These remarks were delivered on Friday, June 28, at the 12th International Symposium on Bilingualism in Edmonton, Alberta for the panel "Multilingualism in the Expanding Circle: English as an Additional Language" organized by Suzanne Hilgendorf and featuring her, Bouchra Kachoub, and Elizabeth Martin.
The
three papers presented today offer an empirical look at the complex ways in
which English functions in what world Englishes (WEs) theory has traditionally
called the "expanding circle" (EC). In theory, the EC has
been a useful construct to distinguish regions which have no colonial history
involving English, or where the language has not taken root to be used in
everyday, intranational contexts. In practice, as these papers have shown, it
has become more and more difficult to conceive of the EC as comprising settings
in which English is truly “foreign.” In the 35 years since Kachru’s concentric
circles model of WEs was proposed, it has become clear that the EC is perhaps
the most dynamic of the circles, and that there is a need to reexamine how we
conceive of English and its uses in these widely divergent contexts.
Each
of these papers complicates that notion and forces us to consider the social,
cultural, and sociolinguistic functions of what I will call "L1 + English
bilingualism" with more nuance.
Hilgendorf's
paper about the penetration of English language-media in Germany -- a
country where the German language, which is spoken by 100 million people
worldwide, dominates everyday life -- shows that Germans have a degree of facility and familiarity
with English that we might not expect to see in a setting where it is
considered a "foreign" language. While she showed that English
language film and television have long been a staple of German media
consumption, in variously dubbed, subtitled, or other formats, she also showed
that the emergence of transnational video streaming platforms like Netflix
allows further linguistic choice, and potentially thus more exposure to English
media. It seems likely that more Germans will, in fact, choose to consume television
and films in English to some degree, though further research is needed in this
area.
Kachoub’s
paper on the use of English on shop signs in Casablanca shows that English
language signs are common even in the non-English-dominant Morocco. The English
in Casablanca's linguistic landscape goes beyond simply the presence of
international companies from the inner or outer circle; English has a variety
of local functions and it comfortably coexists with other local and
transnational languages. This is not simply
the 'pseudo English' or 'display English' of, for example, nonsensical
English language T-shirts in Asia (which themselves actually ought to be an
object of more serious study!) but English with semantically rich meanings,
aimed at a cosmopolitan community of multilingual speakers – perhaps we can
call them speakers of “L1+English bilingualism” – for whom the language and
indeed its mixing with other languages is intelligible and appropriate.
Martin’s
paper, which builds on her previous work on the status of English in
advertising in Quebec and France, confounds our expectations of what should be
found within the boundaries of an “Inner Circle” country like Canada and an “Expanding
Circle” one like France: there is much more English in French advertising, and
almost none at all in Quebec. This is due to differences in both local language
policies and language practices that differ considerably even though both
regions are Francophone and share certain linguistic and cultural similarities.
What,
then, can we say about how our understanding of “L1+English bilingualism” – or
simply a local multilingualism of which English is one part – in the EC should be shaped
by the empirical work we have seen in these papers today?
· First, there
does not seem to be a clear relationship between the spread of English to EC
settings and either the wholehearted embrace nor wholesale rejection of the
language. English emerges as one language among many, an important part of
local linguistic repertoires in some domains such as media, advertising, and
signage, but not necessarily in others. The EC, then, is not a place where
English is a wholly foreign language, but one “local” (yet transnational) language
that can be taken up and used depending on specific local needs and purposes.
· Second, what Alastair
Pennycook has called “global linguistic flows” and “transcultural flows” are in
fact of utmost importance in our understanding of how English functions at both
the societal and individual levels in the EC. It’s not just that people in EC
settings use English for communicating with international interlocutors, but
that “local culture” itself in the EC in fact includes English in important social and cultural domains, because of cultural globalization. One
example: in one of my graduate courses last week, a student showed a video of a popular
Chinese “streamer” – someone who makes videos of himself playing video games –
whose videos depict him interacting with various international gamers
in English, with Chinese subtitles. What is significant here is not just what
the gamers are doing, but that this is a locally made cultural product for a
Chinese audience that includes English as an important resource for meaning.
· Third, I have
used the word ‘local’ several times to refer to EC settings, but we need to
expand or redefine what we mean by “local” beyond the nation. Martin’s paper
includes a specific region of Canada, Kachoub's a specific city in Morocco. This
empirical work shows us wisdom of Paul Bruthiaux’s 2003 critique of the three
circles model when he advocated “moving away from a focus on nation‐states in
favor of a sociolinguistic focus on English‐speaking communities wherever they
are found.” Cities, regions, provinces – and going beyond geography to diasporic
communities, online communities, or even specific physical locations, as in linguistic
landscape research – could become sites for research about how English works in
the EC.
I
do believe that engagement with Expanding Circle Englishes beyond borders is
necessary, and this means, probably, more engagement between world Englishes
research on the one hand and ELF research on the other. I won’t go into the
theoretical disagreements between WE and ELF scholars here, but regardless of
whether we identify more with WE or ELF approaches, or see merits in both,
scholars should have an interest in seeing research and pedagogy regarding the
varieties and uses of English across the world develop and flourish, and we
need to be reading and charitably engaging with each others’ work for this to
happen productively.
“English
as an additional language” has emerged as one of the most useful and flexible
terms to describe the role of English is many people’s lives. “Additional”
avoids the presumed monolingualism of English as a “second” language, but it
also avoids the parochialism of calling English a “foreign” language when
describing contexts in which the language is very much a meaningful (though by
no means dominant) part of peoples’ everyday lives. The work we have
seen today on English in the Expanding Circle suggests that English, is, indeed
an additional language – and perhaps, for many, the additional language.
