the spread of English was not simply a unidirectional, top-down process. Rather, Africans and Asians have significantly shaped the process of English spread. The formation of language policy in British colonies shows the centrality of the struggle against imperialism to the creation of World English.[1]
Clearly, then, globalisation, commodification, resistance and localisation are all key issues
when considering the spread of English. Indeed, some authors discuss English as a ‘glocal’
language just as Tony Mitchell discusses rap as a ‘glocal’ phenomenon.[2]
While emphasis has been increasingly placed on issues of agency, resistance and appropriation in the global spread of English within language studies, almost no work has taken
popular culture seriously. Rather, the focus of world Englishes has been predominantly on
the development of standardised versions of new national Englishes.[3] These studies have
been largely based on a small sample of written language, ignoring the vastness of popular
language use and the political struggle bubbling beneath the surface. Arjuna Parakrama
argues that the ‘smoothing out of struggle within and without language is replicated in the
homogenizing of the varieties of English on the basis of “upper-class” forms’.[4] This approach
to world Englishes, he suggests:
cannot do justice to those Other Englishes as long as they remain within the over-arching structures that these Englishes bring to crisis. To take these new/other Englishes seriously would require a fundamental revaluation of linguistic paradigms, and not merely a slight accommodation or adjustment.[5]
Hip-hop, then, provides an excellent context for the study of these ‘Other Englishes’, and
particularly as they interact with other codes. As Mitchell suggests, ‘a common feature of the
hip-hop scenes in most of these countries is their multiethnic, multicultural nature as
vernacular expressions of migrant diasporic cultures’. (10) It is exactly this sort of dynamic
that seems to be missing from most studies of world Englishes to date. Further, Bent Preisler
points out in the Danish context that although formal classroom learning may previously
have been the principal means through which people came into contact with English, this
is no longer the case:
informal use of English—especially in the form of code-switching—has become an inherent, indeed a defining, aspect of the many Anglo-American-oriented youth subcultures which directly or indirectly influence the language and other behavioural patterns of young people generally, in Denmark as well as in other EFL countries.[6]
Preisler goes on to show the broad knowledge of hip-hop slang among a group of Danish
hip-hop street dancers. The language of hip-hop may be, then, one of the best candidates
when looking for emergent global Englishes.
- ↑ Janina Brutt-Griffler, World English: A Study of its Development, Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, 2002, p. 107.
- ↑ See for example Anne Pakir, ‘The Development of English as a “Glocal” Language: New Concerns in the Old Saga of Language Teaching’, in Ho Wa Kam and C. Ward (eds), Language in the Global Context: Implications for the Language Classroom, SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, Singapore, 2001.
- ↑ For an extended critique of this work, see my article ‘Turning English Inside Out’, Indian Journal of Applied Linguistics, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 25–43, 2002.
- ↑ Arjuna Parakrama, De-hegemonizing Language Standards: Learning from (Post)colonial Englishes about ‘English’, MacMillan, Basingstoke, 1995, pp. 25–6.
- ↑ Parakrama, p. 17.
- ↑ Bent Preisler, ‘Functions and Forms of English in a European EFL Country’, in T. Bex and R. Watts (eds), Standard English: The Widening Debate, Routledge, London, 1999, p. 244.
