It Is Important To Recognize That Encounters With The Language Of The Other

By Author: Mike Jones
Total Articles: 255
Comment this article

Even though a speaker's use of language may be positioned simultaneously on levels other than that of the nation-state, how this language use stands in relation to institutionalized standard varieties or identity-based national languages often constitutes an important aspect of its local meaning. More crucially, in considering the use of English as a global language, in which the interactional domain is Tiffany Jewelry clearly transnational and thus supranational, it is important to recognize that encounters with the language of the other are typically mediated by imagined communities at the level of the nation-state.

With globalization, awareness of other spaces beyond one's national horizons becomes increasingly heightened, and as in any other cases of social perception, such spaces are necessarily conceptualized as a relational one (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). That is, given the awareness of the use of English across many world-wide sites, the social significance of one's own English can only be understood in relational terms: how my English stands in ...
... contrast to those of others. Thus, speakers will view varieties of English not only along the axis of sameness and difference, but also with respect to the (perceived) social values such as authority and authenticity (e.g. 'good English' versus 'broken English'). And in such evaluations, it is again national varieties that are frequently used as points of reference, because they serve as a salient basis not only for identifying varieties of English, but also justifying hierarchies of global power relations. An ideological interpretation of the Three Circles model thus allows us to capture this enduring power of the nation-state in the unified linguistic market. Another problem with Kachru's model discussed above was the model's limitations in accounting for cases which do not neatly fall into any of the three categories, and our reinterpretation makes Chanel Jewelry more meaningful sense of such situations. Given our explicitly ideological take on the model, the existence of hard-to-classify cases such as Egypt and South Africa is only to be expected, since the role of ideologies is precisely to 'erase' exceptions and contradictions to a dominant view of the world (Irvine and Gal 2000); ideological models are by their very nature attempts to smoothen the messy realities with which they come into contact. Thus, the model can be understood as a guide to prevailing ideological stances towards the English language, as manifested via different interpretations of the Essentialist Model.

The omission of South Africa from the list of Inner Circle countries and Egypt from that of the Outer Circle reflects the fact that the established or emerging varieties of English in those countries are not seen (by the speakers of those varieties, by other citizens of the nation, and by people outside the nation) as having an essentialized link with the identity of the national imagined community. Therefore, while scholars such as Bruthiaux (2003:162, 165) point out the scant linguistic basis for such classifications, that 'White South African English' or 'Egyptian English' lacks recognition indeed is a significant fact, because it reveals how the Three Circle model constrains and downplays cases which are incongruent with its underlying ideology of the language-nation-state alignment.