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World English(es) and
the Multilingual Turn
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World English(es) and
the Multilingual Turn:

Frameworks of Complex
Phenomena

By

Annalisa Bonomo
World English(es) and the Multilingual Turn:
Frameworks of Complex Phenomena

By Annalisa Bonomo

This book first published 2017

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2017 by Annalisa Bonomo

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-2307-4

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-2307-4

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To my son Flavio Giordano, for making me who I am.
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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introductory Overview ............................................................................... ix

PART I .......................................................................................................... 1
THE OTHER TONGUE
1. Towards the multilingual turn: theories and perspectives
of a complex phenomenon ............................................................... 1
2. English as a “vehicular leader” or an “obstacle” to the multilingual
identity ........................................................................................... 11
3. Domesticating English? The “cases” of Russia and the Maghreb ... 29

PART II ....................................................................................................... 39
IN-BETWEEN SPACES
1. Translating across cultures: the role of translation in the multilingual
turn ................................................................................................. 39
2. Discussing equivalence (s) ............................................................... 42
3. Translation and multilingualism ...................................................... 47

PART III...................................................................................................... 55
VARIABILITY AS SIMPLIFICATION OR COMPLEXIFICATION
1. World Englishes in the global context: discussing standard
and variation ................................................................................... 55
2. The “cases” of African American English and the Gullah variation:
features and achievements .............................................................. 62

PART IV ..................................................................................................... 75
CHARTING DIVERSITY
1. Dialectometry versus dialectology? ................................................. 75
2. English dialects and non-standard varieties ..................................... 80
3. American Indian English and Tristan da Cunha English:
two lesser-known varieties ............................................................. 86
4. Geordie: the regional variety around Newcastle-upon Tyne
and its spread on the media ............................................................ 98

Concluding Remarks ............................................................................... 105

Bibliographical References...................................................................... 109

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 INTRODUCTORY OVERVIEW

The idea of linguistic uniformity and the spread of multilingualism,

together with the unconditioned recognition of a privileged status of
English, do not solve the problem of communication in all the multilingual
domains.
Indeed, English is considered a transcultural resource which facilitates
mobility and fosters a wide inter-lingual communication. However, some
of the learning policies which involve the use of minority or national
languages in education still see English as a risk to their status and corpus
planning. Such concerns involve the emergent change of most migration
flows, engaged in a longer stabilization in the host country they move to,
searching for mediated education too.
Schools and universities thus become real microcosms of the global
society, fostering or hindering expectations and cultural conflicts of the
new multilingual speakers. Take, for instance, the linguistic complexity of
the sub-Saharan African countries and the South-East Asian ones, where
there are still some tensions between bilingualism and monolingualism.
Interestingly enough, the famous distinction between additive and
subtractive bilingualism by Lambert (1975), matches the contradictory
findings about the effects provoked by multilingual education programmes
in the twenty-first century; this means that while some multilingual plans
add new languages to the intercultural communicative sets, they subtract
something from the home languages causing possible clashes.
However, far from prescribing a monolinguistic view of English, its
worldwide spread has been described by Pennycook as “an acute problem”
because, “while on the one hand, we may want to acknowledge the
usefulness of English as a language of global communication, we clearly
also need to acknowledge it as the language of global miscommunication,
or perhaps, ‘dis-communication’”.1 Despite the many domains in which
English plays the most salient role, it continues to occupy that “in-between

1
A. Pennycook, “Beyond Homogeny and Heterogeny. English as a Global and
Worldly Language”, in C. Mair (ed.), The Politics of English as a World
Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies, Amsterdam, New
York, Rodopi, 2003, p. 5, (3–18).
x Introductory Overview

space” beyond homogeny and heterogeny which calls for contextual

hybridity of the world English patterns.
This book, following the researches which had begun in the last two or
three decades, chooses the plurality of English as an intriguing metaphor
for the modern world, deconstructed and rebuilt as a complex space where
diversity is the norm. Thus, the word “Englishes” works as an umbrella
term which can find applications and perspectives in different domains and
according to various viewpoints (from historical to regional, from social to
functional, but to name a few).
Given the openness of sociolinguistics and taking for granted the
importance of studying cultural and language variation according to a
hermeneutic dimension, the term Englishes, with its formal and functional
multicultural identity, puts the study of English in the spotlight of many
ideological and political standpoints. It is English pervasiveness which led
to the rise of the paradigm of World Englishes as complex phenomena,
widening the famous labels by Kachru’s circles, which have been used to
refer to institutionalized second and foreign language varieties of English
spoken around the world. The more inclusive view of English in the world
today “brings with it new practical challenges—challenges both for those
who use the language as part of their everyday life, and for language
professionals whose job revolves around English”.2
The major objective of World English(es) and the Multilingual Turn:
Frameworks of Complex Phenomena is to blur the edges of what
multilingualism is beyond a good mastery of two or more languages. In
other words, non-linearity enters the global function of English as a lingua
franca; rather than exhibiting English as an imperialist power, the debate
about English as a “vehicular leader” or an “obstacle” to the multilingual
identity matches the quarrel about a domesticated English in countries like
Russia or the Maghreb. Importantly, in order to offer a more nuanced view
of the many implications of the multilingual turn in global society,
translation, standard and variation have been used as key words of the shift
from monolingual to multilingual bias.
Nevertheless, the case studies here reported (African American English
and the Gullah variation, American Indian English, Tristan da Cunha
English, Nigerian English and Geordie, to name the just most relevant)
show how much the sharp line between local dialects and the standard
variety has vanished throughout the long journey of pidginization,

2
P. Seargeant, Exploring World Englishes: Language in a Global Context,
London, New York, Routledge, 2012, p. 3.

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 World English(es) and the Multilingual Turn xi

creolization, assimilation and the melting processes which have gone

through the step of codification.
The main question is, of course, how complex such establishing,
maintaining and spreading of English varieties may be, and how the new
language scenarios will host possible conflicts arising from the new
linguistic interactions. According to such a view, language and socio-
political struggles relate to each other in different ways, involving peace,
education programmes, cohabitation, and mutual understanding of
peoples.
As Patricia Friedrich states in her stimulating “World Englishes and
Peace Sociolinguistics”:

If war amongst nations has unfortunately been a reality throughout the

history of humankind and has required the mediation through diplomacy
and negotiation (i.e. the pursuit of negative peace), there have also been
many instances of linguistic conflict involving languages, which, in a more
metaphorical sense, have been accused, for example, of attempting to take
over the world (Philippson 1992 for English’s alleged imperialism). On the
other hand, one can think of a positive peace mediated through language,
one which is achieved by the maintenance of linguistic rights, the creation
of an inviting ecosystem of linguistic diversity, the empowerment of users
of smaller languages/varieties (empowerment which counteracts fears of
imperialism), and sound linguistic education. Thus, for example, when we
speak of respecting the different Englishes around the world and of
recognizing their functional range, we are fostering the linguistic rights of
language users.3

The goal is to achieve and maintain healthy relationships among

language practices and speech convergence/divergence in most social,
business—and more generally—human interactions.
In the attempt to describe existing language relationships which spring
up from the multilingual turn, many intricate issues must be taken into
account. Thus, language policies, education plans, domains, use, status and
identity of language patterns are all different facets of an effective
communication between English speakers from all around the world. Far
from formulating the myth of an “unmarked” English which is suitable for
all occasions, speaking of World Englishes according to a complex

3
P. Friedrich, “World Englishes and Peace Sociolinguistics. Towards a common
goal of linguistic understanding”, in T. Hoffmann, L. Siebers (eds.), World
Englishes. Problems, Properties and Prospects: Selected Papers from the 13th
IAWE Conference, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2009, p. 409, (407–
14).
xii Introductory Overview

paradigm may help to achieve considerable findings that variation is one

of the most useful pieces of evidence of the good health of a language, its
status, its prestige.
When we say “complex” here and throughout the book, we will refer to
the meaning of “complexity” as commented on and theorized by the
French philosopher Edgar Morin.
According to Morin:

Society is more than a context, it is an organizing whole of which we are

part (…). Complex unities such as human beings or societies are
multidimensional: a human being is a biological, psychological, social,
emotional, rational being. Society includes historical, economic,
sociological, religious dimensions. Pertinent knowledge must recognize
this multidimensionality and insert its data within it.4

This is also an intriguing perspective that is arising in language

matters. The use of complexity in language evolution and language
description designates a real turn in the descriptive approach which
assumes a new “non-finite state of English”, different from the one
postulated by Chomsky who searched for a “more powerful type of
grammar and some more ‘abstract’ form of linguistic theory”.5
Complexity may become a challenging bond between descriptivism,
logical positivism, semantics, cognitive studies and prescriptivism. Indeed,
isolating structures and collecting data without the multidimensionality of
our planetary era may sound out of date, and this may also work in
language studies. According to such a perspective, what is “complex”
means what is woven together in a “non-finite” texture; it does not mean
something difficult or particularly obscure. It is the result of inseparable
elements which make a global view necessary.
In the same fashion, multilingualism as something more than an
accumulation of languages, is a complex framework according to which
the circles of world Englishes become crucially relevant in the question of
“linguistic ownership” and its various implications.
The matter of ownership is to be taken into account in commenting on
English models and their levels of norms, standard, and variation.

4
E. Morin, Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, Paris, Unesco
Publishing, 2001, pp. 30–31.
5
R. Penhallurick, Studying the English Language, Second Edition, Basingstoke,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 272.

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 World English(es) and the Multilingual Turn xiii

However—as Hackert asks—“what does ownership mean with regard to

language?”6
In principle, the answer is the following:

To claim ownership of a language implies a relationship of possession and

control between a particular speaker group and that language. This
relationship is metaphorical but obviously has real world consequences,
which have to do with authority in and power over the language and may
or may not be controversial and contested (…). A different approach to
linguistic ownership is outlined by Wee (2002:284), who views the
concept not in terms of linguistic competence or performance but in terms
of ethnicity and historicity.7

Such an attitude takes the concept of “ownership” beyond the

acceptability of particular usage items typical of a prescriptive enterprise;
the result is an expanded circle of variability which shows how “language
debates are very rarely simply debates about language; they are, more
often than not, intertwined with questions of value”.8
Now, if complexity includes references to concepts of “multiple agents,
complex interactions, ‘on the verge of chaotic’, ‘sensitivity to initial
conditions’, and emergent properties”,9 their applications to language
matters assess new concepts of language change and allow different
possible questions of “values” as promising opportunities of shaping new
cultural and political framework in the twenty-first century.
According to Aronin and Singleton, “parallels between the concepts of
complexity and recent findings in multilingualism shed important light on
the nature of multilingualism”.10

The whole history of multilingualism studies indicates that multilingualism

cannot be understood simply by breaking phenomena down into their
component parts and cannot be reduced to clear-cut rules, forms, and
explanations. Rather, multilingualism has been shown to be a dynamic and
self-organizing system, displaying emergent qualities. It is not only the

6
S. Hackert, The Emergence of the English Native Speaker, Boston, Berlin,
Mouton de Gruyter, 2012, p. 21.
7
Ibid., 21–2.
8
T. Crowley, “Standardization: the complaint tradition”, in A. Bergs, L.J. Brinton
(eds.), English Historical Linguistics, Vol. 1, Boston, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter,
2012, p. 981, (980–94).
9
L. Aronin, D. Singleton, Multilingualism, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John
Benjamins, 2012, p. 183.
10
Ibid.
xiv Introductory Overview

multiple agents—e.g. number of languages, modes of use, variety of

speakers, origins of speakers, linguistic abilities and needs of speakers,
political and historical nuances, etc.—that make multilingual contact
complex. What makes of something merely complicated (having many
elements) something truly complex are the interactions between those
many elements.11

The increasing awareness and some explicit recognition of such a

complex paradigm will be the key points of all the “Englishes” discussed
in this book. A narrow view of what is good or bad English has been
abandoned to exhibit variation and pluricentrity of English as legitimate
and colourful manifestations of its complexity.

11
Ibid.

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The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow
words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
—James D. Nicoll

Being exposed to the existence of other languages increases the perception

that the world is populated by people who not only speak differently from
oneself but whose cultures and philosophies are other than one’s own.
Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry but by demonstrating that all people
cry, laugh, eat, worry and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try to
understand each other, we may even become friends.
—Maya Angelou

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the
pedigrees of nations.
—Samuel Johnson
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 PART I

THE OTHER TONGUE

1. Towards the multilingual turn: theories

and perspectives of a complex phenomenon
The number of languages spoken in the world is growing day by day,
and the system of interrelationship between native, second, and foreign
languages increases active communication in the intercultural perspective;
but who is the multilingual speaker today? According to Kemp:
“complexity is a characteristic of the nature of multilingual participants’
use of their languages (…). Multilinguals may use a number of languages
on account of many different social, cultural and economic reasons”.1 In
such a play, the science of language confirms the practical preoccupations
which concern human communication as Bloomfield argued in 1935.
Thus, apart from the wide-ranging possible definitions of what
multilingualism is, one of the major issues of such debate is how unstable
the balance between context and co-text can be, and how demanding it can
be in multicultural education. Looking back to Bloomfield’s “practical
preoccupations”, and according to multidisciplinary perspectives of the
matter, cultures are given the task of stirring a new turn in language
sciences about the complexity of a non-elite multilingualism;2 in other
words, apart from the traditional diplomacy and the social agencies to
which multilingual communication has been always matched, the new
translational network, and the frequent language contacts—or code-
switching experiences—result in a more “popular” multilingualism, which
enhances new transfer experiences3 peculiar of a challenging multilingual
education.

1
C. Kemp, “Defining Multilingualism”, in L. Aronin, B. Hufeisen (eds.), The
Exploration of Multilingualism, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2009,
p. 12.
2
J. Edwards, Multilingualism, London, New York, Routledge, 1994, p. 2.
3
According to Aronin and Singleton the term “transfer” allows some distinction
between a negative transfer (i.e. interference) and a positive transfer (i.e.
2 Part I

Recursivity, functioning and language awareness—which have marked

the Romantic view of the language as concerned with only its culture—
give way to different linguistic evolutions which move from cultures as in-
between spaces. Indeed, according to the United Nations Educational,
Scientific and Cultural Organization, “culture takes diverse forms across
time and space and that this diversity is embodied in the uniqueness and
plurality of the identities and cultural expressions of the peoples and
societies making up humanities”.4
It is between “uniqueness” and “plurality” that culture plays a strong
role in creating identity. Through culture you feel part of a specific
community, but every culture is organized hierarchically (recalling Hall’s
famous Iceberg Theory5). Thus, social status, meanings of power and
different ways of thinking influence human behaviour and communication
as well.
Moreover, each cultural dimension works according to its own internal
dynamics. Such interrelations are fundamental in understanding the idea of
“contexting”6as proposed by Hall, musing on how much information is
shared in communication, and on how such a process—contexting—is
double faced in which text and context play mutual roles. On the one hand,
contexting improves our understanding of the text (considered as the very
new information we ignored before); on the other hand, the context takes
us away from the essential part of the information we are trying to convey,
widening the spectrum of what is happening between the interlocutors.
Therefore, if “contexting” assumes that different cultures may consider
given information more or less important, it is quite clear how some
cultures give more prominence to context and others to text; in addition to
this, as the Soviet semiotician Lotman affirms: “No language can exist
unless it is steeped in the context of culture; and no culture can exist which

facilitation); see L. Aronin, D. Singleton, Multilingualism, Amsterdam,

Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2012, p. 22.
4
See www.portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php
5
For interesting references to Hall’s Iceberg Theory see D. Katan, Translating
Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators,
Manchester, UK & Northampton MA, St. Jerome Publishing, 2004, pp. 230–43.
6
For further references to Hall see, E. Hall, The Silent Language, New York,
Doubleday, 1959; E. Hall, The Hidden Dimension, New York, Doubleday, 1966;
E. Hall, Beyond Culture, New York, Doubleday, 1976; E. Hall, The Dance of Life.
The Other Dimension of Time, New York, Doubleday, 1983; E. Hall, M. Hall,
Understanding Cultural Differences: Germans, French and Americans, Yarmouth,
Intercultural Press, 1990.

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 The Other Tongue 3

does not have at its centre the structure of natural language”.7 Such a
statement can be a good starting point to discuss how language reflects
culture, how culture is influenced by language and how this combination
affects translators’ choices and the spread of some languages instead of
others.
Nevertheless, how many languages are there in the world? According
to Ethnologue: Languages of the World8 (a printed and online encyclopaedia
published by the Summer Institute of Linguistics) there are 7,097 known
living languages around the world, and every different language implies a
different and ever-changing cultural frame, the product of a “complex
system which includes the knowledge, beliefs, art, moral, law, customs
and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of
society”.9 Another central issue—as Haugen argues—is that society “uses
[the] language as one of its codes”.10 More specifically, “Language exists
only in the minds of its users, and it only functions in relating these users
to one another and to nature, i.e. their social and natural environment, part
of its ecology is therefore psychological: its interaction with other
languages in the minds of bi-and multilingual speakers”.11
The new map of contacts between different codes and communities
overcomes the Romantic view of languages as the unique mirrors of their
cultures we mentioned above; consequently, both native speakers and
language learners are pieces of a multi-facet puzzle of an international
socio-cognitive dimension such as the one represented by multilingualism
and its spread. After all, “multilingualism is the topic du jour—at least in
critical applied linguistics”.12
However, there is a classifying mania provoked by what May calls “the
turn towards multilingualism”:

7
J. Lotman, B. Uspensky, G. Mihaychuk, “On the Semiotic Mechanism of
Culture”, New Literary History, Vol. 9, No. 2, in Soviet Semiotics and Criticism:
An Anthology (Winter, 1978), (211–32), qtd. by S. Bassnett, Translation Studies,
London, New York, Routledge, 2002, p.21.
8
M.P. Lewis (ed.), Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Sixteenth Edition,
Dallas, SIL International, online version: www. ethnologue.com/.
9
E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, New York, Harper, 1958 qtd. by D. Katan,
Translating Cultures: An Introduction for Translators, Interpreters and Mediators,
p.25
10
E. Haugen, “The ecology of language”, in A. Fill, P. Mühlhäusler (eds.), The
Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment, London, New York,
Continuum, 2001, p. 57, (57–66).
11
Ibid., 58.
12
S. May (ed.), The Multilingual Turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL, and
Bilingual Education, London, New York, Routledge, 2014, p. 1.
4 Part I

The terminological proliferation notwithstanding the increasing focus on

super diverse linguistic contexts is welcome. It has usefully foregrounded
multilingualism, rather than monolingualism, as the new norm of applied
linguistic and sociolinguistic analysis. It has increasingly challenged
bounded, unitary, and reified conceptions of languages and related notions
of “native speaker” and “mother tongue”, arguing instead for the more
complex fluid understandings of “voice” (Makoni & Pennycook, 2007,
2012), “languages as social practice” (Heller 2007), and a related
“sociolinguistics of mobile resources”.13

Thus, grammar also has to cope with the evolutionary nature of

languages and the cultural environment which affects them. Considering
grammar as a cognitive process makes the communicative function more
than a monolingual bias.
After all, as Radden and Dirven argue:

Grammar reflects and presents generalizations about phenomena in the

world as its speakers experience them. For example, tense as a
grammatical form is used to express general notions of time (present, past
and future) but not specific notions such as years, hours or days, which are
expressed by lexical material (…).

The grammar of a language is usage-based in that it provides speakers with

a variety of structural options to present their view of a given scene. For
example, I might describe the same scene as I’m running out of time, or
Time is running out.14

It seems evident that concepts like interlanguage (as introduced by

Selinker in 1972) and language competence must be re-settled for
successful language learning in multilingual contexts. In fact, if every
language builds up a system which—as in an integrated approach—
provides an essential and useful framework, it implies greater insights
about its evolution or, as Ingold argues, “particular and unique coming
together and an integration of a number of distinguishable components or
capacities”.15
For this reason, concepts like “standard/non-standard”, and
“developed/undeveloped” varieties are not so easy to disentangle since

13
Ibid.
14
G. Radden, R. Dirven, Cognitive English Grammar, Amsterdam, Philadelphia,
John Benjamins, 2007, p. XII.
15
K.R. Gibson, T. Ingold (eds.), Tools, Language and Cognition in Human
Evolution, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 41.

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 The Other Tongue 5

socio-political motivations can be involved in the matter. The Nigerian

context is a case in point.
In Nigeria, for instance, the inclusion in the Constitution of three
languages, Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo as “the three major languages” has
partly contributed to the increasing attention they have received over the
years. It has also influenced the esteem and the prestige they have
commanded or enjoyed in the national scheme of things, and their
perceived importance among Nigerians.16

How the number of languages spoken in a country, such as Nigeria is

determined has been “a speculation or a guessing game”.17 Apart from the
number of languages assumed to be spoken in the country (up to 400, or
even more), what is interesting is the coexistence of the three provincial
languages (Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba) with English, which is de facto the
national language by now.
Let us muse on the following figures:

x Hausa: (Provincial). De facto provincial language in northern

region. Spoken as L2 in the north. 18,500,000 in Nigeria (1991
SIL). L2 users: 15,000,000 in Nigeria. Total users in all countries:
41,929,000 (as L1: 26,929,000; as L2: 15,000,000).
x Igbo: (Provincial). De facto provincial language in southeastern
region. Main LWC of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo
states. 18,000,000 in Nigeria (Wiesenfeld 1999). Total users in all
countries: 18,007,950.
x Yoruba: (Provincial). De facto provincial language in southwestern
region. 18,900,000 in Nigeria (Johnstone 1993). L2 users:
2,000,000 in Nigeria. Ethnic population: 37,000,000 (2015 World
Factbook). Total users in all countries: 21,043,700 (as L1:
19,043,700; as L2: 2,000,000).
x English: (National). L2 users: 60,000,000 in Nigeria (Crystal
2003a).18

Going beyond the undiscussed role of English and the multiplicity of

the languages still present in Nigeria (divided into educational, dispersed,
developing, vigorous, threatened, shifting, moribund, nearly extinct,

16
E. Adegbija, Multilingualism: A Nigerian Case Study, Asmara, Africa World
Press, 2004, p. 6.
17
Ibid., 3.
18
See Ethnologue. Languages of the World:
www.ethnologue.com/country/ng/status.
6 Part I

dormant, second language only, and extinct19), what favours the three
provincial languages over the others is the intertwined relationship
between language and politics. In other words, “the speakers of those
languages are, to a large extent, the political power brokers and decision-
makers within the country.”20
As Adegbija writes,
In fact, the attempt to maintain a measure of political equilibrium among
Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo speakers has resulted in the considerable neglect
of the other Nigerian indigenous languages, more so the small population
ones, which have become a kind of linguistic shield in the language—a
power game of speakers of major languages.21

Consequently, due to the dominance of new issues which make

interference, codemixing and language contact something more than just
language concerns, firstly, bilingualism research (which has always been
the starting point of every educational implication in the matter of code-
mixing) and, secondly, the new stages in research on multilingualism,
should move towards what Herdina and Jessner call “a dynamic model of
multilingualism”.22As in a system whose parts mutually interact, “at the
core of the theory is the understanding of the behavior and organization of
living organisms as dynamic systems”.23 A new frame is delineated,
according to which loss and maintenance in languages must be considered
as subsystems subjected to variation by their own nature.
What Herdina and Jessner are referring to is a language variation
system which postulates complex interdependences between all the factors
involved in language acquisition and language learning; and what is
interesting is that such changes start on the individual level and only
afterwards result in the variation of the cultural frames the individual is
part of.
Language change in the individual results from adjusting one’s language
system(s) to one’s communicative needs. If, like Grosjean, you look at the
bilingual as an integrated whole, you can watch how changes in the
language environment, and therefore in language needs, affect her/his
competence in one or the other language, not in her/his linguistic
competence in general. Speakers may move from monolingualism to

19
Ibid.
20
E. Adegbija, Multilingualism: A Nigerian Case Study, p. 6
21
Ibid.
22
P. Herdina, U. Jessner, A Dynamic Model of Multilingualism. Perspectives of
Change in Psycholinguistics, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 2002, p. 76.
23
Ibid., 77.

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 The Other Tongue 7

bilingualism, from bilingualism to trilingualism, that is different systems

(LS1, LS2, LS3, etc.) are transitionally commanded by the same
individual. According to the communicative needs, the native speaker has
transitional command of different language systems over a period of time,
resulting, for instance, in monolingualism, bilingualism, trilingualism,
etc.24

For this reason, multilingualism can be studied under the lens of what
Morin calls “complexity”, or, in other words, in terms of interaction,
order-disorder and organizations of the phenomena involved.
Therefore, if we consider multilingualism as a complex set of linguistic
systems mutually interacting, what we need today is a “lay” investigation
of the “babelization” of the contemporary multiethnic society, where “lay”
means overcoming the excessively prescriptive patterns which are usually
applied to language studies and which constitute the fatal attack to new
language entropies.
This implies a new paradigm of intercultural relationships which calls
for linguistics, philosophy, science, sociology and literature, according to a
“complex” and an “eco-ethic turn” which moves, as proposed by Morin,
towards wider perspectives of the intercultural meeting inside the
fragmentation it involves anyway.
The point is strictly connected to the idea of “complexity”. If we
pursue a strong and restrictive disciplinary division of the real, complexity
will be invisible. That is the reason why the term has been rejected or
considered illusory in a lot of fields. On the contrary, as Morin argues:
“the first meaning of the word comes from the Latin complexus, which
means what is woven together. The peculiarity, not of the discipline in
itself, but of the discipline as it is conceived, non-communicating with
other disciplines, closed to itself, naturally disintegrates complexity”.25

24
Ibid., 74.
25
E. Morin, “Restricted complexity, general complexity”, in C. Gershenson, D.
Aerts, B. Edmonds (eds.), Worldviews, Science and Us: Philosophy and
Complexity, London, World Scientific Publishing, 2007, p. 6, (1–25). Here, as
follows, the original quotation by Morin: “D’une part elle signifie couramment
confusion et incertitude; l’expression “c’est complexe” exprime de fait la difficulté
à donner une définition ou une explication. D’autre part, comme le critère de
vérité de la science classique s’exprime par des lois et des concepts simples, la
complexité ne concerne que les apparences superficielles ou illusoires.
Apparemment les phénomènes se présentent de façon confuse et incertaine, mais la
mission de la science est de débusquer, derrière ces apparences, l’ordre caché qui
est la réalité authentique de l’univers”, (Complexité restreinte, complexité
générale, 2006).
8 Part I

Far from being a synonym for “difficult”, “demanding”, “challenging”

or “complicated”, being “complex” means “strictly intertwined” or
“entangled in a thought-provoking way”. The revolution Morin refers to is
not by chance associated to the ecological dimension of the natural
relations between living beings.
According to such an “ecological” perspective, it is necessary to
understand that every event, information or knowledge is connected
inseparably with its own cultural, social, economic, political, natural and
linguistic environment and that every study of multilingualism as a
product of this complexity should start from an idea of a “multiple
society” which calls for localizations rethought according to a new idea of
“the general”.
However, “re-enchanting the world”—according to Bauman—or
“enhancing relativism”—according to Gellner—the relationship between
complexity and postmodernism does not lead to the conclusion that
anything goes, as noted by Cilliers in his Complexity and Postmodernism.
It just means that in a system there are more possibilities that can be
actualized. He writes:
Let us then examine some truly complex systems. The human brain is
considered by many to be the most complex object known. Similarly, the
language with which we communicate daily does not yield to analytical
descriptions (…). In order to frame our description, we have to decide what
our “distance” from the system will be: in other words, what level of detail
are we going to consider?26

Accordingly, it is impossible to focus on multilingualism only in terms

of a conscious development of different languages. It means to cope with a
“liquid society” which, as in a riddle, cannot find out a unique definition of
multilingualism because of the “discontinuities” international communication
is made up of.27
Thus, the assumed spread of English as the backbone of contemporary
multilingualism in the world entails different paradoxical non-linear
feedbacks between languages and cultures in contact; such feedback may
work as an ethical resource, or as a cognitive effort. Taking into account
the centripetal force of society and the centrifugal effort of the languages,

26
P. Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism. Understanding Complex Systems,
London, New York, Routledge, 1998, p. 5. About Gellner, see J.A. Hall, I.C.
Jarvie (eds.), The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, Amsterdam, Atlanta,
Rodopi, 1996.
27
For further interesting references see R. De Rosa, Riflessioni sul plurilinguismo,
Bellinzona, Casagrande, 2009.

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 The Other Tongue 9

the complex view of multilingualism represents the actual possibility of a

reductio ad unum, through which the international dimensions of
languages translate a wider knowledge of the world, favoured by mass-
communication and fostered by translation and intercultural mediation.
In such instances, the combination of multilingual phenomena along
with the chaos theory and the metaphor of complexity reveals interesting
variables of the international language environments and local spheres.
As Kemp wrote in 2009, “multilinguals may live in a multilingual
community, or overlapping bilingual communities, or be in contact with
several monolingual communities. Their proficiency in each of their
languages is likely to differ, and may fluctuate over time”.28 However, in
order to concentrate our attention on the facets of multilingual learning, we
should know what a “language” is in such a frame and what do we mean
by “cultural diversities and multination states”.
According to Kymlicka (1995), the actual idea of “nation” has
remarkably changed. Today we live in what he calls “Multination States
and Polyethnic States” where nation means “historical communities, more
or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland,
sharing a distinct language and culture. But in this sociological sense it is
closely related to the idea of a ‘people’ or a ‘culture’ which are often
defined in terms of each other”.29
Moreover, teaching foreign languages and multilingual educational
policies involve giving the younger generations the necessary coordinates
of what Byram calls “tertiary socialization”, thought of as “a concept
invented to emphasize the ways in which learning a foreign language can
take learners beyond a focus on their own society, into experience of
otherness, or other cultural beliefs, values and behaviours”.30 As he
explains:
Foreign language teaching can be a major factor in what might be called—
as an extension of the notions of primary and secondary socialization—the
process of tertiary socialization, in which young people acquire an
intercultural communicative competence: the ability to establish a
community of meanings across cultural boundaries (…) this involves both
cognitive and affective processes.31

28
C. Kemp, “Defining Multilingualism”, p. 11.
29
W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 11.
30
M. Byram, From Foreign Language Education to Education for Intercultural
Citizenship, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 2008, p. 34.
31
M. Byram, Cultural Studies in Foreign Language Education, Clevedon,
Philadelphia, Multilingual Matters, 1989, p. 5.
10 Part I

As is evident, far from being a formal system that could be isolated

from the rest of society, “one of the most pervasive social activities that
human beings engage is talk”.32 This means rethinking the idea of context
in which multilingualism is embedded and which it starts from.
In other words, we should go beyond the Bateson’s famous metaphor
of the “blind man and his stick”:
Bateson’s metaphor of the blind man and his stick provides a useful point
of departure for thinking about some of the issues involved in the study of
context (…). In Bateson’s metaphor the blind man is navigating through a
world that is solid, fixed and immutable, at least from the perspective of
his walking. He does not rebuild the city as part of the activity of
conducting his walking. However, within social situations, a key
constituent of the environment that participants attend to is other human
beings, which are active agents in their own right, with their own plans and
agendas.33

Taking into account the new asymmetry of the domains of languages

defined by power, prestige, and exploitation, the spread of old and new
languages may rethink the ground of the analysis of languages as practical
actions—to quote Malinowski and what he argued in 1923 about the
interdisciplinary field of ethno-linguistics.34
Thus, some of the following questions are still waiting to be answered:

x How to analyze multilingual communication?

x What is the role played by speakers’ nativeness or non-nativeness?
x To what extent is the number of languages involved in the
communicative exchange important or not?

32
A. Duranti, C. Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive
Phenomenon, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 1.
33
Ibid., 5.
34
See B. Malinowski, “The problem of meaning in primitive languages”, in C.K.
Odgen, I.A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning. A Study of the Influence of
Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923), Supplement I,
London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, Fourth Edition, 1936, (296–336); it is also
worth mentioning the article by G. Senft, “Bronislaw Malinoski and Linguistic
Pragmatics”, in P. Cap (ed.), Pragmatics Today, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang,
2005, (139–55). About “rethinking contexts” Senft writes: “Rethinking context in
Malinowski’s broad definition has shown to be important in studies within the field
of Conversation Analysis, in Cognitive Anthropology, in more recent studies
within the gradually rising field of gesture studies, and in new lines of research that
aim at studying human interaction from both a multi modal and a multidisciplinary
field of research”. (p. 150).

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 The Other Tongue 11

x What is the value of the power relations between minority

languages and prestigious and widely used linguistic codes?

2. English as a “vehicular leader” or an “obstacle”

to the multilingual identity
The spread of international English is the greatest challenge of cross-
cultural interaction. But, as Dovring notes, “if it sounds as a gift to
mankind, when it comes to science and technology, civil aviation and the
postal service, (…) in international relations of politics and culture,
information soon turns into communication by the use of various
communities’ social values”,35 so, the extent of the impact and the cultural
dimension of the language spread as the accomplishments shared by
English as a new tool of talent and education, have been extended, as
Dovring stated in 1997, shifting from “a challenge among diplomats and
politicians to everybody’s concern, the more so as we become aware of the
different voices from global and domestic competing ideologies and
goals”.36
It is high time we assumed English as a tool to dominate globalization;
the outcome of such a statement implies, as Kachru noted, grasping an
intricate system of convergence of cultures and languages whose English
is one of the most powerful and known manifestations. Considering English
as a pluralistic language means “focusing on its layer after layer of extended
processes of convergence with other languages and cultures”.37And this
convergence and contact is unique, since

it has altered the traditional resources for contact, for example, French,
German, Italian, and Scandinavian. The language has opened up itself, as it
were, to convergence with the non-western world: that part of the world
that was traditionally not a resource for English. It is here that, for
example, West Africa, East Africa, South Asia, West Asia and the
Philippines become relevant and have become contributors to and partners
in the pluralism in language.38

35
K. Dovring, English as a Lingua Franca: Double Talk in Global Persuasion,
Westport, Praeger Publishing, 1997, p. XI.
36
Ibid.
37
B.B. Kachru, “The Speaking Tree: A Medium of Plural Canons”, in J.E. Atlatis
(ed.), Georgetown University Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics,
Washington D. C., Georgetown University Press, 1994, p. 8, (6–22).
38
Ibid.
12 Part I

Therefore, how clear can the picture of multilingualism be when

language diversity is a fact of life of many inner circle countries too?39
Indeed, and ironically enough, “the same processes of globalization
that helped establish English as the world’s pre-eminent language have
been responsible for the increasing linguistic diversity of inner-circle
countries”.40 This encourages us to focus less on a new monolith structure
for the cross-cultural interaction, and more on what Edwards describes as
“an astonishing diversity of languages which lies just beneath the veneer
of homogeneity, even in the English-speaking world.”41
If, on a global scale, monolingualism still works as a norm today, the
dismantling of a new kind of imperialism which sees English as a bearer
of political power sheds a new light on its spread and impact in different
sectors and contexts. Thus, on the one hand, the existence of a lingua
franca tries to prevent miscommunication across cultures favouring a
global interaction through “the internet/emails and videoconferencing in
business and the academic sphere, by global cooperation in politics,
academia and administration, increased migration, short and long term,
and study abroad”,42 on the other hand, one of the most intriguing
paradoxes of multilingual countries whose language is a language of wider
communication is that
no matter how significant linguistic diversity is, as a result of immigration,
the monolingual population tends to remain unashamedly monolingual and
characterize the tone of the entire nation. This applies especially to

39
Kachru divided World Englishes in three concentric circles, introducing a model
which is the most known and quoted today about the worldwide spread of English.
He named the circles after their distance from the native-speaking varieties. So the
“inner circle” included the regions where English is spoken as the first language;
the outer circle contained those countries where English was firstly introduced due
to colonial or administrative reasons; the “expanding” circle comprised all those
countries where English is spoken as a foreign language. For further references
see, B.B. Kachru, “Standards, codification, and sociolinguistic realism: the English
language in the outer circle”, in R. Quirk, H. Widdowson (eds.), English in the
World: Teaching and Learning the Language and the Literature, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1985, (11–31); B.B. Kachru, The Alchemy of English:
The Spread, Function, and Models in Non-native English, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1986; B.B. Kachru, “World English: Agony and Ecstasy”, in
Journal of Aesthetic Education. Vol. 30, No. 2, 1996, (135–55).
40
V. Edwards, Multilingualism in English-speaking World, Oxford, Blackwell
Publishing, 2004, p. 9.
41
Ibid., 5.
42
J. House, J. Rehbein (eds.), Multilingual Communication, Amsterdam,
Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2004, p. 24.

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 The Other Tongue 13

English-speaking countries which have had a long history of absorbing

immigrants of different language backgrounds.43

From this perspective, the communicative systems can be rethought as

metaphors for chaos and complexity leading to the impossible solution of
the riddles above; in other words, the over 1,400 million people who live
in countries in which English is the official language prevent English from
being the definite squaring of the circle of the debate on multilingualism.
The virtues of English as a “vehicular leader” overcome the inevitable
success arisen from its hegemony in trade, economy, finance, technology,
and politics.
On the contrary, the great potential of a language, so widely spread all
around the world, can spring from its ability of being an/the “in-between
space”, inside which mediation and translation can play one of the most
challenging roles in fostering democracy; it is the multiple contextualization
that drives towards new citizenships and to the quintessence of an
intercultural education which stirs from intercultural communicative
competences. Multilingual communication summarizes the general and the
specific, compounding standard and variation, conflict and reconciliation.
For this reason, translation studies seem, today, as one of the most
inspiring disciplines of a world in rapid expansion. Quoting Tonkin and
Esposito:
they can be seen as a product of work in cultural studies and literary theory
but also in policy studies and political theory. They have taken on a certain
priority because the matter of language, locally, nationally, and globally,
has assumed a new urgency. Holding this world together, or keeping it
apart, is language. At the boundaries of languages are the translators—
mediators of cultures, enablers but also gatekeepers (…). Indeed, the
question that language policy makers must face today is above all the
management of the vast array of competing linguistic channels. If the
management of world affairs demand communication, the maintenance of
human identities demands variety. How can we give the cultures of the
world enough room to breathe, while working together to deal with the
world’s problems? How can we preserve linguistic difference without
hindering linguistic communication? Is it even possible?44

Such elements work as priorities in translation and it is through

language that understanding cultural identities is possible. However,
linguistic utopia and language competitions need new language policies

43
Ibid.
44
H. Tonkin, M. Esposito Frank (eds.), The Translator as Mediator of Cultures,
Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2010, p. VIII.
14 Part I

which—on the one hand—encourage centralization in language relationship

between cultures; on the other hand, they stir respect for the linguistic and
cultural differences of the groups involved in the process.
As an effect of such a balance, the concept of equivalence in
translation acquires different meanings and localized perspectives. Since
Nida, the balance between science and art of translating or the tension
between theory and practice have demanded more consciousness of the
importance of “contexts” in defining the translating competence. Today,
most translations imply high technologies; anyway, they still deal with a
lot of culture-bound elements, and build an intimate relationship between
texts and environments (socio-cultural and lexical ones of course); but it is
in these “between spaces” that the history of a country begins with its
traditions, with its culture(s), with its language. In these spaces the journey
of a language starts and in these blurred edges translators need a little bit
of “strabismus”, as Scott Doyle suggests:
The notions of strabismus and enterprise lead, respectively, toward a
consideration of two heuristic devices which may assist in achieving a
better understanding of some of the complexity involved in and flexibility
required for felicitous translation. The duality characteristic of a strabismus
points toward the importance of binary relationships and /or oppositions;
the notion of enterprise points toward a cline representing the choices
made and the risks taken by the translator while working from one
language toward and into another. (…) The sine qua non of translation, the
moral operative heart of the enterprise, is the notion of fidelity. (…) Yet
the translator’s requisite strabismus—the eyes incessantly focusing on both
the text-that-is and the text-to-be—makes adherence to fidelity no simple
matter for, as Barbara Johnson has so aptly described it, the translator
cannot help but be a “faithful bigamist”.45

From the intensified spread of English and its results in some

ideological standpoints, new lines of inquiry can therefore be developed,
granted by a greater interdisciplinary approach to language issues which
may consider code-switching contexts and non-elite multilingualism as the
outcomes of an increased international mobility. In other words, as Cruz-
Ferreira argues, “multilingualism has nothing to do with particular
languages, because languages cannot be multilingual. People can”.46

45
M. Scott Doyle, “Translation and the space between. Operative parameters of an
enterprise”, in M.L. Larson (ed.), Translation: Theory and Practice, Tension and
Interdependence, Binghamton, State University of New York Press, 1991, p. 13,
(13–26).
46
M. Cruz-Ferreira (ed.), Multilingual Norms, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern,
Bruxells, New York, Oxford, Wien, Peter Lang, 2010, p.1.

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 The Other Tongue 15

This idea demonstrates English as a tool extremely varied and more or

less specialized. It is like a tree with an increasing number of branches;
and the branches are the domains in which English is becoming an
essential requirement of a global and “liquid” society. A number of
possible uses can be observed in science, commerce, entertainment,
tourism, and in a lot of professional environments together with higher
education sectors working as the main actors of language learning all
around the world. A powerful example in this regard can be found in a
new application of words such as “evolution”, “ecology”, and “life of
languages”, which may still play an important role in defining variation
within languages, and shed new light on the modern conditioning factors
of such changes. According to such a perspective, the ecology of language
as described by Haugen in the seventies, may again be a possible tool for
the interpretation of the multilingual society we live in: “Another part of
its ecology is sociological: its interaction with the society in which it
functions as a medium of communication. The ecology of a language is
determined primarily by the people who learn it, use it, and transmit to
others”.47
However, the question is: how can such ecology be applied to the
languages spoken in the global village? And what contribution does it give
to the multilingual turn? We think it works as the “hosts” thanks to which
the language “species” develop. As Mufwene points out,
Parasitic species are a fairly adequate analog chiefly because a language
does not exist without speakers, just like parasites do not exist without
hosts. The life of a language is, to borrow from Brown, “closely tied to the
distribution of its hosts, which provide many of the essential environmental
conditions necessary to its survival and reproduction”. Many of the
ecological factors that affect a language are not physical features of its
speakers but features of other parasitic systems that are hosted by the same
individuals, such as culture—which brings along notions such as status,
gender, and power—and other language varieties.48

The metaphor of the parasitic species improves rather than diminish

the concept of variation in the “biological life” of languages. English being
the focus of this study, it is impossible to trace its rise and outline what
kind of spread it has in the multilingual puzzle without mentioning the
multiple uses and the psychological and sociological conditioning factors
which affect the growing demand for it in the world. Its uniqueness lies in

47
E. Haugen, “The ecology of language”, p. 57.
48
S.S. Mufwene, The Ecology of Language Evolution, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2001, p. 152.
16 Part I

the magical interplay between such “hosts”, which vary in the way of
learning, using and transmitting it in the new international background.
This being so, the study of the spread of English needs to work
simultaneously on four different levels, at least:

x the individual use of the language;

x the use of/in language communities;
x the use of English in family bilingualism; and
x the use of English for specific and professional purposes.

All four levels deal in some way with issues of language loss, shift or
maintenance in language contexts which still reveal double frames and
pushes; take for instance countries as Morocco (or the Maghrebian
countries more generally) where a conservative attitude towards native
languages coexists with a modern and progressive trend in the colonial
languages and their use. Interestingly enough, as Ennaji argues, it is a
matter of linguistic policies between individuals and larger communities:
In many parts of Africa, mother tongues are marginalized to the extent that
the populations are divided into two: the elite who can speak and write the
colonizer’s language and the rest of the people who are either illiterate or
literate in the local language (see Bamgbose 1992:2 and Martens 1998). It
seems as though education were used to suppress the mother tongues and
to perpetuate the hegemony of French and English. (…) For Moroccan
individual speakers, language choice is motivated by socio-economic
needs and by the desire for social mobility and for improved living
conditions.49

49
M. Ennaji, Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco, New
York, Springer, 2005, pp. 214–15. Teaching foreign languages in the Maghreb is
still a cultural dilemma for schools and educative institutions to solve; in fact, they
struggle between the desired hegemony of the Arabic language and the new
language policies produced by multilingualism as a tool for democracy. For these
reasons, the “health” of the English language in Maghrebian countries may depend
on different factors, above all the quality and the quantity of “exposure” to the
language itself. What Abbas Na’ama writes about the higher levels of education in
Maghreb is very interesting: “Most of the difficulties which university students
face in learning English are a consequence of the degree to which their native
language differs from English. For example a native speaker of Arabic learning
English faces many more difficulties in realizing the English consonant clusters
because they alternate consonant and vowel sounds and try to force vowels in
between the consonants. (e.g. desks—desukus) The weakness of English-language
learners in general, and English-language department majors graduates more

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 The Other Tongue 17

This sounds very different from the post-Imperial English in Nigeria.

By 1940, English had assumed a settled role as Nigeria’s official and
dominant language but the reason for such an unassailable condition was
the preponderance of expatriate officers.50 In the words of the Nigeria
Year Book 1969 “the language of government, commerce, national politics
and Higher education is English although in the North Hausa has equal
status in the legislature”.51 What is relevant here is that the new language
experience is much greater even outside the English classes and along the
streets. The linguistic rivalry between French, English and the new
Arabization has caused the language policy adopted in countries like
Morocco, to an extent that “Arabization enhanced the role of English to
the detriment of French in the sense that French no longer retained
widespread prominence for governmental, educational and conversational
purposes”.52
The consequence is therefore that the relationship between languages
of wider communication and the local language needs to be re-thought
“contextually”, historically, empirically; furthermore, what should also be
taken into account is how the communicative competence of new speakers
could become a new strategic competence, where the word “strategy”, as
noted by Tarone, Bialystok and Dörnyei, acts on a double perspective: on
the spontaneity of the use and the conscious need of it.53 In view of these

specifically, has been attributed to various factors: lack of knowledge, English

language department curricula, teaching methodology, lack of the target language
environment and the learners’ motivation”, see A. Na’ama, “An Analysis of Errors
Made By Yemeni University Students in The English Consonant Clusters System”,
in Damascus University Journal, Vol. 27, No. 3+4, 2011, (145–61).
50
Most commentators observed that, “In 1945 most of the responsible
administrative posts, both in government service and outside, were held by
Europeans”, see A. Bamgbose, “Post-Imperial English in Nigeria 1940–1990”, in
J.A. Fishman, A. Conrad, A. Rubal Lopez (eds.), Post-Imperial English: Status
Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940–1990, Berlin, New York,
Mouton de Gruyter, 1996, p. 357, (357–72).
51
Ibid., 358.
52
A. Zouhir, “Language Situation and Conflict in Morocco”, in Ӑ.Ӑ. Orie, K.W.
Sanders (eds.), in Selected Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Conference on African
Linguistics: Linguistic Interfaces in African languages, Somerville, Cascadilla
Proceedings Project, 2013, p. 275, (271–77).
53
About the “strategic perspective see the following studies: E. Tarone,
“Conscious Communication Strategies in Interlanguage: A Progress Report”, in D.
Brown, C. Yorio, R. Crymes (eds.), On TESOL’77, Washington D. C., TESOL,
1977, (194–203); E. Tarone, “Communication Strategies, Foreigner Talk and
Repair in Interlanguage.”, in Language Learning, 30, 1980, (417–31); E. Tarone,
18 Part I

developments, and even though the EFL educational implications have

been widely discussed for more than a quarter of a century, little work has
been done on the best use of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) in
European and extra European educational contexts. The central issue here
is not the fact that English has become extremely powerful: the point is the
number of speakers of EFL and ESL. It is a matter of exposure to the
language and different roles in the educational system. It is important to
remember that
in EFL countries, English is not a medium of instruction or government,
but is learnt at school, as in the case of France or Japan, for communicating
with speakers of the language, or for reading texts in the language. There
are (or should be) quite different teaching needs and strategies in ESL and
EFL situations. (…) The essential question then is the nature of the
relationship between the standard English of core-English-speaking
countries and periphery-English variants”54 [emphasis mine].

Thus the ELT profession is one of the most complex tenets of

multilingualism especially when, as McKay notes, “the ELT profession
has frequently operated within an English-only framework in which any
language other than English is discouraged in the English classrooms”.55
The impact of globalization has enhanced the “epistemic break”56 of
the traditional language relations with their formalized educational

“Some Thoughts on the Notion of Communication Strategy”, in TESOL Quarterly,

15.3, 1981, (285–95); E. Bialystok, “Some Factors in the Selection and
Implementation of Communication Strategies”, in C. Faerch, G. Kasper (eds.),
Strategies in Interlanguage Communication, London, Longman, 1983, (100–18);
E. Bialystok, Communication Strategies: A Psychological Analysis of Second
Language Use, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1990; Z. Dörnyei, “On the Teachability
of Communication Strategies”, in TESOL Quarterly, 29.1, 1995, (55–85).
54
R. Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992,
pp. 24–5.
55
S.L. McKay, “Principles of Teaching English as an International Language”, in
L. Alsagoff, S.L. McKay, G. Hu, W.A. Renandya (eds.), Principles and Practices
for Teaching English as an International Language, London, New York,
Routledge, 2012, p. 36, (28–46).
56
The well-known metaphor of the “epistemic break” harks back to the concept
Michael Foucault adopted from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. With regard to
such a break, Kumaravadivelu writes: “To paraphrase Foucault’s thoughts in
simple terms, an episteme is a set of relations that unite, at a given period, the
discursive practices that give rise to formalized knowledge systems. (…) Foucault
used the break from the knowledge systems governing the classical age and those
of the modern age as illustrative examples of epistemic break. The break from the

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 The Other Tongue 19

systems and norms of discourses, all-encompassing new economies of

English-language teaching and some premises about SLA (Second
Language Acquisition). According to Kumaravadivelu, most of the
common assumptions about interlanguage, fossilization, acculturation,
communicative competence and intercultural competence (all issues that
characterize most part of the studies and researches about SLA, “are
heavily tilted towards the episteme of the native speaker”57 who takes part
in “acquisitional paths, classroom input and interaction, and, tellingly, in
the role and use of learners’ first language”.58 English classrooms in
China, and their syllabus, may be mentioned as a case in point among
those countries in which English plays no historical or governmental role
but in which it is increasing its power as a medium of international
communication.
The growing demand for English as a tool of economic development
matches the undoubtedly large number of the students population in the
Chinese frame. This is why new methodologies of ELT have been sought
for. After the so-called “open-door policies” of the seventies onwards,
China became interested in Western scenarios, and English increased its
appeal too. To start with, the intensive reading model was under a stark
criticism till the College English Syllabus (1985). As Anwei reports:
The ultimate goal of the College English program, the syllabus specifies, is
to develop students’ competence to communicate in the target language via
written and oral channels. In the syllabus, while linguistic competence is
referred to as “the ability to use one’s knowledge of the language to
comprehend and construct sentences”, communicative competence is
defined as “the ability to employ appropriate skills at discourse level to
acquire ad convey information. (College English Syllabus Revision Team
1985:267). (…) As for teaching methodology, the syllabus propounds the
notion Bo Cai Zhong Chang (assimilating merits of different teaching
approaches for our own use).59

‘modern’ concept of self-identity to its ‘postmodern’ concept may also be

considered another example”: see B. Kumaravadivelu, “Individual Identity,
Cultural Globalization, and Teaching English as an International Language”, in L.
Alsagoff, S.L. McKay, G. Hu, W.A. Renandya (eds.), Principles and Practices for
Teaching English as an International Language, p. 14, (9–27).
57
Ibid., 17.
58
Ibid.
59
F. Anwei, “In Search of Effective ELT Methodology in College English
Education: The Chinese Experience”, in G.L. Lee, L. Ho, J.E.L. Meyer, C.
Varaprasad, C. Young (eds.), Teaching English to Students from China, Singapore,
Singapore University Press, 2003, p. 5, (1–20).
20 Part I

Unfortunately, as some data and observations report, the majority of

teachers of English in China maintained their traditional teaching tools,
favouring a passive approach to the language and a teacher-centred
transmission; nevertheless, according to some surveys released a few
decades ago, something is changing in the medium of instruction. For the
first time, the target language is gaining importance in the student-teacher
feedback. Here are some interesting figures of Chinese teachers’ responses
to the question on the medium of instruction effectively used in their class.

Medium of instruction No. of people % of people

No answer 26 7.4
Always in Chinese 2 0.6
Almost always in Chinese 3 0.9
Mostly in Chinese 27 7.7
Half in Chinese and half in English 74 21.1
Mostly in English 125 35.6
Almost always in English 85 24.6
Always in English 9 2.6
(n. 351)60

Locked into their traditional approaches, and owing to the wide range
of socio-cultural differences between the target language and the learner’s
own, the Chinese approach to English as a global language was still
impeded, despite the clear indications and advocacies in the syllabus of
1985. And the reasons seemed to come essentially from what Guo in 1995
called “Chinese characteristics” of foreign language education in China;
more specifically, the communicative approach does not address “Chinese
characteristics”61 (because Chinese students want their teachers to explain
morphology, syntax and texts in detail during their classes while they feel
discomfort if asked to perform role-play or peer-discussion). A definite
implementation of the methodologies used in teaching English in China
dates back to 1999 thanks to a revision of the syllabus proposed in 1985.
The new version evolved the most general objective of the method,
proclaiming that “the goal was to develop in students strong reading skills

60
The table has been freely adapted from, F. Anwei, “In Search of Effective ELT
Methodology in College English Education: The Chinese Experience”, p. 9.
61
About the notion of “Chinese characteristics” see F. Anwei, “In Search of
Effective ELT Methodology in College English Education: The Chinese
Experience”, p.10; and, J.K. Guo, “Improve classroom teaching and raise CET to a
new plateau”, in Wai Yu Jie (Journal of the Foreign Language World), 57, (1),
1995, (50–53).

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 The Other Tongue 21

and certain levels of listening, speaking, writing and translating competence

so as to enable them to exchange information” (College English Revision
Team 1999).
Even the term communicative competence was replaced by a new
notion, Yingyong Nengli, which could be translated into competence for
application.62
The story ends with a strong desire for maintaining the Bo Cai Zhong
Chang (assimilating merits of different teaching approaches for our own
use) fostering some teaching methodologies with a “Chinese flavour”.
As a consequence, considering Chinese students in a stereotypical way
may involve some misunderstandings especially about their presumed
unwillingness to think and act critically in class. On the contrary, Chinese
learners “might be instrumentally motivated in their learning as their long-
term focus may be to obtain certificates with which to secure employment
in a highly competitive job market”.63

62
F. Anwei, “In Search of Effective ELT Methodology in College English
Education: The Chinese Experience”, p. 14.
63
P. Stanley, A Critical Ethnography of “Westerners” Teaching English in China,
London, New York, Routledge, 2013, p. 16. Grammar and intensive reading and
writing courses held in Chinese universities lead to the CET examination (College
English Test) without which students cannot graduate. The speaking component
can be taken after and separately as the following schema: the CET comprises the
CET Band 4(CET-4), CET Band 6(CET-6) and the CET-Spoken English Test
(CET-SET). The last one was introduced in the CET battery in 1999. Nevertheless,
other certificates are worth mentioning; take, for instance, The National
Matriculation English Test (NMET), which is the university entrance test of
English for the whole country. As Cheng explains: “The purpose of the test—
introduced in 1985—is to make inferences about candidates’ English-language
ability, which is used in university admission decisions together with the scores
from university entrance tests in another five or six secondary school subjects. A
student needs to take tests in five or six subjects depending on the requirements of
the type of the university for which he/she applies. Chinese, Mathematics, and
English are three compulsory subjects for all candidates regardless of their choice
of university”. Then there is the Test for English Majors (TEM), which “assesses
the language performance of English majors and is administrated by the National
Advisory Commission on Foreign Language Teaching. Another purpose of the test
is to promote English teaching and learning for English majors.” Apart from these
tests in institutional settings, there are some non-credential English tests in China.
Take for instance the Public English Testing System (PETS) which is “probably the
largest in scale among them. It was developed in 1999 by the Chinese National
Education Examinations Authority (NEEA) with assistance from the University of
Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (UCLES). This test is a non-credential
test, which is open to all English learners, with no restriction on age, profession or
22 Part I

On the other hand, teachers’ motivations for teaching English in

countries like China may be different. Teaching in China may mostly offer
the “opportunity to acquire skills with which to return home or to move
into other roles in the same or another translational location. Spending
time abroad may confer an intangible ‘worldliness’ and/or more concrete
skills such as language skills with which to construct identities and build
future careers”.64
This involves an approach to teaching and learning English which
takes into account the intercultural competences as the main goal as said
by the Chinese Ministry of Education in 2007 about the kind of knowledge
the CET battery aims at. As reported by Stanley, “College English is not
only a language course that provides basic knowledge about English, but
also a capacity enhancement course that helps students to broaden their
horizons and learn about different cultures in the world”.65
Something different happens in the ESL countries where speakers
acquire English within their bilingual or multilingual context. Thus, a
further complication arises from the role played by nativeness or non-
nativeness of the speakers. The Nigerian language context is a case in
point. It was born after the code-mixing favoured by the slave trade from
the fifteenth century onwards; at the same time, most varieties of English
come from the first and second diaspora.66 Even though language mixing
works according to systematic norms, rules and strategies, there is a reason
for so many studies and research on varieties of English together with
Standard English issues. The reason for this is “to give a clear signal that

academic background. It aims to promote English learning nationwide. It provides

assessment and certification of communicative English language skills in reading,
writing, listening, and speaking at five levels of competence from Level 1 to Level
5”, see L. Cheng, “The key to success: English language testing in China”, in
Language Testing, 25 (1), 2008, pp. 18–20 (15–37). As evident from such
apparatus of English testing, the language exposure and practice involve an
increasing demand for English teachers at all levels of education programmes
(from grade three to university).
64
Ibid., 29.
65
Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education, College English
Curriculum, Beijing, Tsinghua University Press, 2007, p. 32, qtd.by P. Stanley, A
Critical Ethnography of “Westerners” Teaching English in China, p. 32.
66
The first diaspora involved relatively large-scale migrations of mother-tongue
English speakers from England, Scotland and Ireland predominantly to North
America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; the second happened during
the eighteenth and nineteenth century and from such a dispersal other Englishes
developed, such as Nigerian English, Indian English, Singaporean English, and
Philippine English.

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 The Other Tongue 23

the New Englishes should be considered in their own right, and not in
terms of their differences from a standard variety”.67
If the category of “new Englishes” share certain features, as Jenkins
notes, the “newness” must be divided into two categories at least: the “new
Englishes” which result from the first diaspora, and the “New Englishes”
from the second. More specifically:

The new Englishes of the former group developed independently of, and
differently from, English in Britain partly because of the original mixtures
of dialects and accents among the people who settled in these areas, and
partly because of the influence of the languages of the indigenous
populations. (…) On the other hand, the latter group of Englishes, those
commonly described as New Englishes (even though some of them predate
the first group) were, and still are, for the most part, learnt as second
languages or as one language within a wider multilingual repertoire of
acquisition.68

With Nigeria having such a wide multilingual range, and with the great
extent of variation in the type of pidgin English spoken by different ethnic
groups, what it is interesting about the Yoruba/English pair, for example,
is the co-occurrence of code-switching and language mixing in the same
text. This is exemplified by some examples presented by Bajio, in “On the
Status of Yoruba/English language mixing”:

(1) W͕n examine gbogbo papers ýn. But they found nothing wrong with
them
(They examined all those papers. But they found nothing wrong with
them)
Here we have an example of code-switching in which there is language-
mixing in the first sentence (which we would argue is a Yoruba sentence),
and a switch to English in the second sentence. This is different from (2),
which is an example of language-mixing in complex sentences:

(2) Mo wá a, but mi ò rii

(I looked for it, but I did not see it)
But notice that (3) would not be acceptable:

67
J. Jenkins, World Englishes, London, New York, Routledge, 2003, p.22.
68
Ibid.
24 Part I

(3) Mo wáa, but òrii

where the subject of the conjoined sentence is deleted, as it would be in
English, but not in Yoruba.69

The multilingual policies in Nigeria are regulated by the language

provisions of the National Policy of Education (2004). The document
explains the government’s position about Nigeria’s goals in education and
its management of the languages actually spoken in the countries. In its
own vision, the study stipulates that “The language of instruction at the
lower levels of education (nursery and primary) shall be any Nigerian
indigenous language within the vicinity of the learners, that is, language of
immediate environment (LIE), while English shall be taught as a school
subject”.70
Indeed, such provisions seem to contradict the fact that Nigeria is a
second language user of English. In Babalola’s words, the question
depends on the coexistence of English and so many other indigenous
languages in the country:
The Nigerian state is made up of over 300 ethnic groups each with at least
two distinct languages and several language-like dialects giving a replica
of the Biblical Tower of Babel! But thanks to English that readily filled the
vacuum of a neutral language with which the country was brought together
and remained together. Now, how can a country desiring to inculcate high
level of proficiency in English in its learners at the same time be
discouraging early exposure of the same learners to the language that is
very important to their full integration in all the facets of life: academic,
social, political, and inter-personal relationships?71

The discrepancies on the use of English as a second language and its

relationships with the indigenous Nigerian languages have been discussed
for more than 40 years. Nevertheless, it is still impossible to muse on a
standardized form of Nigerian English. According to Soneye and Ayoola,
a broad approach to the matter should involve different parameters, three
at least:

x geographical (i.e. Southern, Northern varieties);

69
A. Bajio, “On the Status of Yoruba/English language mixing”, in O.M. Ndimele
(ed.), Convergence: English and Nigerian Languages (2007), Port Harcourt, M &
J Grand Orbit, 2016, p.3, (1–8).
70
E.T. Babalola, “Communicative Language Teaching and English Language in
Nigeria”, in M.A. Vyas, Y.L. Patel (eds.), Teaching English as a Second
Language, New Delhi, PHI, 2015, p. 51 (45–56).
71
Ibid.

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 The Other Tongue 25

x educational (i.e. non-education, primary, secondary, etc.); and

x ethnic (i.e. Igbo English, Hausa English, Edo English, Yoruba
English, etc.).72

Despite living in second language environments, Nigerian learners

must face a lot of challenges which deal with improving their grammatical
and communicative competences of English. The teaching-setting still lacks
many features of a successful CLT (Communicative Language Teaching)
for a number of reasons connected to the teaching staff’s competence in
the target language, the availability of books and the lack of a shared first
language (which happens most of the times). Furthermore, as Babalola
argues, one of the greatest problems of the Nigerian teaching/learning
scenario is that it is essentially “exam-focused” giving more emphasis on
paper qualifications. The consequence of this is that
before a primary school pupil could gain entrance to the secondary school,
they must pass English, and to gain admission to the University, English
must be passed at credit level at the West African Examination Council
(WAEC)—organized examinations. In addition, English is a compulsory
subject that must be passed in the university matriculation examinations for
all students seeking admissions into the university in Nigeria.73

These elements confirm students’ unease with standardness and

correctness when they are outside the classrooms, and after they pass their
exams.
Finally, the present status of English in Nigeria must be studied as the
combined outcome of the contact/clash between English and the
indigenous languages in five dimensions of influence: the educational,
political, cultural, sociolinguistic, and linguistic.

a) The educational dimension concerns the changing role of the English

language as a medium and subject of instruction. (…);
b) The political dimension concerns the emergence of an English-
speaking elite and the role played by the language in the fight for
independence as well as in the evolution of the various constitutions
under which the country has hitherto been governed. (…);

72
T.O. Soneye, K.A. Ayoola, “Onset consonant cluster realization in Nigerian
English: the emergence of and endogenous variety?”, in U. Gut, R. Fuchs, E.M.
Wunder (eds.), Universal or Diverse Paths to English Phonology, Berlin, Boston,
Mouton De Gruyter, 2015, p. 117 (117–34).
73
E.T. Babalola, Communicative Language Teaching and English Language in
Nigeria, p. 54.
26 Part I

c) The cultural dimension concerns the introduction of new concepts and

values, as well as modes of interaction, as reflected in both Nigerian
English and Nigerian languages. (…);
d) The sociolinguistic dimension concerns the mode of acquisition and
use of English, and the emergence of a bilingual elite, speaking English
and one or more Nigerian languages. (…); and
e) The linguistic dimension concerns not only the way English has
permeated the vocabulary of Nigerian languages (particularly technical
terminology), but also other less conspicuous influences in the sound
system.74

The set of these interactions asks once again for a reorganized

knowledge and a reformation of education which—referring back to
Morin—needs new strategies more than innovative programmes. We must
recognize that we are dealing with a macro-concept, because strategy
means different things in different times. However, with cases like the
Nigerian one, the evolution of the multilingual web becomes a high
paradigmatic concept which involves a continuous exchange with the
socio-political environment. Besides, the new generations of speakers of

74
A. Bamgbose, “English in the Nigerian Environment”, in K. Bolton, B.B.
Kachru (eds.), World Englishes, Vol. II, London, New York, Routledge, 2006, pp.
105–106, (105–119). As regards the influences on the sound system, it is also
worth mentioning the issue concerning the onset-consonant-clusters realization in
Nigerian English as investigated for the first time systematically by Soneye and
Ayoola. They found out that: “British English has a complex syllable structure that
can be described as (C0-C3) V (CO-C4) (Yavas 2011). This means that in British
English between zero and three consonants can occur in the onset position of a
syllable and between zero and four consonants in the coda position after the
nucleus. Consequently, in English a wide range of syllable types are possible. (…)
Nigerian languages, by contrast, have a prevalence of CV syllables. Nigeria’s three
major indigenous languages, Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa for example, do not permit
onset clusters. Yoruba and Igbo manifest only three types of syllable structures,
which are CV, V, and N. Both allow a maximum of two elements in a syllable.
These elements are one consonant and one vowel (CV). Yoruba and Igbo also
allow syllables without onsets, and both allow syllables consisting on a single
syllabic nasal (N). (…) With regard to consonant clusters in Nigerian English,
Jowitt (1991) Simo Bobda (2003–2007) and Gut (2007) found consonant reduction
in syllable codas as well as insertion of epenthetic vowels. Simo Bodba describes
consonant cluster reduction as common in the coda position in words such as uncle
and devil (2003:30), while Gut (2007), found that deletion occurs more often in
three-consonant coda cluster (e.g. rinsed [rinzd]) than in two-consonant coda
clusters (e.g. cold [kԥuld])”, see T.O. Soneye, K.A. Ayoola, “Onset consonant
cluster realization in Nigerian English: the emergence of an endogenous variety?”,
p.122.

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 The Other Tongue 27

English, who—in a growing number—have English as their L1 are more

than relevant. Most young Nigerian speakers have used English since the
pre-school living communicative contexts in which English was almost
always used as the only medium of education and for day-by-day
communication.
In other words, the multilingual turn translates the different facets of a
plural and migrating society; it entails some uncertainties and antagonism.
This, in turn, leads to the new spirit launched by the European
Commission which considers multilingualism as a necessary tool to be at
ease in more worlds; by the same token, this speaks volumes even over the
European boundaries.
In 2003, House wondered if it were possible to consider English as an
obstacle to multilingualism. More specifically, her question was “English
as a lingua franca: a threat to multilingualism?”
Given the widespread use of English all around the world, the myth of
monolingualism is surely put into question. Many people use English
differently (at least a billion people worldwide) and this recalls Kachru’s
and McArthur’s models of the “world Englishes” spoken today. But the
doubt House was referring to started from the distinction between
“languages of communication” and “languages of identification”, drawing
the attention to the findings of some research carried out by the University
of Hamburg some years ago.
Despite the success of all the non-native speakers in using ELF (English
as a lingua franca), the word multilingualism still works on the basis of a
shared knowledge of meanings which cannot be part of an identity
linguistically determined. Effectively, in House’s words, such identity
needs not to be unitary and fixed, but can be multi-faceted, non-unitary and
contradictory (Norton 2000), when an individual speaks more than one
language. Because EFL is not a national language but a mere tool bereft of
collective cultural capital, it is a language usable neither for identity
marking, nor for a positive (“integrative”) disposition towards an L2 group,
nor for a desire to become similar to valued members of this L2 group—
simply because there is no definable group of EFL speakers. (…)
Paradoxically as this may seem, the very spread of EFL may stimulate
members of minority languages to insist on their own local languages for
emotional binding to their own culture, history, and tradition, and there is,
indeed, a strong countercurrent to the spread of EFL in that local varieties
and cultural practices are often strengthened.75

75
J. House, “English as a lingua franca: a threat to multilingualism?”, in Journal of
Sociolinguistics, 7 (4), 2003, pp. 560–561 (556–578).
28 Part I

In other words, the unconditioned recognition of a privileged status of

English does not solve the problem of communication in all the
multilingual domains, which call necessarily for hybridity and not for a
new imperialism of languages. Consequently, the multiple relationships
between multilingualism and a new lingua franca, needs to be re-
examined by asking:

x how to consider multilingualism a resource thanks to the global rise

of the English language?
x how to regulate the transfer?
x how to make multilingual education a meaningful participation tool
of democracy?

We may not find all the answers, but as Robert Phillipson noted, the
rhetoric of egalitarian multilingualism is strictly intertwined to concerns of
linguistic hierarchisation and marginalization. The study of linguistic
imperialism moves from the penetration of the strongest languages in
many different countries and several domains of the social life. But the
pace of this breach is growing faster and faster today and from the
theoretical foundations of the linguistic imperialism now it is important to
ask how English as a lingua franca can or cannot become a lingua
frankensteinia in many parts of the world.76 As Mohanty notes in the
interesting Social Justice Through Multilingual Education,
Phillipson demonstrates that many language-in-education issues in Europe
have similarities with postcolonial dilemmas. He cautions against false
arguments for English and merely treating English as a lingua franca when
it actually functions as a lingua frankensteinia in many parts of the world.
He does not deny the role of English in an egalitarian multilingual
framework, but pleads for careful analysis pf how to counterbalance its
adverse and subtractive effects on linguistic diversity, multilingualism and
MLE.77

Although the international space gained by English, the empirical

studies of its variations around the world show a blurred map of diversity

76
For further references to Phillipson’s debate on linguistic imperialism see, R.
Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992; R.
Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism Continued, Hyderabad, Orient Blackswan, 2009.
77
A.K. Mohanty, “Multilingual Education: a Bridge too Far?”, in T. Skutnabb-
Kangas, R. Phillipson, A.K. Mohanty, M. Panda (eds.), Social Justice Through
Multilingual Education, Bristol, Buffalo, Toronto, Multilingual Matters, 2009, p.8,
(3–18).

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 The Other Tongue 29

related to the use of it as a foreign/second language. Hence, while the

introduction of English in Nigeria is a matter of fact today, the language
conditions of countries like Russia, or the Maghreb may be interesting
cases in point of an open debate.

3. Domesticating English: the “cases” of Russia

and the Maghreb78
English is gaining ground in a lot of countries, even outside Europe. It
is a passport for better careers, and it works as a mediator between
millions of speakers who look at the “language of Albion” as a democratic
tool of independence; however, if we focus on the status of English as an
international language in countries such as Russia and the Maghreb, the
following areas must be taken into special account:

a) the implications of language education;

b) the language contacts; and
c) the influence of English in terms of functions in the social and
public domains.

This means that the study of English outside its traditional contexts
asks for something more than a mere account of equivalences. As Eddy
states:
the foundation for the study of English in non-native contexts was laid by
the “social-realistic” or functionally oriented approaches to language study
of J. R. Firth (1935) and other scholars, such as Labov (e.g. 1963, 1966,
1972, 1974). These studies emphasize the connection between language
and society, linguistic pluralism and diversity.79

What Eddy was referring to in the interesting dissertation about the

spread of English in the Russian contexts was inspired by the socio-
political conditions of England, America and Russia after the fall of the
Iron Curtain in the late 1980s. Since then, a function-oriented approach to
the linguistic exchanges, which occurred between English and Russia in
the new “contexts of situation”—to quote Firth—has been applied. Even

78
Some of the ideas and data debated in the chapter “Domesticating English” are
to appear in A. Bonomo, “The English language and the multilingual turn”, in
Token: A Journal of English Linguistics, Vol. 4, 2016, (forthcoming).
79
A. Eddy, English in the Russian Context: A Macro-sociolinguistic Study, Ann
Arbor, Pro Quest, 2008, p. 6.
30 Part I

without a colonial past, the level of polyglossia for Russian speakers is

now potentially higher especially in relation to Russia’s contacts with a lot
of Eastern countries.
In the past, in the Soviet Union and post-Communist Russia, the traditions
of communicating with Asian countries had relied on interpreting and
translation between Russian and the target language. Nowadays English
has replaced this language-to-language channel by functioning as an
intermediary lingua franca. English language pedagogy, which in the past
had concentrated on communicating Russian culture to English speakers,
and Anglophone culture to Russians, now needs to be recast in terms of
multiple Asian cultures, languages and norms (…).80

However, the extent of the relationship between English and Russian is

not a simple one; due specifically to the possible constraints if we consider
the transliteration of Roman letters into the Cyrillic alphabet, and some
culture-bound differences between the two countries which sound relevant
from a linguistic point of view. Possible questions are, then: can we
understand different cultures through the use of their key words? Or, in
other words, how is the lexicon affected by the core values of a country,
and what does it tell us about them? Wierzbicka’s study offers a possible
answer. Musing on polisemy, allolexy and “valency options”, Wierzbicka
proposes an interesting linguistic analysis of language issues and their
relationship to cultures, widening the perspective by Sapir according to
which language is a symbolic guide to culture. She focused her attention
on English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese (languages thus very
different from each other), focusing on key concepts across cultures, such
as “friendship”, “freedom”, “homeland and fatherland” especially. What
she discovered is an interesting comparison of meanings based on a
Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM):

The theory assumed in this book posits the existence not only of an innate
and universal “lexicon of human thoughts” but also of an innate and
universal “syntax of human thoughts”. Taken together, these two
hypotheses amount to positing something that can be called “a language of
thought”, or, as I called it in the title of my 1980 book “Lingua Mentalis”.
It is this “lingua mentalis” which is being proposed, and tested, as a

80
A. Kirkpatrick, R. Sussex, English as an International Language in Asia:
Implications for Language Education, Heidelberg, New York, London, Springen,
2012, p.7.

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 The Other Tongue 31

practical metalanguage (NSM) for the description and comparison of

meanings.81

Despite the rich diversity between English and Russian, for example,
she makes a comparison between the Russian svoboda and the English
freedom, showing how the two words might be seen at a first glance as
corresponding, while they embody different perspectives on human life.82
The contact between two languages which are so far apart necessarily
implies debates on word formation and the study of foreign lexical items
which refer to a wide range of fields (from trade to technology, from
politics to science, from literature to entertainment).
From the 1920s to the 1940s, Russia registered two groups of loan
words, both “lexemes, associated with new concepts, and loan words
which replaced already existing Russian lexical items”,83 while from the
1950s up to the 1980s, many foreign words have been rejected as a side-
effect of World War II and the Cold War. Since then, the history of
English/Russian relationships has been full of language resistance and
developments concerning the use of a foreign language instead of Russian.
However, “since perestroika in the 1980s, the connotation of Russian as
an intra-national and inter-national language has dropped significantly”.84
Thus, since the beginning of the twentieth century, and with the New
Russia epoch, English has been the most “affecting” language on the
Russian linguistic system, on different levels: “lexicon, stylistics, semantics,
pragmatics, phonology, morphology, graphics, and punctuation”.85
What is interesting from a linguistic point of view is that this
relationship has been a mutual one, which is why Podhajeckca speaks
about “Russianisms in English”: “there is some evidence that Russianisms
were steadily transferred into the English vocabulary. As they appeared, in
some cases extensively, in printed sources, lexicographers started recording
them in dictionaries, which are now indispensable resources for
reconstructing past language contacts”.86

81
A. Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English,
Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, p.
28.
82
For further references see, A. Wierzbicka, Understanding Cultures through
Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese, pp.129–143.
83
A. Eddy, English in the Russian Context: a Macro-sociolinguistic Study, p. 83.
84
Ibid., 93.
85
Ibid.
86
M. Podhajecka,“Russian Borrowings in English: Similarities and Differences in
Lexicographic Description”, in R.W. McConchie, O. Timofeeva, H. Tissari, T.
Säily (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 2005 Symposium on New Approaches in
32 Part I

However, while the first Russian words were borrowed in the second
half of the sixteenth century by “English merchants and ambassadors of
Russia” (see Podhajecka), and their number increased considerably in the
nineteenth century, most loan words were taken into English in the
twentieth century, as we may guess from the diversification of the
Russian-American contacts. Moreover, “characteristically, towards the end
of the century the interest in Russian words decreases. The 1980s brought
two keywords of the decade, perestroika and glasnost, but no other
borrowings have become clearly recognizable since”.87 However, it should
be added that words like apparatchik, nomenklatura and samizdat have
also gained currency in the past few decades.
Podhajecka’s researches are very stimulating, maybe because the
papers on Russianisms are very scarce and most of the times connected to
single aspects of borrowing and calquing. For this reason, it is worth
mentioning her research methodology and some of her findings:
My research material consists of the largest monolingual dictionaries of
English. For British English, I took into account Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and the OED2. I also consulted
three volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary Additions (1993–97
henceforth the OEDA) for some recent vocabulary. As regards American
English, I examined the Century Dictionary (1889–91 edition and
Supplement) and three consecutive editions of Webster’s New
International Dictionary: 1913 (1909 edition and Addenda), 1953 (1934
edition and Addenda) and 2000 (1961 edition and Addenda); henceforth,
Webster’s 1, Webster’s 2 and Webster’s 3, respectively. Three volumes of
the Barnhart Dictionary of New Words (1973, 1980, 1990, henceforth the
BDNW) complement the analysis of American dictionaries. (…) From the
above-mentioned dictionaries, some of which are now available in the
electronic form and are thus easily searchable (the dictionaries that had to
be literally “read” page by page were Webster’s 2, the OEDA and the
BDNW), I excerpted headwords either etymologised as Russianisms (or
Sovietisms) or defined in relation to Russia (or the Soviet Union). Next, I
compared the lists of words and excluded calques (e.g., five-year plan),
loanblends (e.g. refusenik or Gorbymania) and semantic borrowings (e.g.
pioneer). Further criteria allowed me to leave out, for instance, specific
technical terms (e.g. achtaragdite or uvarovite), toponyms (e.g. Kursk or
Scherbakov) and proper nouns in the attributive position (e.g., Molotov
cocktail or Stanislavsky technique). Then, to revise the etymologies of the
remaining words, I worked with primary and secondary sources in English

English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX), Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville,

MA, 2006, p. 123 (123–34).
87
Ibid., 124.

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 The Other Tongue 33

and Russian, of which the latter included Dal’s (1880–82) and Vasmer’s
(1986) dictionaries. At this stage, indirect borrowings (e.g. Kremlin or
tsarina) and etymologically irrelevant lexical items (e.g. britska or
mazurka) were dropped. Finally, problematic words, for which no clear
evidence was found, were taken at face value; in other words, their cultural
identity was treated as a predominant factor. Cosmonaut, perceived here as
a borrowing of Russ. kosmonaut, is perhaps the most conspicuous case. It
has to be kept in mind, however, that every etymology presupposes a
varying margin of error.88

As we can see from the Russian example, the language issue is full of
paradoxes and there are different levels of the concept of domestication of
English around the world.
The range of multilingualism depends on the extent of language
contact, the mastery of the language, and the role played by language
education.
Another interesting case is represented by the Maghrebian countries
with a remarkable geopolitical situation which affects their journey
towards multilingualism. In such cases, the implications for language
policy and planning depend on a wide range of factors such the ones
Ennaji points out referring specifically to Morocco, “bearing in mind the
language-power relation, factors like ethnicity, cultural identity, education,
literacy, gender, social stratification, and Westernisation intermingle in the
everyday life and transactions of Moroccans”.89 With regard to the spread
of English in Morocco,
most educated people like English and would like to see their children
learn it. Progressive and conservative parties advocate the teaching of
English, which has non-colonial overtones. Most intellectuals favour
English because they see it as the language of international
communication, technology, and economic exchanges. (…) English is
regarded by Moroccan students as being more flexible than French. (…)
Many Moroccan students tend to turn to English not only because they find
it easier to learn, but also because it is an important international language.
Additionally, they are less socially penalized when they make mistakes in
English than in French.90

Indeed, English is increasingly powerful in a range of domains even in

North Africa, where something about the old set of the indigenous
languages is changing and, as Aitsiselmi and Marley note, “the production

88
Ibid., 125.
89
M. Ennaji, Multilingualism, Cultural Identity, and Education in Morocco, p.6.
90
Ibid., 196.
34 Part I

in Berber is gaining a higher profile both in the Maghreb and

internationally”.91
The desire for a hybrid space between Arabic and French has worked
as an identity quest which can be linguistically expressed too. Morocco,
Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Mauritania and parts of the western Saharan
countries are still coping with the difficult problem of making a multilingual
education a national priority and a tool of democracy.
In fact, as Mortimer notes,
Situated between East and West, drawing upon Africa, Europe, and the
Middle East, the Maghreb as a geographical and cultural entity is capable
of privileging cultural pluralism and multilingualism. Writers such as
Abdelkébir Khatibi in Morocco, Abdelwahab Meddeb in Tunisia, and
Mouloud Mammeri in Algeria have spoken for plurality of language and
culture, an ideological perspective that sees beyond territorial boundaries.92

Since the 1960s, the independence of the Maghrebian countries has

opened up new opportunities and contacts with the international markets,
stirring the debate whether foreign language learning started from the
presumed failure of Arabic in scientific and technological sectors or not.
The increasing introduction of English in language curricula, and the
new training of professionals involved in the process, is still trying to
answer the needs of the global market even against the several resistances
from those who still believe in the uniqueness of Arabic and Muslim
culture. Indeed, while politicians such as the Algerian President Abdelaziz
Bouteflika asked for multilingualism and a cultural plurality, some of the
bloggers of the same regions still wonder how to master foreign languages
writing sentences like these: “Bilingualism is a calamity. Why isn’t China
teaching its kids a foreign language?”, or “In the Sadiki school, or Sadiki
education, pupils used to start learning French very early since primary
school, just like today. Therefore, the problem does not lie in the timing of
learning a foreign language, but rather in its methodology, the efficiency
of teachers, and the conviction of students about the importance of
languages”.93

91
Aitsiselmi and Marley qtd. by D. Ayoun (ed.), Studies in French Applied
Linguistics, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2008, p. 187.
92
M.P. Mortimer (ed.), Maghrebian Mosaic: a Literature in Translation, Boulder,
Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001, p. 5.
93
These are anonymous comments taken from the blog Zawaya. A Service of
Maghrebia:
http://zawaya.magharebia.com/old_zawaya/en_GB/zawaya/opinion/302.html

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 The Other Tongue 35

Consequently, focusing on foreign languages in the Maghreb, and

especially on teaching English as a counterpart of French dominance, it is
seen, as Gordon states, “potentially neo-colonialist”,94 building a cultural
dilemma which deals with the overcrowding of the classes (an average of
40 students, and even 50 in Morocco) and with the introduction of English
as a school subject from the beginning of the third year of primary school.
Effectively, Francophonie was part of a global strategy which had
linguistic purposes together with a political one; however, in 1999
President Bouteflika pointed out how multilingualism was ready to work
as a modernizing engine which Algeria really needed.
He said:
Let it be known that Algeria is part of the world and must adapt to it and
the Arabic is the national and official language. This being said, let it be
known that an uninhibited opening up to other international languages—at
least those used in the United nations—does not constitute perjury. (…) To
move forward, one must break taboos. This is the price we have to pay to
modernize our identity. Chauvinism and withdrawal are over. They are
destructive (Bouteflika on El Watan broadcasting, 1999).

What can we conclude from this? Surely, that each language identity is
not a fixed entity. On the contrary, as Suleiman notes, “they are always
constructed. And they are always contextualized. In short they are in a
state of evolving betweenness. The problem arises when we try to
eliminate difference or overstate sameness in defining identities”.95
This hybrid nature of the greatest postcolonial cultures has been
represented by the Francophone literature of French Africa and by the
Anglophone bilingualism of the Indian Subcontinent. Hence, the
domestication of English in Maghreb is still something new if compared to
the professional standards which English has already obtained in other
parts of the world. It means to further competitiveness of teachers,
students and institutions, putting Arabic on the top, preserving the value of
French, but promoting the spread of English too.
This is what happens in Tunisia, according to Mohamed-Salah Omri.

94
Gordon qtd. by R. B. Kaplan, R. B. Baldauf Jr., (eds.), Language Planning and
Policy in Africa. Algeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Tunisia, Vol. 2, Clevedon,
New York, Multilingual Matters, 2007, p. 28.
95
Y. Suleiman, “The betweenness of identity. Language in trans-national
literature”, in Z.S. Salhi, I.R. Netton (eds.), The Arab Diaspora: Voices of an
Anguished Scream, London, New York, Routledge, 2006, p. 24, (11–25).
36 Part I

In Tunisia, English was initially taught as a third language at a late age in

secondary education and at the university level. It was taught as a language
of culture with focus on American and British history and literatures. (…)
Changes occurred recently, reflecting local and global developments.
Linking the teaching of English to the needs of the country and moving
away from the curriculum outlined earlier has become policy. English is
called upon to serve a “function rather than cultural” aim. (…) This
adjustment occurs within the recognition that a wider range of English
literatures perhaps closer to students’ interests from outside Britain and the
United States has become widely available. In recent years English has
been making serious headway at the expense of French at the secondary
and primary levels of education. The second language in Tunisia remains,
however, French. It still wields power and influence in business and
politics and in cultural turn. Yet, English is now firmly a voice in the
polyphony of languages in the Maghreb. 96

The impossible reduction of a language in a sequence of rules thus

makes the language itself the concrete manifestation of our actual
experience of difference. Besides, for a multilingual speaker, it is all
matter of interdependence. According to Herdina and Jessner,
If the rate of growth or the rate of attrition of one language system is
dependent on the development or behaviour of other language systems
used by the multilingual speaker—and/or other interdependent factors—
then it does not make sense to look at languages acquisition or language
growth in terms of isolated language development. (…) Instead of looking
at the development of individual language systems in isolation, it may
make more sense to look at the overall system of languages commanded
simultaneously by the multilingual individual and then try to determine the
patterns of convergence and divergence of the multilingual system, rather
than see the multilingual system as a mere accumulation of the effects of
concatenated of sequential individual systems.97

96
M.S. Omri, “Voicing a culture ‘dispersed by time’: metropolitan location and
identity in literature and art of Sabiha al Khemir”, in Z.S. Salhi, I.R. Netton (eds.),
The Arab Diaspora: Voices of an Anguished Scream, p. 56, (53–75).
97
P. Herdina, U. Jessner, “The Dynamics of Third Language Acquisition”, in J.
Cenoz, U. Jessner (eds.), English in Europe: the Acquisition of a Third Language,
Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto, Sydney, Multilingual Matters, 2000, p. 92, (84–98).

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The word “translation” comes, etymologically, from the Latin for
“bearing across”. Having been born across the world, we are translated
men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in
translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be
gained.
—Salman Rushdie

Translation is the art of failure.

—Umberto Eco

In antiquity, for instance, one of the dominant images of the translators

was that of a builder: his (usually it was him, not her) task was to carefully
demolish a building, a structure (the source text), carry the bricks
somewhere else (into the target culture), and construct a new building—
with the same bricks.
—Andrew Chesterman
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 PART II

IN-BETWEEN SPACES

1. Translating across cultures: the role of translation

in the multilingual turn1
Culture and translation are inextricably linked, an interaction which
challenges intercultural communication. As a consequence, the multiple
contacts of peoples with different languages and cultural backgrounds
involve broader perspectives on the meaning of equivalence in translation
and on its relationship with context and the information transmitted.
Therefore, as in translating idioms, “localized” perspectives are needed to
understand how language reflects culture, how culture is influenced by
language and how this combination affects translators’ choices.
The dynamic equivalence(s) between source and target text has always
stirred long-standing discussions about the nature of translating.
According to Nida, the balance between science and the art of translating,
or the tension between theory and practice, have demanded more
consciousness of the importance of “contexts” in defining the translating
competence. Translating thus becomes a “risky business”, as in the case of
Herman Aschmann, translator of the three versions of the New Testament
in the Mexican Totonaco.
According to Nida,

one of the most creative translators I have ever known is Herman

Aschmann, a person of limited academic training, but one who became
entranced by the cultural content and literary potential of Totonaco, an
Indian language in Mexico. Instead of submitting one possible rendering of
a biblical expression, he usually had half a dozen ways of representing the
meaning of the Greek text. Not only did he produce an exceptional New

1
Some of the ideas and data reported in the chapters “Translating across cultures”
and “Discussing equivalence(s)”, have already been published in A. Bonomo, “In-
between spaces: translation as intercultural communication”, in Language,
Literature and Cultural Studies, Vol IV, No. 2, Bucharest, Military Technical
Academy Publishing House, 2011, (253–64).
40 Part II

Testament in Totonaco, but inspired local people to imitate his skill in

discovering more and more meaningful ways of communicating a message
into an entirely different language-culture.2

After all, according to the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and

Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (Paris 2005), “cultural
diversity is a defining characteristic of humanity”.
Such elements work as priorities in translation, and it is through
language that understanding cultural identities is possible. However, it is
quite difficult to cope with such a mutual interaction; on the one hand, it
needs new language policies encouraged by centralization in language
relationship between cultures; on the other, it means respect for the
linguistic and cultural differences of the groups involved in the process.
As an effect of such a balance, the concept of equivalence in translation
acquires different meanings and localized perspectives.
Applying such ideas of culture to the act of translating, in 1975 Steiner
pointed out that: “The translator is a bilingual mediating agent between
monolingual communication participants in two different language
communities”.3 Such a statement overcame the traditional idea of
translation as “an active, even aggressive act, an appropriation of foreign
cultural values”.4 Moreover, similar trends (proposing translation as an
invasion of territory and a violation of cultural identities) should always
take into account how translation enters complex cultural poly-systems
and all the educational aspects involved in intercultural communication.
As a matter of fact, the mutual interrelationship of linguistic and cultural
awareness has been investigated for many years, acquiring “centrality in
intercultural communication studies around the 1990s”,5 as Rizzo notes in
her English Across Disciplines.
The question is, however, how can we describe what translation is,
choosing between thinking of “language as something culturally neutral”
and the presumed existence of a “lingua-culture” (considered as a link
between language and subjective ideas of cultures), both investigated by

2
E. Nida, Contexts in Translating (1914), Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John
Benjamins, 2001, p. 7.
3
G. Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, New York,
London, Oxford University Press, 1975, p.45.
4
S. Bassnett, A. Lefevere, Translation, History and Culture, London, New York,
Pinter Publishers, 1990, p. 28.
5
A. Rizzo, English Across Disciplines: From Theory to Practice, Roma, Aracne,
2007, p. 71.

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 In-Between Spaces 41

Risager, as two “problematic” questions?6 The perspective of the present

study is that, as Taylor says, “every translator should therefore ideally7 be
bilingual and bicultural”.8
In other words, he/she should be able to make the author and the target
reader closer, knowing that language and culture are inextricably linked.
Such a point of view comes from the assumption that “there is an
abundance of theories available regarding the meaning of culture”,9 and
that

culture awareness and knowledge involves the degree to which an

individual is aware of and knowledgeable about the history, institutions,
rituals, and everyday practices of a given culture. This would include an
understanding of the basic perspectives a culture has on gender roles,
religious practices, and political issues as well as the rules that govern
daily interactions among members of the culture.10

Hence, it is clear enough how the ideas of sameness and difference in

linguistic and cultural settings, as well as the high and low context cultures
(HCC/LCC)—as theorized by Katan—and their consequences in
translation, play an important role in decoding contemporary multilingual
communication.11

6
As regards Risager’s ideas about the relationship between culture and language
see, K. Risager, “Towards a Transnational Paradigm in Language and Culture
Pedagogy”, Paper read at the AAAL Annual Conference, March 2008, Washington,
D.C., USA, pp. 1–22:
ruc-
dk.academia.edu/KarenRisager/Papers/123914/Towards_a_transnational_paradigm
_in_language_and_culture_pedagogy.
See also K. Risager, Language and Culture Pedagogy: From a National to
Transnational Paradigm, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 2007.
7
Emphasis mine.
8
C. Taylor, Language to Language: A Practical and Theoretical Guide for
Italian/English Translators, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998/2003,
p.103.
9
T. La Fromboise T., H.L.K. Coleman, J. Gerton, “Psychological Impact of
Biculturalism: Evidence and Theory”, in Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 114, No. 3,
1993, p. 396, (395–412).
10
Ibid., 403.
11
See also E. Nida, C.R. Taber, The Theory and Practice of Translation, Leiden,
E.J. Brill, 1969. Very interesting are Nida and Taber’s considerations about
translating from English to German, from English to Hungarian and from English
to Hindi.
42 Part II

The “umbrella term” interculture and its relationships with

multilingualism no doubt nowadays requires a descriptive application of
translating (as theorized by Holmes) which should be able to begin to
move from the interdisciplinary aspects involved in the communication
between cultures.12

2. Discussing equivalence(s)
According to Lambert, all functionally relevant aspects of translation
activity in its historical context need to be carefully observed because of
the shifting between the source literary system (with its author, text, reader
and literary and cultural norms) and the target one.13
In such a movement, “equivalence” becomes a dynamic idea and an
abstract concept as well; on the one hand, it may indicate the highest
correspondence (both semantic and cultural) between the source text and
the target one; while on the other, it represents one of the most difficult
language transformations calling for extra-linguistic references. As a
consequence, the best equivalent in translation will depend not only on the
linguistic system being handled by the translator, but also on the way the
linguistic system of the text is manipulated or somehow changed by the
translator himself. If we take, for instance, the process of manipulation of
Mao’s works in China, Kenan notices:

Mao’s works were regarded as sacred texts during the period (1950s); the
saying “one word in Mao’s works equals ten thousand in value” vividly
reflects the power and value of Mao’s sayings at the time. It is said that
translators of his works during that periods were required to follow the
linguistic form of the original strictly, and they were not allowed to break
his long sentences into short clauses, even when it was necessitated by the
grammar of the target language.14

Assumptions like these argue that each language tells reality in

different ways; so, generally speaking, this interpretation should be

12
As for Holmes’s description of the descriptive branch of translating see also E.
Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories, Clevedon, Multilingual Matters,
2001, p. 94.
13
J.S. Holmes, J. Lambert, R. Van den Broeck, Literature and Translation: New
Perspectives in Literary Studies with a Basic Bibliography of Books on Translation
Studies, Leuven, Acco, 1978, p.63.
14
L. Kenan, “Translation as a Catalyst for Social Change in China”, in M.
Tymoczko, E. Gentzler (eds.), Translation and Power, Boston, University of
Massachusetts Press, 2002, p. 179, (160–83).

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 In-Between Spaces 43

effective enough to describe translation as a necessary tool for intercultural

communication or as a means through which cultures are strategically
introduced.
Regarding “equivalence”, we can go back to a famous worldwide
example:

The question of semiotic transformation is further extended when

considering the translation of a simple noun, such as the English butter.
Following Saussure, the structural relationship between the signified
(signifié) or concept of butter and the signifier (signifiant) or the sound-
image made by the word butter constitutes the linguistic sign butter.(…)
But Saussure also distinguished between the syntagmatic (or horizontal)
relations that a word has with the words that surround it in a sentence and
the associative (or vertical) relations it has with the language structure as a
whole. (…) When translating butter into Italian there is a straightforward
word-for-word substitution: butter – burro. Both butter and burro describe
the product made from milk and marketed as a creamy-coloured slab of
edible grease for human consumption. And yet within their separate
cultural contexts butter and burro cannot be considered as signifying the
same. In Italy, burro, normally light coloured and unsalted, is used
primarily for cooking, and carries no associations of high status, whilst in
Britain butter, most often bright yellow and salted, is used for spreading on
bread and less frequently in cooking. (…) So there is a distinction both
between the objects signified by butter and burro and between the function
and value of those objects in their cultural contexts. The butter-burro
translation, whilst perfectly adequate on one level, also serves as a
reminder of the validity of Sapir’s statement that each language represents
a separate reality.15

As pointed out by Bassnett, there are many cases in which non-

equivalence becomes a problem in translation, and different strategies are
needed. What happens when we consider cases of non-equivalence at
word level, when the target language has no direct equivalent for a word
(or groups of words)?
English words like pudding or shilly-shallying, or idiomatic
expressions like to be a peeping Tom, or to be as happy as a sandboy
represent non-equivalence problems in translation strictly connected to the
English cultural background. While the word pudding needs a periphrasis
to describe one of the most peculiar English recipes of the British culinary
heritage, the verb to shilly-shally asks for a synonym to be perfectly
understood in other languages than English. Expressions like to be unable
to come to a decision, or verbs like to dawdle or to procrastinate would be

15
S. Bassnett, Translation Studies, pp. 27–8.
44 Part II

very good alternatives to make the verb to shilly-shally16 more

understandable but, what happens to the original onomatopœic effect of
the word? The modulating process applied in this case decreases the ironic
connotation implied in the sound of the English verb, but allows other
languages to come to the point in the correct way. After all, as Attardo
says in Translation and Humour: “Each pun will consist of a set of
different features which may or may not be paralleled in TL structure or
text. Those puns that exhibit in the SL a set of features which is consistent
with a set of features in the TL, such that the pragmatic goals of the
translation are fulfilled, will be translatable”.17
Moreover, what about translating idiom-based wordplays?
In this case, searching for equivalence should take into account the
complex balance between “literal” and “free” translation.
Very commonly, languages share general words—and general
meanings—but they lack specific ones that seem to be strongly dependent
on what each culture considers relevant to its particular environment.
Moreover, as Strassler argues: “An idiom is a concentration of more than
one lexeme whose meaning is not derived from the meaning of its
constituents and which does not consist of a verb plus an adverbial particle
or preposition. The concentration as such then constitutes a lexeme in its
own right and should be entered in the lexicon”.18
Even if definitions like these exclude in some way phrasal and
prepositional verbs which usually work as idioms—as Strassler himself
notes—all idioms and wordplays acquire what Veisbergs describes as “a
trite or a cliché-like character”.19 Such triteness depends on the contextual
use of signs; it recalls the pragmatic approach defined by Morris in 1938
as “the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the psychological,

16
For an interesting occurrence of the verb to shilly-shally see, Oscar Wilde, The
Importance of Being Earnest and Four Other Plays, Introduction and Notes by K.
Krauss, Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003, p. 17: “Lady Bracknell: Well, I must say,
Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether
he was going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd.
(…)” (emphasis mine).
17
S. Attardo, “Translation and Humour. An Approach Based on the General
Theory of Verbal Humour”, in The Translator, Vol. 8, No. 2, Manchester, St.
Jerome Publishing, 2002, p. 190, (171–92).
18
J. Strassler, Idioms in English: a Pragmatic Analysis, Tubingen, Gunter Narr
Verlag, 1982, p. 79.
19
A. Veisbergs, “The Contextual Use of Idioms, Wordplays, and Translation”, in
D. Delabastita (ed.), Traductio: Essays on Punning and Translation, London, New
York, Routledge, 1997, p. 157, (155–76).

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 In-Between Spaces 45

biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in the functioning of

signs”.20
Thus, most interlingual transfers should be aware of how the
communicative meaning and the intention involved in it imply an
empirical investigation of “contexting” in translation. Going back to the
examples of idiomatic expressions mentioned above, how can we translate
to be a peeping Tom from English to other languages? How can we find an
equivalent to the verb peeping and the name Tom that seem to work as a
collocation restriction (which does not follow logically from the
prepositional meaning of the words used)? In order to focus sharply on the
implications of this “frozen” expression, English myth and lore are needed
in this case.
Almost everyone knows something about the fashionable Lady
Godiva, also known as the naked woman on a horse, riding through the
streets of Coventry as a protest to an oppressive tax imposed by her
husband Leofric III, the Earl of Coventry. Over the years, the expression
“peeping Tom”, has become a frozen expression, commonly used to
indicate “voyeurism”; but, not everyone is aware of the relationship
between Lady Godiva and Tom, the tailor who, according to the legend,
looked at the unclothed lady on her horse even though it had been
forbidden. The poor man was struck blind (or died according to other
versions of the legend) the moment itself he saw the woman.
Moreover, “by the mid-eighteenth century the name Peeping Tom is
used in ways that assume it is already widely known. Coventry town
records for 1756, for example, list expenses for “Peeping Tom” and five
years later the name appears in a mock-heroic poem by Edward Thompson
called The Meretriciad”.21
Now, notwithstanding the usage and abusage acquired by the English
idiom over the years, searching for a direct equivalent of “Peeping Tom”
in Italian, for example, finds fuzzy matches as regards the information it
gives about voyeurism; in fact, no matter which translation strategy is the
chosen one, all communications, and idioms as well, are made up of
“shared information”, or—as Beekman and Callow suggested—of
“immediate context, remote context and cultural context”.22 Since such

20
See C. Morris, “Foundations of the Theory of Signs”, in R. Carnap et al. (eds.),
International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science, 2:1, Chicago, The University of
Chicago Press, 1938, p. 108, (monograph collection).
21
D. Donoghue, Lady Godiva: a Literary History of the Legend, Malden, Oxford,
Victoria, Berlin, Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p. 73.
22
See J. Beekman, J. Callow, Translating the Word of God, Grand Rapids, MI,
Zondervan, 1974, pp. 45–57 qtd. by C. Sin-wai, A Dictionary of Translation
46 Part II

non-equivalence problems very often occur in translation, lots of strategies

can be applied to make implicit information as explicit as possible. Musing
on “implicit information” in his Dictionary of Translation Technology,
Sin-wai recalls eight of the different methods available to deal with it in
translation. He speaks about, “strictly literal translation, dynamic
equivalent translation, paraphrase, translations with no notes, translations
with footnotes, indexes, glossaries and maps”.23
This is far from being surprising, if the present technological turn in
translation is taken into account. In fact, as Sin-wai argues in the
introduction to the dictionary:

Translation tools are increasingly used in the work of translation. We use

word processors for document processing, scanners for data-capturing,
dictation tools for text inputting, concordancer for text analysis, online
dictionaries for meaning clarification, translation memory systems for the
reuse of previous translations, and automatic translation systems for
informational translation.24

Finally, a few words about the idiom to be as happy as a sandboy.

Charles Dickens in Old Curiosity Shop told us about “The Jolly
Sandboys Inn”, where “Little Nell and her grandfather stayed with Codlin
and Short”.25
As Fyfe reports in Dickens’ own words, “The ‘Jolly Sandboys’ was a
smaller roadside inn, of pretty ancient date, with a sign representing three
sandboys, increasing their jollity with as many jugs of ale and bags of
gold, creaking and swinging on its post on the opposite side of the road”.26
So how can sandboy be translated from English into other languages?
And, more importantly, what is a sandboy? According to The Oxford
Dictionary of Idioms by Siefring, the expression “to be happy as a
sandboy” means “to be extremely happy or to be perfectly contented with
your situation”.27

Technology, Hong Kong, The Chinese University Press, 2004, p. 103. The
dictionary has 1,375 entries, all of which have been commented on in a concise
manner and arranged in alphabetic order.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid., p. viii.
25
T.A., Fyfe, Who’s Who in Dickens: A Complete Dickens Repertory in Dickens’
Own Words (1913), Honolulu, University Press of the Pacific, 2004 p. 168.
26
Ibid.
27
J. Siefring, The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
2004, p. 136.

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 In-Between Spaces 47

However, in order to be understandable as well as possible, the entry

adds an important note so as to make the reader aware of the reason why
the noun “sand” is used in connection with the noun “boy” to mean “great
happiness”: “An 1823 dictionary describes a sandboy as an urchin who
sold sand in the streets, and according to the same source the expression
jolly as a sandboy was already proverbial by that date for “a merry fellow
who has tasted a drop (…)”.28

3. Translation and multilingualism

If translating means considering the intercultural references and
inferences involved in oral and written communication, it is possible to say
that translation begins in a magical “in-between space”—quoting
Bhabha—which makes words represent nations’ identities and their
cultural backgrounds. Such a “localized” perspective of translation
involves communication in a responsible process of “constructing
identities” (national, cultural and individual ones), and it is strictly
connected to style, register and all the linguistic tools involved in
communication. Therefore, as Virgilio de Ferreira observed that: “a
language is the place from where you see the world and in which the limits
of our thinking and feeling are mapped out”.29
One of the biggest challenges of the multilingual society is the
elaboration of new strategies in translation, since translation and
multilingualism are strictly intertwined, even though this relationship in
Translation Studies has only been studied in the last decades. As Meylaerts
argues, “recent publications cover a vast array of fields and topics—
literary translation, audio-visual translation, localization, language
management, community interpreting, language policy, etc.—and a wide
range of geographical and institutional settings—Australia, South Africa,
Nigeria, Israel, the United States, the EU, etc.”30 However, this remains
mostly associated with literary translation and language mixing. Basically,
the role of translation in the contemporary global outlook is assuming new
urgency; the strategies of translating or non-translating texts, documents,
speeches in a multi-ethnic society may foster or not multilingual
competences of the speakers involved in such language contacts. A good

28
Ibid.
29
V. Ferreira, qtd. by I. Figueiredo-Silva, I. Oliveira, Meeting Academic Needs for
Mobility Students, Catanzaro, Rubbettino, 2009, p. 122.
30
R. Meylaerts, “Multilingualism and Translation”, in Y. Gambier, L. Van
Doorslaer (eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John
Benjamins, 2010, p. 227, (227–30).
48 Part II

example of this is Belgium in the early nineteenth century where “French

was the institutionalized language in administration, army, legal affairs,
whereas institutional translation into Dutch was legally forbidden. Non-
translation obliges minorities or migrants to become (more) multilingual,
i.e. to learn the national language and operate in it for communication with
the authorities”.31The adversaries of such a translation policy consider it
discriminatory and dangerous to the maintenance or loss of language and
cultural identities. That is why other possible translation policies have
been sought in order to describe what “cosmopolitanism” is in terms of
being parts of a large homeland which transforms divergence and variation
in similarity. Here are three other cases, commented on by Meylaerts:

- Institutional monolingualism combined with occasionally and

temporary translation into the minorities’ and migrants’ languages.
This strategy foresees limited translation rights for well-defined
situations (official documents, interpreters in court, medical care, etc.)
in attendance of the minorities’ or migrants’ becoming more
multilingual through national language learning. It is applied in many
contemporary societies (e.g. the U.S.) and is based on the idea that
restricted translation furthers integration and emancipation of
minorities and migrants.
- Complete institutional multilingualism with obligatory multidirectional
translation in all the languages for all. This overall translation strategy
allows citizens to be always and everywhere served in “their own
language” in their communication with the authorities. Obviously,
especially in today’s context of growing mobility and of increasing
migration flows this communication strategy is rather utopian: it leads
to a dead end, is a financial burden and impedes social cohesion and
national identity (Van Parijs 2008).
- Institutional monolingualism at the local, lower level combined with
institutional multilingualism and multidirectional obligatory
translation at the superior (e.g. federal) level. This strategy creates
monolingual institutional islands under a multilingual umbrella,
preventing multilingualism to apply at all institutional levels. It applies
to societies with important minority groups which can claim historical
territorial rights (Belgium, Spain, Canada, Switzerland, South-Africa)
and permits them to remain monolingual, to be served always and
everywhere in “their own” language.32 [emphasis mine]

No matter which one of the policies above is applied, the problem of

translating in multilingual environments deserves as much attention as

31
Ibid., 229.
32
Ibid.

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 In-Between Spaces 49

possible, as it may contribute to language decline or language fostering.

The use of different languages and the translation services have been
frequently debated by the European Parliament musing on how to permit
the European countries to speak in one voice without undermining
multilingual essential principles. As a result of the cultural convergence,

neither in the multiculturalism of society nor in the multilingualism of the

individual do languages simply exist side by side. They interact and
interpenetrate. The multilingual competence of language users is more than
the sums of its parts. It enables them to translate and interpret, to mediate
between unilinguals, to codeswitch as ideas come more easily in one
language than another, bringing foreign words into a discourse which with
frequent use become adapted and integrated into the receiving language.33

The rapid expansion of translation-training programmes enhanced by

the European Community has involved the creation of translator certification
systems and the birth of large active associations dealing with translating
and interpreting. The United Kingdom merits inclusion as an international
case study. Below are some interesting references about the foundations of
the most important associations of translators and interpreters.
Translator training in the United Kingdom began with postgraduate
programmes, mainly for interpreters, at Westminster in London (1963) and
Bath University (1966). A four-year Bachelors programme was established
at Heriot-Watt University in 1976. The predominant model is,
nevertheless, for translators to be trained in a one-year or two-year
postgraduate programme (…); CIOL: The Chartered Institute of Linguists
was founded in 1910, and “serves the interests of professional linguists
throughout the world and acts as a respected language assessment and
recognized awarding organization delivering Ofqual (Office of
Qualifications and Examinations Regulator) accredited qualifications”.34
In 2011 its Translating Division had 2,700 members. More specifically:

The Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) was founded in 1986 as

a breakaway from the CIOL. It is a member of the FIT. “Qualified”
members require “a first degree or postgraduate qualification in a relevant
subject or a corresponding qualification accepted by ITI”; (…) TASA: The

33
J. Trim, “Multilingualism and the Interpretation of Languages of Contact”, in A.
Tosi, Crossing Barriers and Bridging Cultures: the Challenges of Multilingual
Translation for the European Union, Clevedon, Buffalo, Toronto, Sydney,
Multilingual Matters, 2003, p. 13, (8–20).
34
C. Férailleur-Dumoulin, A Career in Language Translation, Bloomington,
Author House, 2009, p.91.
50 Part II

Translators Association of the Society of Authors was established in 1958.

It is a member of the FIT and the Conseil Européen des Associations de
Traducteurs Littéraires and lists 330 members. Membership is based on
publications; (…) NUPIT: The National Union of Professional Interpreters
and Translators was founded in 2001 as a part of Unite, Britain’s largest
trade union. All the members are self-employed and freelance; (…) APCI:
The Association of Police and Court Interpreters was founded in 1974 and
had 350 members in 2011. ATC: The Association of Translation
Companies was founded in 1976. Its website lists 173 member companies;
(…) PIA: The Professional Interpreters’ Alliance was formed in 2009; (…)
SPSI: The Society for Public Service Interpreting was formed in 2011 to
represent interpreters listed with the National Register of Public Service
Interpreters (NRPSI).35

The increased flexibility of multilingual interaction does not negate

rules, goals and status of translation; on the contrary, it reaffirms the task
of interpreting and translating as promoters of multilingual awareness at an
individual and at a societal level. These “assets” are some of the actors of
the changing perspectives of multilingual communication. According to
Apfelbaum and Meyer, “while in the past linguistic research was focusing
mainly on grammatical aspects of phenomena of bi- and multilingualism,
such as code-switching, mixed languages, or, more generally, on the
variation of linguistic systems in the context of language contact,
approaches inspired by Conversation Analysis and ethnomethodology
perceive bilingual repertoires as communicative resources”.36
The first step is, then, to discover how many different tasks languages
can perform within the global society, whose hybridity is a powerful
weapon of democracy. At any rate, translation and interpreting (so the
written and the oral face of the interlanguage exchange) find a role in all
the four possible macro-perspectives on multilingualism which—as Auer
and Wei note—will remain essentially the following:

x Multilingual language acquisition (Becoming Multilingual)

x Multilingual language maintenance (Staying Multilingual)
x Multilingual interaction (Acting Multilingual)

35
See The Status of the Translation and Multilingualism: The Status of Translation
Profession in the European Union, (DGT/ 2011 /TST), Final Report, 24 July 2012,
European Commission, 2012, p. 59:
ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/publications/studies/translation_profession_en.pdf
36
B. Meyer, B. Apfelbaum (eds.), Multilingualism at Work, Amsterdam,
Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2010, p. 2.

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 In-Between Spaces 51

x The problematic relationship between a multi- or monolingual

society and a mono- or multilingual individual (Living in a
Multilingual Society).37

37
P. Auer, L. Wei (eds.), Handbook of Multilingualism and Multilingual
Communication, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2007, pp. 3–4.
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The job of the linguist, like that of the biologist or the botanist, is not to tell
us how nature should behave, or what its creations should look like, but to
describe those creations in all their messy glory and try to figure out what
they can teach us about life, the world, and, especially in the case of
linguistics, the workings of the human mind.
—Arika Okrent

The only languages which do not change are dead ones.

—David Crystal

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

—George Bernard Shaw
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 PART III

VARIABILITY AS SIMPLIFICATION
OR COMPLEXIFICATION

1. World Englishes in the global context:

discussing standard and variation
The linguistic and sociolinguistic backbone of multilingualism is
endorsed—so to speak—by the increasing spread of English. However,
worldwide Standard English is but one of the many other related varieties
which enjoy prestige on a larger scale. These variants may be identified
according to different features which make the plural “Englishes” an
umbrella term whose edges are necessarily blurred.
For instance, take all the different English-based pidgins and creoles,
the second-language varieties, the regional varieties or even the function-
focused varieties such as technical English, legal English, and all
English(es) for specific purposes.
All of these have attracted the attention of researchers for centuries
and, “a number of highly interesting questions, linguistically and
culturally, might be asked in this context, including the central issue of
why all of this has happened and whether there is an underlying scheme
that has continued to drive and motivate the evolution of new varieties of
English”.1
Indeed, we can deal with language variety according to multiple
perspectives and some of the most important categories usually used to
describe the evolution of the languages and their use may be called into
question. Descriptivism and prescriptivism, synchronic and diachronic
analysis, standard and variation are all established features of linguistic
research. Furthermore, musing on dialects, accents, regional and social
varieties of English may transform the issue of “correctness” as almost
irrelevant. In fact, and interestingly enough, “in linguistic scholarship on
the history of the English language, the prescriptivism of the modern

1
B. Kortmann, E.W. Schneider, K. Burridge, R. Mesthrie, C. Upton (eds.), A
Handbook of Varieties of English, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, p.1.
56 Part III

period is often framed as, in many ways, an epic fail. It represents a

concerted effort by a group of elitists, sometimes self-proclaimed language
authorities to stop language change that does not recognize that language
change cannot be stopped”.2
The role of authorities is more than relevant in language matters, and
prescriptivism—which can question and sometimes stop language
change—still looks backwards to Johnson’s Dictionary and its desire not
to “embalm” English language but only to preserve it from corruption and
decay. However, there is a space-between in which prescriptivism can
shape the history of English and its changes. According to Curzan, “if
histories of English evaluate the prescriptive project solely in terms of its
success or failure to stop language change, they can miss these real world
consequences for speakers, both in how they use the language and how
they think about their and others’ use of the language”.3
Yes. We are saying that from this perspective, language use can be the
success and the failure of any prescriptive approach because it does not
depend on the question “should we prescribe? And if yes, what?”, but as—
as Cameron suggested—“who prescribes for whom, what they prescribe,
how, and for what purpose? These are all interesting issues of verbal
hygiene thought as a sociolinguistic phenomenon”.4 Though coming from
one of the scholars urging purism and order in language and in the social
world, what Cameron says opens up, paradoxically, to some degree of
descriptivism of some social factors influencing the actual use of
languages.
There are some signs that the typically sharp dichotomy between
prescriptive and descriptive approaches in language phenomena has
provided some empirical evidence of language flow and its codification. In
other words, all language factors that can be described as improper or,

2
A. Curzan, Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2014, p.2.
3
Ibid., 7.
4
D. Cameron, Verbal Hygiene, London, New York, Routledge, 1995, p. 1. About
the state of the language, Cameron used the metaphor of the “verbal hygiene” as
follows: “Our commonplace narratives about language are themselves a kind of
verbal hygiene: they are bits of discourse whose function is to tidy up the
messiness of linguistic phenomena and package then neatly in forms that make
sense; they do have to be consistent with one another to fulfil this function. I do
not doubt that we need stories about language, just as we need creation myths and
botanic classification systems and theories about the dimensions of the universe or
the causes of disease, to give us a better grasp of the world we inhabit. But I do
think that in the case of language we are especially tenacious in clinging to stories
that distort and mystify far more than they explain”, pp. 214–219.

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 Variability as Simplification or Complexification 57

more generally, incorrect and considered as non-standard manifestations

of languages; seemingly, everything that can be prescribed as pure and
unchanging will be part of what standard is—or it should be—in use.
Nevertheless, whatever your attitude towards language usage and habits
may be, having English as a global language, implicitly involves a healthy
combination of prescriptivism and descriptivism. Speakers of English as a
second or foreign language may be a case in point. From Crystal’s point of
view, very little descriptive research has been done about New Englishes
becoming standardized markers of “educated regional identity”. As a
matter of fact,

Similar attitudes will be encountered in all parts of the world where

English is developing a strong non-native presence, and at all levels.
Teachers of English as a Second or Foreign Language have to deal with the
situation routinely, with students increasingly arriving in the classroom
speaking a dialect which is markedly different from Standard English. The
question of just how much local phonology, grammar, vocabulary and
pragmatics should be allowed in is difficult and contentious. But there
seems no doubt that, gradually, there is a definite ameliorative trend
around the English-speaking world, with expressions which were once
heavily penalized as local and low-class now achieving a degree status.5

Focusing on exchanges and developments of this kind gives prescriptivism

(represented by the “ameliorative trend and the degree status” in Crystal’s
quotation) some colours of the sociolinguistic field, because some varieties
of English are going through the underlying system of standardization.
In terms of vocabulary, standardization and codification result from
systematic spelling, sounds, grammatical structures and meanings. In
addition, the belief in the existence of a Standard English comes back to
the historical evolutions of the language throughout the centuries. Here, as
follows, two of the most important phases of the standardizing needs as
reported by Galloway and Rose.

There is a record of very early attempts to standardize language during the

reign of King Alfred (849–901), when policies aimed at making West
Saxon English the official language of the court, education and scholarship
(Nevalainen and van Ostade, 2006). West Saxon began to permeate other
regions of England both in its written form and through the prestige
associated with its spoken form. The next movement of language
standardization came centuries later, with the establishment and promotion

5
D. Crystal, English as Global Language (1997), Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2003, p. 176.
58 Part III

of the Chancery Standard, coupled with the impact of the printing press
(…).6

The notion of “fixing” English emerged strongly again in the

eighteenth century. In fact, as Hickey notes, apart from literary authors,
the need for fixing language patterns became “a practical concern”7for
many speakers and educators.
For example, take the eighteenth-century developments which led to
the nineteenth-century Victorian condemnation of regional or local
accents:

The eighteenth century is a period in which a large number of grammars

appeared, mostly for practical purposes, i.e. for use in education, often
private education.
It was also the period in which women wrote many such works and
these grammars do not concern themselves with variation but with
imparting knowledge about a unified form of language. The social
dimension to eighteenth-century notions of standard English concerns
attitudes to language use and the increasing concern of an incipient middle
class (then termed the “middling orders”) with the linguistic expression of
their social status. (…) The practice of elocution acquired a new meaning,
not just for the successful public oratory, but the technique of speaking
with a non-regional, quasi-standard accent.8

Looking at the worldwide English, globalization may be considered as

the new channel thanks to which its spread has been favoured, after
“settled colonization, slavery, trade and exploitation colonies”.9 The
increasing volume of speakers of ESL and EFL matches the political and
economic power of the language on a global scale. If we add the role of
pidgins and creoles as developments of relexification and language
contacts between superstrate and substrate, the future of Standard English
will have to reject all monolithic views to adopt a never-ending story of
variation and massive change. Given this, chaos theory and the complex
paradigm named after Morin’s philosophy may translate the non-linearity
and discontinuity of such widespread patterns of English.

6
N. Galloway, H. Rose, Introducing Global Englishes, London, New York,
Routledge, 2015, p. 44.
7
R. Hickey, “Standard English and standards of English”, in R. Hickey (ed.),
Standards of English: Codified Varieties Around the World, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2012, p. 5, (1–33).
8
Ibid., 5–6.
9
Ibid., 8.

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 Variability as Simplification or Complexification 59

Consider the case of creoles with their multiple external variables

which a nonlinear language contact may involve:

x The ratio of various populations during creole genesis;

x The degrees of hegemony and subservience and heterogeneity or
homogeneity of each population (different at each site of genesis);
x The number and nature of the superstrate languages involved and/or
the dialectal complex of the superstrate; and
x The extent of sociological expansion of the nascent creole at or shortly
after the moment of genesis.10

As English is becoming the language of whoever is able to speak it,

standardization will never be complete as the language will keep on
absorbing vital and harmful substances from its cultural and linguistic
environments. The increasingly divergent nature of what Standard English
should be, and what dialects and varieties of English are, is still a matter
for to debate.
As attractive as it might be to assume that a perfectly regular English
does exist, fixed and codified language patterns are now more than ever
under pressure. There is an incredible amount of information on language
contact, dialects, varieties, accents, and vernaculars, but the possible kinds
of variation always involve individual use and the speech community with
its repertoires. Since it is all-encompassing, the term speech community
has been debated because of the fuzziness of what a speech community
can be today in global society. Since English is the focus of this work, “in
reality speakers of English can be distinguished regionally, ethnically, and
socially, as well as through factors like their gender, jobs and interests. In
other words, they belong to several speech communities at the same time,
which may be discrete or intersecting”.11
The gulf between standard English and its possible varieties is thus
doomed to increase according to the role(s) and the impact of English in
the world; consequently, issues like identity, medium, special purposes,
gender, and internationality must play the most important part in the
debate about language variation, say, providing that mixture of descriptive
and prescriptive information about such topics which affect a wide range

10
G. Lang, “‘Chaos and Creoles’: towards a new paradigm?”, in J. McWhorter
(ed.), Language Change and Language Contact in Pidgins and Creoles,
Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2000, p. 446, (443–458).
11
D. Davies, Varieties of Modern English: An Introduction, London, Pearson
Longman, 2005, p. 5.
60 Part III

of language matters such sounds, meanings, etymologies, spellings and

supra-segmentals too.
In the field of varieties of British English, American English is
definitely the most intimate relative—at least at first sight. On the
contrary, there are lots of studies based on the comparison between the
two “reference varieties”, as Schachtebeck has called them,12 and more
specifically about their different spelling, pronunciation, punctuation,
lexicon, and the historical reasons for their developments. In short, as the
George Bernard Shaw’s famous quotation states, “England and America
are two countries divided by a common language.” The paradox of a
“division” by something which is “common” perfectly pinpoints the
history of one of the most relevant English dialects spoken today in the
world, often referred to as “Standard American English”.
Unfortunately, such a label does not mark the end of a quarrel about
one of the most prestigious varieties of English, providing chief patterns to
native and non-native speakers worldwide. In its development, American
English has gone through different stages, “from the simple transplantation
of a wide range of British dialects to the Americas to the internal
diversification of dialects within America”.13

12
T. Schachtebeck, Spotlight on Standard American English and Standard British
English, Munich, Grin Verlag, 2007, p. 2.
13
W. Wolfram, N. Schilling-Estes, American English (1998), Second Edition,
Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, p. 103. The volume gives an interesting list of
some common “myths” about dialects. Here, as follows, some of these myths and
their real counterpart:
“MYTH: a dialect is something that someone else speaks.
REALITY: everyone who speaks a language speaks some dialect of the language;
it is not possible to speak a language without speaking a dialect of the language.
MYTH: dialects always have highly noticeable features that set them apart.
REALITY: some dialects get much more attention than others, but the status of a
dialect is unrelated to public commentary about its special characteristics.
MYTH: only varieties of a language spoken by socially disfavored groups are
dialects.
REALITY: the notion of dialect exists apart from social status or evaluation; there
are socially favored as well as socially disfavored dialects.
MYTH: dialects result from unsuccessful attempts to speak the ‘correct’ form of
language.
REALITY: dialects speakers acquire their language by adopting the speech
features of those around them, not by failing in their attempts to adopt standard
language features.
MYTH: dialects have no linguistic patterning in their own right; they are
deviations from standard speech.

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 Variability as Simplification or Complexification 61

In American English, Wolfram and Schilling-Estes outline a complete

and up-to-date picture of American English, focusing on how the term
“dialect” started its life as a neutral label referred to language patterns
shared by a group of speakers. Only since the 1960s has research into
dialects and vernaculars in the United States “started focusing more
specifically on social and ethnic variation in American English than on
regional variation”.14
Thus, since the 1970s the number of studies on vernacular varieties of
English in the United States increased so much as to have—for example—
more comprehensible bibliographies of African American English, listing
“over 2,400 entries related to this variety”,15 and of the Southern variety,
listing “over 3,800 work, the majority of which relate to the vernacular
dialects of the South”.16
In order to comprehend the different levels of dialect and further issues
of language reform and spread in American English, it is necessary to
remember how much of the variation came from the settlers in North
America during the colonial period and how much of American English
history is connected to the immigrants who came to the “New World” with
their lexical differences and language models.
Such intertwined language relationships are well represented by the
following examples as offered by Davies who comments on the countries
which most enriched the American variety:

Country Borrowing
France Bayou (a marshy inlet)
Netherlands Caboose, cookie, coleslaw, waffle
Spain Coyote, adobe, mesa
Germany Bum (shortened from bummer); to nix

REALITY: dialects, like all language systems, are systematic and regular;
furthermore, socially disfavored dialects can be described with the same kind of
precision as standard language varieties.
MYTH: dialects inherently carry negative social connotations.
REALITY: dialects are not necessarily positively or negatively valued; their social
values are derived strictly from the social position of their communities of
speakers.”, pp 7–8.
14
Ibid. 25.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
62 Part III

Chutzpah (impudence/nerve)
To kibitz (to give unsolicited advice/joke around)
Kosher (genuine/legitimate)
Klutz (clumsy person)
To schlep (trudge/lug)
Central
Schmaltz (exaggerated sentimentalism)
European
Schmooze (chat/gossip)
Countries
Schnoz (a large nose)
Tush (backside)*
*These expressions are of Yiddish origin, from the
many Central European Jews who settled in New
York.

The table has been freely adapted from C. Davies, Divided by a Common
Language, 2005.17

2. The “cases” of African American English

and the Gullah variation: features and achievements
The history of dialects in the United States begins with the colonial
period and continues with the westward expansion of English and its
current features.
African American English, also known as Black American English,
Ebonics, Negro Dialect, African American Vernacular English, Vernacular
Black English, Non-standard Negro English, or Spoken Soul,18 is one of
the most interesting dialects spoken in the United States.

17
C. Davies, Divided by a Common Language: A Guide to British and American
English, Boston, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005, pp. 4–6.
18
About the Spoken Soul see, J.R. Rickford, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black
English, New York, Chichester, Weinheim, Brisbane, Singapore, Toronto, John
Wiley & Sons, 2000, p. 3. Here Rickford gives the very origin of the terms
“spoken soul” used to call the Black talk. As he writes, “‘spoken soul’ was the
name that Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land, coined for
black talk. In a 1968 interview he waxed eloquent in its praise, declaring that the
informal speech or vernacular of many African Americans ‘possess a pronounced
lyrical quality which is frequently incompatible to any music other than that
ceaselessly and relentlessly driving rhythm that flows from poignantly spent
lives’”, p. 3. Claude Brown was born in 1937 in Harlem. His 1965 best-seller,
Manchild in the Promised Land, is an autobiography on his youth and tells of his
ascent from a dreadful childhood of violence, crimes and poverty. The book is
currently considered a classic of American literature. He died in 2002.

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 Variability as Simplification or Complexification 63

According to Wolfram and Schilling-Estes, such variety can be seen as

“a case study” about standard and variation: its diversity is ethnicity-
based, that is, involving a multifaceted complexity deriving from a cutting
edge relationship between language and social issues.
The increasing number of linguists interested in the matter (e.g. Labov,
Mufwene, Foster, Lanehart, Smitherman, Morgan, and Wolfram Wyatt, to
name just a few) point out the inevitable interdisciplinarity of language use
in and by the African American speech communities. Most controversies
come from the African American lexicon and the phonological and
grammatical features which differentiate African American English from
other vernacular varieties currently spoken in the United States.
In conjunction with such language issues, the “white-black” balance
sustains the comparison between African American English and other
“white American varieties”. In other words, the black-and-white speech
relationship encompasses the history itself of such a dialect which was
born in the United States as a result of the slave trade in the eighteenth
century. Exploring these relationships means evoking the first experiences
of language and social discrimination and its following establishment in
the field of education, media, literature, and music.
Indeed, the African American speech community is a rich one, in terms
of cultures and sub-internal varieties. Oddly enough, the AAE shows
internal, say, regional variation to some extent: we may distinguish
between northern metropolitan versions and southern rural ones, or, even
more, “between the South Atlantic coastal varieties which are different
from those found in the Gulf region”.19
At the same time, these admitted sub-varieties share a number of
supra-regional language features. Here are some of the most relevant
structural features of AAE, which may be useful in a contrastive study of
widespread English. To begin with, the following rules and examples will
aim at demonstrating that AAE is not “just a badly spoken version of
English, marred by a lot of ignorant mistakes in grammar and
pronunciation, or worse than that, an unimportant and mostly abusive
repertoire of street slang used by an ignorant urban underclass”.20
The most relevant phonological features of AAE that have been
investigated since the 1960s onwards deal with stress markers and certain
sound combinations with their phonological environment. Thus, the
description of such an underlying phonological system has been mostly
based on the study of final consonant sounds, devoicing, liquid

19
W. Wolfram, N. Schilling-Estes, American English, p. 218.
20
R.S. Wheeler, The Workings of Language: from Prescriptions to Perspectives,
Westport, Conn, Praeger, 1999, p. 40.
64 Part III

vocalization, additional phonological patterns (such as -in), the

occurrence of skr in syllable initial position, haplology, vowel sounds,
metathesis, and mutations of interdental fricatives.21
Considering the available data, and given the fields mentioned above,
below are some examples of the most frequently quoted features of AAE
phonological system:

x Reduction of word-final consonant clusters especially in those

ending in t or d as in han’ for the Standard English hand.
x Deletion of word-final single consonant (mostly nasals) after a
vowel, as in ma’ for the Standard English man.
x Voiceless th (ș) as t or f, as in: tin for the Standard English thin.
x baf or the SE bath.
x Voiced th (ð) as d or v, as in den for Standard English then.
x Deletion or vocalization of l after a vowel, as in he’p for SE help.
x Deletion or vocalization of r after a vowel, as in sistuh for SE
sister.
x Deletion of initial d and g in certain tense-aspect auxiliaries, as in
ah ’on know for the SE I don’t know.
x Deletion of unstressed initial and medial syllables as in ’fraid for
SE afraid, or with sec’t’ry for SE secretary.
x Metathesis or transposition of adjacent consonants as in aks for SE
ask.
x Haplology or deletion of reduplicated syllable as in Mississippi –
Misipi.
x Realization of syllable-initial str as skr as in skreet for SE street, or
deskroy for SE destroy.
x The realization as n of the sound ng in the -ing suffix (runnin for
SE running).
x The occurrence of the diphthong [oܼ] in some environments in
which oa (as in coach) occurs in general American English.22

21
For detailed descriptions of each category see L.J. Green, African American
English: A Linguistic Introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002,
pp. 106–124.
22
As Green notes, “it is possible that the [oܼ] is an example of an older patter of
AAE (…). The first part of the diphthong is the o sound in coach, and the second
part is the [i] sound at the beginning of itch. Speakers who use this diphthong have
the following pronunciation: coach [koit‫]ݕ‬, road [roܼd], approach [ԥproܼt‫]ݕ‬, roach
[roܼt‫]ݕ‬. The examples here are from speakers who either live in or grew up in the
South (in particular, Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana), but it would be

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 Variability as Simplification or Complexification 65

x Stress on first rather than second syllable as in pólice instead of SE

police.
x Realization of ing as ang, and ink as ank in some words as in thang
for SE thing, or drank for SE drink.
x More varied intonation, with higher pitch range.23

The observation of such distinctive features show how AAE is a

systematic variety and not a careless speech one, as some may assume. In
addition, there are other relevant aspects that increase the structured body
of AAE, even under the morphological and syntactical level, the verbal
system, and in prosody.
Look at the following elements which give a general overview of the
dialect which has been stirring new and new debates after the famous
Oakland School Board’s decision (December 1996) to make its teachers
more sensitive towards the vernacular spoken by their African American
students.24

Some AAE features about morphology, syntax, verbal markers, and

negation:

x The absence of the Saxon Genitive -’s

x The absence of plural - s
x The absence of the third singular person - s

interesting to determine whether AAE speakers actually use this diphthong if they
live in other parts of the United States and do not have close ties with the South”,
in L.J. Green, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction, p. 123.
23
The list of features above has been freely arranged from J.R. Rickford, African
American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution, Educational Implications,
New York, Chichester, Weinheim, Brisbane, Singapore, Toronto, John Wiley &
Sons, 1999, pp. 4–5.
24
The event, known also as “The Ebonics Controversy”, dates back to 1996–1997
and it deals with how the Ebonics gained a global attention. About December 18,
1996, Baugh reports: “That was the day the Oakland California school board
passed a resolution declaring Ebonics to be the ‘predominantly primary language’
of its 28,000 African American students. That linguistic assertion did more than
label the speech of every African American student attending public schools in
Oakland. It also set off a chain of political and research events that continue to
reverberate in communities where people of African descent speak English.”, see J.
Baugh, “Ebonics and its controversy”, in E. Finegan, J.R. Rickford (eds.),
Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 305, (305–318).
66 Part III

x The presence of multiple negation (as in I ain’t goin’ to give

nothin’ to nobody).
x The use of is and was with plural and second person subjects (as in
we was there).
x The absence of copula in contracted forms of is and are (as in she
good instead of she is good).
x The use of be for habitual or discontinuous actions (as in sometimes
my ears be itching).
x The use of an invariant be for the future “will be” as a result of the
deletion of the contracted form from we will be ĺwe’ll be ĺ we
be.
x The use of stressed BIN to mark remote phase (that the action
happened or the state came into being long ago) as in she BIN
married for she has been married for a long time (and still is).25
x The use of finna (sometimes fitna, derived from fixin’to) to mark
immediate future, as in he finna go for he’s about to go.
x The use of had + simple past to mark a simple past action (as in He
had saw a flower).
x Double suffixation of past tenses and past participles as in liked +
ed instead of liked.
x The absence of relative pronouns (who, which, what and that) as in
that’s the man came here for the SE that is the man who came
here.26

In a similar way, AAE differs in some prosodic features and vocabulary

items too.
As for the former, the study of suprasegmentals may be useful to catch
what is the meaning of “sounding black or white” as suggested by
Rickford in 1972, or—at least—to understand if such distinction may
stand on prosodic patterns too. Regarding Rickford’s investigation, Green
notes that, “according to his data, listeners who heard speech samples were
able to identify speakers’ ethnicity with some degree of accuracy. In the
study, it was suggested that a number of features such as stress patterns,

25
J.R. Rickford, African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution,
Educational Implications, p.6.
26
Ibid. About the omission of relative pronouns Rickford notes that while the
omission of object relative pronouns is allowed in many varieties of English, the
omission of subject relative pronouns is rarer and unique to AAE.

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 Variability as Simplification or Complexification 67

pronunciation and tone of the voice are indicators of the ethnicity of the
speakers”.27
One of the most interesting AAE prosodic cues deals with the stress
moving to the first syllable of the words as in pólice instead of políce; at
the same time, AAE shows a peculiar intonation made up of rises and falls
of the pitch curve which is far from other European American English.
Thus, the study of prosodic cues as markers of language ethnicity dates
back to the 1970s with Tarone’s examination of the intonation contours of
African American and European American adolescents. From Loman,
Michaels and Collins onwards, such a perspective has shown how much
the understanding of prosody in dialectology may reveal social meanings
and intra-speaker variations strictly related to language use and co-existing
systems of language varieties.
Other interesting issues arise from some vocabulary items which
clearly have West African origins (such as buckra “white man”, tote “to
carry”, bogus “fake”) or—in other cases—are items which have English
form but an overlapping Western African meaning (as in dig “to
understand”, cool “calm”, bad “really good”).28 The last example shows a
second significant feature of AAE tendencies in vocabulary, say, the
reversal process of using negatives to refer to positive things; such a facet
seems to come from West African usage.29
The data reported put AAE in a hybrid position calling for a complex
viewpoint about its development. In other words, it needs an integrated
approach which begins from the four major hypotheses concerning its
birth and evolution (the Anglicist hypothesis, the Creolist hypothesis, the

27
L.J. Green, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction, p. 124.
28
Africanisms can be analyzed according to a double perspective, the one of
retention and/or the one of continuity. As Williams explains, “An African retention
is a cultural element that is identical, or nearly identical, with an element in the
African source culture, in both form and function. On the other hand, an African
continuity is a modified version of an African cultural element or a foreign element
that has been modified to conform to an African cultural pattern. Continuities are,
by definition, more difficult to study”, see S.W. Williams, “Substantive
Africanisms at the End of the African Linguistic Diaspora”, in S.S., Mufwene, N.
Condon (eds.), Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties, Athens,
London, The University of Georgia Press, 1993, p. 411, (403–422).
29
See also T.B. Champion, Understanding Storytelling Among African American
Children: A Journey from Africa to America, London, New York, Routledge,
2014, pp. 109–114.
68 Part III

Neo-Anglicist hypothesis and the Substrate hypothesis as introduced by

Wolfram and Schilling-Estes).30
Although the historical origins have been commonly associated with
the slave trade of African natives brought to the New World and to the
subsequent creole languages which flourished in such African diaspora,
the real status and background of AAE is still under dispute. Even up to
this point, as Wolfram and Thomas note, “written records are sporadic and
incomplete, and open to interpretation; demographic information about
language use is also selective and largely anecdotal”.31
The definition of clear boundaries of AAE is contrasted even by the
existence of sub-varieties under the umbrella term “African American
English”, owing to the role played by the term “vernacular” and its
monopolization. The Gullah variation is one of the most interesting cases
in point.

30
“The Anglicist Hypothesis was initially proposed by prominent American
dialectologists such as Hans Kurath and Raven McDavid in the mid-twentieth
century, based on extensive surveys of regional English under the aegis of the
Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. (…) It appeared that older black
and white speakers interviewed in the 1930s and 1940s shared many of the same
regional features. On this basis, American dialectologists concluded that AAE
could be traced to the same sources as earlier European American dialects, the
dialects of English spoken in the British Isles. According to this historical scenario,
slaves brought a number of different African languages with them when they were
transported, but over the course of a couple of generations these were replaced by
the English varieties spoken by their regional cohorts, with only a few minor traces
of the ancestral languages remaining. (…) According to the Creolist Hypothesis
(which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s), AAE developed from a creole language
that was fairly widespread in the antebellum South. (…) The Neo-Anglicist
Hypothesis is like the Anglicist Hypothesis in maintaining the earlier, postcolonial
African American speech was directly linked to the early British dialects brought
to North America. However, the Neo-Anglicist position acknowledges that AAE
has since diverged so that it is now quite distinct from contemporary European
American vernacular speech.”, see W. Wolfram, “African America English”, in B.
Kachru, Y. Kachru, C. Nelson (eds.), The Handbook of World Englishes, Oxford,
Blackwell Publishing, 2009, pp. 334–335, (328–348); as for the new “substrate
hypothesis”, Wolfram and Schilling-Estes state that “even though earlier AAE may
have incorporated many features from regional varieties of English in America, its
durable substrate effects have always distinguished it from other varieties of
American English.”, see W. Wolfram, N. Schilling-Estes, American English, p.
223.
31
W. Wolfram, E. Thomas, The Development of African American English,
Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2002, p. 184.

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 Variability as Simplification or Complexification 69

Gullah,32 locally defined as Geechee, and named after a tribe in

Liberia, seems to be “the most conservative form of ‘black English’
spoken in the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia today. It strongly
resembles the Krio language of Sierra Leone and draws many elements
from other West African languages as well”.33
Developed in the rice fields during the eighteenth century, Gullah is
considered as a creole English-based vernacular whose origins are still
under dispute because of its in-between space amid the Anglicist
hypothesis and the Creolist one which has gained a wide recognition
because “there is no evidence of copula absence in the history of British
English”.34
Of course, the endeavours that seek to establish the connection
between Gullah, AAE and English as its base language have shown
interesting results about the dynamics of language contacts here involved.
After his investigation of Gullah speech community from 1929 to 1949,
Lorenzo Dow Turner—considered to be the first relevant black African
American linguist—delivered some interesting figures about the number
of African words (approximately 350) and nicknames (roughly 3,600)
used by Gullah speakers; at the same time, he noticed how the African
heritage in Gullah variety was not only vocabulary restricted.
As reported in the second volume of the Encyclopedia of African
American History, edited by Finkelman,

before Turner, Gullah was usually considered “broken” English, but

Turner demonstrated that Gullah was structured as systematically as any
language; it had a predictable sound structure, a method of forming words,
and a grammar and or syntax. (…) He was able to prove, among other
things, that the intonation of words within a sentence structure played an
important role in the meaning of Gullah sentences, just as it does in West
African “tone languages”.35

32
As Pollitzer reports, “the first known appearance in print of a word resembling
‘Gullah’ was in the South Carolina Gazette, May 12, 1739, in an ad for a runaway,
Golla Harry. John Bennet claimed that it was derived from the Gola tribe of
Liberia, one source of slaves brought into Charleston.”, see W.S. Pollitzer, The
Gullah People and Their African Heritage, Athens, London, The University of
Georgia Press, 1999, p. 107.
33
N. Brouwers, The Face of an Island: The Gullah Language Variety of the
Southern Coastal Sea Islands, Munich, Grin Verlag, 2004, p. 4.
34
Ibid.
35
P. Finkelman (ed.), Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619–1895:
from the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass, Vol. 2, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 253. Re Turner, Cross notes that “He also
70 Part III

One of the most intriguing features of Gullah dialect is the peculiar and
frequent use of idioms, proverbs or fixed expressions: For example:

Mus tek cyear a de root fa heal de tree (SE: you need to take care of the
root in order to heal the tree);

Tek'e foot een 'e han (SE: to run, or to leave quickly);

Tas'e 'e mout' (SE: something appetizing to eat);

Two-time-one-gun (a double barrelled gun); and

Lawfully lady (lawfully wedded wife).36

In terms of vocabulary, there are words which convey wide-ranging

thoughts depending on the tone used; thus, the semantic sets of single
words increase so as to allow a few well-chosen words to express complex
ideas.
Finally, while the African roots of Gullah are evident, one can presume
that Gullah vernacular diverged further from its colonial language
ancestors than AAE. Moreover, “the colonies of Virginia, very central to
the emergence of AAVE, and of South Carolina, critical to the emergence
of Gullah, did not start at the same time. The former was founded in 1607
directly from England, while the latter started as a second generation
colony settled from Barbados in 1670”.37

composed many of the Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Wolf tales, which were popular with
adults as well as with children and are much quoted today. He pointed out many
common words in English that are almost directly related to their African
counterparts. These include, for example, the following: animal names (bambi,
gorilla, zebra); plant names and foods (banana, goober, okra, yam); action words
(bogus, booboo, boogie, dig, hippie, honkie, jamboree, juke, sock, tote); religious
and ‘otherworld’ terms (bad eye, booger, boogie, mojo, voodoo, zombie); and
musical and dance terms (bamboula, banjo, bongo, jive, mambo, samba)”, see W.
Cross, Gullah Culture in America, Winston-Salem, John F. Blair Publisher, 2012,
p. 153. About Turner’s researches, see L.D. Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah
Dialect, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1949.
36
See V. Mixson Geraty, “The Gullah Creole Language”, in
Charleston County Public Library:
www.ccpl.org/content.asp?id=15717&catID=6042&action=detail
37
S.S. Mufwene, “The emergence of African American English”, in S. Lanehart
(ed.), The Oxford Handbook of African American Language, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2015, p. 58, (57–84).

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 Variability as Simplification or Complexification 71

The relationship between Gullah, AAE and English still shows

complex issues; the pidgin evolution into creole was undoubtedly
influenced by the English dialects spoken by the overseers on the
plantations where it was born for mutual communication needs.
Nevertheless, the establishment of a structured grammar, a widespread
lexicon, and a relevant number of fixed expressions used do not allow any
definite confirmation of its status of sub-variety of AAE.
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Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every
dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted
composition of all.
—Walt Whitman

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English

than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and
sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and
uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.
—John Steinbeck

Never let it be said that dialect is a reflection of intellect. On the contrary,

it is a reflection of the deep traditional values of a culture that respects
family, God, and a language system above everything else. I give thanks to
my maker that I’m a Southern woman.
—Patricia H. Graham

Dialect is one of those words that almost everybody thinks they

understand, but which is in fact a bit more problematic than at first seems
to be the case.(…) But whether the focus is regional or social, there are
two important matters that need to be considered when defining “dialect”.
We have to decide what the building blocks of a dialect might be. And even
before this, we could usefully confront the most common mistakes that
people make when referring to “dialect”.
—Oxford English Dictionary
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 PART IV

CHARTING DIVERSITY

1. Dialectometry versus dialectology?

The interest in documenting the different varieties of English springs
from the fascinating maps of its geographical and social dialects.
Moreover, new approaches to dialect study have been developed in recent
decades moving from what Kirk, Sanderson and Widdowson defined in
1985 as “a need for a radical revision of older cartographical techniques
and the production of a new map in which the SED (Survey of English
Dialects) fieldwork localities can be presented in the context of the new
English counties”.1
The cartographic mapping overlapped the emergence of a new
dialectometry which dealt with the description of language phenomena
whose results—in Sanderson and Widdowson’s words—“can fruitfully be
applied to many other branches of language study, and indeed to an
impressive range of cultural studies including history, literature,
anthropology, folklore and social studies in general”.2
The legend of dialects as fossils far from the global dimension of
language studies should thus be banned in the name of a great number of
inter-related English varieties which show real contexts of living speech
rather than “good” or “bad” English.
Dialectometry and standardization therefore become interesting tools
for measuring linguistic differences, establishing language typologies and
endorsing systemic characteristics which can be formalized. Borin assumes
the existence of a “linguistic distance measure”, which,

1
J.M. Kirk, S. Sanderson, J.D.A. Widdowson, “Introduction: Principles and
Practice in Linguistic Geography”, in J. M. Kirk, S. Sanderson, J.D.A. Widdowson
(eds.), Studies in Linguistic Geography, London, New York, Routledge, 1985, p. 1,
(1–33).
2
S. Sanderson, J.D.A. Widdowson “Linguistic geography in England: progress
and prospects”, in J.M. Kirk, S. Sanderson, J.D.A. Widdowson (eds.), Studies in
Linguistic Geography, p. 34, (34–50).
76 Part IV

gives us not only the means for determining when two individual language
systems or linguistic products should be considered to represent the same
language—using some kind of (motivated) threshold—but also for
grouping languages in more encompassing categories and placing them
relation to each other in some kind of abstract space.3

Idiolects, balancing between individual usage and their social

constitution, seem to be the safe ground of every speaking behaviour
reasonably representative of linguistic products. After all, they do not
change in an unpredictable way, as they involve different steps within
blurred geographic and social boundaries which make the terms “variety”
and “dialect” a multidimensional area and a difficult task to face with. It is
probably true that English varieties come from the colonial legacy and
from what Trudgill defines “the inevitability of colonial dialects”.4
However, we already know that standard English is but one of the
varieties of English available; or, in other words, it is a socially marked
dialect which is “no longer a geographical dialect, even if we can tell that
its origins were originally in the southeast of England”.5
Taking all this into account, the debate is still widening its perspectives
even far from the prescriptive boundaries for grammarians who have to
accept some interesting “idiosyncrasies of Standard English”6 if compared
to many other dialects which seem to be more “regular” and “accurate”.
Here are some interesting SE features, as reported by Trudgill:

x SE fails to distinguish between the forms of the auxiliary verb do and

its main verb forms (…);
x SE has an unusual and irregular present tense verb morphology in that
only the third person singular receives morphological marking: he goes
versus I go. Many other dialects use either zero for all persons or -s for
all persons;
x SE lacks multiple negation (…);

3
L. Borin, “The why and how of measuring linguistic differences”, in L. Borin, A.
Saxena (eds.), Approaches to Measuring Linguistic Differences, Berlin, Boston,
Mouton De Gruyter, 2013, p. 4, (3–25).
4
P. Trudgill, New-dialect Formation. The Inevitability of Colonial English,
Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
5
P. Trudgill, “Standard English: what it isn’t”, in T. Bex, R.J. Watts (eds.),
Standard English: The Widening Debate, London, New York, Routledge, 1999, p.
124, (117–28).
6
Ibid., 125.

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 Charting Diversity 77

x SE has an irregular formation of reflexive pronouns with some forms

based on the possessive pronouns, e.g. myself, and others on the
objective pronouns, e.g. himself (…);
x SE fails to distinguish between second-person singular and second-
person plural pronouns, having you in both cases (…);
x SE has irregular forms of the verb to be both in the present tense (am,
is, are) and in the past (was, were) (…);
x In the case of many irregular verbs, SE redundantly distinguishes
between preterite and perfect verb forms both by the use of the
auxiliary have and by the use of distinct preterite and past participle
forms: I have seen versus I saw. Many other dialects have I have seen
versus I seen; and
x SE has only a two-way contrast in its demonstrative system, with this
(near to the speaker) opposed to that (away from the speaker). Many
other dialects have a three-way system involving a further distinction
between, for example, that (near to the listener), and yon (away from
both the speaker and listener).7

As is evident, language mobility and dialect mixture has drawn a new

map of English changes and its contacts with and within indigenous
languages; in these cases, the social status which the speakers belong to is
more than relevant.
Indeed, the history of dialects blending and a sort of “variationist”
approach to language matters regarded the very first evolutions of English
language, from Old English onwards.
According to Trudgill,

Nielsen ascribes some of the characteristics of early Old English to the fact
that it is the result of a mixture of West Germanic dialects from continental
Europe. (…) because of dialect mixture Old English had, initially, more
variability that the other Germanic languages where no colonial dialect
mixture had been involved. For example, Old English had a large number
of different forms for “first”: ærest (cf. Old High german eristo); forma (cf.
Old Frisian forma); formesta (cf. Gothic frumists); and first (cf. Old Norse
fyrstr).8

Given the contingency of historical data, the matter of “English(es)”

involves a complex view, requiring pluralism and new methodological
paradigms. An interesting layered list of new frameworks for the history of
English is summed up by Adams in his introduction to Studies in the
History of the English Language (2015). Significantly, he collects 13

7
Ibid.
8
P. Trudgill, New-dialect Formation. The Inevitability of Colonial English, p. 11.
78 Part IV

different historical linguistic reconstructions, demonstrating a wide range

of methodological approaches used to investigate very different language
phenomena throughout the historical evolution of English (from Old
English to the contemporary one, from issues concerning phonology, to
syntax and lexicon matters).9
Finally, the volume ends with three “paradigm-shifting” papers
concerning some interesting psycholinguistic perspectives on early
English (as proposed by Bergs and Pentrel); an ideological rebuilding of
the term onomatopoeia (by Moore); and a discussion about the
relationships between complexity systems and the history of English
language (by Kretzschmar).10
According to the latter, linguistic matters, language use and speech
data can be analysed according to the magnifying glass of the complexity
theory. This extends the importance of a new linguistics of speech, which
balances between the role of rules and how rules may come from what
people actually say.
More specifically,

Correctness, the ideology of Standard English, is something in which

people believe, even to the extent that they associate correctness with
morality and citizenship. It is unlikely that linguists would ever be able to
substitute for correctness another set of beliefs (“authentic
understanding”), whether beliefs about some linguistic structure or about
speech. But most people also believe implicitly in the rightness of language
for particular groups of people, as a result of our perception of speech
around us, and most linguists can also value the rightness of language in
use for the population that uses it, both those interested in the structure (for
instance those in the endangered language movement) and those interested
in speech.11

Such a new distributional model results in the combination of many

sub-disciplines of linguistics which recognize the new boundaries of
language varieties by putting the notion of correctness into question. Indeed,
English as a lingua franca is facing the challenge of being right and
effective at the same time, or, in other words, it dwells in an interesting in-

9
See M. Adams, L.J. Brinton, R.D. Fulk (eds.), Studies in the History of the
English Language VI, Berlin, Munich, Boston, Mouton de Gruyter, 2015, p. 1 and
ff.
10
Ibid., 247.
11
W.A. Kretzschmar, Jr., The Linguistics of Speech, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2009, p. 275.

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 Charting Diversity 79

between space between grammatical correctness and uncodified actual

language behaviours.
In terms of cultural salience, dialectology—as Viereck states—“which
is so readily accused of being broadly deficient in theories, has done
something for theoretical structuralist linguistics”.12 One of the premises
for such a theoretical grounding can be found in the large amount of data
in linguistic atlases which overcome the traditional geographic patterns,
mostly used to explain variation according to a spatial framework. It is
what Pickl and Rumpf call “a variant-based dialectometry”:

If we try to find patterns in the spreads of linguistic forms (“sprachliche

Erscheinungen”) rather than of lects (“Sprachen”), and then “aggregate
them” by assembling them into a corpus of geographical patterns, the
concept of linguistic space is quite different. It is the single variant, then,
that establishes linguistic spaces, which entails as many spatial
configurations as there are linguistic variables. (…) If ten out of a hundred
linguistic variables show a recurrent, clear pattern which is not represented
in the distribution of the lects as a whole, then relevant information is
being ignored during the dialectometric process. A reversal of the sequence
1) aggregation 2) detection of patterns can prevent this information from
being neglected and lead to a new methodology in dialectometry that is
based on a different concept of linguistic space and directed at answering
different questions than those typically asked by classical dialectometry.13

Hence, in order to give a more complex picture of varieties as a broad

area of language changes and dynamics, the quantifying procedure offered
by dialectometry can be helpful to the dialectologists’ tasks; but since the
classification of dialects represents one of the many targets of dialectology, it
may also be “unsatisfactory since much of the qualitative information
contained in a linguistic atlas is lost through the counting process”.14
In a tentative conclusion we may say that while the variant-based
paradigm opens up to language spread (redrawing a map of forms which
begin within the contemporary blurred edges of a dialect whose elements

12
W. Viereck, “Linguistic Atlases and Dialectometry: The Survey of English
Dialects”, in in J.M. Kirk, S. Sanderson, J.D.A. Widdowson (eds.), Studies in
Linguistic Geography, p. 94, (94–112).
13
S. Pickl, J. Rumpf, “Dialectometric concepts of space: towards a variant-based
dialectometry”, in S. Hansen, C. Schwarz, P. Stoeckle, T. Streck (eds.),
Dialectological and Folk Dialectological Concepts of Space, Berlin, Boston,
Mouton de Gruyter, 2012, pp. 200–201, (199–214).
14
W. Viereck, “The Computerization and Quantification of Linguistic Data:
Dialectometrical Methods”, in A.R. Thomas (ed.), Methods in Dialectology,
Clevedon, Multilingual Matters, 1988, p.547, (524–50).
80 Part IV

in aggregation detect new language patterns), the use of statistics and

mathematical information may still lose some extra information which
play an important role in dialects classification (e.g. cultural and social
code-switching phenomena, migration issues, or individual’s language
properties).

2. English dialects and non-standard varieties

In relation to contemporary English, the term “dialect” as a regional or
social variety to which the educated speakers were unaccustomed, has
undergone various and relevant historical developments. As a matter of
fact, the spread of education, together with the increased strength of a
spoken language open to the acquisition of new words from different
fields or nations, affect the very original sense of the word “dialect” as
reported by Rev. Skeat in his famous survey of English Dialects in 1911.
He wrote, “The word dialect was simply a ‘manner of speaking’ or
‘phraseology’, in accordance with its derivation from the Greek dialectos,
a discourse or way of speaking; from the verb dialegesthai, to discourse or
converse”.15
In the strictest sense, what Skeat investigated as English Dialects with
their value and legacy (specifically, the dialects of Northumbria, the
southern dialect, the southern dialect of Kent, and the Mercian dialect)
may be considered the tip of the iceberg of the contemporary macro-area
which studies language variations combining the social and geographic
dimension of dialects with a sociolinguistic perception of certain varieties
of English.
Apart from the most traditional English dialects still perceived as
regional varieties, plenty of “provincialisms” (such as the ones mentioned
above), the ownership of English as a non-native language internationally
spoken, together with what Trudgill calls the “inevitability of Colonial
Englishes” (predictable form the mixture of dialects taken from the British
Isles to the Southern Hemisphere throughout the nineteenth century), defy
a unique and simplified idea of what dialects are, or should be.
Since the English Dialect Grammar by Wright (1905), the survey of
dialects comprised the dialects of England, Shetland and the Orkney
Islands, together with those parts of Scotland, Ireland and Wales where
English was habitually spoken.

15
W.W. Skeat, English Dialects, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1911, p.
1.

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However, Wright’s grammar intended to muse particularly on non-

literary words, less influenced by the literary language than the ordinary
words in use both in literature and dialects. It was a huge and challenging
task, because the material to be gathered in the grammar was so great that,
as Wright explained in the Preface, “it was found expedient to compile and
print the index first, and then to write the grammar chiefly form the
material contained in the index”.16
The result was a grammar containing 2,431 words, 15,924 dialect
forms, and over 90,000 references to counties or parts of counties.
A few years later, MacBride restricted the focus of dialects
investigation, publishing his London’s Dialect, an Ancient Form of
English, with a Note on the Dialects of the North of England and the
Midlands and of Scotland (1910).
As is evident from the table of contents of the book, the purpose of the
study was not a simple one. It wanted to provide an overview of the issues
involved in English dialects investigation, from the forty dialects of
English, to the question of refinement, from the Impoverishment of the
Language to the King’s English and the Power of the Old Dialects (to
name a few of the chapters).
Curiously enough, the pivotal themes of the book assumed that dialects
were not mushrooms, and that speech varieties were determined by
“natural tendencies, or unconscious local preferences, or by other dialects
or language”.17
Basically, the spread of English due to economic, political, social,
historical and cultural factors has provoked a new idea of language variety
according to which the English speakers draw different dialects/varieties
maps.
For these reasons, pidgin, creole and vernacular varieties must be taken
into account in relation to dialectology and non-standardized processes.
While the famous distinction between pidgins and creoles is still based on
the affirmation of the variety as the mother tongue of the new speech
community, what is interesting is that such apparent simplifications of
English in the interlanguage play, speak volumes of what happens when
languages come into contact free form the enslavement of literate
standards, as Todd notes and comments on some interesting cases of
pidgins and creoles from all around the world.

16
J. Wright, The English Dialects Grammar, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1905, p. V.
17
M. MacBride, London’s Dialect, an Ancient Form of English, with a Note on the
Dialects of the North of England and the Midlands and of Scotland, London, The
Priory Press, 1910, p. 7.
82 Part IV

They have resulted from the fusion of almost every possible combination
of languages and occur in all inhabited areas of the world. In Europe
Russenorsk, a pidgin now almost extinct, arose from the contact of two
Indo-European languages, Russian and Norwegian, as a means of
facilitating communication between Russian and Norwegian fishermen. In
South Africa we find many creoles among the Surinam’s Sranan, a creole
which resulted from the contact of English and a variety of West African
languages. In the Pacific, Hiri Motu arose from the contact between
speakers of Motu and other Papua vernaculars. It has recently expanded its
vocabulary by adopting words from Tok Pisin. Chinook Jargon is now
almost entirely restricted to Canada but in the nineteenth century it was
spoken from Oregon to Alaska. This pidgin is thought to have developed
from the contact of French and English with Chinook and Nootka; but
there is still controversy over its origin (see Hancock, 1972, p. 3). In
Africa, in the Central African Republic, the pidgin Sango developed due to
the contact of Ngbandi with other African languages. Along the coast of
China, in Shanghai and to a lesser extent in Hong Kong, one finds relics of
the once widespread China Coast Pidgin English which arose as a result of
the contact between English and coastal Chinese. These six cases are only
a sample of the variety of possible combinations but they give some
indication of how widespread the pidgin /creole phenomenon is.18

Thus we may enquire whether pidgins and creoles and other social
non-standard varieties do not have a role in most dialectology domains
typically concerned:

- with sub-standard or low status forms of languages;

- with other spoken variants we can find all around the word with no
evidence of written forms; and
- with presumed bastardized or irregular forms of a standard
language.

The answer could be positive, at least according to a restrictive use of

dialectology as being essentially the study of dialects. However, as
Dossena and Lass point out in their introduction to Studies in English and
European Historical Dialectology:

linguistic realizations, no matter how restricted from the point of view of

their social, historical or geographical distribution, always interact with
other forms, making it necessary to study them in the awareness that they
may be construed as regional, social, or genre-specific dialect, depending

18
L. Todd, Pidgins and Creoles, London, New York, Routledge, 2003, p. 4.

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 Charting Diversity 83

of the facet that appears to be most relevant for their users or indeed the
scholars analysing them.19

According to such a non-static view, the relationship between dialects,

pidgins and creoles, within and across their mirroring standard forms in a
distorted way, becomes a complex issue. The play of superstrate and
substrate languages which mark the linguistic continuum whose English is
most of the time the main actor, together with linguistic variations on the
level of dialects and their social and geographical spread, may find an
overlapping and integrated dimension of research which makes
dialectology meet linguistic typology. In Bosang’s words, “this may be
due to the fact that dialectologists concentrate on social and historical
motivations of variation across dialects, whereas typologists are interested
in universal patterns of variation across languages and their motivation by
human cognition and discourse”.20
The exploration of linguistic variation which goes through languages
joining multiple phenomena and combining data allows a mutual profit
between dialectology, typology, register analysis and quantitative
linguistics. Following the volume edited by Kortmann in 2014, Wälchli
and Szmrecsanyi’s survey on such disciplines aggregation in the study of
language varieties springs essentially from the following points:

x Variation is increasingly seen as a “core explanandum” (Adger and

Trousdale 2007:274) in linguistics; and
x Corpus-studies is ultimately indebted to the usage-based turn in
linguistic theory, which posits that grammatical knowledge is
experience-based, and should be studied by investigating language in
use (parole), avoiding data reduction and/or abstraction as much as
possible.21

19
M. Dossena, R. Lass (eds.), Studies in English and European Historical
Dialectology, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt, New York, Oxford, Wien, Peter
Lang, 2009, p. 8.
20
W. Bisang, “Dialectology and Typology—An Integrative Perspective”, in B.
Kortmann (ed.), Dialectology Meets Typology. Dialect Grammar from a Cross-
Linguistic Perspective, Berlin, New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, p. 12.
21
B. Wälchli, B. Szmrecsanyi (eds.), Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and
Register Analysis, Berlin, Boston, Mouton de Gruyter, 2014, pp.1–2. For Adger
and Trousdale see, D. Adger and G. Trousdale, English Language and Linguistics,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007. The famous metaphor concerning
variation as the “core explanandum” in linguistic theory points out that variation in
language studies is incontrovertible, challenging and the basis for every usage-
based theoretical linguistics.
84 Part IV

This means that even morphosyntactic variables, which should act as

prominent typologies and parameters for typological classifications, do not
only come from their linguistic context; as a matter of fact, they are the
final outcomes of different agents such as former discourses, tasks,
speakers and audience, and, more generally, other psycholinguistic and
sociolinguistic concerns. In other words, variation can be formal and
functional if usage-based as Adger and Trousdale suggest.
Musing on an “aggregate dialectal variability”22 represents one of the
most challenging proceedings of dialectometry, which, in Szmrecsanyi’s
words, “is concerned with measuring, visualizing, and analysing aggregate
dialect similarities or distances as a function of properties of geographic
space”.23
Combining the quantitative approach to the qualitative one, puts a new
light on dialects as multidimensional and complex objects which include
geographic and socio-cultural axes. In a paper entitled “Vertical convergence
of linguistic varieties in a language space”, Røyneland mentions the vertical
convergence as the outcome of standard/dialect contact in opposition to
the horizontal one, which usually deals with an interdialectal level. He
explains,

the term vertical convergence refers to the process whereby a certain range
of linguistic features of a variety is substituted by features that enjoy higher
standing than the original ones. Hence, vertical convergence arises from
direct or indirect contact between varieties where the converged-to variety
holds a higher status in social space than the converging variety.24

If the English-based perspective and the resilience of its dialects were

true, such a vertical convergence would be a powerful force in dialect
deviation from Standard and in dialect levelling. Røyneland understands
dialects levelling as “a dynamic and multidimensional dialect contact
phenomenon that leads to the reduction of inter-systemic variation by a
gradual abandonment of local dialects features in favour of more regional
or standard ones”.25

22
See B. Szmrecsanyi, Grammatical Variation in British English Dialects,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 1.
23
Ibid.
24
U. Røyneland, “Vertical convergence of linguistic varieties in a language space”,
in P. Auer, J.E. Schmidt (eds.), Language and Space. An International Handbook
of Linguistic Variation, Vol. 1, Berlin, New York, Mouton De Gruyter, 2019, p.
259, (259–74).
25
Ibid., 261.

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 Charting Diversity 85

Issues in standard/dialects convergence are peculiar because of their

complex linguistic situations as the English one since it is affected by an
increasing social mobility which finds in language features one of its
relevant counterparts. Vertical convergence may perform both in language
spaces with a strong standard and in language settings with a weak
standard ideology. Moreover, a coexistence of convergence and divergence
is also possible within the same geographical boundaries as in the United
States where the couple convergence/divergence has marked the history of
many English dialects in North America. As Auer and Hinskens note,
“some English dialects have converged towards the standard variety to
such an extent that they are on the verge of being wiped out by it. On the
other hand, there is massive dialect diversification going on in the U.S.”26
With regard to interlingual similarities, Höder paradoxically states that
there are cases in which convergence at the same time is divergence, and
that together they can be said to be “types of relational diachronic
language change—as opposed to diachronic stability—in which two or
more languages become structurally more similar or dissimilar,
respectively”.27
More recent research has shown how much important convergence and
divergence hypothesis are after the multilingual turn, provoking cases of
functional convergence and formal divergence in the speech community’s
repertoire.

26
P. Auer, F. Hinskens, “The convergence and divergence of dialects in Europe.
New and not so new developments in an old area”, in U. Ammon, K.J. Mattheier,
P.H. Nelde (eds.), Sociolinguistica, 10, Tubingen, Max Niemever Verlag, 1996, p.
1, (1–30).
27
S. Höder, “Convergence vs. divergence from a diasystematic perspective”, in K.
Braunmüller, S. Höder, K. Kühl (eds.), Stability and Divergence in Language
Contact: Factors and Mechanisms, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John Benjamins,
2014, p. 41, (39–62). More specifically, Höder assumes that “a) convergence and
divergence do not imply bidirectionality; b) convergence and divergence do not
have to affect whole languages, but can also cause the emergence of new varieties;
c) convergence and divergence can be restricted to specific parts of the language
system (e.g. sentence intonation or verbal syntax) and apply to different aspects of
linguistic structure”. (p. 42). One of the examples of the mutual action of
convergence and divergence is the contact between Standard (High) German and
Low German in Northern Germany. The contact—which increased during the
twentieth century—“resulted in the establishment of a new regional dialect
(regiolect) of High German (North High German), a converged variety, while the
remainder of the High German varieties did not undergo similar changes”, Ibid.
86 Part IV

3. American Indian English and Tristan da Cunha

English: two lesser-known varieties
According to Leap, many American Indians “claim to be able to
identify people’s tribal background simply by listening to their English”.28
If this were true, variation would become a cue to labelling cultural
heritage and the socio-linguistic backgrounds of speakers in many parts of
the world. The debate around American Indian English can prove it.
There have been interesting attempts in defining such a lesser known
variety of English spoken by Native American or Alaska descents who
live very close to reservations or in the Indian neighbourhoods.
Among others, Leaps’ overview of American Indian English sets forth
in a comprehensive way the relationship between Indian English and their
ancestral language tradition focusing on sound patterns, sentence
formation and lexicon together with a thought-provoking survey of the
context of schooling in the Northern Ute Reservation.
The colonialist context and the control over native languages as tools
for colonial exploitation “could be used to represent indigenous people
lives in such a way as to weaken claims to sovereignty and strengthen the
United States government’s bureaucratic and territorial agendas”.29
Nevertheless, the communicative scenario of American Indians and
Alaskans is still a multilingual one, with the co-occurrence of their
ancestral languages with forms of Indian English in their day-by-day
conversations. Thus, code-switching and language contact situations affect
the numerous dialects of which American Indian English is comprised.
As Reese notes,

When the first Europeans came to America, there existed more than 500
different Native American and Alaska Native languages. Some of them
were quite similar, because they had the parent language, so their relation
can be vaguely compared with that of for example French, Italian and
Spanish today (which had Latin as their parent language). But others were
coming from completely different language families, varying greatly in

28
W. Leap, American Indian English, Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press,
1993 p. 3.
29
R. Spack, America’s Second Tongue, American Indian Education and the
Ownership of English, 1860–1900, Lincoln, London, University of Nebraska Press,
2002, p. 14.

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 Charting Diversity 87

syntax, grammatical structure and vocabulary—very much as today’s

relation, of for example, Arabic, Japanese and English.30

The range of linguistic issues for such a multilingual scenario makes

the identification of an American Indian English speaker a difficult task;
and the numbers do not help the research. As reported by Leap, before
considering grammar and knowledge of the language that people have in
these regions, it is necessary to define the speech community we are
dealing with, and how much the present American Indian English speakers
share certain norms of language even if they do not come from the same
linguistic systems.
According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA, the “lead agency”
responsible for services to American Indians and Alaskans within the
federal government), there are 263 federally recognised tribes, bands,
pueblos, and other organized Indian entities in the forty-eight contiguous
states in Alaska and more than 200 federally recognized Alaskan villages.
The BIA estimates the total Indian population living “on or near” federally
protected lands at 1 million. This figure does not include members of
federally recognized tribes who have moved away from their reservations
or native communities and into the cities.31
After all, American Indian English has a long history; one of its peaks
is represented by the Peace Commission which at the end of the nineteenth
century tried to promote a language sameness (with English replacing the
native languages), in order to “fuse the multitude of native nations into a
controllable entity—one homogenous mass”.32
The civilizing plan proposed education policies as expanders of
sovereignty operated—in the boarding schools—by different religious
agents mostly interested in teaching and fostering Christianity (even using
a vernacular language if needed). Thus, despite the introduction of
bilingual schools for natives, they rarely provided sufficient knowledge of
English, making Indians mediocre English speakers.
One of the manifestations of these policies was Pratt’s American
Indian programme, in order to convince the “sceptical public that English-
only education off the reservation could succeed in civilizing native

30
K. Reese, American Indian English: Background and Development, Munich,
Grin Verlag, 2009, p. 2.
31
W. Leap, American Indian English, p. 14.
32
R. Spack, America’s Second Tongue, American Indian Education and the
Ownership of English, 1860–1900, p. 17.
88 Part IV

people”.33 From then on, lots of pictures were distributed about the Indians
involved in the program, as a result of their civilized attitudes in response
to their second-language acquisition too. The pictures of the native Tom
Torlino (Navajo), before and after his three years at the Carlisle Indian
Industrial School are still memorable.34
The Hampton and Carlisle schools offered pedagogical innovations
which aimed at making English a means of a “supportive teaching
environment”;35 however, they were riddled with language and cultural
contradictions. As Spack notes, “on the one hand, these teachers were
motivated by a desire to teach well and to improve students’ lives. On the
other, they were a product of virulently ethnocentric time”.36
In the late nineteenth century, the educative process meant “grammar”
following definitions and applications. Interestingly enough, the absence
of a shared language between teachers and students did not allow, at first,
the use of text books, leaving the pace to the use of toys and objects in
general, according to the Pestalozzian “object teaching”; this involved
activities of observations and descriptions by the young learners, just as
mothers teach their children. This shifted the instructional tools from
books to objects, which was felt by the students to be more familiar and
real.37

33
Ibid., 20. Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt represents the intensified educative
system introduced in the late 1800s to assimilate Indians under the promotion of
English in the first boarding schools. His programmes at Hampton and Carlisle are
still remarkable. According to Bonnell, “The outing system was an essential
component of Pratt’s assimilation of the Indian: if Indians could submerge
themselves in white culture, they would eventually become civilized themselves,
or so he believed”, see S. Bonnell, Chemawa Indian Boarding School: the First
One Hundred Years, 1880 to 1980, Boca Raton, Universal Publishers, 1997, pp.
29–30.
34
The pictures showed very big differences in the physical appearance of Torlino
before and after attending the boarding school. They are available in John N.
Choate's Souvenir of the Carlisle Indian School, Carlisle, PA, J. N. Choate, 1902,
and on the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (Online) at:
carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/images/tom-torlino-1882-and-1885
35
R. Spack, America’s Second Tongue, American Indian Education and the
Ownership of English, 1860–1900 p. 48.
36
Ibid.
37
In the famous How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1894) the Swiss educator
Johann Pestalozzi urged a new teaching method which used things rather than
abstract words. For further references to Pestalozzi’s educative programme see E.
Kalenze, Education is Upside-Down. Reframing Reform to Focus on the Right
Problems, Lanham, Boulder, New York, London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2014, p.

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 Charting Diversity 89

Despite the different methods used in the new classes, from the
Pestalozzian one to attempts of memorization and talking classes, it was
understood that real communicativeness was still far off, perhaps owing to
some of the psychological traits of Indian students who were generally
afraid of embarrassing themselves or the others for their bad use of the
language. The problem was a severe one, but it is important to notice that
students attending the new classes were “not” children and they did not
deserve to be “infantilized”, because—in other words—they had to be
“civilized”.
However, such an educational plan provoked a double effect: on the
one hand, the presumed failure of the boarding schools and their English-
only education stirred the disillusionment about the nature of Indians as an
“underclass” with nothing to offer to the new American society; on the
other, the interest in Indian cultures and traditions began to flourish thanks
to a change of attitude towards cultures all seen as equal and worthy. The
question was a difficult one, because the Indian mythologies deserved
more careful attention, far from the biological side of the problem. As
Boas wrote some decades after, “as a matter of fact, it would be
exceedingly difficult to say at present time what race is pure and what race
is mixed”.38 Obviously, the anthropologist was referring to the problems
connected to race, language and culture due to the intertwining of different
racial types.
In the twentieth century, after the bad experiences in the boarding
schools attended by the Indians, Indian children began to attend public
schools and in 1924—thanks to the Indian Citizenship Act—all the Indian
population became officially part of the United States. This was the first
important step of a long journey of assimilation of Indians into the
American mainstream which passed from the reforms of Indian education
(1924–1944) to the “termination era” (1945–1968) which, as Prucha says,
“was the termination of federal responsibility and federal programs for
Indian groups and Indian individuals”.39 Then they gained the self-
determination (1969–present), which, as Reyhner and Eder note, meant

27; and R.J. Altenbaugh (ed.), Historical Dictionary of American Education,

Westport, Greenwood Press, 1999, p. 265.
38
F. Boas, Race, Language, and Culture, Chicago, London, The University of
Chicago Press, 1940, p. 19.
39
F.P. Prucha, The Great Father: the United States Government and the American
Indians, Lincoln, London, University of Nebraska Press, 1984, p. 340.
90 Part IV

“letting Indian people through their tribal governments determine their

own destiny”.40
Linguistically speaking, many Indians still speak their native language,
while “many others who no longer use their tribal language do not speak
standard English”41—as we might expect: the reason may come from the
kind of English they are asked to learn.
Since these students are taught from the time they enter the educational
system using materials based on standard American academic English,
here a clear disparity between the language many Indian children speak
socially and the language they expected to control in the academic
environment.42 As a matter of fact, there are many areas where the
language used for education (English) matches the tribal ones to an extent
that it is possible to affirm the existence of different sub-varieties of
American Indian English. Among such possible variants, the description
of sample characteristics of Ute English as one of the most famous
American Indian English(es) shows interesting syntactic and discourse
features as analysed by Leap. Here are the most relevant ones:

- Devoiced (or “whispered” vowels in middle and final word position);

- Devoiced consonants in word final positon; no evidence of reduction
or deletion of consonant pronunciation in that position;
- Reworking of syllable structures into a C-V-C-V sequence;
- Tense marked only once per clause (…);
- Right-to-left arrangement within sentence-level constructions (e.g. the
pronouns precede rather than follow their antecedents) (…);
- Information processed from a written text in terms of the meanings of
whole sentences, not single words or phrases. (…);
- Subjective, personalized assessment assigned higher value than
objective, detached commentary (…); and
- Responses consistent with the terms set by the task, though not always
restricted to those terms.43

The context of schooling in the Northern Ute reservation shows the

existence of different parallels between English and the native Indian
languages. Ute English is the most commonly used type of English on the

40
J. Reyhner, J. Eder, “A History of Indian Education”, in J. Reyhner (ed.),
Teaching American Indian Students, Norman, The University of Oklahoma Press,
1992, p. 54, (33–58).
41
E. Hoffman, “Oral language development”, in J. Reyhner, Teaching American
Indian Students, p. 132.
42
Ibid.
43
W. Leap, “American Indian English”, in J.A. Reyhner, Teaching American
Indian Students, p. 144.

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 Charting Diversity 91

reservation, though maintaining lots of inside varieties which vary across

speakers on a micro-level and communities on a macro one. In a sense, “to
speak Ute English is almost like speaking the Ute language in a form
which non-Indians will understand”.44
While Ute English is the language Ute students study as their first
language, being “also the language in which mathematics is learned and
(depending on the person providing the instruction), it may also be the
language in which mathematics is taught”,45 one factor helping to shape a
general overview of such a multilingual scenario is that two other non-
Indian varieties coexist with the Ute English; they are Standard English
and Basin English, also called “cowboy English”, a sort of “rural” variant
where the word “Basin” refers to the Great Basin as the area between the
Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada Range in the western part of the
United States.
The existence of many American Indian English(es) makes each one
unique and interesting because of its grammar features and semantic
properties.
Navajo English, Mojave English, Isletan English, Tsimshian English,
Lumbee English, Tohono O’odham English, and Inupiaq English are but
some of the varieties which rearranged typically English sound patterns,
inflection, articles, tense/aspect and pronouns. Generally speaking, as
Möller, Gibbert and Vy Lam explain, we may affirm that:

a) In all varieties, vowel shifts occur, making AIE audibly distinct from
Standard American English (as in Navajo, [i],[e], [iy] and [ey] are
often replaced by [e]);
b) Consonants are substituted because the Ancestral Language does not
have counterparts (as in Tsimshian English where [f] and [v] often
realized as [b] => Blank (Frank));
c) Plural morpheme often deleted or replaced (as in “There’s two way of
talking (Lakota));
d) Mass nouns pluralized like count nouns are (as in Homeworks and
Furnitures);
e) Influences from Ancestral Language, which has no articles (as in
Navajo “He asked shopkeeper for sheep”);

44
R. Mesthrie, J. Swann, A. Deumert, W.L. Leap (eds.), Introducing Sociolinguistics,
Second Edition, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 264.
45
W.L. Leap, “Assumptions and Strategies Guiding Mathematics Problem Solving
by Ute Indian Students”, in R.R. Cocking, J.P. Mestre (eds.), Linguistic and
Cultural Influences on Learning Mathematics, London, New York, Routledge,
1988, p. 181, (161–86).
92 Part IV

f) The demonstrative them indicates reference to named individual and

associated people (as in Tsimshian English “Them Fred’s having a
party”);
g) Inconsistencies between gender of pronoun and noun and subject
pronoun deletion as in Mohave English “But then woke him up”);
h) Action that does not occur before other activities in the discourse;
action with duration, before or after the main event of the discourse;
action that has not yet begun (or irrealis) as respectively in the
following Apache English sentences: “Then he will looking forward to
the day when he will finish”; “But he keep on going until he got to top
of the hill”; “I will becoming a leader the people will be helping by
me”;
i) Get as a verbal auxiliary usually used to form passive constructions as
in “Fly got bitten by spider”; and
j) Copula deletion allowed in several varieties when Standard English
allows contracted auxiliaries (as in the Isletan English “She a Red Corn
people”).46

In addition to this, some characteristics of Indian English set forth an

unexpected lexical heritage which many modern days English speakers
may not know. Look at the following words celebrated by the Time in an
article published a few years ago:

- moose (n.): a ruminant mammal with humped shoulders, long legs,

and broadly palmated antlers that is the largest existing member of the
deer family (Moose comes from the New England Algonquian word
for that animal: moòs. Algonquian describes a family of about three
dozen languages spoken by American Indian tribes, like Arapaho and
Cree);
- Yankee (n.): a nickname for a native or inhabitant of New England,
or, more widely, of the northern States generally (Yankee, that word
the redcoats used to use to mock American doodles who thought they
were fancy because of their feathery hats, is of uncertain origin. But
one of the earliest theories is that the slang comes from the Cherokee
word eankke, meaning slave or coward);
- raccoon (n.): a small North American animal with grayish-brown fur
that has black fur around its eyes and black rings around its tail (Our
word for what may be the most adorable cat-sized, trash-eating
creatures in America comes from a Virginia Algonquian language);
- squash (n.): any of various fruits of plants of the gourd family widely
cultivated as vegetables (Squash is a shortened form of what the

46
The list has been freely arranged from L. Möller, T. Gibbert, T.T. Vy Lam,
American Indian English, 2009, available at: wwwhomes.uni-bielefeld.de/
sgramley/American-Indian-English(Lam-M%C3%B6ller-Gibbert).pdf

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 Charting Diversity 93

Narragansett, an Algonquian-speaking tribe from what is now Rhode

Island, called that food: asquutasquash);
- toboggan (n.): a long, light sled that has a curved front and that is
used for sliding over snow and ice (Early French settlers in what would
later be North America took the Algonquian word for this vessel and
made it tabaganne, and that became the English toboggan. The
northern neighbors of the tribes who used this word, Alaska Natives
like the Inuit, gave English words too, like kayak and husky);
- skunk (n.): a North American animal of the weasel kind, noted for
emitting a very offensive odor when attacked or killed (Skunk comes
from the Abenaki tribe’s name for the potent weasel: segankw);
- caucus (n.): a private meeting of the leaders or representatives of a
political party (Like Yankee, the exact origin of this word is unknown.
But a possible derivation is from an Algonquin word cauƍ-cau-asƍu,
meaning one who advises, urges or encourages); and
- OK (adj., int.): all right; satisfactory, good; well, in good health or
order (the lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary do not give
a definite origin of this word. They do say it “seems clear” that the
heavy favorite theory (O.K. being an abbreviation of “oll korrect,” a
play on “all correct”) is true. But they still list competing, underdog
origin stories, including the idea that “O.K. represents an alleged
Choctaw word” okii, meaning “it is”).47

Although it is well known that the influence of American variants on

British English cannot be considered a recent phenomenon, some new
words born to designate different and peculiar realities of the American
territories have become part of the BE variant as a result of language
policies which—in the case of Indians—maintained the cultural isolation
of natives for a long time.
Until Leap’s exhaustive studies on the matter, little research had been
done about American Indian English which involves significant numbers
of speakers mostly set in United States or Canada.48

47
K. Steinmetz, “7 English Words You’d Never Guess Have American Indian
Roots”, in Time, Nov. 26, 2014, available attime.com/3606251/thanksgiving-
indian-english/
48
In a survey which dates back to 1989, Holm described the American Indian
English community as follows: “800,000 Indians, 6,600 Aleuts, and 30, 000 Inuits
or Eskimos (in the U.S.) with 303,000 Indians and 23,000 Inuits (in Canada).
These figures do not include the many people of American Indian or mixed
ancestry who did not identify themselves as such in the 1980 census”, see J.A.
Holm, Pidgins and Creoles: Vol.2: Reference Survey, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1989, p. 506.
94 Part IV

Interestingly enough, and to sum up, we may say that American

Indians spoke (and still speak) and experienced different “degrees” of
English, mostly on the bridge of pidginization and creolization of the new
language structures which spread as soon as the communicative need
increased. However, as Holm notes, the sociolinguistic link between
English settlers and the American Indians was different from what
happened with African natives. He writes,

However, Indian slaves who were in their own country and near their own
people were more likely to attempt to escape—and succeed—than were
Africans. While the Africans had to adapt at least partially to the culture
and language of the English in order to survive, the Indians remained
members of far more separate societies that maintained their own cultural
and linguistic identity.49

Geographical factors of some language varieties as well as the isolation

of the speaking communities, play important roles in the language
diffusion or linguistic seclusion.
The English language spoken in the Tristan da Cunha archipelago
represents an interesting case in point and a good example of some lesser-
known English varieties affected by “a genuine linguistic melting pot in
which contact with koinéisation processes occurred in substantially
limited, at times even virtually absent, exchange with the outside world”.50
The directionality of koinéisation implicitly comes into terms with the
relic assumption theory on certain conservative dialects and their reactions
to the inputs coming from the founders. Speaking of the founder’s legacy,
Schreier comments on two interesting examples:

There is a sizeable literature on the retention of archaic features in enclave

varieties: in contemporary Appalachian English (AppE), for instance,
Montgomery (1989) traces the verbal concord pattern which attaches the
suffix -s to all grammatical persons (“we goes bear-hunting in November”)
to the Scots-Irish immigrants who transplanted this feature when they
settled the area in the eighteenth-century. This type of present tense
concord was a distinctive feature in the Ulster region of Ireland at the time

49
Ibid., 508.
50
D. Schreier, “English transported to the South Atlantic Ocean: Tristan de
Cunha”, in R, Hickey (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2004, p. 393, (387–401).

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 Charting Diversity 95

of emigration, and its presence in current AppE is a legacy of the

community’s founders.51

Assuming the effects of such a legacy to be relevant does not mean that
relics—if and when they existed—are destined to remain fixed and
unchangeable. The analysis of the speech patterns showed by isolated
communities can pinpoint how much development has been arrested and
how many changes have been pursued by the communities themselves.
The emergence of norms passed through inter- and intra-individual
variability and the stabilization of new generations of speakers; such
variables are particularly relevant in the Tristan da Cunha language
scenario, where the little number of inhabitants and speakers would
deserve a chapter in an adventure story based on creolization and melting
races, seafaring, military and nautical backgrounds of the first settlers.
As one of the main trading routes between Europe and the Indian
Ocean in the past, Tristan da Cunha is still under the sovereignty of the
British Crown, and it counts today a few inhabitants (roughly 300 units)
who have farming and fishing as their unique economy.
The language spoken in the archipelago developed in 1820s as a result
of mixed inputs brought to the island “from various regions of the British
Isles, the northeastern US, the South Africa Table Bay region and St.
Helena”.52
Tristan da Cunha’s isolation peaked in the twentieth century, and when
World War II broke out the inhabitants lived in pre-industrial conditions
which changed after the British admiralty installed a naval station on the
island in 1942.
Compared to the complex settings in which English is spoken today,
Tristan da Cunha is by no means the most uncommon place in which
English is spoken as a first and unique language.
Despite the isolation and the early settlement story, the dialect
landscape is various as a result of the English-speaking colonizers who
were essentially divided into two groups, the British and the American.
The former came from all parts of the British Isles “the English south-west

51
D. Schreier, Isolation and Language Change. Contemporary and Sociohistorical
Evidence from Tristan da Cunha English, Basingstoke, Palgrave, Macmillan, 2003,
pp. 36–7.
52
D. Schreier, “Tristan da Cunha English”, in D. Schreier, P. Trudgill, E.W,
Schneider, J.P. Williams (eds.), The Lesser-Known Varieties of English: An
Introduction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 245, (245–62).
96 Part IV

(Nankivel and Burnell), London (Riley), Sussex (Swain), Humberside

(Cotton) and the Scottish Lowlands (Glass)”.53
The investigation of Tristan da Cunha English represents the result of
the massive work done on English spread and its countless varieties.
Indeed, we know everything about some global variants while we neglect
some others, due to the wide heterogeneity of English as a lingua franca or
as a first, second and foreign language in the world.
As Schreier notes,

All the Tristan settlers has at least some knowledge of English which
excludes pidginaziation and creolization effects on Tristan da Cunha. On
the other hand, these L2 forms have an impact on Tristan da Cunha English
and several non-native features were adopted when the local variety
nativized (th-sibilization, i.e. dental fricatives realized as /s/, as in think,
throw, etc.). The existence of Creole-type features in Tristan da Cunha
English (such as extremely high rates of consonant cluster reduction and
absence of -ed past tense marking; /v/ realized as [b]; lack of word-order
inversion in questions; copula absence; etc.) can only mean that a creolized
from of English was transplanted via (at least some of) the women who
cross-migrated in the 1820s from St. Helena.54

In the same vein, the Tristan da Cunha dialect has been considered as
an example of those “creoloids”, which, as a result of imperfect learning,
and thanks to the maintenance of the native-speaker tradition, “have not
experienced a history of reduction followed or ‘repaired’ by expansion”.55
Among the results of Schreier’s exhaustive research on Tristan da
Cunha English (which covers variation in accent and grammatical
variables to name a few aspects of his survey) the completive done and the
use of the greeting formula How you is? exemplify interesting
sociolinguistic changes.

53
D. Schreier, “English transported to the South Atlantic Ocean: Tristan da
Cunha”, p. 393.
54
D. Schreier, “The consequences of migration and colonialism II: overseas
varieties”, in P. Auer, J. E. Schmidt (eds.), Language and Space: An International
Handbook of Linguistic Variation, Vol. 1, Berlin, New York, Mouton de Gruyter,
2010 p. 463, (451–67).
55
P. Trudgill “Dual-source pidgins and reverse creoloids: Northern perspectives on
language contact, in E. Håkon, I. Broch (eds.), Language Contact in the Artic:
Northern Pidgins and Contact Languages, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 1996, p. 8,
(5–14). Creoloids are those languages which seem to be creoles but they did not go
through the pidgin phase. About “creoloids” see also, D. Crystal, Dictionary of
Linguistics and Phonetics, Sixth Edition, Malden, Oxford, Victoria, Blackwell
Publishing 2008.

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 Charting Diversity 97

As for the former, the feature in question is the use of done in

constructions like these:

a) I think they done took it;

b) She asked us if we turned in the assignment; we said we done
turned it; and
c) They used to get much more…two years ago the pensioners done
got a free gas bottle.

The use of done outside its proper form in the paradigm has been
found in lots of vernacular varieties of English, with specific reference to
those associated with the South. Consequently, as Trousdale reports, the
use of done as a completive aspect marker rises questions of

whether the form was a feature of the language of the original settlers who
brought English to different places around the world, whether there was
independent parallel development in these new varieties, or whether an
older form was supported and renewed by a similar feature in other
languages which were part of the contact.56

According to Schreier, the development of the completive done in

Tristan da Cunha cannot be explained only in terms of retention of archaic
forms, but also in terms of contact with other varieties instead. On the
other hand, the greeting formula How you is? works as an identity marker
in Tristan da Cunha English. Like other speech patterns which have been
always investigated in terms of linguistic demarcation, the greeting,
“observed phenomenologically and hermeneutically, is formed into the
constituting act of mutual recognition prior to mere convention”.57
This is particularly true for an island in the middle of the South
Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, the formula has different values for islanders of
different ages.
Although there are various cases in communicative contexts in which
the Tristanians use the more standard formula how are you? in answering
back to their interlocutors, such findings show that they have the option to
“take up the formula and use it to address an outsider, or else to use a non-

56
G. Trousdale, An Introduction to English Sociolinguistics, Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Press, 2010, p. 74.
57
W. Wang, “Beyond Identity and Alterity? From Heidegger’s Viewpoint”, in G.
Liu, C. Zhang, Z. Guan (eds.), Identity and Alterity: Phenomenology and Cultural
Traditions, Wurzburg, Konigshausen & Neumann, 2010, p.176, (139–208).
98 Part IV

local type associated with the linguistic background of the addressee”.58

This involves a certain amount of individual variability along with
interaction needs instead of value judgments on the part of the speakers
involved in the interaction. On the contrary, what can be relevant is to
investigate how much and to what extent the pragmatic value of greeting
formulae will maintain their localization after the increasing mobility of
the global society which has its counterpart in a wider linguistic
awareness.
As a tentative conclusion, according to Schreier, “future research, with
close attention to subsequent changes in the community, might detect the
trajectory of these changing attitudes and clarify whether the reaction to
outsiders using how you is? is indeed in the process of changing from
individual to social significance”.59

4. Geordie: the regional dialect around Newcastle-upon

Tyne and its spread on the media
There have been countless debates about the language minorities of
England and such discussion has often dealt with the definition of the term
“Geordie”.60

58
D. Schreier, “Greetings as an act of identity in Tristan da Cunha English: From
individual to social significance”, in P. Skandera (ed.), Phraseology and Culture in
English, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2007, p. 361, (353–74).
59
Ibid., 370.
60
“No one knows for sure exactly how the residents of Tyneside—or perhaps more
accurately, Newcastle upon Tyne—became known as ‘Geordies’. One theory is
that it was the name given to the workers of the railway pioneer ‘Geordie’
Stephenson, another is that it was a term for a pitman deriving from the use of
Stephenson’s Geordie Lamp. Certainly, Geordie was regularly used to describe a
pitman during the nineteenth century, and during much of the earlier part of the
twentieth century it was applied to most natives of the North East. An extensive
series of monthly magazines published and edited in Newcastle upon Tyne from
1887 to 1891 entitled the Monthly Chronicle of North Country Lore and Legend
explored the region’s history and heritage in depth and uses the term Geordie more
than 30 times. In almost every instance, ‘Geordie’ is used in a slightly patronizing
sense to describe pitmen and their apparently naïve ways. Several of the ‘Geordies’
described are not resident in Tyneside, and include ‘Geordies’ from the mining
district north east of Durham city, the Herrington area of Sunderland, and Castle
Eden on the Durham coast. It was clear that at time Geordie was by no means a
term confined to a native of Tyneside let alone Newcastle”, see:
www.englandsnortheast.co.uk/GeordieOrigins.html

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A still worthy starting point is John Wells and his Accents of English
(1982) where, after musing on aspects of accent, phonology, standard
lexical sets and cases of residualism, prestige innovations and some further
British inventions, Geordie was introduced as an accent which “differs in
several striking ways from other urban speech varieties of the north of
England”.61
Apart from the obvious reference to the early eighteenth century when
“the inhabitants of Newcastle supported the English kings George I and
George II”,62 the term can be applied to anyone who comes from
Tyneside.
However, as Keuchler argues, we can also say that “people living in
Sunderland, not more than twenty miles south of Newcastle, would
probably feel offended when being called a Geordie. They prefer the term
Mackem in spite of quite a number of similarities to the Geordies with
regard to language”.63
There has been much research for a unique definition, moving from the
assumption that Geordie differs not only from Received Pronunciation but
also from many other northern varieties of English.
Interestingly, Geordie seems to be a “closed” or “jargon” variety,
strictly associated with Geordie identity, and it excludes the speakers
outside the local community. That is why it is described as the most
difficult spoken dialect of Britain.
Oddly enough, and despite the proximity to the Scottish accent, some
combinations of vowel sounds make Geordie “a Nordic language closely
related to early Russian that has assimilated English words into its
vocabulary”.64
It means that in the ninth and tenth century, North West Russians, and
some British people from the North, spoke a language with the same
origin. Thus, the pronunciation of vowels is a key feature in the Geordie
accent as in the following example: How pet, gannin’ doon toon wi’ wuh?,

Notably, as Clark reports, “In Newcastle, the dialect dictionaries first refer to the
‘North Country’, then ‘Northumberland’, with the popular label ‘Geordie’ not
being applied to a dictionary until the 1960s”, see U. Clark, Language and Identity
in Englishes, London, New York, Routledge, 2013, p. 105.
61
J. Wells, Accents of English, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p.
374.
62
K. Keuchler, Geordie Accent and Tyneside English, Munich, Grin Verlag, 2007,
p. 2.
63
Ibid.
64
M.J. Littlefair, The Warld’s Forst Geordie-Russian Phrasebook, Lulu Press,
2015, p. 1.
100 Part IV

which is the Geordie variant for Hello mate, do you want to go into town
with us?65
As evident from the example above, Geordie dialect shows lots of
differences in lexicon and vowel pronunciation which make it different
among the other British English varieties, including—as many other
variants—a wide range of intra-deformities which deals with speakers
from different social and cultural backgrounds. In other words, Geordie
involves a complex texture of elements from which its peculiarities come
out, from the historical to the regional references, from the socio-
communicative environment to the education of its speakers.66
Apart from the most distinctive North-Eastern pronunciation feature as
the glottalization of /p, t, k/ sounds,67 with regard to pronunciation, Else
notes that,

the o sound often becomes ee, so that “no” and “do” are pronounced nee
and dee. The word “take” becomes “tak”, “make” becomes “mak”, while
“all” becomes al or aa’, and “walk” becomes “waak”. Similarly, the word
“know” is “naa”, “stone” is “steeyen”, shirt is “shawt”, “cold” is “caad”
and “work” is “wark” —almost like the pronunciation of “walk” in
standard English.68

Actually, the dialects of the North have taken numerous forms, and
Geordie is but one of these (take, for instance, the Wearside dialect of
Sunderland, and the Northumbrian one, to name but two other sub-
varieties of the Northern variation). Eighty per cent of the words showing

65
D. Else, British Language and Culture, London, Lonely Planet Publications,
2007, p. 187.
66
“Broad Geordie” is an example of an internal variety of pronunciation which
“refers to pronunciations associated with dialect speakers, while other entries
identify pronunciations more common in careful speech or among certain social
groups, such as older speakers, the middle classes or females”, see
www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/case-studies/geordie/vowel-sounds/
67
According to Beal, the glottalization of /p,t,k/ can be considered today a
complex pattern as it changes according to the age of the speakers involved in the
communication. He writes, “The younger speakers, especially the young women,
tended to use the glottalised pronunciations of these consonants more than the
older people did. Since these glottalised pronunciations are normally associated
with the accent of Tyneside (‘Geordie’), Llamas suggests that the speech of
younger females in particular may be converging with that of further north in
Tyneside, Wearside and Durham and diverging from the standard British English
unmarked variant, but also from realizations found further south in Yorkshire.”,
see J. Beal, Language and Region, London, New York, Routledge, 2006, p. 9.
68
Ibid.

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 Charting Diversity 101

a strict Angle origin make Geordie the prestigious remnant of the Anglo-
Saxon language which survives in Geordie and Northumbrian more than in
Standard English.
No matter how apparently incorrect or odd some Geordie words may
appear, Geordie lexicon is more than something associated with a
particular region and/or a social class. In linguistic terms, the increased
level of education and the wide spread of Standard English seem to have
paradoxically favoured the maintenance of Geordie as a lively spoken
variety of English.
The educated people who can use English correctly are the absolute
majority; but, if, on the one hand, the new awareness of English has
supported a stronger integration of Geordies in the cultural and working
mainstream, on the other, a new consciousness of the role played by
dialects and local-speech as explicitly iconic enregisterments of local
identity and cultural heritage, has been the guarantee of their own lives
and reinforcement.
Consequently, many dictionaries of North-East varieties have been
produced, as well as much research into the peculiarities of Geordie
grammar, vowels, consonants system, and lexicon above all.69
An interesting survey of some Geordie sayings was released by
Chronicle Live on 15 July, 2015. The article was inspired by the great
media exposure Geordie has had during the last years.
Below a list of the top ten popular North-East examples of saying,
words or phrases which have been immortalised on TV programs from Auf
Wiedersehen, Pet in the 1980s to Hebburn, as reported by the article
mentioned above:

x howay man!
Non Geordie translation: generic proclamation of exhortation or
encouragement, can be both positive and negative.
Usage: “Howay man! We gannin’ doon Morrisons to beat the queue?”
Important note: howay must also be followed by man, which explains
the popular but somewhat confusing phrase “howay, man, woman,
man!”

69
For further detailed information about Geordie language patterns see the
following studies, F. Graham, The Geordie Netty: A Short History and Guide,
Newcastle Upon Tyne, Butler Publishing, 1986; B. Griffiths, North East Dialect:
the Texts, Newcastle Upon Tyne, Centre for Northern Studies, 2002; F. Graham,
The New Geordie Dictionary, Thropton, Northumberland Butler, 1987; D.
Simpson, Aal Aboot Geordie, Tyne and Wear, My World, 2012.
102 Part IV

x wey aye, man

Non Geordie translation: generic proclamation of positivity or
agreement.
Usage: anytime you want to agree with someone without resorting to a
boring “yes”.

x purely belta, beltas

Non Geordie translation: generic proclamation of joy
Usage: “The Toon were purely belta on Saturday, like!”

x Marra
Non Geordie translation: friend, colleague, workmate.
Usage: “Howay, man, marra, let’s gan doon the pub for some beltas
scran.”

x Stott
Non Geordie translation: to throw and bounce an object off
something Not to be confused with stottie cake, a popular type of bread
bun generally expected to bounce if dropped.

x Monkey’s blood
Non Geordie translation: the raspberry or strawberry flavour sauce
used to garnish ice cream cones sold from a van (“cornets”).
Usage: “Can I have monkey’s blood on me cornet?”

x workyticket
Non Geordie translation: someone being mischievous or downright
annoying.
Usage: “The bairn’s being a propa workyticket, if he’s not careful
there’ll be nee kets this week.” Can also be used as a verb, as in to
work one’s ticket, meaning to behaving in a vexing manner.

x had ya pash
Non Geordie translation: take your time, be patient (literally “hold
your patience, old fellow”).
Usage: “How man, had ya pash, divvin’ be a workyticket.” Another
Geordie phrase meaning the same thing is “had ya watta”.

x Nappa
Non Geordie translation: head.
Usage: “Me nappa’s knacking off gannin’ on the hoy.”

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x giz a bag o' crisps

Non Geordie translation: I’d rather not, thanks (usually in response to
being asked whether you fancy someone).
Usage: “Howay man, divvin’ be daft. Him? Never. Giz a bag o’
crisps”.70

Many TV shows and programmes together with festivals and famous

comics such as Viz—founded in 1979 by Chris Donald—have contributed
to making Geordie popular and appealing.
Although the young bruiser Biffa Bacon and Sid the Sexist are some of
the last icons of the Geordie comics, “Viz comics and its Anglo-Saxon
lexicon of ‘truffle pipes’, ‘rib cushions’ and ‘cocksmiths’, continues to
defy all trends in modern media”;71 thus, the context within the dialect is
used, the purpose of the speech and the command of the language are
important features of the relationship between dialects and the category of
“variation”.
While some people still feel ashamed of their local accent, feeling they
would get better job opportunities without it, some media have strengthen
the effects of local speeches so as to ban prejudice or misunderstandings in
which local speakers are frequently involved comparing their language to
the standard variety.
The BBC sit-com I’m Alan Patridge—named after the main character
Alan Patridge who, despite having been absent from television screens for
quite a few years is still convinced that he is a major media star—uses the
weird north accent as a paradoxical reason for laughing. That is why one
of the characters, Michael, is Geordie and Alan’s best friend, even though,
most of the time, he cannot understand his strong northern accent.
The premise of such a media success of Geordie dialect springs from
the assumption that media attainments work on a double perspective: on
the one hand, they foster the predominance of English as a lingua franca,
but, on the other, they do not erase the values of regional dialects, far from
possible misinterpretations of Standard English as their only means and
channel.

70
See “Geordie sayings: The top 56 things that you’ll only hear someone from
Newcastle say”, in Chronicle Live, 15 July, 2015:
www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/geordie-sayings-top-56-things-
6466922
71
See I. Burrell, “Viz: The adult cartoon comic is launching a website, but will
farting and fornication work for a digital audience?”, in Independent (online), 9
October, 2014: www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-viz-the-adult-
cartoon-comic-is-launching-a-website-but-will-farting-and-fornication-work-
online-9785698.html
104 Part IV

Media pressure has encouraged the exposure to different accents so as

to allow people to be free to decide how they want to sound, be seen and
thought. For this reason, recently, many actors and show-men have
decided to exhibit their own accents rather than diminishing them on the
radio and during different TV programmes.
Geordie Shore—a structured reality show on MTV, following a group
of friends living together in a house in Newcastle—is an interesting case in
point. Indeed, due to the fame of the show, lots of up-to-the-point on-line
dictionaries have been published so as to “update your brains and give you
a quick lesson on all the weird and wonderful Geordie lingo that’s
guaranteed to come out of the gang’s gobs”, as one of them reports”.72

72
See also the following websites www.sugarscape.com/film-tv/news/a105
2971/the-geordie-shore-dictionary-all-the-help-youll-need-with-the-lingo-for-
series-8/ and www.mtv.co.uk/geordie-shore/news/geordie-shore-learn-the-lingo

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 CONCLUDING REMARKS

The trans-cultural demands of the multilingual turn faced by global

society can be discussed from many perspectives, putting the plural
“Englishes” in the middle of lots of assumptions which see it both as a
language matter and a socio-cultural, regional, functional, historical
element of international communication. The irregularity of language
systems must therefore be taken into account because as global speakers
we face multimodal and multilingual imperatives. While such imperatives
have been theorized or put into practice accepting English as the most
powerful lingua franca in the world, trained to solve problems of
intercultural communication and ideally operating among multiple codes,
the multilingual turn in education programmes and policies is still at the
beginning of its story. This calls for what Cenoz and Gorter described as
the continuum of “being and becoming multilingual”.1
It is a matter of multilingual contexts: “students can ‘be multilingual’
because they are fluent in both the minority and the national language
(Catalan/Basque and Spanish) and at the same time ‘becoming
multilingual’ because they go on learning these languages and additional
languages such English”.2
While many countries have enjoined the presence of some forms of
bilingualism, yet an impressive multilingual set fosters an idea of language
both as a regular system ready for regular acquisition and as a sequence
of non-linear interactive processes; such processes have much in common
with the dynamic and complex systems of chaos and complexity as they
are “open and import free energy from the environment to reorganize
themselves to increasingly higher orders of complexity. Finally, these
complex, dynamic systems are nonlinear. This means that the effects
resulting from a cause will not be proportional to the cause”.3

1
J. Cenoz, D. Gorter (eds.), Multilingual Education, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 2015, p. 8.
2
Ibid.
3
D. Larsen Freeman, “Language acquisition and language use from a
chaos/complexity theory perspective”, in C. Kramsch (ed.), Language Acquisition
and Language Socialization: Ecological Perspectives, London, New York,
Continuum, 2002, p. 39, (33–46).
106 Concluding Remarks

However, such “discrepancies” are grounds for the turn of English in

the multilingual poly-system, focusing on a new perspective of English
plus other languages rather than the paradigms of English education only.
As Sollors notes, “promoting English plus other languages is likely to
prepare students better for world citizenship and reduce cultural friction at
home by providing more vehicles of understanding between the English-
language majority and historical and newly immigrated linguistic
minorities”.4
The World Englishes analyzed in this study have shown how
multilingualism is not without contention, since the twentieth and the
twenty-first centuries are the scenarios of the relevant changes in what
language practice is or should be. Some of the tools to be used throughout
the investigation of such a new paradigm which goes through language,
nationalities and social upheavals deal with meaning assessment and
predominantly within the domains of multilingual corpus analysis and the
studies of language learning and language use.5
This book can thus be thought as a Russian doll, which from the
general traits of multilingualism wanted its readers to focus on specific
cases which are all parts of a sociolinguistic interest in variation and in its
context-bound effects.
The terms “multilingualism” and “lingua franca” have been presented
as being problematic labels to deal with. The purpose of such a survey was
not to give a fixed definition of what a multilingual framework is, nor to
redefine it apart from the previous studies about the matter. However the
“descriptive turn” of multilingualism has been our perspective and final
goal. Schools policies and educative plans see multilingualism both as a
great opportunity and a matter of confusion. From such skepticism,
English has become a world language of inclusion and exclusion; so, if
there is no doubt that “English constitutes an, if not the international
language, it is also true that in the age of globalization students can easily
come into contact with many varieties within the language system called
English”.6

4
W. Sollors, Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the
Languages of American Literature, New York, London, New York University
Press, 1998, p. 3.
5
In the same vein, see the following studies based on interesting data analysis: T.
Schmidt, K. Wörner (eds.), Multilingual Corpora and Multilingual Corpus
Analysis, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2012; E. Todeva, J. Cenoz
(eds.), The Multiple Realities of Multilingualism, Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2009.
6
L. Ming, “Globalism and Localism: Issues of Standard and Variation in English
as a Foreign Language”, in K. Tam, T. Weiss (eds.), English and Globalization.

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 World English(es) and the Multilingual Turn 107

This means that the fragmented varieties of English inevitably question

the authoritative power of standard, making linguistic globalism and
localism the double paradigm in which EFL and ESL have found their
major expression; being a dominant agent of interculture communication,
the potential of multilingualism and the leading role of English have been
seen as a benign consequence of a global world, regardless its threats and
how much elusive the idea of culture may sound today.
Precise geographical boundaries have bumped into non-static linguistic
identities of many speech-communities which are becoming accustomed to
a transitory existence: just think about the Third Culture Kids and what
they represent in cross-cultural enrichment.

Third Culture Kids spend at least part of their childhoods in countries and
cultures other than their own. The term is used to describe a child who has
parents of two different cultures, and they are “abroad” in a third. For
example, Tom’s mother is Haitian, his father is American, and the family
lives in Mexico. Or it may apply to a child with parents from the same
culture who lives in a country other than his or her own, and attends a
school in a third culture, as does Mary; her parents are from the U.K., the
family lives in Thailand, and she attends an international school. Children
are TCKs for many reasons: their parents are military personnel or
missionaries; or there is civil unrest in the home county, causing the family
to become refugees.7

TCK testify to a multicultural existence which overcomes the spread of

English as represented by Kachru’s circles or the fringed core by
McArthur.8 The degree of contact between English and other languages
builds a complex framework through which terms as “language contact”
and “nativeness” acquire further implications, especially after the
dissipation of the “Euro-English”, which seemed to be the predominant
pattern before the results of the Brexit9 referendum in June 2016.

Perspectives from Hong Kong and Mainland China, Hong Kong, The Chinese
University Press, 2004, p. 181, (181–204).
7
T. Tokuhama-Espinosa, “Third Culture Kids. A Special Case of Foreign
Language Learning”, in T. Tokuhama-Espinosa (ed.), The Multilingual Mind.
Issues Discussed By, For, and about People Living with Many Languages,
Westport, London, Praeger, 2003, p. 165, (165–170).
8
For further references to McArthur’s model see, T. McArhtur, The English
Languages, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
9
“Brexit” stands for “British Exit [from the European Union]”. The term was
derived from “the fashionable concept of ‘Grexit’—Greece exiting the Euro, which
newspapers like the Financial Times popularized (…)”, see D. MacShane, Brexit:
How Britain Will Leave Europe, London, New York, I.B. Tauris, 2015, p. 4.
108 Concluding Remarks

As a consequence, multilingual education programmes need a complex

and holistic approach, and all of this implies a twofold awareness. On the
one hand, multilingual strategies should address all the levels of education,
according to national plans which want to harmonize or resist the
pressures of multilingual competences. On the other hand, the promotion
of multilingual programmes should involve a wide range of actors of the
education response, first and foremost “the linguistic heterogeneity of a
country or region, specific social or religious attitudes, or the desire to
promote national identity” in Cenoz and Genesee’s words.10
The result is a new idea of communication which, leading to an
interdisciplinary knowledge of the world, deliberately encompasses the
value of linguistic “otherness” with the growing spread of English as a
complex tool for “sameness”.

10
J. Cenoz, F. Genesee (eds.), Beyond Multilingualism, Clevedon, Philadelphia,
Multilingual Matters, 1998, p. 41.

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