The Handbook of Asian Englishes

Kingsley Bolton, Werner Botha, Andy Kirkpatrick, Kingsley Bolton, Werner Botha, Andy Kirkpatrick

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781118791653
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The first volume of its kind, focusing on the sociolinguistic and socio-political issues surrounding Asian Englishes

The Handbook of Asian Englishes provides wide-ranging coverage of the historical and cultural context, contemporary dynamics, and linguistic features of English in use throughout the Asian region. This first-of-its-kind volume offers a wide-ranging exploration of the English language throughout nations in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. Contributions by a team of internationally-recognized linguists and scholars of Asian Englishes and Asian languages survey existing works and review new and emerging areas of research in the field.

Edited by internationally renowned scholars in the field and structured in four parts, this Handbook explores the status and functions of English in the educational institutions, legal systems, media, popular cultures, and religions of diverse Asian societies. In addition to examining nation-specific topics, this comprehensive volume presents articles exploring pan-Asian issues such as English in Asian schools and universities, English and language policies in the Asian region, and the statistics of English across Asia. Up-to-date research addresses the impact of English as an Asian lingua franca, globalization and Asian Englishes, the dynamics of multilingualism, and more.

• Examines linguistic history, contemporary linguistic issues, and English in the Outer and Expanding Circles of Asia
• Focuses on the rapidly-growing complexities of English throughout Asia
• Includes reviews of the new frontiers of research in Asian Englishes, including the impact of globalization and popular culture
• Presents an innovative survey of Asian Englishes in one comprehensive volume

Serving as an important contribution to fields such as contact linguistics, World Englishes, sociolinguistics, and Asian language studies, The Handbook of Asian Englishes is an invaluable reference resource for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, and instructors across these areas. Winner of the 2021 PROSE Humanities Category for Language & Linguistics

1
Asian Englishes Today

KINGSLEY BOLTON, WERNER BOTHA, AND ANDY KIRKPATRICK

Introduction

As is well known, from the 1980s onward, Braj B. Kachru proposed an approach to scholarship on English worldwide based on the “Three Circles” model, which included the Inner Circle (countries where English is the “first language” of a majority of the population, for example, the UK, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand); the Outer Circle (where English is regarded as a “second language,” for example, India or the Philippines); and the Expanding Circle (where English has typically had the status of a “foreign language,” for example, China or Japan). In this context, Kachru argued for a paradigm shift in English studies, which would recognize pluralism at the levels of both theory and application:

First, a paradigm shift in research, teaching, and application of sociolinguistic realities to the functions of English. Second, a shift from frameworks and theories which are essentially appropriate only to monolingual countries. It is indeed essential to recognise that world Englishes represent certain linguistic, cultural and pragmatic realities and pluralism, and that pluralism is now an integral part of world Englishes and literatures written in Englishes. The pluralism of English must be reflected in the approaches, both theoretical and applied, we adopt for understanding this unprecedented linguistic phenomenon.

(Kachru, 1992, p. 11)

Kachru’s advocacy of a “socially realistic” approach to world Englishes (WE; 1992) enabled him to establish a rich theoretical framework for his WE research, which included such constructs as the “Three Circles of English”; “norms”; “variables of intelligibility”; “bilingual creativity”; “multi‐canons”; and the “power and politics” of the English language. The recent publication of the Collected works of B. B. Kachru shows the breadth of his vision, which connected the WE enterprise to research and scholarship on such issues as bilingualism, code‐mixing, cultural contact, language policy, linguistic creativity, literary expression, multilingualism and multiculturalism, the politics of language, linguistic standards, and much else (Kachru, 2015). The effects of this paradigm shift in English studies have been felt across a range of language studies, including applied linguistics, descriptive linguistics, English language teaching, and sociolinguistics. Today, the world Englishes approach to English studies finds expression at the conferences of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE), as well as through publications in such international journals as Asian Englishes, English Today, English World‐Wide, and World Englishes. Courses on world Englishes are now part of the curriculum in many of the world’s leading universities (which was not the case in the 1980s, when the WE project was first launched), and there is a strong case for asserting that world Englishes has now clearly established its own disciplinary credentials (Seargeant, 2012).

Braj Kachru and Asian Englishes

For many reasons, Braj B. Kachru can be seen as the leading pioneer of the study of Asian Englishes, given his early engagement with this field at the University of Edinburgh in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This resulted in the completion of a PhD thesis entitled An analysis of some features of Indian English: A study of linguistic method, which was supervised at Edinburgh University by John C. Catford and Michael A. K. Halliday. Following the acceptance of his thesis, one of his first publications was an article in the journal Word on “The Indianness in Indian English.” In this essay, Kachru quotes Rao on the bilingual creativity of Indian writers in English, where Rao asserted that “We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English […] Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colorful as the Irish and American” (Rao, 1938, pp. 9–10, cited in Kachru, 1965, p. 397). In the 1980s, Kachru went on to publish a number of book‐length studies dealing with Indian English and Asian Englishes, including The other tongue: English across cultures (1982), The Indianization of English: The English language in India (1983), and The alchemy of English: The spread, functions, and models of non‐native Englishes (1986). Research on Asian Englishes also gained greater recognition from 1985 onward, when Braj Kachru and Larry Smith became co‐editors of the journal World Englishes. Through such work, Braj Kachru, Yamuna Kachru, and Larry Smith played a major role in establishing Asian Englishes as an important field of study, not only through the WE journal, but also by encouraging many other Asian researchers in this field. Initially, his focus was very much concerned with the status, functions, and features of Indian English (Kachru, 1987, 1994), but by the late 1990s he also published a number of key articles discussing the spread of English throughout Asia in more comprehensive fashion.

Writing on the topic of “English as an Asian language,” Kachru (1998) noted that, in recent decades, the total English‐using population of Asia had grown remarkably, and drew an important distinction between genetic versus functional nativeness. While the English language could not claim genetic nativeness in the Asian region, he asserted, there was, however, strong evidence that English had become functionally native in many Asian societies, as attested to by the diverse contexts – attitudinal, creative, formal, functional, historical, and sociocultural – in which English was used. More specifically, Kachru argued that “Asia’s English must be viewed in terms of that [functional] nativeness,” which includes uses of English (i) “across distinctive linguistic and cultural groups”; (ii) “as a medium for articulating local identities”; (iii) “as one of the pan‐Asian languages of creativity”; (iv) as a language with “its own subvarieties indicating penetration at various levels”; and (v) as a language “that continues to elicit a unique love‐hate relationship that, nevertheless, has not seriously impeded its spread, functions, and prestige” (Kachru, 1998, p. 103).

Kachru also makes the case for English as a “liberating language,” highlighting the importance of literary creativity, and the “multi canons” of English literature visible in the Asian context, so much so that:

The architects of each tradition, each strand, have moulded, reshaped, acculturated, redesigned, and – by doing so – enriched what was a Western medium. The result is a liberated English which contains vitality, innovation, linguistic mix, and cultural identity. And, it is not the creativity of the monolingual and the monocultural – this creativity has rejuvenated the medium from ‘exhaustion’ and has ‘liberated’ it in many ways.

(Kachru, 1998, p. 106)

In a later book‐length study, Kachru discussed the Asian experience of English in its full complexity, in the Hong Kong University Press volume on Asian Englishes: Beyond the canon (2005). In this important publication, Kachru tackles a wide range of subtopics linked to the issue of the English language in the Asian region, and the volume has a total of 10 substantive chapters dealing with multiple aspects in this context. These include the description of Asian Englishes, South Asian Englishes, English in Japan (“The Japanese agony”), the Englishization of Asian languages, language policies, creativity and standards, English as a “killer language,” issues of pedagogy and identity, and the future prospects for English in Asia. Ultimately, in the Asian context, Kachru argues, one has to understand the centrality of the pluralism of English worldwide, which can be seen in the metalanguage of our...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Asian Englishes Today
• Part I: The History and Development of Asian Englishes
• Part II: English in Outer Circle Asian Societies
• Part III: English in Expanding Circle Asian Societies
• Part IV: New Frontiers of Research
• Index
• End User License Agreement