Entangled Englishes – Under contract with Routledge (anticipated publication date: late 2024/early 2025)
Edited by Jerry Won Lee (University of California, Irvine, USA) & Sofia Rüdiger (University of Bayreuth, Germany)
Description: Following the growth of scholarship on World Englishes since the 1980s and, more recently, on Global Englishes, there has been a growing understanding that a conceptualization of Englishes, rather than that of a singular English, is better suited to approach an understanding of the diversity of forms and functions of English worldwide. While World Englishes and Global Englishes are at times presented as oppositional metalinguistic constructs (e.g., Canagarajah, 2013; Jenkins, 2014; Pennycook, 2007), what they share is an investment in viewing English beyond a monolingual and monolithic norm. From these collective scholarly developments, we have come to be attentive to the diverse forms English takes and is taking worldwide (e.g., unique lexical, pragmatic, and discursive features through corpus-based research), alongside diverse functions through different Englishes (e.g., the performance of new cultural and ethnic identities through language practice).
The global proliferation of Englishes, of course, is not the result of an automatic or even neutral process. The British Empire imposed English upon her territories in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, oftentimes through force, with the stated goal of ‘civilizing’ its subjects. When the US emerged as the world’s superpower following the conclusion of World War II, American cultural imperialism emerged as the next force that would ensure the globalization of English. And while certainly British and American varieties are considered to be the most ‘prestigious’ in many contexts, such designations are ideological if not entirely arbitrary. Indeed, decades of research has demonstrated, repeatedly, that systematic varieties of English occur in postcolonial contexts associated with ‘nonnative’ speakers, and new varieties are emerging in numerous global contexts, even in places not having had the same exposure to the global forces of English.
The above narratives are, by now, perhaps not newsworthy, and this volume is premised on the belief that scholars in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and other language-oriented fields are positioned to pursue a newer set of more interesting, if not more urgent, inquiries into the globalization of English. We propose the need to explore the globalization of English in relation to its multiple, complex, and oftentimes unexpected entanglements. Our proposal to approach Englishes as a phenomena of entanglement is inspired by Pennycook’s (2020) essay, “Translingual Entanglements of English,” which argues for the value in exploring not only how English ends up in different global locations but also how it can be traced and made sense of in unexpected places: a seemingly innocuous sign advertising English language lessons in the Philippines, for instance, tells stories not only about the legacies of US colonial occupation but other entanglements that include racial hierarchies, domestic workers, Korean English frenzy and, even more literally, tangled wires. Entanglement, in other words, can be reflective of a wide range of senses in relation to Englishes:
- entangled with languages other than English
- entangled with complex histories and sociopolitical forces
- entangled with conflicting language ideologies
- entangled with material and spatial assemblages
It is no longer adequate to study the globalization of English merely as a language but instead as an entity or phenomenon that is invariably entangled with and through various languages, cultural forms (e.g., ideological commitments, social norms, teaching philosophies), or even (im)material objects (e.g., food, signage, attire). These entangled narratives of English are imprinted and in circulation in various global contexts–and with the right questions can be uncovered and explored.