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
- Ideologies of English in Asia: an editorial (by Alexandra Grey, Loy Lising and Jinhyun Cho)
- Constructing a white mask through English: colonized consciousness and racialized identities (by Jinhyun Cho). This article is Open Access, i.e. free for all to read online.
- English as Eastern: Zhuang, Mongolian, Mandarin and English in the linguistic orders of globalized China (by Alexandra Grey and Gegentuul Baioud)
- Language ideologies and self-orientalism: Representing English in China Daily travelogues (by Xiaoxiao Chen)
- Voices of English: Language and the construction of religious identity amongst Ismaili Muslims in Pakistan and Tajikistan (by Brook Bolander)
- English language education reform in pre-2020 Olympic Japan: Educator perspectives on pedagogical change (by Michiko Weinmann, Ryo Kanaizumi and Ruth Arber); and
- a book review, It Is Never a Language Itself!: Language Ideologies of English, Gender, and Embodied Capital in South Korea (by Juyoung Song, reviewing Cho’s (2017) book, English Language Ideologies in Korea).
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?