Englishes in an age of reimagining: Perspectives from multicultural Asia

Abstract

In what is viewed as the second phase of postmodernity, in particular as defined by digitality, we are afforded challenges and opportunities for reimagining once-imagined English communities. I identify 2 phenomena that I suggest need to be appreciated for their significance in the language contact dynamics of this era and their impact on the evolution and conceptualisation of Englishes in multicultural contexts. I consider peripheral or minority communities who have shifted from their ancestral vernacular to the colonial language they accessed, English – and I use as illustration the erstwhile Baba-Malay-speaking Peranakans of Singapore. With such communities, while their emergent variety, considered a lesser-known variety of English, is usually described as displaying both acrolectal as well as vernacular features, its characteristic as a mixed code is often mentioned but not afforded sufficient scholarly attention as a fundamental dimension of the Englishes of such contact communities. I also consider communities who, even with English as a post/colonial language, are essentially other-language-dominant – here I use Cantonese-dominant Hongkongers as a case in point. The challenge in such contexts is that, for a new variety of English to genuinely emerge as a variety, it has to be used widely and spontaneously in a society, for internally driven norms to emerge. In such contexts, it is computer-mediated communication (CMC) which serves as a vital platform and catalyst. CMC of multilingual communities favours the use of English, promotes significantly more code mixing with and calqueing into English compared to spoken discourse, and prompts subsequent spread to other domains. Diasporic web-based communities of practice use their contact language variety more than in traditional writing of spoken face-to-face interaction. Such a platform and its practices support the evolution and positioning of multilingual English varieties. What were traditionally language communities on the margins of study in the linguistics of English – those engaging in mixed language practices, developing multicultural New Englishes – are in a time of reimagining, in practice and in scholarship, and need to be valued for what they can reveal about language contact dynamics, diversity, evolution, and authenticity in the study of Englishes.