The Icing on the Cake: English as another Addition to Our Linguistic Repertoires

Abstract

(Mead, 1963: 186).This classic epigraph seems clear and pragmatic. Yet, when carefully considering the ideas inherent in the phrase, one finds a strong, assumed correlation between culture and language. Mead wrote these words over sixty years ago, in 1963. Yet, for us living in the postmodern world, I question the assertion that culture is finite, transferable product, and that people can be so easily defined, by linguistic or other approaches. For example, not all Americans are English speakers, and not all Chinese are Mandarin speakers. Moreover, in many parts of the world, young people grow up speaking two or more (non-English) languages, as a matter of necessity. They may have one indigenous home language, and one or more dominant languages for work, education, and/or media usage; they may also have English.As an English language educator, I then ask myself: Where does English fit into a non-mainstream multilingual youth's scheme of things? Why would young students, already bombarded with several languages, seek fluency in English?In my studies of non-mainstream multilingual children from Siberia, I have found that young Buriat students studying in North China have many valid reasons to switch to English, in both oral and written