ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 มิ.ย. 2023
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Mario Saraceni's presentation on "Re-thinking Decolonization and World Englishes" at the 2022 ISLE summer school
Abstract
Even though decolonization is rarely mentioned explicitly, the academic field of world Englishes can be said to be animated by a decolonizing ‘spirit’. The inequality that exists between varieties of English in the Inner Circle and those in the Outer Circle has its roots in empire and colonization, and so the ambition to achieve equality among Englishes is also the ambition to decolonize the language and its varieties. Key to this is the recognition of the plurality and validity of the forms and functions of English in postcolonial countries, and the consequent claims of ‘ownership’ that people in those settings could make over the language.
However, important questions remain. The dominance of English over other languages is undeniable and is part of larger and more profound forms of inequality in the world. How can advocating equal status for varieties of English address such inequality? Who decides that Englishes are indeed equal? Can the illusion of linguistic equality among Englishes help perpetuate the status quo? Is the idea of equal Englishes a mere beautiful facade of what is, in effect, ‘unequal Englishes’ (Tupas, 2015).
In this talk I discuss these questions and argue that we need to reconsider our subject matter both by de-stabilising our very understanding of what ‘English’ is and by challenging the primacy of language in our understanding inequality in the world.
Readings
Tupas, R. (ed.). 2015. Unequal Englishes: The Politics of Englishes Today. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
