ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 พ.ย. 2024
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Lisa Lim's presentation on "Before and Beyond Empire - Asia, Contact, and the Decolonising of English" at the 2022 ISLE summer school
Abstract
The significance of the contact dynamics in the evolution of Englishes in multilingual ecologies of Asia for the theorisation - and decolonisation - of the linguistics of English is sometimes understated. In this lecture I distil several dimensions (Ansaldo and Lim 2020; Lim and Ansaldo 2021; Lim 2022).
(i) Rethinking histories: I remind us of the populations and languages across the networks of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, beyond the usual identification of conventional English-speaking colonisers and indigenous populations during Britain’s trade and colonisation ventures, highlighting other contact circumstances which are equally as critical in the formation of Englishes in the region. I illustrate this by tracing the routes of transmission of ‘cultural words’ (after Hoogervorst 2018), which also offers, at the methodological level, an approach to reconstructing sociolinguistic trajectories in English scholarship.
(ii) Rethinking typologies: I revisit the evolution of features such as tone, and particles, and the ubiquity of mixed codes, across Asian Englishes, which demonstrates how the feature pool of the ecology determines the limits or otherwise of the typology of these English varieties (e.g. Lim 2009), and which underscores how English is, more than ever, a contact language (also see Schreier and Hundt 2013).
(iii) Rethinking platforms: I reflect on how, particularly with communities which are essentially dominant in other language, contemporary contact situations such as computer-mediated communication comprise a vital platform and catalyst for the evolution of the English variety -promoting significantly more mixing with and calqueing into English compared to spoken discourse, and prompting subsequent spread to other domains.
Rethinking the contact dynamics scenarios before and beyond Empire brings us to a more nuanced engagement with the players and processes in the evolution of Englishes, the parallels with general patterns of contact and evolution, and ultimately the positioning of English linguistics research, for a more unified theorising in the discipline.
Readings
Ansaldo, U. and Lim, L. 2020. ‘Language contact in the Asian region’. In E. Adamou and Y. Matras (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Language Contact. London/ New York: Routledge. 434-461.
Hoogervorst, T. 2018. ‘Sailors, tailors, cook, and crooks: On loanwords and neglected lives in Indian Ocean ports’. Itinerario 42: 516-548.
Lim, L. 2009. ‘Revisiting English prosody: (Some) New Englishes as tone languages?’ The Typology of Asian Englishes, Special Issue, English World-Wide 30(2): 218-239.
Lim, L. 2022. ‘What it is like in words: Sociolinguistic itineraries and afterlives in global Asias’. In J. W. Lee (ed.) The Sociolinguistics of Global Asias. New York: Routledge. 57-72.
Lim, L. & Ansaldo, U. 2021. ‘Contact, Asia, and the rethinking of Englishes in multilingual ecologies’. In A. Onysko (ed.) Developments in Research on World Englishes. London: Bloomsbury Academic. 73-94.
Schreier, D. & Hundt, M. (eds.) 2013. English as a Contact Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
