emphasis on teach-
ing and learning English, which is perceived as a global language of eco-
nomic opportunity. As evident from the discussion thus far, language
learning in the neoliberal society is dominated by pragmatic purposes
and processes and preoccupied with accountability as evidenced by the
popularity of language tests. Even the Common European Framework
of Reference for Languages, which was developed with a broader vision
of acquiring not only narrowly defined linguistic competence but also
intercultural skills and dispositions, has been mostly used for measuring
linguistic competence using its six-point scale (McNamara 2011).

Neoliberal multiculturalism

As liberal multiculturalism in the United States champions diversity,

openness, and freedom, neoliberal multiculturalism advocates ‘open
societies’ and ‘economic freedom’ (Melamed 2006, p. 16). Here, eco-
nomic freedom overlaps with societal freedom. Furthermore, the United
States, a democratic nation with multiethnic diversity and proclaimed
freedom of religion and speech, is obligated to secure ‘political and
economic liberty for every person, in every society’ (Melamed 2006,
p. 16). Neoliberal multiculturalism respects cultural difference as long
28 Ryuko Kubota

as it contributes to profitable economic activities. In fact, not respect-

ing subtle cultural nuances in global business would result in failure in
capitalist expansion.
However, neoliberal multiculturalism makes a distinction between
legitimate and illegitimate diversity, justifying the multicultural Self
with freedom while derogating the monocultural Other without free-
dom. This is demonstrated in the controversy of banning women from
wearing headscarves in various Western nations, where this cultural
tradition is viewed as an infringement of individual rights. There are
two underlying issues here: First, individual freedom advocated in this
controversy is also juxtaposed with ‘the common, national, transcend-
ent values that mark “us” out as different’ (Lentin & Titley 2011,
p. 176). The neoliberal multiculturalist contradictory condemnation of
diverse cultural practice is justified by a nationalist valuing of freedom.
Second, as seen in the condemnation of the Muslim tradition, culture
and race—two distinct concepts—are often blurred. Neoliberal multicul-
turalism justifies racial discrimination as a matter of cultural difference,
as seen in antiterrorist discourse about good Muslims and bad Muslims
(Melamed 2006). Conversely, racial difference is neutralized and, in the
name of diversity, group-based antiracist struggles are undermined. This
is exemplified by pressure imposed on historically black colleges and
universities in the United States to increase diversity (Melamed 2006).
In sum, like liberal multiculturalism, neoliberal multiculturalism
obscures power relations among racialized groups. The contradictory
recognition of sameness and difference in liberal multiculturalism
parallels the neoliberal multiculturalist insistence on universality and
heterogeneity; that is, while a universal value of freedom and rights is
promoted even though it distinguishes between legitimate and illegiti-
mate diversity, a pluralist value of openness and diversity is respected.
Liberal forms of multiculturalism have been critiqued from perspectives
of critical multiculturalism, to which I will now turn.

Critical multiculturalism

Criticism of liberal and neoliberal multiculturalism, which I have

reviewed above, constitutes critical perspectives of multiculturalism.
Underlying critical multiculturalism is critical recognition of and enact-
ment against power, inequalities, and discrimination that affect not
only individual members of society but also groups of people divided
by various social categories. One conceptual foundation aligned
with critical multiculturalism is critical race theory, which has been
 Inequalities of Englishes, English Speakers, and Languages 29

developed since the era of the Civil Rights Movement in the United
States. Founded on the recognition that racism pervades our society,
critical race theory exposes the everyday experiences of people of color
through counter-storytelling (see Kubota 2013a; Kubota & Lin 2009;
May & Sleeter 2010). In this framework, racism is conceptualized as not
only individual intolerance but also structural inequalities and racially
biased social and academic knowledge. Although race constitutes a pri-
mary focus, critical race theory also examines intersectionality among
race, gender, class, sexuality, and other social categories that shape our
lived experiences. Critical approaches to race and other social categories
also require us to scrutinize invisible social norms that are linked to
privileges. They allow us to scrutinize the ways in which white privilege,
male privilege, and other privileges normalize certain social practices
while marginalizing others.
Critical multiculturalism overcomes the dilemma of sameness/
universality and difference/heterogeneity through employing situ-
ated ethics, which encourage critical moral judgments based not on
a universal application of common rules but on the notion of equity
that envisions a transformation of unequal power relations. Social
transformation is made possible through praxis—committed reflection
and action or committed enactment of critiques. In establishing equity
and justice through praxis, mutual accommodation is essential (Nieto &
Bode 2008). Contrary to the assimilationist expectation imposed on
minority groups to accommodate for the majority culture, mutual
accommodation expects both dominant and minority groups to share
a responsibility to adapt to each other’s culture in order to construct
equity and justice.
I have laid out a conceptual background of selected approaches to
multiculturalism. I will now return to pluralist approaches to English
and analyze their ideological underpinnings vis-à-vis what I have
reviewed thus far.

Liberal multiculturalism and pluralist approaches to English

Ideological elements of liberal and neoliberal multiculturalism run par-

allel with the pluralist approaches to English. Some scholarly critiques
of WE and ELF in particular provide a critical lens. Readers might say
that liberal/neoliberal multiculturalism and pluralist approaches to
English are dissimilar in that the former is a discourse produced by a
dominant cultural group for understanding minorities, whereas the
latter represents postcolonial skepticism from a minority or subversive
30 Ryuko Kubota

perspective. Lok (2012) indeed interprets the WE paradigm as post-

colonial resistance of the colonized for authenticating their linguistic
identity, which parallels strategic essentialism deployed by historically
oppressed groups. It can be said that in the pluralist views of English,
the power of Inner Circle Englishes is explicitly called into question
rather than kept invisible. Nonetheless, I argue that some overlapping
features between the pluralist approaches to English and liberal/neolib-
eral multiculturalism can be identified. Below, I will focus on WE and
ELF first, followed by postcolonial performativity.

WE and ELF
First of all, just as liberal multiculturalism tends to essentialize a culture
and reduce it to a unitary whole, the WE paradigm has been criticized
for conceptualizing sociolinguistic varieties in an essentialist manner,
despite its good intention to overcome a normative perspective of lan-
guage. It has been argued that the attempt to describe national varieties
of English (e.g. Indian English, Philippine English, China English) actu-
ally essentializes them as homogeneous linguistic systems (Bruthiaux
2003). These essentialized national varieties of English are juxtaposed
with each other on a level playing field with little attention paid to the
symbolic power attached to certain varieties in social institutions and
contexts.
In this nation-based framework of sociolinguistic analysis, the privi-
lege of the dominant linguistic group within the nation is also unques-
tioned. That is, each variety of English tends to represent the socially,
economically, and politically dominant segment of the population.
Tupas (2004), for example, argues in the context of the Philippines
that Philippine English as discussed in the WE framework represents
the variety of English used by economically and intellectually privi-
leged elites, which is not too much different from Standard American
English. He argues, ‘by focusing simply on “educated” English, studies
on Philippine English have lent themselves towards an elitist (socio)
linguistics by almost completely ignoring the linguistic practices of
genuinely marginalized voices in Philippine society’ (Tupas 2004, p. 54).
Second, liberal and neoliberal multiculturalism’s paradoxical union of
difference and sameness and contradictory support for legitimate and
illegitimate diversity can be mapped onto the issues of intelligibility in
the paradigms of WE and ELF. Both paradigms obviously problematize
traditionally accepted linguistic norms and in turn support linguistic
diversity. However, from a pedagogical point of view, a laissez-faire
acceptance of multiple linguistic codes without intelligibility would be
 Inequalities of Englishes, English Speakers, and Languages 31

problematic. Thus, intelligibility is regarded as an important component

in communication among diverse speakers of English (Nelson 2011;
Seidlhofer 2011). The notion of intelligibility is based on linguistic com-
monality. Yet the notion of intelligibility may not be entirely straightfor-
ward; a question is ‘who is to decide whether a given stretch of language
production is intelligible or unintelligible?’ (Rajagopalan 2010a,
p. 468). What is intelligible for one group of speakers might not be so for
another. Similarly, in written academic discourse, lexico-grammatical
acceptability tends to be highly idiosyncratic (Heng-Hartse & Kubota
2014). Scholars pursuing research on ELF have sought components and
features of global intelligibility for diverse English speakers (Jenkins
2000; Seidlhofer 2011). But wouldn’t this effort create yet another norm?
Just as neoliberal multiculturalism supports ideal universal freedom and
yet distinguishes between good and bad diversity, a pursuit of global
intelligibility may also create legitimate and illegitimate intelligibility.
Furthermore, behind the pursuit of intelligibility in global Englishes
exists the assumption that communication between any native speakers
of a language is perfectly intelligible (Rajagopalan 2010b), which again
overlooks the vast heterogeneity among native speakers.
Another relevant question is who is responsible for establishing
intelligibility. Drawing on Hyejeon Kim’s dissertation research on com-
munication between airline pilots and air traffic controllers, which
involves routine phraseology in ordinary conditions and plain English
in less predictable situations, McNamara (2011) observes that miscom-
munication often occurs due to native English-speaking pilots’ failure to
follow the communication protocol (e.g. routine phraseology or plain
English). Thus, successful communication or intelligibility is made
possible by sharing communicative responsibility between two inter-
locutors; the onus is not just on non-native or nonstandard language
speakers (Lippi-Green 2012), which echoes the notion of mutual accom-
modation in critical multiculturalism (Nieto & Bode 2008).
To summarize thus far, the debates about intelligibility resonate with
liberal and neoliberal multiculturalism’s paradox between celebration
of diversity and desire to seek commonality. Here, the ideology of
normatism, as seen in the native speaker model or standard language
ideology which WE and ELF problematized to begin with, remains
intact. Intelligibility among diverse English speakers becomes mainly a
non-native or nonstandard English speakers’ matter, leaving native or
standard English speakers’ power unquestioned.
The third point, which is related to intelligibility, is a peculiar absence
of discussions on social categories that often influence how people
32 Ryuko Kubota

understand or fail to understand each other. Quantitative research

conducted in the United States on reverse language stereotype, a phe-
nomenon in which a speaker’s perceived membership influences the
evaluation of that person’s speech, indicates that the perceived race/
nationality of a speaker of English influences listeners’ comprehension
and social judgment (Kang & Rubin 2009; Rubin 2002, 1992). Kang
and Rubin (2009), for example, conducted a study in which listeners
listened to the same lecture recorded by a native speaker of English with
two different types of visual information about the instructor: Chinese
ethnicity/nationality and Caucasian native English-speaker. They found
that listeners, when they were presented with the former information,
comprehended the lecture less, perceived more accent, and gave lower
evaluation for teaching effectiveness.
Such racial biases that English teachers of color experience are well
documented in their counter-storytelling, revealing a colorblind nature
of typical discussions of the hegemony of native speakers or the power of
Inner Circle varieties of English (see Curtis & Romney 2006). For
instance, Japanese-American native English-speaking teachers in Japan
face employment discrimination and marginalization due to the expec-
tation that native English-speaking teachers ought to be white, or suf-
fer from psychological wounds from a gap between their own racial
identity and perceived one (Kubota & Fujimoto 2013). Romney (2011)
further points out the omission of Anglophone Caribbean nations from
the category of Inner Circle countries proposed by Kachru (1985) in
his original model and argues that this omission, which is inconsistent
with Kachru’s definition, stems from the fact that the majority popula-
tion in these Caribbean nations is black, whereas that of other Inner
Circle countries is white. This prevalent ideology that equates Inner
Circle native speakers of English with whiteness on the one hand and
people of color, regardless of their language background, with non-
native speakers of English on the other hand is also observed in school
settings. Motha (2006) reported that immigrant students of color in
the United States from such countries as Jamaica, Ghana, and Sierra
Leone were labeled as world English speakers who required instruction
in English as a second language, even though English was their native
language.
In spite of these studies, the nexus between race and language has not
been an inquiry focus in the WE framework. Likewise, the research on
intelligibility or accommodation in ELF has not investigated whether
ELF interlocutors’ racial backgrounds would in any way affect commu-
nication in English. Paralleling liberal and neoliberal multiculturalism’s
 Inequalities of Englishes, English Speakers, and Languages 33

avoidance of explicit explorations of issues of race, racialization, and

racism, WE and ELF have paid little attention to these issues.

Postcolonial performativity
Let us turn to other pluralist approaches to English that are informed
by postcolonial performativity (Pennycook 2001). As mentioned earlier,
they resonate with WE and ELF in their critique of the colonial legitima-
tion of linguistic norms and the native-speaker model but move beyond
the pluralization of sociolinguistic varieties or linguistic rules and
instead focus on the complexity of global linguistic flows and language
use as local practices.
The treatment of diversity in postcolonial performativity is cer-
tainly nuanced and sophisticated rather than superficial or essentialist.
Nonetheless, this perspective, despite its greater attention to complexity,
fluidity, and situatedness of linguistic practices, seems to romanticize
the multiplicity of local language use without sufficiently interrogat-
ing inequalities and injustices involving race, gender, class, and so on.
Language users are described as crossing traditionally defined rigid
linguistic boundaries attached to ethnicity or other social categories,
using linguistic codes in unexpected ways. Or they appropriate and
invent specific linguistic expressions to construct and express their
local identity. As in liberal and neoliberal multiculturalism, individual
agency is recognized, and yet group struggles for power are seldom dis-
cussed. This observation raises several questions: Do the apparent fluid
and unhindered linguistic practices reflect individual freedom or are
they enmeshed with ideology and unequal power relations? Who has
resources and access to acquire hybrid English codes in the first place?
What potential social consequences are imposed on hybrid language
users and are such consequences unevenly experienced? Can all English
users regardless of their racial, gender, socioeconomic, and other back-
ground equally transgress linguistic boundaries and engage in hybrid
and fluid linguistic practices? In this regard, Cutler (2009), for example,
discusses the use of the word ‘nigga’ in Hip Hop battles. While ‘nigga’ is
used by black Hip Hop artists to address their black or white competitors,
it is avoided by white Hip Hoppers, which in turn confirms black soli-
darity while marking white identity. This unidirectional use of ‘nigga’
shows that race is a significant factor in linguistic (non)transgression.
As discussed above, liberal and neoliberal multiculturalism that cele-
brates diversity, freedom, and individualism diverts our attention from
inequalities between nations or between social groups and pervasive
prejudice and symbolic violence. Similarly, postcolonial performativity
34 Ryuko Kubota

perspectives that highlight hybridity and fluidity have not sufficiently

addressed power relations and consequential societal injuries. In fact,
the notion of hybridity has been called into question as it represents
cosmopolitan theorists’ self-congratulatory intellectual language game
(Kubota 2012; May 2009). Overall, postcolonial performativity tends to
stay comfortably in the celebration of trans-border linguistic hybridity,
multiplicity, and fluidity in the world where many interethnic, interna-
tional, and intranational conflicts and tensions coexist with capitalist
economic globalization.
Engaging in the intellectual game of pluralism and hybridity is
not unrelated to the neoliberal discourse of English and the neolib-
eral higher education system. Below, I will discuss how the pluralist
approaches to English and neoliberalism are in a complicit relationship.

Complicity with neoliberal academic expectations

The neoliberal promise of English, which proliferates the discourse
about global English (i.e., its perceived benefit for education, work, and
economy) reinforces the legitimacy of conducting research on the diver-
sity, intelligibility, and performativity of English. In other words, the
neoliberal discourse that champions the omnipresence and universal
usefulness of English (or simply English as a world-dominant language)
actually benefits scholars who engage in intellectual activities of pro-
moting pluralist perspectives of English. Through conducting research
and publishing, their symbolic capital, including mine, becomes greater
in the global academic market or intellectual field—to borrow Bourdieu’s
term (Swartz 1997)—of applied linguistics. The current accountability-
based and ranking-driven neoliberal system of higher education increas-
ingly requires university intellectuals to produce as many publications
as possible in prestigious journals in order to maintain and advance their
academic careers. Academic publishing then becomes an intellectual
field, in which academics are compelled to develop their competitive
edge, just as workers are expected to develop their human capital to
prevail in unstable neoliberal employment conditions. Scholars with
pluralist perspectives of English have certainly created distinct concep-
tual frameworks as a legitimate form of cultural production. At the same
time, greater publishing pressure and broader publication choices have
compelled scholars to gain greater symbolic capital in the intellectual
field. This has proliferated the symbolic power of the discourse about
the English language, which ironically runs parallel with the neoliberal
promise of English in the non-intellectual field (e.g. language training,
language testing).
 Inequalities of Englishes, English Speakers, and Languages 35

Often overlooked is transborder communication in languages other

than English in local communities. Colonization and more recent glo-
balization have created linguistic contacts across national and linguis-
tic borders in non-English-dominant countries. Consequently, while
English predominates in some geographical locations, local languages
other than English continue to dominate in other locations, imposing
an expectation on newcomers (e.g. guest workers, immigrants) that they
learn the local dominant language (Kubota & McKay 2009; Mufwene
2010). Likewise, in workplaces that involve transnational workers, the
common language is not necessarily English (Amelina 2010; Kubota
2013b). Thus, English is not always the common language in global
contact zones. Although the global phenomenon of multilingual-
ism has increasingly attracted scholarly interest (see Martin-Jones,
Blackledge & Creese 2012), research that supports pluralist paradigms
of global English, perhaps inevitably, pays attention only to communi-
cation that involves English. In our intellectual field, topics like plural
Englishes and local practices involving English index legitimate diver-
sity with greater symbolic power, whereas multilingualism involving
other languages is rendered obscure, diversity less worth studying. Here,
English as an object of scholarly exploration gets more symbolic power
than other languages. Not all languages are equal in the intellectual
field of applied linguistics.

Where should we go from here?

In juxtaposing pluralist paradigms of the global spread of English and

ideologies of liberal and neoliberal multiculturalism, I have pointed out
problems behind the celebration of multiplicities with little attention
paid to unequal relations of power. Power relations exist among vari-
ous Englishes (both intra- and international varieties), among various
users of Englishes from diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic back-
grounds, and between English and other languages as produced by the
prominence of English as a topic of academic investigation. In short,
what is lacking is critical attention to the inequalities that exist amongst
Englishes, English users, and languages including English.
This reflection encourages us to focus more on social and linguistic
inequalities in relation to plural perspectives of languages. For instance,
one might conceptualize a practice of trying to pass as a native speaker
or resourceful speaker (Pennycook 2012) as an appropriation of the lan-
guage of the Other and a reflection of an individual speaker’s agency.
Yet who is passable in the eyes of others depends likely on his or her
36 Ryuko Kubota

physical appearance. The whiter you are, the more likely you are to pass
as a native speaker of English. That is why even some native English-
speaking Asian people often receive comments like ‘Where did you
learn your English?’ and ‘Your English is very good’ (Fujimoto 2006,
p. 45). The pluralist paradigms do provide renewed understanding of
Englishes but they have not yet sufficiently addressed everyday strug-
gles experienced by non-native or non-standard speakers of English or
English speakers of color.
I have also argued that a significant amount of the research from plu-
ralist perspectives of English in the world is in a complicit relationship
with the neoliberal academic pressure to produce scholarly outcomes.
The neoliberal ideology also emphasizes the usefulness of English as a
language of opportunity, promoting teaching and learning. However,
the imagined nature of the need/promise of English has been called into
question (Kubota 2011a; Terasawa 2011). Scholars who support pluralist
paradigms should explore how they can challenge this neoliberal ideol-
ogy and reconceptualize the purpose of learning English.
The neoliberal pragmatic promotion of English as a global language
is obviously in conflict with the linguistic ecology in local communi-
ties where English does not function as a lingua franca. Furthermore,
even if English is used as an international communicator in some
instances, what is the nature of such communication? Do all people
from diverse racial, ethnic, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds
in the world interact in English as a lingua franca in the same way they
do with more immediate members in their local languages? Wouldn’t
such a utopian image be illusionary, given not only unequal access
to English language learning due to socioeconomic factors but also
inter-group conflicts? If, for example, only 15 percent, 20 percent, and
26 percent of Japanese people have positive images toward China,
the Middle East, and Africa, respectively, versus 83 percent toward the
United States (Cabinet Office, Government of Japan 2014), can the
same kind of lingua franca interaction among all interlocutors from
diverse nations be expected? Or, more optimistically, can English (or
any language for that matter) serve as an emancipatory discourse
to disrupt racist and nationalist stereotypes in inter-ethnic conflicts
(Schlam-Salman & Bekerman 2011)? Rajagopalan (2010a) points out
that the existence of common language does not guarantee intelli-
gibility; rather a willingness to understand each other postulates the
existence of a lingua franca. Along the same line, I argue that what
makes intelligibility possible is not necessarily a lingua franca but a
willingness to communicate. Many local communities involve at least
 Inequalities of Englishes, English Speakers, and Languages 37

some elements of today’s super-diversity (Vertovec 2007)—multifac-

eted demographic and spatial diversities brought by the transnational
mobility of people. This requires us to become aware that English does
not always enable people from different linguistic backgrounds to com-
municate with each other and that border-crossing communication,
including willingness to communicate, communicative strategies, and
critical dispositions, enables mutual understanding across difference
(Kubota 2011b, 2012, 2013b).
This indicates that our intellectual field needs to reflect and reevalu-
ate critical applied linguistics (Pennycook 2001). Critical applied lin-
guistics, together with pluralist approaches to English, despite some
conceptual differences, has transformed our understanding of language,
linguistic variety, and language use and is gaining a legitimate status in
applied linguistics. Conversely, perhaps not unrelated to the poststruc-
turalist notion of power as circulating and omnipresent and thus harder
to identify and oppose (McNamara 2012), social injustices such as preju-
dice, discrimination, and inequalities as well as issues of privilege have
not been examined or critiqued enough. Scholars supporting pluralist
paradigms of English and other languages are encouraged to reflect on
the perspectives and praxis of critical multiculturalism and re-envision
critical applied linguistics.
Finally, pluralist paradigms with a more critical edge should be
understood as a larger intellectual discourse involving other languages.
English as an international language is just part of this broader dis-
course. Such a conceptualization would allow greater emphasis on
learning not only English but other languages; education for respectful
communication across differences, rather than superficial manipulation
of language, and critical understanding of the political and ideological
underpinnings behind communication in additional languages.

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2
Unequal Englishes, the Native
Speaker, and Decolonization
in TESOL
Rani Rubdy

Introduction

To begin, we might ask, can there be real equality between languages, or

their varieties, in a world in which language (and culture) is most unde-
niably human capital? Or is it just a fine but far-fetched utopian fan-
tasy? Referring to the lingering allure of the concept of utopia that has
driven a great many intellectual ventures in the past, Seargeant (2008)
notes how the rhetoric of some of its pioneers for a ‘perfect language’
is still echoed occasionally by advocates of EIL (English as an interna-
tional language). As, for example, Modiano (1999a) who, in envisaging
a blueprint for a workable international English, comments: ‘Language,
instead of creating barriers, or upholding systems of membership and
exclusion, should promote cooperation and understanding between
peoples from different walks of life’ (p. 27). Seargeant goes on to point
out that although as a humanist manifesto this may be admirably
democratic, ‘it rather overlooks the way in which language works as an
index of difference, and operates by means of a dynamic which orders
experience through the creation of hierarchies’ (p. 226, citing Bourdieu
1991). In other words, there is a no such thing as a neutral playing field
where all languages enjoy equal status. Power is real.
This is particularly true of English and the power it wields today,
derived from its link with British colonialism and imperialism, and
strengthened more recently by its close interlocking with the corporati-
zation of the world as embodied by the processes of globalization. The
latter encompasses also English’s dramatic monopolization of educa-
tion, technology, culture, mass media, consumer values and lifestyles in
many parts of the contemporary world. It is precisely this nexus between
globalization, the empire (in Hardt and Negri’s 2000 sense of hegemonic

42
 Unequal Englishes, Native Speaker, Decolonization in TESOL 43

national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule

that operates across the globe), and TESOL that Kumaravadivelu (2006)
refers to as a ‘dangerous liaison’, when he writes, ‘the mutually advanta-
geous liaison between the project of globalization, the power of empire,
and the politics of English is complex but clear’ (Kumaravadivelu 2006,
p. 13). Any discussion of English as a global language and its socio-
educational implications, therefore, cannot ignore the fact that far from
being a solution to the dismantling of the ‘unequal power’ relations in
the world, English is in fact often part of the problem.
Hence, in attempting to understand the complex issues underlying
the phenomenon of unequal Englishes, it is not enough simply to con-
sider the language as an autonomous system, but also its regulation and
practice as part of a larger social system, and the historical, political and
ideological processes that form a crucial part of its context. Similarly,
as Seargeant (2008) states, ‘a simple a priori conception of democratic
language regulation’ (p. 230) is unlikely to produce the intended results
unless it is sensitive to the processes by which language and ideology
are linked. In studying English in its global context, therefore, it is the
relationship between politics and linguistics that needs to be the true
object of study (p. 230).
This chapter sets out to argue that the supremacy of standard English
and the dominant discourse of native speaker authority, which places
non-native speakers in a position of deficit competence, are at the root
of unequal Englishes, and have much to do with the historical, eco-
nomic, political, and ideological processes associated with colonization
and globalization. Holliday equates this deficit discourse with an ideol-
ogy of racism, when he notes, ‘in the complex centre-periphery conflict,
which reinforces the native versus non-native speaker dichotomy, there
is a permanently uneven relationship within the international world of
English language teaching which derives from the differences of race
and power connected with the history of imperialism’ (Holliday 2008,
p. 124). Given that English has been the language of a small but power-
ful elite since British imperialism and colonization, with class, gender,
ethnicity, and access to education operating as gatekeeping devices, the
challenge for many Outer Circle communities is to democratize the
acquisition and use of English. Yet, as I shall argue in this chapter, the ide-
ologies and discourses surrounding English as part of the colonial legacy
act with powerful continuity to reinforce such unequal power relations
and ensure the continued reliance on Inner Circle canons and norms.
It is therefore essential ‘to constantly negotiate, modify and resist
power to achieve the interests of dominated communities’ (Canagarajah
44 Rani Rubdy

2006, p. 2002). While we cannot delude ourselves that resistance and

appropriation will automatically end the domination of Inner Circle
norms or succeed in dismantling them for good, the chapter suggests
that strategies for destabilizing dominance will need to work within
conditions of domination and social structure, and manifest themselves
at all levels of language regulation and practice. It is suggested that in
opening up spaces for the democratization of English and allowing
greater equity for Englishes other than the metropolitan standards,
decolonizing the mind of both the colonizer and the colonized is cru-
cial. While this is a task of multidimensional proportions involving
multiple agents, some possible strategies will be considered.

Questions of legitimacy, exclusion, and pluricentricity

Discussions of inequality in the literature relating to the global rise of

English as a language of power and the systems of stratification caused
by differential access to it revolve around two basic concerns: (i) its
relationship with other languages, in particular the several minority
or indigenous languages affected by its hegemonic dominance, and its
impact on the language ecology of the world, and (ii) language-internal
(intra-linguistic) forms of variation that exist within the orbit of its
own complex of linguistic systems, which are generally perceived to be
imperfect, inferior, and corrupt versions of the standard form and for
this reason have long remained the basis of discrimination and social
inequity.
A great deal of the debate on the role of English in creating inequal-
ity has revolved around the hegemonic spread of English worldwide as
a ‘killer language’ and the devaluing, marginalizing, and endangering
of minority languages in its wake. Phillipson’s (1992, 2009) work is the
most prominent example of scholarship in sociolinguistics that investi-
gates the effects of language policies and educational practices involv-
ing English as an imperial and hegemonic force in terms of the damage
caused to other languages and cultures. Similarly, Pennycook (1994)
has written extensively on the myth of English as an international
language, arguing for example that the myths of the global spread of
English as natural (having evolved into the global language without
overt political action), neutral (as disconnected to social, economic,
and political concerns), and beneficial (as being inherently beneficial to
all that learn and use it) are untenable. Much in line with perspectives
shared by postcolonial scholars, this body of research aims to show
how ‘imbalances in power and imperialist attitudes of superiority were
 Unequal Englishes, Native Speaker, Decolonization in TESOL 45

discursively constructed and then inscribed onto cultures and languages

producing various forms of symbolic violence’ (Higgins 2009, p. 9, cit-
ing Bourdieu 1991).
Turning our attention to language-internal varietal differences, the
main focus of this chapter, a key factor at work is what Milroy (2001)
terms the ideology of correctness, where the notion of a standard
variety leads speakers to treat any variety acquired outside of institu-
tional contexts as ‘incorrect’, ‘wrong’, or ‘broken’, despite the claim
by sociolinguists that all languages and all dialects have equal merit,
and that the reason some dialects are still considered substandard is
because the relative worth of dialects is socially determined (i.e., lin-
guistic and social prestige and stigma are intertwined). Mesthrie (2006)
points out that one reason why the history of English has often been
(misleadingly) cast as the unilinear progress of the standard variety is
the simplifying and idealizing process that historiography of necessity
involves. Hence, ranked uppermost among these varieties in terms of
prestige and privilege are the two metropolitan Englishes based largely
in London and US cities like New York and Washington. Additionally,
varieties spoken in the Inner Circle countries are often considered to be
‘special’ because they relate to the ENL (English as a Native Language)
varieties. This has necessarily meant that all other dialects and varieties
are either much less known or not recognized as legitimate varieties
of English. Using the expressions the ‘legitimate and illegitimate off-
spring of English’ to refer to those varieties spoken by descendants of
Europeans speakers as opposed to varieties spoken by those who are
not, Mufwene (1997) contends that such terminology involves biased
processes of hierarchization and are fundamentally flawed and ethno-
centric. While the most extreme group of ‘illegitimate offspring’ is that
of the English-based pidgins and creoles, often considered not to be
entitled to the name of ‘language’ at all, also disenfranchised are the
indigenous New Englishes of the Outer Circle. Noting the political and
ideological stances underlying these attitudes, Mufwene rightly com-
ments that this ‘has to do more with who have appropriated and speak
them than with how they have developed and how different they are
structurally from each other, hence with how mutually intelligible they
are’ (Mufwene 1997, p. 182).
In other words, the sociolinguistic categorizations that have emerged
have less to do with language or the variety of the language per se than
the (often entirely non-linguistic) characteristics associated with the
people who speak it. Issues of race, class, ethnicity, gender, education,
and so on which are imbricated in them often constitute the real though
46 Rani Rubdy

hidden criteria for the inclusion of certain groups and the exclusion of
others. Thus, referring to such elite activity that accompanied the rise
of a new middle class with the growth of capitalism in England and its
transition to a modern society, Leith (1997) tells us how from the very
beginning the symbolic meaning of the standard variety as a badge of
a specifically middle-class social identity was established through pro-
cesses of standardization and codification in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries. When the English language gradually went through
a process of standardization, the codification of the standard was not
based on an informed and systematic analysis of the language, but on
the arbitrary judgment of a few language gatekeepers—some of them
men of genius, like Samuel Johnson; others, self-appointed guardians of
the language. These people were not, however, without their allegiances
to class and social background so that, as Leith (1997) comments:

One thing we can be clear about is that the process of standardisation

cannot be seen as merely a matter of communal choice, an innocent
attempt on the part of society as a whole to choose a variety that
can be used for official purposes and, in addition, as a lingua franca
among speakers of divergent dialects. It involves from the first the
cultivation, by an elite, of a variety that can be regarded as exclusive …
(p. 33, italics added)

Thus, Standard English was a very particular construction of political

activity. Milroy and Milroy (1999, p. 18) have suggested that ‘standard
languages are fixed and uniform state idealizations’ and that ‘no one
actually speaks standard language’ (p. 27). They note how in addition
to this idealization, there is a standard language culture that inculcates
and maintains a set of beliefs about Standard English. They argue that
‘language experts’ have failed to appreciate either their role in support-
ing standard language ideologies or that ‘what is involved is only super-
ficially a debate about language and is more fundamentally a debate
about ideologies’ (Milroy & Milroy 1999, p. 23).
In a similar vein, Eggington (2000) notes the emergence of a ‘com-
mon set of metaphors’ for the English language in historically English-
dominant societies: ‘As English speakers, we share a set of cumulative
metaphors dealing with English that have grown out of the sociopoliti-
cal history of the language’ (p. 31). He cites as an example the connec-
tion between ‘correct’ language use and moral fiber that took hold in
many people’s minds in England at the beginning of the seventeenth
century, and has been part of the set of English language metaphors
 Unequal Englishes, Native Speaker, Decolonization in TESOL 47

since then, with many of them having an anti-metaphor corollary:

‘Thus if we accept the “correct English is morality” metaphor, then we
must also accept the “incorrect English is immorality/lazy” metaphor’
(p. 31). He explains how acceptance of this metaphor led to social
action and social policy, as in the production of dictionaries and gram-
mars, and the sending of children of the upper class and the aspiring
middle classes to ‘grammar schools’ to help them become educated,
moral citizens of the nation. Such language metaphors and ideolo-
gies, epitomizing the spirit of prescriptivism that manifested itself in
the doctrine of linguistic correctness that surfaced at the time, became
so pervasive as to influence many sociocultural constructs, including
language policy procedures and outcomes. Eggington maintains, they
‘work’ because they are already accepted by most people in the native
English-speaking world, thus facilitating their seeping into general lan-
guage and language-in-education policies (p. 33).
It comes as no surprise then that these metaphors and ideologies
should have become part of the cultural apparatus embedded in the
conceptualization of English wherever the language spread, and particu-
larly in the British colonies. Hence, Phillipson’s cautionary note:

What is at stake when English spreads is not merely the substitution

or displacement of one language by another but the imposition of
new ‘mental structures’ through English. This is in fact an intrinsic
part of ‘modernization’ and ‘nation building’, a logical consequence
of ELT (English language teaching). Yet the implications of this have
scarcely penetrated into ELT research or teaching methodology.
(Phillipson 1992, p. 166)

Deconstructing standard English ideology, rethinking

normative paradigms

Rethinking Standard English would necessitate a critically oriented

three-pronged approach—deconstructing long-standing ‘myths’ about
Standard English, problematizing monolingual, normative approaches
to English language teaching, and relocating center-based perspectives
on English language education through a transformative restructur-
ing of the TESOL professional activity (Holliday 2008; Kachru 1985;
Kumaravadivelu 2003, 2006; Modiano 1999a; Pennycook 2002, 2003,
2007; Saraceni 2009).
Like Phillipson’s (1992, 2009) noteworthy attempt to deconstruct
and debunk the hegemonic dominance of English as an international
48 Rani Rubdy

language, much of Pennycook’s (1998, 2001, 2007) work shows us how

the practice of colonialism has permeated the cultures and discourses of
both the colonial and colonized nations, and that the traces of colonial-
ism run so deep that its effects are still evident today. Unlike Phillipson
(1992), however, Pennycook (1998) suggests that the matter of inequal-
ity between languages is better tackled not so much by language policies
to support other languages over English but rather by adopting a poli-
tics of opposition as a means by which to dislodge the discourses and
ideologies of colonialism that construct English in particular ways. This
in turn could lead us towards quite a different way of thinking about
how English language teaching may be approached.
For starters, deconstructing Standard English involves challenging
many ‘commonsense’ assumptions about its superiority (and that of the
idealized native speaker represented most often by a UK or US national),
rationalized on the basis of assumptions of authority, authenticity, and
autonomy. The history of Standard English effectively reveals the pro-
cess of the elevation of one dialect among many, first in Britain and
then in the United States. One way to question and unsettle the funda-
mental value systems associated with the notion of standardization is
by looking at how recent the history of Standard English is and how the
whole process of standardization was motivated by social, economic,
and political considerations (Curzan 2002; Leith 1997). This is a matter
of problematizing the notion of authority which has long been linked
with native speakers being ‘the custodians of the language’, who are ‘to
the language born’ and who tend to look upon other kinds of English
as ‘not the genuine article’—i.e., ‘the vintage language’ (Widdowson
1994, p. 378). Similarly the standard language ideology is rationalized
by the claim that it is the only authentic language, based on criteria that
include historicity, coherence, and value, while de-authenticating other
varieties as supposedly lacking a dignified history, as being opportunis-
tic or chaotic or even worthless (Milroy & Milroy 1999). The notion of
authenticity holds the view that Standard English is the ‘best’, the most
‘correct’ and ‘authentic’ version of the language.
With reference to questions of authority conferred by native speaker-
hood, Kandiah (1998, p. 110) very rightly argues that most approaches
to New Englishes miss the crucial point that these Englishes ‘fundamen-
tally involve a radical act of semiotic reconstruction and reconstitution
which of itself confers native userhood on the subjects involved in the
act’. The crucial point then is, it is not so much whether one is born in a
particular community but rather what one does with the language. And
Pennycook (2006, p. 110) reminds us that ‘[L]anguage use is centrally
 Unequal Englishes, Native Speaker, Decolonization in TESOL 49

an agentive act, an act of reconstruction rather than reproduction’, such

that rather than the repetition of prior grammatical structure, what is
centrally involved is a semiotic restructuring in the performance of
particular acts of identity (see also Pennycook 2003). Furthermore, as
teachers, academic administrators, and materials developers, speakers
of New Englishes are taking a more active role in the teaching and
spread of the language, not only in respect to the development of
educational models for the teaching of local varieties, but also in their
understanding of how the language is used for cross-cultural commu-
nication (Modiano 1999a, p. 23), thus exhibiting linguistic agency and
autonomy on their own terms.
Recent scholarship has problematized previous normative approaches
and instead proposed a heterogenous and critical conceptualization
of English that focuses on plurality and a re-negotiation of ideologies
to constitute ‘anti-normative paradigms’ (Kubota 2012, p. 55). These
scholars argue that the dichotomous terms ‘native’ and ‘non-native
speaker’, which suggest competence or authority over the language as
an accident of birth, should be dropped altogether. They offer alterna-
tive notions such as ‘the proficient user of English’ (Davies 1991), ‘the
expert user of English’ (Rampton 1990), the ‘multicompetent bilingual’
(Cook 1999), the ‘successful bilingual’ (Prodromou 2006), and so on
to replace them as a yardstick for determining whose language compe-
tence to adopt as a model for use.
Alongside these developments, plurilithic models have been envis-
aged as replacing the monolithic, monochrome model of Standard
English. These include Crystal’s (1997) notion of bidialectal speakers of
World English who will use one variety for international communica-
tion and the other at the local or national level in their own countries.
Yet another proposal is Modiano’s (1999a) concept of the EIL speaker,
regardless of whether they are native or non-native, who shares a core
of features common to all varieties of English and, in addition, whose
speech is free of strong regional accents that may impede international
intelligibility. Even more recent is Canagarajah’s (2013) notion of
plurilingual or translingual competence, which prioritizes pragmatic
strategies of communication and negotiation, leaving the grammar to
take care of itself, in recognition that it is impossible to capture the
variability of English forms used in different contexts around the world
within a single term.
While each of these proposals offers some sort of resolution in han-
dling the variability and diversity of English resulting from its global
spread, they do not quite confront the problem head on—which is that
50 Rani Rubdy

we cannot in truth do away with the notion of standards (as different

from Standard English). As Holliday (2008) reminds us, we need to have
standards for teaching and testing wherever English is taught no matter
in which part of the world.
There is also a need for bringing about an attitudinal change in what
has historically been a tendency to valorize the native Self and marginal-
ize the non-native Other—a tactic used by the colonizers to maintain the
authority of the center over the periphery and the dominance of inter-
ested Western knowledge over local knowledge. An argument frequently
advanced in this context is that the nativization of the colonial language
that has resulted in the development of New Englishes is evidence of the
empire ‘writing back’. Kumaravadivelu (2003) contends, however, that
nativization is not the same as decolonization. In his view:

In the context of world Englishes nativization may be seen as an

attribute of a language whereas decolonization is an attitude of the
mind. Nativization is a relatively simple process of indigenizing
the phonological, syntactic and pragmatic aspects of the linguistic sys-
tem of the English language—a target that has been largely achieved.
Decolonization is a fairly complex process of taking control of the
principles and practices of planning, learning, and teaching English—a
task that has not been fully accomplished. (p. 540)

For Kumaravadivelu, then, nativization marks only the beginning, not

the end of the process of decolonization. He believes that to erase the
lingering traces of English imperialism and to claim ownership of
the language learning and teaching enterprise, it is imperative to move
from nativization to decolonization.
A related point is that while the process of marginalization has not
gone unchallenged, it is also true that the practice of self-marginalization
on the part of the periphery aids the center in perpetuating its strat-
egy of subtle power. Canagarajah (1999), for instance, comments that
non-native speakers of English are often complicit in their own margin-
alization. Self-marginalization manifests itself in many forms such as job
announcements stating special preferences for native speakers in teach-
ing and consultancy or looking up to native speakers for inspiration in
language teaching and teacher education. According to Kumaravadivelu
(2006, p. 22), through such practices ‘the periphery surrenders to the
voice and vision of the center. That is, members of the dominated group
knowingly or unknowingly legitimize the characteristics of inferiority
attributed to them by the dominating group’.
 Unequal Englishes, Native Speaker, Decolonization in TESOL 51

This argument resonates with Fanon’s (1961) call for self-determi-

nation on the part of the colonized in freeing themselves from the
shackles of colonial oppression. Fanon knew from his first-hand expe-
riences how devastating, destructive, and crippling an effect racism,
colonialism and assimilation can have on the psyche of the colonized.
He argued that the major weapon of the colonizers was the imposition
of their image of the colonized on the subjugated people. The latter, in
order to be free, must therefore first purge themselves of these depre-
ciating self-images. The struggle for freedom and equality has to pass
through a revision of these images, requiring the development of a new
socio-ideological consciousness, on the part of both the colonized and
the colonizers.
Kumaravadivelu (2006, p. 23) notes that this is not an easy task. Such
a transformative restructuring when applied to TESOL poses a chal-
lenge that involves multiple tasks by multiple players, an intractable
one being ‘the abdication of authority’ by center professionals and
‘the acceleration of agency’ by periphery communities, something that
‘demands a new mindset that is yet to crystalize’. This is also essentially
the spirit in which Holliday (2005, 2008) proposes that TESOL be liber-
ated from its native speaker fetishes by ‘undoing’ native-speakerism. In
his view, rather than taking the metropolitan native speaker as refer-
ence, teachers outside the English-speaking West need to find ways to
reposition themselves in the ideological discourse of World TESOL and
assert their identity, professional status and employability. He argues for
decentralized research that records the realities of home settings, and
for de-Centered curriculum content in which students are exposed to
the ways English relates to their own communities. He goes on to spell
out what form this could take:

This content might include interaction between English and local lan-
guages, the politics of English, translations and literature authored in
English by non-native speakers, the representation of native English
cultures as ‘one among many’ texts written by English-speaking
Western people from diverse ethnic backgrounds which discourage
simplistic images of speakerhood, the writings of critical linguists in
English and other languages, the de-Centring of textbooks with local
teachers’ own realities, moving away from Western universities and
publishers. (Holliday 2008, pp. 125–126)

Arguing that while we cannot do away with standards, especially in the

context of language education and teacher education, Holliday points
52 Rani Rubdy

out that a definition of standards on the basis of speakerhood would

immediately fall into the trap of native-speakerist discrimination (since
it essentializes the self-image and identity of users of English), intensi-
fied by associations with race and ethnicity. Therefore, any definition of
English standards must acknowledge an alternative paradigm based on
the belief that all users of English can claim ownership of the language.
In other words, ‘standards must therefore be convincingly de-Centered,
and must allow those who consider themselves periphery to take
Centre-stage’ (Holliday 2008, p. 119; see also Holliday 2005).
Thus, there is no denying the importance of standards, but in the
changed world of English, there needs to be a valid, realistic, achievable,
and appropriate way of defining them and open-minded reconsideration
of what is of communicative value and pedagogical relevance. This view,
while acknowledging the reality and necessity of upholding standards in
language teaching, seeks to define standards in more democratic, more
equitable terms. In linguistic democracy, the non-native majority of
English speakers are no longer categorized and labeled as ‘periphery’. Nor
are they thought to yield to the native ‘core’ minority. In this system all
speakers of English, native or otherwise, have the right to remain faithful
to their original culture. This proposal goes a step beyond just empha-
sizing a descriptive as opposed to a prescriptive model in view of the
great deal of multiplicity observed in language use. It goes even beyond
Modiano’s argument that the standard should be derived from the lan-
guage behavior of proficient speakers of the language, whoever they may
be. This mode of thinking acknowledges that we cannot do away with
standards, but suggests, very much in keeping with Parakrama’s notion
of de-hegemonizing English, that they can be made more inclusive:

The existence of standards, however objectionable, cannot be

denied, so the only viable option, politically at any rate, is to work
towards broadening the standard to include the greatest variety
possible, particularly the ‘uneducated’ arenas of usage which have
so far been considered inappropriate, mistaken, even pathological.
(Parakrama 1995, p. 9)

Saraceni similarly argues that academic debate misses the point that
egalitarianism cannot be imposed from above and that English should
be left in the hands of its users. He in fact maintains that, ‘As English
affirms itself as the global lingua franca for hundreds and millions of
people around the world, it evolves and finds forms of standardization
in ways which escape precise academic description. This process is not
 Unequal Englishes, Native Speaker, Decolonization in TESOL 53

top-down but bottom-up’ (Saraceni 2009, p. 183). He suggests that

English should no longer be presented and taught as a foreign language,
and hence as somebody else’s language, but as an additional resource
that one adds to one’s linguistic repertoire. In other words, if what we
are seeing is a relocation from Anglo-American cultures to global and
local ones, ‘the classroom should reflect more faithfully this cultural
relocation of English that is taking place in the real world’ (p. 184).

Towards decolonizing English

As Kumaravadivelu (2003, 2006) reminds us, only a fundamental

restructuring, not superficial appropriation, can help us begin to erase
the lingering traces of English imperialism and bring about the trans-
formative remaking of power relations envisioned—a project that could
involve multiple tasks by multiple players. What is needed is ‘not only
de-centering the authority Western interests have over the ELT indus-
try but also, more importantly restoring agency to professionals in the
periphery community’ (Kumaravadivelu 2006, p. 540). It requires both
a redistribution of power in communication and significant shifts in the
entire manner in which we approach the teaching of English.
One example is how we view the relationship between the teaching
of English and language planning and language education policy. The
political and economic consequences of the global spread of English
are that the formulation of medium-of-instruction policies supporting
English education unduly ‘privileges certain groups of people [includ-
ing native speakers and non-native elites who have the opportunity to
master it] and may harm others who have less opportunity to learn it’
(Warschauer 2000, p. 516). In the former colonial states, English was
made available as the medium of instruction to an exclusive group
of social elites who became part of the wealthy, powerful ruling class,
while the indigenous languages were used as medium of instruction for
educating the wider populace, a practice that has perpetuated tremen-
dous economic disparity and stratified local societies.
More recently, the spread of English has contributed to the creation
of a global capitalist empire in which certain parts of the world have
become economically dominated by other parts. Alongside the global
spread of English is the spread of scientific, technological, and cultural
knowledge, predominantly from the developed countries to developing
countries, creating, in turn, a huge instrumental demand for English.
From this perspective, medium-of-instruction policies in post-colonial
nations, through promoting the extensive use of English in education,
54 Rani Rubdy

have contributed to the creation and maintenance of a new global eco-

nomic and political imperialism. Thus, there is continuity in the way
medium-of-instruction policies have functioned from the colonial to
the post-colonial eras (Deng & Gopinathan 2006, p. 619).
Therefore, what we need is a deeper and more sophisticated analysis
of the functions and agendas underlying the selection of languages as
medium of instruction (Tollefson & Tsui 2004) in order to understand
the complex interconnections between medium-of-instruction policies
on the one hand and colonial discourses and ideologies on the other:

Researchers and policy-makers need to investigate carefully whose

agendas are being served by different policies through looking at what
the policies promote or deny—not only within the social, political,
and economic structures they support but also within the complex
ideological and discursive contexts in which they are formulated,
developed, and implemented. (Deng & Gopinathan 2006, p. 621)

It is important to demystify the way English language education

has contributed to reproducing processes of symbolic domination
(Bourdieu 1991), both historical and contemporary, and to provide local
leaders and educators with information that can help them to redirect
medium-of-instruction policies that create a much more equitable soci-
ety through corrective measures, whereby access to English linguistic
capital does not privilege certain sections of society, and devise pro-
grams of action in the marginalized speakers’ interest.
Another example is in the context of curriculum content and class-
room practice. Recognizing the complexities of the role of English in
the world, several scholars have proposed a paradigm shift in English
language teaching predicated on the following main points as summa-
rized by Saraceni (2009, pp. 176–177):

• non-native speakers of English outnumber native speakers;

• native speakers of English can no longer claim exclusive ownership
of the language;
• native varieties of English, British, and American English (or any
other ‘native’ variety) do not represent relevant models for learners
of English around the world, be they in the Outer or the Expanding
Circle;
• native speakers of English should no longer be regarded as the sole
repository of truth about the language nor the default choice as lan-
guage teachers;
 Unequal Englishes, Native Speaker, Decolonization in TESOL 55

• the distinction between native and non-native speakers should be

downplayed as irrelevant or unhelpful; and
• as English becomes abstracted from Anglo-Saxon culture, the cultural
component of ELT and learning should look to the other (local as
well as global) cultures as reference points.

In a similar vein, Modiano (1999a) argues: ‘Demoting the importance

of near-native proficiency goals in English language instruction is a
first step. Dismantling antiquated notions of prestige accents naturally
follows. Dropping an unhealthy insistence to keep English “pure” …
brings us closer to a more realistic understanding of how language
is being used, and the direction it is expected to take in the decades
ahead’ (p. 27).
Yet, despite considerable heated debate in the literature on which
models would be most suitable for Outer and Expanding Circle learners/
users this has not had any tangible effect on actual classroom reality,
with little or no uptake on the part of language educationists and policy
makers. Such research has resided mainly within academic discourses
and has yet to have a visible impact in the classroom. As Saraceni (2009,
p. 177) comments, this disconnect between academic endeavor and the
language classroom is unfortunate and paradoxical, considering that
much of the former revolves precisely around pedagogical concerns.
However, apart from the very practical reasons of the ease of availability
of teaching and reference materials in Standard English, and that it is
well codified, one reason for the hesitancy on the part of both educa-
tional authorities and teachers is the tendency of such debates to be car-
ried out at an abstract, theoretical level with few concrete suggestions
as to how these broad principles might translate into classroom practice
for them, given the specificity of pedagogical contexts and challenges
that teachers face.
In this context, Curzan (2002) writes of the challenge in teaching
students the politics of Standard English while teaching Standard
English itself. Noting how the appeal of an idealized vision of accepting
nonstandard varieties in the educational system collides with frustra-
tion about the feasibility of such idealism, she comments that teach-
ers are often left in a conundrum about how to negotiate Standard
English in the school system (see also Tupas 2006). Notwithstanding,
she contends, ‘as linguists who teach students about the structure and
meaning of the English language, we have a responsibility not only
to provide students with linguistic information about standard and
nonstandard varieties of the language but also to provide them the
56 Rani Rubdy

framework in which to think critically about the social, political, and

educational implications of language variation’ (Curzan 2002, p. 340).
She maintains that ‘it is possible to teach Standard English while at the
same time creating a meta-awareness of that educational process, so
that students are empowered to examine the system and its language
hierarchies critically, so that they can challenge that view if they should
choose to—with full control of the language variety of power’ (p. 342).

Concluding thoughts

In discussing the inequalities arising out of language hierarchization in

relation to English, and TESOL specifically, there is always a danger of
converting the complex, multiply dialectical nature of the issue into an
intransigent, dichotomous oppositionality—do we celebrate or apolo-
gize for the spread of English worldwide and its role as accompanist
to globalization? The real issue for former colonial countries is not of
opposing either globalization or English, but rather of bringing about a
more equitable distribution of globalization’s benefits. This can only be
achieved if English no longer serves as a mechanism for reproducing the
status quo, i.e., no longer ‘serves to keep the third world from sharing
its existing cultural capital and aggressively marketing its own highly
competitive intellectual products’ (Vaish 2005, pp. 202–203) but func-
tions, instead, as a tool of decolonization and helps it access the global
economy on equitable terms.

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3
Structures of Feeling in Unequal
Englishes
Joseph Sung-Yul Park

Inequalities involving English have been a subject of much critical

scrutiny. The multiple dimensions of this inequality—the greater value
attributed to ‘standard’ varieties of English over other varieties; the
dominance English exerts over other languages as a ‘global language’;
and the consequences of social inequality that derive from such une-
qual evaluations—have indeed been key topics for sociolinguistic and
applied linguistic research. In this chapter, I aim to draw attention to
how dimensions of subjectivity rooted in lived experiences may con-
tribute to such inequalities of English. I propose that addressing and
contesting inequalities of English requires politicization of seemingly
personal and mundane feelings regarding English in everyday life, as it
is such aspects of subjectivity through which more enduring effects of
unequal Englishes are reproduced and naturalized. Through an account
of how anxieties about English in Korea are rooted in multiple struc-
tures of inequalities, I argue that finding ways to articulate and reflect
upon such insecurities becomes an important way of making visible
the mechanisms of unequal Englishes and securing political space for
transforming the meaning of English.

Subjectivity and unequal Englishes

In previous research, as well as in popular wisdom, inequalities of

English are often seen as rooted in social structure—that is, in the rigid
and dominant relations of power that are largely beyond the control
of individuals. The hegemony of English as a global language, for
instance, is often treated as linked to forces of globalization, grounded
in imperialistic expansion of English-speaking states or transnational
capital; value attributed to fluency and competence in English is
59
60 Joseph Sung-Yul Park

commonly explained by the mechanism of the market through which

communicative skills are increasingly commodified; the authority of
Standard English is assumed to be reproduced through the institutions
of education, and supported through state policy and interests of social
class. These views obviously point to important social conditions that
constitute the material basis for inequalities of English. However, they
are also problematic because, from a perspective that aims to transform
the inequalities of English (the perspective that serves as a motivation
for this book), they make it difficult to account for how social transfor-
mation may be brought about. If inequalities of English are rooted in
such structural aspects that exist independently of our agency, how can
we introduce change? Attributing the inequalities of English to macro-
structures provides an easy explanation for their origins, but it can also
lead to cynicism and displacement of responsibilities, for it is implied
that there is nothing that we can do about it as individuals.
Avoiding such pitfalls requires shifting our attention to what is hap-
pening on the ground. Instead of understanding the inequalities of
English as a result of a top-down imposition—that is, as a direct out-
come of macro-level forces—we should try to emphasize how language
users in specific contexts interpret, respond to, and negotiate such
macro processes through their usage and understanding of English: in
other words, ‘how English is taken up, how people use English, why
people choose to use English’ (Pennycook 2001, p. 62). But this does
not necessarily mean focusing on observable practices that constitute
overt political action in direct response to such large-scale processes,
such as ‘resistance’ towards the authority of Standard English or
‘appropriation’ of global forms of English into localized forms. Equally
important are dimensions of subjectivity, or ‘the ensemble of modes
of perception, affect, thought, desire, fear, and so forth that animate
acting subjects’ (Ortner 2005, p. 31), which saturate our everyday prac-
tices and lived experiences and shape our very sense of being. Recent
studies argue that aspects of subjectivity such as affect, emotion, and
sentiment are not simply matters of an individual’s inner psychology,
but constitutive elements of subjects as agents (Ahmed 2004; Besnier
1990, 2011; Hochschild 1983; Lutz & Abu-Lughod 1990; McElhinny
2010; Ortner 2005; Wilce 2009, among others). Thus, analysis of
social inequalities that wishes to move beyond an imbalanced focus
on macro-structures must also be able to understand how subjectiv-
ity, sometimes considered mundane, ineffable, private, and trivial,
nonetheless produces important consequences for cultural and social
formations and distinctions.
 Structures of Feeling in Unequal Englishes 61

This is particularly so in the case of social evaluation of language

varieties. For instance, in his early work, Labov (1966) talked about the
discrepancy between a recognition of a ‘correct’ standard and one’s
own language use in terms of ‘linguistic insecurity’ and how this is
manifest through phenomena such as hypercorrection. Though Labov
was primarily interested in uncovering the mechanisms through which
language variation may mediate language change, this early insight from
sociolinguistics highlights the importance of subjective elements of anxi-
ety in sustaining the legitimacy of the standard over vernaculars. Also,
Bourdieu’s (1991) theory of the linguistic market recognized that the
value and legitimacy of varieties are not simply determined by institu-
tional forces that lie behind them, but through the mediation of the habi-
tus, which generates practice not so much through rational, intentional
calculation as through ‘a sense of knowing the place which one occupies
in the social space’ (1991, p. 82). In other words, we come to evaluate
language varieties and their speakers through an inculcated set of moral,
affective, and aesthetic dispositions that are often manifest as practical
senses such as anxiety, embarrassment, confidence, timidity, condescen-
sion, ease, frustration, and so forth, which in turn lead us to act and think
as subjects occupying particular social positions (see also Park &Wee
2012). Such frameworks clearly show that it is crucial to look at dimen-
sions of subjectivity as an important key through which inequalities of
English may be sustained, reproduced, and potentially transformed.
One useful concept that can aid us in this purpose is Raymond
Williams’ (1977) notion of ‘structures of feeling’. Williams problema-
tized the distinction between the ‘social’ and the ‘personal’, insisting
that the perception of social structure as fixed, enduring products
removed from everyday, subjective experience is a discursive con-
struction in itself. Thus, as a way of transcending this distinction
and capturing the lived experiences of subjects through which social
structure operates, he suggested the notion of structures of feeling—
‘characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically
affective elements of consciousness and relationships’, but understood
in terms of ‘a “structure”: as a set, with specific internal relations, at
once interlocking and in tension’ (1977, p. 132). In other words, for
Williams, such dimensions of subjectivity do not reside outside of
social structure; they are an integral and organic part of that structure,
representing its lived and evolving nature. For this reason, structures of
feeling are also historical in nature, both reflective and constitutive of
social change; in Williams’ terminology, structures of feeling are associ-
ated with ‘emergent’ social or cultural formations of a given generation
62 Joseph Sung-Yul Park

or period, existing as a process through which ‘dominant’ institutions

and hierarchies come to be established. Thus, identifying constella-
tions of affect, emotion, and sentiment that interact with language
ideologies and practices about English and analyzing them in terms of
a structure of feeling can provide us with a useful viewpoint for under-
standing how inequalities of English come into being, how they are
sustained and reproduced, and how they may be contested and trans-
formed. In the rest of this chapter, I attempt such an analysis, tracing (in
very rough strokes) the historical trajectory of anxieties about English
in Korean society and the consequences of inequality that they generate.

Unequal Englishes in Korea

South Korea is a useful place for illustrating the inequalities of English.

The current nationwide emphasis on English language learning that has
been gripping the country since the mid 1990s, known as the yeongeo
yeolpung (English frenzy), valorizes competence in English as a crucial
index of human capital development and ideal neoliberal subjecthood.
In this context, English has become an indispensable resource for sur-
vival in the increasingly bleak job market of post-financial crisis Korea
(Park 2010a; for a general account of the Korean English frenzy, see
Park 2009). As all Koreans are pressed to invest in securing this precious
linguistic capital, unequal access to opportunities for English language
learning makes English a salient point of social tension. The divide
between English ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ thus becomes a hotly debated
issue (Kim 2010). For instance, the media frequently report on the exor-
bitant investments that the upper class makes in their children’s English
language learning—such as highly expensive English-only kindergartens,
‘native speaker’ private tutors, and study abroad in English-speaking
countries (often called jogi yuhak, or early study abroad)—inviting
criticism that the English frenzy only serves as another way in which
distinction between classes is reproduced and exacerbated.
The Korean English frenzy also reproduces and reinforces language
ideologies that sustain the authority of Standard English over other
varieties of English, and in that process, inserts the tensions of class
within an even more complex network of inequalities. The ideal kind of
English pursued through the English frenzy is typically that of a ‘native
speaker’, imagined in terms of class, race, and national origin—that is,
the ideal speaker of English is presumed to be a white, educated speaker
of mainstream American English. At English language schools, there is
often an explicit preference for white speakers from a Western-English
 Structures of Feeling in Unequal Englishes 63

speaking country when selecting teachers (Cho 2012); the ideal destina-
tion for jogi yuhak remains the United States, due to the acquisition of
American English it is supposed to facilitate (Park & Bae 2009); and the
ideal learner of English is an elite learner whose successful acquisition
of English is evidenced through successful communication with and
recognition from elite professionals from the West, such as global busi-
nessmen or high-ranking diplomats (Park 2010b). Positing of the native
speaker—an essential Other—as the ideal goal of English language
learning has multiple consequences of inequality. It rationalizes the
endless and increasingly heavy investments in English, for the acquired
competence of Koreans can always be reframed as unsatisfactory given
their lack of legitimacy to decide what counts as ‘good’ English (Park
2010b, 2011a); it delegitimizes Koreans’ own English as ‘Konglish’, for-
ever stigmatized as broken, incorrect English, despite the perfectly func-
tional, localized uses of English found in Korean society (Park 2008);
and it reproduces unequal relations of race, class, and national origin,
as the linguistic authority attributed to speakers of valued varieties
such as mainstream American English may be iconically reapplied to
position those speakers as racially, intellectually, and morally superior
to speakers of other varieties.
However, the inequalities of English in Korea cannot be understood
properly without reference to an equally salient phenomenon—the
deep sense of insecurity about English. The unequal relations that
English reproduces through the English frenzy are seldom experienced
as pure socioeconomic constraints or abstract assessments of value;
they are virtually always mediated by subjective reactions that color
such material and ideological constraints with feelings of anxiety, frus-
tration, and uneasiness. Having to speak English is said to invoke the
feeling of junuk, a strong sense of inferiority and inadequacy that para-
lyzes a person confronting a superior or powerful figure (Park 2012).
In the case of English, that figure is the authority of English and the
native speaker, against which the Korean speaker of English can only
be positioned as inferior and illegitimate. It is a real, debilitating feeling
that is linked with bodily responses such as palpitations, sweating, or
sudden loss of words, invoking emotions of fear, shame, and frustra-
tion. The experience of junuk is frequently talked about through end-
less reports, jokes, accounts, and complaints that depict Koreans who
freeze with anxiety and struggle to find the English words to express
their thoughts in front of a Westerner. It is indeed this weight of anxi-
ety that drives the English frenzy; the insecurity and inferiority that
overwhelms Korean speakers of English leads them to invest even more
64 Joseph Sung-Yul Park

in mastering the language, with hope that someday they will be free
from that petrifying fear of English.
It is important to recognize that junuk is not simply a temporary
lack of confidence that language learners experience in the process of
becoming fluent second language speakers. Nor is it a purely psycholog-
ical reaction that is only experienced by the individual and restricted to
the enclosed space of the personal. While it is an actual, bodily feeling,
it is also social, not only in the sense that it carries social consequences,
but also in the sense that it is discursively circulated and recognizable as
a point of reference for metalinguistic talk about English (Park 2011b).
Even those with reasonable competence in English experience junuk,
and this is not because it has to do with some common cultural trait
or essential characteristic shared by Koreans. Rather, junuk serves as a
frame for experiencing English, a frame which is circulated, reproduced,
and reinforced through lived experience and recurrent practice. Koreans
are not overwhelmed with junuk when attempting to speak languages
other than English—it is the particular material conditions and social
relations surrounding Koreans’ experience and shared memory of
speaking English that give rise to this feeling, allowing the meaning of
English to be constructed socially while also being rooted in the subjec-
tive, bodily experiences of individual speakers.
This convergence of material, ideological, and subjective dimensions
suggests that the Korean English frenzy should not be understood solely
in terms of the macro-forces that condition the place of English in Korea.
While the deep relations of dependency between South Korea and the
United States, the complex network of class, privilege, and social mobil-
ity, and the neoliberal transformation of Korean society are all indispen-
sable elements of the story of English in Korea, the real process through
which all these forces lead to the reproduction of multiple structures of
inequality can be understood only when we consider the aspect of subjec-
tivity. Instead of dismissing the anxieties of English as mere psychologi-
cal reactions of insecure language learners, we need to understand the
multiple dimensions of Koreans’ lived experience with English in terms
of structures of feeling—that is, with a focus on how ‘affective elements of
consciousness and relationships’ take part in the constitution of inequali-
ties of English that are at once structured and evolving.
By approaching the complex and multiple inequalities of English in
Korea in terms of structures of feeling, we may gain a deeper under-
standing not only of how such inequalities are sustained, but also of
how we might challenge and transform the inequalities that define
the place of English in Korea. Williams’ historical perspective suggests
 Structures of Feeling in Unequal Englishes 65

that structures of feeling should not be understood in terms of fixed

institutions, defined experiences, or stable formations, but in terms of
a process, perpetually moving, though also constantly in tension; it is
this perspective that makes dimensions of subjectivity a key element in
our search for ways in which inequalities of English may be contested
and transformed. In the next section, I illustrate this point by tracing
the historical trajectory of the anxieties of English in Korea, with a focus
on three particular scenes in Korean history—the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century reformist conceptualizations of East and West,
the influence of the United States on post-colonial South Korea, and the
current neoliberal transformation of Korean society—and discuss how a
particular structure of feeling came to emerge through specific historical
circumstances and political relations.

Tracing anxieties of English in modern Korean history

Since its early days in Korea, English was not simply a foreign language;
it was the language of modernity. While English language teach-
ing in Korea officially began in 1883 with the establishment of the
Dongmunhak, a government institution to train officials for work in
diplomacy and trade, the vast majority of the population would not
have access to English for several more decades. Yet, during the late
nineteenth and twentieth century, as Koreans’ understanding of their
own position in the world was drastically transformed, English was
firmly inserted into a structure of feeling, becoming an index of particu-
lar social relations and positions of subjectivity, thus foreshadowing the
complex constellation of affect, emotions, and desire through which
Koreans experience English today.
The years of transition from the nineteenth to twentieth century
were a period of enormous change. The old Sino-centric social order
of the Joseon dynasty was deteriorating, and imperial powers of the
world including Russia, the United States, and Japan were descending
upon Korea, eventually leading to Japanese colonialism in 1910. For a
group of educated elites, commonly called the reformers (gaehwapa),
modernization was the way out of this crisis. Their key idea was mun-
myeong gaehwa (civilization and enlightenment: Schmid 2002)—that
the Korean people should move away from ignorance of the past and
strive to embrace new knowledge and transform themselves, so that
Korea could earn its place in the ranks of modern nations and gain
power and respect from other countries. The reformers established
and edited newspapers such as the Doklip Sinmun, Daehan Maeil Sinbo,
66 Joseph Sung-Yul Park

and Hwangseong Sinmun, and used these as platforms to actively pro-

mote their ideas to the Korean populace, urging them to embrace mod-
ern practices such as universal education and public hygiene, reject old
customs and superstitions, and unite for the goal of building a strong
nation. Fundamental to this discourse of munmyeong gaehwa as it was
propagated through the new technology of the media was the binary
contrast between East and West. It was the West that served as the
model that Koreans had to strive for—the West was the superior Other
whose practices and values represented universal ideals towards which
all nations had to progress. In contrast, the East was cast as backward—
ignorant, inhumane, unhygienic, barbarous, and lazy, unaware of the
enlightened ways of life that were the norms of Western countries.
This binary opposition had significant consequences for Korea’s
newly emerging subjectivity, because it was also framed in terms of
affect. An important rhetorical strategy of the newspapers was ‘to incul-
cate shame and anger into the readers’; for instance, readers were urged
to feel ashamed and angered ‘at Korea’s lowly place on the ladder of
civilization and the resulting humiliating treatment’ by the imperial
powers, and to be embarrassed about fellow Koreans who ‘without any
sense of shame, urinate and defecate in the streets’ (Schmid 2002,
p. 43). In other words, the East-West contrast also became a relationship
of affect; Koreans were not only supposed to recognize the lower value
that must be attributed to their own traditions, ideas, and practices,
but also expected to feel in a particular way about it—it defined and
colored Koreans’ newly defined identity in the global world in terms of
subjectivity, which in turn worked to solidify and rationalize any form
of inequality that transpired between Korea and the modern world.
Even though English, not yet being a language that was widely taught
or learned among the populace, did not figure as an index of civilized,
modern nationhood in the newspapers themselves, the language still
had great significance for the promulgators of the discourse of mun-
myeong gaehwa. As intellectual elites, the reformers behind the most
influential newspapers were among the very first Koreans to actively
learn English. The two editors of the very first modern newspaper
Doklip Sinmun, Seo Jaepil and Yun Chiho, for instance, were both edu-
cated in the United States and considered English an important part of
their linguistic identities. Seo used an anglicized name Philip Jaisohn
and obtained US citizenship in 1890, and was said to have insisted on
speaking English rather than Korean during the years after his return to
Korea in 1895; Yun kept a meticulous diary for all his life, over 50 years’
worth of which he recorded in English. It would not be unreasonable
 Structures of Feeling in Unequal Englishes 67

to presume that their strong identification with English was shaped by

a desire and longing for the civilized ways of the West and shameful
resentment of the backwardness of Korea. As Yi Seunglyeol noted, Yun
Chiho ‘yearned to learn and master English and displayed pro-Japanese
behavior because of his modern desire to lead modern Korea out of the
“backward” history of the East’ (Yi 2007, p. 268). It was such ‘modern
desire’, experienced in terms of emotion and affect and conditioned by
the relations of imperial power, that placed English within an emerging
structure of feeling in turn of the century Korea.
The complex subjectivities of English found a more concrete mani-
festation in Korea’s dependent relationship with the United States. The
image of the United States in Korea was two-sided—on the one hand,
it was a country of great benevolence, an ally, protector, and wondrous
country of wealth and abundance; on the other hand, it was a country
of great injustice, an arrogant bully and aggressor that looked down
upon those under its power. The benevolent image of the United States
had its roots in the late nineteenth century, when missionaries from
the United States played an important role in Korea’s first experiences
with modernity, establishing modern educational institutions, offering
Western medical treatment, and promoting individual freedom and
democracy. Later, the military presence of the United States since the
end of Japanese colonialism was viewed by many Koreans as an act of
liberation and protection against communist aggression. The material
wealth and popular culture of the United States also led Koreans to
desire the United States as an attractive, generous, and modern place,
giving rise to the American dream that enticed many immigrants to
the United States. But at the same time, Koreans also recognized the
inequalities and injustices that the United States represented; the impe-
rial agendas behind the United States military’s presence in Korea, the
series of military dictatorships that the United States bluntly endorsed,
violent crimes of the United States military personnel targeting Korean
citizens that went unpunished, unfair trade deals that the United States
forced upon South Korea, and so on, all shaped Koreans’ perception of
the United States, often leading to anti-American sentiment. Yet South
Korea remains heavily dependent on the United States in terms of
economy, security, politics, academic research, and culture, resulting in
a great sense of humiliation and resentment.
English, as the language of the United States, thus came to carry
a complex affective significance. English in Korea quickly became
the language that promised and indexed success, therefore desired as
a language of power and opportunity; but the inferiority invoked by
68 Joseph Sung-Yul Park

the unequal relationship between the United States and Korea also
meant that English became a language of anxiety and insecurity—it
was the language of the powerful and superior Other to which one
had to submit oneself, humbling oneself despite the inequities that
defined one’s relationship to the Other. Discourses of English that were
circulated through transnational links between the United States and
Korea also played a role in shaping this anxiety. Depictions of Asians as
incompetent speakers of English—speaking broken, incomprehensible,
‘pidginized’ English—in American popular culture such as films and TV
serials (Lo & Kim 2012) were propagated in Korea due to the popularity
of US media and also through AFN Korea (American Forces Network
Korea), the broadcast network of the US military stationed in Korea
(Kim 2008). Also, as theories and perspectives of US and UK applied
linguistics dominated the field of English language teaching in Korea,
the authority of the native speaker was taken for granted (‘native-
speakerism’ in the words of Holliday 2005), automatically placing
Koreans in the position of illegitimate speakers of English—particularly
so because the notion of the native speaker was also defined in terms of
race, due to the Korean imagination that views ‘Americans’ as ‘White’
(Kim 2008). The contrast between the authoritative American native
speaker and the illegitimate Korean English learner, then, was reinforced
through multiple material conditions and ideological formulations,
leading Koreans to internalize the inequalities that produced such
contrast and experience English in terms of junuk, forever positioned
as the inferior subject.
The recent transformations of Korean society brought about through
globalization further deepened this sense of anxiety. Unlike the organi-
zation of imperial powers of the past, the empire today has no center or
an outside (Hardt & Negri 2000), and control and exercise of power is
more immanent in the social relations and understandings of selves in
local contexts. While the figure of the white, foreign native speaker still
remains prominent in Korean discourses of English, recent transforma-
tion in Korean society and the concomitant English frenzy saw anxieties
of English becoming more and more intricately tied with what Michel
Foucault calls ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault 1997). By the mid-
1990s, when South Korea started to embark on an active globalization
drive, English had already been an important index of class privilege,
perceived and pursued as a crucial means for upward social mobility.
But as Korean corporations more actively sought ‘global workers’ who
could successfully deal with the challenges of globalization and the gov-
ernment put greater emphasis on boosting the English language com-
petence of its citizens, English language learning in itself started to lose
 Structures of Feeling in Unequal Englishes 69

some of its value of distinction. In a sense, English became ‘mundane’

and was ‘domesticated’ (Kang & Abelmann 2011)—it was no longer so
much about the United States, or interacting with the world abroad, as
it was about how to manage and develop oneself in the new, neoliberal
Korean society.
Periods of stagnant economic growth and financial crises have
cast a long, dark shadow of uncertainty across the future paths of
many Koreans. High rates of unemployment and irregular labor pres-
sure young Koreans to invest a great amount of time and money
into acquiring various ‘specs’—different types of qualifications such
as internship experience, licenses, awards, good test scores, etc.—to
increase their chance of survival in the job market. Moreover, the
flexibility and precariousness of the job market also means that such
specs need to be constantly upgraded and expanded. In other words,
the workers in the new economy need to be entrepreneurs of the self,
constantly developing and improving themselves as marketable prod-
ucts, branding their identity as a bundle of skills. Under the neoliberal
conception of the self this is not seen as inauthenticity, but as an
unlocking of the true, hidden potential of the self, therefore a moral
imperative for all responsible individuals (Urciuoli 2008). English is
one of the many specs the Korean worker is expected to accumulate,
but perhaps one that most iconically captures the demand for end-
less self-development that neoliberalism entails. The ideology of the
native speaker as the racial, foreign Other means that one can never
fully reach the goal of ideal competence; English language learning
can thus only be an endless, lifelong project, in which the constant
struggle to improve and develop oneself becomes an idealized way of
life in itself (Park 2010a).
In this sense, the anxiety of English in contemporary Korea is not just
about insecurities of the job market; it is also a moral anxiety, about the
struggle to become a responsible human subject who is wisely manag-
ing one’s human capital and potential as an individual. Of course, such
neoliberal conceptions of the self obscure inequalities of the linguistic
market. The English language skills one has acquired can always be
revalued and reinterpreted as lacking value, as the Korean workers
themselves do not have control over what counts as valued linguistic
capital (Park 2011a); in this context, investments in English in itself will
not guarantee success in the market without the support of other forms
of cultural and social capital, necessarily privileging certain people over
others. But anxieties of English that posit English language learning as a
moral imperative transform such inequalities of the market into matters
of individual responsibility—which only exacerbates the insecurities
70 Joseph Sung-Yul Park

that Koreans experience and embeds them deeper into complex net-
works of social inequalities.

Speaking of feelings: seeking a way forward

The discussion above has outlined how structures of feeling that char-
acterize the place of English in Korean society emerged and evolved
through various moments of modern Korean history. The point here
was not to argue for a deterministic influence of a particular historical
event on current conceptualizations of English, but to demonstrate
that material and ideological conditions that sustain unequal Englishes
cannot be understood separately from dimensions of affect, emotion,
and sentiment. English in Korea has always carried deep and complex
significances that are interpreted and experienced in terms of subjec-
tivity, building upon feelings and emotions that resonated from his-
torically prior moments and expanding them into new meanings that
shape Koreans’ own sense of self. At the same time, such subjective
dimensions constitute those very tensions and inequalities surrounding
English, naturalizing and rationalizing the oppositions of identity that
sustain unequal social relations. The intensity and embeddedness of
such dimensions of subjectivity in the Korean case press us to recognize
that the sense of anxiety, insecurity, frustration, embarrassment, desire,
and anger that Koreans experience in relation to English is not a matter
of the ‘personal’—it is a centrally constitutive element of the structural
problems of English in Korean society, not reducible to a matter of indi-
vidual psychology, but a social condition in itself, thus a key analytical
concern for a critical study of unequal Englishes, a point of intervention
for research and activism.
In terms of research, the notion of structures of feeling suggests that
we avoid treating dimensions of subjectivity as reflections of some
objectively measurable ‘competence’, and instead approach them as
both social condition and practice. Applied linguistic research has
usually treated anxieties of second language speakers of English as psy-
chological manifestations of incomplete mastery of the language, thus
reinforcing the ideology of native-speakerism that locks the non-native
speaker into a shell of incompetence. In sociolinguistic research, the
notion of language attitudes tends to approach dimensions of subjectiv-
ity only as a window for identifying underlying contrasts in function
and status of language varieties, thus considering them as distinct from
those very contrasts sociolinguistics purports to study. The more recent,
linguistic anthropological framework of language ideology represents a
 Structures of Feeling in Unequal Englishes 71

step forward, as dimensions of affect and emotion are considered to be

constitutive of identities and located within relations of power. But still,
we need to give more attention towards the sometimes unarticulated
and seemingly ineffable dimensions of subjectivity that characterize
the broadly shared experience of Koreans which connect their sense
of being with macro-level social phenomena, and focus on the role of
affect and emotion in mediating the integrated relationship between the
individual’s lived experiences and structural conditions of everyday life.
Such a perspective provides us with clues about how we might trans-
form the inequalities of English that persist in Korea and elsewhere.
An emphasis on subjectivity highlights the role of the agent, not in
terms of the material actions that the agent may take, but in terms of
the entire range of modalities through which agency is exercised and
experienced, including affect and emotion, which typically have been
conceived of as passive, unagentive psychological responses or states. If
dimensions of subjectivity constitute aspects through which individu-
als shape and construct social relations and social structure, an impor-
tant way through which speakers can bring about transformations in
social structure would be to reflexively engage with such dimensions
of subjectivity. Even though such dimensions are not matters of con-
scious choice or manipulation, reflexive engagement with supposedly
inarticulable and ineffable affect and emotion can bring about greater
awareness of speakers’ collective agency as mediated by discursive
action and solidarity.
In the case of Korean speakers of English, for instance, it is clear that
anxieties of English cannot be turned on and off at will, but making
such feelings a subject of metalinguistic awareness can open up a space
for addressing the issues of inequality that are sustained by the inse-
curities and anxieties experienced by speakers themselves. To be sure,
anxieties of English are already often talked about among Koreans, as
jokes, complaints, and anecdotes, and accounts of such insecurities
are common topics of metalingusitic talk (see also Park 2009). But
such commentary rarely takes place with critical awareness of how
those instances of metalinguistic talk serve as sites where anxieties of
English are reproduced. In other words, the political work of anxiety
and insecurity remains hidden in Korean metalinguistic discourse, and
this is not surprising given how affect and emotion are commonly
understood as passive responses restricted to the domain of individual
psychology rather than social practice in the domain of lived experi-
ences. Indeed, the persistence of inequalities of English despite con-
tinued critique by critical scholars in the fields of applied linguistics
72 Joseph Sung-Yul Park

may be due to this hidden role of subjectivity in the reproduction of

unequal social relations.
An important locus for transforming the inequalities of English, then,
might be to develop opportunities for reflecting upon the interconnec-
tions between the multiple manifestations of subjectivity surrounding
English and how such interconnections emerge across important histor-
ical and political junctures—so that the social significance of everyday
affect about English may be laid bare. An important outcome of such
collective reflection might be the development of a sense of solidarity
that can form the basis of political action. In considering together the
implications of lived experiences of English, speakers may come to
acknowledge that such aspects of affect and emotion are not just indi-
vidual matters but social practices in which they are jointly engaging.
This, in turn, could work to elevate matters of subjectivity into a ques-
tion of joint political action, allowing speakers to approach mundane,
everyday experience of English through the lens of power and participa-
tion, thereby planning the seeds of transforming the way we think, talk,
and feel about English. While the suggestions I provide here remain
conceptual and programmatic at this point, a natural conviction which
we should share is that transforming inequalities of English ultimately
must be grounded in political action, rather than in theory alone—
and such political action cannot afford to ignore the highly mundane
dimensions of subjectivity that form the very medium through which
speakers (including us as scholars) experience unequal Englishes.

References
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pp. 419–451.
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Pragmatics, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 265–282.
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Hydra: its impacts on non-English language cultures, Multilingual Matters, Bristol,
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a globalizing world, Routledge, New York.
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Maului Sikminjuui, Dangdae, Seoul, pp. 265–288.
4
Global English and Inequality:
The Contested Ground
of Linguistic Power
Peter Ives

As the contributions to this book testify, one of the major areas

of research and debate concerning the advent of global English or
increased usage of Englishes (unevenly) across the globe is how to ana-
lyze and understand the inequalities and power differentials involved in
language (Schmidt 2006, pp. 104–107). There are immense complexities
surrounding questions of power relations among both differing ways in
which English is spoken and used, various forms of English, and rela-
tions between English and other languages across a variety of language
domains and contexts. But before even considering the array of empiri-
cal situations in which such complexities manifest, it is worth focusing
on the conceptual basis for what we mean by ‘unequal’ and its obvious
correlate, ‘equal’. This is a contested and ambiguous terrain that often
lies below the surface of current debates and remains more implicit than
explicitly interrogated. Other concepts such as hegemony, oppression,
exploitation, and injustice are mobilized in conjunction with inequal-
ity. Notions of creativity, spontaneity and expression also stand in
for and enrich or confuse many of our ideas and experiences with
English and inequality. As a political theorist focused on language
issues, I will use this chapter to make more explicit one of the emerg-
ing and important fault-lines within analyses of global English(es)
and power relationships. This fault-line, I will argue, lies precisely at
the question of whether inequality should be understood as existing
between and among languages and language varieties themselves, or
whether the real issue of social justice is to be located exclusively in
relations among users of language. Should inequality be reserved for
application to individuals and groups of people?
In other words, should our primary concern be literally about une-
qual Englishes, or can we confine or refine this question to the unequal
74
 Global English and Inequality 75

dynamics among users of Englishes? It is this latter position that I argue

is an emerging ramification of current trends. My analysis of this ques-
tion will lead to an elucidation of my reservations concerning analyses
that hold to this latter position. For my explicit examples of such
arguments I will use the book-length articulations of this position pro-
vided by Lionel Wee’s Language Without Rights and Vanessa Pupavac’s
Language Rights: From Free Speech to Linguistic Governance. But I will also
argue that these positions are the logical ramification of the recent posi-
tions articulated by Alastair Pennycook and Suresh Canagarajah.
After a brief discussion of the concepts of equality and inequality in
the history of political theory, I will summarize variations in approaches
that see inequality as a concept that can be applied to languages and
varieties of a given language, like English. I then turn to perspectives
that implicitly or explicitly reject the notion that inequality is a concept
that can be applied beyond the people who use language. After discuss-
ing these two divisions, I briefly consider the work of Stephen May and
Will Kymlicka who do not fall neatly on either side of this fault-line. By
tracing out current debates in this rather schematic manner, I conclude
by highlighting the potential pitfalls of limiting questions of inequality
to users of languages and withholding the concept from varieties of any
given language, of which English is clearly an incredibly important one.

Equality as a contested concept

Disputes over the concept of ‘equality’ have been at the heart of

‘Western’ political theory at least since Aristotle and have divided vari-
ous approaches to politics and human sociability including the major
division between the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’. Of course, Aristotle
is known, particularly among language scholars, for his proposition
that the faculty of language distinguishes humans from other animals
(Aristotle 1968, p. 6). He also defined justice through the concept of
equality, arguing that for democracies, justice is treating equals equally.
However, he did not stop there. He added that there is also an element
of justice found in the oligarchical contention that it is just to treat
those who are not equal, unequally (Aristotle 1968, p. 129). We should
reject this elitism of Aristotle’s because it rests on the view that some
people are born with differing natures including that some people are
born with having the nature of slaves (Aristotle 1968, pp. 9–11, 145)
and thus should not and cannot be treated as equals.
However, being critical of some of Aristotle’s argument should not
prevent us from drawing on his other important insights so central
76 Peter Ives

to political theory.1 Crucially here, Aristotle provides a clear focus on

the question that concerns us. He asks ‘equals and unequals in what?
This is a question which raises difficulties, and which involves us in
philosophical speculation and politics’ (Aristotle 1968, p. 129, emphasis
added). Such difficulties are pertinent to questions of unequal Englishes
both in terms of questions of variations and forms of English and how
such Englishes are related to other languages, including the also con-
tested distinction between native and non-native speakers. As noted
above, is it the users of given languages or their varieties who are treated
unequally, or do we have to consider the philosophical complexities of
the languages themselves as the locus of a systematic denial of agency,
efficacy, and empowerment?
One way of describing the crucial break in the history of Western
political theory is the way ‘modern’ theorists like Thomas Hobbes and
John Locke in seventeenth-century England redefined ‘equality’ as
something we humans possess as individuals in the ‘state of nature’
prior to any political formation or social contract. Indeed, much politi-
cal theory is organized around varying distinctions between ‘equality
of opportunity’, ‘distributive justice’, ‘equal treatment before the law’,
‘equal protection by the law or state’, ‘equal outcome’, and the like.
The relative weight of individual freedom versus social equality is com-
monly used to explain the basic right-left political spectrum. Questions
of equality dominate contemporary political theory from John Rawl’s
resurrection of theories of liberal justice in the 1970s, through the
liberal-communitarian debates of the 1980s and 90s, and more recent
concerns with multiculturalism and the politics of (equal) recognition
and identity. In other words, one thing political theorists can contrib-
ute for critical language scholars is that we cannot take the concept
of ‘equality’ as if it is self-evident or ignore all the complexities that it
immediately raises.2 Rather than attempting to grapple with the myriad
of dimensions in which the concept of equality is contested by political
theorists, here I will focus solely on this narrower question of the rami-
fications of applying ‘inequality’ to individual speakers or to languages
themselves.

Equality among languages

The notion that all languages are equal in that there are no objective
grounds to declare one language as ‘better’, more ‘accurate’, ‘beautiful’,
‘precise’, ‘expressive’, etc. … than another is still a central technical point
at the heart of linguistics, including the subfields of sociolinguistics and
 Global English and Inequality 77

applied linguistics. Reiterating this sense of language equality continues

to be necessary to counter many ‘common sense’ or ‘popular’ under-
standings of language that cling to prescriptivist ideas that ‘proper’
grammar of a given language is more accurate, rational or successful
at conveying ideas than variations that are deemed dialects, slang or
improper grammar (Ghomeshi 2010). But especially with growing con-
cern about the extinction of many languages (Crystal 2002; Harrison
2007; Nettle & Romaine 2000, inter alia) and the rapid increase in the
use of English in the latter half of the twentieth century, ‘equality’
becomes a more important determinant to describe and analyze clear
differences between languages in terms of the number of speakers they
have (including levels of proficiency and native versus non-native dis-
tinctions), their vitality and future prospects, and the domains in which
they are used.
Languages are often taken technically as the objects of study and
comparisons among varieties and languages are expressed in terms like
those of equality and inequality. For example, in their overview of the
development of modern English, Mesthrie and Bhatt (2008) discuss
the first and second ‘declines’ of various standard Englishes, describ-
ing the different relationships, if not with the actual terms ‘equal’ and
‘unequal’, with relative power relationships among the forms of the
languages. Thus, they emphasize that the ‘second decline’ of Standard
English was not a ‘decline’ in the actual language, which ‘continues to
prosper’, but a decline relative to ‘its potential sovereignty over a large
territory, the USA’ (Mesthrie & Bhatt 2008, p. 15). And they proceed
to discuss the ‘rivalries’ and competition among different languages
and different forms of the same language (noting of course that the
boundaries here are fluid and not determinable in a technical or objec-
tive sense). In such technical approaches to linguistics, the questions of
inequality among languages and varieties of languages are not necessar-
ily explicitly connected to the relationships of power among the speak-
ers of these languages. But scholars such as Mesthrie and Bhatt do not
deny or rule out such connections.
Questions of the inequality among languages take on an explicitly
political dimension going well beyond mere description with the
prominence of more critical approaches to language policy and scholar-
ship. As James Tollefson (2006, pp. 43–44) summarizes, ‘work in critical
theory generally investigates the processes by which social inequality is
produced and sustained, and the struggle to reduce inequality to bring
about greater forms of social justice’. One of the most influential and
controversial representatives of this position is Robert Phillipson and his
78 Peter Ives

analysis of ‘linguistic imperialism’, which hinges precisely on the notion

of inequality among languages from a more overtly political perspective.
Phillipson defines (at least at a working level) linguistic imperialism as
that ‘the dominance of English is asserted and maintained by estab-
lishment and continuous reconstruction of structural and cultural
inequalities between English and other languages’ (Phillipson 1992,
p. 47). Of course, one does not have to accept Phillipson’s specific analysis
of linguistic imperialism to analyze structural and cultural inequalities
among languages (e.g. Bruthiaux 2008, p. 19; Ives 2006).
Marnie Holborow applauds Phillipson’s work for highlighting the
very political processes connecting British and US imperialism to
the spread of English, but is quite critical of his general approach. She
launches various criticisms of Phillipson culminating with the point
that ‘the term “linguistic imperialism” itself is misleading. It seems to
highlight the glaring reality of linguistic oppression, but in reality it
deflects attention from the source of the inequalities, as well as miss-
ing the contradictory character of language itself’ (Holborow 1999,
p. 78). This is not the place in which to further interrogate such debates
(see Ives 2006), rather I am highlighting that within such debates there
exists a larger agreement that supports treating inequality as a concept
that can apply both to relations among individual speakers but also
more structurally to relations among languages themselves, includ-
ing varieties within a language like English. Disagreements like that
between Holborow and Phillipson about the sources of inequalities
occur within an agreement that languages and varieties of languages
themselves can be subject to the scrutiny of the concepts of equality
and inequality.
Much contemporary sociolinguistic, applied linguistic and educa-
tional research on language teaching and policy locates the inequality
among languages in terms of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘linguistic
capital’. As Tan and Rubdy (2008, p. 2) summarize, many scholars ‘see
linguistic capital inherent in these languages [which are] being evalu-
ated as commodities that command an exchange value’.3
Whether overtly political, as Phillipson is, or more technical and
‘objective’, many of these approaches are criticized by Brutt-Griffler
(2002) for employing ‘political terminology’ like sovereignty, domi-
nance, hegemony, imposition, that takes the place of ‘concrete inves-
tigation of language spread’ (Brutt-Griffler 2002, pp. 10–11; for a
critique of this approach see Ives 2006, p. 123). It is unclear whether
Brutt-Griffler would include ‘equality’ as ‘political terminology’ barred
from use in ‘objective’ sociolinguistic analysis, but presumably so, if by
 Global English and Inequality 79

equality we mean anything more than a sterile mathematical compari-

son (e.g. if we take heed of the political implications of one language
having a smaller number of speakers, and especially a declining number
of speakers in relation to another).
However, it is not the reason Brutt-Griffler gives, of inappropriately
employing ‘subjective’ political concepts for analysis of linguistic
phenomena that should be addressed ‘objectively’, that accounts for
a more recent trend in the literature that undermines the applica-
tion of inequality to language varieties. Rather, there is a growing
and influential literature that aims at questioning key notions within
dominant language ideologies including the native/non-native speaker
distinction, the presumption of monolingualism, the homogeneity and
boundedness of language communities, and, most importantly here,
the boundedness of a given language as a stable structure delineable
from other languages and language forms or varieties. I will argue that
the ramifications of this trend are that inequality must be confined to
discussions about the relationships among users of language rather
than languages and varieties themselves. We can disambiguate criti-
cisms of the native/non-native speaker, monolingualism and even the
static nature of language as a stable system used by a delineable speech
community from whether or not varieties of languages exist in such a
manner that they and not just their users can be deemed as unequal.
Alastair Pennycook and Suresh Canagarajah can be taken as key and
influential figures within this perspective, although we should not take
their positions to be identical nor underestimate differences with others
involved in similar critiques of ‘modernist’ approaches to language.
Moreover, to my knowledge, neither Pennycook nor Canagarajah
explicitly addresses this question of whether inequality can be applied
to languages or varieties per se. However, they both mount a vocifer-
ous campaign to change the very way we think about languages. As
Pennycook (2010, p. 2) writes, ‘The notion of language as a system is
challenged [by this book] in favour of a view of language as doing’. For
Pennycook (p. 2), ‘… all language practices are local’, and much of his
analysis explores the complexity of understanding how location and
spatial relations are created, rather than treating them simply as givens.
Language, he argues, should not be seen as a pre-existing entity or struc-
ture that is used in a given place. This has many implications, but the one
I am focused on here is the extent to which a given language or variety of
language is not understood as a structured entity (even a changing and
fluid structured entity) for which inequality can be determined vis-à-vis
another variety or language. This would leave equality as a characteristic
80 Peter Ives

that then could only be applied among different individual or group

users and not the language varieties themselves.
Similarly, while not directly addressing the question of what can
be deemed an object of equality or inequality, Canagarajah (2013,
p. 7) explicitly argues that ‘meaning doesn’t arise from a common
grammatical system or norm, but through negotiation practices in
local situations’. This opens the important question of what we mean
by ‘local situations’ and whether such negotiations are theorized
in terms of entities or structures such as languages or language varieties,
or are always rooted in the individuals involved. He calls for shifting
the focus on language to ‘translingual practice’ that entails rejecting
assumptions that tie a given language to a stable structure mapped
onto a homogenous language community and sovereign geographi-
cal territory (Canagarajah 2013, pp. 19–34). Again, there are many
contentions being made and this chapter does not intend to challenge
Canagarajah’s rejection of the modernist ideologies that lead to assump-
tions of homogenous, bounded language communities which can then
in turn be mapped onto geographical territories. Instead, my focus is on
the ramifications of denying the existence of entities called languages
(or dialects) about which questions of equality can be posed.
The key point to focus on in both Pennycook and Canagarajah’s
work is this shift in perspectives that sees specific languages as linguistic
resources ‘appropriated by people for their own purposes’ (Canagarajah
2013, p. 7). As we shall see in our look at the work of Lionel Wee,
this conception of language or linguistic activity and competency as
‘resource’ leads him directly and explicitly to reject any conceptual basis
for applying equality and inequality to languages or their varieties. I will
agree with Wee’s logic, although due to that logic, I will question the
premises he shares with Pennycook and Canagarajah.

Inequality among language users, not languages

In his book length attack on the idea of language rights, Wee (2010)
mounts a very clear argument that because language needs to be under-
stood as a ‘semiotic resource’ that is continually changing due to ‘con-
stant resignification’ (Wee 2010, p. 190), we should abandon any notion
of language rights or linguistic human rights. Instead, he insists that we
need to focus on the rights of individuals (Wee 2010, p. 196) and con-
sider language as an activity of individuals who may be discriminated
against due to many attributes, one of which is language. Wee argues
that instances of language discrimination need to be addressed purely
 Global English and Inequality 81

in terms of inequality among speakers and not languages themselves.

In Wee’s view, it is a dire mistake to grant languages status as objects
themselves among which we could assess questions of inequality and
injustice. To ascribe rights to languages puts us ‘in danger of reifying a
social practice that is inherently changeable and variable by dissociat-
ing it from the interests of its speakers’ (Wee 2010, p. 3). Of course, this
terminology of language as a social practice and the way its fluid and
changing nature makes it inappropriate to reify, to treat as an object or
entity, is exactly the argument both Pennycook and Canagarajah are
making, as discussed above.
While Wee does accept some limited notion of ‘group rights’, he is
insistent that they not be based on ‘culture’ or ‘language’ in terms of
defining the constitution of specific groups (Wee 2010, pp. 196–197).
Moreover, he argues that ‘the appeal to the discourse of language rights
seems to increase the likelihood of ethnic tension …’ (p. 121), as he finds
in his comparative case studies of Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore.
Wee takes a different position than Thomas Pogge, who criticizes lan-
guage rights and treating languages as objects of concepts like equality
precisely because languages rest on group rights, that Pogge argues
are illiberal. Thus, Pogge places language within a liberal individualist
framework where only individuals can be said to have rights (Pogge
2003). This argument is mounted against scholars of group rights within
a liberal individualist framework, most specifically Will Kymlicka, to
be discussed below. Nevertheless, Wee provides a fairly comprehensive
argument, taking into account epistemological and political reasons to
confine political questions of inequality (or inequality as an injustice)
to individual speakers and bar its application to languages as such.
In the field of international relations, Vanessa Pupavac (2012)
has mounted a critique of language rights that has similarities with
(although also some differences from) Wee’s, including criticizing lan-
guage as an object of concern, and instead insisting that users of lan-
guage must be the focus. Pupavac articulates a more profound critique of
international human rights discourse in general. Where Wee is critical of
linguistic human rights and language rights, he endorses human rights
in general but argues they need to be ascribed to humans not languages.
Pupavac, by contrast, argues that the discourse of human rights has
shifted away from its origins in protecting individuals against the state,
including freedoms of speech. Drawing on legal studies, she addresses
language rights and linguistic human rights through the legal scholar-
ship on human rights, adopting the historical model that distinguishes
three generations, starting with civil and political rights, extending
82 Peter Ives

to economic and social rights, and then finally, in the phase crucial
for language activists, including cultural and identity rights (Pupavac
2012, pp. 26–32). She argues that this general trajectory of human
rights is towards increased ‘governance’ in the Foucauldian sense.
Rights discourse becomes a modern, liberal way of regulating indi-
viduals rather than allowing them freedom. In this way, Pupavac sees a
collusion between human rights and global governance strategies that
she applies to the issues of language and language rights. As she states,
‘efforts to address language wrongs through the language of rights do
not necessarily make linguistic human rights governance emancipa-
tory’ (Pupavac 2012, p. 25). She argues that by granting supposed rights
to language, we constrain the activities of individuals in terms of the
languages they choose to learn and use. Here her examples include
Stephen May, François Grin and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas. Pupavac
questions how rights of languages themselves ironically threaten the
freedom of speech rights of individuals. She explicitly criticizes ‘inter-
national linguistic rights advocacy, seeing equality between languages
and equality of outcomes, not only equality of opportunity’ and cites
Robert Phillipson and Skutnabb-Kangas as specific examples of her
reproaches. She argues that by using language rights to secure the
equality of outcomes in effect regulates and denies freedom to majori-
ties (Pupavac 2012, p. 38).
Thus, Pupavac’s work is more explicitly critical of contemporary
rights in general than Wee is. She sees language as an inherent part of
this degradation of the original promise, whereas Wee just sees language
as an inapplicable topic or object of human rights. Nevertheless, they
come to similar conclusions, Pupavac warning that attaching rights to
languages will necessarily hamper the civil and political rights that are
needed for linguistic creativity and originality. Thus, insisting that we
address inequalities between languages through protecting minority
rights comes ‘at the expense of political speech and experimentalism’
(Pupavac 2012, p. 250). She accuses language rights advocates of appear-
ing ‘closer to Burkean [i.e. Edmund Burke] conservatism than [Isaiah]
Berlin’s liberalism in its treatment of cultural or linguistic identity as
universal ends’ (Pupavac 2012, p. 11). This is a crucial point in her
argument because, as noted in the introduction, conceptions of equality
are often used to divide the political spectrum from left to right. And
Pupavac is arguing that giving languages rights is a conservative posi-
tion, whereas her insistence that only individuals can have rights is a
liberal one, and she does not address the political spectrum to the left
of liberal individualism.
 Global English and Inequality 83

One might presume that the influence of critical post-structuralist

theories on the work of Pennycook and Canagarajah would put them at
odds with the liberal individualist presumptions at the heart of Wee and
Pupavac’s arguments. And there are many ways in which this is true.
However, without delving into Marxist critiques of post-modernism as
overly filial with mainstream liberal individualism, it does seem that
Pennycook and Canagarajah’s approaches concur with Wee’s emphasis
on the problems of stipulating boundaries between languages, and call
for addressing languages as a collection of social practices and continual
resignification (see Ives 2015a). From such an epistemological posi-
tion, it is difficult to see how a concept like equality could be applied
to languages as such, and any focus on inequality would have to con-
cern itself with the agents of language use. As I will return to below,
Pennycook draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, although not uncriti-
cally, but he also discusses the ‘hegemony of global English’ (Pennycook
2010, p. 139) and champions marginalized peoples’ struggles against
the structures of dominant liberal individualist ideologies and forces in
a more critical manner than Pupavac or Wee.

Between the two conceptions of quality

Stephen May and Will Kymlicka are perhaps the most difficult schol-
ars to pigeon hole into a clear position concerning whether inequal-
ity should be a concern if it exists among languages or solely among
individuals and then take account of the language usage they enact.
But their place on the borderline between these two positions can be
very illuminating about what is at stake for the question of how we
understand inequality. A succinct look at their positions will also help
keep us from conflating the important debates concerning the concept
of group rights in relationship to individualism, which is beyond the
scope of this chapter, with our focus, which is whether or not inequality
can be applicable to languages or language varieties as such and not just
limited to language users.
Both May and Kymlicka are strong supporters of group rights and
language rights in particular, and thus are often cast as key targets
for criticism by Wee, Pupavac, Pogge, and others. However, Kymlicka
describes his own project as having overcome the liberal-communitarian
debate by demonstrating how group rights fit comfortably within a
liberal individualist framework and that those who understand group
rights as necessarily at odds with liberal individual rights create a false
tension (Kymlicka 2001, pp. 17–68). His major contribution to political
84 Peter Ives

theory is to articulate a liberal multi-cultural theory, whereby ‘group

rights’ are attributed to majorities in the often neutralized processes of
nation-building, and thus, accommodating minority group-rights, dif-
ferentiated according to the type of minority group addressed, is merely
a liberal commitment to individual liberty (Kymlicka 1995, 2001).
Where national minority groups (as distinct from ethnic groups and
other marginalized groups like women, gays and lesbians, or differently
abled peoples) are granted self-governing rights including language
rights, it is based on the granting of equality among individuals and
not allowing individuals who happen to belong to majority cultures to
have such rights that are denied to those in minority national cultures.4
Kymlicka’s main argument for how group rights do not trump indi-
vidual rights and thus are not illiberal involves distinguishing ‘external
protections’ of national groups from the dominant culture of the major-
ity from ‘internal restrictions’ which continue to protect individuals
within minority cultures (whether national, ethnic, or marginal) from
any illiberal activity of the group on members internal to it, even while
the national group may want to ward off ‘the destabilizing impact of
internal dissent’ (Kymlicka 1995, p. 35). This is not the place to review
the myriad of criticisms, debates, and rebuttals that Kymlicka’s work
has spawned within liberal theory around group rights and cultural
recognition. For our purposes, the point is that if we view Kymlicka’s
position solely in terms of our question about where issues of inequality
lie, Kymlicka is true to his individualist, liberal roots—it is only in terms
of individuals and their membership in groups that language equality
should be a concern. Despite the central role that language plays in his
work, both in articulating the need for group rights and for defining
‘culture’ and distinguishing how ‘differentiated group rights’ are differ-
entiated, Kymlicka would have to agree with Wee, Pupavac, and Pogge,
that our concern needs to be with users of languages not languages
themselves (although perhaps his argument about the false dichotomy
of individual and group rights would apply to the very premise of sepa-
rating the two). Elsewhere, I have discussed Kymlicka’s avoiding of the
reasons why language is so important and connected to our sense of
ourselves and our participation in democracy (Ives 2015b).
Stephen May is heavily influenced by Kymlicka and follows his argu-
ment in favour of collective language rights in terms of liberalism and
its commitment to individualism. In May’s incredibly comprehensive
and influential Language and Minority Rights, now in a revised second
edition, there are only two moments of explicit critique of Kymlicka.
One is purely methodological and disciplinary, in that Kymlicka, May
 Global English and Inequality 85

(2012) argues, ‘only engages briefly and tangentially with the socio-
linguistic and educational research commentary that would further
support his position’ (May 2012, p. 133). But as evident in this quota-
tion, May suggests such engagement would just reinforce Kymlicka’s
theoretical position. However, the second point on which May differs
from Kymlicka is more substantive and potentially related to the issues at
hand in this chapter. At first, May presents this point as one of style
more than substance, ‘Kymlicka is rightly skeptical here of any notion
of a group identity that is pre-given or fixed but articulates this much
less clearly than, say, Iris Marion Young’ (May 2012, p. 130). However,
May’s discussion of Kymlicka yields the need to augment his position
with ‘Young’s more nuanced conception of fluidity and interfusion of
groups’ in order to ‘provide us with a powerful explanatory model for
a legitimate defense of national minority rights within liberal theory’
(May 2012, p. 131). Where May here explicitly augments Kymlicka’s
approach, he also implicitly makes another addition with his underly-
ing reliance on the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu, a theorist
notably absent from Kymlicka’s writings. This is important, because it
is to Bourdieu that May turns when articulating the key theorization
of the ‘interrelationship between collective and individual trajectories’.
May finds Bourdieu’s conception of ‘habitus’ indispensable to define
ethnicity in a manner that is not rooted in the essentializing tradition
of German Romanticism of Herder, Humboldt, and Fichte, but is less
amorphous and ephemeral than post-modernist notions of hybrid-
ity. While there may be parallels between what May describes as the
‘common ground’ of Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ to overcome the overly stark
oppositions between structure and agency in the sociological tradi-
tion on one hand, and Kymlicka’s attempt to transcend (or deny the
initial existence of) the individual versus group rights opposition, May
never addresses it explicitly, only silently but more pervasively adding
Bourdieu to his theoretical framework ostensibly derived from Kymlicka
with an explicit nod toward Young. Here, perhaps the critics like
Pupavac and Wee are correct to see in May a much greater willingness
to countenance the importance of equality among languages as well as
among individual users of language.
Strengthening this perspective is a comparison between May and
Pennycook’s appropriations of Bourdieu. Where both rely on him,
Pennycook (2010, p. 48) notes, ‘we need to be cautious with Bourdieu’s
thinking on language as social activity [because] … his view of con-
text is too confining’. Pennycook reiterates Judith Butler’s (1997,
p. 142) critique of Bourdieu’s ‘conservative account of the speech act’
86 Peter Ives

that is better at accounting for institutionalization and reproduction

of social systems than emphasizing change. Or as Kerim Friedman
(2009, p. 362) summarizes, ‘The consequences of Bourdieu’s empha-
sis on the forces of social reproduction over those of social change
have been widely remarked upon’. This is not the place to explore
Bourdieu’s social theory in any detail, except to note that May accepts
his rendition of the structure/agency reconciliation, which if anything,
seems to lean to the more structuralist side. This would seem to place
May in a potentially more critical position vis-à-vis liberal individual-
ism than Kymlicka. So while it is not unambiguous in May’s writings,
there seems to be greater openness to consider languages and language
varieties as entities to which questions of inequality could and should
be applied.
Considering the specific concept of ‘equality’, May is again interest-
ing in that he distinguishes linguistic equality from linguistic democracy,
finding more possibilities in the latter to effect real political change in
the lives of minorities. While again there is ambiguity here, May seems
to be suggesting that linguistic rights – specifically group differentiated
rights – are needed for fair and full participation in the democratic
process even if the utopian goal of full linguistic equality is unrealistic.
This brings May closer to Wee’s goal of deliberative democracy, except
May insists that without linguistic democracy, participatory democracy is
unattainable. However, these linguistic rights are attributable for May
to languages themselves, a position that Wee, as we have seen, rejects.

The importance of equality applying to languages

From the vantage point of having considered May and Kymlicka as

scholars who sit on the line between those for whom only language
users could be considered unequal and those who find it perfectly valid
to view languages themselves as unequal, we can return to the work
of Pennycook and Canagarajah to show how the ramification of their
arguments is that equality should not be extended to languages or lan-
guage varieties themselves. Pennycook (2010, p. 11) explicitly argues,
like Wee, that the discourse of ‘imperialism, language rights or even
language as commonly conceived, prevents us from escaping the very
epistemological frameworks that are part of the problem’. In shifting to
viewing language as ‘translingual practice’, Canagarajah concurs that the
conceptual basis of structuralism in positing languages as entities is part
of the problem that must be rejected (Canagarajah 2013, pp. 20–24, 74).
Structuralism can refer to many differing positions from Ferdinand
 Global English and Inequality 87

de Saussure’s linguistics to Claude Levi Strauss’s anthropology, Louis

Althusser’s Marxist philosophy and Noam Chomsky’s generative gram-
mar. But here we can focus on a specific aspect of understanding a vari-
ety of language as a structure, however fluid and changing.
The best way to address this is to look at Pennycook’s use of the
Russian linguist, Valentin Vološinov. Both Pennycook and Canagarajah
positively invoke the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, a close associate of
Vološinov (see Ives 2004a, pp. 53–96). Pennycook specifically notes
that he is drawing on Vološinov’s criticisms of the tradition he labels
‘abstract objectivism’—that is the view of language as a stable, self-
sufficient, system that is abstract, bounded, and ready-made (Pennycook
2010, p. 10). However, Pennycook ignores the other side of Vološinov’s
argument, which is his critique of what he labels ‘individualistic subjec-
tivism’ (Vološinov 1986, see also Ives 2004a, pp. 53–74). Interestingly
enough, one of the key figures of this tradition that Vološinov criticizes
is Karl Vossler, who presented a view of language very similar to that of
Pennycook and Canagarajah, that ‘The first and most obvious assump-
tion of the science of language is that there is a language. But this is
precisely what is uncertain … To begin with, there is actually no lan-
guage, but only speech: my speech, your speech, our speech now and
here, to-day and yesterday’ (Vossler 1932, p. 7). While, as noted above,
Pennycook’s detailed investigation of the idea of location or place takes
Vossler’s assumptions of time and place in a decidedly post-structuralist
direction, the initial undermining of the reification of language as a
thing is the same.
In other words, my concern is that in undermining all elements of
the structuralist view of language, Pennycook and Canagarajah erode
both the entities we commonly know as languages or varieties of lan-
guages and, in so doing, the structural power relationships inherent in
the structural and social nature of language itself. I will provocatively
invoke a key structuralist semiotician, Roland Barthes, and his concept
of ‘global signification’, to make the point. What is communicated in
the textbook phrase, ‘quia ego nominor leo’? ‘I am forced to realize that
the sentence in no way signifies its meaning to me, that it tries very little
to tell me something about the lion and what sort of name he has …’
(Barthes 1973, p. 125). And this ‘global signification’ is not a politically
neutral, or natural and purely logical set of rules, but itself the histori-
cal result of the codification and standardization of the language, what
I have elsewhere argued is inherent in Antonio Gramsci’s concept of
‘normative grammar’ (which he distinguishes from, but does not simply
oppose to, ‘spontaneous grammar’) (Ives 2004a, pp. 39–40; Ives 2015c).
88 Peter Ives

In other words, we should apply unequal-ness to languages themselves

because when we hear someone speak, such ‘global signification’ is
operative and cannot be merely wished away—that which is commu-
nicated that has nothing to do with the content of what the speaker
wishes to say. Not taking this into account significantly enough—by not
viewing languages as entities—is to disavow the overcoming of ‘indivi-
dualistic subjectivism’ as Vološinov labels it. All such issues seem to be
obscured in the way the liberal individualist tenets of these theorists
are prioritized, and they seem inherent to analyzing questions of language
standardization and the prestige of native language varieties with which
investigations of world Englishes must necessarily engage.

Conclusion

As Rakesh Bhatt (2010, p. 94) notes, one of the key issues facing us
today is ‘to what extent are patterns of linguistic variation related
to political-economic macroprocesses of valuation and domination’.
And yet, it is not too clear how such serious questions can really be
addressed if we are so confined by having to address questions of
inequality solely at the level of individual choices where languages
are understood primarily as ‘resources’ mobilized by speakers, where
the emphasis is on doing and speaking where the structures that define
varieties of languages (however fluid, changing, and hybrid) seem to
fall completely out of the picture. Clearly, the concept of ‘equality’ is
contested terrain. Many concerned with questions of social justice in
connection to language politics deploy a more specific conception of
‘inequality’ through the term ‘hegemony’ sometimes attributed spe-
cifically to Antonio Gramsci. But in the field of language studies in
particular, ‘hegemony’ is almost always used in the pejorative sense of
domination or imposition, albeit with a degree of consent rather than
raw coercion, be it military, economic, social, or cultural (see Ives 2006).
I have written at length elsewhere about how Gramsci developed his
conception of ‘hegemony’ with a good deal of influence from the field
of linguistics and with an eye towards language policy in Italy from the
latter nineteenth to the early twentieth century (Ives 2004b). Crucial to
Gramsci’s project was not solely a critical deployment of hegemony
to understand how capitalist class power operates and garners consent
(always combined with a degree of at least a threat of coercion) but also
as a strategy that he endorsed, in its democratic, progressive form. But as
Nicola Short has recently argued, if we are interested in questions of
difference and inequality (and she is focused on racialized and gendered
 Global English and Inequality 89

inequalities) we should look beyond Gramsci’s concept of ‘hegemony’

and at very least include his understanding of the historical bloc, ‘the
arrangement of different historically constructed social elements and
the material and ideological logics that govern the reproduction of
those arrangements’ (Short 2012, p. 199). It is difficult to see how such
a thorough shift from viewing people as users of varieties of English or
other languages and dialects to seeing them as using a variety of lin-
guistic resources, of viewing language as local or translingual practice
could address Short’s notion of the ‘ideological logics that govern the
reproduction of those arrangements’ (p. 199). It is within the broad
structural dynamics, process, and relations that human inequality
exists, and if we confine ourselves to looking only at individuals, we
will fail to locate much inequality and injustice. Perhaps the complex
power relationships that are central to unequal Englishes and languages
can only be understood with a series of concepts that situate individual
speech practices within these wider structures of continually shifting
power arrangements. Thus, inequality belongs in a cluster of concepts
that could include others developed by Gramsci, from hegemony and
historical bloc to normative and spontaneous grammar (see Ives 2004a).
There are of course other options, but to leave such a key concept, equal-
ity, in its diminished capacity as applying solely between individuals is
to give up on the fundamentally political questions raised by the global
spread of unequal languages and unequal Englishes.

Notes
1. Indeed, Alastair Pennycook wants to oppose a dominant line of thinking
from Plato to Kant, Saussure, Habermas, and Chomsky with that begin-
ning with Aristotle and reaching through Vico, Vološinov, and Bourdieu
(Pennycook 2010, p. 10).
2. As a political theorist by training, I should note that I think political theorists,
especially those concerned with language, have much more to learn from
critical language scholars (see Ricento 2014).
3. The concept of language as a commodity, while yielding interesting research
perspectives, seems to me conceptually vague and potentially problematic
precisely because it is very difficult to separate the exchange value and use
value of language in any way similar to how Marx developed those terms
within his conception of a commodity. If ‘commodity’ is being used in a more
general (non-Marxist) sense without a specific reference to ‘exchange value’
but rather just as a marketable good, it still raises the issues of how linguistic
skills (Heller 2011) (and the commodification of their acquisition), linguistic
labour, and linguistic products (whether speech, recorded language or writing)
are distinguished and related. The notion of language as a commodity is often
used to separate the ‘instrumental’ dimension of language from its ‘symbolic’
90 Peter Ives

function (e.g. Wee 2010), an abstract division that I have criticized at length
elsewhere precisely because it tends to de-politicize language (Ives 2015a).
4. I will forego a detailed explanation of the same liberal individual logic that
Kymlicka uses to argue that ethnic, immigrant minorities should be granted
‘polyethnic rights’ so they are not forced illiberally to adopt cultural par-
ticularities of the dominant culture that are not warranted, while other mar-
ginalized social groups should be granted ‘special representation’ rights. See
Kymlicka (1995, pp. 30–33); and Kymlicka (2001).

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Part II
Englishes in Nexuses of Power
and Inequality
5
‘Just an Old Joke’: Chinglish,
Narrative, and Linguistic Inequality
in the Chinese English Classroom
Eric S. Henry

In 2010, I was finishing an interview with an English teacher in her

classroom at a middle school in the northeastern Chinese city of
Shenyang. While packing up my equipment and notes, one of the
teacher’s students arrived for a tutoring session. The teacher introduced
us and encouraged the student, a young woman, to speak English to
me. ‘No, no, no’, she refused in Chinese, waving her hand at me in
embarrassment, ‘I can only speak that kind of Northeastern English
[dongbei yingyu]’. The teacher and I both laughed and I left them to their
review session.
For me, the incident passed without much notice, subsidiary as it was
to my main task that day of investigating pedagogical methods in pub-
lic education. It is also quite common to hear self-effacing comments on
foreign language ability in China, where even quite proficient speakers
refrain from engaging actively in second language conversations for fear
of negative evaluations of their abilities. On later reflection, though,
I began to realize just how powerful this response to the teacher’s request
was, and how it comments upon a situation of intense linguistic ine-
quality. What did she mean by ‘Northeastern English’? And how might
the answer to this allow us to address how negative language evalua-
tions arise, are disseminated, and maintained?
The student’s response requires a bit of semiotic unpacking in order
to make sense outside of the utterance’s regional context, although
it was quite understandable within the local speech environment.
Dongbei (or Northeast, roughly equated with the historical extent
of Manchuria and the modern provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and
Heilongjiang) is a term tinged with local sentiment. It highlights a
distinct regional identity in opposition to people from other parts of
China, particularly metropolitan capitals such as Beijing and Shanghai.
95
96 Eric S. Henry

Dongbei can be used as a descriptor for almost anything: style, food,

culture, attitude, and personality. At the same time, it indexes a
locally-oriented, predominantly rural identity, one that fails to tran-
scend regional limitations or to participate in global orders of social
belonging. Dongbeihua (Northeastern speech) refers to the local dialect,
which, in a pattern common to diglossic inequality, is stigmatized in
public forms of interaction even as it is associated with the warmth and
familiarity of the private family home. Dongbei is therefore an ambiva-
lent referent encapsulating both regional pride and anxieties about its
inhabitants’ place in both the nation and the wider world, and thus
‘Dongbei English’ begins to make sense: the student was saying that
her English was too tinged with the local to be identifiable as global. It
was therefore marked, inferior, and in interaction with a representative
of that global world, unspeakable.
In this chapter, I consider the production of English linguistic ine-
quality in the Chinese context through the prism of discourse. Through
practices of what Michael Silverstein (1996, 2003) has labeled metaprag-
matic discourse, or talk about language in use, speakers both nominate
the utterances of others (or themselves) as instantiations of particular
linguistic forms, and also serve to critique or devalue those utterances as
characteristically malformed or nonstandard. The student’s self-ascrip-
tion of her language to the category of Dongbei English above is one
such example. As I will argue, in China this metalinguistic commentary
is typically directed at ‘Chinglish’, an ostensibly deficient nativist form
of the English language. As I have argued elsewhere (Henry 2010),
Chinglish should not be viewed as an established variant of Standard
English based upon unique lexical, phonological, or morphosyntactic
qualities borrowed from Mandarin Chinese forms.1 It is rather a shift-
ing signifier that can be attached to many forms of language produc-
tion in China, including Mandarin-inflected grammar, but also English
speech that is perceived as heavily accented, codemixed, stylistically
old-fashioned or simply audibly nonstandard. Such judgments are sali-
ent when rendered by an individual who can claim some kind of lin-
guistic authority—as a teacher, native speaker, or as one associated with
‘foreignness’ (see also Henry 2013)—over the speaker, leading those
speakers to internalize these evaluations of their speech and monitor
their own production for such forms.
At times these critiques are explicit. I recorded stories from students
of their teachers shaming them in front of the class for their nonstand-
ard English or Mandarin pronunciation (in other words, for speaking
Dongbeihua when they should have been speaking Mandarin), forcing
 ‘Just an Old Joke’ 97

the student to sound out each syllable of a recitation carefully until

it was sufficiently ‘correct’ to pass their scrutiny. But in this chapter,
I would like to examine more subtle forms of metacommentary, where
multivalent speech acts can be interpreted as fulfilling a variety of func-
tions in interaction. Specifically, I will be looking at joking narratives—
in which jokes are embedded in other types of speech events in order
to comment upon broader contextual factors—as instances where the
socialization of English varietal inequality occurs. I follow a long tradi-
tion in the study of discourse that points to the importance of narrative
as a means not only of relating events from the past to others, but
of coming to terms with the present, of understanding the reasons
for and meaning of contemporary social forces, transformations, or
institutional arrangements, and one’s own place in them (Ochs & Capps
2001; Schiffrin 1996; Schiffrin et al. 2010). Narrative allows us, in other
words, to make sense of experience, to ‘construct in the interdependent
process of narration and interpretation a coherent set of interrelation-
ships that we call an “event”’ (Bauman 1986, p. 5).
Similarly, jokes are powerful speech acts because they straddle a
line between public and private, serious and playful (as in the cliché
‘I was just joking … but seriously’) (Hill 2008; Kramer 2011; Santa Ana
2009). While much attention has been paid to the formal analysis of
jokes in terms of linguistic structure—initiation, pivot, punchline,
etc. (Berger 2010; Ritchie 2004)—I prefer to regard jokes as forms
of speech play which ‘involve complex manipulations of linguistic,
interactional, and cultural relations’ (Sherzer 2002, p. 36). Jokes draw
upon, and are made meaningful by, the surrounding discourse context
that may be directly or indirectly indexed in the course of telling the
joke (Silverstein 2010). In this way, they can act as vehicles for serious
forms of social evaluation, but served in an easy-to-dismiss, light-
hearted idiom.
A joking narrative thus uses humor to educate the audience, in this
case Chinese foreign language students, about pressing social, cultural
or linguistic issues that permeate the educational experience itself, and
allow them to make sense of the surrounding context. It is a form of
ideology hiding in plain sight, allowing as it does a certain non-serious
deniability about the content of the narrative while still making the
crucial point that language locates individuals within a socially mean-
ingful cartography encompassing the values of power, modernity,
agency, or, for those disfluent in the dominant modes of talk, their
opposites. These speech acts therefore serve to create, maintain, and
reinforce relations of inequality among different linguistic forms.
98 Eric S. Henry

The politics of English in China

During the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, hundreds of thousands

of youth volunteers were deployed by the government throughout the
city to assist foreign visitors. With over a million applicants for these
positions, Olympic officials made their selections on the basis of their
knowledge of Olympic and Chinese history, city geography, first aid
and, most especially, foreign language ability. This is but one example
from the past several years of the numerous ways in which fluency in
a foreign language—overwhelmingly English—has become an official
plank of the Chinese government’s language policy and a key element
of China’s modernizing strategy.
The popularity of English has, of course, fluctuated throughout
China’s modern history. While English was a tremendously popular
subject of study in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
the success of the Communist takeover in 1949 signaled the beginning
of a hiatus that was to last until Deng Xiaoping initiated a series of
social, political, and educational reforms in the late 1970s and early 80s
(Adamson 2004; Bolton 2003). In the 30 years since these reforms began,
English has once again emerged as the most important foreign language
in China, with over 90 percent of students studying a foreign language
doing so in English (Gil & Adamson 2011; Lam 2002). English language
education has been integrated into the public school curriculum at all
levels, typically beginning in about the third year of elementary school
and consisting of between 80 and 200 minutes of instruction each week
(Cheng 2011). At higher levels, English constitutes a significant portion
of the final grade in both high school and college entrance examina-
tions.2 Known colloquially as gaokao, the National College Entrance
Examination written in June is one of the most crucial events in a
Chinese student’s life. The score determines university placements for
students across China, who are thus under intense familial and social
pressure to achieve high grades (Cheng 2008; Fong 2004, pp. 87–126).
The exam’s English component is considered so important by parents
and teachers that linguistic instruction largely ceases in the final year
of high school, and students spend hours (both in class and at home)
drilling multiple choice practice questions on esoteric points of English
grammar or obscure vocabulary. Many students also take the TOEFL
or IELTS language examinations at this stage to qualify for university
admission in the United States or Commonwealth countries.
Outside of the education field, English has also become an indis-
pensable asset for workers in China’s new service, technology, and
 ‘Just an Old Joke’ 99

information fields, with most highly desirable jobs requiring certifica-

tion of foreign language ability. At Shenyang’s Human Resource Market,
a sprawling building where employers quickly screen applicants for
employment positions, job seekers regularly carry copies of both their
résumés and College English Test score reports. The presence of an
English language teaching industry, offering language training through
private schools, books, software, and entertainment, combined with a
high degree of government support, has also led to a situation of incipi-
ent bilingualism in many urban areas.
In sum, English is an important, high-stakes subject in Chinese educa-
tion, determining not only university admissions but job opportunities
after graduation. It is also considered essential for one of the hallmarks
of educational achievement in China: study abroad. The reliance
on written examinations tends to accentuate technical grammatical
knowledge over spoken competence as the primary focus of instruction.
Nevertheless, English should be considered more than a mere academic
subject, as it is playing an ever larger role in China’s national strategy
of global engagement and modernization.

Objectification and evaluation of linguistic difference

For inequality between linguistic forms to exist, those forms must first
be identified, objectified, and materialized. There appear to be two
broad trajectories for the development of these forms of objectification
in language. In the first place, this may occur through governmental or
educational policies, as certain languages or speech forms are designated
by leaders or institutions as desirable, proper, or necessary, usually to the
detriment of minority languages or dialects.3 Linguists have been quite
active in identifying such institutional practices and critiquing both
their premises—that, for instance, support for minority languages or
multilingualism breeds ethnic division—and the impacts those policies
have on already endangered languages and their speakers (Spolsky 2004;
Tollefson 1991; Tsui & Tollefson 2007). One need only consider here the
example of English Only movements in the United States that seek to
enshrine English as the ‘official’ language of the nation, and by exten-
sion remove support for bilingual education or government services
(Crawford 2000; Lippi-Green 1997; Woolard 1989). Diversity becomes
equated with deficiency, or even pathological deviance, especially as
it pertains to non-English language use in the American public sphere.
Once subject to institutionalizing forces, a seemingly necessary step
is the formalization of what constitutes this newly favored code. Laada
100 Eric S. Henry

Bilaniuk (2006) has provided an especially clear example of this in her

analysis of language practices in Ukraine, a country that is, as recent
political events have demonstrated, a prime example of the way that
national languages paper over what are often serious linguistic and eth-
nic diversities. Although often dominated politically by Russia, during
historical periods of relative independence Ukrainian elites struggled to
codify and standardize Ukrainian grammar, orthography and vocabu-
lary, a task made more difficult by the tremendous regional variation in
Ukrainian itself, and by the influence of Russian, a closely related Slavic
language. After independence in 1991 and a resurgence of Ukrainian
nationalism, state officials turned to these earlier compilations as
records of a ‘pure’ Ukrainian that would serve as the language of state,
often in active opposition to the previous 50 years of Russification in
which Soviet officials had employed many of the same standardizing
practices to make Ukrainian more Russian (Bilaniuk 2006, pp. 71–102).
An important rationale for use of these documents was classifica-
tory: one needs to know what qualifies as ‘pure’ Ukrainian and what
does not and, by extension, who qualifies as ‘pure’ Ukrainian and
who does not. Rather than describing some pre-existing linguistic
form—always hiding in plain sight—that serves as the model from
which all variants diverge, grammars, dictionaries and speech manu-
als act as hegemonic prescriptive documents, identifying difference as
problematic and those who speak differently as in need of correction.
But surely government policies are not enough to induce extensive
and permanent linguistic shift?4 The cases cited above are remarkable
not only for the hubris of officials who believed they could legislate lin-
guistic questions away, but for their uneven application and the active
resistance of those subjected to these policies—after all, Russification
did not eliminate Ukrainian, and the predominance of English in the
United States has not served to eliminate the domestic use of Spanish
and other immigrant or indigenous languages. Policies may be effective
in initiating or accelerating long-term shifts in speaking practices, but in
themselves are not enough to explain why languages might be stigma-
tized outside of purely official discursive domains.
This leads to the second trajectory of objectification. A language is a
product not just of internal structural or grammatical features but also
of social histories. Study of the intersections between conceptions of
language and the discursive processes that bring these into being has
been conducted under the label of ‘language ideology’ (Blommaert
1999; Kroskrity 2000; Schieffelin et al. 1998). In brief, language ideolo-
gies are broad cultural beliefs about the form and appropriate use of
 ‘Just an Old Joke’ 101

language in practice. Speech forms are often taken to be indicative, even

constitutive, of particular groups of people, a process that Susan Gal and
Judith Irvine (1995) term ‘iconicity’. Consequently, ‘as part of everyday
behavior, the use of a linguistic form can become a pointer to (index of)
speakers’ social identities’, a process that relates languages to the ‘sys-
tematic behavioral, aesthetic, affective, and moral contrasts among the
social groups indexed’ (Gal & Irvine 1995, p. 973). As Richard Bauman
and Charles Briggs (2003, p. 17) have shown in their history of linguis-
tic modernity, language variation in the modern era has been laminated
with social topography such that ‘ways of speaking and writing make
social classes, genders, races, and nations seem real and enable them
to elicit feelings and justify relations of power, making subalterns seem to
speak in ways that necessitate their subordination’. The result is a pro-
cess similar to the objectification of language performed by dictionaries
and grammars: language becomes regimented to a standard form iden-
tified with a coherent social group, and each language/social group is
evaluated in contrast to a perceived standard norm.
In this second trajectory of objectification, the social value of par-
ticular linguistic codes is not legislated from above, but discovered in
the act of discourse itself. Asif Agha (2007) has suggested that linguistic
varieties are gradually enregistered with social value, both positive and
negative, through discursive practices that gradually sediment these
values in place over time and identify them with particular social types.
Such practices include elite discourses of standardization (Dong 2010;
Silverstein 1996), appropriately gendered speech (Inoue 2006), and
the detriments of racial, ethnic, class or status sociolinguistic variation
(Cavanaugh 2005; Johnstone 2009; Newell 2009). Agha (2007, pp. 203–
219) himself charts the development of Received Pronunciation (RP)
in the United Kingdom from a regional prestige sociolect to a national
standard for ‘correct’ pronunciation and ‘civilized’ discourse. Britons
were gradually ‘educated’ about the enlightenment qualities of RP, ini-
tially through political tracts and social polemics against the manners
of provincials, and later through everything from etiquette guides and
advice handbooks to literary works that tied depictions of fictional char-
acters to particular forms of dialogue. The public circulation of knowl-
edge about RP ‘created a widespread awareness in the reading public of
the social value of accent, including an awareness of the social value of
the most prestigious accent, RP’ even as the competence in that accent
was being cultivated in the public school system, which restricted access
to the prestige variety and guaranteed its continued social value (Agha
2007, p. 219).
102 Eric S. Henry

In the example of RP, metapragmatic discourse (the talk about talk)

serves to encode and systematize the evaluative judgments of entire
speech communities, which then sediment over time into particular semi-
otic registers imbued with social value. As Agha shows, metapragmatic
statements may take the form of explicit correction (as in the speech
manuals for aspiring gentlemen) but are more generally embedded in
other speech genres such as educational and entertainment discourse.
Uriah Heep’s claim in Dickens’ David Copperfield that ‘I’m a very umble
person’ (cited in Agha 2007, p. 214) both activates existing register evalu-
ations in the audience and serves to disseminate them further, even as
the statement is not explicitly a comment on language itself. In light of
this, I turn now to what I believe is one common genre of socialization to
language attitudes in China: jokes about Chinglish.

Narrating Chinglish

The following narratives are taken from a transcript of an English

language class I recorded in Shenyang in 2010. The teacher, Charles,
was Chinese, about 30 years old and a dynamic and engaging foreign
language educator. He had studied abroad in Malaysia for five years,
worked as a businessman there, and eventually returned to Shenyang to
open an English school with an old classmate. He told me that he had a
collection of stories such as this that he could draw upon any time the
attention of his students drifted. These were, in his words, examples of
Chinglish that served to both entertain and to teach the students the
value of their language lessons by highlighting the negative effects of
nonstandard English. There were seven students in attendance that
day, all aged 16–17 years and preparing to enter their final year of high
school before university.
The stories Charles told fit within a genre of humorous narratives fre-
quently found in oral discourse and popular media in urban China. They
recount the adventures of people out of place: farmers in the big city,
provincials in the capital, ordinary Chinese people abroad. From 1995
to 2011, for instance, the Dongbei comedian Zhao Benshan contributed
skits to the annual nationally televised New Year’s Gala that dramatize
this role: the rural peasant subjected to the verbal trickery of the urban
conman (Gao & Pugsley 2008, pp. 458–464; Mu 2004). Often the pro-
tagonist of this type of story is simply referred to as Xiaoming (literally,
‘little bright’), a generic name with no discerning individual properties
for the character other than that he or she is Chinese.5 Xiaoming narra-
tives tend to dramatize contexts that the audience would find familiar
 ‘Just an Old Joke’ 103

but that the protagonist finds alien and strange, such as a farmer eating
in a fancy restaurant for the first time or contemplating people playing
golf. For an urban audience these are all perceptually familiar activities;
even urban citizens who have never played golf can recognize the game
and imagine themselves behaving appropriately in that context. The
fact that Xiaoming often behaves inappropriately (in one story I heard,
clapping and cheering wildly as a golfer is about to swing, which leads
to him being escorted from the golf course) incorporates the listener as
a knowing member of the audience.6 In this sense, Xiaoming narratives
are a kind of othering device within an increasingly stratified society
marked by forms of economic, political, and status differences between
the agrarian countryside and urban areas.

(1) There’s a very simple joke, okay? There’s a single word, a word, an
expression that says ‘look out’. Just a very old joke, okay. Xiaoming
… he went to America. When he got to America he lived in an
apartment building, and in the building he lived on the first floor.
Then one day, he heard from outside someone shouting, ‘look out!’
He thought it meant look outside. Look … out … He thought it
meant look outside. Something like ‘look out of the window’.
Yeah? But actually, in reality we all know what this means, right?
Then, he looks outside. He opened the window and looked outside.
‘There’s nothing going on’. Nothing special. There wasn’t anything
special out there. And then … HUA! A bucket of dirty water. A
bucket dirty water, just pour down. Just came down. It spilled all
over his body. He thinks it’s strange, why did this person ask me to
look outside? Did she pour the water on me on purpose?
[Chinese = roman text, English = bold]

In the first narrative, Charles interrupts the normal flow of his class-
room discourse and signals his intention to initiate a new topical
frame with the words ‘There’s a very simple joke, okay?’ This serves
to alert the audience that the serious talk of the instructor has now
been replaced with a more informal or light-hearted speech event.
Nevertheless, there is a thematic continuity from his earlier instruction
in that he highlights an ‘expression’ on which the joke hinges, similar
to other expressions he had taught in the preceding hour: ‘out of date’
and ‘beware of dogs’ for example. Therefore, while it might appear
that Charles is abandoning his role as teacher by shifting into a jocular
tone, left implicit is the fact that students are still being instructed, just
in a more indirect way.
104 Eric S. Henry

(2) It’s Xiaoming again, he goes to an American university to study.

Xiaoming thinks his own English is really good. Then, he’s just
in the library reading a book. He thinks his own English is really
good. Beside him is sitting an American girl, just beside him. Then,
this girl, she doesn’t notice—girl doesn’t notice. Xiaoming sees
it, he says, ‘Look! A bug. Look, a bug’. Then the American girl
said, ‘Oh, it’s a ladybug’. Xiaoming said, ‘How can you tell it’s
a female? Oh god, you are so amazing. How can you tell it’s a
female?’

The second narrative occurred about 10 minutes after the first. In the
interval, Charles resumed teaching, but again breaks out of the teach-
ing frame with another prefatory phrase, ‘It’s Xiaoming again’. As in
the first narrative, the majority of Charles’s talk is in Chinese, but while
(1) was characterized by Chinese with only occasionally codemixed
English, here Charles uses Chinese fairly consistently until he reaches
an exclamatory point just prior to the joke’s pivot—seeing the bug—
where he switches into English. I would also note here that none of
the narratives contain much co-constructed dialogue between Charles
and his audience. In my recording there was some laughter, particu-
larly after the punchline, and a few background vocalizations such as
‘what happened next [ranhou ne]?’ but none of these affected the flow
of Charles’ talk. The same was true during much of Charles’ explicit
classroom instruction as well, which is quite typical of teacher-centered
pedagogies in China (Zhang & Wang 2011; Zheng & Davison 2008).

(3) Xiaoming, it’s Xiaoming again. He goes to America. Xiaoming was

taking driving lesson. So, the day he went to the driving exam,
the driving test, to get the driving license … Then, Xiaoming gets
in the car. The examiner sits beside him, beside him in the passen-
ger seat. Xiaoming is very afraid. Very nervous. He starts driving.
He drives straight ahead. He sees ahead there’s a sign, traffic sign.
On it is written, the meaning is you must turn left. There’s a sign,
okay? When Xiaoming sees this he’s just so nervous, and he asks
the examiner beside him, ‘Left? To the left?’ The examiner says,
‘Right’. So Xiaoming turns right, so he failed.

Charles used the third narrative roughly half an hour after (2) to close
the class. Once again, Charles initiates the joke with a phrase that
marks the boundary of a new frame of talk, in this case, ‘Xiaoming,
it’s Xiaoming again’. Here, several of the English codeswitches are
 ‘Just an Old Joke’ 105

significant because they concern content from the lesson, in particular

the words ‘afraid’ and ‘nervous’.7 In (1) such switches exhibited a recur-
sive character, as some of them repeated or rephrased earlier Chinese
utterances in English (‘look outside. Look … out’). The purpose of this
mixing style is pedagogical, as Charles first presents information for
comprehension in Chinese, then switches into English to reiterate the
point, giving students two channels of related information.
In comparing the three stories, there are several common themes that
are significant for understanding the implicit lessons being taught to
students. The stories all take place abroad, a location that plays a pro-
found role in modernist imaginings as the source of authentically ‘for-
eign’ culture in China.8 This distancing from the student’s immediate
social environment is relevant for several reasons. First of all, for most
of the students, studying abroad was in fact their ultimate goal. The
students in Charles’ class were all preparing for the National College
Entrance Examination and international language exams, meaning that
Xiaoming’s plight of being surrounded by English was one students
actively desired for themselves.
But situating the stories abroad also severs the audience’s connection to
the setting as knowing actors. While Charles had lived abroad for several
years, none of the students had experience outside of China. Whereas
other Xiaoming narratives might dramatize the plight of peasants in the
big city—towards whom the audience can relate as actors who are famil-
iar with both settings—in Charles’ narratives the audience must take his
word that the surrounding social contexts are as he presents them (the
disposal of dirty water over a balcony, or the experience of a driving
exam). In their discussion of the concept of identity in sociolinguistics,
Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall (2005) argue that identity is a relational
phenomenon: identities only acquire meaning in relation to other avail-
able identity positions occupied by other social actors. One such pair of
intersubjective relations is in the opposition between authorization and
illegitimation. Authorization ‘involves the affirmation or imposition of
an identity through structures of institutionalized power and ideology’
while illegitimation ‘addresses the ways in which identities are dismissed,
censored, or simply ignored by these same structures’ (Bucholtz & Hall
2005, p. 603). In this instance, the foreign setting authorizes Charles as
the narrator because of his foreign experience, while de-authorizing the
audience’s ability to critique or contest the joke’s metapragmatic mes-
sage. The students may wish to go abroad, but are ‘not-yet’ participants,
and must defer to Charles’ evaluative judgments of Xiaoming’s behavior
and mistakes due to their lack of expertise.
106 Eric S. Henry

And it is these ‘mistakes’ that Xiaoming makes in English which

form the crux of each joke: misunderstanding the directive ‘look out’,
misinterpreting the word ‘ladybug’, and confounding the two mean-
ings of ‘right’. But note, ironically, that the crucial misunderstanding
in each case is not a question of phonology or syntax, but semantics
and pragmatics. Xiaoming does not err in understanding the ref-
erential content of the English phrases, only in misapprehending
their contextually dependent semantic ambiguity. In other words, we
have to come to grips with the fact that Xiaoming’s problem, and by
extension the students’ problem, is not with the form of English itself
(Chinglish or Standard English) but with something more abstract:
the socially acquired knowledge of how certain words and phrases can
take on different meanings in different social contexts. This is knowl-
edge that largely comes from living in and experiencing the language
in context rather than from the classroom, knowledge gained by use
rather than study.
This would seem to undermine the logic of studying English in
Charles’ class: indeed, why bother to learn from him if such pragmatic
knowledge is ultimately unattainable in China? But Charles’ Xiaoming
narratives enregister these errors in English language use as indicative
of a particular social type who uses English inappropriately: a person
who, in other words, speaks Chinglish and not English. Far from a
legitimate dialect or local variant, Chinglish in the Chinese context rep-
resents a personal failure of modernization, a sociolinguistic blight to
be cordoned and eliminated. Imperfect English is thus pathologized in
reference to a globalized world of English discourse, a form of disorder
rather than difference, highlighting the illegitimacy of the stigmatized
Chinglish speaker to participate effectively in this speech community
and in turn reinforcing the authority of those who ‘know’ English to
evaluate the speech of those who do not. The source of Charles’ knowl-
edge becomes unchallengeable on any other basis, such as perhaps
checking a dictionary or a textbook, because the joke hinges upon prag-
matic contextual factors that are bound within the narrative itself. But
more importantly for Charles, Xiaoming narratives naturalize a particu-
lar logic that underwrites the entire private language learning enterprise
in China: that students need to pay for classes to speak perfect English
lest they be relegated to backwardness and irrelevance in China’s mod-
ern market economy. The implications for the students may not be
immediately obvious, but are nonetheless clear—study English well or
look what might happen.
 ‘Just an Old Joke’ 107

Conclusion

My central claim in this chapter has been that Xiaoming narratives used
by English teachers in China, such as Charles, underwrite a particular
structure of authority when it comes to knowledge of a language, posi-
tioning the teacher as one who knows a language (and is familiar with
its attendant cultural formations) and the students as those who do
not. Charles’s Xiaoming jokes problematize for the students the pres-
ence of nonstandard English in an interconnected global world where
‘mishearing’ may lead to negative or humiliating consequences. By
locating the jokes in a foreign setting, the context itself and the teach-
ers’ participation in it becomes the source of this authority, one that is
inevitably denied to students who have not themselves been abroad.
And yet it also charts out a clear path to eventually acquiring this same
authority: take this class, study abroad, and in time you too can possess
this knowledge.
Xiaoming truly is a kind of Chinese everyman because every student
was intended to project him or herself into Xiaoming’s role of the
Chinese English user abroad. That projection interpellates students into
a particular status in relation to the language and to their own prob-
lematic identities as individuals caught between China and the foreign,
inculcating a presumed responsibility to represent themselves and their
nation successfully through globally recognized linguistic standards.
It is this deep sense of anxiety that led the student who I described at
the beginning of this chapter to problematize her language as ‘Dongbei
English’. Xiaoming stories therefore socialize students to approach their
own language acquisition with suspicion, to be constantly on guard and
aware of the potential for Chinglish ‘mistakes’ to slip into their speech.
Only through using the teacher as a mediating influence (and thus
paying for the class) can the student hope to successfully master and
eliminate these errors in their speech.
While the stigmatization of nonstandard English variants is often
attributed to state policies, institutional structures and new forms of
educational governmentality, I have tried to show here that linguistic
inequality is also engendered and maintained through everyday dis-
cursive interactions. Language valuations circulate through the public
sphere in a semiotic chain of transmission, often from elites to the
masses, that naturalizes language difference as a form of pathology
rather than of diversity. Through everyday discursive practices such
as jokes, narratives, and language lessons, Chinglish is both objectified
108 Eric S. Henry

as a particular linguistic form and enregistered with negative social

value. In practice, the ideology of Chinglish serves to reinscribe the
authority and authenticity of Standard English in China.

Notes
1. Such a view appears to be the default position in studies of Chinese English.
See, for instance, Jiang (1995); Qiang & Wolff (2003).
2. The exact weighting of English in the overall examination score changes
from year to year and also depends upon the examination scheme used in
each particular province. Although recent curricular reforms have sought to
de-emphasize the importance of foreign languages on the examination, this
has not lessened demand for English lessons.
3. An extreme example was the attempted ‘purification’ of Chinese during the
Maoist era; for details see Ji (2004).
4. Conversely, we might note the failure of pure policy approaches in cases of
language maintenance; see Fishman (2001).
5. Although story (2) specifically identifies Xiaoming as male (through his
attempt to hit on a girl), the lack of gendered pronouns in Chinese offers the
possibility that Xiaoming could also be female, and thus that women could
also imagine themselves in the role.
6. See Mu (2004, pp. 24–28) for an analysis of the audience’s perception of and
response to Zhao Benshan’s New Year’s skits. She argues that as much as they
might morally disapprove of the character of the swindler, Chinese audiences
are made to feel superior to the plight of the swindled who is taken in by the
swindler’s words.
7. Codeswitching is exceptionally common in Chinese EFL classrooms. Despite
a marked preference for a monolingual English environment, teachers often
found this unworkable in practice and frequently mixed English and Chinese.
See also Qian et al. (2009).
8. The trope of the ‘foreign’ as an incubator of modernist authenticity can be
found in a host of literary, dramatic, and discursive genres in China; see for
instance Dikötter (2006); He (2002); Lee (2006).

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6
English in Japan: Indecisions,
Inequalities, and Practices
of Relocalization
Glenn Toh

Languages are no more pregiven entities that pre-exist

our linguistic performances … Rather they are sedi-
mented products of repeated acts of identity.
(Pennycook 2007, p. 73)

[T]he … sedimentation of English subsystems is a

result of agentive acts, particular moves to identify, to
use and adapt available semiotic resources for a variety
of goals. English, like any other language, does not
exist as a prior system but is produced and sedimented
through acts of identity.
(Pennycook 2007, p. 73)

This chapter threads together the socio-historical and structural ine-

qualities and contradictions inherent in the meanings, practices, reali-
zations, and appropriations of English in Japan, a language (as will be
seen) that the Japanese are not entirely comfortable with for historical
and ideological reasons. I will argue that various realizations, enact-
ments, vacillations, and indecisions concerning English and Englishes
in Japan can be traced to Japanese conceptualizations of socio-cultural
space in turn closely tied in to a political economy and cultural politics
that can be traced back, at least, to the traumas of Japan’s post-war occu-
pation by English-speaking Allied powers led by the forces of the United
States. Put simply, the matter of unequal Englishes in Japan defies sim-
ple explanations and needs to be understood alongside intricacies to
be found in both politics and history. In the course of my discussion,
I will address the following issues and how they are linked to the matter

111
112 Glenn Toh

of unequal Englishes: (1) the question of whether there is a variety of

English which can be called ‘Japanese English’; (2) factors that influ-
ence the positioning of a Japanese English vis-à-vis essentialist views of
American English as well as formalized and regulatory practices regard-
ing English language education in the country. This chapter concludes
that structural and ideological inequalities, inhibitions, prohibitions,
and prejudices linked to the presence and treatment of English in Japan
are not easily surmountable and are therefore unlikely to go away any
time soon.
As a long-staying resident in Japan married to a Japanese national,
I have found my positioning as an insider working in ELT in higher
education to be an interesting one. Alongside 27 years of experience
teaching EAP and ESP, as well as on TESOL programs in Hong Kong,
Thailand, Laos, Australia, New Zealand, and my native Singapore, such
a positioning has afforded me an emic perspective and subjectivity-led
perceptions of issues concerning language, politics, culture, history,
and ideology vis-à-vis the way English is treated in Japan. As part of my
praxis of action and reflection as a teacher (Freire 2000) in the Japanese
system, I have discovered that my subjectivity as a non-white foreigner
is significant because of the tendency in Japan for both overt and cov-
ert racialization of foreigner and foreign teacher subjectivities (Kubota
2002; Stewart & Miyahara 2011; Toh 2013) alongside convergent and
monolithic conceptualizations of language, culture, and ethnicity (Befu
2001; Heinrich 2012; McVeigh 2002a, 2002b; Seargeant 2009; Stewart &
Miyahara 2011). Such conceptualizations of language, culture, and
ethnicity will be explained in the course of my discussion and, in
particular, will become all the more apparent in the commentaries
on nihonjinron (theorizations of Japanese uniqueness) and Japanese
ideologies of nationalism and how they impinge on issues of language,
ideology, and unequal power relations.

Japanese English: spread or performativity?

As a preamble to the critiquing of issues to do with language, ideology,

hegemony, and inequality, I will first examine current debates over
conceptual and epistemological questions concerning the existence and
ontology of a Japanese variety of English, and how the issues therein
are borne of ideologies that precipitate (and sustain) inequalities in
various power relations. In simpler terms, I would like to examine what
Japanese English means if viewed from multiple perspectives, especially
those concerning ‘spread’ and ‘performativity’.
 English in Japan 113

The question of ‘spread’

A World Englishes ontology of global Englishes proceeds from the
belief that the English language ‘spread from the center (England/UK/
USA etc.) until it was adapted locally, leading to distinct local varieties
of English’ (Pennycook 2010, p. 70). Such narratives about origin and
spread, here discussed in relation to English, have been problematized
for reasons that the processes are actually

more complex than … global English taking on local flavors. While

an analogy with World Englishes may bring us pluralization … there
are many limitations to such a strategy. (Pennycook 2010, p. 72)

Pennycook (2010, p. 21) argues that ‘global Englishes do not have

one point but rather multiple, co-present, global origins’. He argues
that ‘such an understanding of global Englishes reshapes the ways
in which we can understand global and local cultural and linguis-
tic formations, and takes us beyond the current debates between
monocentric and pluricentric models of English’ (p. 71). Instead of a
World Englishes Three Circles model with English spreading from its
traditional centers and appropriated as Outer and Expanding Circle
varieties (Kachru 1995), Pennycook (2010, p. 71) argues for the impor-
tance of viewing global Englishes ‘in terms of local language practices’
in order to mitigate the attention given to ‘a language entity called
English with peripheral variants’ or ‘English spreading and being
locally appropriated’, which in turn reifies a Center-Periphery motif.
Such local language practices point to repeated and grounded enact-
ments or performances of language representing local cultural and
discursive spaces while affirming local acts of identity (Pennycook
2010). The implications for the question of unequal Englishes will be
discussed later in the chapter. Suffice to say at the moment that in
relation to Japan, this Center-Periphery motif assumes deeper political
and spatial innuendos, not least on account of its post-war occupation
by none other than the powerful armed forces of an English-speaking
Center.
Meanwhile, to continue with the issue of World Englishes concep-
tualizations, Pennycook (2007) describes how such conceptualizations
set out to understand the existence of indigenized varieties of English
through a history of spread from Center to Periphery, bona fide ‘codi-
fication of local norms in dictionaries, grammar and literature’ (p. 97),
presence in education and the media, alongside documented under-
standings of the pragmatics of use, and representations in local canon.
114 Glenn Toh

Within such a framework, the immediate question that comes to mind

is whether there would be a ‘Japanese English’ as part of an Expanding
Circle of Englishes (Kachru 1995) where English at least becomes used
in aspects of local interaction, and whether codification of local norms
is taking place. In other words, the question to be addressed is whether
there is in fact a ‘describable’ variety in the making, alongside a prom-
ising canon of creative writing reflecting Japanese specificities (Hino
2009; Kachru 1995).

Japanese English: examining contrasting viewpoints

There are different opinions about the existence (or not) of a Japanese
English. The skeptical view centers around discourses capturing the
belief that the Japanese do not need English, they are perfectly at home
in Japanese, and do not learn enough of English in any case.

The Japanese can deal with almost anything in Japanese and the
majority of people do not feel the need to learn English. Do they
have opportunities to use what they have learned? No. English is
never used among the Japanese, while a language must be used if it is
to be effectively learned. Do they learn English for long enough and
intensively enough to internalize the basics of the language? Again,
no. (Yano 2011, p. 133)

What this means is that ‘the Japanese are unlikely to use English to
such an extent that they will establish a distinct Japanese English’ (Yano
2011, p. 134). This concurs with an observation made in Yamagami
and Tollefson (2011) that there is actually little benefit or reason for
Japanese to successfully acquire English, and widespread bilingualism
will, consequently, be unlikely.
There is, nonetheless, a contrasting view that posits Japanese English
to be an expectable outcome of the years of teaching and learning of
English in Japanese schools as well as its use in international com-
munication by Japanese people (Hino 2009; Honna & Takeshta 1998).
Japanese English, it is argued, is a reasonable expectation because of the
collective energy coming out of the years of English teaching and learn-
ing in school. The line of reasoning proceeds like this:

The definition of Japanese English is difficult to describe … Suffice

it to say that it is the kind of English patterns that many students
of average and above-average grades can produce after six-plus years of
training in school … The collective energy and time spent by more
 English in Japan 115

than sixty million Japanese who compulsorily studied English for

some six years is truly enormous … Japanese students should be
encouraged to take advantage of the outcome of their educational
experience. One way to achieve this is to recognize that Japanese
ordinarily are expected to speak Japanese English. (Honna &
Takeshita 1998, p. 126)

Alongside its use in international communication by Japanese peo-

ple, this ‘optimistic’ view posits that a Japanese variety of English is a
distinct possibility in the making (Hino 2009). However, arguing that
Japanese students actually do not have enough exposure to English
to use it for meaningful communication, the contrasting view prof-
fered by Yano (2011) is that the existence of a Japanese English or the
emergence of a so-called ‘recognizable’ variety cannot be simply pegged
to the teaching and learning of English as put forward by Honna and
Takeshita (1998) because the contact hours are actually much too few
(Yano 2011, p. 133):

They say [students] have studied English for 6 years from grades 7 to
12 but their contact hours are 3–5 hours a week for 40 weeks a year
for 6 years, which amounts to only 720–1200 hours in total while a
child is constantly exposed to its mother tongue … for about 30,000
hours during the first six years and in addition it has a real need to
communicate.

More importantly, regarding the perennial matter of ‘authenticity’,

Yano (2011) points out that for the Japanese, native speaker Englishes
are held to be genuine or authentic and there is a strong reverence
among the Japanese for ‘norms set by native speakers’ while non-native
varieties are judged as being ‘imperfect’ (p. 133). Honna (2008), too,
concedes that native speaker models, especially American varieties, are
held up unequally for emulation, which in turn fuels his attempts to
make the case for the evolvement of a ‘Japanese English’, which, in his
view, can be borne of classroom learning.
While the above discussion represents different ends of a cline of
beliefs about the existence (or not) of a Japanese English, as well as
the power inequalities (native-non-native, authentic-inauthentic, etc.)
thereof, the next section will add a new dimension into existing ways of
conceptualizing a Japanese English, one which draws on very different
epistemologies that do not rely on the metaphors of nativeness, origin,
spread, and indigenization.
116 Glenn Toh

Japanese English as local ‘practices and performativity’

In this section, I will focus on how the important notions of locality
and the relocalization of practices become useful for generating new
and fresh understandings of a Japanese English. My discussion is guided
by an observation from noted critical educator, Paulo Freire (1985,
p. 190): ‘We do not generalize without basing our generalizations on par-
ticulars. Before becoming universal, you are particular … Universality …
derives from the vigor and force of [the] locale’ (p. 190).
A variant of Freire (1985) can be found in Pennycook (2010, p. 128):

Everything happens locally. However global a practice may be, it

still always happens locally. The notion of the local is not therefore
confined to the non-global, as seems to be the case in various ways of
thinking about the global and the local. When we talk of the global,
we are referring to the apparent co-occurrence in different times and
places of local practices … Being local is … about the perspectives,
the language ideologies, the local ways of knowing through which
language is viewed.

In the search for alternative ontologies for a Japanese English, I will

note that the role of practices situated in local spaces provides suitable
contrasts to what a spread and indigenization paradigm has to offer. In
other words, the local is where English happens. Dominating a spread
and indigenization perspective is the reification of an unequal Center-
Periphery narrative that accords Center status to native varieties while
relegating non-native varieties to a peripheral or subaltern status (Lin
2012). However, speaking particularly about World Englishes, Lin (2012,
p. 174) notes that it inadvertently follows:

the same ‘center-periphery’ cultural imaginary, and places different

English varieties into different concentric circles, with English varie-
ties originating from Britain, United States, Canada, or Australia clas-
sified as ‘inner circle’ Englishes.

Pennycook also attempts to draw on alternative epistemologies, argu-

ing against fixations on a metaphor of ‘spread’ as in how ‘English
spread from the Center’ (Pennycook, 2010, p. 70). He argues that
English ‘cannot be usefully understood in modernist states-centric
models of imperialism or world Englishes, or in terms of traditional,
segregationist models of language’ (Pennycook 2007, p. 5). Instead, he
 English in Japan 117

turns to epistemologies suggesting that a localized form of English is in

reality a ‘relocalized’ formation (Pennycook 2010) of an already local
English. To explain this, he cites the example of the unique rhythms
of local drumbeats and hip-hop, pointing out that a localized form of
English is an outcome of cultural production borne of performance,
repetition, reproduction, and relocalization of already-used expressions
(Pennycook 2010). Pennycook (2010) therefore takes issue with the
notion of historical ties and historical spread that have fed Center-
Periphery narratives. Instead, he argues that any use of English need
not necessarily be tied to a past history, but is rather ‘to perform English
anew’ (Pennycook 2010, p. 52), noting that people ‘produce language
as a result of … local practices’ (p. 41) and that such language produc-
tions are marked by enlivened renditions of hybridization, intertextual-
ity, mimesis, and performance.
Thus, a Japanese English can be thought of as the outcome of local-
ized activities and practices, all of which claim and enact Japanese
locality and identity. Japanese English, in other words, is one that is
performed and its existence can be traced back to an epistemology
of enactment and performance in place of earlier narratives of spread
from Core to Periphery. Other examples of space-claiming performa-
tive practices include the spraying of graffiti or the occupation of
inner city spaces with graffiti (Pennycook 2010), the J-Wave bilingual
Japanese and English radio taking to the air, as well as the trend of
exploiting ‘“difference” for cultural and aesthetic effect’ (Maher 2005,
p. 88), where a new cultural wave now provides ‘an alternative para-
digm for Japan: cultural difference as cultural cool’, as in ‘You have
an Ainu name? That’s cool. Your mother’s side is Korean? That’s cool’
(Maher 2005, p. 90). Similarly, Japanese English practices, it will be
seen, are practices that take advantage of interrelationships and varia-
tions between Japanese and English cultural forms and subjectivities to
refashion local Japanese spaces and identities.
Interestingly, it is Yano’s (2011) description of the songwriting
practices of Yumi Matsutoya, a well-known Japanese singer and song-
writer that provides a vivid illustration in this connection. Matsutoya
is known for having English in her lyrics (with italics indicating
words from English), such as ‘Yakusoku tsuburete buru ni natteru’ and
‘Yowakina maindo ga anata wo anata wo oikaketeru’ (Yano 2011, p. 138).
Matsutoya’s lyrics are particularly relevant because they highlight
the way a Japanese English is both translingual and performative. By
translingual, the lyrics aptly illustrate how Japanese English is ‘both
English and Japanese’ making it almost ‘pointless … to look at [the]
118 Glenn Toh

languages as separable entities’ (Pennycook 2007, p. 114). As for the ele-

ment of performativity, the lyrics are useful in drawing attention to how
‘language and identity are products of sedimented performance rather
than pre-given categories’ (p. 98). In other words, performativity is how
language, locality, identity are produced and sustained in their perfor-
mance. Following this fresh paradigm, a Japanese English is therefore
one that is borne not so much of description, codification, or previous
history, but of a performativity that legitimates its existence.
In this connection, a point to note here is that a superficial look at
Matsutoya’s lyrics may lead (or tempt) an inexperienced observer to
conclude that the English lyrics in a Japanese track are simply the result
of an invasive or homogenizing spread of English from Center sources
(Pennycook 2007). A fresh way of looking at it, however, would be to
resist the temptation of seeing Matsutoya’s use of English as a passive act
of imitation, as if she were an unknowing ‘victim’ of the hegemonic and
homogenizing influences of English and its spread. The way English is
used suggests instead a fresh way of recontextualizing and reappropriat-
ing English, one that expresses identification, localization, and powerful
reinterpretation, richly reminiscent of how language identities are actu-
ally performed by doing rather than locked to pre-set codes.
Thus, we have in this an enlivened case of what Stanlaw (2004)
calls translingual Japanese and English, authentic and refreshing, once
removed from more staid and stolid perspectives centered on whether
there is a Japanese English categorized as an Expanding Circle variety.
Such an observation is consistent with Stanlaw’s (2004) views. While
looking at the uniqueness of English used in Japanese popular music as
well as advertisements, ideographs and other visual symbols, Stanlaw
(2004) makes concurring observations about translingual interplay
between English and Japanese, often ‘to create chick and non-con-
formist impression(s)’ (p. 165). Stanlaw considers the unique outcomes
of such interplay to be ‘Japanese English’. He notes that English per-
vades the daily life of the Japanese people and that English is in fact ‘a
creative—and necessary—force in Japanese sociolinguistics and artistic
dynamics’ and that hardly a conversation can proceed today ‘with-
out the use of English loanwords or English-based vocabulary items’
(Stanlaw 2004, p. 2). Very importantly, Stanlaw (2004) argues that ‘the
English used in Japan is not really borrowed, as is commonly thought,
but … is a created-in-Japan variety for use by Japanese in Japan (p. 2,
italics added). Hence, English becomes local in Japan precisely because
it stakes its claims on local space while animating, resonating and enliv-
ening local meanings and local practices.
 English in Japan 119

Resistance to Japanese English

One may wonder why the above descriptions of a ‘practices and per-
formativity’ conceptualization of a Japanese English are not more
widely considered in ‘academic’ discussions. There are several possible
reasons for this, apart from Pennycook’s (2007) observation that lin-
guistic phenomena growing out of what he calls a ‘spread of subcul-
tural style’ or ‘an emergence of English from below’ (p. 2) (itself a clear
admission of inequality) tend to be ignored in mainstream discussions
in language education.

ELT and educational establishment mindsets

Japan has a documented history of resistance against English and other
things foreign (Befu 2001; McVeigh 2002b; Rivers 2010; Seargeant 2009;
Yamagami & Tollefson 2011). Stanlaw (2004) notes that the Japanese
Education Ministry has regularly expressed dismay over English in the
form of ‘loanwords’ or in the form of English neologisms ‘created in
Japan’ (p. 17), a good reminder of the localized translingual practices
highlighted earlier. Given socio-historical circumstances character-
ized by narratives of resistance against English in Japan (more of this
below), the domains of such localizing performative practices may be
either missed, marginalized, or misunderstood. Opening up space for
recognizing such localizing performative practices may also be regarded
cautiously (or suspiciously) as a distraction. For Japanese policy makers
taking such a cautious view, English is best left as English and Japanese
as Japanese. Japanese English as distraction is best left in the margins.
Moreover, fresh understandings of Japanese English may also be
considered a distraction from mainstream discussions over classroom
pedagogies and target and production models (‘How do we teach
English if there is no core, native model, or standard?’). Hino (2009)
highlights the mantle of controls that enable the persistent prioritiz-
ing and privileging of ‘native’, particularly Anglo-American, varieties
while marginalizing others. Mainstream narratives on ELT continue to
be centered on curriculum, methodology, testing, and measurement
alongside ‘accurate’ target and production models, which as noted
earlier would mean an American or Anglo-American variety, to the
Japanese at least (Hino 2009; Honna 2008; Honna & Takeshita 1998).
ELT itself is ironically complicit in marginalizing a ‘practices and per-
formativity’ understanding of a Japanese English. ELT and TESOL circles
continue to operate within reductionist conceptualizations of English
(or even, for that matter, Englishes) and may likely continue in this
120 Glenn Toh

fugue of frustration over how Japanese people can (or more often can-
not) approximate a native model. I will revisit matters concerning ELT,
TESOL, and English language education later in relation to Japanese
education policy agendas. Meanwhile, I turn to important considera-
tions taking the form of political and cultural hegemonies and inequali-
ties brought on by Japan’s post-war occupation.

Nationalist ideologies and post-war history

The above challenges to fresh understandings of a Japanese English
from strongly establishment mindsets need to be further appreciated
within a larger political and historical backdrop of hegemonies and
inequalities.
In 1945, Japan was occupied by forces that spoke principally American
varieties of English. Powerful hegemonies weighed in on politics and
ideology during and after the occupation. These hegemonies have
contributed to the construction (and extension) of Japan’s lease as a
monolingual nation (Heinrich 2012; Hino 2009) and continue to imbue
a political dimension to the question of inequalities vis-à-vis Englishes.
I will first examine notions of Japanese monolingualism before linking
them to how English is mustered as a mark of foreignness in discourses
on Japanese monolingualism.

• Nihonjinron and quintessential Japaneseness

Japanese monolingualism is connected with deep national pre-

occupations over the question of what it means to be Japanese and
over what essentially constitutes Japaneseness or Japanese national
character (Befu 2001). These preoccupations, including Japanese
monolingualism, are examined in a genre of writing called nihonjinron
writings which commonly proffer reductionist or essentialist ideas of
Japanese uniqueness (Befu 2001). These include ethnocultural and eth-
nolinguistic sentiments; the unique image of Japaneseness; Japanese
monolingualism as a sign of unity, integrity, superiority, and progress;
and stereotyped trappings of ‘Japan, Inc.’ (Heinrich 2012; McVeigh
2002a), including the mythic qualities of the Japanese businessman
or the ‘Japanese way’ of doing business. McVeigh (2002a) furthermore
observes the following about attitudes towards language and people
foreign to Japanese soil:

Japanese are somehow essentially and morally linked to the Japanese

language (unlike gaikokujin or “foreigners”); that is, Japanese should
 English in Japan 121

speak Japanese because they are born Japanese … Because being

Japanese is so tightly tied to national and racial identities, non-Japa-
nese who emit signs of Japaneseness (i.e., use the Japanese language)
are calling into question linguistic boundaries; they are challenging
what are often regarded as immutable and essentialist identities.
(McVeigh 2002a, p. 124, italics added)

To build on such essentialist identities, English is rhetorically mustered

as a putative mark of foreignness: ‘“otherness”—specifically English and
the presence of foreigners—ironically builds national identity’ (McVeigh
2002b, p. 148). Indeed, the presence of English in institutional spaces
has been harnessed for promotion of conservative nationalistic ideolo-
gies: English and non-Japanese instructors are converted into ‘practices
and people that reinforce Japanese identity … the “foreign instructor” …
performs the role of the outsider coming to Japan and bearing knowl-
edge of the Other’ (McVeigh 2002b, p. 148).
The historical and political turn to these observations is one that is
linked to Japan’s post-war history, marked indelibly by the occupation
of Japan by foreign (principally American), English-speaking forces.
The humiliation of this occupation itself would no doubt jolt Japanese
memories of earlier encounters with American power when in 1853,
Commodore Matthew Perry and his kurofune (literally ‘black ships’)
forced Japan out of centuries of self-imposed isolation. The preemi-
nence accorded to a monolithic and manifestly Othered American
English is definitely not without a political-historical dimension borne
of the traumas of foreign intrusion etched in racial memory.

• Hegemonies from the Occupation

There is a vivid history behind the way English is viewed reductively

in Japan as an American cultural form. Whether it is the bureau-
cratic statist-capitalism embodied in ‘Japan Inc.’ resurrected as part
of American Cold War strategy against the rising tide of communism
(Johnson 1995; Schaller 1995) or the superiority and exclusivity of the
so-called ‘Japanese model’ or the ‘Japanese way’ often legitimated and
reified in nihonjinron literature (Befu 2001), Dower (1999, p. 558) reveals
actually that:

[m]uch of what has been characterized as a post-war ‘Japanese model’

proves to [be] a hybrid Japanese-American model: forged in war,
intensified through defeat and occupation, and maintained over the
122 Glenn Toh

ensuing decades out of … a widespread belief that Japan needed top-

level planning and protection to achieve optimum economic growth.

Indeed, the ‘Japanese model’, with all its exclusivities repeated in nihon-
jinron writings reifying ‘grandiose fixations of [Japanese] blood and
culture’ (Dower 1999, p. 558) was ultimately a product of American
patronage. This patronage fed and feted the inner circles of Japanese
Rightist-statist politics and bureaucratic capitalism, closely dependent
on the auspices of the American occupiers. Given the Cold War and the
threats posed by the rising tide of Communism, joining forces was only
advantageous for both Americans and Japanese.
While the Japanese paid polite deference to the ‘good grace of the
American overlords’ (Dower 1999, p. 559), there was also the quiet
realization that these overlords were a foreign, English-speaking Other,
to be held in juxtaposition and tolerated against a Japanese speaking
Self. The incongruities of such an arrangement would have been appar-
ent to both sides. The Americans made a strategic (possibly duplici-
tous) turnaround from their occupation agenda of democratizing and
liberalizing Japan from pre-war bigotries (Caprio & Sugita 2007); the
Japanese lived with the discomfiting truth that their patrons were an
erstwhile bitter enemy and also an English speaking foreign occupier.
The keidanren (the Japanese Economic Federation), the conservative
voice of Japanese big business, praised Supreme Commander General
MacArthur for his occupation policies (Dower 1999). With the reha-
bilitation of the bigwigs of Japanese conservatism and big business
(some war criminals included), the American occupation ultimately
supported a political economy that perpetuated inequality, exclusivity,
and a society that would remain inward-looking (Caprio & Sugita 2007;
Johnson 1995; Weiner 1994).
The point to note from the convolutions (and convulsions) of this
history is that English would continue to be viewed reductively as an
American cultural form, the tongue of an external and overlording
Other, upon which the Japanese would imbue exotic, mythic, and
heightened qualities of foreignness (McVeigh 2006), not to mention
erstwhile enmity, all too consistent with the reinforcement of Japanese
identity. To recall nomenclature from World Englishes, ‘American
English’ in such an essentialized form would stay in an ‘inner circle’ of
exclusivity, to be at once held in awe and yet viewed suspiciously as a
threat to Japaneseness. In a rather unfortunate sense, a World Englishes
paradigm ironically helps to stoke not only the primacy but also the
rarity and Otherness of the English of Japan’s post-war occupiers.
 English in Japan 123

Monolithic American English and Japanese

English—defying simple comparisons

In the above sections, I have attempted to construct, reconstruct, and

deconstruct the ontologies, epistemologies, and histories of Japan’s
monolithic conceptualization of (American) English, as well as an
emergent Japanese English epitomizing a ‘practices and performativ-
ity’ paradigm. The question to be asked of such discussion is whether
there can actually be any in-depth academic insights to be gained from
a one-to-one comparison of these two realizations of English in Japan.
Alternatively, the question is that of whether the matter of unequal
Englishes is one that needs to be about the pitting of two varieties as
a way of determining which one is dominant versus which one is not
dominant, or which one is ‘liked’ versus which one is not ‘liked’.
As noted, Japan’s inheritance of a post-war conservative autarchy and
powerful Right-leaning politics promoted preservation of an ‘unadulter-
ated ethnocultural identity’ and Japanese cultural purity (McVeigh 2006,
p. 224). One outcome is that English has been viewed, not so much in
its plural identities as Englishes, but as one imposing monolithic foreign
threat (Yamagami & Tollefson 2011). Japanese politicians commonly
identify English and other things foreign as serious affronts and antith-
eses to things Japanese. Such arguments proceed in the vein of how
‘English takes time away from Japanese language study and citizenship
education’ while ‘national unity and Japanese national identity are being
undermined by a focus on English’ (p. 31). Singularizing (or essentializ-
ing) English like this forecloses opportunities for wider recognition (and
embracement) of a plurality of Englishes. An essentialized conceptualiza-
tion of American English viewed as a monolithic cultural form is at once
held up as preeminent but also coopted into the discourses of threat.
Australian English, African-American English, or for that matter, British
English are not accorded the same polar positions of dominance or noto-
riety (Kubota 2002). Kubota tells of how teachers who are speakers of
Australian English (even here again, one monolithic Australian English)
were asked to change their accents to sound American. Similarly, Black
American English and Southeast Asian varieties are thought of negatively
(Honna 2008; Kubota 2002). Thus in a very real sense, Japan is only able
to countenance (stomach, tolerate, or deign to) the presence of only one
dominant type of English, both as ornament for awe and admiration
(Seargeant 2009) but also as target for repudiation as external threat.
There remains little room left for serious consideration of (or comparison
with) another English, let alone a plurality of Englishes.
124 Glenn Toh

In terms of academic inquiry however, this does not mean that

matters concerning Japanese essentializations of American English
and an emergent ‘practices and performativity’ conceptualization of
Japanese English cannot be examined in more nuanced (and reveal-
ing) dimensions vis-à-vis English language education in Japan. As I
seek to do this in the next section, I am very conscious of the need to
extend beyond direct one-to-one comparisons (which English is loved,
which is not, etc.) to deeper confluences of educational, socio-cultural,
spatial, historical, and political factors contributing to inequalities in
cultural and power relations vis-à-vis the presence and enactments of
English in Japan.

Spatial inequalities and incompatibilities between English

language education and an emergent Japanese English
Given the historical and political factors that precipitate essentialist
and politically embedded positions concerning the English language
in Japan, existing English language education paradigms (TESOL, TEFL
implicated) and an emergent ‘practices and performativity’ conceptu-
alization of Japanese English are ontologically poised to inhabit very
different social, discursive, and ideological spaces. That these spaces
receive sharply unequal recognition is something which attests to the
power of (1) the custodians of nihonjinron, who would see performativ-
ity and hybridity as a ‘threat to … linguistic, cultural and political sta-
bility’ (Pennycook 2007, pp. 14–15) and (2) the conservative influences
on English language education. I attend to both of these issues in the
following two sub-sections.

• Performativity and hybridity as threat

The nervousness evoked from the educational establishment, by attrib-

utes of both performativity and hybridity in an emergent Japanese
English, will not be hard to imagine. Performativity, in the way it pro-
duces and reproduces language, locality, and identity, will render all
three dynamic, contingent, and negotiable rather than stable, static,
and pre-given. Hybridity similarly constitutes a direct affront to the
purity, uniqueness, and Japaneseness that nihonjinron seeks vigilantly to
guard. For these reasons and those relating to monolithic conceptualiza-
tions of American English, an emergent ‘practices and performativity’
conceptualization of Japanese English is unlikely to gain significant
traction in the near future, at least not in the mindsets of education’s
officialdom, where stability and status quo are considered important for
the maintenance of national identity and patriotism (Kubota 2011b).
 English in Japan 125

• Conservative influences on English language education

The present Courses of Study guidelines issued by the Education Ministry

do not give recognition to a variety of Englishes (Hino 2009). To wit,
a putative linkage of English to an Othered rendition of Whiteness
remains a backhanded way to engender Japaneseness among the young
(McVeigh 2006; Stewart & Miyahara 2011; Toh 2013):

‘real’ English speakers are white and have blonde hair and blue
eyes … Learning to speak English competently is not enough; one
must obtain neiteibusupika (‘native speaker’) level. The best one can
achieve is an artificial, simulated version of English that does not
violate one’s inherent Japaneseness. (McVeigh 2006, p. 152)

In other words, the cultural politics of nihonjinron and its reverence for
the sacrosanctity of Japaneseness demands that the influence of English
among young Japanese be tamed or neutered through its containment
and Othering as one monolithic foreign (principally White American)
language. English is allowed a controlled form of existence while at the
same time subject to an underhand form of Othering. Any attempt to
destabilize prevailing monolithic notions of American English native
speakerism is also an attempt to destabilize one of nihonjinron’s most
revered totems. To maintain Japaneseness, English must be subject to
the godfatherhood of nihinjinron politics as well as to the particular-
ized (nannying) formalities of English language education in Japan—a
matter to which I will now turn.

• Formalized structures shown to be exclusionary

The containment and controls exercised through the carefully engi-

neered Othering of a monolithic conceptualization of American
English are complemented by formalized and reductionist forms of
English language education practices to reinforce the ‘foreignness’ and
‘un-realness’ of English. In Japan, English language education features
strongly in narratives relating to formal paper qualifications, entrance
examinations, standardized tests, employment, and promotion (Kubota
2011a; Maher 2005; McVeigh 2002b, 2006; Murphey 2004). These are
in turn a part of the organizational, administrative, ministerial, and
commodified structures (and strictures) that Japanese business and
political agendas have foisted on English language education (Kubota
2011a; McVeigh 2002b, 2006; Stanlaw 2004). For example, the com-
modification of standardized testing can be seen in the way the TOEIC
test, a reductionist multiple-choice test using decontextualized items to
126 Glenn Toh

test reading and listening ability is thought of widely (but, as Kubota

(2011a) argues, mistakenly) as a good measure of one’s suitability for
employment or promotion. Stanlaw (2004) similarly describes how
Japanese university entrance examinations are characterized by their
use of decontextualized ‘picayune’ bit test items (p. 86) on obscure
aspects of grammar or phonology—what Toh (2012, p. 305) describes
as ‘highly contrived and controlled ways of having students answer
questions about English without having them know the language well
enough for them to develop an attachment to it’. Murphey (2004)
similarly describes the un-realness and dysfunctionality of the Japanese
entrance examination question formats and the examination commit-
tees that create them.
In contrast, relocalization, performativity, and translingual practices
and the emergent Japanese English enacted through them are very
real. They are part of real and fast-expanding (but officially under-
acknowledged) performative spaces auguring authenticity, newness,
and transformation. Speaking about hybridity, shifting allegiances, and
new cultural flows, Maher (2005, p. 89) describes the following: their
‘operating system … is Cool. Ethnic absolutism is out. Cool is in. Cool
is now the main operating principle of cultural hybridity’. Operating in
a similar vein as Maher’s (2005) Cool, an emergent Japanese English is
closing in on the restive spaces where the worst of policy, bureaucracy,
capitalism, and ethnocentricity (Canagarajah 2005) come face-to-face
with new hybridities, performativities, and localized enactments of
English. The free-and-easy realms of creative local practices (Pennycook
2010) are too often incompatible with the formalized (but powerful)
structures linked to university entrance, employment, and promotion.
While the newer and fresher enactments of an emergent Japanese
English may expose English language education and its collocation
with examinations and instrumentalism to be in a state of stodginess,
existing structures of power and privilege will mean that an emergent
Japanese English will be viewed as unequal and with skepticism, if not
derogatively.

Conclusion

With the large number of conversation schools spread across Japanese

cities and with universities ever wanting to employ new English teach-
ers to teach on English programs, one might be lured into thinking that
Japan is experiencing a renaissance of sorts with the English language.
The reality of course is that Japan is not in the happiest of situations
 English in Japan 127

with the matter of English, let alone Englishes. In graphic terms, Japan’s
agenda of English-as-threat will remain a game of ‘Catch’ as long as
Japan’s cultural connoisseurs and political eagles continue to indulge
nihonjinron as an enduring game of cultural ‘Tail-Chasing’. Hino (2009)
wonders darkly whether it might have been ‘better’ if Japan had been a
colony of English speaking masters. Meanwhile, the teaching and learn-
ing of English takes place within a narrow band of formalized testing
and examination practices (Murphey 2004; Toh 2012) while subject to
restrictive socio-cultural and socio-historical narratives. If one brings in
the matter of Englishes using a World Englishes paradigm, such narra-
tives, in corroboration with the categorization of a plurality of Englishes
in Inner, Outer and Expanding varieties, further fuel inequalities (and
pre-judgments) amongst these Englishes.
At a person-to-person level, Japanese people may define their continued
weakness in English as part of a cultural narrative of Japaneseness (Befu
2001; McVeigh 2006). I add here on a personal note that as a non-White
speaker of English, I routinely encounter mixtures (fixtures) of wonder,
admiration, and surprise from Japanese acquaintances when they find out
that a true-brown Asian like me will use English, Japanese, and Cantonese
with my half-Japanese offspring. Mixed marriages and hybridity, coupled
with Otherness in the English language command an aura of rarity, which
results in non-computation and disbelief where the attributes of purity
and essentialism are revered. One wonders if this present state of affairs
is more than a matter of a concatenation (or confluence) of misplaced
parochialism, misaligned loyalties, unwarranted bigotries, nervous vacil-
lations, late decisions, and missed opportunities. Japan appears to be still
in two minds concerning English and Englishes (Hino 2009; Honna 2008;
Toh 2012). As has been discussed, such a state of affairs is ultimately part
of a superintendent regime of political and cultural mythologies where
inequalities are both inherent and structural. Until the myths in such nar-
ratives are exposed and contested, such inequalities will remain.

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7
Performing Gayness and
English in an Offshore
Call Center Industry
Aileen O. Salonga

Gendered analyses of call center work and communication have mostly

focused on the link between feminization and the call center industry
in terms of, first, the greater number of female call center workers vis-
à-vis male ones who engage in frontline customer service work in both
the source countries and offshore locations (Belt 2002; Belt et al. 2000;
Breathnach 2002; Elmoudden 2005; Fernandez & Sosa 2005); and,
second, what Cameron (2000a, 2000b) characterizes as the feminized
speech style that call center workers are required to use. Both are defi-
nitely useful ways of examining the issue of gender in the call centers.
However, they are not enough to account for what seems like a unique
development taking place in the Philippine offshore situation: the
great—and increasing—number of gay men in the industry (Salonga
2010; also see Bolton 2010).1 Given the call center data in most loca-
tions, both in the source countries like the United States and the United
Kingdom, and offshore like India, this trend or phenomenon seems to
be taking place only in the Philippines.
In this chapter, I explore the relationship between performing gay-
ness and performing English, or between gay identity2 and certain
sociolinguistic practices that allow the gay identity to thrive in the
industry. In the process, I look into how the success of gay call center
workers in the industry may be considered as a possibility of linguistic
agency in which alternative forms of linguistic expressions and identi-
ties find meaning, thrive, and pave the way for transformative practices.
I do end, however, on a cautionary note that, while the success of the
gay identity is linked to certain linguistic resources that are valued in
the industry, success in the industry is also often tied to other social
identities as well. Specifically, while gayness is valued, because it is per-
ceived as able to index qualities that are considered important in the
130
 Performing Gayness and English 131

call centers, it also intersects with the ability to use a particular kind of
English, which is tied to other social categories such as class. What this
ultimately suggests is that it is not only one’s gayness, but also other
kinds of social positionings that guarantee one’s success in the industry.
Thus, the call center industry as a space that allows for agency, while
true for some, remains inaccessible to many largely because the use of
English in the industry serves not only a stratifying but also a gatekeep-
ing function, revealing often-masked social inequities.
The narratives of 20 call center workers, the majority of whom were
customer service representatives (CSRs) at the time of the interview,
form the basis of this chapter. I recruited the informants through the
social network (or friends of friends) method (Milroy 1980), and col-
lected their narratives from June 2007 to September 2008 as part of
a bigger research project (see Salonga 2010). Out of the 20 call center
workers interviewed, twelve were male and eight were female. Seven of
the 12 male informants were gay. This information was made known
to me either prior to the interview, because I had an existing relation-
ship with the informant, or during the interview, because the inform-
ant mentioned it. In the course of the analysis, I provide background
information on the informant. I translated the responses that were in
Filipino3 or Taglish4 into English with the original Filipino/Taglish in
bold and the translation in brackets. Pseudonyms are used in identify-
ing the informants.

Feminization and gay identity in the offshore call center

The link between femininity and call center work is well established
with most studies reporting that about 60 percent to 70 percent of call
center workers who engage in frontline customer service work in both
the source countries and offshore locations are women (Belt 2002; Belt
et al. 2000; Breathnach 2002; Elmoudden 2005; Fernandez & Sosa 2005).
Studies of the feminization of call center work have generally looked to
the gender division of labor as an explanation for this phenomenon.
Sociological studies of work have demonstrated that labor is gendered,
with some jobs billed as ‘men’s work’ and other jobs regarded as ‘wom-
en’s work’ (Kerfoot & Korczynski 2005; Leidner 1993; McDowell 2007;
Webster 1996). ‘Men’s work’ tends to include jobs that are invested
with qualities stereotypically considered masculine, such as leadership,
decisiveness, intellect, and toughness, while women’s work tends to
include those jobs that emphasize the stereotypically feminine values
of nurturance, empathy, and cooperation. Within this configuration,
132 Aileen O. Salonga

service work is considered ‘women’s work’, given that it capitalizes on

the aforementioned feminine values. Not surprisingly, ‘men’s work’
tends to be dominated by men, and ‘women’s work’ by women. ‘Men’s
work’ and ‘women’s work’ are also differentially valued, with the former
often invested with power and respectability, while the latter is not
(Leidner 1993; Marchand & Runyan 2000; McDowell 2007; Webster
1996). Studies have shown that the gender division of labor makes
the correspondence between genders and the jobs to which they have
been assigned seem natural, but in fact, such a division is based on and
shaped by the structural inequalities between men and women in soci-
ety as a whole, and stereotypes about what men and women supposedly
do and are supposedly good at (Forseth 2005; Gustavsson 2005;
Kerfoot & Korczynski 2005; Leidner 1993; McDowell 2007).
Within the context of the call center, Cameron (2000b) argues that
the verbal behavior or speech required of call center agents indexes a
feminine persona, since this speech style has certain characteristics—
politeness, sincerity, friendliness, and deference—that are associated
with ‘women’s language’ (WL). The notion of ‘women’s language’ (or
WL) began with the publication of Robin Lakoff’s Language and Woman’s
Place in 1975. In this seminal publication, Lakoff ([1975] 2004) proposes
that the way women use language can be characterized by the use of
weak expletives (or none at all), a specialized vocabulary (with more spe-
cific terms for color and a wider range of words for activities tradition-
ally associated with women, such as cooking), empty adjectives (divine,
charming, fantastic), excessively polite forms (I wonder if you could tell me
the time), hedges (well, kind of, maybe, sort of), a hypercorrect grammar
(one that avoids slang expressions such as ain’t), a rising intonation
even on declaratives or statements, and/or tag questions even in con-
texts where a question is not necessarily being asked (Cameron 2000b;
Coates 1993; Crawford 1995). While empirical research has shown that
Lakoff’s claim is not necessarily true5—that is, ‘not all women use WL
and not all WL-users are women’ (Cameron 2000b, p. 333)—Lakoff’s
work ([1975] 2004) has nevertheless ushered in a proliferation of stud-
ies that examine the differences between how women and men use
language (Coates 1993; Crawford 1995; Holmes 1995; Holmes & Stubbe
2003; Tannen 1990, 1994). Overall, what these differences suggest is
that ‘women are more cooperative conversationalists and more sensi-
tive to the face-wants of others’ (Cameron 2000b, p. 330). As a result,
women tend to be more polite, using more indirect and polite linguis-
tic forms and structures (Coates 1993; Crawford 1995; Holmes 1995;
Holmes & Stubbe 2003; Lakoff [1975] 2004; Tannen 1990, 1994).
 Performing Gayness and English 133

There also remains a popular notion of WL that generally draws on

stereotypical ideas about how women and men talk (Cameron 2000b,
p. 333). Cameron adds that no matter how ‘inaccurate’ and ‘unsatisfac-
tory’ this notion of ‘women’s language’ may be from the standpoint
of both empirical research and academic scholarship, it ‘provides a
powerful symbolic “meaning resource” for “stylistic agents” to draw on’
(2000b, p. 333, italics in the original). In the context of the call center
industry, this is particularly important because call centers have ‘appro-
priated and recombined’ certain elements of the ‘symbolic construct’
of ‘women’s language’ in creating a particular speech style that works
within its notion of professional service (p. 334). Similar to the notion of
the gender division of labor that ‘naturalizes’ the link between women
and particular kinds of jobs, the symbolic relationship between call
center talk and femininity also works to ‘naturalize’ the fit between
women and call center work.
The presence of an increasing number of gay men in the industry
seems to draw on this symbolic construct as well, albeit in an even more
indirect fashion. From the narratives of my informants, the link is, on
the one hand, between women and gay men, and on the other, between
gayness and the performance of femininity.6 The first relationship is
not surprising as it derives from the stereotypical notion that gay men
are just like women. As a result, since women thrive in the call centers,
so too do gay men. Josh, a gay informant who is a language trainer/
specialist, commenting on the number of women and men in the
industry, notes that there seems to be an equal number of women and
men in the industry, but

on the standpoint of emotion, it seems like there are more women,

because you have a good chunk of women and … gay men. A lot of
gay people in call centers, I have to tell you.

What Josh is doing here is aligning the gay men with the women, sug-
gesting that they are emotionally alike. Because of this emotional affin-
ity, the women and gay men can be counted together. As a result, even if
it were the case that there were an equal number of women and men in
the call centers, there would still be more women than men.
However, this link is clarified later on as not so much between women
and gay men, but rather femininity and gay men. Josh also notes, ‘[Gays
are] attuned to their feminine [side]’. This is a comment that my other
informants echo, suggesting that it is not so much that women and
gay men are alike emotionally, but that gay men are able to perform
134 Aileen O. Salonga

femininity, or more specifically, traits that are symbolically associated

with femininity. For instance, Jean, a female informant who is a cus-
tomer service representative, notes:

There’s a lot of gays in call centers, kasi, siguro magaling mag-

project ng happy, magaling silang maging happy na kahit irate
na pagnaka-mute, pag sumagot talagang very professional tapos
andun yung ‘I’m willing to serve you’ na tone of voice. [because
they know how to project/act ‘happy’ even when they are already irate.
They may be irate when the phone is on mute, but once they pick up, they
have it down pat. They have this perfectly professional voice with just the
right touch of this ‘I’m willing to serve you’ tone.]

In this response, the ability to project good, positive feelings is under-

scored through the use of the word ‘happy’, and the linguistic manifes-
tation is the tone of voice that clearly says ‘I’m willing to serve you’.
While a ‘happy’ and ‘I’m willing to serve you tone’ is not an inherently
feminine characteristic, the indexical relationship between them is nev-
ertheless drawn upon, because the point of reference in making sense
of why there are many gay men in the industry is the set of linguistic
practices that is already symbolically linked with femininity, and the
point of departure is that gay men are in touch with their feminine side.
Josh has an interesting follow-up to this point:

Some of [the gay men], they sound like a man on the phone, anyway,
but since they’re attuned to their femininity, and everything, you
know, they have better rapport.

In this response, Josh is making a distinction between gay men who

sound like men on the phone and those who employ a feminine
persona and therefore sound female.7 At this point, Josh seems to be
suggesting that it does not matter if the agent sounds like a man or a
woman, dissolving the earlier link made between women and gay men,
because the more important aspect is being attuned to one’s femininity.
Femininity here is very clearly cast as being able to create rapport. In
fact, he says ‘better rapport’ which also suggests an interesting observa-
tion made by some of my informants—that is, some gay men are in fact
better agents than some female agents because they seem to be better at
building rapport or doing, in the words of Hochschild, ‘emotional labor’
([1983] 2003). That gay men perform femininity better than women (or
the notion that gay men are better at ‘being women’) is an observation
 Performing Gayness and English 135

that has been made by gender scholars such as Hall (1995) in her study
of phone sex workers. Josh continues to say that call center work ‘is like
show business. You have to act. Even if you don’t care about the person,
you have no choice. You have to act like you care for the person’. Again,
the acting that is being done here is that of caring, caring for another
person, which, as Cameron (2000a, 2000b) has established, is culturally
coded as feminine.

Challenges to structures of control

Early critics of the call center industry in the United Kingdom and
the United States have described call centers as ‘“customer service fac-
tories”, as the “sweatshops of the twenty-first century”, and as “dark
satanic mills”’ (Belt et al. 2000, p. 368). While they differ in their use of
terms, many scholars nevertheless agree that call center work remains
extremely regimented, strictly monitored, and extraordinarily stressful
(Russell 2006; Taylor & Bain 2005, 2006). Similarly, the language used
in call centers has been characterized as highly scripted, stylized, and
pre-packaged (Cameron 2000a, 2000b). Cameron labels call centers as
‘communication factories’ (2000a, 2000b) and explains how the CSRs’
lack of control over their work production crystallizes in the kind of talk
that CSRs are required to use when interacting with customers, specifi-
cally in how CSRs are required to say certain things and say them in a
certain way. In this regard, Cameron deems call centers as spaces where
workers cannot claim linguistic and/or stylistic agency (2000a, 2000b).
As a result of these constraints, call center workers are deemed as hav-
ing little to no control over workplace practices and their own linguistic
production at work.
While these structures of control remain in place, the presence of gay
men in the call centers seems to challenge them, as it provides spaces
for linguistic agency. Specifically, what the Philippine call centers seem
to offer is a venue in which call center workers, specifically the gay
men in the industry, can use their linguistic skills to perform a kind of
identity that is normally constrained or deemed threatening in, specifi-
cally, more traditional workplaces, and generally, in Philippine society.
For this reason, many of my informants contend that despite the chal-
lenges in the call centers, the industry is nevertheless an empowering
and liberating space (for other reasons, see Salonga 2010). The fact that
gay men thrive in the call centers is seen as recognition of the linguistic
practices that they can bring into the table and the normalcy and legiti-
macy of the gay identity. Sarah, a female language trainer/specialist,
136 Aileen O. Salonga

notes that people in the call centers ‘come in all shapes and sizes’. She
continues: ‘[Call center workers may be] girl, boy, bakla, tomboy [gay,
lesbian] … beautiful, not so beautiful, dark, fair, everything’. Charles,
also a gay informant who works as a CSR, confirms that the call centers
‘are open for everybody as long as you can do the job. It doesn’t mat-
ter if you’re old, young, straight, gay. As long as you deliver, it’s great’.
From these responses, it is possible to see the call center industry in
the Philippines as a place where linguistic agency is potentially possible,
as it allows for and encourages the performance of linguistic practices
and identities that are generally not valued in other, more traditional
industries. For gay men especially, it seems that the industry provides a
space where they can be true to who they are and not be persecuted; in
fact, they can and are even rewarded for staying true to who they are.

‘English’ as gatekeeper

It is tempting to submit to the claim that the call center workplace is a

liberating and empowering space despite the systems of control at work
there. However, although indeed many of my informants consider the
link between gayness and the performance of femininity as a means
of explaining the presence and success of gay men in the industry, an
interesting and rather unique notion of performance also emerges in
my data. Will, also a gay informant who is a language trainer/specialist,
believes that the reason why many gay men get accepted to work in the
industry and eventually excel is because they are not afraid to perform.
However, he turns to the English requirement to explain his point. Will
says that gay men are not afraid to learn and perform the preferred vari-
ety of English, and are not at all shy in exaggerating sounds to achieve
the preferred accent:

I noticed that the gays have a lot of fun experimenting actually on

the accent. They’re not too shy twisting their tongues until they get
it right. They are not afraid to exaggerate … Say, for example, we’re
going to teach them the ‘e’ sound, a very difficult sound, vowel
sound, for most Filipinos. Gays are really open there. They drop their
jaw until they get the sound right. They would really exaggerate and
they’re not ashamed, because they would just laugh at it.

Will adds that since gay agents think of call center talk simply as a mat-
ter of performing particular sounds, they pick up the desired variety and
accent right away, allowing them to perform their job well and succeed
 Performing Gayness and English 137

in the industry. What is interesting in this observation is that it redirects

the obvious link, the performance of femininity, to something that is
less obvious, the performance of English, the implications of which
turn the analysis from the issue of gender to other social positionings
that allow call center agents to perform the desired variety of English in
the industry. In other words, this suggests that one can also be gay but
not necessarily be able to perform the desired English in the industry.
One can twist one’s tongue and drop one’s jaw again and again and
again, and in the end still not get the right sounds, because getting
the right sounds implicates not only gayness but education and social
class (among many other social factors) as well. This is exactly what
happened to Vash,8 as narrated to me by one of my informants. He was
poor and gay, and was a garment sewer in a factory before he applied as
a call center agent. He was highly motivated but still failed his training
miserably because he was a ‘lost cause’. He could not even differentiate
between ‘b’ and ‘v’. In short, despite performing gayness, he failed to
perform the right English.
Sarah, a language trainer, provides the possible context for the indus-
try’s rejection of Vash:

You have to admit, really, the middle class to the well off, they’re the
ones who actually get to watch cable, or they’re the ones who get to
buy dictionaries and encyclopedias for their kids, or the quality of
education that they get, you know, everything just works for them.
So, for example, even if [they] didn’t graduate from college—a lot
of call centers do welcome undergrads—their high school education
probably came from Ateneo, La Salle Greenhills, or even Miriam
[exclusive private schools in the Philippines]. They survive and
thrive in the contact center industry. They grew up with computers.
They grew up with all of the cable channels available to you and they
are very comfortable with the language. That’s an edge right there.

The performance of English in the industry is therefore hinged not

on one’s gender alone and the traits associated with such gender, but on
the other social categories one inhabits. Proficiency in English is, after
all, tied to where one is located in the social structure. The critical point
that this foregrounds is that a singular analytical category like gender
needs to be coupled with other analytical categories for the analysis to
more fully accommodate and account for complex social realities.
In the offshore context, the English requirement is, in fact, another
layer of control and an additional burden (Salonga 2010; Shome 2006;
138 Aileen O. Salonga

Sonntag 2009). If not a burden or mechanism of control, it is neverthe-

less construed as a critical component in getting into the industry and
having a successful career (Forey & Lockwood 2007). As my informants
themselves report, only three to four out of a hundred applicants make it
in the industry due to the applicants’ low level of English proficiency
(also reported in Forey & Lockwood 2007; Martin 2010). The relatively
high level of English proficiency9 required in the industry therefore
already serves as a gatekeeping practice that effectively sifts out who
among the applicants will eventually get into the industry. The English
requirement effectively discriminates against a large number of people,
this group occupying a particular set of subjectivities, such as being
poor and educated in a marginalized rural community. It is helpful to
see the gatekeeping function of English in the call center industry within
the context of the larger Philippine society in which the use of English
remains highly stratified along class lines (Bautista 1996; Sibayan &
Gonzalez 1996; Tayao 2008; for a comprehensive review, see Tupas
2001a, 2001b, 2004). This parallel serves to explain that on a bigger
scale, Filipino language users have different and differential degrees of
access to and relationships with English, and this has significant impli-
cations for how they live their lives. As Tupas (2004) notes, English in
the Philippines is enmeshed in ‘the politics of power and social stratifica-
tion, which are both responsible for the distribution of wealth (of which
language is a part) in society, as well as the maintenance of the status
quo’ (p. 53). However, the relationship between English and social life
is one that, while generally acknowledged, is not seriously examined.
For instance, the blindness of some of my informants to the impli-
cations of the English language requirement for the larger Philippine
population, or at the very least, their inability to make the connection
between the English requirement and the kinds of social identities that
become successful in the industry, may be a result of their own position-
ing in the social structure. True, my informants provide ample examples
of how success in the industry relates to performing English and other
identities as a feminized, indeed ‘gay’, practice. But these are gay people
who are now speaking from within the industry, who have indeed per-
formed the desirable identities in the workplace. These are gay people
whose social positionings have given them access to what is considered
a desirable English. To a great extent, the English requirement does not
affect them in the sense that they already have the required variety of
English at their disposal, so they are not able to see from a critical stand-
point that what is accessible to them is not automatically or necessarily
open to others.
 Performing Gayness and English 139

Most call center workers also do not see that, while it may indeed be
liberating to arrive as one pleases and not worry about how one looks
in the call center workplace, the reason behind this nonchalance about
appearance should also be examined. Call center workers are not seen;
they are only heard. Jean, in fact, notes that they are asked to be in
business clothes when there are visiting clients. Essentially, this means
that call center workers are allowed to wear whatever they want to wear,
because they are not going to be seen by the customers. The gay men
in the industry are free to cross-dress, because there are no customers
on site to offend. These customers do not see them. They only hear
their voice. Consequently, what this means is that instead of looking
a certain way, call center workers now have to sound a certain way.
Producing the desired sound may prove just as difficult as, or perhaps
even more difficult than, producing the desired look. In this regard, call
center workers are, indeed, not judged based on how they look, but on
how they sound. Apart from emotional labor, offshore call center work-
ers also perform what Mirchandani (2008, p. 88) calls ‘aesthetic labor’,
or the practice of sounding right. For this reason, equally, call center
workers can be abused or punished if they do not achieve the desired
sound. Or those gay call center applicants who may be quite good at
performing femininity may still not make it to the industry because
they cannot perform ‘good’ English. In the end, they still do not sound
‘right’. This suggests that modes of discrimination only change and take
on different forms; they are never entirely eliminated.

Conclusion

On the whole, while call center workers are able to recast the call center
workplace as an empowering and liberating space, specifically as it
allows for the existence and success of the gay identity, it does seem that
they also enter into other kinds of arrangements that are not necessarily
equitable. The fact that the gay identity is not the sole determining fac-
tor of success in, even entry to, the industry suggests that it is embedded
in other kinds of social positionings that are ultimately tied to one’s
place in the social structure. In addition, the discriminatory function
that English serves in the industry, coupled with the blindness of some
call center workers to the uneven implications of certain practices in
the industry, tends to maintain and recreate existing inequalities such
that only particular kinds of people, usually those who are already privi-
leged, given that they have been deemed to speak the desired variety of
English, can take part in what the industry has to offer.
140 Aileen O. Salonga

Notes
1. There are no official statistics on the population of gay men in the industry.
However, as is shown later in the chapter, this is an observation that keeps
recurring from both call center industry observers and insiders. At this point,
it is unclear whether there are also a good number of lesbians in the industry.
It is safe to assume so, but as far as the formal and informal literature is con-
cerned, the focus seems to be on male homosexuals.
2. The notion of gay identity is not developed or problematized in this chapter.
It is used only in the most common sense that the informants of the study
use it: in reference to men who also like other men. Some distinctions will
appear in the data later, e.g. gay men who use a feminine persona while on
the phone, but these distinctions are also loose. However, the chapter does
subscribe to the idea that ‘gayness’ is a socially constructed and contested
term, one that needs to be made sense of in relation to other social categories.
3. Filipino is the national language of the Philippines.
4. Taglish is the code-switched form that mixes Tagalog, a Philippine language,
and English, a form used frequently in Manila, the site of my fieldwork.
5. More contemporary research also contends that, in fact, Lakoff’s thesis is
not necessarily about the differences in the way women and men speak but
largely about power and how power differentials affect and influence lan-
guage use (Hall 2003).
6. The informants in Bolton (2010) also make this link.
7. One common practice in the industry is that of gay men taking on a feminine
persona by using a feminine-sounding voice while on the phone. Sometimes,
they also use feminine names like Sunshine (as documented in Bolton 2010).
8. Vash’s story is narrated in more detail in Salonga (2010). The full narrative
may also be found at http://sexybetweentheears.blogspot.com/2008/04/vash.
html.
9. Also described as ‘native-like fluency’ by some of my informants.

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Part III
Englishes in Changing
Multilingual Spaces
8
Earning Capital in Hawai‘i’s
Linguistic Landscape
Christina Higgins

In its traditional formulation, the sociolinguistic concept of diglossia

(Ferguson 1959; Fishman 1967) takes inequality as a starting point. In
multilingual societies described as diglossic, ‘vernacular’, non-official
language varieties are relegated to informal, private, and usually low
prestige contexts while official languages, often the legacies of colonial
rule, are reserved for formal and public contexts which by their very
nature index high prestige. Language in Hawai‘i is said to demonstrate
this type of diglossia, where English is a co-official state language along
with Hawaiian, and where Pidgin (also known as Hawai‘i Creole) is more
or less only deemed appropriate for low prestige contexts (Marlow &
Giles 2010; Reinecke 1969; Romaine 1999; Sato 1991). The English
specific to Hawai‘i is generally not stigmatized even though Local1
people recognize that there are differences between mainland US and
Hawai‘i varieties of the language. On the other hand, Local people often
take pains to distinguish between ‘proper English’ and Pidgin, often
referring to the latter as a form of ‘broken English’. Of course, Pidgin
arguably carries covert prestige (Labov 1966), for speaking this language
is a crucial way to mark oneself as Local amongst a population made
up of short-term visitors, transplants from the mainland United States,
immigrants, and other recent arrivals. Recently, Pidgin has become
more visible in Hawai‘i’s public sphere, however, which may be both
a result of the expression of its value and a catalyst for increasing its
value in the future. In this chapter, I argue that beyond representing
mere covert prestige, this unequal language is potentially undergoing
a prestige shift, since it is now being used to buy and sell in the mar-
ketplace and to take a political stance, and this has implications for its
symbolic—and even economic—value.

145
146 Christina Higgins

As Blommaert (2005, p. 411) explains, inequality has to do with modes

of language use, not with languages, and if we intend to do something
about it, we need to develop an awareness that it is not necessarily the
language you speak, but how you speak it, when you can speak it, and
to whom that matters. Through exploring modes of language use, this
case of an ‘unequal’ language moving into new sociolinguistic domains
thus sheds new light on the dynamic nature of inequality, prestige, and
diglossia in contexts where English is presumed to be the language of
choice in ‘high’ domains. It also suggests that the assertion of Local iden-
tities is providing new and rich areas for further study of these topics.

Shifts in language inequality in Hawai’i

In studying the modes of English and Pidgin use, it is important to

acknowledge that over the course of its history, Pidgin has shifted in sta-
tus from being an unremarkable lingua franca to that of an unequal lan-
guage, and more recently, to a language that embodies Local-style pride.
In nineteenth century Hawai‘i, the establishment of sugar plantations
led to the decline of the Hawaiian language and helped to promote
the birth of a Hawaiian-based Pidgin that later developed into Hawai‘i
Pidgin English (Sato 1993). HPE was used as a link language among the
primarily Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and English speak-
ing populations on plantations and in port areas. Until the turn of the
century, HPE was an instrumental language used for communicative
purposes. Of course, social class was certainly relevant in people’s lives,
but there was a great deal of segregation between plantation workers
and wealthy, land-owning Caucasians and aristocratic Hawaiians. The
latter sent their children to expensive private schools while plantation
workers’ children attended missionary schools and public schools, once
they had been established. This segregated system continued under
the auspices of the English Standard schools, established in 1924 to
serve the increasing number of Caucasian Americans who moved to the
islands after the Territory of Hawai‘i was established. Since most of
the recently arrived haoles were not wealthy landowners, they could not
afford the expensive private schools. Rather than sending their children
to the public schools along with the children of plantation laborers,
they demanded education specifically for their children (Benham &
Heck 1998). Consequently, English Standard schools were established,
and admission to these schools was contingent on an oral language test.
Unsurprisingly, children who spoke Pidgin or Pidgin-influenced English
did not pass the test and were enrolled in public schools instead. As
 Earning Capital in Hawai‘i’s Linguistic Landscape 147

Romaine (1999, p. 289) writes, ‘By institutionalizing what was essen-

tially racial discrimination along linguistic lines, the schools managed
to keep creole speakers in their “place”’.
These schools created a race-based stratification system that had a
direct impact on language inequality. Even though Pidgin was the norm
in plantation communities, negative attitudes developed and became
pervasive during the 1920s and 1930s, even among Pidgin speakers,
due to the influence of English Standard schools and their concomitant
ideologies which linked race, language, and social class. Public schools
therefore became centers of language subordination. For example,
‘Better English Week’ was held at one public high school in 1926 as
a way to discourage students from speaking Pidgin. During the week,
one of the classes held a ceremony which ‘married’ McKinley High to
Good English, and another class put Pidgin on trial for ‘slaughtering
good English with his double-edged tongue’ (McKinley Yearbook 1926).
Pidgin was found guilty, of course, and it received a death sentence. A
coffin marked ‘Pidgin English’ was buried as part of the closing ceremo-
nies of the week. Though such activities clearly sought to discourage the
language at schools, Pidgin continued to be spoken among plantation
workers and their families, and it developed covert prestige as a source
of solidarity and Local identity. Overt prestige was attached to English
due to its association with exclusivity and privilege in the English
Standard schools (Romaine 1999, p. 289). These schools were disman-
tled after World War II, but negative attitudes toward Pidgin had already
become institutionalized along race and class boundaries.
In more recent decades, Pidgin has enjoyed a shift to a more positive
status. The 1970s and the period of the Hawaiian Renaissance brought
a great deal of attention to Local identity and created a context for
people to show pride in their languages and cultures. On a grander scale,
this was spurred on by the Civil Rights Era. At the 1978 Constitutional
Convention in Hawai‘i, the Hawaiian language became the official state
language alongside English. During this time, Hawaiian cultural tradi-
tions flourished: traditional slack-key guitar became popular, the Merrie
Monarch competition began as a celebration of hula, and the traditional
Polynesian non-instrument sailing vessel, the Hōkūlea, made its first
voyage. Support for Pidgin was also expressed at this time in plays about
Hawai‘i, written by Local playwrights, and performed at Kumu Kahua
Theater, a venue established to serve Local audiences. Local fiction
published by Bamboo Ridge Press and Bess Press grew in popularity as
well, and in 1981, the very popular Pidgin to da Max, an entertaining
illustrated Pidgin dictionary of sorts, became a best seller. A few years
148 Christina Higgins

later, positive views toward Pidgin were reinforced when the Hawai‘i
Board of Education (BOE) attempted to ban Pidgin from schools in
1987. A backlash occurred as many residents voiced support for Pidgin,
and the BOE revised its policy to allow Pidgin in the classroom while
giving high priority to English.
While the domain of education remains a contentious one for the
official inclusion of Pidgin (though see Higgins 2010; Higgins et al.
2012), it has arguably grown in visibility and acceptability across
domains over the past decade, reflecting a possible move away from
restricted use into something approaching a more balanced bilingual
model. Local authors Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Lee Tonouchi now write
nationally-acclaimed fiction entirely in Pidgin, and a recent documen-
tary on the language (Booth 2009) has encouraged new discussions to
take place about the role of Pidgin in today’s Hawai‘i. Moreover, though
Pidgin was absent from television advertisements as recently as 10 years
ago, just the right touch of the language has become commonplace as
a way for companies to speak to Local audiences (Hiramoto 2011). To
further explore the relationship between Pidgin, prestige, and domain,
I examine how the language is used in the linguistic landscape.

Studying the linguistic landscape

My analysis builds on the original formulation of the linguistic land-

scape put forth by Landry and Bourhis (1997), who describe the focus
of such research as ‘the language of public road signs, advertising, bill-
boards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public
signs on government buildings’ (p. 25). However, I take up more recent
revisions of this framework (e.g. Shohamy & Gorter 2009; Shohamy
et al. 2010) as a way to explore how public space is symbolically con-
structed in part through language. Recent linguistic landscape work
expands the scope of the landscape to include signs in public spaces,
including handwritten signs, signs on moving vehicles, and even graffiti
to analyze emplacement, or the process by which signs create the spaces
that they are in (Scollon & Scollon 2003). Leeman and Modan’s (2009)
analysis of Chinese in Washington DC’s Chinatown helps to provide
ways of looking at the symbolic value of language when it is emplaced
in a public space, whether as a functional expression of the people who
work and live in a place, or as a ‘symbolic design element, an ornament
in the commodified landscape’ (p. 359). To illustrate the latter, they pro-
vide the example of Starbucks, whose sign is translated into Chinese as a
means of creating a Chinese sense of place in an increasingly gentrified
 Earning Capital in Hawai‘i’s Linguistic Landscape 149

(and non-Chinese populated) section of the city. Hence, language can

be used to express symbolic-authentic meanings which speak to certain
groups of people who identify with these languages, and it can be used
to synthetically construct a sense of place and to commodify a language
and/or culture. Leeman and Modan’s analysis is a good example of
Habermas’s vision of the public sphere as a buffer between the state and
the realm of private enterprise, and how the nature of public spaces is
increasingly commercialized for corporate purposes.
In the case of Hawai‘i, both authentic and synthetic processes are
found with regard to Hawai‘i English and Pidgin2. Both languages are
used for commodification purposes in the tourism industry, which is a
major source of revenue for the state and a source of employment for
many residents. In addition, the languages are often used in signage
to advertise a Local experience for Local consumers on restaurants and
shops. However, as this chapter argues, the Localness of Pidgin is also
being used as a form of authenticity that is tied to politicized concerns
about the local ecology. To better understand the ways that these lan-
guages are used to construct authenticity, I briefly describe the linguistic
features of both languages.

Hawai‘i English and Pidgin

There is arguably a large degree of overlap among Hawai‘i English and
Pidgin in terms of linguistic structures, for both languages share many
phonological, prosodic, and lexical features.
This is compounded by the fact that most people who speak these
languages mix them with regularity, and often describe any utterance
with a local characteristic to be ‘Pidgin’. Hawai‘i English is largely char-
acterized by its phonological and lexical systems, which contrast with
mainland US varieties. Words that were historically borrowed from
Hawaiian, such as keiki (‘child/children), ohana (‘family’) and kama‘aina
(‘resident’) are commonly understood and used without translation in
print advertising and in news broadcasts. Hawai‘i English is distinct
from mainland varieties in that reduced vowels are atypical (e.g. today
would be produced with two full vowels, rather than a schwa), and
because of the monophthongal nature of the vowels (and particularly
/o/), which are often dipthongized in mainland varieties (Drager 2012).
Major differences are found in the linguistic systems of Hawai‘i
English and Pidgin. Basilectal Pidgin has seven monopthongs, whereas
Hawai‘i English has 15 vowels (Sakoda & Siegel 2003). The consonant
systems are also quite distinct. In Pidgin, /t/ and /d/ are heard in words
like ting (‘thing’) and dat (‘that’), where /θ/ and /ð/ would be found in
150 Christina Higgins

Hawai‘i English (Sato 1993). Hawai‘i English demonstrates variation in

post-vocalic [r], and Pidgin is typically non-rhotic in post-vocalic posi-
tion. A major prosodic feature that is common to both languages is the
use of rising-falling intonation in questions in sentence-final position,
a feature that makes it challenging for newcomers to know whether the
speaker is asking a question or making a statement.
Lexical and syntactic differences have also been described for the
two languages. Due to its plantation roots, lexical items from Japanese,
Portuguese, Cantonese, and Hawaiian are common in Pidgin, and they
are also frequently used in Hawai‘i English. A good example is pau, a
Hawaiian-origin word meaning ‘finished or completed’. This word is
often heard in Pidgin imperatives such as Pau the stuffs (‘Finish the
work’) and in Hawai‘i English, as in Are you pau? (‘Are you finished?’).
While the grammar of Hawai‘i English is similar to mainland US varie-
ties, Pidgin grammar differs in many significant ways, including the use
of inversion for predicate adjectives (e.g. cute da baby), the use of copula
stei (e.g. da stew stei nice ‘the stew is nice/tasty’), past tense marker wen
(e.g. I wen go, ‘I went’), and neva as a past tense negative marker (e.g. We
neva eat dere ‘we didn’t eat there’) (Drager 2012; Sakoda & Siegel 2003).

Hawai‘i English in the linguistic landscape

Public signs carry a functional purpose to a readership that can appre-

ciate the linguistic code, and in doing so, they can convey a sense of
the local. Hawaiian-origin words are particularly common in Hawai‘i
English conversation and on public signage, as illustrated in Figure 8.1,
a sign written for bus passengers who need to know where the bus stop
has been relocated to during road construction. While words such as
makai (‘ocean side’) were once considered borrowings, it is more accu-
rate to treat these as part of the Hawai‘i English lexical system in the
present day. Upon encountering the sign in Figure 8.1, Local people
would understand that 200’ MAIKAI 24/7 means that the bus stop has
been relocated 200 feet towards the ocean, and is relevant 24 hours a
day, seven days a week. Across the Hawaiian islands, north-south-east-
west directionals are rarely used, in favor of more obvious markers such
as the ocean and the mountains (mauka). All Local people know these
terms, derived from Hawaiian, and newcomers quickly learn them in
order to navigate their way.
As Figure 8.1 shows, the distinct lexicon of Hawai‘i English on public
signage is not part of any sort of commodification or with any recog-
nizable symbolism. Other similar and very functional signs include one
 Earning Capital in Hawai‘i’s Linguistic Landscape 151

Figure 8.1 Bus stop 200’ makai

Source: Reproduced with permission of Toshiaki Furukawa.

PLEASE DO NOT FLUSH HAND TOWELS OR

FEMININE PRODUCTS!

MAHALO

USE THIS TRASH BIN FOR DISPOSAL OF DA KINES.

Figure 8.2 Sign posted in a restroom

found in a women’s restroom in a bar in Chinatown, which is repro-

duced below in Figure 8.2.
The sign uses regionally unmarked English on the first two lines,
followed by the ubiquitous use of the Hawaiian word for thank you,
MAHALO. This word is even more widely used than makai, and it is
deeply integrated into the English and Pidgin that Local people speak
across the islands. On the bottom line, customers are entreated to use
152 Christina Higgins

a specific trash bin in English to place DA KINES (‘whatchamacallits’) a

non-specific Pidgin word that is used here as a euphemism for feminine
products such as tampons. The use of this word allows the sign to be
discreet yet clear to patrons who know the language. The co-presence of
the English phrase FEMININE PRODUCTS at the top of the sign ensures
that everyone will understand the sign, including tourists and other
newcomers.
Other locally-produced signs circulated for general populations make
use of similar forms of bilingualism, where Hawai‘i English operates
alongside mainland US forms, as depicted in Figure 8.3. Here, KEIKI
MENU (‘children’s menu’) is made more transparent through mention of
what a kid’s meal includes in small print below the heading, and through
the image of a personified mug on the menu, a picture that might enter-
tain children. Of note is the use of KEIKI MENU (rather than KEIKI’S
MENU), which reflects the distinct way of using uninflected determiners
as adjectives (particularly on Hawaiian lexical items) where mainland US
varieties would use possessive forms (Sakoda & Siegel 2003).
A final example of the unmarked nature of Hawai‘i English comes from
a less public place, albeit one that is visible to many residents of Hawai‘i.
Figure 8.4 is an image of a label on a drawer in a patient room in a health
clinic which holds medical supplies. Though the label for STERILE GLOVES
is no different from what might be found on the mainland United States,

Figure 8.3 Keiki menu

Source: Reproduced with permission of Bill Tobin.
 Earning Capital in Hawai‘i’s Linguistic Landscape 153

Figure 8.4 Sterile puka sheet

Source: Reproduced with permission of Marissa Hanada.

the label for STERILE PUKA SHEET is clearly Hawai‘i English, and refers to a
sheet made of paper with a puka (‘hole’ < Hawaiian) in it. The sheet is to be
draped over patients for privacy while they are undergoing physical exams.
That the plural form appears as SHEET, rather than SHEETS, is another
aspect of Hawai‘i English, and can be said to be an influence of Pidgin.

Using the voice of the people to promote the local

The four examples above demonstrate how Hawai‘i English is used in

a functional and instrumental nature, rather than any commodified
sense. This makes sense since English is an official and widely used lan-
guage in the state of Hawai‘i. The distinct features of the language, such
as its lexicon, are simply part of the variety and readers are expected to
know them. Additional examples follow:

• Truck concourse, trucks only, pedestrians kapu (‘forbidden’, Hawaiian)—

sign posted at delivery entrance of a shopping mall
• Here’s to pau hana (‘the end of work’, ‘happy hour’, Pidgin)—on a
Bacardi delivery truck
• Please kokua (‘help’, Hawaiian), area beyond this sign closed to
vehicles … Please help native species by walking from here—sign posted
in a sand dune restoration area.

The frequent use of Hawai‘i English with no expressed concern for

mutual intelligibility with users of other varieties of English arguably
154 Christina Higgins

displays a sense that the English used in Hawai‘i is simply ‘English’.

There is no acknowledgment of its uniqueness, despite being frequently
challenging for newcomers to understand.
On the other hand, in public signage containing Pidgin, much clearer
forms of symbolism are found, and more direct linkages between lan-
guage and Local identity are displayed. While many of these signs link
language and identity to consumerism, thereby commodifying Pidgin,
another set of signs tie Pidgin and Local identity to more civic-minded
pursuits. Pidgin is also used this way, but when advertising local busi-
nesses and local products, Pidgin plays a more significant role in
creating a symbolic economy, which Zukin (1995, p. 3) defines as ‘the
intertwining of cultural symbols and entrepreneurial capital’ (cited in
Leeman & Modan 2009, p. 337), and for creating consumer culture built
around local language symbolism. Beyond entrepreneurialism, Pidgin is
also used to draw attention to social justice and civic issues as a way of
foregrounding Local people’s concerns and issues.

Pidgin as local commodity

The first example of the linkage between language, identity, and consum-
erism is a sign posted in the garden section at Honolulu’s Home Depot,
a US-based, warehouse-style home improvement store with hundreds of
stores nationwide. The ad uses Hawai‘i’s state flag to introduce Carex,
a plant it describes at the top as a NATIVE HAWAIIAN PLANT, drawing
attention to its endemic nature. The sign was one of several also described
as native Hawaiian. The purpose seemed to be to draw customers who
were interested in using native materials in their own gardening pro-
jects as part of a larger commitment to addressing constant threats from
outside species to Hawai‘i’s ecosystem. Dedication to ‘keeping things
local’ is reflected in the DESCRIPTION & CARE of the plant, is entirely in
Pidgin, and is presented as though the plant is actually speaking to the
prospective buyer. The plant calls out to the customer, Ho cuz, try check
me out! (‘Hey friend, please check me out!’), and then lists its qualities.
Grammatical elements such as the copular use of stay (most likely derived
from Portuguese ‘estar’) in I stay one supah gorgeous clumping grass (‘I am
a really gorgeous clumping grass’) and infinitive marker fo in only need
small kine water fo’ grow (‘[the plant] only needs a small amount of water
to grow’) convey an authentic form of Pidgin. Beyond grammar and
vocabulary, phonological features are marked, such as wit’ (‘with’) and
tick (‘thick’), which authenticates the ‘voice’ of the sign.
Local languages are often seen in advertisements that bring more
global brands such as Home Depot to Local audiences. In the vein of
 Earning Capital in Hawai‘i’s Linguistic Landscape 155

Figure 8.5 Carex for sale at Home Depot

Source: Photo by Christina Higgins.

glocalization (Robertson 1995), ads that draw on Local language do so

to appeal to Local consumers, and the Carex example is no exception.
However, beyond merely establishing rapport with a Local consumer
base, the ad in Figure 8.5 effectively links language with the delicate
issue of land protection and consumers who seek to fend off invasive
species. This theme continues below, to varying degrees, and seems
to be a way of indexing Local concerns and identities in the symbolic
economy of Hawai‘i.
A Local consumer identity is also constructed on Aloha Maid Iced
Tea and Calamansi (half and half) drink cans by way of the slogan
HAPALICIOUS, a recently coined Pidgin word that parallels another
better-known Pidgin word onolicious, which is a combination of
Hawaiian ono (‘delicious’) and the latter part of the English word deli-
cious. Consumers who are Local would appreciate this new word, which
replaces ono with hapa (‘half’, often referring to ethnicity). Many Local
people are themselves hapa (‘half’ < Hawaiian) and common ethnic
identifications include Chinese-Hawaiian, Japanese-haole (‘anglo’), or
‘mixed plate’, that is, a combination of five or six different ethnicities.
Though the idea of being hapa is a sensitive topic in contexts such as
Japan (Kamada 2010), it is an identification often worn proudly on
156 Christina Higgins

t-shirts and bumper stickers in Hawai‘i. Aloha Maid Natural (and rival,
Hawaiian Sun) drinks are a mainstay at local gatherings, and according
to their website, they are made in Hawai‘i with local ingredients such
as Maui sugarcane and local tropical fruits. Moreover, MADE IN HAWAI‘I
is printed at the top of the can in red letters. Similar to the Carex sign,
then, Aloha Maid Natural is linking its product to Pidgin and to the act
of buying local and hence, contributing to local sustainability.
The commodification of Pidgin is particularly easy to find as a means
of promoting local businesses, local products, and local pastimes. Many
restaurants that serve local food exploit Pidgin to draw attention to
their local ownership, local customer style, and ability to deliver what
Local customers want. Examples of this symbolic economy appear
below, with the Pidgin features underlined:

• Spam in the A.M. Two new local grindz! (‘foods’)—a poster-sized pro-
motion at Burger King restaurants
• Da Kine Video (‘whatchamacallit’ video)—business sign for a store
renting DVDs
• Mean da chicken (‘Really tasty chicken’)— a banner advertising huli
huli (spit-roasted) chicken in an outdoor market
• Verna’s—she go! (‘top notch’)—a sign hung on a restaurant named
Verna’s
• Any Kine Grill—Da Place for Ono (‘any kind grill—the place for deli-
cious’)—neon restaurant sign
• Side Street Inn—on Da Strip (‘on the strip’)—restaurant sign
• Mo Betta Bowlla (‘an improved bowler’)—the name of a business that
drills and resurfaces bowling balls
• Choke smoke Hawai‘i (‘Many smoking devices’)—a business sign for a
store selling tobacco products
• Can? … Noh Can! (‘Is it possible? … Noh Foods can do it’)—an ad in
a parking garage promoting Noh Foods, playing off of the well
known Pidgin expression If can can, if no can no can (‘Do it if you can,
and if not, don’t worry’)

Pidgin as local politics

Pidgin is also used next to English in signs concerning public civic mat-
ters that have a decidedly Local stake. In this regard, Pidgin seems to be
used to set boundaries, assert Local perspectives, and draw attention to
causes. From a diglossic point of view, the examples that follow dem-
onstrate that Pidgin is used to convey Local views on high stakes and
controversial topics in ‘formal’ domains.
 Earning Capital in Hawai‘i’s Linguistic Landscape 157

Figure 8.6 is a sign posted in Honolulu that is sponsored by District

Council 50 of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades,
a labor union representing workers across North America who are in
the construction and remodeling industry. Their purpose is to ensure
that Local people are the ones to be offered work, rather than being
undercut by cheaper labor brought in from elsewhere. In union-friendly
Hawai‘i, the sign reminds politicians of the large number of unionized
citizens who are about to cast their vote for mayoral candidates, the
state legislature, and the United States Congress. The sign establishes
the economic-political stance clearly in English, and the repetition of
Local underscores the assertion. The bottom half of the sign reads No
Get My Back, No Get My Vote in Pidgin (‘if you don’t have my back, you
won’t have my vote’), which is a message from District Council 50 to
political candidates running during the 2012 year, advising them to
support Local workers and labor unions. The use of Pidgin here next
to a message advocating for Local people makes a strong indexicality
between the language of the people and the expression of political will.
More Pidgin is creatively used on DC50’s website http://www.dc50.
org/local-jobs-for-local-people/, which encourages people to report on
job sites that are hiring non-local workers by filing a Roach Report. A
roach refers to a non-Local worker who has been hired to do construc-
tion work in Hawai‘i through working for a company that has won

Figure 8.6 No get my back, no get my vote

Source: Reproduced with permission of Fellen Kelemente.
158 Christina Higgins

the lowest bid. The report is promoted in Pidgin, as spoken by a Local

worker. The union states, ‘EH, NO COCKROACH MY JOB!’ (‘hey, don’t
steal my job’), and the images of roaches appear next to this message,
providing a negative yet effective visualization of outsiders invading
the local economy. In a parallel manner to the commodity-oriented
ads discussed above, the use of Pidgin along with the image of cock-
roaches evokes a concern about protecting Hawai‘i’s ecology, including
its human workers.
The use of Pidgin to call for political action is found elsewhere as
well, including bumper stickers on automobiles. One example is No
be lōlō (‘don’t be crazy/stupid’), which appears as the main text on a
bumper sticker for a non-profit organization (restorestreamflow.org)
dedicated to stopping wasteful water diversions and restoring ‘the Four
Great Waters’ of Maui for sustainable ecology and traditional Hawaiian
practices. In a similar vein are lawn signs on the Big Island that state No
Spray (‘don’t spray’), asking state-controlled weed control crews not to
spray herbicide on their property.
A final example is taken from a letter written by Kalani Fukumoto
to the editor of the Honolulu Weekly, which was written in a mixture
of English and Pidgin (Table 8.1). Only the first paragraph is analyzed
for the sake of space, and a translation is provided to the right of the
text. Pidgin features are indicated through underlining the respec-
tive elements in the English translation. This letter was written in
response to deliberations by the state that took place in 2009 to use
Hawai‘i’s rainy day fund to cover the budget shortfall needed to pay
state workers’ salaries, including those of public school teachers. That
year, state workers were ‘furloughed’ approximately one day a week,
meaning that they did not work on that day, and they were not paid.
In the letter, the writer is discussing how state workers were calling
for the rainy day fund to be used instead of agreeing to furloughs.
The letter points out the hypocrisy of state workers wanting to use the
rainy day fund for themselves in the face of hardship, despite failing
to support this idea for others, such as employees of recently defunct
Aloha Airlines, who were similarly affected by difficult economic times
in the past.
It is challenging to find an explanation for each and every use of
Pidgin in the letter. What is more meaningful is that the letter is colored
with Pidgin, and that Pidgin helps to convey the sentiment of question-
ing state workers’ and the state government’s actions. Similar to the
examples above that provide examples of civic-minded efforts that seek
 Earning Capital in Hawai‘i’s Linguistic Landscape 159

Table 8.1 Raining on my parade

Original text Translated text

Wen Aloha airlines wen down, When Aloha Airlines went down,
our government officials felt so badly, our government officials felt so badly,
dey stay propose free medical coverage they began to propose free medical coverage
for all of these furloughed people, for all of these furloughed people,
free counseling too. Real good-hearted free counseling too. Real good-hearted
officials we get. I remember all the job officials we have. I remember all the job
fairs we had all of a sudden to get those fairs we had all of a sudden to get those
people back to work. Eh, but still yet, people back to work. Yeah, but still,
our gvoernment (sic) officials still neva our government officials still did not
propose to raid da ‘rainy day’ fund for any propose to raid the ‘rainy day’ fund for any
of these airline employees or any of the of these airline employees or any of the
Mahalo Airline employees that Hawaiian and Mahalo Airline employees that Hawaiian and
Aloha wen squash and put down. Rememba Aloha [airlines] squashed and put down. Remember
dat? No ‘rainy day’ fund for any of the that? No ‘rainy day raid’ for any of the
Superferry people too. Superferry people, too.

to prod state officials and Local politicians into making choices that
will serve the good of the people and the land, this letter speaks for a
populace that is questioning the decision-making capacity of its leader-
ship. Throughout the letter, Pidgin is threaded into the text, both at the
superficial level of orthographic choices such as ‘Wen Aloha Airlines went
down’, and in more grammatically significant ways such as ‘Hawaiian
and Aloha wen squash’. The effect is the articulation of a Local voice
that speaks for the people, and which sets up an opposition to a state
bureaucracy that is difficult to trust.

Discussion

The data from Hawai‘i’s linguistic landscape indicate that the domain
boundaries for Pidgin and English may be more flexible than previously
thought. Though more research is needed to establish what is happen-
ing, it appears that a new form of diglossia may be emerging where pub-
lic messages of a political nature are presented with at least some degree
of a Pidgin voice. This makes sense, since these messages are coming
from people who are speaking out, often in opposition to the state, or at
least in opposition to the status quo. Pidgin appears to be representing a
populist perspective that is demanding to be heard. A similar sentiment
160 Christina Higgins

is attached to the more commercial acts of using Pidgin to appeal to

Local consumers. When a local restaurant describes its food as broke da
mout (‘delicious’), they are doing more than boasting about their tasty
dishes. Beyond that, they are creating a linkage between food, place,
and community. The idea of ‘keeping things local’ is alive and well in
Hawai‘i, not only in terms of protecting indigenous species, but also
in protecting local jobs and livelihoods. Though mass-market chain
restaurants and retail outlets are becoming increasingly common across
the islands, locally-owned small businesses make a strong effort to win
customer loyalty and to become respected in Hawai‘i’s tight-knit island
communities. Though many would describe this as simply the ‘aloha
spirit’, going the extra mile to develop good relations with consumers
is especially important in Hawai‘i since it experiences the highest cost
of living in the United States while the incomes are below comparable
regions on the mainland.
No matter what studies on language attitudes in Hawai‘i might indicate,
Pidgin clearly has a place in Hawai‘i’s symbolic economy, as illustrated
in its linguistic landscape. During this present time, in which discourses
of globalization, internationalization, and worldliness abound, this is a
curious situation. Hawai‘i may present a case of resistance to globalizing
pressures to embrace a cosmopolitan identity in pace with the rest of the
world. As much linguistic landscape work shows, there is a predominance
of internationally oriented cosmopolitanism that is marketed with global
reference points (e.g. Kasanga 2010; Sayer 2010; Seargeant 2009). This
globalism is also, of course, marked through English, with some ads in
countries like Germany appearing entirely in English (Piller 2001), and
elsewhere, others taking on hybrid forms to express ‘cool’ and ‘modern’
ideas to trend-observant consumers. ‘Youth Frenglish’ often appears in
advertisements in France such as ‘Relooker ton mobile’ (‘change the look
of your mobile phone’), where the English verb ‘look’ is transformed into
French through the addition of affixes re– (‘again’) and –er (a verbal end-
ing) (Martin 2006, p. 183). Similar strategies have been found in Korea
(Lee 2006), Tanzania (Higgins 2009), and Japan (Backhaus 2007), with the
effect of constructing consumers as globally-minded and sophisticated
people who are interested in and familiar with the world beyond their
immediate surroundings.
Since much of Hawai‘i’s linguistic landscape celebrates the local
without aligning with a world beyond, the Hawai‘i context may offer
us interesting foundations for further analysis of linguistic landscapes.
Additional studies that explore responses to government activities
through the medium of the linguistic landscape would be invaluable,
 Earning Capital in Hawai‘i’s Linguistic Landscape 161

and research on other multilingual contexts involving stigmatized

languages would help to shed light on the nature of prestige shifts in
‘diglossic’ contexts.

Notes
1. The capitalized term Local is used to refer to a person who is born and
raised in Hawai‘i. Most Locals are descendants of sugar and pineapple plan-
tation workers who came from China, Portugal, Japan, Okinawa, and the
Philippines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is gener-
ally the case that one must be born and raised in Hawai‘i to be seen as Local.
Native Hawaiians may claim the identity of Local, but non-Hawaiian Locals
do not refer to themselves as ‘Hawaiian’. For a fuller discussion of these terms,
see Sumida (1991, Preface).
2. Hawaiian plays a significant role in the linguistic landscape as well, and many
Hawaiian words such as mahalo (thank you) and kokua (help, assistance)
appear on government signs and public busses. Given the scope of this vol-
ume, the focus of analysis here is on Pidgin, since this language is often seen
as a lesser version of English by the people who speak it.

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9
Glocalization and the Spread
of Unequal Englishes: Vernacular
Signs in the Center of Beijing
Lin Pan

The spread of English across the world and the changes it has gener-
ated at different localities have been a focus of study for sociolinguists
in recent decades. One of their perspectives is to analyze the various
Englishes in relation to their regional and local linguistic varieties in
context, and this is achieved by exploring the semiotic information
that is available on linguistic signage (Backhaus 2007, 2009; Gorter
2006; Jaworski & Thurlow 2011; Shohamy & Gorter 2009; Shohamy
et al. 2010). Indeed, in our societies, which are becoming more and
more multilingual, the English language is used to an ever greater
extent on signage in what Kachru (1990) defined as the Outer and
Expanding Circles of the world. But in different localities and neigh-
borhoods, the Englishes which have appeared on public signs exhibit
fundamentally different characteristics with regard to their forms, their
design, and their arrangements; as Tupas and Rubdy remark, ‘there is
no one English, but many Englishes’ (see Introduction, this volume).
These public signs, with their use of different forms of English, and their
distinctive types of design and arrangement, are the concern of this
chapter. I argue that public signs are a product of an unequal process of
glocalization as the localized forms, functions, and values of Englishes
illustrate people’s social aspiration, their differentiated access to social
resources, and their places in the social hierarchy. I also argue that the
ways in which particular forms of languages are written, adopted, and
shown on public signs indicate the unique social aspirations and the
social domination and subordination of each community.
In particular, I will investigate the shop signs I found in a six-century-
old commercial street, Dashilan, in the centre of Beijing. This site was
chosen as it demonstrated features of both old historic Beijing and new
metropolitan Beijing. It is a long established commercial area and it
163
164 Lin Pan

was also newly refurbished and ‘modernized’ (in official terms) before
the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games to present the image of Beijing as a
modern metropolis to international visitors. This paper examines the
commercial signs that display English. I explore how English is used in
relation to its Chinese counterparts by studying the design, the place-
ment, and the functions of these signs, and interpret their semiotic and
symbolic values. The role that English plays in these signs is analyzed
in relation to an understanding of the glocalization process (Blommaert
2010; Robertson 1995) and ‘the global spread of English’ in China and
around the world. I hope to show that though the public use of English
in Dashilar is encouraged and has achieved popularity, the use of lan-
guages in signs is strictly regulated and constrained. In this neighbor-
hood, one of the oldest in Beijing, the English used in the public signs
is no longer the so-called ‘Standard English’ used in English speaking
countries. The changed forms and functions of English demonstrate
that the spread of English is an unequal process in which English travels
into spaces filled with established norms, traditions, and expectations
and hence its usage and presentation have to accommodate to local
businesses, values, and social development. At the same time, the uncon-
ventional use and design of English signs indicate the constraints on
the choices of their designers and producers, and their unequal access
to global resources.

Globalization, glocalization, and the spread

of unequal Englishes

Public signs, especially multilingual signs, are often studied in relation

to the globalization process (Gorter 2006) and are referred to as products
of globalization. Indeed, globalization penetrates cultures and trans-
forms localities, and this cultural impact of globalization on localities
has become the topic of intense debate among scholars. Three broad
schools of thought on the issue emphasize homogenization, heteroge-
neity, or hybridization. The ‘homogenization’ point of view claims that
there is an ever greater global uniformity of lifestyles, cultural forms,
and behavioral patterns, in which the American culture of consumer-
ism constitutes the dominant centre (Barber 1995; Ritzer 2000, 2006).
Terms such as ‘McDonaldization’ and ‘McWorld’ were coined (Barber
1995; Ritzer 1993) to illustrate the cultural expansion of uniform global
standards. Some other scholars, such as Anthony Giddens (2000) and
John Tomlinson (1999), argue that globalization actually means greater
diversity; they claim that cultural heterogenization has emerged and
 Glocalization and the Spread of Unequal Englishes 165

that local cultures are strengthened in the globalization process, thus

cultivating local autonomy.
It is my contention that an over-emphasis on either the homogeniza-
tion view or the heterogenization view can lead to one-sidedness and
a simplification of the real picture. As pointed out by many scholars
(Appadurai 1996; Massey 1994), globalization is not a one-way flow:
it is not impacting on the whole world to an equal extent. Rather, a
dialectical process is involved, in that ‘local happenings may move in
an obverse direction from the very distanciated relations that shape
them’ (Giddens 1990, p. 64). Hence, ‘glocalization’, a term developed
from Japanese business culture, was later adopted by Robertson (1995)
to convey the idea that syntheses of cultures often emerge through
the ever-increasing contacts between the global and the local. He
asserted (p. 27) that ‘the debate about global homogenization versus
heterogenization should be transcended. It is not a question of either
homogenization or heterogenization, but rather of the ways in which
both of these two tendencies have become features of life across much
of the late-twentieth-century world’ (p. 27). Cultural homogenization
and heterogenization are seen as happening simultaneously, making
localities seemingly different from each other. This process is described
as glocalization—a hybridization of culture.
Nederveen Pieterse (2004) writes extensively on this topic, but arguing
that no matter what terms are used to describe global hybridization,
what is often missing in the discussion is the differential impact of
globalization on different localities and an acknowledgement of the
actual unevenness, asymmetry, and inequality of global relations. What
Pieterse has indicated is that the process of globalization is a localizing
one, in which different societies appropriate the materials of modernity
differently due to their varied historical, cultural, and social conditions.
Appadurai (1990, p. 17) describes the actual form of cultural globali-
zation as deeply ‘historical, uneven’, and advocates a deep study of
specific geographies, histories, and languages undergoing this process,
because ‘all aspects of everyday life must be understood from the per-
spective of maintaining a sense of locality’ (p. 17).
However, it should be noted that the mutual influence between
‘global’ and ‘local’ does not happen in a random way. It should be
viewed as a rational process of delocation and relocation. In terms of
language spread, some languages, English in particular, are no longer
tied to their original locality, but rather are delocalized and operate glob-
ally. When a language (in this case, English) travels to a new place, it is
delocated out of its original home and superimposed on another native
166 Lin Pan

language and culture. This new place, more often than not, is structur-
ally, historically, and culturally different. Hence, the forms, values, and
functions of English will be appropriated by the new locality. This pro-
cess of appropriation is also a process of relocation in which new forms,
functions, and values will be given to English (Blommaert 2005).
Nevertheless, once English gains official or civil permission to set-
tle down, it will gradually influence or change the locality and its
language, including the forms, values, and functions of the local
language (Blommaert 2005). The whole process is a dialectic one. In
Swyngedouw’s (1997, p. 137) words: ‘local actions shape global flows,
while global processes, in turn, mould local actions’. And such a process
of ‘going global and local in the same moment’ (Hall 1990, pp. 26–27) is
what I am going to focus upon in this chapter: how ‘glocalization’ has
affected the local public signs.
I would like to emphasize, however, that the glocalization process of
English in any locality is a unique one, characterized by various forms
of inequality. Indeed, the relocation of English includes the realloca-
tion of linguistic forms, functions, and values, but the local agencies
in their appropriation of English often face various choices and con-
straints. In terms of the use of English in public signs, people’s access
to understanding of English also varies. Hence, their choice of the
language or ingredients of it is quite often restricted, and the original
meanings of English may be lost and new vernacular meanings created.
To use an example given by Blommaert (2005) on African English,
the linguistic resource that symbolizes status and prestige locally may
become a product of confusion and stigmatization when lifted out
of its locality in a transnational environment. Blommaert, therefore,
pointed out that there are always various constraints on what people
can do with a language because language is often used in the presence
of conditions that are beyond the user’s control. In terms of the study of
linguistic signs, it can sometimes even be debated whether or not a sign
is actually in English, or has English on it. Such signs, as we shall see
later, only appear to be English. They can be interpreted as ‘semiotic
artifacts, in which specific resources are being blended in an attempt
to make sense to mobile people—foreign tourists to whom ‘English’
appears more accessible than ‘Chinese’ (Skroon et al. 2011, p. 4). But
the blended forms often cause confusion and indicate social inequal-
ity. In a later part of this paper, we will analyze what these resources
are, why they are employed in public signs, and what meanings such
employment gives rise to and how they are constitutive of some forms
of inequality.
 Glocalization and the Spread of Unequal Englishes 167

Situating the study of public signs in semiotic

landscape and geosemiotics

All over the world, researchers have observed the increasing use and vis-
ibility of the English language in public spaces, especially on public signs.
And a new field of study of ‘Linguistic Landscape’ has been developed
in recent decades to study this phenomenon. Linguistic Landscape refers
to texts, images, sound, and people situated in a diverse and changing
public space and argues that their interaction shapes the public space
and is the unique feature of the space. As Landry and Bourhis (1997,
p. 25) explain: ‘linguistic landscape serves as a distinctive marker of the
geographical territory inhabited by a given language community—It
informs “in-group and out-group members of the linguistic characteris-
tics, territorial limits, and language boundaries of the region they have
entered”’. For Cenoz and Gorter (2006, p. 67–68), the linguistic land-
scape ‘reflects the relative power and status of the different languages in
a specific sociolinguistic context’, while it also ‘contributes to the con-
struction of the sociolinguistic context’, while for the audiences ‘the lan-
guage in which signs are written can certainly influence their perception
of the status of the different languages and even affect their own linguis-
tic behavior’. Jaworski and Thurlow (2011, pp. 2 &14) extend the idea of
linguistic landscape to ‘semiotic landscape’ and suggest that it is to ‘study
(public) space with visible inscription made through deliberate human
intervention and meaning making’ and they advocate that research on
semiotic landscape should ‘move on from the predominantly survey-
based, quantitative approaches to more nuanced, genre- and context-
specific analyses of languages in ‘landscape texts’. This paper will be such
an endeavor and aims at developing a context-based qualitative study.
It uses site-specific data and by investigating the presence or absence of
English and other local languages, it foregrounds the local and global ori-
entation of the signs and explore the inequality that the use of Englishes
(and the ways Englishes are used) has brought to the locality.
Public signs can be examined and interpreted from a number of
perspectives. In the first instance, my principles of analysis are based
on Scollon and Scollon’s (2003) ‘geosemiotics’. I maintain that just as
the placement of public signs tells the social, political, and cultural
features of the place, it also forms the place (Pan 2010). Three key ele-
ments in geosemiotics are my chief concern: code preference, inscrip-
tion, and emplacement. Firstly, in a multiple-codes sign (with two or
more codes, such as English, Chinese, and Chinese Pinyin), a system
of preference appears. The preferred code is usually on top, on the
168 Lin Pan

left, or in the centre, and the marginalized code is on the bottom, on

the right, or at the margin (Pan 2010). Secondly, the semiotic system
of inscription is of interest as, for example, the designers or producers of
the sign usually present a banner purposefully; in Scollon and Scollon’s
words (2003, p. 129): ‘they know about not just the typefaces but the
type of cloth and the way it would be hung to suggest a range from
the lightheartedness of a sale to the seriousness of a new exhibition’.
Thirdly, sign emplacement is of importance to my analysis. One type
of emplacement is defined as that of ‘decontextualized signs’, by which
Scollon and Scollon (2003, p. 129) mean all forms of signs, pictures, and
texts that may appear in multiple contexts but always in the same form.
One familiar example is the ‘universal’ Coca-Cola typeface.
Furthermore, my examination is based on the understanding that
public signs are agentive, historical, and cultural. To say that they are
agentive means that their way of exhibition is actually a trace of the
communicative situation which they intended to shape. Every sign
‘comes to exist in its social environment through a series of institu-
tional decisions and practices. Any given pattern comes about through
agentive decisions’ (Coupland 2012, p. 2)—‘their products point back-
wards to their producer(s) and their conditions of production; and
they point forwards, towards the intended audiences and the intended
consequences of the sign’ (Coupland 2012, p. 2). In addition, public
signs are historical and ‘culturally indicative’ (Coupland 2012, p. 2).
They ‘provide us with a series of sedimentary layers of social accretion,
each (historical and) cultural stratum reflecting particular ideological
origins, intentions and contexts’ (Schein 1997, p. 661). Public signs are
constrained by normativities, and determined by the general patterns
of cultural customs of their time. Sign producers can make a creative
choice about the forms of discourse (what is to be said and how it is to
be said) which they wish to use, but their freedom of choice is limited
and determined by the social, cultural, political, and historical time and
space that they live in, where any individual’s agency and the structure
of society connect with each other. Consequently, there are cumulative
histories, cultures, and social values in public language display.

The demographic context of Dashilan:

history and status quo

This research was conducted in a six-century-old marketplace, Dashilan,1

in the centre of Beijing. It is to the south of Tiananmen Square, west
of Qianmen Street (see Figure 9.1). It is said to have developed into a
downtown area around the year 1420, and is the oldest commercial
 Glocalization and the Spread of Unequal Englishes 169

West Chang’an Avenue East Chang’an Avenue

Great
National The National
Hall of
Grand Museum of
the
Theatre China

No
people Tiananmen
r th
Square
Xin
hu North
aS
tre
Southern et
Church at
Xuanwumen Qianmen

Xuanwumen East Street Qianmen West Street Qianmen East Street

South Xinhua Street

Qianmen Street
eet
Rongbaozhai / West Liulichang Str
Street shilan
Da

Figure 9.1 Geographical location of Dashilan

Source: Lin Pan.

street remaining in Beijing. The street originated in the Yuan Dynasty

(1271–1368 AD) and thrived in the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 AD) and
Qing Dynasty (1644–1911 AD). During the Ming Dynasty, the area (then
called: Langfang Sitiao) was already a flourishing commercial district,
and a meeting place for merchants. The name Dashilan བྷḵḿ literally
means ‘big fence’, and historical records show that in the earlier years
of the Ming Dynasty, to maintain order in the capital wooden fences
were constructed at the entrances to all streets and lanes in Beijing by
the central government (Zhang 2008). Even after the entire street was
burned to the ground during the Boxer Uprising in 1900 and the fence
practically disappeared, the name ‘Dashilan’ remained and the place
continued to enjoy the status of being the most prosperous commercial
centre in Beijing, which it had been for centuries.
However, for the past three decades, as urban development in Beijing
has mainly centered on the northern and eastern part of the city,
Dashilan has experienced a significant deterioration. Typical dwellers
occupy the lower social strata, have low incomes and poor education,
and very limited social mobility; also the business status of Dashilan,
once held in such high regard, has been on the wane. Apart from some
170 Lin Pan

century-old shops (what are locally called ‘time-honoured shops’2),

most of the businesses on Dashilan offer goods of poor quality at low
prices; additionally, perpetrators of fraud and extortion operate on the
street (Jiang 2006). Though some efforts were made to restore this pedes-
trian market street and repair its fences in the 1990s, it was not until
the year 2000 that the government rebuilt the iron fence, the symbol
of Dashilan, at its entrance. Nevertheless, in preparation for Beijing’s
2008 Olympic Games, intensive renovation was at last undertaken in
this six-century-old commercial street. It is recorded that 93 million
Yuan RMB (an equivalent of $14.7million) was spent in the Dashilan
renovation campaign, and the street was designed to showcase China’s
traditional culture and history to visitors from home and abroad. It was
hoped that this redevelopment would be a good opportunity to recon-
nect with China’s historical past, to bring new business to the area, and
to reinvigorate the area’s economy.3
It was in 2008, just one month before the Olympic Games, that this
research was conducted. As can be seen in Figure 9.2, the posters for
the recent refurbishment were still placed along the street to showcase
its ancient splendor. The logos read: ‘Along the Forbidden City, 600
years, Legend Commerce’ and ‘All Brands Co-exist Harmoniously, Ideal
Ancient Streetscape for Tourists’. They stress that this ‘new’ historic
street has retained the traditional appearance of ancient Chinese build-
ings, and it is explicitly publicized as a place for locals as well as inter-
national customers. The aim is to bring back the time when this area
served as Beijing’s main hub of commerce.
This marketplace is my concern, as I view it as a discourse frame
within which there are the active buying and selling of commercial
goods and services; there is a continuum from the old to the new in

Figure 9.2 Refurbishment and reintroduction of Dashilan before the 2008

Beijing Olympic Games
 Glocalization and the Spread of Unequal Englishes 171

shops, and at the same time a struggle between maintaining Chinese

local identities and presenting a more international global identity. In
describing the language situation of this community, I seek more than
to identify and enumerate a list of the varieties of language being used
in all shop signs; I aim also to probe from a more nuanced perspec-
tive the code preference, inscription, and emplacement of the signs
and interpret their meanings in relation to the locality where they are
found, their distribution and allocation, and their cultural values as sug-
gested in the previous section. My aim is to probe how this marketplace,
via its shop signs, communicates with its local and international visi-
tors and how glocalization has penetrated this marketplace. Specifically,
I hope to explore how English has evolved in such a local place, which
aspired to become international in the period of the Beijing Olympic
Games, and how the evolved forms and usage of English suggested the
local people’s unequal access to the global resources.

Glocalization reflected in commercial signs in Dashilan

In this 275-meter long street, there were 36 shops constituting 11 trades

in 2008. The language varieties and visual designs of the shop signs in
Dashilan may be seen as lying on a continuum from modern and con-
temporary to local and traditional, in line with its new development
plan, ‘All Brands Co-exist Harmoniously, Ideal Ancient Streetscape for
Tourists’ as advertised (see Figure 9.2). At one end of the continuum,
there were internet cafés, jewelry, mobile and accessories shops, evok-
ing international fashion and modern science and technology; at the
other end were businesses such as retailers of traditional Chinese silk
and clothing, Chinese tea houses and galleries. As mentioned earlier,
I will not aim to give a quantitative and exhaustive list of all the lan-
guages displayed in all the 36 shops. Instead, I will adopt a geo-semiotic
perspective in examining the impact of glocalization on the shop signs,
and to do so I provide a sociological analysis of four selected examples,
two engaged in traditional businesses, one modern business, and one
small private shop.

Jui Fu Hsiang His Huang Ghi: an early embrace of English

Walking from the eastern end of the street, one would be immediately
attracted by a two-storey marble building in the western Baroque archi-
tectural style with elaborately carved Ionic pillars.4 The large golden
characters placed in the middle of the building above the entrance give
172 Lin Pan

the name of the shop—⪎㳘⾕呯䇠 (Jui Fu Hsiang Hsi Huang Ghi) (see
Figure 9.3). Jui Fu Hsiang Hsi Huang Ghi, a well-known Chinese silk and
fabric brand since 1893, specializes in selling silk and providing a tailor-
ing service at reasonable prices. Its business enjoyed a prestigious past,
at some point having been entrusted with making the first flag of the
People’s Republic of China. Its name is written in traditional Chinese,
following a traditional right-to-left text vector. Chinese couplets are
engraved on the two sides of the front gates on both the two floors and
red lanterns hung in front of the building. While one may admire the
attractive combination of eastern and western styles of this architecture,
one may also marvel at the tremendous authority and prestige that the
building conveys.
Stunningly, fixed on both sides of the building are eight marble
plaques. At the ground floor level, the following Chinese characters are
inscribed:
ᵜ㲏ੁ൘ѝཆᆹ㦈 ᇊ₏䟷䗖九ㅹ࣐䟽 ㏒㐎㍇㖵哔㍠ᐳ⮻ ૸ஷജ㎘㾯ᴽ
㎢઒
亗㒑࿍૱ᱲᔿᯠ㺓 ㄍ㖞਴ぞ㍠∋Ⳟ䋘 ⎧喽≤⦪བྷ∵么㻆 䚨᫷㋮㢟‫ܩ‬٬
‫ݻ‬ᐡ

Figure 9.3 Jui Fu Hsiang Hsi Huang Ghi: a ‘time-honoured’ silk shop
 Glocalization and the Spread of Unequal Englishes 173

Rather than a persuasive advertisement, this is a very information-

intensive instruction, detailing the range and scope of the shop’s busi-
ness. The writing is organized in a traditional right-to-left text vector,
and traditional Chinese characters are adopted, mixed with archaic
forms of Chinese characters indicating a long history and author-
ity, and its elaborate choice of words follows a prominent symmetric
seven-character layout. Such sophisticated choice and deployment of
archaic forms of Chinese are not seen on the other shop signs in this
street. And the comprehension of its Chinese meaning is difficult even
for a contemporary, college-educated Chinese. The traditional Chinese
characters are associated with the history of China before the People’s
Republic and the right-to-left writing vector was also common, if not
the preferred practice, before 1949. The language practices and policies
of the People’s Republic of China since 1949 have been that Chinese
should be written, like English, from left to right (Scollon & Scollon
2003). The archaic forms of Chinese characters adopted in the sign,
though difficult to understand, add artistic and historic flavor to the
building. Interestingly, above the ground floor, English inscriptions
were included in four more plaques, in positions symmetrical to the
Chinese ones. Nevertheless, the English transcriptions follow a left-to-
right text vector, in a reverse direction to their Chinese counterparts.
Every letter is capitalized. The English name of the shop is first given
‘Jui Fu Hsiang Hsi Huang Ghi’ in Wade-Giles,5 which is itself now an
archaic way of transcribing Chinese with a roman alphabet to resonate
with its Chinese counterpart. The English then expounds the range and
scope of the shop in the following words:

We have experienced representatives in China and foreign coun-

tries ordering and selecting superior quality goods of the following
description: silks, satins, and fine cloths. Velvet, Western dress mate-
rials, broad cloths, etc. Embroideries decorative articles, new clothes
in all latest fashions and various kinds of finest furs. Seal and otter
collars for dyer coats. Nice selection, prices moderate.

According to the code-preference principle given by Scollon and

Scollon (2006), the Chinese characters are placed at the ground floor,
which is visually more accessible. The English inscription is on the upper
floor, a less identifiable and more marginal position. In addition, it is
very clear that the English characters are not as standard, well-chosen
and symmetrical as their Chinese counterparts. Nevertheless, it is to be
noted that both the Chinese and the English codes were produced at the
174 Lin Pan

same time about a century ago. It was a period when the business trade
in China started to open to western countries. Hence, the English pre-
sented on this shop sign indicates that western influence started to per-
meate China and its local business and that this silk business embraced
such western influence. Indeed, it is known that signs with English,
though fairly common today, were rarely used in China in the 1890s,
but the owner of Jui Fu Hsiang Hsi Huang Ghi, who was determined
to gain a more international standing for his business, spent heavily in
employing professional translators for this translation (Shuang 2006).
And the way in which both English and Chinese were engraved in the
marble of this building indicated his wish that both of the texts should
last as long as the building itself. We can see that the design, the arrange-
ment and the layout convey history, order, authority, and authenticity.
And the intensive English information, with the Wade-Giles employ-
ment for its name inscribed about a century ago together with its archaic
Chinese counterpart, demonstrates Jui Fu Hsiang Hsi Huang Ghi as a
product of glocalization, a combination of western influence with local
Chinese culture. It gives an example of how Chinese shops opened to
the outside world by adopting western design. In so doing, it showcases
the shop’s national and international reputation both in the past and at
present. Its authoritativeness is beyond any dispute.

The discrepant identities of Xinli Xinfu Silk shop

Just a few steps further to the West from Jui Fu Hsiang Hsi Huang
Ghi, one sees another silk shop, Xinli Xinfu, housed under a roof in
traditional design (see Figure 9.4). Unlike the deployment of both
English and Chinese language demonstrated in the previous example,
it is noticeable that there is a systemic imbalance between the use of
Chinese and English in Xinli Xinfu. On the Chinese side, the shop
name—䪛࡙䪛⾿㔨ᒴ (Xinli Xinfu Silk shop) is written in simplified
Chinese characters from a left-to-right text vector in accordance with
the post-1949 language reforms and principles of language use. But it
should be noted that the word ᒴ (shop) was more often used before
the People’s Republic of China was founded to mean a wholesale or
a large business. On both sides of the shop banner, the shop name ‘Xin’
(䪛) and ‘Fu’ (⾿) is engraved and hence emphasized. Nevertheless, apart
from the shop’s name, there is very little information in Chinese. In
contrast, an abundance of English information is displayed on the shop
sign. Even the ‘䪛࡙䪛⾿㔨ᒴÿ sign in Chinese is actually located under
an enlarged ‘the Silk Road’ sign in English, and immediately below that
 Glocalization and the Spread of Unequal Englishes 175

Figure 9.4 Xinli Xinfu silk shop

the following information is tightly placed in two plaques, all in English

with no Chinese equivalents:6

SPECIALIZING IN TRADITIONAL AND CONTEMPORARY CHINESE

FASHION FOR MEN WOMEN AND CHILDREN

A WIDE VARIETY OF SILK CLOTHING ACCESSORIES HOME

DECORATION FRESH ADN SALT WATER PEARLS AND MANY
OTHER CHINESE TREASURES IN STOCK WHICH ARE HANDMADE
FROM OUR FACHORIES IN HANGZHOU, CHINA

TO MEET ALL YOUR NEEDS MOST TRAILORING JOBS CAN BE

COMPLETED IN 1TO 3 DAYS PICKUP OR DELIVERY SERVICE TO
YOUR HOTELS IS AVAILABLE

3 FLOORS OF QUALITY CLOTHING AND FABRICS

Backhaus (2007, p. 58) and Reh (2004) have distinguished four types
of multilingual information arrangement: ‘(1) duplicating; (2) fragmen-
tary; (3) overlapping; and (4) complementary’. The first three types
176 Lin Pan

constitute partial or total mutual translations of each other, whereas,

type 4, by contrast, gives two or more languages conveying completely
different kinds of contents. It is clear that the information which the
shop gives clearly belongs to type 4, and that the English information
given outweighs that which is in Chinese.
We might therefore claim that the shop seeks to be more foreign
than Chinese, as the asymmetrical ordering of the two linguistic codes,
English and Chinese, is intentionally suggestive of the identity that
the shop aims to adopt. Nevertheless, if we take a closer look at its
English code, contradictions arise. First, the English code on the white
plaques is in four different colors (black, green, red, and purple). It is
discordant with the design and the style of the shop, and is clearly a
new add-on. If anything, this only discloses the temporality, novelty,
and freshness of its business (Scollon & Scollon 2006) to English-
speaking customers. But this English addition is in line with one of the
purposes of Dashilan’s renovation campaign for the use of English, an
international language, to bring new business to this area and reinvigor-
ate its economy. Before we conclude that the language policy has been
effectively and successfully implemented, we should notice that, in the
ample textual English information which the shop provides (as shown
above) the English used deviates from its normal forms; for example,
‘AND’ and ‘FACTORIES’ are expressed as ‘ADN’ and ‘FACHORIES’. The
‘English’ exhibited here is no longer the English that we are familiar
with. Nevertheless, if we explore the production line of such shop
signs, such deviations are not difficult to explain. This change of forms
reveals that the existence of a public sign involves a sequence of people,
the designer, the translator and the sign producer, and not all of them
have the same access to this translocal linguistic resource. Therefore,
the same translocal linguistic resource, while being passed from one
producer to another, is perceived differently, and changes in both
forms and meanings are often the result (Pan 2010). Furthermore, let
us go back to my former argument that with the abundance of English
information, the shop seems more foreign to the locals. Looking more
closely at the business of the shop, one will be immediately attracted
by its yellow ‘clearance’ signs—‘Big Price Reduction’ (བྷ⭙আ) and
‘Reduction! Reduction! Reduction!’ (⭙! ⭙! ⭙!) are put everywhere on
the clothes on the ground floor. We should also note that these signs
are all in Chinese, and Chinese alone. Hence, we see a doubtful identity
indicated by the shop signs. On the one hand, by putting on clearance
signs, the shop has aimed at attracting local customers and bargain
hunters. On the other hand, it had made efforts, in producing English
signs, to be in line with the local development plan—English was newly
 Glocalization and the Spread of Unequal Englishes 177

put on to showcase a more international and global Dashilan. The first

example and this second one were products of different times in history
and are different in terms of the nature of their businesses (Jui Fu Hsiang
His Huang Ghi being time-honored and catering for international
business and Xinli Xinfu being a mainly local business). They indicate
how local businesses, at different times in history, adopted and used
translocal resources to make them more international. When process-
ing translocal resources, they faced constraints and compromises. Their
efforts towards globalization (adoption of English in their shop signs)
lead to glocalization (the glocalized forms and usage of English) and
their deployment of translocal resources creates newness, discrepancy,
and alienness for both the local and the foreign visitors.

Branding in English: the ‘secret’ of success

At the western end of Dashilan lies a men’s clothes shop (see Figure 9.5).
The grey building gives it a sense of solemnity, as does the shop name,
ⲷᇦ㓵䍥, shown in simplified Chinese. ⲷᇦ means ‘royal’. 㓵䍥 means
‘noble gentlemen’. The Chinese name is presented in a much bigger font
than the English name and is highlighted in green. The English name,
‘U.K. Royal Sungre’, is written in a much smaller font and is placed
below the Chinese name. The sign apparently makes Chinese the more
dominant source of information, placed in a more important position,
but in fact the shop’s ‘foreignness’ and ‘upper-class’ identity are claimed
in other ways. First, the British-style logo placed besides the shop name
gives it a foreign identity and indicates that this is not a brand of Chinese
origin. Second, the shop also asserts a high-class quality by offering a
clean and clear window display of its products, with no ‘clearance’ labels
and the price tags concealed (in contrast with the ‘clearance’ signs put
everywhere shown in the previous example). Furthermore, the concepts
of ‘royalty’ and ‘noble gentlemen’ connoted in the shop name were not
promoted in the allegedly proletarian ‘classless’ PR China, but in a mod-
ern and globalizing China. These ideas now represent modernity, and
connections with westernization and globality.
A display of this type reminds one of the decontextualized signs
defined by Scollon and Scollon (2006). They said that decontextualized
signs are all forms of signs, pictures, and texts that appear in multiple
contexts but are always in the same form, for example, the characteristic
‘KFC’ or ‘Coca-Cola’ typefaces. ‘They are all cases of decontextualized
signs which may appear in the same form on posters, packages of the
products, or on the stores in which these products are sold’ (Scollon &
Scollon 2006, p. 145). This shop sign (Figure 9.5) makes one wonder
178 Lin Pan

Figure 9.5 ‘U.K. Royal Sungre’ men’s clothing store

whether this seemingly ‘classy’ and ‘royal’ ‘U.K. Royal Sungre’ is a global
brand and a decontextualized sign itself. As is well known, decontex-
tualized signs are often used by international brands. Nevertheless, for
anyone who is familiar with international fashion, this ‘U.K. Royal
Sungre’ is not likely to be familiar. Its website shows that the ‘U.K.
Royal Sungre’ is actually a Shanghai clothes business, which claims
to be in cooperation with the British Sungre Men’s fashion company,
and the chief advisor of this company is William Wallace, a tailor for
the British royal family. Its website also asserts that the brand caters to
international fashion and aims to bring British fashion to the Chinese
people.7 Investigation of this shop through its website shows clearly
that it is not a global brand at all, but one wonders why ‘being British’,
‘being royal’, and ‘being a gentleman’ are valued ideas for this business.
As English now acts as an international language for many people,
its use also reflects the widespread appeal of a global ideology. In fact,
this device of claiming to be ‘foreign’, ‘royal’ and ‘international’ is com-
monly used and is found in many local brands in developing countries.
After an interview with a Mexican cigarette manufacturer about adopt-
ing an English name for a local brand of cigarettes, Baumgardner (2006,
 Glocalization and the Spread of Unequal Englishes 179

p. 260) explained that ‘English is a global language. By using English,

[the] product has a greater opportunity to become known in different
countries because more people speak English as a first, second and for-
eign language than any other language in the world. English was one
of their secrets of success’. He concluded that ‘English has the power
to convince people to buy products’ (p. 260). Ross (1997, p. 31) echoes
similar reasons for the use of English in the shop names of Milan, Italy:

The simple reason for most of these shop signs (in Milan) adopting
English is that English is today seen as an attractive and fashionable
language. An English name lends an aura of chic prestige to a busi-
ness, suggesting that it is part of the international scene, following
the latest trends, up-to-date with the newest ideas. This aspect of
English as an international language—is perhaps too often underes-
timated. Yet, English is important for communication world-wide,
but English is also important because of the prestige associated with
English-speaking countries.

If we relate the use of English in public to the glocalization of a lan-

guage, we see that when English spreads to China, and other developing
countries, its values and functions are processed. The use of English, an
ordinary daily and taken-for-granted product in English-speaking coun-
tries, is re-allocated with more distinctive functions and starts to play a
very important and powerful role in advertising and marketing. Brands
using labels and slogans in English are perceived as being of superior
quality and more reliable than others and they symbolize prestige,
exclusiveness, and modernity. The use of English in branding engenders
potential inequalities as using such English labels is a device to endow
the products with status and prestige.

A display of grassroots literacies in English

Opposite the ‘U.K. Royal Sungre’ shop is a ‘GALLERY’ (see Figure 9.6).
Its Chinese name, བྷ㿲⭫ᓺ, is written and displayed following the tra-
ditional design of a right-to-left text vector. The English name of the
shop, ‘GALLERY’, is placed beneath the Chinese name, arranged from
left to right. The background of this shop sign shows the streetscape of
old Beijing. It seems that these semiotic codes combine well to convey
the message that here is a shop exhibiting traditional Chinese arts,
and it is open to foreigners. Nevertheless, a closer look shows that the
English name of the shop, ‘GALLERY’, is not an equivalent translation
180 Lin Pan

Figure 9.6 Gallery

of its Chinese counterpart, which means ‘Grand View Gallery’. Another

striking feature is that there is an English-language poster placed in
front of the shop in handwritten calligraphy, saying ‘please write your
name in Chinese’. This poster is clearly a new add-on and a temporary
placement. This sign, which does not have a Chinese equivalent, would
puzzle non-Chinese passers-by. A conversation with the shop owner
disclosed that the ‘GALLERY’ had been unable to make any profit,
and in order to subsidize its business the owner now offered a seal-
engraving service8 to foreign visitors, whose names would be translated
into Chinese and engraved in a seal on the spot, because seals with
one’s names on have been very popular souvenirs for foreign visitors
in China. This conversation solved my problem of understanding this
English poster. I realized that instead of saying ‘please write your name
in Chinese’, the correct statement should have been ‘we write your
name in Chinese (and carve it on a seal)’.
Also to be noticed is that though the shop provides a typical Chinese
service (a gallery of Chinese art and seal-engraving), the visual hierarchy
 Glocalization and the Spread of Unequal Englishes 181

of this shop sign shows that English is the chosen prominent language.
When explaining the factors which influence the language choice
on public signs in Jerusalem, Spolsky and Cooper (1991, pp. 74–94)
summarized three principles: ‘writing signs in a language you know’;
‘preferring to write signs in the language or languages that intended
readers are assumed to read’, and ‘preferring to write signs in [their]
own language or in a language with which you wish to be identified’.
It is clear that English is used in this shop sign to attract its target visi-
tors and customers. Nevertheless, such a wish has been made in vain, as
both the shop’s name, ‘GALLERY’, and the confusing sign, ‘please write
your name in Chinese’, only disclose the shop’s very limited repertoire
of the target language.
Indeed, though the shop hopes to employ the ‘symbolic value of
English’, what we encounter here is at best called ‘grassroots literacy’
(Blommaert 2008, p. 113) because the semiotic resources are deployed
in an unconventional way and look ‘out of control’. The poster, though
intended to improve its business, may have played the opposite role
and became a product of stigmatization. Thus, we see that the efforts
to expand the service and become ‘more international’ were made in
vain, because of the shop owner’s and the sign maker’s limited access to
translocal resources. The English on the sign, though without any gram-
matical problems and in the same form of English as used in English
speaking countries, has a problematic contextual meaning and dis-
torts the owner’s intention. As a product of grassroots literacy, it shows
that the global spread of English is an uneven process—not everyone
has the same level of command. It can bring tremendous symbolic capital
to whoever has full access to it, usually the elite class of a society and
the well-educated, while it may also cause stigmatization, contempt,
and misunderstanding for those whose access to it is heavily restrained
(e.g. the sign maker in this example), and these are often the already
disadvantaged groups in society.

Conclusion

I have explored four shops and investigated their display of signs in

Dashilan in central Beijing. The research was carried out in the context
of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, when Beijing positioned itself as
an international city and promoting English became an indispensible
element in its drive towards internationalization. In this newly reno-
vated shopping street, I found many shop signs which used English but
in the four examples shown above, the ‘English’ was no longer that
182 Lin Pan

which is used in English speaking countries; the examples show local-

ized forms, functions, and values. Moreover, the language choices and
their designs on these shop signs also varied greatly. I have argued that
such mixed adoption of Englishes shows that the (linguistic) resources
to which the sign makers/designers have  access are truncated; hence,
rather than a single global English, the result is a range of different
manifestations of English. The localized forms, functions, and values
of Englishes show people’s social aspiration, their different access to
social resources, and their places in the social hierarchy. I have aimed
to demonstrate the unequal spread of English, which results from the
fact that languages do not travel across an ‘empty space’; rather they
travel into spaces filled with established norms, traditions, and expecta-
tions rooted in their unique social, cultural, and historical circumstances
(Blommaert 2005, p. 72). Hence, people in each space make their own
choices when it comes to the understanding and absorption of the delo-
calized language. And the result is what we see in Dashilan—a form of
glocalization: a locality which displays different ‘Englishes’ has become
a place which is unlike what it was before. It has become unfamiliar to
the locals, strange to the elite, illegible to foreigners.

Acknowledgment

This paper was supported by Science Foundation of Beijing Language

and Culture University (supported by ‘The Fundamental Research Fund
for the Central Universities’). Approval number: 12YBB19.

Notes
1. ‘Dashilan’ is literally Dazhalan Street (in Chinese characters, བྷḵḿ).
Dashilan means ‘big fence’ and is spelled variously as Dashilan, Dazhalan, or
Dashilaner. The name ‘Dashilan’ is adopted in this paper.
2. ‘Time-honoured shops’ is the official translation of Laozihao (㘱ᆇਧ), which
is a government distinction awarded to certain brand names and shops
that have proven histories. To be awarded the title of ‘time-honoured shop’
requires meeting certain standards. They must have been set up before 1956,
maintain profitable operations, and provide products with unique Chinese
characteristics.
3. http://www.topchinatravel.com/china-attractions/beijing-dashilaner-street.
htm.
4. The Ionic order forms one of the three orders or organizational systems of clas-
sical architecture. The Ionic order originated in the mid-sixth century BC in
Ionia and the Ionic column was used in mainland Greece in the fifth century
BC. The first of the great Ionic temples was the Temple of Hera on Samos,
built about 570–560 BC. It stood for only a decade before it was leveled by
 Glocalization and the Spread of Unequal Englishes 183

an earthquake. A longer-lasting sixth century Ionic temple was the Temple of

Artemis at Ephesus, reputedly one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
5. Wade-Giles was a common system of transcription in the English-speaking
world for most of the twentieth century, used in several standard reference
books and in all books about China published in western countries before
1979, when it has been replaced by the pinyin system in mainland China.
6. ‘AND’ and ‘FACHORIES’ are made bold by the author for emphasis.
7. www.shengui.com/brand.html (last accessed on 3 January 2013).
8. To have one’s name carved on a seal is a Chinese tradition. It derived from
ancient China when all the emperors had their own seals. Personal seals have
been considered to represent one’s power and authority.

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10
Singlish Strikes Back in Singapore
Catherine Chua Siew Kheng

Singapore is a city-state located at the southern part of Malaysia in

Southeast Asia. Its literacy rate is about 96.2 percent (Singaporeans
aged 15 years and above) (Department of Statistics Singapore 2013).
The country was originally a small fishing village with mostly Malay
inhabitants but the arrival of the British in 1819 attracted a large num-
ber of migrants into the country, such as those from China and India.
Under the British rule, the non-resident population increased at an
unprecedented rate. For example, in 1827 there were less than 16,000
people residing in Singapore. By 1836, it had increased to more than
30,000, and in 1860 it expanded to 81,000 (Turnbull 2009). Currently,
Singapore has a total population of about 5.18 million and a total land
space of about 715.8 square meters. The present population is made up
of about 3.28 million Singapore citizens and 533,000 Singapore perma-
nent residents from different countries. Although a cosmopolitan city-
state, the three dominant races in Singapore are Chinese, Indian, and
Malay (Department of Statistics Singapore 2013).
The Singaporean language ecology has been rich and complex since
its early days, due to the influx of migrants who spoke a variety of
regional languages. In recent years, the increase in migrants residing
in Singapore has brought greater richness to the sociolinguistic land-
scape. According to the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority of
Singapore (2012), the main contributors to Singapore’s contemporary
population growth are Americans, Australians, Bangladeshis, British,
Indians, Japanese, Malaysians, and people from other non-traditional
sources such as Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and
other Asian countries. Thus, language contact is a prominent feature in
Singapore’s linguistic ecology. From this emerged, among many other

185
186 Catherine Chua Siew Kheng

sociolinguistic phenomena, Singapore’s culturally iconic brand of col-

loquial English called Singlish.
This chapter contends that Singlish is unlikely to disappear in view of
the new dynamics of a super-diversified Singaporean society. New forms
of migration and new policies will be crucial factors in Singapore’s
future and development, and these will have profound implications for
the country’s language policies.
Singapore’s bilingual policy was implemented to meet the needs of
a postcolonial migrant society, and for the last 40 years it has helped
Singapore achieve robust economic growth. In the process, English has
become the dominant language of Singapore, with Singaporeans trans-
forming the language to suit the needs of local cultural realities. It is this
vastly indigenized English that has been the target of deliberate govern-
ment campaigns to eradicate it because the government believes that
Singlish interferes with the learning of Standard English. It is for this rea-
son that Singlish, despite its cultural pervasiveness, has had a history of
persecution both in official and everyday popular discourse. However, the
complexity of contemporary Singaporean society, significantly brought
about by contemporary migrants, requires a revised language policy that
will prepare the country for a ‘new’ Singapore. It is in this context that
Singlish strikes back against acts and ideologies of hostility against it.

Migration and language spread

Every case of migration has far-reaching consequences on the social fab-

ric of the society of origin (sending country), the society of destination
(receiving country), and the migrants themselves (Kerswill 2006; Trudgill
1986). For example, the arrival of the British in Singapore attracted
diverse groups of migrants into the primarily Malay-speaking Singapore,
and this resulted in changes in both the social structure and linguistic
landscape of the country. The British brought English to Singapore, the
Chinese different Chinese languages (or Chinese ‘dialects’ in everyday
and official discourse), and the Indians different Indian languages as
well. For pragmatic reasons, some local Singaporeans were forced to
learn British English in order literally to serve the colonial master.
Other Singaporeans, on the other hand, developed a common ‘market’
language—Bazaar Malay—in order to facilitate communication among
different ethnic groups whose languages were mutually unintelligible.
In addition, a simplified form of Hokkien served as a common language
among the Chinese (and non-Chinese) in the marketplace. Thus, many
Singaporeans could converse in more than one language and possess
 Singlish Strikes Back in Singapore 187

the ability to mix their languages or code-switch in everyday interaction

(Lim 2013; Pakir 1991). Consequently, everyday language contact and
code-switching resulted in increased multilingualism, as many could
deploy more than two languages in daily conversation (Li 2007).
Under the current bilingual framework, the ‘first language’ and
sole medium of instruction is English, followed by Mandarin (for the
Chinese), Malay (for the Malays), and Tamil (for the Indians). While all
four languages are the official languages of the country, the last three
are the official ‘second languages’ or ‘mother tongues’ in Singapore,
to be taught as subjects in school. According to former Prime Minister
Lee Kwan Yew (2012), the choice of the three official mother tongues is
grounded in the belief that Singaporeans must retain their cultural roots
and heritage, thus to accomplish this aim the education system requires
the learning of one of these ‘mother tongues’, depending on one’s eth-
nic race. The wisdom and politics behind this unique configuration of
Singapore’s bilingual policy has been extensively discussed elsewhere (e.g.
Chew 2007; Chua 2003, 2004; Silver 2002), but the point here is that
with schools reinforcing this view of bilingualism (English + one official
mother tongue), a unique social and linguistic environment has emerged
in contemporary (post-colonial) Singapore which facilitates and rein-
forces newer forms of code-switching among present-day Singaporeans.

An overview of the history Singapore and its ‘English+1’

bilingual policy

During the colonial period, the Singapore education landscape was

fragmented with different races setting up schools offering different
media of instruction (Chew 2007). For example, the wealthy Chinese
and Indian industrialists built their own schools to provide vernacular
education for their children (George 1992). The British were more inter-
ested in setting a trading post in Singapore so it was not their first prior-
ity to educate Singaporeans. The colonial days were briefly interrupted
by the Japanese Occupation that lasted from 1942 to 1945. Although
the Japanese allowed schools to continue to operate, the Japanese lan-
guage was introduced as the medium of instruction, and schools were
expected to promote Japanese culture and values (George 1992).
The subsequent return of the British led to a new change to the
Singaporean education system. Resources were channeled into expand-
ing the English-medium schools in order to provide the human
resources needed for local British firms. The British education system
favored English and its small group of speakers (the English-speaking
188 Catherine Chua Siew Kheng

elite, in other words), and left the other languages and their speakers
very much to fend for themselves. In 1959, the People’s Action Party
(PAP) led by Mr Lee Kuan Yew became the ruling party of Singapore
as Singapore gained full self-government status. In 1963, Singapore,
Sarawak, and North Borneo (Sabah) joined Malaysia to form The
Federation of Malaysia, but the union lasted for only two years and
Singapore was separated from Malaysia in 1965 and became an inde-
pendent country. The sudden separation from the Malaysian federation
of states resulted in the Singaporean government adopting an aggressive
approach to modernizing the country; its focus was on transforming
Singapore into a manufacturing industry (Turnbull 2009).
These key historical events played important parts in the construction
of national policies in Singapore, including its education and language
policies. In response to these events, the Singaporean government
adopted a pragmatic ‘to survive’ approach. The idea of survival has been
the central theme in governing the country; it stresses the importance of
national unity and stability to safeguard state and national interests. The
ideology of survival focuses on employing outcome-oriented strategies
in dealing with potential challenges faced by Singapore. To complement
this ideology, the government also adheres to the concept of meritocracy,
which highlights the need to manage social inequality by rewarding an
individual’s merit based on his/her hard work and capabilities rather than
his/her race, ethnicity, or language background (Mauzy & Milne 2002).
Mr Lee Kuan Yew, who became the prime minister for the next 31 years,
believed that it was only practical or pragmatic to adopt English as the
first language for all Singaporeans. He believed that doing so would unite
the highly diverse population and hence give Singapore a higher chance
of survival in the global world. According to him (Lee 2012),

Newly independent countries have multiple languages: the language

of the imperial power and the various languages of the peoples who
had been brought together into one country under colonial rule. A
new nation, however, needs its people to understand and speak one
common language so that the government can communicate with
them, and they with one another. Hence all new countries are trans-
iting from multiple languages to one common language and several
secondary languages. (p. 13)

Lee (2012) added that without English, ‘Singapore was like different
tanks of fish in an aquarium’ (p. 50).
Unlike other Asian countries such as Japan, where English is seen as
a second or foreign language, in Singapore English is regarded as the
 Singlish Strikes Back in Singapore 189

lingua franca among Singaporeans. Although Singapore has inherited

English from the British, the government retains the language for prag-
matic reasons i.e., a meritocratic tool to provide equal opportunity for
all to succeed and prosper. The learning and teaching of English in the
newly independent Singapore was challenging because the environ-
ment was not conducive to learning the language. The acquisition of
English was difficult for many Singaporeans as it was a foreign language.
Furthermore, many Singaporeans were ‘illiterate’ and unskilled, and
schools were faced with high attrition rate. As mentioned previously,
many Singaporeans of different races used simplified Malay and/or
Hokkien (a Chinese language) to communicate with each other. As a
result, the standard of English taught as a second language in Chinese
medium schools was poor and many teachers were not trained suf-
ficiently to teach in English (Chua 2011). It was only in 1987 that all
schools would use English as the medium of instruction (except for
mother tongue language classes) as there had been an increasing num-
ber of parents sending their children to English-medium schools due to
better job prospects for the English-educated (Lee 2012).
Chua (2003) pointed out that the adoption of English had privileged
English-speaking communities over non-English speaking communities.
Moreover, the conception of multiracialism through the bilingual policy
also functioned as an ideological tool to frame state policies. The clas-
sification of race within Singapore contributes ‘directly to the formation
of the Singapore state’ (p. 61). This is because the adoption of the concept of
multiracialism enables the government to appropriate a CMIO (Chinese,
Malays, Indians, and Others) scheme that ensures that ‘the languages,
religions and festivals of the three major groups receive formal equal treat-
ment’ (Chua 2003, p. 60). Therefore, when a ‘child is assigned the race of
the father, his/her racial language is to be that of the “mother tongue”,
which, with few exceptions, he/she learns as a second language in school’
(p. 61). Similarly, English plays an important ideological role in the main-
tenance of multiracialism when it functions as a ‘neutral’ language to all
Singaporeans, as it will not favor any race. Hence, language-planning in
Singapore is primarily designed to meet the social and economic needs of
the country, and at the same time function as a tool for modernization.
Thus in a nutshell, the ‘English+1’ bilingual policy was implemented
in 1987 with the aim of allowing Singaporeans of different races to
communicate with one another, trade with English-speaking countries,
and at the same time maintain and preserve ‘Asian culture’ defined
mainly through Chinese, Malay, and Indian value and belief systems
(Pakir 2004). Although Malay has been chosen as a national language
for historical reasons, it is mostly spoken only by the Malay community.
190 Catherine Chua Siew Kheng

Therefore, in order to ensure that Singapore is linguistically and cultur-

ally ‘diverse’, the three mother tongues are to be learned by the three
biggest ‘ethnic’ groups in the country alongside English. Essentially,
diversity in Singapore is deliberately engineered as language plan-
ning which neatly segregates race and culture; social identification is
achieved through the choice of language as speakers define their social
identities and establish their social relationships with others by the lan-
guage (and languages) they use (Li 2007).

Singapore’s top-down approach to language planning

Therefore, it can be argued that language planning in Singapore is care-

fully planned for what may be called ‘national interests’. As pointed
out by Liddicoat (2013), ‘language is one of the fundamental dimen-
sions of education and government policies for education often include
reference to language issues’ (p. 5). For example, only standardized
languages are taught in schools, and high status languages such as
Mandarin and Standard English are encouraged at home and in other
social settings (Dixon 2009). In order to ensure that the bilingual policy
is implemented effectively, the Singapore government and the Ministry
of Education (MOE) have adopted a top-down approach in rolling out
their language-in-education policy to ensure that the various activities
are well coordinated. Basically, a large-scale tripartite approach has been
deployed, involving teachers, curriculum (including teaching pedago-
gies and examinations), and community policy. For example, all teach-
ers are recruited and sent to the National Institute of Education (NIE)
for training by the Ministry of Education (Chua 2011).
Moreover, there are concrete ways to show how the Singapore gov-
ernment’s aggressive top-down approach is deployed. First, it ensures
that the educational system is well-funded (Chua 2011). For exam-
ple, from 2011–2013, education funding rose from S$10.9 billion to
approximately S$11.6 billion for 2013 (Budget 2013 Singapore 2013).
Secondly, the educational system is centralized, hence school reforms
have been progressively rolled out, mainly by the MOE, since the 1990s,
and schools have translated them into practice (Gopinathan 2001).
Thirdly, to ensure that the intended outcomes of the bilingual policy
are achieved, the MOE also makes sure that the syllabi for the kinder-
garten school curriculum and the primary school and secondary school
language curricula are aligned, and that there is a gradual progression
in the acquisition of essential English literacy skills throughout a child’s
educational journey (Chua 2011).
 Singlish Strikes Back in Singapore 191

Nevertheless, the top-down approach to language planning has also

opened up issues to do with language use. For example, Singapore
English is generally assumed to be more important than the mother
tongue languages, especially because all school examinations are con-
ducted in English (except for mother tongue examinations). The expo-
sure time to English and mother tongues is also unequal, with English
receiving more attention and practice. This would predictably result in
English being used increasingly in everyday life, thus making it suscepti-
ble to linguistic and functional changes as more and more people use it.

Singlish in early English education in Singapore

Although right from the beginning of a child’s education, the gov-

ernment places a heavy emphasis on building a strong foundation
for language skills by nurturing ‘a love for bilingual learning in our
[Singapore] children from young’ (MOE: Lee Kuan Yew 2013, italics
added), emphasis is given to extensive exposure to English as early as
the preschool level. This is to ensure that students in Singapore have
a strong foundation in the language before they enter primary school
(MOE English language syllabus 2001 2013). By the age of five and six,
preschool students are expected to know how to obtain information
and communicate with others. At the primary level (7–12 years old),
students are exposed to different genres and opportunities to practice
and enhance these skills. At the end of primary school education,
students are expected to be independent learners and to develop the
literacy skills needed for secondary school education. At the secondary
school level (13–16/17 years old), students need to have the skills to use
English creatively. They are expected to have the ability to differentiate
between formal and informal English, as well as between the different
Standard varieties of English (British, American, and others). By the
end of secondary school education, students must be able to process
information obtained from a variety of sources, and they should be able
to speak fluently on a wide range of topics. As mentioned above, the
aim for all these early years is to ensure that a majority of Singaporean
students will have a good level of English competency by the time they
complete their 10 or 11 years of education (six-year primary school
education and four/five years of secondary education). The point here is
that the relative success of language policies in Singapore has been due
to both the emphasis on early education in English, and a centralized as
well as structured English curriculum for primary and secondary school
education (Chua 2011).
192 Catherine Chua Siew Kheng

Nevertheless, despite the centralized and structured English programs

in kindergarten, primary and secondary schools, the English competency
levels of children in Singapore vary. One explanation for such variation
is that in Singapore, many children are under the care of maids and/or
grandparents, and they may speak a different variety of languages. For
instance, there are Filipino foreign maids speaking in Filipino English
or Tagalog, and grandparents speaking in other Chinese languages such as
Cantonese, Hokkien, and Malay. When this happens, these children will
only be able use Standard Singapore English in school since their care-
givers are not able to communicate with them in this standard variety
at home. However, for some who are unable to code-switch to Standard
English at all, they will be conversing in non-Standard English and/or
other languages inside and outside of the classroom (Chua 2011; Silver
2002). Another explanation may bring us to the opposite of the variation
spectrum; that is, Singapore’s language planning extends beyond the
national school system. Proficiency in English can be further enhanced
by external private organizations that offer additional help in learning
English as some Singaporean parents can be found to be spending S$6,000
per month just in tuition fees to get additional help for their children in
their studies (Koh 2012). According to Teng (2013), the demand for tui-
tion in Singapore is increasing; it was found that Singapore households
spend about S$800 million on private tuition. Currently, there are about
800 tuition and enrichment centers in the country offering popular
subjects, particularly English, Mathematics, and Mandarin. For example,
premier tuition centers such as The Learning Lab Singapore offer specially
designed English programs for primary school children (including Math
and Science) that aim to develop their writing, speaking, reading, and
listening skills which, in turn, will enhance their overall language appre-
ciation and mastery (The Learning Lab 2013).
These two explanations are important in explaining the phenomenon
of Singlish. Many families are found to be conversing in Singlish and
not ‘English’ at home, especially those who come from lower socioeco-
nomic status. While some can code-switch between Singlish and the
more standard variety of English in Singapore, others are unable to do
so because their socioeconomic environments and trajectories are satu-
rated mainly by the use of Singlish. According to Gil (2003), Singlish
constitutes a full-blown language system, and can be acquired in early
childhood in ways typical of first or second language acquisition.
Hence, the different levels of proficiency in English have led to unequal
Englishes in Singaporean society, with not only Singlish being devalued
or rejected as a legitimate language, but also its speakers, especially
those who cannot code-switch into Standard English if the need arises.
 Singlish Strikes Back in Singapore 193

Nevertheless, as will be seen below, sociolinguistic and socioeconomic

transformations in Singapore and around the world reconfigure the role
of Singlish as one that transcends traditional and popular characteriza-
tions of the language.

Singlish becoming the ‘native’ language of Singapore

Hybridity emerges when there is racial and cultural mixture as a result

of cultural differences and fusion (Kraidy 2009). As the society becomes
multilingual and coupled with complex webs of communication (i.e.
code-switching), hybridization of languages occurs. As seen in the
example of Singapore, the constant code-switching between languages
has led to a creation of Singlish which has English as its base form
but has linguistic structures and vocabulary drawn from other languages
in Singapore (Gil 2003). For example, in Singlish, noun phrases con-
stituting a single bare word are usually unmarked for number and (in)
definiteness (Gil 2003), such as:

Geraint eat apple.

In this example, the apple can be understood as mass, singular, or plural;

it can also be understood as definite or indefinite. In this sense, Singlish
differs from Standard English because the former resembles other Asian
languages such as Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin which do not have
a plural form for nouns such as apple or ‘㤩᷌’. Instead, the quantity is
indicated by measure words such as ‘ањ㤩᷌’ (one apple) or ‘ᖸཊњ㤩
᷌’ (many apples). In addition, unlike Standard English, Singlish may not
have subject-verb-agreement, i.e. Geraint eat(s). This is because in many
Asian languages there is also no subject-verb agreement. For example,

He eats apple (Ԇਲ਼㤩᷌)

They eat apple (ԆԜਲ਼㤩᷌)

In the above example, the verb ਲ਼ (‘eat’) remains unchanged regardless

of whether the subject is singular or plural (Gil 2003).
The other distinctive feature of Singlish is the usage of words from
Chinese languages and other Asian languages as part of the grammatical
structure. For example, in an attempt at compromising or negotiating,
one may say,

‘I finish my homework tomorrow teacher. Why got detention?

Can cham siong, I help to clean classroom’ (Taken from Gartshore
2003, p. 24)
194 Catherine Chua Siew Kheng

In the above example, ‘Why got detention?’ is a literal translation from

Mandarin or Chinese languages (ѪӰѸ ‘why’; 㾱㻛 ‘got’; ਇ㖊 ‘deten-
tion’). The word ‘cham siong’ (negotiate) is a Hokkien word.1 These are
concrete examples of how the English language, having been transported
from Britain to Singapore, has assimilated into its new cultural envi-
ronment (Gil 2003). In other words, Singlish here reflects Singapore’s
multiracial, multicultural, and multilingual landscape; it ‘reflects the
cultural context in which it is used … and Singlish is not incidental; it is
inevitable’ (Wong 2014, p. 300). In fact, it has over the years become the
common language among many Singaporeans who ‘wear’ it as a badge of
identity and use it as an inter-language among the ethnic groups. Almost
all Singaporeans, regardless of race, are able to converse in Singlish.
However, as mentioned earlier, Singlish is also a language frowned upon
by others, especially by the government, because of the belief that it will
place Singapore at a disadvantaged position because of its lack of inter-
national intelligibility (Chng 2003; Wee 2014).

The ‘Speak Good English Movement’ (SGEM) in Singapore

Due to the accelerated use of Singlish and its increasing popularity (cov-
ert prestige in sociolinguistic research), the government has undertaken
an aggressive approach to banishing Singlish by stressing the need to
maintain Standard English to ensure Singapore’s economic survival in
a highly competitive global market (Rubdy 2001). Bruthiaux (2010)
pointed out that the SGEM is the government’s ‘systematic attempt
to influence the English language as used locally by steering it away
from indigenized adaptations and closer to something internationally
recognized as standard English’ (p. 92). The main objective is to modify
Singaporeans’ linguistic behavior through different modes of com-
munication such as booklets, media coverage, posters, and particularly
a website known as the ‘Speak Good English Movement’ (2013). For
example, The Speak Good English Movement has partnered with the
British Council to develop an online quiz to enable Singaporeans and
other viewers to test their English skills. Although through the years it
has used different slogans, these are nevertheless variations of the same
theme (see Table 10.1 below). The main focus remains unchanged, and
that is to speak International Standard English so that Singaporeans can
be understood regionally and globally.
The government fears that many younger Singaporean children
would likely learn Singlish as their first language instead of Standard
English (Dixon 2009). Hence, when these children start their pre-school
 Singlish Strikes Back in Singapore 195

Table 10.1 Speak Good English Movement themes

2000/04 Speak Well, Be Understood

2005/06 Speak Up. Speak Out. Speak Well
2006/07 Be Understood. Not only in Singapore, Malaysia and Batam
2007/08 Rock Your World! Express Yourself
2008/09 I Can
2009/10 Express. Inspire. Intoxicate
2010/11 Get it Right

and primary school education, these children will have to relearn their
‘English’, and schools will be faced with the challenge of teaching
the ‘correct’ variety of English. This is what Wee (2014) refers to as the
‘interference claim’ as part of the argument to reject Singlish, but which
has been found to be untenable in the light of available evidence (cf.
Siegel 1999) which shows that ‘stigmatized varieties either have no
effect on the learning of the standard, or they can actually have a posi-
tive effect’ (Wee 2014, p. 91).

Singlish and contemporary migration in Singapore

Compared to the past, where human mobility was more restricted due
to the lack of an efficient transport system, contemporary migration is
faster, sporadic, and frequent with a greater number of people coming
from non-traditional countries. According to Vertovec (2007), contem-
porary migrants come from a multiplicity of countries and are highly
diversified. Therefore, contemporary migration differs in terms of the
number of migrants, its intensity, countries of origins, which includes
‘ethnicity, religious affiliation and practice, regional and local identi-
ties’ i.e., super-diversity (p. 1032). The main contributor to Singapore’s
population growth has always been people migrating from China,
India, and the surrounding countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia.
However, the current profile of migrants in Singapore has become
even more diverse and greater in numbers. Such intense and diversi-
fied movement of people means that there would be a greater dispersal
of languages, and subsequently occurrence of language contact, thus
posing new challenges to the sociolinguistic and language planning
situation in Singapore.
The same phenomenon of migration has resulted in an increase in
the number of transnational families in Singapore, for example the
new citizens and permanent residents who may not belong to the three
196 Catherine Chua Siew Kheng

dominant races in the country (again, Chinese, Malay, and Indian).

This is compounded by the fact that many foreigners have been taking
up Singaporean citizenship as well. Currently, there are more than 40
international schools in Singapore, such as the Canadian International
School Singapore (CISS), Chinese International School Singapore
(CNISS), German European School Singapore (GESS) and Global Indian
International School Singapore (GISS). Another recent trend is the
increase in the number of mixed marriages with partners of different
ethnic groups in Singapore. Many Singaporeans are marrying foreign-
ers rather than Singaporeans of a different ethnic group. This means
that there will be an increase in the number of children who also do
not belong to any of the three ethnic groups. The recent easing of the
policy to allow mixed-race Singaporeans to include both races in their
children’s registration forms shows that these numbers are expected to
increase (Tan 2012; Tay 2010). According to the Department of Statistics
Singapore (2013), the total population in 2000 was around four million
with around 287,000 permanent residents and 750,000 non-residents.
By 2012, the total population had increased to about five million with
around 533,000 permanent residents and 1.5 million non-residents (but
working or living in Singapore).
These changing trends in immigration patterns are significant vis-
à-vis Singapore’s linguistic ecology as new communities and their
languages are expected to be increasingly dominant over a period of
time (see Figure 10.1 below). New migrants need to learn English and,
for some, Singlish as well. For many non-English speaking migrants
such as Koreans and Vietnamese, the use of Singlish is a pragmatic
imperative in Singapore, especially in situations such as engaging in
simple conversations with local Singaporeans. When this happens, it
is possible that features of the new languages will find their way into
local languages and Singlish as well. There are now many online lan-
guage guides for foreigners to understand Singlish. As one foreign blog-
ger recently wrote, ‘English’ alone is insufficient; knowing Singlish is
important as well since it is very much part of the essence of Singapore
and its culture (AussiePete 2008–2012). According to Heng (2013), a
new Singlish workshop at the Stanford Language Centre Singapore has
been introduced to help expatriates to interact with local Singaporeans.
In the process, Singapore’s changing demographics due to the influx
of new citizens and permanent and non-permanent residents (both
lower and highly skilled workers) would inevitably exert a significant
influence on the structural and functional features of Singlish, thereby
re-strengthening the position of Singlish as the country’s inter-ethnic
 Singlish Strikes Back in Singapore 197

Bilingual Policy (Postcolonial migrant society)

English as the first language and lingua franca for Singaporeans

Mandarin Malay Tamil

Others
‘Chinese’ ‘Malays’ ‘Indians’

Singlish

Globalisation and urbanization (Contemporary Singapore society)

Mandarin Malay Tamil Others + New

‘Chinese’ ‘Malays’ ‘Indians’ Citizens +
Permanent
Residents +
Racially-mixed
Singaporeans +
Foreigners

Increase in number of migrants from diversified countries and increase in

number of mixed unions – Contemporary multilingualism

Evolving Singlish

(Si) English + 1 bilingual policy

Figure 10.1 The changing social and linguistic landscape of Singapore

lingua franca. New migrants would have to assimilate Singlish into their
own linguistic repertoire to better integrate into Singapore society.
The government in this sense would have to deal with an increasingly
expansive Singlish, perhaps re-examining current strategies to eradicate
it. For example, such new strategies—referred to as ‘creative’ strategies
by some—involve ordinary citizens and government officials who are
deployed on the ground to ‘correct’ Singlish usage in places like hawker
centers and replace it with its so-called Standard equivalent (Wee
2014). For example, the SGEM encouraged Singaporeans to correct any
English errors that they might find in public places, and this was done
by replacing the ‘bad English’ with sticky notes that contained the cor-
rect version (Wee, 2014). Nevertheless, unlike in the past when English
had replaced Bazaar Malay and Hokkien among younger Singaporeans
198 Catherine Chua Siew Kheng

because of schooling and bilingual policy (Rubdy 2001), the same policy
in the midst of changing sociocultural transformations has established
Singlish as one of the key languages of communication in Singapore.

Conclusion

To sum up, Figure 10.1 above illustrates that the present bilingual policy
has successfully transformed the Singaporean society into a structured
multilingual country with the population neatly categorized into
distinctive ethnic groups—Chinese, Indian, and Malay. However, the
same figure also shows that there has been an increase in the number
of ‘Others’ in Singapore in recent years such as new citizens, perma-
nent residents, and foreigners. They are expected to help facilitate the
spread of Singlish. Coupled with the increase in the number of racially-
mixed Singaporeans, this means there will be more multilingual new
Singaporeans who will have the ability to code-switch between their
parents’ and their own languages, Singlish and English. In view of this,
language planning and policy in Singapore would have to evolve, espe-
cially when Singlish would not likely be stamped out. The new policy
should include raising awareness of the inevitability and desirability of
effective code-switching between Singlish and English. It will be impor-
tant for students as early as in pre-school to learn to identify the dif-
ferences between varieties of English so as to ensure appropriate use of
these varieties in different domains of Singaporean society. The English
curriculum will then need to be more rigorous in including examples
of Singlish and Standard English. In other words, Singlish should be
accepted at the national level, as it reflects Singapore’s contemporary
multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan society, implying that the country needs
a ‘super-diversified’ language policy, which, among many other consid-
erations, incorporates Singlish as an important, integrative language.

Notes
1. The correct Chinese sentence should be ‘ѪӰѸՊ㻛ਇ㖊˛ਟԕ୶䟿ੇ?’

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Part IV
Englishes in Unequal
Learning Spaces
11
Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and
Rule’ Policies: Linguistic Apartheid,
Unequal Englishes, and the
Postcolonial Framework
Vaidehi Ramanathan

The colonialists usually say that it was they who

brought us into history: today we show that this is not
so. They made us leave history, our history to follow
them, right at the back to follow the progress of their
history.
(Cabral 1973)

… colonial authorities adopted a policy of ‘divide

and rule’ allied to territorial separation. One com-
munity was separated from another as indigene had
earlier been separated from immigrant … The simple
Christian-Heathen or English-Foreigner dichotomy
was replaced by ever more elaborate classifications
as governments divided and redivided populations
into discrete groups, on the basis of linguistics, reli-
gion, ethnicity and skin colour. These, because they
appeared in official census reports, assumed a degree
of permanence as officials operated on the assump-
tion that the groups so distinguished were distinct
entities, to be treated differently. In India it was even
noted that the purely descriptive function of the
census assumed a part in creating new communities
as well as re-enforcing pre-existing communities. The
census in the British colonies was far from passive ….
(Christopher 1988, pp. 233–234)

This chapter offers a situated account of English and vernacular literacy

practices towards better understanding of ‘unequal Englishes’, and it
203
204 Vaidehi Ramanathan

does so from a postcolonial perspective. Postcolonial scholarship in

disciplines such as cultural studies and English literature has alerted us
to the extent to which colonial rule partially created and reproduced
negative images regarding ‘natives’ with their ‘divide and rule’ policies,
so as to be better able to govern. Within applied linguistics, this aware-
ness provides a necessary socio-historical background against which
to understand current schisms between the English- and vernacular-
mediums of education in postcolonial contexts. Based on a long-term,
evolving exploration regarding English language teaching and learning
in English- and vernacular-medium settings in Ahmedabad, Gujarat,
India, and assuming the postcolonial positioning of ‘speaking back’,
this chapter offers a discussion of two key points: (1) the degree to
which English is vernacularized in multilingual postcolonial contexts,
thus contesting colonial policies of keeping English and the vernacu-
lars separate; and (2) ways in which vernacular pedagogic practices are
effective ways of learning and teaching English (contesting disparaging
colonial attitudes about vernacular ways of teaching and learning). Both
of these issues together partially inform current inequalities around
world Englishes. Recent scholarship in language contact shows how
contact between English and local languages has given rise to ‘new
Englishes’ (Thomason 2001; Winford 2002), many of which are creoles
and still in the process of becoming fully-fledged varieties. As the data
in this chapter shows, contact between English and Gujarati contributes
to these ongoing processes, thus raising questions and implications for
(west-based) English language-teacher education.

What is postcolonialism? What were the Raj’s ‘divide

and rule’ policies?

In simple terms, postcolonialism refers to particular points of view of

people from formerly colonized countries. In terms of scholarship, it
refers to formerly colonized people ‘speaking back’ to colonial powers,
often in the language of colonizer. European colonial powers had in the
nineteenth century assumed the right to take over entire countries—
almost all of them non-western—and sought to rationalize their
takeover in terms of prevailing anthropological discourses that viewed
non-western peoples as ‘inferior, child-like or feminine, incapable of
looking after themselves (despite having done so perfectly well for mil-
lennia) and requiring the paternal rule of the west for their own interests
(today they are deemed to require “development”)’ (Young 2003, p. 2).
The policies and mandates that colonial powers set in place, especially
 Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and Rule’ Policies 205

in the field of education, were in many instances (including in the

South Asian contexts of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh)
ones of ‘divide and rule’. This was a mode of operating that the Raj (the
English colonial power as it is known in India) devised so as to rule
more effectively. As Christopher (1988) maintains, colonial administra-
tions compiled reports and censuses in a classificatory manner, drawing
initially on Christian-Heathen or English-Foreigner dichotomies which
were replaced by ever more elaborate classifications based on languages,
religions, ethnicities, and skin colors. Because these appeared in official
reports, they assumed hues of permanence as government personnel
operated on the assumption that groups distinguished in these ways
were to be treated differently. Difference, then—linguistic, ethnic, edu-
cational, and spatial—was key to the Raj and vitally informed the basis
of their governance. Profoundly segregationist in orientation, the finely
grained levels of division and difference worked to not just protect
British settlers but also to keep Indians in subservient positions.
In the area of education, the Raj needed Indians to run their Empire,
and so offered English education to small numbers of Indians who
would help them in this endeavor. This one colonial policy took root
and went very, very deep into the South Asian ideological space, to the
point where English-medium education was deemed as having more
cultural capital and symbolic power than an education in the vernacu-
lars (Gee 1990, 2003). The general importance accorded to English and
the extent to which it pervades the everyday life of the postcolonial
person has, from the point of view of some scholars, rendered the post-
colonial identity ‘hybrid’. Indeed, authors such as Verma (2010) and
Spivak write about ‘forked tongues’ and the general deracination a per-
son educated in the English-medium person feels because he/she does
not have as intimate a connection with their local vernacular as they
do with English (and so by extension may be seen to feel ‘less Indian’).
Thus, within the Indian context itself, there are inequalities around
English usage, with the language proficiency of the vernacular-medium
student being typically regarded as ‘insufficient’ and ‘lacking’.1
Based on my long-term endeavor regarding English and vernacular
language instruction in India (Ramanathan 2005, 2006a, 2006b, 2011,
2012), specifically Ahmedabad, Gujarat (where I was raised and edu-
cated), I offer in this chapter a grounded exploration of what some of
these separationist policies look like in English- and vernacular-mediums
of education. Students emerging from the two tracks are emerging
with very different English language proficiency skills, thus inform-
ing the larger canvas of unequal Englishes in important ways. Power, of
206 Vaidehi Ramanathan

course, flows disproportionately through these domains and in the

larger cultures that keep these inequities in place. When west-based
TESOL’s (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) ideologies
are interpreted in light of some local, grounded realities in non-western,
postcolonial contexts—where English has long since been vernacular-
ized and decolonized—the need for re-visioning west-based TESOL’s
onward march seems all the more imperative. Thus, while the first half
of the chapter addresses how English gets positioned and taught and
practiced in very particular Gujarati-medium settings, the second half
addresses implications of such findings for global TESOL teacher educa-
tion. Globalizing cross-currents make it imperative that we gain fuller
understandings of Englishes in diverse, formerly colonized spaces.

Unequal Englishes: a legacy of the Raj’s

‘divide and rule’ policies

The notion that TESOL’s various workings can be read as ‘texts’/signs

whose meanings are multiple, open-ended, and fluid stems partially
from the Barthesian view that texts are wrought by their cultural codes
and conventions, that they reflect and embody particular ideologies,
and that they are not enclosed units trapping meaning within. If we
view all texts and their meanings as being plural, manufactured, and
uncertain—inviting incessant unpeeling and questioning—then we can
better envisage a space whereby we recognize that meaning is not inher-
ent in the TESOL-related issues that have come down to us as ‘givens’
and defaults, but ‘acquire significance by being strung together and by
being decoded in particular ways’ (Cavallaro 2001, p. 65). The overall
meanings that we have collectively assembled in the profession—our
insistence on ‘communicative competence’, ‘appropriate methods and
materials’, ‘English-only’ policies, to say nothing of viewing grammar-
translation practices as being dated, defunct, and irrelevant—are only
some of the ways in which west-based TESOL has created a set of mean-
ings that have become the status quo, a naturalized state that tends to
dictate the ‘way things should be’. When viewed in the light of English-
language teaching and learning (ELTL) realities in postcolonial contexts,
this status quo begs uncovering and revision. While the meanings
I make from my extended and ongoing work in India emerge from links
that I—as both ‘native’ and ‘researcher’ in that scene—establish, and
thus also need to be viewed as open-ended and fluid (Luke 2003) as
well, they throw into relief some tropes of west-based TESOL that invite
serious reconsideration.
 Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and Rule’ Policies 207

At the risk of grossly simplifying my ongoing endeavors in India: in

some of my research devoted to this work (Ramanathan 2003, 2005)
I  show how the splintered, hybrid, and unequal Englishes that exist
on the postcolonial Indian ground are entrenched at base in a class-
based divide (with ancillary divides of gender and caste as well), with
issues of inequality, subordination, and unequal value seeming to
revolve directly around English’s general positioning with vernacular
languages. This general institutionalization of what I have called the
‘English-vernacular divide’ (addressed in detail in Ramanathan 2005
and summarized here) seems to a large extent ‘rule governed’, with
‘rules’—such as language policies and institutional constraints and
orientations, among other things—delineating the scope and direction
of individual and institutional action. The efforts of individual teach-
ers and institutions to mitigate against the English-vernacular gulf are
crucial in this regard because they partially indicate that these teachers
have not only taken note of the strings that manipulate their and their
students’ movements (including inequalities regarding Englishes), but
take additional steps to actively resist the tugs while still participating
in the performance. This delicate dance of participation and quasi-
opposition shows up in a range of settings, including ways in which
both EM and VM teachers draw on vernacular resources in their teach-
ing, in their attempts at breaking down alien, western concepts into
local, accessible terms, in struggling to have Indian writing in English
represented in syllabi, in resisting becoming overly pro-English despite
the surge towards it, and in hiring faculty who can teach English in the
vernacular. Inequalities between mediums and, thus, Englishes, get
addressed in very local terms.

Vernacularization of English

Toward illustrating some ways in which English is completely ver-

nacularized in the Gujarati-medium, I offer a discussion of: (1) the
content/readings of some K-12 English language textbooks used in
Gujarati-medium classrooms, and (2) ways in which vernacular peda-
gogic practices (especially choral recitation and two-way translation
methods) are presented as effective means of English language learning
and teaching (ELTL). Both these issues—local content and pedagogic
practices—are intended to make us collectively rethink how localized
English is in multilingual contexts (thereby also prodding us to ques-
tion the ‘pure’, ‘unsullied’ ‘native-speaking’ status that was first put in
place by the Raj, with the ‘divide and rule’ policies being outgrowths
208 Vaidehi Ramanathan

of these ideologies). They also prod us into questioning what passes

for ‘effective’ and ‘appropriate’ learning and teaching in west-based
TESOL. So it appears, then, that there are two layers of complexi-
ties regarding unequal Englishes here: first, the layers of inequalities
between the English-medium and vernacular-medium Englishes, and
second, the unequal nature of ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ Englishes.
Incorporating these complexities into our thinking about Englishes
worldwide is a first step in ‘redressing’ west-based TESOL.

Vernacularizing English by drawing on local contexts

for content: issues in readings
The extent to which the vernacular is amalgamated into readings in ELTL
textbooks used in Gujarati-medium settings is extensive, and is partially
illustrated in instructions provided in Gujarati that direct students to
draw on texts written in English. The following text based on a segment
in an English language textbook used in the sixth grade is an example:

Figure 11.1 Local vernacular content in English language textbooks used in

Gujarati-medium classes
Note: Text on ‘A visit to the fair’, instructions in Gujarati
Source: Purani et al. (1998, pp. 54–55).
 Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and Rule’ Policies 209

While some of the reading above is in English, we can see that

instructions for activities are in Gujarati. Also evident are degrees of ver-
nacularization in the use of local images: characters called Iqbal, Renu,
and Minu, references to an elephant at the fair, a bangle stall, and fresh,
hot idlis. Another segment—this time a piece of simulated conversation
between friends, one of whom lives in a village and the other in a city—
captures local color as well.
While the characterizations of village and city life in the above piece
are static and inert, the references to local ways of living—of walking
in fields instead of parks, of going to the village Shiva (Mahadev in the
text) temple instead of watching TV—embed the English in this text (see
Figure 11.2) to (what the authors of the textbook perceive as) lived, eve-
ryday realities. The activities, instructions for which are given in Gujarati
(comparing village and city living, working in pairs to formulate ques-
tions and answers, matching questions and their responses), also draw
on local images (eating chapattis, playing cricket, and riding scooters).

Figure 11.2 Local vernacular content in English language textbooks used in

Gujarati-medium classes
210 Vaidehi Ramanathan

Vernacularizing English through pedagogic practices: choral

responses and two-way translations in textbooks and classrooms
Elsewhere (Ramanathan 2004, 2005), I have addressed how choral
recitations in classrooms are partially justified by their use in non-
academic learning and teaching practices, such as those used in Hindu
temples. Responding chorally at key junctures in Kathas (discourse
events where a Hindu priest narrativizes myths and at specific points
elicits particular choral responses from the audience) is a common
religious practice (one that I remember occasionally participating in
myself as a child) and is sometimes used in Gujarati-medium class-
rooms, with the teachers’ prosodic cues educing particular responses
(Naregal 2001). However, what is interesting is that choral recitation
isn’t just a practice ‘borrowed’ from non-schooling arenas, but one
that is partially formalized as a teaching practice in Gujarati-medium
English-language textbooks. The following excerpts partially illustrate
this point:

Figure 11.3 Excerpts

Source: Jadeja et al. 1999, pp. 8–9
 Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and Rule’ Policies 211

The instructions above explicitly state that students should repeat/

recite these words after the teacher. When I showed pages such as the
previous to some of the Vernacular-medium (VM) teachers I have been
extensively engaged with, many of them said that such instructions in
Gujarati encourage teachers to engage in choral recitations whenever
relevant. Certainly, my extensive observations of tertiary level Gujarati-
medium classes allowed me to see how teachers teaching a variety of
different disciplines (Statistics, Geography, Psychology, English) pro-
sodically cue their students to respond to particular questions in choral
ways. As several of the teachers pointed out to me, choral responses
allow students to participate without the apprehension of being judged.

Two-way translations
Another relatively common practice in both English-medium (EM) and
VM language classrooms, but more so in VM classes, is the use of two-way
translations (Naregal 2001), a practice whereby student-performance and
comprehension is partially gauged by having students engage in reverse
translations in a variety of contexts: to explain instructions, to provide
overall meanings of a piece of reading, to translating passages from texts
(in both Gujarati and English) in exams, to encouraging student-responses
in one language when the teacher has asked a question in another and
vice-versa. In VM settings and in classrooms where EM teachers teach VM
students, both teachers and students float seamlessly between languages,
a practice that, like choral recitation, is formally codified in text books.
The following excerpts from the Standard 10 English textbook (used in
the Gujarati-medium) illustrate their frequent use as pedagogic tools. Both
segments are drawn from the same textbook; in the first, the student is
asked to translate from English into Gujarati, in the second from Gujarati
into English. (Examples such as this occur throughout the textbook.)

Use of translations in ELT

Translate the following into Gujarati:

1. When we reached the station, the train had arrived.

2. Come to my house before you go to school.
3. I asked the blind man where he wanted to go.
4. The principal told the chief guest how the World Environment
Day was celebrated in school.
5. The woman continued to talk with the robbers until the police came.

(From English, Standard 10, Kotak et al. 1993, p. 95)

212 Vaidehi Ramanathan

Figure 11.4 Translation exercise

Source: From Kotak et al. 1993, p. 10.

Most of the VM students and teachers I have observed, interviewed,

followed, and have had discussions with emphasize the value of two-way
translations. As one teacher in the VM college put it:

If I have them translate what I have said or what they read back into
Gujarati, then I know they have understood. This helps a lot. I do
think that if they understand what they are reading, they are less
likely to simply parrot all the stuff. (Faculty interview, 15:2)

Two-way translations serve other purposes as well: by integrating

Gujarati completely into English language teaching, teachers are not
only drawing on resources students bring with them to class—thus
validating their home identities and discourses—but also proactively
working to reduce the pressure that students sometimes feel to engage
in extensive memorizing (See Figure 11.4).

What does such research mean for west-based TESOL,

in general and unequal Englishes, in particular?

Needless to say, this and other such explorations (Lin 2001; Sahni 2001;
Stein 2001) open up ways in which we can rethink aspects of west-based
TESOL and while the ‘meanings’ of my previous points are only one set
of possible meanings, they do challenge some of the very ‘givens’ in the
field, including those relating to ‘effective’ teaching, and developing
 Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and Rule’ Policies 213

‘communicative’ pedagogical tools and practices. Indeed, extensive

translation methods and choral recitations of the kind described previ-
ously have been precisely the kinds of learning practices that west-based
TESOL has generally regarded as promoting ‘rote learning’, and as not
developing communicative fluency. So a question I now turn to is: What
relevance do such explorations have for west-based TESOL? What is the
crossover between these divergent realities? The kind of self-reflexive
turn that my points hinge on, where we as relative ‘insiders’ in different
realms—myself as an insider in some communities in India and as an
insider in parts of west-based TESOL teacher-education—are motivated
by an ongoing understanding that we need, as much as possible, to have
the tropes of our ‘divergent’ realities inform each other. Variously posi-
tioned as we each are in the numerous pockets of our thought collec-
tives (Ramanathan 2002), we have to constantly pull back and critically
reflect on and question the very grooves of our participation, including
the meanings we collectively make of our TESOL-related texts/signs.
Gaining meta-awareness about what is involved in the knowledge pro-
duction (and consumption) of our disciplinary thought collectives is
critical for all of us, but it is especially important for teachers and poten-
tial teachers because it allows us to see that our knowledges determine,
in part, the social realities we inhabit by contributing to our sense of
social order; to our creating, reproducing, and privileging some forms
over others; and to our making sense of what is ‘natural’ and ‘common-
place’ in our discipline. These ‘taken-for-granted’ ideologies, around a
host of TESOL-related signs—individual teaching-education programs,
genres, and pedagogic materials such as textbooks—manifest in differ-
ent ways when understood in the light of ELTL teaching explorations in
nonwestern worlds (Sahni 2001), and it is crucial that west-based TESOL
engages in discussing such manifestations, since doing so will prevent
embedding versions of ‘commonsense’ attitudes about (‘effective’,
‘communicative’) language teaching and learning into the disciplinary
river-bed. The following points address some ways in which we can
begin to address crossovers between the two realms:

How local cognitions of TESOLers—in both west-based TESOL and

nonwestern TESOL are shaped by what is immediately available to and
around them

An extended exploration carried out by Mary Schleppegrell, Catherine

Davies, and myself of two different MA-TESOL programs in differ-
ent parts of the United States (2001) showed us that these programs
214 Vaidehi Ramanathan

highlight different teaching skills, constrained and influenced as these

programs are by local institutional and communal demands and needs.
Enrolled TESOLers have their local cognitions shaped by what is avail-
able in their immediate environment, cognitions that are quite differ-
ent from another set of potential TESOLers enrolled in another TESOL
teacher-education program in a different part of the country or world
(Ramanathan 2002). We realized that the two programs—housed as
they are in different departments, one being in English, the other in
Linguistics—have little option but to assume the ideological under-
pinnings of their larger departments: L2 teachers from the English
department gain most of their practical experience teaching composi-
tion/writing skills to ESL students, whereas those in Linguistics gain
more experience teaching listening and speaking skills. The potential
TESOLers, thus, have their ‘knowledges’—cognitions, skills and expertise—
shaped by what is immediately available to them.
Taken to international planes—especially postcolonial, non-Anglo-
phone contexts where English has become vernacularized, adapted as
it is to local languages, customs, pedagogic tools, practices, and con-
straints—the local understandings of teachers in such contexts are just
as shaped by what is available and around them as with a west-based
TESOLer. In multilingual environments such as India where there are
at least 22 official languages, drawing on and integrating local ways of
speaking, thinking, behaving, and responding, including partially using
the mother-tongue, occurs because the understandings of teachers in
this context are partially shaped by availabilities and constraints in their
milieu. The following excerpt from a primary textbook used in teacher-
education programs in Gujarat partially illustrates how completely
integrated the mother tongue is in all domains of language teaching
(see Excerpt 11.1).

Excerpt 11.1 Advocating the use of the mother-tongue in teacher-education

textbooks

* The teacher may use the mother-tongue to explain the peculiarity

of certain sounds in English and to compare them with sounds in
the mother tongue.
* He may use the mother-tongue to explain unfamiliar words when
the explanation of those words in English is more difficult than
the words themselves. E.g. abstract nouns, ideas, etc.
* He may use the mother-tongue to explain abstract words, phrases,
and idioms.
* He may explain some particular grammatical points of the English
language in the mother-tongue to make those points easy for the
 Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and Rule’ Policies 215

pupils to learn. At times the teacher may compare and contrast

the grammatical points in English and in the mother-tongue.
* He may use the mother-tongue to help pupils to collect ideas and
then to organize them when they prepare to write compositions.
* He may use the mother-tongue in the classroom to test pupils’
comprehension.
* He may use the mother-tongue to help pupils to learn to use the
dictionary.
* He may use the mother-tongue when giving instructions to pupils.
Source: Raval & Nakum 1996, pp. 103–104

While there are undoubtedly degrees to which mother-tongue use is/

is not integrated into the ELTL curriculum in Gujarat, the point I am
trying to underscore is that it is very much a part of the larger language-
learning scene, both at levels of classroom practice and in teacher educa-
tion. Heightening awareness among (potential) west-based L2 teachers
of such divergence will hopefully enable them to ask the next set of
critical questions: What does the incorporation of such divergence in
learning practices mean for the larger (international) TESOL discipline?
In what ways do realities about English and vernacular language teach-
ing in non-western, (postcolonial) communities impact ELTL in the
west and what can west-based TESOLers do to address, incorporate and
learn from such research? How do such grounded explorations help
us to better understand unequal Englishes? While scholars have long
since debated issues around home/heritage languages (Hornberger and
Sylvester-Skilton 2003; Ricento 2000; Skuttnab-Kangas & Phillipson
1995), little of this research makes its way into average MA-TESOL pro-
grams in the west, and it seems imperative that we change this.

Alerting west-based TESOLers to how the very language they are going to
teach falls along the lines of serious social stratifications in non-western,
postcolonial contexts: encouraging them to find ways of mitigating social
divides

By building in situated analyses of the ELTL in non-western contexts,

west-based TESOLers are likely to see their own ELTL practices more
clearly and are likely to have a clearer sense of those disciplinary prac-
tices that need reconceptualizing. In an article on tertiary-level writing
in India (Ramanathan 2003), I attempted to show how writing instruc-
tion in both the English and vernacular mediums of education falls
along class-based social stratifications with divergent literacy practices
for each. My efforts to understand the struggles of vernacular-medium
216 Vaidehi Ramanathan

students in English-medium colleges led me to examine some of the

divergent writing instruction requirements and practices in K-12 set-
tings. Called ‘Minimal levels of writing’, these writing requirements are
mandated by the Gujarat State Board of Education, and are partially
presented in the table below (Table 11.1).

Table 11.1 Divergent MLLS for Gujarati- and English-medium students

Divergent MLLs for GM and EM Students

Excerpts from MLL from English Excerpts from MLL from English
textbooks used in the Gujarati textbooks used in the English
medium: medium:
Grade 5 Writing: Gains control of the
basic mechanics of writing in
English like capital letters, small
letters, punctuation, writing
neatly on a line with proper
spacing
Transcribes words, phrases and
sentences in English
Writes cardinals up to 50,
telephone numbers, road signs
Produces words and spells them
correctly
Writes numbers up to 50,
telephone numbers, road signs
Grade 6 Reading: Reads aloud simple
sentences, poems, dialogues and
short passages with proper pauses
Reads and follows given
directions
Reads numbers up to a hundred
Writing: Writes with proper
punctuation marks
Writes words and sentences
neatly on a line with proper
spacing, punctuation marks,
and capitalization
Writes answers to questions
based on text material
Writes simple guided
compositions in 4–5 sentences
on people, objects, or places
Translates words and sentences
from English into Gujarati and
Gujarati into English
Reading and writing: Reading textual
material and writing answers to
questions based on and related to
the text
Reading and interpreting and
offering comments on maps and
charts
Reading children’s literature and
talking about it
Writing paragraphs on given topics
Reading and writing simple recipes
Reading and interpreting labels on
wrappers
Reading and writing: Reading textual
material and writing answers to
questions based on the text
Reading and interpreting simple
abbreviations
Reading narrative prose and
adventure stories and talking about
them
Writing/building stories based on
given questions/points
Reading and using the telephone
directory
Writing captions for given
photographs, pictures, maps,
charts, diagrams and graphs
Writing messages for telegrams
Reading and interpreting labels on
bottles
 Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and Rule’ Policies 217

Grade 7 Reading: Reads aloud simple
sentences
Finds key words and phrases
from a text
Writing: Writes words and
sentences and paragraphs
dictated with correct spellings,
proper punctuation marks
Learns to write words and
sentences neatly on a line with
proper spacing and punctuation
Writes answers to questions
based on the text
Writes simple guided
compositions
Writes informal chits [notes]—
thank-you notes and invitations
From: Purani, Salat, Soni, and Joshi (for grades
5, 6 and 7 respectively) 1998, pp. 1–3. (Purani
et al. 1998)
Reading and writing: Reading textual
material and writing answers based
on the text
Writing essays based on the text
Reading literary stories and prose
lessons
Reading simple passages of reflec-
tive prose
Reading and interpreting com-
mon instructions such as railway
timetables
Reading and interpreting maps,
labels
Reading short plays/passages/writ-
ing summaries
From: Purani, Nityanandan, and Patel
(for grades 5, 6, 7 respectively) 1998,
p. 2

Two noticeable writing-related differences shown previously are: (1) writ-

ing for vernacular-medium students is presented as a discrete skill and is
addressed separately from reading, a feature that contrasts with writing
and reading being presented as conjoined entities for EM students, and
(2) that writing for EM students is essayist in orientation from early on:
‘writing paragraphs on given topics’ vs. ‘gaining the basic mechanics of
English writing … with proper spacing’ (English and vernacular medium
textbooks respectively, grade 5), or learning to write words and sentences
neatly vs. writing essays based on the texts (vernacular vs. English-
medium texts, respectively, grade 7). Making all TESOLers aware of how
their profession falls along socially stratifying lines puts them in a better
position to envisage their next steps: What can they do to mitigate gulfs?
To what extent are these gulfs tied to language policies (Tollefson & Tsui
2004) and what can they, as teachers, do to side-step these policies and
counter them both inside and outside classrooms?

Building in a thick strain of ‘globalization and English’ into average

TESOL programs: Alerting (west-based) TESOLers to global and local
discourses regarding ELTL

Recent debates on globalization have raised several nuanced arguments

about what the role of English is in its surge (Morgan & Ramanathan 2005).
218 Vaidehi Ramanathan

Block and Cameron’s volume (2002), for instance, attempts to raise

awareness of both local and global aspects around English lan-
guage teaching, issues that have direct relevance for west-based
MA-TESOL programs. One key strain they isolate is the market-based
one where languages tend to get viewed as economic commodities
because of hastening technological cross-currents across very differ-
ent parts of the planet leading to a blurring of ethnic and national
identities.
However, they are careful to point out that this blurring of iden-
tities may perhaps apply only to 10 or 15 percent of the world’s
population who are able to ‘wander through a cultural supermarket,
choosing … the identities they perform in their social worlds’ (Block
& Cameron 2002, p. 4). Local realities and stratifications still do exist
and access to technology and English in very many parts of the world
fall along socially stratified lines (Ramanathan 2005). An excessive
emphasis on globalization and English runs the risk of imposing a
homogenizing blanket on languages (Cameron 2002). Both orien-
tations—the market-based proclivities and the homogenizing dan-
gers—around globalization and English ring true, and because each
seems to be part of and in a symbiotic relationship with the other,
west-based TESOL needs to find ways of speaking of local and global
concerns around English in integrated, non-polarized ways, while
still respecting differences. Certainly much of my ongoing work with
Gujarati-medium teachers reveals versions of these tensions, with
many teachers voicing both anxieties and ambiguities about the gen-
eral surge toward all things English (‘Angrezi Paagalpan’ that, among
other things, has been propelled by the country’s growing computer
industry), while recognizing its commercial value. The following
quote by one Gujarati-medium teacher poignantly captures his con-
fusion and fears:

You see, we are now at a stage where we have become completely

mad about English. Our children see it on cable TV, the programs
are all American or British, our chief minister now wants to start
English from grade 1—they have already started that in Delhi—
there are English language classes all over the city. And the craze
is seen more among VM students; you EM people are familiar with
this from the beginning (tum EM vaalo ko tho pehle se hi in sab baatho
ke bare mein pehchaan hai). It is us Gujarati-medium people who
have to now figure it out. You ask me what I feel about it; I would
 Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and Rule’ Policies 219

have to say I am confused. My son who was himself schooled in

the Gujarati medium is now thinking of putting his child in an EM
school.

Somewhere deep down that is troubling me. What is wrong with

our Gujarati-medium that he has to think about enrolling Amrish
in English-medium schools? You tell me … (Iske bare mein mujhe
thoda dukh hain. Hamaare Gujarati-medium mein kya kharaabi hai, ki
voh Amrish ko EM mein dale? Tum hi bataao mujhe …) And yet, almost
all the tech-based jobs need English. (Faculty interview: 19:5)

As I have pointed out elsewhere (Ramanathan 2004), the numerous

English-language classes mushrooming in Ahmedabad, the explicit
specifications in job ads that applicants need to be fluent English speak-
ers, the recognition by VM students that they run the risk of being
left out of the country’s growing computer industry can all be seen to
bear out the previous teacher’s views. There is, then, ambivalence and
self-questioning on the part of (both EM and VM) teachers about the
divisiveness between English and the vernacular languages on the one
hand and a pull towards English on the other since the search and drive
for English occurs simultaneously with a serious questioning of and
resistance to the same.
Such complexities around English and local languages make us see
how profoundly layered the domain of Englishes is and the very local
concerns that go into creating inequalities between different Englishes
in one space. It is awareness of such multifaceted canvases that needs
to be part of TESOL.

What am I doing about it?

Having made these ponderous statements about ‘redressing’ west-based

TESOL, I turn now to addressing briefly the following crucial question:
What am I doing to integrate issues of unequal Englishes into west-
based second language and teacher-education domains that I am a part
of? There are at least the following realms that I am actively trying to
create space for:

1. Forefronting issues of other languages (OLs), especially home and

heritage languages and ways in which they are contained, repro-
duced, and countered by prevailing language policies and ideologies,
220 Vaidehi Ramanathan

many of which are reified in pedagogic materials, institutional

norms, and existing curricula;
2. Incorporating situated readings regarding English, local languages,
and pedagogic practices in non-western parts of the world;
3. Sensitizing teachers to discursive images around ‘other languages’:
how pedagogic practices associated with them have been histori-
cally devalued, how these images stretch deep into local and global
oppressions and subordinations, how ‘ethical’ choices/decisions
teachers make in the classroom vis-à-vis their students and with their
curricular materials need to emerge from a historicized awareness
of their present positionings;
4. Encouraging teachers to be sensitive and open-eared to voices of
ambiguity and conflict about (west-based) English, to explore and
create spaces whereby their students can speak easily about tensions
they may feel between their home languages and English.
5. Building in thick strains of uncertainty regarding the ‘meanings’
of most things in the discipline; actively creating contexts where
student teachers begin to recognize the constructed nature of all
‘meaning-making’ they engage in.

Each of these points hinges on unequal Englishes. As contact between

home languages and English grows, more and more varieties of Englishes
grow, and given local conditions, the constellations of inequalities
vary. Awareness of unequal Englishes is crucial in all domains of TESOL
(teacher feedback, methods and materials, assessment and placement,
second-language acquisition, research methods). And it isn’t just the
space of unequal Englishes and the discipline’s signs that invite critical
reading; it is also that each of us participants in TESOL—western and
non-western—is a ‘text’, manufactured, created, and put together by the
very signs and symbols we study/research/utilize. We each need to be
self-critical and questioning of how our participation constructs the dis-
cipline. So questions for all of us to wrestle with, then, are: how are each
of us in our different TESOL realities contributing to unequal Englishes?
How are we being constructed as particular kinds of speakers of English?
How are our various Englishes constructing the discipline? Posing eve-
rything we ‘know’ in the discipline as questions instead of stated givens
and viewing all and everything in the discipline as incomplete opens up
the possibility of not only having the discipline reflect the larger, uneven,
uncertain world (Radhakrishnan 2003), but of also reconstituting some
of the discursive images around English so as to make room for speakers
of unequal Englishes who are typically first speakers of other languages.
 Contesting the Raj’s ‘Divide and Rule’ Policies 221

Note
1. Postcolonial scholarship often refers to this amalgam as being ‘hybridized’
because a variety of colonial and vernacular resources inform personal
identities. Formerly colonized countries have also been called the ‘subal-
tern’ since they remained on the margins of dominant hegemonic power
structures.

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12
Unequal Englishes in Imagined
Intercultural Interactions
Phan Le Ha

Introduction

The appropriation of the English language has been taking place in

ways that have empowered users of English, particularly the ‘Other’
speakers of it (Doiz et al. 2012; Park & Wee 2012; Preisler et al. 2011;
Tsui & Tollefson 2007). In this sense, many countries and their insti-
tutions in Europe and Asia have been able to take advantage of the
international status of English to internationalize and to enhance
their higher education competitiveness. The establishment of English-
medium programs and of Western universities in many countries all
over Europe and Asia is a major strategy. In such a context, several aris-
ing questions include (1) what does intercultural interaction mean in
English-medium programs?, (2) whose norms are to be followed?, and
(3) what intercultural spaces are shared and how are they negotiated?
While these questions have been studied extensively in the English-
speaking West (Campbell 2012; Leask 2010; Marginson & Sawir 2011;
Ryan & Viete 2009; Sercombe 2011; Sowden 2005), they remain more
or less unexplored outside this boundary.
This chapter responds to this gap by focusing on intercultural inter-
actions in English-medium programs offered by Australian universities
in Malaysia to address the question of the meaning of intercultural
interactions in the context of the internationalization of education. It
argues that for many students in these programs, intercultural interac-
tions are essentially imagined as communication with ‘native’ speakers
of English whose linguistic norms and cultural values are the yardstick
against which ideal intercultural communication practices are meas-
ured. Thus, the internalization of education in Asia and other parts of
the world has increasingly become a potent cultural avenue through

223
224 Phan Le Ha

which deep-rooted ideologies about English are (re)articulated, foremost

of which are beliefs about ‘native’ speakers of English not only as the
arbiters of linguistic norms and cultural values, but also as the obliga-
tory interlocutor entities in intercultural contact with international
students.

The international status of English

The accepted belief in the international status of English is an assump-

tion that both undergirds the internationalization of higher education,
as well as drives and generates the globalization of knowledge. English
has indeed achieved its international status and has been globalized.
English is not the property of only the English-speaking West any
more. However, there are concerns regarding the unequal ownership
of English and the reproduction of colonial dichotomies between
the Self (the colonizer) and Other (the colonized) (Canagarajah 2005;
Pennycook 1998, 2001; Phillipson 1992, 2009) which some argue are
embedded in the internationalization of higher education processes
(Altbach 2004, 2007; Chowdhury & Phan 2014; Phan 2013). As such,
questions concerning the celebration of the dominance of English
in the internationalization of higher education policy and practice in
global contexts have been increasingly raised. For example, many schol-
ars have pointed out that although English has become a global lan-
guage, native-speaking English varieties from North America, the United
Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand are still often regarded as the
desired standards for international education (also see Tupas & Rubdy in
the Introduction to this volume). Internationalization of higher educa-
tion policies and practices underlying these varieties and their products
are considered better quality, regardless of context. Other Englishes, such
as Singaporean English, Indian English, and Malaysian English are seen
as second-class (Kramer-Dahl 2003). Consequently, to date the interna-
tionalization of higher education is still mostly exhibited in the import
and export of English-language products and services from the English-
speaking West (Altbach & Knight 2007; Huang 2007; Yang 2011).
The growing internationalization of higher education has also been cou-
pled with the commodification of English often associated with the belief
that ‘the West is better’. Thus many products and services from the West
are taken for granted as being superior and of reliable quality (Barnawi
& Phan 2014; Pennycook 1998; Phillipson 2008, 2009; Widin 2010).
English has often been marketed as one of the most appealing elements
in and a must-tick for the internationalization of education that would
 Unequal Englishes in Imagined Intercultural Interactions 225

earn a nation’s competitive advantage and modernization, as well as

bring about good jobs, status, knowledge, and access (Airey 2011; Low &
Hashim 2012; Marimuthu 2008). Kabe (2007, p. 3) examines the
justification to turn education into an export and income-generating
industry in Australia and refers to the consistent nationwide ‘efforts
to attract overseas students … using the selling point that Australia …
is part of the English-language sphere’, among other factors. It should
be noted, however, that not all Englishes, but only the Englishes from
the Inner Circle countries (i.e. the United States, Canada, the United
Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand), enjoy this power in most cases
(cf. Chowdhury & Phan 2014 for more discussion).
However, competing discourses argue that English no longer belongs
to just ‘native’ English speakers, and these ‘other’ users of English can
appropriate and ‘own’ it (Canagarajah 1999, 2005; Pennycook 2008, 2010;
Singh et al. 2002). As documented in my earlier work (Chowdhury &
Phan 2014), the most recent literature discusses the shift from English
uniformity to diversity and hybridity in several contexts and settings
in Europe, Asia, and China (Doiz et al. 2012; Park & Wee 2012; Preisler
et al. 2011). This body of literature demonstrates how the dominance
of English is not able to win over the diversity and power of local lan-
guages and practices in English-medium programs and universities.
It shows how various stakeholders have exercised their ownership of
English through negotiations at multiple levels. But, at the same time,
embedded in these works are the many struggles and recurring unpleas-
ant incidents expressed and reported by local students, international
students, and academics, who either have to and/or choose to teach
and learn in English, for different reasons including as part of their
universities’ requirements, as part of the practice of internationalization,
as part of their professional aspirations, and as part of their desire to be
internationally mobile. Likewise, many other European academics and
students express the frustration and dissatisfaction associated with the
teaching and learning in the medium of English in a growing number
of European classrooms (Jensen et al. 2011; Labi 2011). Issues concern-
ing pedagogy, culture, and language are paramount, while a preference
for ‘native’ speakers of English is evident, particularly when complaints
about poor English proficiencies among teaching staff and (international
and exchange) students in classrooms in Denmark, Finland, Sweden,
and Germany, for example, are repeatedly reported and confirmed.
Moreover, the internationalization of higher education and the compe-
tition among institutions to recruit international students have hugely
increased the number of courses and programs in English in Europe.
226 Phan Le Ha

In this environment, more often than not the English-speaking West’s

systems, curricula, standards, and academic norms serve as guides for
course development and improvement. There is indeed an unequal
relationship between Anglo-American and non-Anglo-American English-
medium courses, in which the former are often regarded as the target
standard for the latter to follow.
In the same vein, Canagarajah (2005, p. xvi) rightly points out
that ‘Standard English’ is still the norm in most Asian and Western
Anglophone higher education institutions and that a place for other
languages and other forms of English is not yet guaranteed. The estab-
lishment of more English-medium programs across Asia with govern-
ment policies often favoring ‘standard English’ from certain Inner Circle
countries further consolidates this unequal status of other Englishes and
other languages (see Phan 2013 for more details).
In this chapter, I demonstrate in what ways students perceive, imag-
ine, as well as legitimize intercultural interactions as ones dominated
and shaped by native speaker norms and values. I argue that the imag-
ined native speaker entity gains its power and influence largely through
students’ imagination.

Intercultural issues in the internationalization

of higher education

In 2009, I participated in a one-day symposium, ‘Developing inter-

cultural competence in international higher education communities:
Initiating European conversations’, supported by the British Association
for International and Comparative Education (BAICE), The Higher
Education Academy’s Subject Centre for Education (ESCalate) and the
University of Bristol. At the symposium, academics, policy makers, and
professionals from mainland Europe and the United Kingdom were
discussing the importance of the topic, asking and exploring why inter-
cultural competence in teaching, learning, and assessment had been an
under-researched area of study, as well as why there had also been a lack
of inter-community communication across the board of internationali-
zation. As such, this symposium was the first of its kind in Europe dedi-
cated to this topic, and strongly urged paying serious attention to this
area should internationalization continue to shape higher education
in this part of the world. I argue that this is not particular to Europe,
and that what is happening in the internationalization of education in
Australia and Asia poses the same problem as well.
 Unequal Englishes in Imagined Intercultural Interactions 227

The term ‘international’ itself entails intercultural interactions and

some ‘foreign’ element, and internationalization too assumes these.
Intercultural issues arise in every moment of the internationalization
process, ranging from policy and administrative to academic matters. It
is often observed that English-medium programs tend to assume and/or
promote ‘Western’ values that are in many ways at odds with ‘local’ val-
ues, thus creating unequal intercultural interactions and often one-way
knowledge transfer. By the same token, the taken-for-granted preference
of ‘global’ over ‘local’ as embedded in the mottos of many institutions
worldwide further validates the inclination towards the ‘global’, which
in many ways resembles ‘the West’ (Altbach 2004, 2007; Phan 2013;
Yang 2002).
To date, many studies on intercultural issues in English-medium
higher education focus on different contexts and settings in the English-
speaking Western countries, such as Campbell (2012) on New Zealand,
Montgomery (2011) on the United Kingdom, and Volet and Ang (1998)
and Marginson and Sawir (2011) on Australia. These studies share a view
that successful internationalization of higher education is only achieved
when there are more intercultural interactions between international
and local students, and when favorable conditions are created for such
interactions to occur. International students in these studies often express
their dissatisfaction with the lack of opportunities to interact with local
students, and these local students’ unwillingness to interact with them.
In all these studies, insufficient English language proficiency, self-blaming
for being an international student, and unfamiliarity with cultural norms
in the host country contribute in large measure to the absence of inter-
cultural experience among international students. Recommendations
then often include interventionist measures to teach local students to
be more welcoming and aware of intercultural interactions, to create
local-international student encounters in and outside classrooms, and
to involve international students in local cultural activities. Leask (2004,
2009, 2010) has come up with ideas to enhance intercultural interactions
for both staff and students participating in the internationalization of
higher education processes, but these ideas, while being widely cited,
are still driven by the perceived presence of the local/native/West as the
target host on one end of the intercultural parameters.
In the same fashion, English-medium programs offered in places
beyond the English-speaking West, including those in European univer-
sities, both embody and face similar issues related to intercultural inter-
actions and/or communication. For example, Wieczorek and Mitręga
228 Phan Le Ha

(2009) present two case studies of multicultural classes/programs in

two Polish universities where English is the medium of instruction. The
students came from a wide variety of countries, including those outside
Europe, and the professors in the case studies were Chinese, American,
and Polish. The Polish students in these classes and programs hinted at
a preference for American professors because of their English and their
teaching approaches. They also regarded more highly students from
Western and Northern Europe who possessed higher English proficien-
cies. Students from Spain, for instance, often struggled in class and were
left alone in group-work activities because their English was considered
to be of a lower standard than other students. One student from China
was also disliked for the same reason and for the fact that his perspectives
on certain aspects of teaching and learning were similar to those of the
Chinese visiting professor teaching the class. Both the Chinese student
and the Chinese professor were described as having poor English and
cultural values that other students found hard to appreciate, for exam-
ple being defensive and not open for negotiation of ideas. Wieczorek
and Mitręga (2009) show clear evidence of a tendency to associate with
‘the West’ in terms of teaching methodologies and English language
proficiency among the Polish students observed. The data I will present
in this chapter add more complexity to intercultural interactions when
English is the medium of instruction in universities in Asia, particularly
when the fantasy and desire to interact with the ‘local’ in these settings
is completely out of the picture. This raises a legitimate question: who is
considered a desirable ‘local’?
For many international students, interactions with other inter-
national students or with ‘non-Western’ academics are not seen as
‘authentic’ intercultural experiences, as discussed in my earlier work
(Chowdhury & Phan 2014). This problem, I argue, exists because the
local-international dichotomy assumed in a vast majority of work
on the internationalization of higher education has pre-empted the
mindset of many stakeholders of international education, leading them
to expect only a limited array of possible intercultural experiences.
Consequently, ‘the Western locals’ are viewed as only those who can
validate and authenticate such experiences. As I have discussed else-
where, among international students themselves, most see interactions
with local ‘Western’ students and staff as desirable, and interactions that
should be available throughout their international education journeys.
Thus, when such interactions are missing they tend to view their expe-
rience of studying in English-speaking Western universities as being
 Unequal Englishes in Imagined Intercultural Interactions 229

‘faked’, unfulfilling, and dissatisfying (Chowdhury & Phan 2014). The

self-promotion of many Western and/or Western-franchised universi-
ties is to blame too, particularly when they tend to over-advertise the
attractiveness and glamour of ‘Western’ education with endless oppor-
tunities for international students to experience the best of the ‘West’,
part of which is interactions with ‘Western’ native speakers of English
(Chowdhury & Phan 2014). The data discussed in this chapter will fur-
ther elaborate these arguments.

The study and data

The data reported in this chapter is only a small sample of a huge data
set collected with students studying and staff working at foreign uni-
versities in various Asian countries between 2005 and 2014 to examine
the policy, practice, and pedagogy of the internationalization of higher
education in Asia. This multi-site, qualitative case-study research project
employs individual interviews, group discussions, email correspond-
ence, and field observations as data collection techniques.
Intercultural interaction is one of the topics I have invited the par-
ticipants to talk about. This chapter specifically addresses the meaning
of intercultural interactions as internationalizing contexts, based on
two extended excerpts collected with two small groups of students at
two different times at an Australian university located in Malaysia.
These excerpts offer insights into questions of Standard English, native
and non-native speakers of English, and the dichotomies of the West
versus the Other, and of Asian values versus Western education. These
questions arose as the student participants were describing and dis-
cussing their own intercultural experiences as well as their perceptions
and imagination related to teaching and learning in a Western univer-
sity. All the students studying at foreign institutions are considered
international students, whether they leave their home countries to
study in another country or whether they study at home (Chapman &
Pyvis 2006).

‘Paying Western fees to study with Asians and to speak

Chinese’: invalid intercultural interactions
Excerpt 1, below, is from a group conversation with six students, all
female, at an Australian university in Malaysia. They all knew each
other and were enrolled in some units together. They agreed to talk
to me after we had met during their lunchtime at a food court nearby.
230 Phan Le Ha

Excerpt 1:
Student 1 (from Indonesia): You know, we are all Chinese studying
together here, Chinese from Malaysia,
Chinese from China and Chinese from
Indonesia. We are taught by Malaysian
Chinese and Malaysian Indians, but still
Malaysians. You don’t really feel much
different, everything is still Asian, still
Chinese. I expected something different.
Le Ha: What did you expect?
Student 1: More Westerners, of course. You know, my
friends and I speak Chinese all the time.
Yeah, convenient, but it kind of makes you
wonder … I kind of feel disappointed.
Student 2 (from Malaysia): We speak Chinese a lot in class too when
we do our group work, as all of us speak
Chinese. So you pay Western tuition fees
to study with Chinese and all Asians.
Student 3 (from China): I want to have more interactions with
native speakers. They speak English differ-
ent from us. My parents thought I would
meet a lot of foreigners here.
Le Ha: I think this is true because I can see that
you come from different countries, right?
Student 3: But all Asians. I like Asian food, but
I want Western education, I think, better
than our education, just exams exams
exams and memorization. But now I have
new friends here.
Student 1: Is it the same where you teach in Australia?
Other students (all turned to me): Is it
the same? It must be different because it is
in Australia, more local students right?
Le Ha: Oh it depends what and where you study
in Australia, but I’ve heard many interna-
tional students say similar things about
their experience there.
Student 3 (from China): Really? I am thinking about spending my
next semester in Australia … um … What
should I do now?
 Unequal Englishes in Imagined Intercultural Interactions 231

Other students: But at least you … (speaking in Chinese

among themselves) ….
Student 1: Do you have local students in your class
Dr Phan? And how do you interact with
Australian students?
Student 4 (from Malaysia): Are they very different
from Asians? There must be a lot of dis-
cussions in Australian classrooms right?
Student 6 (from Indonesia): Do they behave?
Student 5 (from China): Do you speak Chinese Dr
Phan?
Le Ha: (laugh) What do you expect my experience
to be like? And what do you think my
Australian students normally do in class?
(These three students switch to Chinese
and mix Chinese with English.)
Student 1: You know, we don’t talk much in class
but we do a lot of exercise. I thought an
Australian university would be different.
Student 2: We don’t think differently here, the same,
no critical thinking, our lecturers here are
Asians, so still Asian ways. We interact
in Asian ways. You know what we mean.
(laugh)
Student 4: we had one native speaker from Australia
in our class once, and we were excited at
first, but then didn’t enjoy his class … urm
… … ah …
Le Ha: Why didn’t you like his class?
Student 4: (turning to her friends) He didn’t have
many lecture notes, just talking, and we
couldn’t take notes, and we got lost.
Student 5: … and he wanted us to speak in class and
think critically about the topics he used.
We’re not good at it, and he thought we
are lazy. He just came to class and left
right after that. We seldom talked to him.
Student 6: When exams come, we need the notes.
Yeah, we don’t like to have just Asian
teachers here but it is helpful with exams.
232 Phan Le Ha

We pay a lot of money and we need to pass

and to graduate to get a good job. But we
still think it’s good to have more Western
people here on campus. You know, it’s an
Australian university, not a Chinese, not
a Malaysian university, so you kind of
expect this … (laugh), but an Australian
degree makes it easier to get a good job in
Asia, no doubt.
Student 1: And we work in Asia, following Asian
ways … (laugh) With an Australian
degree, they think we are more like the
West, right? (laugh again)
The other students all nod their heads
and laugh loud and happily. I laugh
too.

As I was listening to these students, I was telling myself ‘This paradox

is really fascinating. The students desire Western values while holding
firm to Asian practices, as they describe their experiences. This is both
pragmatic and idealistic’. One can also argue that being enrolled in
English-medium programs at this Australian university, it is not unrea-
sonable for these students to express their expectation to have ‘the
Western style’ of teaching and learning in their programs.
Excerpt 1 presents two main dichotomies surrounding the West-Asia
and native-nonnative speakers of English. These students’ expectations
of international education scenarios emphasize an almost absolute
fondness for Western native speakers of English being their classmates
and teachers. Embedded in the expectations is dichotomous thinking
associated with commonly held stereotypes about Westerners being
critical thinkers, good communicators, and innovative teachers, while
Asians are exam-oriented, passive, and rely on lecture notes and memo-
rization. Such stereotypes are found in studies conducted in offshore
education, such as those reported in Dunn and Wallace (2004, 2006),
Dobos (2011), Smith (2009a, 2010, 2012) and Smith (2009b). The stu-
dents also imagined Australian classrooms to be interactive and exciting
with active Australian students eager to participate in discussion and
talk-oriented activities.
Although the students wanted to have Western native English-
speaking teachers teaching them, they did not necessarily feel that their
learning purposes were fulfilled when they had one Australian male
 Unequal Englishes in Imagined Intercultural Interactions 233

teacher. They blamed themselves, however, for not being able to cope
with this teacher’s speaking pace and his style of teaching that focused
more on discussing issues in class instead of giving students lecture
notes to study at home. They thought they were not critical enough
for this Australian teacher’s expectation. The students legitimized the
Australian teacher’s pedagogical and intercultural failure (I would argue)
by condemning Asian cultural and educational traits. They found rea-
sons to qualify him so that his image would still fit their imagination
and fantasy of Western native English-speaking teachers: he could have
enjoyed his teaching and we could have learnt much from him if we
had been exposed more often to the Western style of teaching. The
students seemed to imply that it was their Asian teachers that were to
blame for their inability to cope with Western teaching—the one that
they desired and expected to experience in an Australian university.
When their expectation was not met, these students appeared not
to enjoy their experiences and to make blanket statements about their
Asian-origin teachers, who could be Malaysian, Chinese, and Indian.
Race and ethnicity clearly played a role in the students’ perception
and idealization of ‘the West’ and its imagined underlying values and
practices. This is well supported by Kubota and Lin (2006) as well as
Appleby (2013), who discuss how race is played out in English-medium
classrooms around the world and how it shapes students’ desire for the
unproblematic ‘White’ ‘Western’ race that they see as superior and thus
desirable. What these students expressed also supports the data reported
in Wieczorek and Mitręga (2009), whereby many Polish students
referred to race and ethnicity as the very reasons behind their refusal
to take courses instructed by ethnic minority professors. Likewise, these
Polish students also rated the teaching by ethnic minority professors
lower than that by Polish and American professors just because of their
ethnic and racial difference.
However, interwoven in the conversation I had with the students
in Excerpt 1 lies a dilemma that the students revealed quite straight-
forwardly. On the one hand, they needed an Australian degree to be
more competitive in the job market and acknowledged it was their
Asian teachers who made it possible for them to graduate by preparing
them well for all exams. On the other hand, they criticized these Asian
teachers for following everything ‘Asian’ in the classroom, on campus,
and in exams. The dilemma, ‘we know we can’t go out there with good
job offers without you Asian teachers, but we still think you are inferior
to Australian teachers, including the one that we didn’t learn much
from and who didn’t help at all with our learning for exams’, made it
234 Phan Le Ha

impossible for the students to reconcile their perceptions, imagination,

and experiences. Asian teachers are still not good enough, no matter
what they do, because they are ethnically and culturally Asian and
because they speak English differently from native speakers of English,
as consistently described and expressed by these students. Their desire
for more interactions with native English-speaking teachers and class-
mates and their imagination of an idealized West seemed to take away
their ability to critically assess the (intercultural) interactions they had
had with those around them on campus.
For these students, paying ‘Western’ tuition fees to be taught by
Asians and to have classmates who mostly spoke Chinese seems to
have created their own internal battle that was clouded by their own
imagination of intercultural interaction with a particular population of
native speakers of English.

What is ‘Australian’ in our experiences: few foreigners, not enough

English, too many Indonesians and unfriendly Muslims around
Excerpt 2 is from a group conversation with three students studying at
the same Australian university taking place in 2012. Two of them are
from Indonesia and one is from Malaysia. They are all from Chinese
ethnic backgrounds. I approached them while they were sitting together
in a lecture theatre studying for their exams.

Excerpt 2:
Student 1 (from Malaysia): So you are teaching in Australia?
Le Ha: Yes, I am. Are you studying for your exams?
All students nod their heads saying
‘Yes’.
Student 2 (from Indonesia): What do you think of
our campus here?
Le Ha: I was here before and there have been many
changes now. I think you have a very nice
campus. It is very quiet today on campus,
I think the students must be at home study-
ing for their exams. I am so fortunate to
meet you three here.
Student 1: Because if we stay at the dorm, we can’t
study, so we have to come here (laugh).
Too much temptation there and of course
shopping is just nearby (laugh). We are good
friends and we stick together all the time.
 Unequal Englishes in Imagined Intercultural Interactions 235

Le Ha: So do you also study with other students

too?
Student 1: Not really. You know, we have some class-
mates from Bangladesh but they always
stick together.
Student 3 (from Indonesia): And many other class-
mates are from Indonesia. I feel like I am
still in Indonesia here, lots of Indonesians.
Le Ha: So do you all speak Chinese?
Student 1: My Chinese is not good, but I can speak
Indonesian, so we can speak Indonesian
together, and English too.
Student 2: I speak Indonesian with other Indonesian
students here. You know Bahasa right?
We speak more Bahasa than English here.
I didn’t know studying here will be like
this. Not much English.
Le Ha: Oh, I thought you have the English-only
policy here on campus?
Student 3: But we don’t speak English to Indonesians
(laugh). We speak Chinese too, but not
often as Bahasa. Her Chinese is better than
my Chinese (pointing to Student 2).
Student 1: But we use English in class. Our teachers
are Malaysian Chinese, Malaysian Indians
and Indians and others, and they only
speak English to us. We only had two,
right, foreign teachers in our course, and
you know we nearly graduate. Three years,
two foreign teachers.
Le Ha: What do you think of this?
Student 2: It’s ok, but … (pause) … it is Australian
university here.
Student 3: … and we don’t have opportunities to know
native speakers to practice English.
Student 1: My English is very bad, but I think it is ok
here in Asia. I just want to stay and work
in Asia. But you kind of want to have more
Australian classmates and teachers around
(laugh).
Student 2: I want to work in Singapore after this.
236 Phan Le Ha

Student 3: But my parents want me to help their busi-

ness. I learn something about business here
and people like a foreign qualification in
Indonesia, easier to get a job if I don’t want
to help my parents.
Le Ha: I am sure several years in Malaysia will
be beneficial to your future, wherever you
work. I think you can learn so much from
being here in this place.
Student 2: People here are not friendly with Indonesian
people, so we are afraid to go outside of
the university area. Most people here are
Muslim, and it’s not safe, and we are not
Muslim, we are Chinese Indonesian, so
they don’t like us.
Le Ha: How do you know they don’t like you?
Have you tried interacting with them?
Student 2: No, I don’t have any Muslim Malaysian
friend. They look unfriendly to me, and it’s
hard to know what they think. But I think
they don’t like people who are not Muslim.
Student 3: Malaysia is not much different from
Indonesia, although my parents think it’s
more developed and its people speak good
English. It’s still Asian and many areas are
dirty too. A lot of Malaysian people don’t
speak good English, but they think they are
better than Indonesian people.
Le Ha: So does it mean that this university here
offers one of the best environments for good
English, given that English is the medium
of instruction and the quality is controlled
by Australian standards?
All three students nod their heads, but
they do not seem to let my points sink
in here.
Student 1: But it could be better if we had more teachers
and students from Australia coming here.
Student 3: I stay in the dorm a lot because it’s the
same here and the dorm, just all Asians.
 Unequal Englishes in Imagined Intercultural Interactions 237

Student 2: … and I go back to Indonesia whenever we

have break, so for me I interact most with
Indonesians, so how can I improve my
English?

This excerpt touches upon cultural, linguistic, and social stereotypes

about certain groups and countries. At the country level, the students
saw both Indonesia and Malaysia as ‘Asian’ and not as sophisticated
as the West. What these students described in the excerpt further con-
firms the intensification of all kinds of stereotyping perpetuated in
and by international education (Caruana & Ploner 2010; Phan 2015).
What makes this matter even more problematic is the lack of effort
from these students to try to interact with other Malaysians apart
from those in their courses, to diversify their experiences and move
beyond their stereotypes. The fact that these students spent most of
their time amongst themselves in their dorms, on campus or in the
shopping area around the university limited their chances to move
outside their comfort zone and their perceived images of Malaysia and
other social groups.
This excerpt also highlights a well-known myth, which is the auto-
matic improvement of English among international students when
they participate in international education. Studies have demonstrated
that international education does not always provide an environment
for English language improvement and for intercultural interactions
through the medium of English (Chowdhury & Phan 2014; Marginson &
Sawir 2011; Pham & Saltmarsh 2013). These studies also point out
the tendency among international students to form their own groups
based on their cultural and national similarities/sameness. This ten-
dency results from many factors, including international students’
self-perceived low English competencies, the high concentration
of students from the same country in one place, the temptation to
mingle with those who speak their home language and eat the same
food, the misrepresentation of international education experiences
among host institutions, local students’ alleged unfriendliness towards
foreigners, and negative stereotypes about certain cohorts of interna-
tional students that have led to them being isolated. In this excerpt,
the three students placed great emphasis on improving their English
proficiency as a target while studying at this Australian university, and
thus the lack of opportunity to interact with other students in English
disadvantaged them. They also referred to Bangladeshi students
238 Phan Le Ha

forming their own group, and thus the high number of Indonesian
students had few others but themselves to interact with. This perhaps
made their desire to have native English-speaking Australians around
even stronger.
At some point earlier in our conversation, I felt that these students
had shared with me a more complex understanding and somewhat
balanced evaluation of their international education experiences.
However, as our conversation progressed, it was clear that they were
not appreciative of their experiences mostly because of the absence of
native English-speaking Australians/foreigners on campus. It was almost
three years between the two group conversations presented in Excerpts
1 and 2 above. Their experiences were rather similar, in that they had
not used as much English as they had expected and their teachers and
classmates were still predominantly Asian. These students all wanted
to see more ‘Western’ native speakers of English on campus. They also
wanted to have more interactions with Western foreigners during their
study at this university.
However, one main difference between the two groups lies in the
ways they viewed and described their Asian teachers. While both groups
seemed to construct an Australian university as being filled with ‘foreign
teachers’ whom they perceived to be ‘Australian’ and ‘native speakers
of English’, the second group did not express an explicit dissatisfaction
with their Asian teachers. Their desire to have ‘more Australian class-
mates and teachers around’ did not necessarily lead to negative percep-
tions of other teachers, as seen in Excerpt 1. But all in all, both excerpts
show how deeply rooted the belief about ‘the West is better’ is, and how
it shapes and controls how far one can go with their stereotypes about
certain ethnic groups and with their imagination of the West’s power to
improve these students’ learning experiences.

Conclusions and further thoughts: intercultural

interaction and unequal Englishes

The data provide incidents and materials that evoke many questions
related to international education, intercultural interactions, and une-
qual Englishes, upon which I elaborate below.
First, I argue that intercultural interactions, in this sense, are more
about an imagined rather than a real experience, in which the partici-
pants imagine them to be interacting and negotiating with an absent
‘West’ entity, often at the cost of undermining what is taking place
 Unequal Englishes in Imagined Intercultural Interactions 239

around them. They, accordingly, could become handicapped in both

worlds, real and imagined. The data reveals that intercultural interac-
tion essentially does not involve participants from more than one cul-
ture, but rather between a ‘real’ group of participants and an imagined
interlocutor. The imagined interlocutor could be an English native-
speaker lecturer, a group of ‘foreign’ students from the English-speaking
West, or some assumed unitary ‘Western’ authority who is judging the
student-student and student-teacher interactions in the classroom. As
such, the students tend to refuse to take advantage of their immediate
contexts, in which meaningful intercultural interactions could happen
with other students who may possess sophisticated knowledge of their
major, or of other cultural, social aspects of many topics. Likewise, this
could make the students unable to appreciate and participate in real-
life intercultural events, while at the same time their imagination of
the superior West prevents them from interacting with ‘Western’ native
speakers. This extends the body of work on international students’
learning experiences in English-speaking Western contexts and settings
cited throughout the chapter.
Another argument I want to put forward is new understandings of
the concepts of ‘the local/the native/the host’ in international educa-
tion and intercultural interactions. In studies conducted in the English-
speaking Western contexts and settings, the ‘local’ is often conflated
with the ‘native speaker of English’, therefore entitled to be the gate-
keeper of standards and the desirable authentic validator of cultural
knowledge associated with the English language. However, when the
research sites shift away from the English-speaking West such as the
case of Australian universities located in Malaysia, ‘the local/the native/
the host’ become undesirable in many ways. At one level, they are
referred to as ‘unfriendly Muslims with poor English’, therefore undesir-
able and not worth interacting with. At another level, Malaysia is a real
physical place where the university is located and where international
education takes place, but what is within the university campus seems
to have little to do with the host society as a whole. The international
students from Indonesia and China in this study, for instance, did not
express any enthusiasm about and interest in learning about the coun-
try and its culture. Instead, they dreamt of a faraway land of Australia,
so willingly giving up their chances to explore intercultural experiences
where they were physically placed. Being ‘guests’ in Malaysia, the invis-
ible ‘Australian’ becomes the desirable host in the imagination of these
students. Again, its native-speaker status and an affiliation with the
240 Phan Le Ha

West have made Australia a place of admiration and fantasy, without it

even having to do any hard work to achieve that.
Finally, I argue that under the banner of the internationalization of
higher education and the international status of English, the desire to be
like ‘the West’, the lack of trust in ‘Asians’, and the deeply rooted belief
that ‘the West is better’ continue to drive interactions and practice in
many English-medium programs and institutions in Asia. They prompt
many students, their parents, and academics to demand ‘Western’-style
teaching and learning to be the norm whenever a program and an
institution claim to be ‘international’. What seems rather odd in many
such contexts and settings is a strong desire for ‘native-speaker’ and
‘Western-oriented’ norms, even when the teaching and learning takes
place entirely among ‘Asians’. Somewhere ‘in the air’ is the perceived
legitimacy of the ‘native speaker’ and ‘the West’ as the target norms
even in places where successful teaching and learning are all credited to
‘Asians’. It is this line of argument that further consolidates my work in
international education and the overall theme of this volume, which is
‘unequal Englishes’.

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13
Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal
Englishes’: The D-TEIL Experience
in Cuba
Ian Martin and Brian Morgan

In this chapter, the co-authors will describe their participation in an

undergraduate program in the Discipline of Teaching English as
an International Language (D-TEIL) at Glendon College in Toronto,
Canada. A key component of the D-TEIL certificate program is the three-
week practicum held at E. A. Varona Higher Pedagogical University in
Havana, Cuba, in which Varona’s Cuban faculty collaborate in the
supervision and guidance of Glendon’s students. In preparing for
the Varona practicum, the co-authors will discuss the required courses
that they teach in the certificate program and how they conceptual-
ize and organize them in support of the socio-political intercultural,
linguistic and pedagogical challenges that the D-TEIL students are
expected to encounter.
In Brian Morgan’s course, English as a World Language (EWL) (EN/
LIN 4695), readings and assignments explore the notion of unequal
Englishes across a variety of international settings and conceptual mod-
els (i.e. linguistic imperialism, language ecology, postcolonial appro-
priation, cosmopolitan citizenship, neoliberal instrumentalism). In Ian
Martin’s course, Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL)
(EN/LIN 4696), there are five interrelated components: observation
and reflection tasks on L2 classrooms, post-methodology1, pedagogical
grammar, cultural awareness of Cuba, and the practicum. Attention is
given to developing the students’ ability to reflect upon their own L2
language learning and to notice patterns in the various L2 classrooms
(English, French, and Spanish) available for observation at Glendon.
These observation skills, combined with Cuban cultural awareness,
will be necessary when, in the first week of their practicum, they are
required to observe Varona classrooms.

244
 Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal Englishes’ 245

The observation week allows our students to enter Varona classrooms

gently, observing Varona’s skilled Cuban teachers of English, who under
the terms of the practicum agreement are given a mentoring role.
Perhaps this aspect of our program is somewhat rare: a language teacher
education (LTE) program from an ‘inner circle’ university goes to great
lengths to locate its practicum in an ‘expanding circle’ country and
explicitly privileges the pedagogic skill of non-native teachers as exem-
plars to be learned from. In this way, our program addresses ‘unequal
Englishes’ by recognizing forms of pedagogical expertise that extend
beyond parochial notions of ‘nativeness’. Our students’ initial task in
Varona classrooms is to use their pattern-noticing skills to try to see how
the practices of learning and teaching English are accomplished in the
context and to draw upon these observables to inform their teaching in
weeks two and three. In this way, our practicum sees itself as a micro-
scopic version of the process of adaptation that an EIL teacher would
go through in preparing for an overseas teaching/living opportunity.

Storied inscriptions in a TEIL program

In preparing language teachers, the setting of priorities has changed

in significant ways that illustrate the types of issues that unify this
collection on unequal Englishes. One of the fundamental changes can
be seen in the ‘tools of the trade’ (i.e. epistemologies, values, modes of
inquiry) that we promote in our LTE programs. For example, many new
students to D-TEIL anticipate acquiring—and some, in a notably quick
and straightforward manner—a set of ‘best methods’ by which a second/
foreign language is most efficiently taught anywhere and anytime.
Though not usually satisfied, such expectations reference paradigmatic
notions of universality and objectivity, hallmarks of positivistic research
(Lynch 1996; Reagan 2004), but they also align with current efforts to
re-organize universities as business enterprises, in which relationships
between students and teachers are narrowly viewed through a cus-
tomer/service-provider lens replete with fixed outcomes and ‘quality
assurance’ measures (Clarke & Morgan 2011; Corson 2002). In such a
top-down, carefully managed environment, teachers essentially become
technicians, the delivery boys and girls of ‘expert’ curricula developed
by outside specialists.
Yet, the priority and exclusivity once associated with positiv-
istic research is now considered alongside more recent models
(e.g. community of practice, activity theories, feminist poststructuralism,
246 Ian Martin and Brian Morgan

constructivism, ecology/complexity theories) in which the local and

contingent aspects of learning are foregrounded as crucial for theory
making and pedagogy (e.g. Canagarajah 2005; Kumaravadivelu 2003).
These new approaches, highlighting identity and agency, raise the
stakes for teachers by suggesting a more central role for them in the
knowledge that is received and/or resisted in classrooms. The subse-
quent tools that we encourage in LTE become more introspective in
focus as they are utilized to investigate the ‘inner world’ of the new
practitioner and how his or her prior experiences, beliefs, and ideologies
mediate instruction. In many LTE programs, this inner world, and the
‘pattern noticing’ it reflects, which has been mentioned as integral to
observation skill development in the TEIL course, has thus become an
immediate concern for syllabus design through course components that
include storytelling, reflection papers, auto-ethnography, and journal
and blog entries as new footings for professional initiation. Our two
D-TEIL courses certainly subscribe to the field-value recognized in these
personalized forms of writing, some of which are presented in this chap-
ter below. Still, it is interesting to extend or reverse this reflective gaze
further to consider not only our students but also our own inscriptions
on the D-TEIL program and how the courses themselves embody narra-
tivized, autobiographical elements worthy of reflection, particularly in
respect to how Unequal Englishes are represented in program curricula.
In doing so, we recognize an insightful and productive line of inquiry
recently explored by Nunan and Choi (2010), Pennycook (2012), and
Vandrick (2009), to name a few.
Speaking of stories: given the size of the country, and number of
post-secondary institutions with EFL/EIL programs, the fact that both
Ian and Brian, at different times (Ian: 1982–83; Brian: 1987–88), taught
English at the Sichuan Foreign Language Institute (SFLI) in Chongqing,
People’s Republic of China, is a remarkable coincidence. For Brian,
the experience was a somewhat intense entry into the field, coming
soon after his TESOL certification in 1986–87. As he recalls (Morgan
1998, pp. 3–5) early into his term at SFLI, his faith in the local viability
of Communicative Language Teaching, preeminent in his and other
pre-service courses at the time, was soon under strain and challenge,
eventually resulting in numerous efforts to re-negotiate the syllabus and
integrate familiar local practices. Brian was also soon to learn that with
his designation as a ‘foreign expert’ and as a so-called Native-English-
Speaking Teacher (NEST), his salary would be 10 times that of his Chinese
colleagues, a source of surprise and embarrassment for him as he recog-
nized that their relevant expertise (e.g. L1/L2 linguistic understanding,
 Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal Englishes’ 247

preferred local methods) far exceeded his own. Such experiences reflect
what Kumaravadivelu (2012)—drawing from Foucault, globalization,
and postcolonial theories—rightly describes as an ‘epistemic depend-
ency’ on Western/Center-based knowledge production in the field of
English as an International Language (EIL).2 For Brian, these experiences
in China opened up further questions and a longstanding interest in
language, power, and identity, and how critical theories and pedagogies
might inform pre-service syllabus design in ways that better prepare
teachers for the inequalities that Brian encountered in his own profes-
sional initiation. In the EWL syllabus, readings that foreground the geo-
politics and economics of English (e.g. Blommaert 2009; Karmani 2005;
Kubota 2010; Pennycook 2000; Spring 1997; Wee 2008) or problematize
the construct of a native-speaker in EIL (Holliday 2009; Kirkpatrick
2006) can be traced back to Brian’s SFLI experiences.
Ian received his first crash course in linguistic inequality when he
spent 1972 working as an adult education teacher in an indigenous
(Ojibwa) community in Northern Ontario, where he saw first-hand the
linguistic face of Canada’s colonial hegemony, which positions settler
languages (and claims to lands and resources) above indigenous peoples
(and their lands and resources). This experience has never left him,
and for the rest of his career, he has spent as much time promoting
indigenous languages as working out possibilities of a non-hegemonic
ideology for English. Ian also brings a wealth of first-hand experiences
of working in Nunavut, where he contributed to developing a ‘strong
bilingual’ (Inuktitut-English) plan for the territory’s new education sys-
tem. One element of this plan involved a re-imagining of English, not
as a colonial imposition subtracting children from their threatened (and
sometimes lost) mother tongue and taught by monolingual (in both
language repertoire and, alas, in ideology) southern Canadian teach-
ers, but rather as a highly useful tool for defending Inuit interests and
making connections with the wider world. This re-imagined English
would be a lingua franca, and preferably should be taught by bilingual
teachers, a majority of whom would be Inuit.3 Another aspect of the
decolonizing stance of the instruments available to Nunavut is its com-
mitment to (re-)asserting the value of all varieties of the Inuit language,
and doing whatever can be done to support the Inuit language replacing
English as the ‘default’ language among Inuit in more and more con-
texts in Nunavut.4 There is also a need for lingua-franca perspectives on
English to replace monolingual assimilationist models of ELT.
The two ways in which Ian’s experience is inscribed in the D-TEIL pro-
gram are associated with his struggle against assimilationist language
248 Ian Martin and Brian Morgan

and semiotic ideologies. First, the program requires the Glendon stu-
dents to be at least ‘on the path’ towards personal English-Spanish
bilingualism, which would be a counterpart of the Spanish-English
bilingualism promoted by the host institution. Adding this requirement
to our program requirements underscores the importance of a very
Glendon view that English is embedded in a local bilingual ecology, in
which concepts of language contact and additive bilingual education are
part of the LTE program. Second, and this relates to Kumaravadivelu’s
parameter of possibility, the D-TEIL program adds an additional com-
mitment to ‘promoting the teaching of an English capable of carrying
the weight of new users’ cultural experience and diverse ecologies of
knowledge’ (Santos 2007) as a natural consequence of English used as a
lingua franca by bi- and multi-lingual speakers.
Regarding D-TEIL, another collaboration of note is the TESOL
Quarterly (2007) special issue (SI) on policy enactments for which Brian
served as a co-editor with Vaidehi Ramanathan (e.g. Ramanathan &
Morgan 2007), and for which Ian contributed a forum piece on post-
1990s ELT language policies in Cuba (Martin 2007). The SI theme of
teacher agency in policy implementation and development is one that
is strongly promoted throughout D-TEIL. In the LIN 4696 practicum
course, it is reflected in the prominence assigned to Kumaravadivelu’s
(2003) post-method pedagogy, and his parameters of particularity,
practicality and possibility, all of which enhance the status and trans-
formative potential of language teachers. In LIN 4695, teacher agency
in EIL is encouraged through examples and case studies of critical
teaching (e.g. Ha 2004; O’Mochain 2006; Sifakis 2007), and through
a final assignment option of an Issues Analysis Project (IAP), in which
student teachers are asked to identify a problem or gap (linguistic and/
or socio-political) in the EIL field and propose a ‘blue-print for action’
(e.g. a policy initiative, advocacy letter/report, pre/in-service workshop,
curricular material), which could serve, in part, to address the issue (e.g.
Morgan 2009, 2010).
In LIN 4695, Ian’s 2007 article in the SI is one of the most popular
course readings, especially for those who are about to participate in the
University of Varona practicum. Commenting on the article, Hannah,5
a D-TEIL student in both EWL and the practicum noted:

I found it interesting to delve a little deeper into the Cuban ELT his-
tory for my research essay and I’m really glad I chose to do so. In a
way, I think it made the experience that much more meaningful to
me; … I really like contexts and having purpose to things I do, so this
 Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal Englishes’ 249

helped me understand the cultural/social/political situation specific

to Cuba and where I fit into it, adding motivation and meaning to
my experience. (EWL questionnaire)

For reasons that reflect its inclusion in the SI, the article details language
policies and practices in a country that, because of its recent history and
politics, receives marginal attention from American-based journals such
as TESOL Quarterly, a situation compounded by the country’s lack of any
on-line digital publications with which to share its own ELT research.
This point was also raised by Hannah, who chose to write a final essay
on Cuban ELT as ‘another means to connect with the Cubans’, a pos-
sible connection complicated by limited resources and access:

A challenge I had with my research essay was acquiring articles about

Cuban ELT. The York database didn’t have access to very many arti-
cles on the subject of ELT in Cuba and I think that many Cuban arti-
cles are probably unavailable on the Internet due to Cuba’s limited
access to Internet, both internal and external. (EWL questionnaire)

‘Connecting with Cuba’ is something that the Glendon English

Department has been intimately involved in since 1987. Ian, along with
several Glendon colleagues, participated throughout the 1990s in the
training of English-language teachers in the newly-developed network
of schools for tourism workers, following the collapse of the Soviet
Union and, not incidentally, the disappearance of Soviet economic aid
to Cuba. As Russian declined, English was embraced, but not any more
with an exclusive US focus, as it had been before the 1959 Revolution,
but as a vital tool of wider communication with non-hispanophone
visitors (including those who use a variety of English as an L1 and
those—many—who use it as a lingua franca). Ian has been following
Cuba’s ELT scene for over 20 years, and Glendon’s international D-TEIL
teaching practicum at Varona is a natural outgrowth of his deep per-
sonal and professional involvement with the island.

Program history and background

About 25 years ago, the English Department of Glendon College,

York University, in Toronto, Canada, took the step of adding a new
fourth-year course, Teaching English as an International Language
(TEIL), to its already substantial list of applied linguistics offerings.
Since the Department was staffed by Britons and Canadians who had
250 Ian Martin and Brian Morgan

taught English abroad, and since the College had long promoted both
English-French bilingualism and internationalism, the new course was
welcomed by colleagues and students alike.
It was clear also that the new course breathed life into a cluster of
other courses: Structure of English soon began to include analysis of ESL
learner texts; Phonetics students started to look at ESL learner pronun-
ciation; Varieties of English introduced the burgeoning field of New and
Expanding Circle Englishes; Second-language Learning helped students
acquire a metalanguage with which to reflect on their own L2 learn-
ing experiences and that of others; Sociolinguistics, Language and Society,
and Bilingualism grounded our students in the social dimensions of
languages in contact; and English as a World Language presented the his-
tory of English Language spread and diffusion and its emergence as the
world’s lingua franca, with important implications for language teach-
ing and learning. In short, the pedagogical and geopolitical concerns
of D-TEIL were coming to influence a whole range of linguistic and
sociolinguistic courses, at the same time drawing attention to the ways
in which disciplinary knowledge in the language sciences align with
English hierarchies and inequalities.
In the D-TEIL program, students who take the fourth-year TEIL and
EWL courses have already spent 180 classroom hours, spread over at
least two years of study, in a program integrated into their B.A. prepar-
ing them to appreciate something of the dynamics of contemporary
English in the world and the consequent development of new bi- and
multi-lingual users of the language across the world exhibiting a rich
diversity of identities, knowledges, and expectations, and to locate
themselves somehow in relation to that world-historical phenomenon.
An additional characteristic of this new program is that, despite the
title of the TEIL course, it was not conceived as essentially providing
a pre-service opportunity for future EFL teachers. In fact, the title of
our Certificate is Certificate in the Discipline of Teaching English as an
International Language (Cert D-TEIL), highlighting the certificate not as
education but as a unique kind of liberal-arts discipline. Since Glendon is
a liberal arts rather than an education faculty, the fundamental goal of the
program was to provide B.A. students majoring in English, Linguistics, or
International Studies with a deeper understanding of the international
reality of twenty-first-century English. The Cert D-TEIL focus is not on
Canada’s many English-learners (francophones, immigrants, and indig-
enous peoples), but rather on the world beyond Canada.6
There is a career path at York for those Glendon students who
wish to pursue a career in teaching English abroad: with a two-year
 Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal Englishes’ 251

overseas experience teaching English, they may apply to the applied

side of York’s one-year LAL graduate program (Linguistics and Applied
Linguistics). Several Glendon graduates have followed this path, and have
found opportunities teaching English in tertiary level institutions, and
some have followed up with distance-education doctorates in Applied
Linguistics. However, equally frequent is a career path leading to other
areas of education, such as speech pathology, teaching English in Canada,
and in areas not related to education, such as graduate programs in
English, Linguistics, International Studies, or Public Affairs.
Perhaps the most important development in the 20-year evolution
of the program, and certainly in its eight years of formal existence as
a university certificate, was the building of a relationship with a like-
minded Cuban university, with a foreign language faculty preparing
future teachers in English and French. Cuba is the closest non-English-
speaking country to Canada and a country with which Canada has had
75 years of unbroken diplomatic relations and which large numbers of
Canadians have visited as tourists.
In the months leading up to the practicum, which takes place every
two years at the end of April and early May, we consult with our Varona
colleagues and pair up Glendon students with specific first- or second-
year classes in Varona’s English program. Often, the D-TEIL coordinator
visits Varona and takes back videos of classrooms and samples of stu-
dent work, by way of preparing the Glendon students for their assign-
ment. In the three-month period before each practicum period, a Cuban
cultural awareness component of the TEIL course is included, devoted
to Cuban culture-learning and general preparation (and fundraising!)
for the trip. The students are required to write a weekly Cuban cultural-
learning journal, reflecting on the films, guest lectures, and readings
they are exposed to. They start to formulate their ‘personal culture-
learning project’, which will continue once they are in Havana. As a
rule two Glendon faculty members (most recently: Martin and Morgan)
accompany the students for all or part of the practicum, to observe our
students’ teaching performances in weeks two and three, to read and
grade students’ twice-weekly lesson plans and reflection notes, and to
provide feedback, counseling and support.
As a general rule, the Glendon students are evaluated not so much
on their actual teaching practice—although our observation of their
lessons inevitably plays a role—but rather on their written-up lesson
plans and reflections. Of course, our reading of the reflective papers is
informed by our observational experience of the ‘same’ lesson, and the
degree of (in-)commensurability between our expert perceptions and
252 Ian Martin and Brian Morgan

their novice perceptions is an important source of evaluative authority.

As we stated in the section above, we are very interested in the inner
world of our students and their decision-making processes both at the
level of principle (particularity, possibility, and practicality), and at
the levels of macro- and micro-strategy (to use the metalanguage
drawn from one of the coursebooks, Kumaravadivelu 2003). Equally,
and as evidence of identity negotiation, we read these reflection papers
for their surprises, joys, and questions as students begin to experience
their Cuban students’ cubanidad, and their emergent sense of value and
agency in the lesson just taught.
The broad structure of the practicum has evolved into a pattern, as
follows:

Week I: Glendon students meet their assigned class and its English
teacher observes the class’s English lessons in the ‘Integrated
English Practice’ course during the week, taking notes in their jour-
nal, which they hand in to the Glendon supervising teacher. In
the afternoons, there are organized group tours of the highlights of
Havana, and they also can visit the city on their own or with their
Cuban students. The Glendon students’ personal cultural projects
are also reported in their journals.
Week II: Glendon students co-teach segments of lessons within the
Cuban teacher’s plan; the Cuban teacher meets Glendon students
after each class to provide ‘notes’ on the lesson. Glendon students
also are obliged to follow each day’s lesson with a conversation with
their Cuban students on ‘what they liked (or not) about the lesson’,
‘how would a Cuban teacher do it differently’, and so on. All this is
written up in their journal and submitted to the Glendon supervis-
ing teachers.
Week III: In the final week, Glendon students are responsible for
planning and delivering full one-and-a-half-hour lessons, observed
by the Varona teacher and the Glendon instructors. Again, both the
Varona home-room teacher and students offer comments following
the lesson. Glendon students report these comments, with their own
reflections, in their journal, and hand these in for comment to the
Glendon supervising teachers.

As mentioned at the outset of this article, an interesting aspect of this

practicum format is the important role played by the Cuban teachers,
who are asked to observe our students, provide feedback on their per-
formance, and in a very real sense, act as role models and mentors for
 Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal Englishes’ 253

our students. Actually, it never crossed our minds that by asking expe-
rienced non-native English teachers to serve as models and mentors
for our ‘native-speaking’ candidate teachers, we were doing something
unusual, but anecdotal accounts of international practicums similar to
ours suggest that our program’s ideological position on the so-called
native/non-native binary might be somewhat of an exception. Still, all
of us are aware of situations similar to Brian’s SFLI experience in China,
whereby freshly-minted English native-speakers are, immediately upon
arrival in a country, catapulted into positions of privilege (accompanied
by bigger salaries) when compared to experienced, local, non-native
teachers of English, and we do not want our students to entertain any
such fanciful career expectations.
Fortunately, throughout our D-TEIL Certificate, the constructs of
‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’ are held up to a critical light and
shown to be the ideologically-loaded colonial terms that they are,
and which will, we hope, pass unlamented from view in the course of
this century. But these terms and others are still current, and our students
are prepared for the (inevitable) projection upon them of these concepts
by their Cuban hosts, and have been provided with deconstructive
strategies to help their interlocutors learn to get beyond such unhelp-
ful terms. Indeed, many of our students have designed lessons for their
third-week classes drawn from their English as a World Language course,
in which they discuss concepts such as English as a Lingua Franca and
World Englishes. For instance, a Chinese-speaking Glendonite, upon
learning that one of Cuba’s most important trading partners is China,
and that Chinese tourists are starting to visit Cuba, presented a practical
lesson on ‘understanding varieties of Chinese English’.
To conclude this section on the evolution and structure of our D-TEIL
Certificate and its international practicum, we should note that in
almost every one of our practicum years, our students have been invited
to speak to a local Havana meeting of GELI (Grupo de Especialistas de
Lingua Inglesa), the professional association of teachers of English in
Cuba, and a division of the Cuban Association of Linguists, within
the Cuban Academy of Sciences. Here, to an appreciative audience of
Cuban teachers of English, our students give an account of an aspect
of the practicum, and identify a particular topic which they would like
to research if they were to stay longer to teach in Cuba. This experience
introduces them to the wider world of professional English teachers,
and, for some, starts them thinking about a career in teaching English
abroad. The warmth and enthusiasm of the Cubans, first their Varona
students and teacher-mentors, and later, teachers from the Havana
254 Ian Martin and Brian Morgan

chapter of GELI, inevitably infects the Glendon students and makes

their international practicum an unforgettable experience.

The Varona practicum experience: perspectives

from students

In May 2012, after our return from Cuba and the D-TEIL practicum,
Brian put together a questionnaire specifically for those students who
had both completed his course, English as a World Language (EN/LIN
4695.3), as well as the three-week practicum at the University of Varona.
Of the 21 students enrolled in EWL in the winter of 2012, there was
D-TEIL cohort of 11 in the class, of which five (Hannah, Shelley, Rita,
Zaria, Cora) responded to and completed the questionnaire (see e.g.
Appendix 1). In this section, we’d like to share a sampling of respondent
insights from the questionnaire and comment on their significance in
respect to the D-TEIL themes and aspirations we have outlined in the
chapter to this point.

The non-native English teacher advantage

One of the final activities of the 2012 Varona practicum was a public
forum for the participants—teachers and students, Cubans and
Canadians—meeting collectively to share experiences and offer recom-
mendations for the future. The provocative and memorable sub-title
in quotations is something Ian said to the gathering, and references a
core theme and learning experience for the D-TEIL participants. One
questionnaire respondent, Cora, reflecting on her own language learn-
ing achievements, specifically notes the remarkable L2 competence she
observed, given the lack of NESTs in the Cuban setting:

One of my main interests is the native vs. the non-native speaker/

teacher, and Cuba is one of the most interesting countries to look
at. My initial topic for the final project for EWL was looking at
the phenomenon of this country’s ability to master the English
language through non-native teachers. I’d like to give a big ‘boo’
to all the articles stating that native speakers are the ideal teachers
when it comes to teaching English as a second language (and this
coming from someone who’s English was not my first language,
yet I was able to learn it at the native speaker’s ‘level’).

The non-native ‘advantage’ is also addressed by Zaria, who makes an

important link between theory and practice, and the ways in which
 Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal Englishes’ 255

EWL and TEWL course materials informed her pedagogical strategies

at Varona:

The articles which pertained to native-non-native interaction and

the acceptance of using the L1 when teaching the L2, and theories
around whether or not students should be able to help one another
in explanations of the subject matter in the L1, were revelatory and
thanks to those articles, [another student] and I were able to conduct
a really welcoming and open-minded class (as some students have
indicated in their feedback).

The pedagogical and affective benefits of utilizing L1 are also noted

by Rita:

Advice for future D-TEIL students going to Cuba would be to have

a good basis of L1 influences to better teach them English grammar.
I think it was absolutely essential to give them comparisons switching
between English and Spanish … Most of the time when I saw the stu-
dents’ mental light bulb turn on was after comparing the grammar
point in Spanish. I feel this way there is also a cross cultural moment
that helps them feel you are trying to bridge the linguistic gap that
may be separating them.

Many EWL readings (e.g. Canagarajah 2007; Jenkins 2009; Kirkpatrick

2006) critique the notion of a ‘standard language’ that underpins
native-speakerism and the presumed ownership of English by ‘inner
circle’ countries. It is interesting to link such materials to events and
responses that transpired during the practicum. One significant exam-
ple comes from Rita, and her classroom comparison of varieties of
Spanish to raise critical awareness of varieties and inequalities in the
development of World Englishes:

One of the boys [in Rita’s practicum class] had learnt English in
England and therefore had a British accent, which in comparison to
the way we speak here in Canada, there are notable differences. A few
of the students asked us to speak in a British accent, but I remember
telling them that I would be faking an accent and not teaching them
my personal English. I then compared the use of Spanish in Spain
compared to Cuban Spanish and they understood the issue a little
better; one was not to be desired over the other, but it is more of a
personal preference.
256 Ian Martin and Brian Morgan

Of note, Rita, Cora, and another student produced an exemplary

IAP—a pre-service/in-service workshop on using L1 (Spanish) in EIL
classrooms. Though Rita’s account above does not address the socio-
historical factors (i.e. colonial, economic, identificatory) that influence
‘personal preferences’, part of the rationale for their IAP integrates this
perspective.
When reading students’ accounts, it is important to reiterate unique
features of D-TEIL and of Glendon College, which have shaped stu-
dents’ observations and responses. The possibilities whereby a non-
native ‘advantage’ might be considered or explored are seeds sown
early in the bilingual, English-French requirements of the College, and
the Spanish-language requirements of D-TEIL, which help valorize a
plurilingual model for language learning and pedagogy in students’
emergent understanding of EIL. Moreover, through their practicum
experience in Cuba, they come to appreciate the L1/non-native advan-
tage not only for its Second Language Acquisition (SLA) or psycholin-
guistic utility but also for its geopolitics—how a developing country
with limited resources can generate its own EIL policies and strategies
that help weaken dependencies on center-based knowledge production
in EIL (Kumaravadivelu 2012). In short, the non-native teacher advan-
tage is about equity as much as acquisition, a key point observed by Cora:

One point I’d like to raise is that of equity. I believe that when the
students found out [Rita] spoke Spanish, and I was learning Spanish,
they could identify and relate to us, seeing as we were in the same
boat as them. This, along with our respect and consideration of their
culture and language in the classroom created an atmosphere where
the students became more comfortable speaking English as days
went by. … For us to use Spanish, demonstrated our respect for the
language, and hopefully conveyed the message that English is cer-
tainly not more important than Spanish.

Teacher–student relationships: noticing agency and identity

In the EWL questionnaire, question #3 specifically asks D-TEIL respond-
ents to reflect on the teacher-student relationships they observed. In
the LTE research literature, such interpersonal classroom bonds are
increasingly viewed as being causally related to second-language learn-
ing (e.g. negotiating collaborative versus coercive relations of power, cf.
Cummins 2001; teacher identity as pedagogy, cf. Morgan 2004). Yet,
such effects and outcomes may not be directly applied, immediately
 Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal Englishes’ 257

observed, nor easily measured through experimental design. A more

appropriate model or metaphor to consider is that of ecology, and its
emphasis on complex, holistic, emergent, and recursive patterns of
learning (e.g. Guerretaz & Johnston 2013; Morgan & Martin 2014)—
conceptualizations to which both Ian and Brian subscribe and attempt
to accommodate and integrate in D-TEIL syllabus design, an important
example being the above references to pattern-noticing as an important
element of observation.7 In EN/LIN 4696, for example, ‘noticing’ is used
as signifying a combination of ‘perceiving’ and ‘reflecting upon’, and is
a significant dimension of observation-training. As mentioned above,
the students are also exposed to Cuban documentary and feature films,
readings, paintings, and food during the three months leading up to
their practicum, and are required to keep a diary of their ‘emergent
gaze’ upon Cuba, and to develop a ‘personal cultural project’ which
they are expected to research before the trip and add to during the trip.
Many of these projects grew out of questions that arose from an expe-
rience of ‘noticing’. Applied to the practicum, we hoped that D-TEIL
students would come to recognize and observe classroom relationships
as embedded in history and locality (i.e. their cubanidad). In ways that
paralleled our own experiences in China, our students’ relative success
would be shaped by their efforts to recognize local patterns and adapt/
negotiate their teaching accordingly.
For the D-TEIL students, one of the most mentioned practicum
observations was the close, personalized relationships between teachers
and students at Varona. Such closeness was clearly surprising and chal-
lenging for our students. Did such family-like intimacies undermine a
teacher’s authority, or instead enhance it, serving to augment second/
foreign language acquisition, as well? To what extent could, or should,
these types of relationships be emulated and transposed into other
settings?
Hannah’s assessment of her mentor teacher indicates that friendships
with students enhance respect and authority rather than weaken them:

I really liked the teacher-student relationships. I thought they were

great—very informal, very casual. Our teacher … without a doubt
had the power and control in the classroom, but it was very clear
the students really respected her and had a sort of friendship with
her. She told Kim and I once that her students were like her children
and their whole class was like a sort of family; they miss class, she
calls them at home to find out why and really stays in the loop, so
to speak.
258 Ian Martin and Brian Morgan

Zaria’s account similarly indicates admiration, yet also suggests some

ambivalence around the classroom relationships that her mentor
teacher fosters with her students:

The teacher-student relation with the Cuban teacher and the Cuban
students was really lax and friendly! In fact, it was so natural that the
teacher would even gossip with us about the students’ personal lives,
relationships, family situations, and health issues—which I’m not
exactly sure how to feel about, but for the most part, I believe that
they have a very trusting relationship. … I haven’t exactly had such a
lax and natural relationship with my foreign language teachers and it
was not until we arrived in Cuba that I realized what a foundational
aspect it is in the Cuban students’ language learning paths.

This ‘foundational’ correlation with language learning is also noted and

explained in Rita’s questionnaire response:

The original homeroom teachers had a really great bond with

their students. I liked seeing the family atmosphere amongst the
students in their ‘aulas’ (classrooms). I feel that the Cuban teachers
create a welcoming atmosphere and encourage language learning.
The students rarely felt shy to speak up and it was because they
were all under the impression they were there to learn and it is
natural to make mistakes. I think that is why they were so quick
with their language learning. Fear of making mistakes is a huge
hurdle when learning languages and the Cuban teachers try their
hardest to eliminate this fear.

Reflecting on her own background as an immigrant from Albania, Cora

suggests that ideology, rather than culture, explains the closeness she
has observed in her practicum classroom:

Being a communist country I think has had a huge impact in the

classroom as well as the teacher-student relationships. … There’s
a huge difference in the teachers’ attitudes in Canada and Cuba.
I don’t know how to put this in other words but I think Cuban teach-
ers are more involved in the students’ education and assuring they
succeed, mostly because they know how hard life in a communist
country can be when employed, let alone unemployed. In Canada,
however, it is different in the sense that students have more choices
and the professors’ job is mostly to ‘raise awareness’ and be there to
 Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal Englishes’ 259

present these opportunities. It is the student’s choice as to what they

want to do with them.

Collectively, these observations of teacher-student relationships illu-

minate several key issues we have raised in the chapter. For one, they
draw attention to a notion of teacher agency and policy enactments
noted above (e.g. TESOL Quarterly Special Issue; Ramanathan & Morgan
2007). For D-TEIL students, they are able to recognize the ways in which
school-based language policies are interpreted, mediated, or resisted
through the interpersonal bonds fostered in and beyond the classroom.
A related point here is both dialogic and experiential, as D-TEIL students
evaluate the classroom relationships they observe through the lens of
their own language learning experiences—good and bad.
When Ian read these responses, he detected a note of surprise, envy
even, in the Glendon students’ noticing the close teacher-student
relationships in Cuba. A teachers’ emergent professional identity and
her image of classroom possibilities is colored by her own prior L2
learning experience, and this is true of Glendon students. Regrettably,
‘classroom warmth’ has often not been our students’ default L2 experi-
ence in Canada, and they frequently offer comments contrasting their
‘cold’, prescriptivist French L2 experiences with what they perceive as
Cuban classroom ‘warmth’. This comment even comes out before the
practicum, when they watch videos of Varona classrooms made by Ian
in previous years, intended to help in the process of developing ‘notic-
ing’ skills and to lay the groundwork for a familiarity with the culture(s)
of the Cuban classroom.8
However, it must be said that what may be perceived as ‘warmth’
is part of a planned feature of Cuban pedagogical universities. For
instance, class sizes are limited to less than 20, which allows teachers to
get to know their students well, both inside and outside of class. Also,
there is, among Varona teachers, frequent reference to a ‘pedagogy of
tenderness’,9 a philosophy of education associated with the ideas of José
Marti, which includes a deeply humanistic teacher-student relationship,
in which affection, sensitivity, and building learner confidence are
essential components, and in which teachers do know about the per-
sonal lives, family situation, and health of their students. Contributing
to the Canadian students’ perception of a ‘family’ feeling in the lan-
guage classroom at Varona are the facts that many teachers are young,
recent graduates of Varona, and the pedagogical material used is often
developed by the Varona instructors themselves10 in a highly collabo-
rative professional environment in which a great premium is placed
260 Ian Martin and Brian Morgan

on practical L2 classroom teaching experience and reflection.11 These

are among the factors which have contributed to the success of Cuban
model of ELT teacher education, and the perception that Cuban teachers
want their students to succeed. It may also be the case that Canadian
students, who live in a hyper-digitized world in which face-to-face com-
munication often takes a back seat to digitally-mediated communication
(and who, consequently, experience a kind of culture shock when they
arrive in a relatively, but not absolutely, un-digitized world such as Cuba)
have come to perceive normal human communication as ‘warmth’.
As this section indicates, ‘unequal Englishes’ interconnect with a
complex range of extra-linguistic factors. At a micro-level, they are
always implicated in the kinds of emotional and interpersonal relation-
ships permitted or required to mitigate pressures and inequalities from
beyond the classroom. In short, they are an integral element of identity
negotiation.

Conclusions

Glendon’s Certificate in D-TEIL has, in its eight years of existence with

its international teaching practicum in Cuba, matured into a successful
program that has prepared over 100 of our undergraduates, majoring in
English, Linguistics, or International Studies, to imagine themselves
in the wider world, some as ELT teachers. It may attribute its success, in
part, to its roots in the mission of our faculty: exposure over four under-
graduate years to liberal arts, bi-/multi-lingualism, applied linguistics
and language awareness, and public and international affairs. It is worth
repeating that it is not a narrowly-focused teacher-training program,
nor do we see ELT in a conventional instrumental sense. In our Cuba
practicum, we are attempting to introduce our undergraduates person-
ally and experientially to their counterparts in another country, and by
doing so, to model something of what is involved in preparing to go
abroad in the future, perhaps wearing the uniform of ‘English teacher’.
We say ‘perhaps’ because, as we have mentioned earlier, we are equally
happy whether or not our B.A./ D-TEIL graduates eventually decide to
take the next step toward making a career of living and teaching abroad.
Our Certificate does, however, introduce them to critical issues of
globalization and inequality, one of which is ‘unequal Englishes’. But
we try to make them aware of other inequalities, including power
inequalities between English and other languages, of gender inequalities,
and economic and human development inequalities. We engage them
 Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal Englishes’ 261

in critical analysis of global issues in which a ‘green English’ approach

to climate change is high on our thematic agenda, and we capital-
ize on their major subject knowledge—English literature, linguistics,
language endangerment, economics, psychology, bilingualism—and
their personal interests and backgrounds, to help them avoid using
commercially-available textbooks and develop thematic modules for
teaching critical issues through English, if local conditions permit. As
one of our students, Jennifer Humphrey (2007), wrote in an article pub-
lished in Approaches, the journal of the Cuban GELI organization, the
Cert D-TEIL with its international practicum can foster the emergence
of an EIL teacher identity, reflective and responsive to local conditions
and new possibilities for language teaching:

The in-Canada and international components of the TEIL course

are inextricable, the former laying the foundation for the latter.
Having the opportunity to practice what one has learned only in
theory and then reflecting on that process to achieve another level
of learning from that experience is what makes the Cert D-TEIL pre-
service teacher training program so unique. Through reflection, the
learning process can continue indefinitely. By incorporating this
indefinite learning process into the in-Canada component and the
international component of the TEIL course, the Glendon students
were able to evolve from students to pre-service practice teachers to
international English language teachers and as international English
language teachers they will continue in their own classrooms as they
reflect on their teaching practice.

This indefinite learning process is one we also welcome, as we continue

to reflect on the ways in which our own academic and professional
histories have shaped D-TEIL and the ‘horizons of possibility’ (Simon
1992) that our students imagine for themselves when they graduate
from our program.

Appendix 1: English as a World Language (GL/LIN 4695)

Questionnaire
1. Did any of the EWL course readings or related themes (i.e. globalization,
language, culture, identity) help you understand and/or prepare you for your
practicum teaching at the University of Varona? Did any readings become a
focus of reflection or re-consideration after the practicum experience? Please
provide details if possible.
262 Ian Martin and Brian Morgan

2. In the 4695 syllabus, many course readings describe a world of ‘unequal

Englishes’, where the ‘ownership’ of English and appropriate models for
teaching purposes are debated. What are your classroom impressions of how
Cuban English teachers and students feel about these issues?
3. What are your thoughts on teacher-student relationships in the Cuban EIL
classroom? How do they compare and contrast with your own teaching and
language learning experiences? What advice would you give future D-TEIL
students going to Cuba for a practicum?
4. Any further thoughts and/or teaching plans?

Notes
1. See Kumaravadivelu 2003 for a detailed explanation of post-methodology.
2. Kumaravadivelu (2012) describes native-speakerism as a Center-based ‘tap
root’ from which all other dependencies (e.g. terminologies, knowledge
production, textbooks, methods, definitions/norms regarding cultural com-
petence) are derived. In spite of decades of critique, ‘the native-speaker
episteme has not loosened its grip over theoretical principles, classroom
practices, the publication industry, or the job market’ (p. 15).
3. According to the Nunavut Land Claim Agreement with Canada, the propor-
tion of government workers (which would include teachers) must be equiva-
lent to the proportion of the Inuit population of Nunavut. At present, this
figure is close to 85 percent.
4. This recommendation comes from Shelley Tulloch’s Building a strong foun-
dation: considerations to support thriving bilingualism in Nunavut (Nunavut
Literacy Council 2009, p. 79).
5. We have used pseudonyms for the D-TEIL students we cite in this chapter.
For the EWL (LIN 4605) post-practicum questionnaire, participation was
voluntary and included a signed consent form for permission to include data
in this chapter (see also below).
6. Another York faculty has developed a TESOL Certificate program for, princi-
pally, domestic Canadian ELT purposes.
7. The field of applied linguistics has recently benefitted from several eco-
logically-informed contributions: e.g. the eco-semiotics of van Lier (2004),
complexity theory as adapted by Larsen-Freeman (2013), and systems theory
as conceptualized by Clarke (2003). Along with Clarke, we are especially
inspired by the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and as explicated
by one of his most eminent biographers, Peter Harries-Jones (1995)—a friend
and mentor of ours. Bateson’s notion of the ‘pattern that connects’ high-
lights the active/recursive building of coherence and meaning, which we see
as central to learning and language teacher education.
8. See Holliday (1994) and (2005) for a discussion of classroom cultures in ELT.
9. See Turner and Pita (2001) and also Smith (2012).
10. Enriquez O’Farrill et al. (2010).
11. Varona students in their second year spend one day per week practice teach-
ing in secondary school classrooms, an amount which increases one day
for each university year, and so Varona’s fifth-year students only appear on
campus one day per week.
 Preparing Teachers for ‘Unequal Englishes’ 263

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Index
agency, 14–5, 23, 33, 35, 49, 51, 53,
60, 71, 76, 85–6, 97, 130–1, 135–6,
168, 246, 248, 252, 256, 259
agentive, 21, 49, 111, 168
appropriation(s), 21, 35, 44, 53, 60,
166, 244
of English, 4, 5, 15, 111,
166, 223
of academic English, 24
anxiety, 61, 63, 68–71, 107
bilingualism, 99, 114, 152, 161, 187,
248, 250
bilingual education, 248
call center(s), 130–140
center, 47, 50, 51, 68, 113, 114, 116,
147, 256
Chinglish, 95–108
class, 25, 29, 33, 43, 45, 46, 60, 62–4,
68, 88, 101, 131, 137–8, 146–7,
181, 207, 215
middle, 25, 46, 47, 137
upper, 47, 62, 177
colonial power(s), 204–5 see also
power relations
colonization, 35, 43
colonized, 30, 44, 48, 51,
204, 206
colonizer/s, 44, 50, 51, 204, 224
correctness, 45, 47
cosmopolitanism, 25, 160
decolonization, 42, 50, 56
decolonize, 5
decolonized, 206
diversity, 5, 22, 24, 26–31, 33–5, 99,
107, 190, 225
diverse, 21–5, 28, 31, 35–6, 167,
186, 188, 190, 195, 206, 248
Dongbei English, 96, 107
Dongbeihua, 96
265
EIL see English as an International
Language
ELF see English as Lingua Franca
English as a Lingua Franca, 14–5, 21,
23, 24, 29, 30–3, 36, 253,
English as an International Language,
37, 42, 44, 49, 179, 244–62
English–medium, 22, 187, 189, 205,
208, 216, 219, 223, 225, 226, 227,
232, 233, 240,
equality, 1–3, 7, 42, 75–89
ethnicity, 6, 25, 26, 32, 33, 43, 45, 52,
85, 91, 112, 195, 203, 233
expanding circle, 15, 23, 54, 55, 70,
113, 114, 118, 163, 245, 250
femininity, 131, 133–6, 136–7, 139
feminization, 130–1
feminized, 130, 138
gay(s), 84, 130–140
gender, 25, 29, 33, 43, 45, 73, 101, 130–7
gendered, 89, 101, 108, 131
global English, 34, 35, 74, 83,
113, 182
global Englishes, 31, 113
globalization, 34–5, 42–3, 56, 59,
68, 90, 160, 164–5, 217–8, 224,
247, 260
glocalization, 163–6, 171, 174, 177,
179, 182
hegemony, 4, 13, 26, 32, 59, 74, 78,
83, 88–9, 112, 247
homogenization, 164–5
homogeneity, 79
homogeneous, 25, 30
hybrid, 4, 5, 21, 24, 33, 88, 127, 160,
205, 207
hybridity, 34, 85, 124, 126,
127, 193
hybridization, 117, 164, 165, 193
266 Index
ideology, 5, 31–3, 43, 47–8, 69, 70,
97, 105, 108, 112, 178, 247, 258
see also neoliberal ideology
of correctness, 45
of native-speakerism, 70
of normatism, 31
of racial liberalism, 26
of racism, 43
of survival, 188
imperialism, 14, 16, 42, 43, 53, 54,
78, 86, 116 see also linguistic
imperialism
neo-imperialism, 8
indigenization, 2, 4, 115, 116
inequalities of Englishes, 3–4, 7,
9–10, 21
inner circle, 1, 5, 6, 23, 32, 43–5, 122,
225–6, 245, 255
inner circle Englishes, 30, 116,
insecurity, 61, 63, 68, 70–1 see also
junuk
intelligibility, 23, 30–2, 34, 36, 49, 153
intercultural, 27, 223–40, 244
Japanese English, 112–26
junuk, 63–4, 68 see also insecurity
Korean English, 62, 64, 68
linguistic equality, 1–3, 86
inequality, 95–6, 107, 247
linguistic imperialism, 13–4, 78, 244
linguistic landscape, 148, 150–3,
159–61, 167, 186, 197
localization, 4, 118,
relocalization, 111, 116–8, 126,
marginalization, 32, 50
self-marginalization, 50
migration, 186, 195, 196
modernity, 65, 67, 97, 101, 165,
177, 179
modern, 9, 14, 65–7, 70, 82, 106,
164, 177
modernization, 47, 65, 99, 189, 225
post-modernity, 85
post-modernism, 23, 83
monolingualism, 79, 120
multiculturalism, 22, 24, 26, 29–30
critical, 28–9, 31, 37, 39
liberal, 24–8, 30,
neoliberal, 26–35
multilingualism, 35, 99, 187, 197
multilingual, 1, 3, 145, 161, 163,
164, 175, 193, 194, 198, 207,
native speaker, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 23,
31–2, 36, 42–3, 50–51, 53, 54–5,
62–3, 68, 69, 115, 125, 223–40,
247, 253, 262
native/non-native, 79, 115, 232, 253,
255
native speakerism, 6, 51, 70, 125,
255, 262
nativization, 4, 7, 50
neoliberalism, 26–7, 34, 69
neoliberal, 22, 24–36, 62, 64,
65, 69, 244 see also neoliberal
multiculturalism
neoliberal ideology, 36
nihonjinron, 112, 120–2, 124–5, 127
non-native speaker, 43, 49, 54–5, 70,
115, 116, 253, 254–6
nonstandard, 31, 55, 96, 102, 107
oppression, 2, 51, 74, 78, 220
outer circle, 4, 23, 43, 45
ownership, 4, 13, 15, 50, 52
ownership of English, 4, 224, 225,
255, 262
performativity, 7, 21, 23–4, 112,
116–19, 123–26
performative, 117, 119, 126
postcolonial see also postcolonial
performativity
periphery, 43, 50, 51, 52, 53, 116
Philippine English, 30,
pluralization, 2, 6, 12, 33, 113
plural, 7, 35, 127, 193, 206
pluralist, 21–37
pluricentricity, 6, 44
pluricentric, 5, 113
pluricentrism, 5
postcolonial, 2, 14, 23, 24, 29, 30,
203–7, 214, 215, 221, 244, 247
performativity, 23–4, 30, 33–4
postcolonialism, 14, 204
 Index 267

power of English, 2, 8 see also symbolic subjectivity, 59–61, 64–6, 70–2,

power 112
power relations, 28, 34, 53, 74, 77, 87, super–diversity, 37, 195, 200
89, 112, 124 see also colonial power symbolic power, 30, 34, 35 see also
unequal, 29, 33, 35, 43, power of English

relocalization see under localization Teaching English as an International

resistance, 14, 23, 24, 30, 44, 60, 100, Language see English as an
119, 160, 219, 221 International Language
TESOL, 43, 47, 51, 56, 119, 120, 124,
Singlish, 185–98 206, 208, 212–220
Standard English, 23, 43, 46, 47–50, translingual, 49, 56, 80, 86, 89,
55–6, 60, 62, 77, 108, 164, 186, 117–9, 126
190, 192, 193, 194, 226, 229
Standard Englishes, 58, 77
vernacular(s), 61, 145, 163, 166, 187,
stigmatization, 107, 166, 181
203, 204, 205, 207–12, 217, 219,
stigmatized, 63, 96, 100, 106, 145,
221, 222
161, 195, 200
vernacularization, 207–12
structure(s), 15, 61, 79, 80, 83, 85–9,
vernacular–medium, 204, 205, 208,
105, 107, 125–6, 135, 168,
215, 218, 222
economic, 54
World Englishes, 1–6, 21, 23, 50,
grammatical, 49
88, 113, 116, 122, 127, 204,
internalized,
253, 255
macro, 60
mental, 47
social, 26, 44, 59, 61, 71, 137–9, 186 yeongeo yeolpung, 8, 62