Official coronation portrait (Image credit: Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2015)

The Queen and the English language are both unique within their categories. The Queen enjoyed special social status among humans through a complex combination of exceptional legal standing, imperial power, accumulated wealth, and sophisticated celebrity cult. The same is true of English: it is different from any other language in terms of reach, clout, and popularity.

English has more speakers than any other language

English today is said to have around 1.5 billion speakers, close to 20% of the global population. Even if counting speaker numbers is notoriously tricky, that’s a lot more than any other language in history. If we were to include everyone with basic proficiency, 1.5 billion is a substantial undercount.

But it is not the large number of speakers that makes English exceptional. After all, Chinese is not far behind with 1.1 billion speakers.

What makes English categorically different from Chinese is the relationship between first and second language speakers. The overwhelming majority of Chinese speakers live in Greater China and speak Chinese as their mother tongue.

By contrast, only a minority of ca. 370 million English speakers live in the United Kingdom and its settler colonies (most notably the USA but also Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and South Africa).

The vast majority of English speakers live outside the Anglosphere: some in former exploitation colonies of the UK or USA (e.g., India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Bangladesh, Ghana), and others in countries with no special ties to the Anglosphere where English is learned as a foreign language (e.g., China, Germany, France, Japan, Russia).

In short, what makes English exceptional among languages is twofold: it is widely used outside the heartlands of the Anglosphere, and it is learned as an additional language by countless multitudes across the globe.

The most spoken languages worldwide, 2022 (Source: Statista)

English is more powerful than any other language

A language does not have power per se. It derives its power from the people and institutions it is associated with. And English has been associated with some of the most powerful people and institutions of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st centuries.

The British Empire was the largest empire in human history, covering 35.5 million km² in 1920 (when it was at its largest), or more than a quarter of the world’s land mass. Even after the decline of the British Empire, English got a second imperial boost due to US global domination.

English is not only associated with powerful states but almost all international organizations have English as their working language (sometimes along with a few other languages), from Amnesty International to the World Trade Organization. Even organizations far removed from the Anglosphere have adopted an English Only policy, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The political might of English is accompanied by economic clout. Most of the world’s most powerful corporations are headquartered in the USA, and even those that are not have been adopting English as their corporate language.

The world’s richest people speak English, too: 8 of the world’s 10 richest people are based in the USA, and the other two (one in France, one in India) undoubtedly also have English in their repertoires.

The examples could go on and on to illustrate that English is spoken in most of the world’s halls of power. That creates an effect that sociologists call “misrecognition”. Power comes from control over military, economic, or political resources; not from language. However, because English is so consistently associated with high power, it becomes “misrecognized” as a source of power.

And because everyone wants a piece of the cake, everyone wants to learn English so that they, too, can reap the successes it seems to confer.

Countries with largest numbers of English speakers

English is more hegemonic than any other language

Misrecognition is closely tied to another exceptional characteristic of English: it dominates through the ideas associated with it. English is stereotypically associated with the best in almost any field of human endeavor.

Most languages are associated with cultural stereotypes, beliefs, ideas, and emotions. Unlike the specific and relatively narrow cultural stereotypes associated with other languages (e.g., “French sounds romantic”), ideas about English are highly versatile: it is the language of modernity itself.

English is seen as the language of Hollywood media glitz and glamour, the language of freedom and liberal democracy, or the language of science and technology. Indeed, the cultural versatility of English is so great that it not only serves as the language of global capitalism but can also appear as its antagonist: the language of resistance.

One important way in which the hegemony of English is maintained is through the pomp and pageantry of the British monarchy. We are currently seeing global media saturation coverage. Its effect is not only to create a cultural, emotional, aspirational, and personally-felt connection with the Queen but with everything she stands for, including the English language.

The future of English

Although the role of the Queen is highly exceptional, her passing reminds us that the role was filled by an ordinary human being. It is likely that the next incumbent will be less capable at arresting the decline of the British monarchy. The role is likely to become less special, with a reduced realm and against the continuing diversification of celebrity cults.

The passing of the Queen has unleashed a global media frenzy, which also reinforces the hegemony of English (Image credit: sohu.com)

It might take longer for English to see a diminished status. In the past, imperial languages such as Latin and Persian survived the empires that spread them by hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

At the same time, the fate of English now rests to a significant degree with the language policies of countries outside the Anglosphere. And these might change as beliefs about the importance of the language change. For instance, if China were to curtail the role of English language proficiency for university entrance, this could send speaker numbers plummeting quite quickly.

The role of English is no longer solely in the hands of the Anglosphere.

Related content

To explore further how English went from peripheral peasant tongue to global superspreader language, and what its meteoric rise means, head over to this guest lecture I delivered at Yunnan University, Kunming, China) on Sept 28, 2021.

TADIT – Teachers Against Discrimination in Taiwan

Imagine yourself on the shores of your ancestral homeland, where your parents and grandparents grew up, where the stories you heard as a child took place. Imagine that you’ve returned to find new opportunities and old connections. Imagine the soaring hopes such a rare and wonderful chance might give a young person in search of their place in the world. Now imagine being turned down for every job simply because of the color of your skin.

Unfortunately, this is not just an imagined story – it is one of many real stories. There is an all too common phenomenon in Taiwan, and across much of Asia, whereby English teachers are chosen more for their looks than their abilities. “Caucasians Only,” read job adverts online. “No ABCs (American-born Chinese).” These explicitly discriminatory practices result in many skilled, willing and able foreigners being passed over for teaching jobs in favour of their white counterparts. Teachers of Asian, Latin or African heritage find themselves at a disadvantage even when English is their first language.  But there is another set of people that are losing out terribly when we stand back and watch as unapologetic discrimination twists our classrooms into a narrow shape: our students.

I could describe to you the problems that inevitably occur when inexperienced teachers hired more for their skin color than their qualifications take the lectern across Taiwan, but there’s something much worse to worry about. What bothers me the most about the racism in private education is the message this sends to our younger generation.

Anyone who has worked in the educational field can tell you all about modelling, about how children learn most of their life lessons through simple observation. Teachers, parents, older siblings, and all adults across the community hand down thousands of lessons to children each day and they aren’t even aware of it! “Do as I say, not as I do,” is an instructional strategy long abandoned, and for good reason. Students need role models. And it’s up to us—all of us—to provide the best example we can.

Giving students of Asian heritage the false impression that teachers of Asian heritage are unable to teach them English is not an inspiring way to begin the day, every day. It only serves to reinforce a notion that appears to be buried deep in the psyche of many Taiwanese: that white skin is somehow ‘better,’ a mark of a success that can be emulated but never quite attained. At Teachers Against Discrimination in Taiwan (TADIT), we have a different vision: a vision of a world and of a Taiwan that is inclusive, welcoming, supportive, and uplifting for all members of the community. We believe that children know and understand the essential values of fairness and equitability—but we also know that they need our guidance to learn how to put these values into practice.

Each of us who is a part of Teachers Against Discrimination in Taiwan has a personal story that has brought us towards working together. Some of us faced rejection after rejection, despite our high hopes in embracing the land of our parents. Some of us left difficult job markets back home in order to find new opportunities in a dynamic and growing region, only to discover that the old civil rights struggles haven’t ended—or seemingly even begun—in our host country. Some of us have simply grown tired of working in environments that do not sit comfortably with our most deeply held beliefs. We know that things can change, and that Taiwan can be stronger and better and more inclusive. That’s why we have set out to share our positive message. We’re not here to cast stones. We’re here to build a new house, with room for all of us.

At the end of the day, a teacher’s mission is to empower their learners to succeed. If the adults in the Taiwanese community are denied access to success despite possessing the exact same tools—the English language—we are giving our students, what sense does it make to teach these skills in the first place? Further, it is very damaging to teach our children to take on an “us vs. them” mentality. The world is full of all kinds of people, and English is a language that has the potential to unite us across our differences.  Eliminating those differences at a child’s first exposure to the language is not an effective preparation for experience in the world. Instead, we have an invaluable opportunity to open doors for our children as they take their first big steps from the classroom door to the massive and diverse international community waiting for them. I know that no matter what happens, teachers of all backgrounds in Taiwan will continue to work their hardest to elevate their students, and I hope all of us can reach back and do the same for our teachers.

The house of the English high school teacher in the village in Sulawesi where Pasassung conducted his fieldwork

In a recent post, I reviewed language policy research that shows how compulsory English in China has given rise to new inequities and is far from being a means to fair development. In that context, compulsory English language learning is problematic for reasons of practical feasibility, allocative effectiveness and distributive justice. That macro language policy perspective is complemented by a school ethnography of English language learning in a small village in Indonesia. The study was conducted by Nicolaus Pasassung in 1999-2000 and has unfortunately never been published but the PhD dissertation it resulted in has now been made available here on Language on the Move.

The thesis titled Teaching English in an “Acquisition-Poor Environment”: An ethnographic example of a remote Indonesian EFL classroom grapples with the question why compulsory English language teaching in Indonesian high schools has been such a failure. That question in itself was not novel even at the time of the research: the World Bank, for instance, had funded the British Council to explore exactly that question a few years earlier and their answer had been that the English language curriculum and the English language teaching methods in Indonesian high schools were inadequate. The solution was relatively simple: the communicative approach was promoted as the panacea to Indonesia’s English language teaching woes.

However, as the researcher found when he spent almost a year in a remote village on the island of Sulawesi, the curricular and methodological problems in the junior high school he observed were part and parcel of a much larger complex that mitigated against the success of English language instruction; this complex also included the status of English, the cultural values of the school and wider society and the material conditions under which English language teaching took place.

To begin with, English and contexts where it was used were entirely alien to the village and there was no place for English in the community outside the classroom. Even in the classroom, the language had a tenuous hold. For instance, the thesis includes a poignant description of a lesson in which students were studying hotel dialogues from the prescribed textbook. Neither the students nor the teacher had any experience of hotels and a number of misunderstandings unfold as the teacher tries to teach and the students try to study vocabulary items in English that they have no concept of in their native language: in a village that does not have electricity, “vacuum cleaner” is one such example where the researcher as participant observer is called upon by the teacher to explain what a “vacuum cleaner” might be.

This is one tiny example of a sheer endless list of obstacles that the students face: inappropriate materials, teachers’ limited proficiency, corruption, efforts to maintain a harmonious society where everyone keeps face, limited resources on every level etc. etc. all conspire to turn the compulsory English lessons in the junior high school under investigation into a meaningless waste of time. Not only does compulsory English study under these conditions not produce any results but it attracts a cost: the opportunity cost to spend the time invested into English lessons in a more productive way.

Like Guangwei Hu and Lubna Alsagoff in their review of compulsory English in Chinese secondary education, Nicolaus Passasung, too, recommends, inter alia, to make English language learning in Indonesian high schools an elective.

Would such a move further entrench the disparities between rural and urban populations and between the rich and the poor, as the proponents of compulsory English argue? In the world described by Pasassung, English simply doesn’t matter. Existing inequities are largely unaffected by English as securing a good education including learning English in itself is not enough to advance in a world where personal advancement depends on connections and even bribery. As one villager explains, without additional financial and social resources, his sons have little to gain from their education:

Why should I be bothered sending my children to university and spend a lot of money? A lot of graduates are unemployed. When someone finishes university, s/he only wants a white-collar job and would prefer being unemployed to working in a garden. I do not have anyone who can help my children find work in a government office, and I do not have enough money to bribe them. (quoted in Pasassung 2003, p. 145)

Pasassung, Nikolaus (2003). Teaching English in an “Acquisition-Poor Environment”: An Ethnographic Example of a Remote Indonesian EFL Classroom Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Sydney

Ad for a private English language school in Taiwan: the normalization of American English is obvious in the name and imagery

There is no denying the fact that English has become the global lingua franca. However, as far as English teaching and learning are concerned, there is a prevailing belief that the world should be learning  not some “English as a lingua franca” variety but “Standard English.” In this post, I want to explore what this kind of “Standard English” that is implicit in English language teaching and learning looks like in Taiwan.

Taiwanese are dedicated English language learners and Taiwan invests a lot in English language learning. Even so, there are often media debates that decry the poor quality of English in Taiwan. So what is the yardstick against which Taiwanese English is measured? It’s American English!

Despite the fact that English is now supposed to be learned for global communication, British English and American English have long been the two models underlying English instruction in English-as-a-Foreign-Language countries such as Taiwan. In Taiwan, it is American English that is regarded as  ‘good English’ because of the close historical and political relationship between the USA and Taiwan. ‘English’ for Taiwanese means ‘American English.’ This is a strictly perceptual and ideological issue and means that Taiwan is different from most other Asian countries, where British English is regarded as the ‘good’ or ‘correct’ model to emulate in learning English.

In examining the language ideologies that undergird English learning and teaching in Taiwan, I employed Critical Discourse Analysis to analyze data drawn from private English language schools and buxiban (Mandarin for ‘cram school’) promotional materials. In my PhD thesis (Chang, 2004), which is accessible here, I specifically analyzed school fliers, websites, television commercials, television English teaching programs and English teaching job ads.

Private English language schools refer to schools that offer general English courses for different groups (elementary, secondary and tertiary students, adults) and whose purposes are not geared towards academic tests. Buxiban refers to language schools that offer arduous supplementary English courses for test purposes, such as junior high, high school English, TOEFL, IELTS, GRE and so on.

The following are two short excerpts from private language school fliers in my corpus that demonstrate how American English is promoted and normalized by English language schools in Taiwan.

Example A:

無國界的世界來臨了， 從小提供小孩子世界通用語言(美語)的環境, 培養最有競爭能力的下一代，是現在父母的期望。

(The time of the world without boundaries has come. To provide little children a learning environment in an international language (American English) and to provide the next generation with competitive ability is every parent’s hope in the contemporary society.) [my translation]

Example B:

您知道美國小孩子如何開始學美語嗎? 您希望您的孩子有同樣的出發點開始學美語嗎? 100% 純美語環境。

(Do you know how American children start learning their American English? Do you want your children to start learning English as American children do? 100% pure American learning environment.) [my translation]

Text A makes a number of unstated assumptions including the one that American English is the global language. In fact, Text A illustrates three pertinent language ideologies of English language learning in Taiwan: in addition to the fact that American English is normalized as THE English, English is also presented as the global language and it is implied that an early start to learning English is imperative. Text B explicitly tells readers that American English is the Standard English and Taiwanese children need to learn it through an English-only immersion teaching method, and, again, suggests that the earlier a child starts to learn English, the better.

Other evidence for the predominance of American English in my data include lexical collocations involving USA, America or American such as USA degree, American English teacher, North American accent, American curriculum, American teaching method, American English learning environment, and American teaching materials. These all reinforce the notion that only one variety of English – American English – is standard, appropriate, correct and prestigious. As far as English language teaching in Taiwan is concerned, anything associated with the term USA or America or American is viewed as the best. Indeed, no other varieties of English were even mentioned in my data.

The language ideology of ‘American English is best’ constitutes the context in which English language teaching policies are formed and in which English is taught and learned. As a result, English language teaching and learning in Taiwan has become a one-language (American English) and one-culture (American culture) teaching and learning environment and has resulted in widespread lack of  familiarity with the existence of any other varieties of English. This, in turn, has resulted in linguistic and racial inequalities between varieties of English and their speakers. It is not uncommon for English teachers speaking other varieties or having been educated in other English-speaking countries (including English-Center countries such as Australia or the UK) to hide their backgrounds and pretend to be American-English-speaking and/or to be US-trained.

The belief that American English is the best English is interlinked with a set of further pervasive language ideologies such as “English is the global language,” “there is an ideal English teacher,” “there is an ideal English teaching methodology” and “the earlier English learning starts, the better.” I will discuss these language ideologies in future posts.

Chang, J. (2004). Ideologies of English Teaching and Learning in Taiwan. Ph.D. thesis. University of Sydney.

Multilingual Hong Kong (Katherine Chen and Gray Carper, 2005-2007)

During our visit to Hong Kong, Kimie and I met Katherine Chen, who introduced us to a sociolinguistic film she has co-produced: Multilingual Hong Kong. The film provides fascinating insights into the linguistic landscape of Hong Kong, into Cantonese-English bilingualism and into bilingual language use more generally.

The premise is simple: Katherine is filmed asking Hong Kong pedestrians to translate a commonly code-mixed sentence – “Today I must present a project.” – into Cantonese only. Most of the teenagers and young adults she speaks to are scratching their heads because they can’t do it or break down giggling because the Cantonese equivalents they come up with are too formal, too far off the mark or simply sound funny to them.

All too soon it becomes clear to the viewer that the interviewees have a hard time using” pure” Cantonese, i.e. saying the sentence without resorting to English loanwords for “present” and, particularly, “project.”. However, when asked what they think of code-switching a fair number of them say that it’s bad, that it’s a sign of laziness, that it’s disgusting or that it’s a sign that a person cannot speak proper Cantonese nor proper English.

Other interviewees, however, celebrate their code-switching and code-mixing and say it’s an expression of their Hong Kong identity. One interviewee even says that mixing Cantonese and English increases her levels of happiness!

A counterpoint to these translation efforts and beliefs about code-mixing of ordinary Hong Kong pedestrians is provided in interviews with Hong Kong linguists. One of them is Agnes Lam and she sums up code-mixing with a beautiful metaphor: mixing Cantonese and English is like wearing jade jewellery with foreign clothes.

Multilingual Hong Kong constitutes fascinating viewing for anyone interested in language and culture and in beliefs about bilingualism and practices of bilingualism in Hong Kong and elsewhere.

I would also like to strongly recommend the film as an ideal teaching resource to anyone teaching in sociolinguistics, bilingualism, language and culture, World Englishes, Asian Studies and related areas.

Running time of Multilingual Hong Kong is 30 minutes. A 4-minute preview of the initial segment is available here. The whole film is available through Yuefilms or by contacting Katherine Chen.

Bangladeshi manager speaking English and subtitled in British educational video “How fair is fashion?”

The other day I watched a show about global textile production. How fair is fashion? by British educational media producer Pumpkin TV is an excellent resource explaining the circuits of cheap clothing for consumers in the global North, huge profits for multinational fashion and retail corporations, and the exploitation of textile workers in the global South. The film was shot in Bangladesh and features stories such as those of an 18-year-old woman, who has been working in a textile factory in Dhaka for seven years. Working 100 hours a week, she earns the equivalent of between 40 and 50 USD per month. Together with her husband she lives in a small room in a slum where they share toilet and water facilities with around 10 other families. The mud track leading to the dwelling doubles as an open sewer.

She is one of thousands of workers working for a factory in the Rupashi Group, which has contracts which many well-known clothing brands. On the day the film crew was visiting they were making shirts for Forever 21.

All the workers interviewed for the film spoke Bangla while managers, policy makers and a high-level union official spoke English. The language choices in the film are thus reflective of a well-known divide in Bangladesh: that access to English and proficiency in English is a marker of privilege.

A new wave of thinking about English and development has recently started to argue that English is vital to development and that to improve the lot of people like the 18-year-old garment worker English would be indispensable to her. English in Action, a UK-funded English language teaching program for development in Bangladesh, is an example:

The Programme’s goal is to contribute to the economic growth of the country by providing communicative English language as a tool for better access to the world economy. The purpose of EIA is to significantly increase the number of people who are able to communicate in English, to levels that enable them to participate fully in economic and social activities and opportunities. (English in Action)

Sounds good. However, watching How fair is fashion? revealed one problem with this theory. The problem was that the show treated all Bangladeshi speakers – irrespective of whether they were Bangla-speaking workers or English-speaking elites – as incomprehensible to the British viewer. Both Bangla-speaking and English-speaking Bangladeshis were presented as requiring mediation to become intelligible: Bangla was translated and English was subtitled. The image provides an example: The general manager of Rupashi group says “We are number three now. Our target is to become number two, and then one.” in English at the same time that the subtitles appear in English.

I have blogged about the politics of subtitling English speakers to other English speakers before. As I pointed out there, subtitling some varieties of English but not others to an English-speaking audience serves to mark the subtitled varieties as illegitimate.

The subtitling of educated Bangladesh English constitutes a perfect example of everything that is wrong with the assumption that being able to communicate in English has anything much to do with development. To assume that being able to communicate in English will enable Bangladeshis – or anyone else in the global South – “to participate fully in economic and social activities and opportunities” fails to recognize that language is never just about communication.

Linguistic exchange is always also an economic exchange, as Bourdieu explains:

[U]tterances are not only […] signs to be understood and deciphered; they are also signs of wealth, intended to be evaluated and appreciated, and signs of authority, intended to be believed and obeyed. (Bourdieu 1991, p. 66)

Subtitled speech is a sign of lack of wealth and authority. Only Bangladeshis who speak English can be rendered illegitimate in this way as the translation of Bangla is simply a marker of linguistic difference rather than a linguistic hierarchy.

The elite Bangladeshis featured in the film are competent speakers of English (you can listen to the excerpt with the General Manager of Rupashi Group and judge for yourself). However, linguistic competence does not necessarily translate into legitimate competence:

The competence adequate to produce sentences that are likely to be understood may be quite inadequate to produce sentences that are likely to be listened to, likely to be recognized as acceptable in all the situations in which there is occasion to speak. (Bourdieu 1991, p. 55)

If the English of competent elite Bangladeshi speakers of English is not acceptable on the global stage (however valuable it may be in the local linguistic market), what likelihood is there that English teaching will turn ordinary impoverished Bangladeshis into global players? Hamid’s (2010) analysis of the gap between policy discourses about the promise of English and the reality of the implementation of English language teaching in Bangladesh paints a gloomy picture of high expectations, inadequate resource investment, and poor outcomes. Essentially, he finds that the current policy of “English for everyone” doesn’t produce much competence in English because it is severely under-resourced, and, where donor-funded, unsustainable and poorly integrated with the local environment.

If I were a cynic, I’d argue that the whole point of universal English language teaching is not actually the acquisition of linguistic competence but the recognition of the legitimate language; not to learn how to speak English but to learn how to recognize legitimate – “metropolitan” or “global” – English; to learn one’s place in the linguistic hierarchy and thus to accept one’s inferior position as a natural and incontestable fact. I am not a cynic and I follow Bourdieu in seeing the disparity between knowledge of the legitimate language (always a limited resource) and recognition of the legitimate language (always much more widespread) as a function of the linguistic market.

While proponents of universal English language teaching for development may not intend to collude in linguistic domination, they fail to achieve any of their well-intentioned aims because they ignore the fact that language is not only about communication but also about legitimacy – an error Bourdieu (1991, p. 53) calls “the naïvety par excellence of the scholarly relativism which forgets that the naïve gaze is not relativist.”

While I’m pessimistic about English for development, How fair is fashion? ends on an optimistic note by featuring a cooperative in rural Bangladesh producing for People Tree, a fair trade fashion label. The garment worker interviewed there earns about the same as her Dhaka-based counterpart. However, in contrast to the factory workers in Dhaka, she has fixed hours and works from 5-9; she has a proper contract and the cooperative also provides childcare and schooling for her children; above all, more autonomous and diverse, there is dignity in her work.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hamid, M. Obaidul (2010). Globalisation, English for everyone and English teacher capacity: language policy discourses and realities in Bangladesh Current Issues in Language Planning, 11 (4), 289-310 DOI: 10.1080/14664208.2011.532621

I’m a mother tongue speaker of English, “the” global language. That means if I want to become a highly fluent speaker, and writer of another language, I, and others who grow up initially as English-language monolinguals and who yearn to become meaningful multilinguals, must fight the global wave of English that so relentlessly aims to throw us back into the throes of comparative English monolingualism.

In so many places we English mother tongue speakers go, it is so difficult – nigh near impossible, actually – to escape the global wave of English.

Take this blog page on Language on the Move, for example: It’s aimed at a global audience and therefore written in English. If I want to write for Language on the Move – and I do — I have to write in English.

English and international NGOs
Or take the international NGO scene: Maybe I want to go work for an international NGO in, oh, I don’t know, let’s say Cambodia. Chances are, I’m not going to get the job unless I’m highly fluent in English, though a bit of French might not hurt.

I use NGOs in Cambodia as an example because we just finished hosting a German graduate student from the University of Tübingen in our home. Anja, who was with us for seven months, came to study at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies (I am a professor in another department at the University of Denver).

In a couple of weeks, Anja will jet from Germany to Cambodia to intern for a few months at an international NGO. She’ll be using English most, if not all, of the time in the workplace.

Turning the linguistic tide
Anja can jet off to virtually any corner of the world, and, if she remains within international domains in a given geographic area, she can be pretty much guaranteed that she’ll be able to practice her best foreign language, which happens to be English. Given her life goals as well as Germany’s emphasis on English —  Anja told me she has taken graduate classes at the University of Tübingen in which there were only German mother tongue speakers and which were carried out one-hundred percent in English – it’s hardly surprising English is far and away her best foreign language.

While Anja can, and did, take undergraduate and graduate courses offered exclusively in English in Germany, that’s never been, and likely never will be, an option for me in the reverse, where I could take, or, as a professor, teach, a university journalism or communications course in German, much less in Spanish here the USA.

Anja can also be assured that if she works in an international job, even in Germany, she will likely have a daily opportunity to use her German-English bilingualism.

The international world is at lot different for me, the English mother-tongue speaker.

A monolingual international communications scholar?
One might think there would be real, instrumental motivation and opportunity for an international communications scholar such as me to be multilingual. Not exactly. Every international conference I go to is in English and every international journal I need to publish in is published in English. Indeed, in the global academic realm, international seems to be a code word for English only.

In sharp contrast to the social pressure on the German academic to publish in English — one might more positively call it socially directed opportunity — I have no such social pressure or motivation to publish in German. Indeed, if, or, hopefully, when, I manage to do a sabbatical year of research in Germany, it’s almost certain that I’ll be working with German scholars on producing scholarship written in English, not in German.

It’s not only on the plane of global academics that American educational elites like me are constantly confronted by a sea of English that can make it very difficult for us to develop deep and broad fluency in a foreign language. For example, in research I’ve conducted, many American college students who study abroad in order to acquire greater fluency in another language tell of the frustrations English’s global presence produce when they’re trying to practice a local language.

No other language group faces this same predicament, not the Russian speakers going to China to learn Chinese, not the Chinese speakers going to Korea to learn Korean, not the Portuguese speakers coming to the USA to learn English. Of course, this is changing as the world moves more toward an English-centric bilingual order.

It’s quite likely this English-centric order may see the Russian speaker going to China to learn Chinese, and the Chinese speaker going to Korea to learn Korean also frustrated by the wave of English sweeping the world. And it goes without saying that, for the foreseeable future, the Portuguese speaker going to the U.S. to learn English won’t have to worry much about being derailed, linguistically speaking, by the Portuguese speaking American swimming the other way.

English belongs to everyone?

The claim that “English belongs to everyone who uses it” has continued to gain more and more cultural cache, at least in global (English) academic circles.

On the surface, the claim that “English belongs to everyone who uses it” makes perfect sense. Indeed, one might say it’s a restatement of the obvious: The people who use a language (re)create it, (re)shape it, and therefore “own” it.

Trouble is, “English belongs to everyone who owns it” is a gross over-simplification, one that (willfully?) ignores the fundamentally hierarchical nature of society.

A more refined and accurate phrasing would be: “English belongs to everyone who uses it in these particular ways in these particular contexts according to these particular rules established by these particular powerful social actors to achieve these particular ends.”

Using China English in an international academic journal?
Let’s take one example: Writing in Bahamian, Singaporean, China, or even so-called Euro English isn’t likely to get you far in the realm of global academic publishing, which generally demands that authors use Standard American or Standard British English.

Similarly, neither is the English version of the United Nation’s web site written in Bahamian, Singaporean, China or Euro-English. More broadly, as far as I know (I confess I can’t read these languages), the UN does not publish its Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, etc. language versions using local forms of those languages; it uses “Standard (Written) French,” etc.

The larger point – one that’s glossed over among those who adhere to the “English belongs to everyone who uses it” view: You have to use particular, standardized forms of languages, including English, in order to be welcomed into, one might also say in order to “belong to”, the linguistic community located in a given (international) power domain.

If you accept this argument, and, frankly, I think it’s difficult to refute – trying submitting your next article to the Journal of Sociolinguistics in a form of English other than Standard British or American English — then the façade of “English belongs to everyone who uses it” begins to crumble.

Core country elites still hold control
On an theoretical level, it’s certainly true that the core countries don’t really “own” English anymore, if they ever really did. However, that doesn’t mean these countries, or, more accurately, the elite social actors who establish, maintain, and enforce “Standard American/British/Australian, etc. English” domestically, in particular in power domains, have given up the fight to control English globally, or that they have somehow already lost this battle.

Far from it. These elite social actors – international academics among them – continue to fight hard to maintain “inner circle” English as the form to which those “outside” the circle must adhere.

Moving down the social hierarchy somewhat, I’m pretty certain it would come as a surprise – and a rather unwelcome one at that — to many, if not most, average Americans (or British, etc.) that they do not own English, and, furthermore, that those for whom English is a second/foreign language now control the global fate of the language.

In fact, comparatively little empirical work has been conducted on attitudes held by those in the “inner circle” speaking countries toward global English, much less on how they might view, and respond to the claim that they no longer have (any?) control over English, globally speaking.

Core country attitudes toward global English
Additionally, as far as I know, no one has examined core country English speaker attitudes toward the crucial question of “a” global English written standard, and how, and by whom, this ought to be determined. Nor, as far as I am aware, has much empirical research been conducted into what specific types of standardized written English are used in particular global power domains. I do strongly suspect that such research would reveal that, contrary to what the “English belongs to everyone who uses it” claim implies, in fact English only “belongs” to those using it in power domains, in written form, if they use it in this particular American or British standardized manner.

In fact, I am a strong advocate for destabilizing and deconstructing a hierarchical global English language order in which educational elites from core English speaking countries establish the exclusive language rules by which everyone must play in order to “belong.” However, I don’t believe that acting as if the global English language hierarchy has miraculously already disappeared and simply declaring, “English belongs to everyone who uses it” is the best way to accomplish this.

Indeed, ironically, those declaring, even if indirectly, that there is no more hierarchy, no more center, in terms of  global English reinforce the very unjust language order they seek to deconstruct. You can’t, after all, take something down if it isn’t there anymore to begin with, can you?

Demont-Heinrich, C. (2008). The Death of Cultural Imperialism — and Power Too?: A Critical Analysis of American Prestige Press Representations of the Hegemony of English International Communication Gazette, 70 (5), 378-394 DOI: 10.1177/1748048508094289

What is “Competent English”?

“PR” is probably one of the abbreviations I have heard most since coming to Australia. Despite the fact that PR – “permanent residence” for the non-initiated – is the much-coveted subject of many conversations, I found out that it is extremely difficult to obtain. Recently, I received an email invitation to a Permanent Residency Information Session for international students at my university. Out of curiosity, I decided to join. The speaker was a lawyer working primarily in Australian immigration and citizenship law. He opened his speech by seriously reminding us, all international students obviously, not to believe any prediction on which academic major would enhance our chances of success when applying for PR. The rules keep changing, as he went on to say, and a major change came into effect this month.

I am particularly intrigued by the fact that the required IETLS test scores have been raised. A band score 6 average, “Competent English,” earns a hopeful applicant 0 points towards PR; at band score 7, “Proficient English,” is worth 10 points, and band score 8, “Superior English,” is valued at 20 points. When the audience collectively gasped at these high scores, the lawyer blithely informed us that some Australians would not be able to obtain a band score 6.

Right now I am happy with my student visa but if I ever were to wish to stay in Australia after my studies, I would have to apply for a general skilled migration visa and take another IELTS test. However, what does doing well on IELTS actually say about my English competence? Coming from Taiwan, I’ve obviously passed the language requirement to study here and obtained an IELTS score of 7.5 prior to admission. Even so, I am finding it hard to claim that I have “competent” English, let alone “Superior English,” of which I’m officially only 0.5 IELTS points short.

Does my tested and certified English enable me to confidently deal with every aspect of daily life here in Sydney? No. For example, I have to endeavor to improve my academic English for my study by reading, conjecturing, memorizing, and practicing the formal academic English genre and fighting with numerous elusive vocabulary items along the way. In three years, I will be expected to produce a PhD thesis which reads as if it had been written by a native speaker of English.

In addition to higher degree research, I, as every other overseas student, need to deal with daily life involving interactions with many different people who speak with various accents and with different levels of proficiency. I regularly read rental ads with grammatical errors; I rented a room from an immigrant landlord who spoke hardly any English, and now I share a unit with other overseas students. I make phone calls to ask information about things like health insurance, medical treatment, or driver’s license and each time I have to deal with different operators who speak too fast with all kinds of different accents and sometimes mysterious ways of explaining things. I have also been trying hard to make local friends by learning some Australianisms (in Taiwan we are expected to learn American English) and by trying to figure out interesting topics for young people (from Cricket to MasterChef). Of course, I am trying to figure all this out without asking too many questions so as not to bore or scare away potential friends.

In sum, there seems a large gap between the English I learned from textbooks and teaching materials and which enabled me to score relatively highly on the IELTS tests, and the English I am encountering in real life in this multicultural and multilingual country, which is supposed to be English-speaking.

However, after having worked hard to study, to overcome everyday problems, and to learn a lot about Australian English as well as all kinds of other Englishes, overseas students who would like to stay in Australia after graduation are being sent back to Square One. To apply for PR they will once again face the official view of their language competence. Once again they will have to sit an IELTS test, a test that is very much about the so-called Standard English that is found in textbooks and teaching materials. From a language perspective, it’s hard not to wonder what the point of studying in Australia is then? What does this Australian experience bring us in terms of English competence if everything I am learning here is not valued should I ever want to settle in this country? Because I could just as easily learn what IS valued – standard English as expressed in an IELTS score – back home in Taiwan.

Pakistan Swat Valley 2009

Ingrid briefly mentioned Zubeida Mustafa’s new book Tyranny of Language in Education: The Problem and its solution recently. Since then, we’ve had numerous enquiries about the book here on Language-on-the-Move, and I’m pleased to offer a review and more information about language education in Pakistan today. Zubeida Mustafa is well-known in Pakistan as a veteran English language journalist and Tyranny of Language in Education is her first book. It has multiple focuses around language and power, bilingualism, language learning, equity in education, globalization, and, of course, language-in-education policy. Here, the readers of this review need to understand that the author has written this book not for academics but for the general public and policy makers of Pakistan. The book’s central argument is as follows:

The child begins life with an advantage in a certain language, namely his mother tongue or his first language, which he uses to communicate and when learning is imposed on him in another language, he is robbed of this natural advantage … . He is additionally burdened with the handicap of a linguistic barrier that he has to surmount when he goes to school. (p. 6)

It’s hard to argue with this point in Pakistan where the national language Urdu could be said to have been imposed on a hugely multilingual society. Parents and pupils are not usually given a choice to have formal education made available in local languages. Furthermore, the author points out the unsound and unjust language education policies and practices in Pakistan, which she argues have been developed and are being sustained by a small elite class:

Polices should be made for the greatest good of the greatest number and not for a small elite class which formulates state policies and thus ensures that its privileged position is not undermined. (p. 6)

By way of background to Zubeida’s work, let me provide you with further information about languages, education and poverty in Pakistan. Ethnologue lists 72 languages for Pakistan. Out of these, 14 languages have more than 1 million first language speakers. The number of speakers and their percentage of the population differs significantly: Western Punjabi, for instance, has 60.6 million speakers and is spoken by 38.3% of the population but there are also languages which have only a few hundred speakers such as Aer, Bhaya or Domaaki. Overall, 85% of the population speak 14 languages and the remaining 58 languages are spoken by 15% of the population. The key point is that Pakistan’s population is a highly multilingual one.

This multilingual population, however, is not served by an equally multilingual language-in-education policy. As a matter of fact, Pakistan’s language-in-education policy is not explicitly stated. While the policy maintains that comprehensive school language policies should be developed in consultation with provincial and area governments, it does not seem to realize the importance of community, school management and teachers and pupils in the development, sustenance and implementation of a policy. Like all other previous language policies the approach adopted seems to be top-down. The current language-in-education policy of the country maintains that Urdu is the medium of instruction in government schools and English is introduced from Class 1 onwards. Most private schools in the country have English as medium of instruction.

Whether as a result of the policy or other factors, education outcomes are dismal: the literacy rate is 57.7%. For males it is 69.5% and for females 45.2%, and urban populations with 73.2% are more literate than rural populations with 49.2%. Furthermore, most people only receive elementary education. Only 18% of girls and 24% of boys are in secondary schools and only 5% of the population of tertiary age are in tertiary education.

While monolingual language-in-education policies for a multilingual population are certainly one aspect of the failure of education in Pakistan, the linguistic facts only go so far by way of explanation, as I’ve argued before. In my view, the material conditions of deep, widespread and entrenched poverty in Pakistan probably go a much longer way to explain the failure of education in Pakistan. For instance, let me tell you about the actual buildings and spaces of schooling in this country: 32.7% of elementary schools are without boundary walls; 36.6% without drinking water; 35.4% without toilet facilities; and 60% without electricity. These statistics help us understand at a surface level why only 10% children out of roughly 70% enrolled in schools manage to finish their secondary education.

Some more statistics: 23% of Pakistan’s population live below the poverty line of USD1.25 per day. The 2010 Human Development Index has Pakistan in 125th position – out of a total of 169 countries. Shocking inequalities manifest in every sphere of life, the poorest 10% of the population have access to 3.9% of the total national income while the richest 10% access 26.5%. The state of the country can also be measured by the fact that perhaps the cheapest thing in Pakistan is human life. People are killed on an everyday basis. Since 2006, 35,000 civilians and 3,500 security personnel have been killed in a “war on terror” that terrorizes our people.

Coming back to Zubeida’s book, I would say that the author at some places in her work makes attempts to connect language-in-education policy with societal power relations, inequalities and the material conditions in the country, such as chapter 7 titled “Ground Realities,” where the accounts are based on her personal visits to a less-privileged area of Karachi. In these account, the reader can easily hear the fresh voice of the author, which in other chapters sometimes gets lost in the scholarly sources tracing the development and explaining language policy in pre- and post-colonial Pakistan. To me, the key achievement of the book then is that it stimulates debate and puts educational disadvantage in Pakistan back on the table of public debate. However, with much of the work the author draws on, the book also shares particular weaknesses in positing particular interpretations of colonial language policy. These often give inadequate empirical evidence and tend to make straightforward links between past and present. It would not be incorrect to maintain that scholarship produced in this country has largely been overly deterministic in such matters without engaging with the material base of education in Pakistan and exploring what actually goes on in schools in Pakistan. Unfortunately, to date the country does not have one single study that could describe and explain the everyday language practices in specific institutions and explore the interlinked micro and macro levels of language in education in Pakistan. My ongoing PhD work is designed to partly fill that lacuna.

In Pakistan, as elsewhere, scholars all too often take refuge in political constructs and partial historical narratives without attending to empirical grounding and depth. If education in Pakistan is embedded in the power structures of the society, giving rise to inequalities and polarization, we would like to know how such dominance, inequalities and polarization is developed, maintained and implemented.

Japanese stop sign

The current global orthodoxy holds that learning English is good: individuals who know English are supposed to have an advantage in the job market and countries with large English-learning populations are supposed to be “developing” and “modernizing.” Critical sociolinguists have, of course, for a long time pointed out that it doesn’t quite work like that. They tend to argue that, while the spread of English has certainly made things easier for international elites, it has also served to exacerbate internal inequalities within many countries. However, even within the critical camp, I’ve never come across the argument that, in some circumstances, a competitive advantage may actually result from NOT knowing English. So, you can imagine my surprise when I discovered precisely this in the facts put forward in a recent article about the global spread of temping agencies (Coe, Johns, Ward, 2012).

The article investigates the global spread of transnational staffing corporations. With the international rise of neoliberal workplace relations and the widespread demise of regular work over the past decades, temping firms have become a lucrative market internationally. Globally, the temporary staffing market is worth many billions of dollars, with the USA, the UK and Japan being the three largest national markets. This huge market is firmly in the hands of a relatively small number of transnational corporations all of which originate in the USA or Western Europe. In 2008, the three largest players internationally were Adecco, Manpower and Randstad. Adecco, which originates in Switzerland, generated 30.2 billion USD in foreign revenue (97% of its total) by operating in 59 countries. Manpower, which originates in the USA, generated 19.6 billion USD in foreign revenue (91% of its total) by operating in 82 countries. Randstad, which originates in the Netherlands, generated 18.2 billion USD in foreign revenue (78% of its total) by operating in 50 countries. So, temporary staffing is big business; big global business.

In this context, the Japanese temporary staffing market (worth 14.7 billion USD in 2008) constitutes an anomaly: it is not dominated by transnational corporations but by national ones. Coe et al. investigate why the big global players have failed to significantly penetrate the world’s fastest-growing and third-most lucrative market. They argue that transnational staffing corporations have failed in Japan on three levels: gaining market entry; gaining business once established; and securing business on an ongoing basis. On each level, language and culture played a role. In terms of gaining market entry, transnationals have no advantage if they start from scratch (“greenfield entry”) because national competitors are well-established. As one interviewee explained:

They might think that Japan is a very big market, but it is a not new market … it is different here. This is not an English speaking country and it has a long history, and a very different culture.

Failing greenfield entry, acquisitions of domestic companies are the other key strategy to gain international market entry. Acquisitions strategies, too, haven’t been going well in an industry heavily dependent on services and communications. The success of a temping agency depends heavily on its good relationships with the companies they are sending workers to and with the actual workers on their books. As it turns out, expatriate managers, who are typically installed in acquisitions and direct subsidiaries, simply aren’t as good at developing and maintaining these relationships than their Japanese counterparts. Most clients of a temping agency in Japan prefer to do business with a Japanese person.

The way multinational staffing corporations thrive internationally is by entering into global contracts with other multinational corporations (e.g., Staffing Company A has a global contract with Hospitality Company B to supply all their cleaning staff globally). However, that strategy does not work well in the Japanese market, either. Apart from the fact that there are relatively fewer transnational corporations operating in Japan to begin with, even if a global contract is in place, the lack of local networks meant that transnational companies often could not actually fulfill their global contract in Japan, as another interviewee explains:

There is a problem with global contracts because Japan is not an English-speaking country. So, when the foreign company A has a global contract with Manpower … for instance Pasona [=2nd largest national temping agency] has been doing the staffing for company A, but because of the global contract they have to switch to Manpower, but Manpower cannot find the 200 skilled English speakers that they need. So, a company might have a global contract, but they might not be able to switch from Pasona to Manpower.

In an industry such as temporary staffing, where the “service” (i.e. supply of workers) is “produced” and “consumed” locally, it is hard to see what transnational companies can actually add in value to the ways in which the service is rendered. On the contrary, they lack a crucial ingredient that their Japanese competitors have: an emphasis on building long-term relationships and trust between clients and companies.

The authors conclude that, as Japanese clients value long-term relationships and trust over universal branding and globally uniform business practices, there are obvious limits to the expansion potential of multinational corporations. Looking at it differently, NOT speaking English actually grants national operators in the temporary staffing industry in the Japanese market with a competitive edge. I wonder whether it wouldn’t be possible to discover many similar cases from around the world if we just started to look beyond the global hype and to undertake actual cost-benefit analyses of the global spread of English?

NEIL M. COE, JENNIFER JOHNS AND KEVIN WARD (2012). Limits to expansion: transnational corporations and territorial embeddedness in the Japanese temporary staffing market Global Networks, 12 (1), 1-26

Sociolinguists have been paying surprisingly little attention to the UAE despite the fact that, along with other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, the UAE has been engaged in a language policy experiment of large-scale language shift from Arabic to English. Widespread language shift in these heartlands of the Arab world has been such that there is now an emerging concern for the long-term viability of Arabic in GCC countries (see also our earlier post “Where is the Arabic?”).

How is such as state of linguistic affairs possible one might ask? Gulf Arabs don’t fit the typical patterns of societal language shift, which is commonly associated with disenfranchised minorities, poverty, and oppression. The only researcher who, to the best of my knowledge, has attempted an answer to this conundrum is Sohail Karmani with his 2005 article “Petro-Linguistics.” There the author explores the nexus between an oil-based rentier society and the GCC countries’ burgeoning English language teaching industry. Karmani starts from the premise of the Arab Human Development Report that oil has been more of a bane than a boon for the region. The well-known paradox of the “resource curse” is based on the observation that countries with plentiful natural resources have often poorer development outcomes than those with less.

Despite the well-known economic and socio-political dangers of overreliance on the extraction of primary resources, the overreliance on oil revenues in GCC countries continues for three reasons: first, the rentier economy serves to buy political consensus; second, oil wealth has led to a capital-intensive mode of development instead of a labor-intensive one; and third, soaring international demand creates strong pressure to continue current high levels of extraction and the attendant rentier mode of social organization.

Karmani argues that these three reasons for the continued over-reliance on oil are directly related to language policy in GCC countries. To begin with, while the rentier state is conducive to political consensus it is not conducive to political participation in the way a tax-dependent state is. Consequently, state-society links in rentier states are usually weak and underdeveloped and state policies, including language policy, do not need to take the needs, desire or practices of the Arabic-speaking citizenry into account.

Second, a capital-intensive mode of development encourages reliance on huge numbers of advisors and international experts, who by the very nature of their backgrounds and expertise, not to mention self-interest, favor English. Finally, international demand and pressure for continued high levels of oil extraction also indirectly favor English through their support for the rentier mode rather than mass industrialization and mass education.

Consequently, Karmani compares the operation of the TESOL industry in GCC countries to the operations of an oil cartel: in this account, the TESOL industry largely controls language policy and, more crucially, language practices in education, and the profits of the enterprise flow back to Western English-speaking countries. Indeed, despite the huge investments into English that GCC countries have made over the past decades, there is also a consensus that overall levels of English proficiency in the region are low. This lack of “success” in English language learning is partly an in-built feature of language teaching in a context where language is a commodity, as I have argued previously with reference to the South Korean context (see here and here). However, it is also a feature of the modus operandi of a cartel:

[…] an increasingly assertive, self-serving mercenary culture had set in that relied largely for its survival on weak state-society linkages and on the stark absence of the kind of accountability and transparency […] (Karmani, 2005, p. 93)

In 2008, the UAE made Arabic their official language, a move that seems to fly in the face of the account above. However, simultaneously, English-medium instruction is expanding to ever more segments of public education. The rhetoric around Arabic as the language of identity and English as the language of modernization has pitched the proponents of both languages against each other in zealous rivalry. It seems to me that these language wars are nothing but distracters from the burning questions humanity is facing today. While the immense challenges of population explosion, environmental destruction, climate change, and extreme inequality confronting us today may have nothing much to do with language, the question remains how language policy can serve to undergird sustainable development and a more peaceful future.

Karmani, S. (2005). Petro-Linguistics: The Emerging Nexus Between Oil, English, and Islam Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 4 (2), 87-102 DOI: 10.1207/s15327701jlie0402_2

Lotus Pond (part of Shinobazu Pond) in Ueno Park

“There are so many stupid Japanese women around, huh? Many Westerners are coming to our country and the stupid women love stupid white men.”

My husband and I were stunned by this comment thrown at us by a stranger in Ueno Park during our Language-on-the Move tour to Japan. The insult came from a middle-aged Japanese man who was standing near Shinobazu Pond holding a can of beer in his hand with a flat expression on his face.

“Excuse me? What did you say?!” My husband, a white Western man walking with his Japanese wife, was not going to let the insult pass and was getting ready for a fight.

“Not worth it!” I grabbed his arm and quickly dragged him away assuming that the stranger was a drunk or mentally ill. Ueno Park is notorious for the large number of homeless people living there and we had already seen so many of them along the way from the park’s entrance. Homelessness is one of the hidden dark sides of Japan’s declining prosperity as Shiho Fukada so poignantly demonstrates in her photography.

Although I hadn’t wanted a confrontation, the comment upset me. I have explored issues of misogyny and of animosity towards interracial relationships in Japan in my research but this was the first time I personally experienced this kind of harassment in a public space.  I was also intrigued by the fact that the man had insulted us in fluent English. I couldn’t get the incident out of my mind: Where did he learn English so well? Does he stand there all day insulting interracial couples walking by? What else does he do? Why is he doing this? How often have such comments resulted in a fight?

After we had looked at the pond and decided not to take the famous swan-shaped boat, we had to take the same way back passing the man again. I felt weary and he, too, noticed us. He was staring at us but said nothing this time. My curiosity got the better of me:

Kimie: “Excuse me, but may I ask where you learned English so well?”
Stranger: “I didn’t learn English. It’s God’s gift.”

Soon we were having a friendly conversation because it turned out that he didn’t mind Australians as much as Americans! He told us how Asian women were stupid going after White men, and how interracial marriage, which he called stupidity, weakens the nation. In his view, Japan should never have opened its doors to the West in the 19^th century. Ever since then, the country had been infected with evil Western influences. In particular he was aggravated by the fact that Japanese women are so into White men. “They say ‘I love you, I love you’ and the women love it. It’s stupid. If love is there, you don’t have to say it.” I asked him if he had a partner. With the same contempt, he said “How can I find a partner when women here watch stupid American romantic movies and expect me to say I love you?”

He also told us that he was a freelance writer and that we were standing right in his publishing office. “I write many things including haiku”, and he took out several hand-made copies of a small booklet. “If you’d like to take one, I’d appreciate a small contribution.” We paid and left. By way of farewell he said “I hope you will enjoy my work.”

When we sat down in a café later, I looked at his collection of twelve haikus. They were beautifully hand-written in English and in a fude brush pen with titles such as ‘Bird’, ‘Northerly wind’ or ‘Journey’.  “How interesting”, I thought to myself in that café in the Ueno Park.

Hideo Asano on the right and Kimie with his haiku collection, September 29, 2010

At that point I did not yet know that we had actually met Hideo Asano, a well-known Tokyo artist, writer and blogger! Attacking Japanese-Western couples seems to be some sort of street performance he engages in as this, rather disrespectful, YouTube video shows.  However, the haikus, poems and short stories on his website are beautiful.

Hideo Asano is a bilingual, English-as-a-second-language writer who could be an inspiration to many learners of English. On his website he writes:

I hope especially my work could encourage students who study English as a second language that anyone could reach to a higher level, striving with persistence, to reach to the point of realizing that the more you know the more you don’t know. English belongs to everyone who cares, a baseball player’s son can’t automatically be a good baseball player.

This must be one of the strongest encouragements to find your own voice in a second language I have seen in a long time! That Asano is left to peddle his art as a homeless person on the streets of Tokyo and to draw attention to himself by insulting others, in a country that is obsessed with English language learning and idolizes native-speaking teachers is a sad and deeply disturbing testament to the power of the intersection of linguistic and racial ideologies.

The CEO of Rakuten, one of the companies who are changing to English, apparently is tweeting stuff like “All elementary school teachers must be sacked. Their English is bad,” “Let’s fire all Japanese English teachers and hire native speakers” or “Japan has failed. Cambodians speak better English than the Japanese.” I’m quoting from memory so this may not have been the exact wording but it’s the gist of the messages. Apart from the fact that the message that “Japanese can’t speak English” is now also delivered via Twitter, nothing seems to have changed in the many years since I’ve been following news about English in Japan.

Hang on! Japan has invested heavily into English language teaching for a couple of decades. Japan probably has a higher native-speaker-teacher—English-language student ratio than any other English-as-a-Foreign country in the world. If anyone has any actual stats on that ratio, send them in! While the eikaiwa business seems to have slowed down a bit, over the past decades huge numbers of Japanese from all walks of life enrolled in private English classes to practice their speaking skills. Many went abroad to study English in a total immersion environment. All for nothing?!

Factually, all that English language learning must have had an impact and today’s Japanese are more proficient in English than ever before, and the way it’s going, each generation is progressively more proficient. However, the discourse that the Japanese collectively don’t know how to speak English hasn’t moved an inch: everyone with an opinion on the matter still seems to say that they need to start earlier, have more native-speaker teachers, overcome their anxiety and just speak, work harder or send their children abroad in the same way the Koreans do as was suggested in yesterday’s discussion. Regular readers of Language-on-the-Move already know what I think of that.

So what does it all mean? The Japanese have been learning English with great dedication and determination for many years and yet the perception of their English as a poor has not changed. There can be only one explanation: inflationary pressure! As proficiency in English goes up, the bar to achieve the promise of English (a better job, a more competitive economy, self-transformation into a cool cosmopolitan etc. etc.) goes up to. Drawing on Bourdieu, Joseph Park has incisively analyzed the process for Korea: as more and more people learn English and attain the qualifications that promised access to jobs and other desired economic (and also social and cultural) benefits, the market constantly needs to be recalibrated to maintain the value of English as a marker of distinction.

Language is immensely suited to be such a marker of distinction and to reproduce social inequalities because in an absolute, philosophical sense it is impossible for anyone to ever speak “perfectly.”

I fully expect to hear another lecture drawing on media data deploring the dire state of English in Japan in 10 years’ time unless someone tells all those commentators to just butt out! Leave our language alone and concentrate on the real challenges – maybe global warming for starters.

Park, Joseph S.-Y (2009). The local construction of a global language: ideologies of English in South Korea
Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110214079

The level of public debate about these corporate language policies is amazing and is characterized by two contradictory positions: pro and contra English-as-an-official-language at work in Japan. From the perspective of Nissan, Rakuten and Uniqlo, English is obviously the language of globalisation, an indispensable tool to increase their competitiveness in the global market. Mikitani asked rhetorically: “If our workers can’t speak English, like those workers in Europe, how can we compete in the global world?” It makes perfect sense to many debaters, and some are even suggesting that it is an opportunity to consider adopting English as the national language.

Not everyone is so enthusiastic, of course, and the other side of the debate is led by scholars such as Masaki Oda and Tatsuru Uchida. Uchida is concerned that the English-Only approach would demoralise workers and have a negative impact on the overall quality of the workforce. The English-as-corporate-language policy might create an environment where competent workers without English competence are being marginalised or even dismissed from their jobs, while incompetent workers with good English proficiency are being promoted.

The strongest criticism, however, has emerged not from academia but from within the corporate world. Takanobu Ito, the CEO of Japan’s giant carmaker Honda has labeled the imposition of the use of English in workplaces within Japan simply as “stupid.” He argues that to be competitive in the global market really means to be strategically flexible in all areas, including language use. As a successful corporate leader with ample international experience, Ito’s words, too, carry a lot of weight with the public. As soon as he made his statement, uncountable tweets and blog posts gave a thumbs-up to Ito’s stance with a common expression of “ホンダ△” (Honda △ – the triangle symbolizes the upward status of Honda).

Those opposed to the imposition of English as the corporate language within Japan complain that Uniqlo and Rakuten are now focusing less on the needs of their Japanese workers and customers. The idea that Japanese workers would converse in English among themselves in shops in Japan has predictably drawn a lot of ridicule as in this example:

妻が「今日から我が家の公用語を英語とする」と宣言した。これは怖い。楽天やユニクロ以上の怖さだよ。俺はもうずっと黙っているしかないな。(My wife just declared “We will adopt English as our official family language from today”. I’m scared. This is scarier than Rakuten and Uniqlo. I will just have to remain silent from now on).

I chuckled at this tweet but cannot help wondering whether the fear to be condemned to silence in English is not very real for some of the workers at the companies with English as their official language.

So far, the two sides of the debate are still battling it out and it remains to be seen who will win the argument. However, one winner has already emerged: the English language teaching industry. English-as-corporate-language policies may well turn out to be an unexpected savior for the industry with its shrinking market share.

Multilingual sign in Namtso (Image Credit: Wikipedia)

Italian version of my blog post about Chinglish. Translated by Emanuela Moretto

Per un attimo provate a pensare che il New York Times abbia chiesto ai propri lettori di inviare barzellette sulle classiche oche giulive, oppure di riportare un episodio divertente che aveva per protagonista una persona di colore. Bene, adesso provate ad immaginare che a seguito della richiesta la blogosfera sia stata bombardata da messaggi e che tutti coloro che si interessano di differenze tra i sessi o tra le etnie abbiano creato un blog o abbiano mandato il proprio contributo su facebook o twitter e che persino gli studiosi nel campo improvvisamente si siano animati ed abbiano proposto analisi sul perché le sopracitate oche giulive o le persone di colore si comportino in una maniera così assurda.

In realtà, ciò non potrebbe succedere, semplicemente perché sarebbe palesemente ed oscenamente sessista o razzista. Ed infatti tiro un sospiro di sollievo che queste cose non facciano più parte della mainstream. Quindi è anche arrivato il momento di giungere allo stesso risultato dal punto di vista della diversità linguistica. Chiariamo subito una cosa: il prendersi gioco di un’altra lingua non è un gioco! Infatti non è altro che una riprova della stessa mentalità ristretta che si ritrova nelle barzellette sulla differenza tra i sessi o tra le etnie, con la piccola eccezione che mentre si considera inaccettabile l’espressione del sessimo o del razzismo, a nessuno viene in mente di eccepire qualcosa quando sono espressi dei pregiudizi a carattere linguistico.

Il New York Times ha pubblicato di recente un articolo intitolato Chinglish, ovvero ‘cinglese’, che per qualche tempo è stato anche l’articolo che ha ricevuto il numero maggiore di email-commento. La reazione da parte dei lettori è stata tale, e tale anche la circolazione di commenti nella blogosfera, che il giornale ha chiesto ai lettori di inviare immagini di “cartelli stranieri e strani”. Persino un blog accademico del campo si è offerto di illuminare i lettori dibattendo sul perché e sul percome “gli errori di traduzione dalla lingua cinese risultino in una versione inglese ridicola o addirittura incomprensibile”.

Non riscontro nessun problema nel ridicolizzare cartelli ridicoli e e dal linguaggio pomposo. Ma vedo un problema quando ci si prende gioco della lingua utilizzata nel cartello solo perché, apparentemente, non corrisponde alla norma linguistica seguita dai madrelingua.

Che il mondo intero si metta ad imparare l’inglese ed allo stesso tempo ne derivi un perenne complesso di inferiorità ha certamente senso dal punto di vista commerciale – ne è la riprova, l’industria multimiliardaria del TESOL. È un sistema aperto allo sfruttamento. È anche del tutto immorale.

L’articolo del New York Times è seguito da due errate corrige; la prima per non aver riportato in modo corretto il titolo di un lettore cinese e la seconda per aver sbagliato a scrivere il nome di un programma di software per la traduzione cinese-inglese. E allora sono l’unica a vedere l’ironia di tutto questo?