Global Englishes

A Resource Book for Students

Jennifer Jenkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317645641
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Routledge English Language Introductions cover core areas of language study and are one-stop resources for students.

Assuming no prior knowledge, books in the series offer an accessible overview of the subject, with activities, study questions, sample analyses, commentaries, and key readings – all in the same volume. The innovative and flexible 'two-dimensional' structure is built around four sections – introduction, development, exploration, and extension – which offer self-contained stages for study. Each topic can also be read across these sections, enabling the reader to build gradually on the knowledge gained.

Global Englishes, Third Edition, previously published as World Englishes, has been comprehensively revised and updated and provides an introduction to the subject that is both accessible and comprehensive.

Key features of this best-selling textbook include:

• coverage of the major historical, linguistic, and sociopolitical developments in the English language from the start of the seventeenth century to the present day
• exploration of the current debates in global Englishes, relating to its uses as mother tongue in the US, UK, Antipodes, and post-colonial language in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and lingua franca across the rest of the globe, with a new and particularly strong emphasis on China
• a range of texts, data and examples draw from emails, tweets and newspapers such as The New York Times, China Daily and The Straits Times
• readings from key scholars including Alastair Pennycook, Henry G. Widdowson and Lesley Milroy
• activities that engage the reader by inviting them to draw on their own experience and consider their orientation to the particular topic in hand.

Global Englishes, Third Edition provides a dynamic and engaging introduction to this fascinating topic and is essential reading for all students studying global Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and the spread of English in the world today.

Section C

EXPLORATION

CURRENT DEBATES IN GLOBAL ENGLISHES

C1

POSTCOLONIAL AFRICA AND NORTH AMERICA

Unit C1 presents perspectives from two particular sites of English use: firstly the English Only movement in the US, with its opposition to any form of institutional bilingualism; and secondly English in Africa and the controversy over whether or not its use serves the purposes of the large number of multilingual ethnic Africans.

English only in the Us

In the US census of 1990, 62 million of a total population of 251 million were found to belong to “visible” ethnolinguistic minority groups:

❑ African: 31 million

❑ Latin American: 22 million

❑ Asian: 7 million

❑ Aboriginal, First Nations: 2 million

(Bourhis & Marshall 1999: 245)

By the time of the 2000 census, these numbers had increased substantially, although the 2000 figures are not directly comparable because of changes in the structure of the groupings (e.g. since 2000, the Latin American group has included Hispanic Whites). The figures below are rounded up or down to the nearest half million, and are followed by their percentage of the total US population in the 2000 census:

❑	African:	34.5 million	12.3%
❑	Hispanic or Latino:	35 million	12.5%
❑	Asian:	10 million	3.6%
❑	American Indian and Alaskan Native:	2.5 million	0.9%

(US Census Bureau, www.census.gov/population/www.socdemo/race.html)

This upward trend continued over the ten years from 2000 to 2010, with the comparable figures in the 2010 census being as follows:

❑	African:	39 million	12.6%
❑	Hispanic or Latino:	50.5 million	16.3%
❑	Asian:	14.5 million	4.8%
❑	American Indian and Alaskan Native:	3 million	0.9%

(US Census Bureau: www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-02.pdf)

By the time of the 2010 census, the total US population was just under 309 million. Thus, these four groupings, by then numbering approximately 107 million, made up over a third (34.6 per cent) of the US total. This represents an increase of around 25 million people on 2000, and 45 million on 1990, when the four had constituted just below 25 per cent of the total. Meanwhile, the (Non-Hispanic) White population continued its downward trend from 2000 to 2010, increasing their number over these ten years by only 1.2 per cent, or just over 2 million, thence forming less than two-thirds (63.7 per cent) of the total US population.

In some US states, this development was even more pronounced. For example, in California, the proportion of Non-Hispanic Whites had fallen by 2000 to just under half the state’s population of 34 million. And by 2010 it had dropped by a further 5.4 per cent and constituted only around 15 million of the total Californian population of just over 37 million. Although California represents one of a few extreme examples, the same general trend was repeated throughout the US, with the 2010 census reporting many states’ sizeable increases in those from both Hispanic/Latino and Asian backgrounds in particular, against drops in their numbers of Non-Hispanic Whites.

It is against the backdrop of the increasing number of non-native English speakers in the US that the English Only movement or as its members prefer to call it, US English or Official English, operates (see www.us-english.org/). It has its roots in the late nineteenth century, until when although the languages of supposedly ‘inferior’ groups (African and Native American) were disparaged (see section B1), multilingualism was tolerated. But at this point, immigrants from southern Europe began to arrive in the US in substantial numbers. These new immigrants were considered to be racially inferior by the northern Europeans who had initially colonised the territory. Theodore Roosevelt’s 1907 response to their arrival, as the Milroys note, was “similar to the rhetoric of the contemporary English Only movement”:

We have room but for one language here and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house

(quoted in Milroy & Milroy 2012: 157)

In order to safeguard their position, the US government began reversing the policy of allowing education for immigrants to take place in their native languages.

By the early 1920s, nearly three-quarters of the US states were insisting on English as the only language of instruction, a policy that was often executed inhumanely. For example, Native Indian children could be kidnapped from their reservations and families, and forced to live in boarding schools in order to learn the English language and the culture of its mother tongue speakers. These children, as McCarty and Zepeda (1999: 203) point out,

faced a system of militaristic discipline, manual labor, instruction in a trade, and abusive treatment for “reverting” to the mother tongue. Many children fled these conditions only to be rounded up by Indian agents (called “school police” in Navajo) and returned to school.

Tolerance for other languages increased in general through the twentieth century. In 1968, the Bilingual Education Act officially recognised the need for education to be available in immigrants’ native languages, albeit as a means of enabling immigrants to progress to English-only education rather than to maintain proficiency in their L1. However, from the late 1960s, when large numbers of people began to arrive in America from developing countries in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia, the xenophobia that followed led directly to the establishing of the English Only movement.

In California, the motivation to end bilingual education was especially strong. In 1998, The English Language Education for Children in Public Schools Initiative (more commonly known as Proposition 227) was passed, requiring all children for whom English is not their L1 to be placed in immersion programmes for a year and then to be transferred to mainstream education. Given that the language of the environment is English and the aim to subtract rather than add a language (i.e. subtractive rather than additive bilingualism), it would be more appropriate to describe these programmes as ‘submersion’ (Richard Watts, personal communication). Ferguson (2006: 45), on the other hand, uses the term for “the not uncommon practice” of placing a child immediately in a mainstream classroom with no special language assistance at all. He glosses this practice “sink or swim”.

Despite an abundance of research into SLA (second language acquisition) demonstrating the effectiveness of bilingual education as compared with that of immersion, school officials have worked hard to justify the switch in policy. For example, the Superintendent of Schools in Oceanside, California, Ken Noonan, wrote a paper in the Washington Post titled ‘Why we were wrong about bilingual education’, in which he concluded:

Now I am convinced that English immersion does work, and that it should begin on a student’s first day of school … Now I believe that using all of the resources of public education to move these students into the English-speaking mainstream early and quickly is far more important than my former romantic notions that preserving the child’s home language should be the ultimate goal of our schools.

Compare this officials firm conviction in the superiority of monolingual English-only education (and the underlying ethos that other languages are inferior), with the accounts of some of those bilingual students who actually experienced it. The following is a sample of the 250 language biographies collected by Hinton from Asian American college students at the University of California at Berkeley over a number of years:

1. At the age often, my family on my mother’s side immigrated to America and this is where I learned my second language. Going to school made me feel deaf, mute, and blind. I could understand nothing that was going on around me.

2. I didn’t have any friends at all because nobody spoke Chinese. How I longed to go back to Taiwan and to see familiar faces and to hear my native language being spoken.

3. It was two heartless comments from a group of small boys in my “white” neighbourhood for me to want to deny my language let along my culture, as well. How was I to react to a racist comment of “Ching chong chooey go back home to where you belong. You can’t even speak English right.” Sixteen small words which possessed so much strength and contained so much power caused a small naive child to lose her heritage – to lose what made her.

4. I know that I have been extremely fortunate to have been able to learn English so easily, but I have paid a dear price in exchange. I began my English education with the basics, starting in first grade. As a result, I had to end my Chinese education at that time. I have forsaken my own language in order to become “American.” I no longer read or write Chinese. I am ashamed and feel as if I am a statistic adding a burden and lowering the status quo of the Asian community as an illiterate of the Chinese language.

5. When some of my classmates began to ridicule and throw racist remarks at Chinese people, I began to distance myself away from Chinese culture. I felt ashamed when my parents spoke to me in Cantonese at a supermarket. I got into heated arguments about why only English should be spoken at home … I continuously tried to fit in, even if it meant abandoning culture and identity. I was probably most hostile to my background during those years in junior high.

6. The loss of one’s cultural la...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• How to Use this Book
• Contents
• Contents cross-referenced
• List of figures and tables
• Preface to the third edition
• Acknowledgements
• A Introduction: key topics in global Englishes
• B Development: implications and issues
• C Exploration: current debates in global Englishes
• D Extension: readings in global Englishes
• Further reading
• References
• Glossarial index