Skip to main content
News

Ideologies of English in Asia

By September 20, 2021One Comment3 min read2,322 views

Language on the Move regulars, Jinhyun Cho, Loy Lising, and I have teamed up with a number of early career linguists to produce a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language that’s just been published and which is devoted to ‘Ideologies of English in Asia’. In a treat for fans of multilingualism and in response to the dominance of English in academic publishing, the articles include bilingual abstracts, in Korean, Mongolian, Mandarin, and Japanese, and of course the viewpoints of researchers in and from Asia. The issue’s contributions examine how socially constructed East-West binaries are interacting with language ideologies about English and other languages on sub-national scales in various Asian contexts including in Korea, China, Japan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan.

That English has spread in Asia is well-known, and the peer-reviewed editorial, five research articles, and a book review enrich the sociology of language literature with new case studies. The focus is on investigating how socially constructed East-West binaries interact with language ideologies about English and other languages.

Our contributors identify and analyze ideologies which map international Orientalist hierarchies onto socially salient hierarchies on more local scales, particularly in relation to language. The specific Orientalist ideologies that our authors analyze include Self-Orientalism, Internal Orientalism, and Internal Colonialism. The five contributions could each be summarized with a phrase that Brook Bolander uses to describe her own findings about the indexicality of English amongst Ismaili Muslim communities in Pakistan and Tajikistan: “ownership of English [is] polysemous”.

The articles also cover varied time periods. To start, Cho uses fascinating 19th century data from the diary of Korea’s first professional Korean-English translator, Yun Chi-Ho, to explore his participation in and reproduction of a process of self-Orientalization. He sought to identify with both the West and the East but became despondent in response to the exclusionary racialisation of English speaker identities which he experienced while living in America. Later in the Special Issue, Michiko Weinmann and her co-authors bring us right up to the present moment with their study of shifts in the sociolinguistic environment of Japan in relation to the 2020/2021 Olympic and Paralympic Games that some of us just had the chance to watch.

My own article, happily co-authored with Gegentuul Baioud, as well as Xiaoxiao Chen’s article examine forms of orientalism and colonization in China in recent times (Internal Orientalism and Self-Orientalism, respectively). Baioud and I foreground minoritized peoples’ experiences. You may have read about our two separate sociolinguistic studies of Chinese minority languages previously on Language on the Move (here and here). This time, we’ve come together to compare our studies and draw out similarities, showing how binary East-West ideologies are reproduced but not necessarily as Foreign language–Local language ideologies. Rather, English and Mandarin are both becoming constructed languages of East China, which further marginalizes minority languages.

This research on the sociology of language has been an intellectual pleasure to edit, research and write. Loy, Jean and I wish you happy reading!

Ideologies of English in Asia: Table of Contents

Alexandra Grey

Author Alexandra Grey

Alexandra is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, in the Faculty of Law. She researches governments' responses to linguistic diversity, including in relation to multilingual, urban Australia and Australian Aboriginal language renewal. Her first book, "Language Rights in a Changing China: A National Overview and Zhuang Case Study" (De Gruyter, 2021), builds from her PhD thesis in sociolinguistics, which was supervised by Professor Ingrid Piller. Alexandra also teaches law and was formerly a legal researcher and advocacy trainer at a Chinese not-for-profit organization in Beijing.

More posts by Alexandra Grey

Join the discussion One Comment

  • Alexandra: The five contributions could each be summarized with a phrase that Brook Bolander uses to describe her own findings about the indexicality of English amongst Ismaili Muslim communities in Pakistan and Tajikistan: “ownership of English [is] polysemous”.

    Polysemous usage much admired by this old codger, graduate cum laude from the University of Billiards, Poker & Pool, revolves around ’embellish’, recently defined in the Oxford dictionary as (a) to beautify, to adorn and (b) to heighten the narrative with fictitious additions.

    Antonyms, n’est-ce pas?

Leave a Reply