Unequal Englishes

The purpose of this article is to analyze the construction of unequal personhood in the institutional logics for the implementation of English as a medium of instruction (EMI) policy. I build on the theories of figures of personhood and figured worlds to discuss how institutions (public schools) use multiple semiotic resources to characterize students' diverse personality traits that reproduce neoliberal subjectivities shaping their EMI policies. The data for this article are drawn from ethnographic observations and interviews with the teachers from two Nepali public schools that have recently introduced a segregated EMI policy. The analysis of data shows that EMI schools use 'śikṣita', 'sabhya' and 'yogya' personality traits to justify the relevance of EMI policy to produce the educated person. The construction of such person types is shaped by sociocultural and political-economic ideologies and build unequal personhood, reinforcing neoliberal subjecthood and epistemic injustice. My recommendation is that we need to pay attention to examining how language policies in education construct unequal personhood by assigning, imposing, and imaging discriminatory personality traits which remain as the foundation of social injustice.

In this paper, I investigate the lived experiences with English of Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong from roughly 30 hours of recorded ethnographic interviews and fieldwork with 28 key participants talking about language in relation to their living and working experiences. Employing linguistic ethnographic approaches to analysis, I describe recurring accounts reflecting the tension between doing being an English-proficient and an English-deficient other: a tension that emanates from enabling and constraining sociolinguistic conditions in the workplace and the host society, and informed by participants’ experiences and education from their home country. I demonstrate how participants seem to discursively invoke and locate themselves in a hierarchy of English speakers: on the one hand, as better English speakers in the household-workplace, commanding respect and being accorded family language policy decision-making powers; while on the other, as of lesser English speaking abilities and rights than native English speakers, choosing to be silent or aloof, and passing negative judgement to fellow Filipinos who deploy stylized English in communication situations. The accounts of Hong Kong-based Filipino domestic workers thus show conflicting effects of unequal Englishes framing migrant workers’ experiences in ways that simultaneously fuel and challenge power asymmetries inherent in this transnational labor set-up.

SUMMARY Unequal Englishes, The Politics of Englishes today is a 267-page edited volume which brings together 13 chapters of 13 to 22 pages in length, 2 of which are co-authored. The editor of the volume, Ruanni Tupas is also joined by Rani Rubdy (who also contributed an article in the volume) to introduce the volume. It is divided into 4 parts which each assemble 3 or 4 chapters. The volume also contains a list of figures and tables, a forward written by Arjuna Pararama (also a contributor), acknowledgements, notes on contributors and a 3-page index. The introduction written by Ruanni Tupas and Rani Rubdy sets the tone for the volume. In their examination of the notion of inequality, the authors claim that the attitudes we entertain about the use of English are inherited from a long tradition of thinking that only 'Inner Circle' speakers can claim English as their own, and that other users of English are illegitimate, having corrupted the language. According to the authors, attempts to counter these deep-seated beliefs have resulted in reinforcing the supremacy of native-speaker Englishes, and in the marginalising of varieties that dare usurp the label " English " to refer to a language which arose out of the contact between peoples and cultures through colonialism and globalisation. Tupas and Rubdy revisit the question of whether 'Inner Circle' users or 'native speakers' own English. They observe that while we have come to accept the plurality of English, it is our trust in notions like functional linguistic equality (Hymes 1985:v) and language diversity that has shaped the hegemony of English (p. 2). Thus hegemony, entwined with political factors, has rendered the legitimacies of Englishes uneven. The authors acknowledge the role played by scholars like Kachru, McArthur, and Bhatt, who have underscored the necessity to reckon with local Englishes. Nonetheless, neither the notion of World Englishes nor the concentric model approach captures the social and linguistic pluricentricity of English. Instead, such ideologies as 'native speaker', 'standard English' and 'nation state' have gone unchallenged. Consequently, it is difficult to supplant these concepts particularly in the field of teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) and to speakers of other languages (TESOL). In these disciplines, the preference for 'native speakers' of the 'Inner Circle' confirms that linguistic diversity is not fully appreciated despite the attempts made by scholars like Kachru to foster the use of more democratic notions.