The Contribution of Language Contact to the Emergence of World Englishes

Contact, Asia, and the Rethinking of Englishes in Multilingual Ecologies

“…In what follows, we illustrate this with two features of New Englishes: tone and particles, features oft en used as the poster child for contact in Asian ecologies (see, e.g., Lim and Ansaldo 2012;Lim 2020;Ansaldo and Lim 2020), precisely because they are most instructive, demonstrating as they do how features of the New Englishes can evolve to be as rich and radical as the typologies of the substrates.…”

“…A signifi cant context that has oft en been overlooked comprises contact occurring before the era of British colonization, typically involving a chain of contact-that is, where a feature is initially transmitted from one language into another, and only later into a language of the European colonizer, usually Portuguese in the fi rst instance (they being the earliest), and thence into English. As recently highlighted (Lim 2020), a substantial proportion of lexicon, such as congee, godown, shroff , catty , and tael , for example, are characteristic of Asian Englishes, but their origins do not always stem directly from contact between the English language in the territories and the language(s) of the local peoples, but are in fact a few times removed. Th e following illustrations are drawn from Lim (2020).…”

“…As recently highlighted (Lim 2020), a substantial proportion of lexicon, such as congee, godown, shroff , catty , and tael , for example, are characteristic of Asian Englishes, but their origins do not always stem directly from contact between the English language in the territories and the language(s) of the local peoples, but are in fact a few times removed. Th e following illustrations are drawn from Lim (2020).…”

“…As noted in Lim (2020), in recent sociolinguistic scholarship, the fl uidity of language boundaries, premised on the possibility that language is never normative but instead always negotiable, has been amply recognized in the translingual turn (see, e.g., Cummins 2008;Garc í a 2009;Blommaert 2010;Creese and Blackledge 2010;Baker 2011;Garc í a and Li Wei 2014;Lee and Jenks 2016). Even while translingual scholarship and the World Englishes paradigm, with its discrete varieties, may at traditional face value seem to be positioned at odds with each other (Lim 2020: 83), the time is more than overdue for World Englishes research to explore what the translanguaging approach can off er, in order to better appreciate the increasing assemblages and entanglements involved.…”

“…Even more so then, the statement that world Englishes, as the collection of English varieties around the world, and World Englishes, as the fi eld of research, collectively owe their existence to language contact hardly needs mention nowadays. Th e evolution of Englishes in the non-settler, exploitation colonies in Asia, in particular, has been viewed as the epitome of language contact dynamics (e.g., Lim and Ansaldo 2012;Lim 2020;Ansaldo and Lim 2020)-because of the range of typologies of the indigenous languages in multilingual ecologies, which make for radically diverse Englishes, as well as because of language policies which have aff orded the spread and penetration and thus evolution of the new varieties. Th e signifi cance of a language contact analysis of Englishes in multilingual ecologies for the theorization of World Englishes is however sometimes understated.…”