Abstract
The rise of English as the world’s main international language has prompted a social justice agenda underpinned by an assumption that English causes or exacerbates inequality and injustice in the world. In this position statement, I set out to problematise and complexify this assumption, suggesting that English is neither a “Tyrannosaurus Rex”, a “Cuckoo” nor a “Lingua Frankensteinia”, but a “Red Herring”, distracting attention away from the underlying causes of inequality. Within the theoretical framework of “verbal hygiene” (Cameron 1995, 2012a), and drawing on my own empirical work and that of others, I argue for widening the scope of global English and more broadly applied linguistics. I suggest that as socially committed applied linguists, we stand a better chance of solving “real-world problems” (Brumfit 1995: 27) if greater attention is accorded to systems of inequality that are not obviously language-based. I will suggest that a too narrow focus on linguistic injustice risks losing sight of the underlying non-linguistic conditions that produce this injustice. I conclude by suggesting some ways forward that centre on co-thinking language with political, social, economic, cultural and material conditions.
Highlights
Global English and Social Justice No other language in history has grown as exponentially as English has in recent decades
I will argue that branches of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics committed to a social justice agenda would gain from an explicit acknowledgement that language is mostly a contingent, secondary factor and not a cause of inequality
In the Nordic countries, English has been said to cause “domain loss”, which refers to the idea that the national Nordic languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish and Icelandic) may lose functionality or be marginalised in transnational areas of life which are felt to be of key importance, such as science, higher education and business. This has at times been framed as an issue of social justice on the grounds that if scientific output is communicated in English, it will be inaccessible to those segments of the population whose English proficiency is not sufficiently high, and that if university students have been trained in English, their ability to undertake professional functions upon graduation will be hampered
Summary
Global English and Social Justice No other language in history has grown as exponentially as English has in recent decades. Economists have modelled the costs involved in learning languages and translating between them (Grin 1996; Hogan-Brun 2017; Gazzola et al 2018), whilst others have predicted the spread of English based on demographic changes (Graddol 2006) In this position statement, I will argue that branches of applied linguistics and sociolinguistics committed to a social justice agenda would gain from an explicit acknowledgement that language is mostly a contingent, secondary factor and not a cause of inequality. In contrast to Piller, I would suggest that language has always been a key trope in applied linguistics, and that the time has come not to “put it on the map of contemporary social justice debates”, but to tone it down. In what follows, I continue work in this vein by making a case for applied linguistics to decentre language
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