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1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney

The Intercultural Nature of Modern English

Continued, from part one

VI. "Loose Canons" as "Insurgent Weapons"

What Henry Gates Jr. has characterized the "loose canons" have yet to enter the portals of what is considered the sacrosanct territory of traditional English departments. There are well articulated attempts by the custodians of canonicity in English to protect the Western canon; there is a call for "reclaiming our heritage," and a rally to protect the purity of the canon from African, Asian, and African-American intruders. These attempts go beyond that; there is concern about the impurity entering the canon from north of the border, from Scottish English.

We see this attitude in the reactions to the use of language in the novel How Late it Was, How Late by James Kelman, last year's recipient of the prestigious Booker Prize. Kelman's book has been called a "disgrace" and "literary vandalism". The New York Times (November 29, 1994: pp.B 1-2) reported as follows:

In his heavy Scottish accent [Kelman] made a rousing case for the culture and language of 'indigenous' people outside of London..."A fine line can exist between elitism and racism," he said. "On matters concerning language and culture, the distinction can sometimes cease to exist altogether."

Recalling times when Glaswegian accents were banned from the radio or when his two daughters were 'reprimanded' in school for using the Scotts "aye" instead of the English 'yes,' he said it was wrong to call the language of his work 'vernacular' or 'dialect.'

"To me, those words are just another way of inferiorizing the language by indicating that there's a standard," he said. "The dictionary would use the term 'debased.' But it's the language! The living language, and it comes out of many different sources, including Scotland before the English arrived.

And not many years ago just over half a century ago the same attitude was expressed about the American literature in Britain. The great pundit of the American language summarized well the British attitude to American English when he wrote that "This occasional tolerance for things American was never extended to the American language." This was in 1936 (see H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th ed. 1936). And now one might ask: Is this attitude about American English in Britain dead? The answer is 'no'; one does not have to go too far for the evidence. Just recently, Prince Charles said that the American version of the language was "very corrupting" and that the English version was the "proper" one. He told the British Council that "we must act now to ensure that English and that, to my way of thinking, means English English maintains its position as the world language well into the next century" (Chicago Tribune, March 24, 1995: section 1, p.4).

And Prince Charles is not alone in taking this position; others, like him, are jealously guarding what is perhaps the only major export commodity left in Great Britain. It is, therefore, rightly claimed that "Britain's real black gold is not North Sea oil, but the English language … The value of having, in the post industrial age, people use the language of one's own culture is virtually inestimable." ("Selling English by the pound." Times, October 24, 1989, p.14: cited in Romaine 1992: 254). We can't say that Prince Charles does not understand that.

VII. Culture Wars and "Loose Canons"

I have briefly discussed the unprecedented diffusion of English in terms of its RANGE and DEPTH, one referring to the intercultural functional range of the language and the other to its societal penetration as varieties within a variety from acrolect to basilect to local pidgins. However, this intercultural nature of English, the multiculturalism represented in the medium and its message, continue to be marginalized, which has resulted in a variety of myths.3

The myths may be characterized as of three types. The first set of myths concerns the self perception of the English-users in the inner circle:- that of idealized speakers to be emulated and the language to represent their ideology and culture. The second set concerns the users of English in the outer circle: people are using English as a nativized and acculturated language for essentially local functions; it is one linguistic arm of their creativity. And the third set relates to the consequences of the diffusion of the language. I will mention just four such myths here.

The Interlocutor Myth: That English is primarily learned to communicate with the native speakers of the language (American, British, Australian). The sociolinguistic fact is that most of the interaction in English takes place among and between those who use it as an additional language; for example, Japanese with Singaporeans, Nigerians with Indians, Germans with Taiwanese, Koreans with Chinese, and so on.

The Monoculture Myth: That English is learned to understand American or British culture; that motivation is only partly true. In reality, one major function of English teaching in Asia and Africa is to impart native cultural values and traditions in culturally and linguistically pluralistic societies. English is thus used as a vehicle for integrative functions in a national sense (see e.g. above statements of Chinua Achebe, Raja Rao, Wole Soyinka and Gabriel Okara).

The Model Dependency Myth: That EXOCENTRIC models of American or British varieties of English are actually taught and learnt in the global context. In reality, the ENDOCENTRIC models provide major linguistic input. However, one must recognize that there is serious confusion among the users of English between what is perceived to be the norm and actual linguistic behaviour.

The Cassandra Myth: That diversification and variation in English across cultures is an indicator of linguistic decay, that controlling the decay is the job of native speakers as teachers of English literature and language, and that of ESL professionals and professional organizations who are involved in the spread and promotion of English around the world. The debate on this question still continues in all the circles of English (see, e.g., Bailey 1990).

These myths inhibit us from considering the intercultural creativity in English(es) within an appropriate paradigm of pluralism. What this marginalizing attitude actually does is preclude raising and answering important theoretical, educational, and ideological issues related to English canon(s) and English studies in our curriculum. The following types of issue come to mind:

  • that English as a medium is used by two distinct types of speech communities: one perceives itself essentially as monolingual and monocultural and the other perceives itself as multilingual and multicultural;
  • that these linguistic and cultural realities reflect in how English is used in various "intercultural" varieties;
  • that each circle of English articulates in its variety of English distinct literary and oral traditions and mythologies; and
  • that norms of literary creativity, the underlying assumptions, and their linguistic experimentations are not necessarily shared.

VIII. Discourse of Marginality and Paradigm Gap

The interculturalism in English as a societal, literary, and pedagogical concept has generally been perceived as a divisive practice and an intrusion on the conventions of the canon. It has been seen as a step toward linguistic Balkanization and as a threat to the Western canon. The variationist and multiculturalist approaches have been attacked as "liberation linguistics" and as off-shoots of "liberation theology," and innovations in creativity in Asian and African Englishes have been characterized as "...planned, managed, and promulgated by those who support a new tongue for new times" (Bailey 1990: 86).

Intercultural creativity seems to suffer from an identity crisis. We still do not seem to have appropriate labels for it. The labels we use seem to be like loaded weapons: Terraanglia, Third World literature, colonial literature, post-colonial literature, and Commonwealth literature. The use of Commonwealth literature is not really innocent. Salman Rushdie (1991: 61) gives an illuminating example of its use:

When I was invited to speak at the 1983 English Studies seminar in Cambridge, the lady from the British Council offered me a few words of reassurance. "It's all right," I was told, "for the purposes of our seminar, English studies are taken to include Commonwealth literature". At all other times, one was forced to conclude, these two would be kept strictly apart, like squabbling children, or sexually incompatible pandas, or, perhaps, like unstable fissile materials whose union might cause explosion.

And Rushdie continues:

A few weeks later, I was talking to a literature don, a specialist, I ought to say, in English literature a friendly and perceptive man, "As a Commonwealth writer," he suggested, "you probably find, don't you, that there is a kind of liberty, certain advantages, in occupying, as you do, a position on the periphery".

In reality, one doesn't have to quote Rushdie here, one sees this attitude about the African American canon, and the Chicano canon.

IX. Interculturalism vs. Traditional Canonicity

The concept of multi-canons and resultant interculturalism in world Englishes is in conflict with the traditional notion of canons. The first point relates to diversity, a concept that is generally being viewed as an initiator of chaos linguistic and cultural. This attitude is clearly reflected in earlier research on bilingualism and multilingualism in the USA. and is much discussed with reference to the "melting pot" hypothesis. Canada, Belgium, India, and Nigeria are thus viewed as cases of linguistic anarchy. The research of academics on bilingualism in the USA up to 1950, and its limitations, has not helped the situation. The same attitude was present in earlier debates on code alteration. This takes me to the second point, that of intense negativism about bilingualism, pluralism, and about such societies.

There is a wide body of literature which expresses such negativism (see e.g., Kachru 1988a, Skutnabb-Kangas 1984). A partial list of such negative attitudes includes :

  • that pluralistic societies are complex and their descriptions present explanatory complexities;
  • that writing grammars is difficult anyway, but writing descriptions of the bilingual's grammars is extremely complicated;
  • that homogeneity and uniformity should be emphasized in linguistic and cultural descriptions;
  • that language "mix" and "switch" are attitudinally unacceptable, and linguistically violate "purism";
  • that diversitysocial, cultural, linguisticessentially leads to chaos;
  • that bilingual groups are considered marginal and problem generating; and
  • that bi/multilingualism contributes to retarding materialistic growth.

There is also a third point which Forster (1970) has discussed in detail. Forster
(1970: 7) argues that:

… we have all been brought up to believe that each language has its mystery and its soul, and that these are very sacred things, in whose name indeed much blood has been shed and is still being shed…

There is enough supporting evidence for this position from the past and it is also evident in contemporary "linguistic fundamentalism" if I may use the term.

We must consider interculturalisms of new canons of English within the paradigms of contact literatures and contact linguistics (see Kachru 1992). This brings me to the fourth point of providing a framework for the description of interculturalism. The multi-canons need to be described with reference to three interrelated sets of areal characteristics: linguistic area, sociolinguistic area, and listening area (Kachru 1992: 150-151). In this trimodal approach to characterizing a canon, multicultural creativity essentially involves processes of translation, transcreation, and relexification. That literary creativity can have such overwhelming productive processes has generally not been accepted for Englishes, or it has been underestimated. Perhaps Lefevre's (1990: 24) reasons may explain part of the problem. The first reason he gives is that "… for the literary historian translation had to do with 'language' only, not with literature." And the second reason, in his view, is "… another pernicious outgrowth of the 'monolingualization' of literary history by Romantic historiographers intent on creating 'national' literatures preferably as uncontaminated as possible by foreign influence."

In this observation, there are many warning signals:

  • Intercultural canons of English are primarily contact literatures, therefore, these are paradigm examples of transcultural translation;
  • Intercultural canons are fully "contaminated" national literatures not based on the Romantic historiographer's notion of monolingualism.

In developing paradigms for understanding intercultural Englishes, as I have discussed elsewhere in the case of India (Kachru 1992a: 156-157), we have to take several characteristics into consideration which contribute to development of multi-canons. I shall just list them here without discussion:

  • relating the choice of available linguistic repertoire to the identities which one desires to establish for a particular interaction;
  • considering style shifts, including "mixing" and "switching," as indicators of identity manipulation; and
  • viewing style choices with reference to the multicultural contexts of ethnicity, caste, and social expectations.

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