Researching Globalization of English

Abstract

Research on the globalization of English – how the English language, no longer the language of the Anglo-Saxons, spread throughout the British Isles, colonies of the English-speaking empires, and the rest of the world, to gain the status of a global language, spoken by more and more people around the world – has developed through various methodologies that focused on the form, function, and ideologies of English. Over the past several decades, a wide range of methods has been employed, ranging from structural description to corpus analysis, from sociological analysis of domains to analysis of media texts, from matched guise technique to ethnographic and interactional analysis. But recent studies, due to the influence of poststructuralist perspectives on language, have increasingly questioned the implication that each of the three aspects of form, function, and ideology can be separately investigated on its own. An increasing number of studies thus shift their attention from nation-states to communities and abandon the assumption of fixed and predefined language boundaries to focus on speakers’ translingual practices as they draw upon multiple linguistic resources. Since the global spread of English is deeply implicated in the relations of power and inequality characteristic of neoliberalism, future innovations are likely to come from interdisciplinary perspectives that strive to move beyond the traditional scope of linguistics and language study toward interfaces with social dimensions that can illuminate the practical conditions of English in the world, such as language and materiality, or language and desire.