PATRICIA FRIEDRICH
In 2003, Margie Berns and I organized a special issue of World Englishes about English in South America (Berns & Friedrich 2003). At the time, we referred to the region as “The other forgotten continent,” an allusion to the fact that both Africa and South America seemed to receive comparatively less attention than other parts of the world when it came to several areas of sociological and linguistic research. Both regions are also subject to descriptions that tend to be homogenizing and that often disregard the immense diversity – linguistic, ethnic, cultural, musical, geographic, and climatic – that they boast.
Such diversity is intuitive: Africa has an area of 11 million square miles and South America almost 7 million. It is hard to imagine that from the cool beach in Angola to the golden savanna in Kenya, and from the rainy Amazon forest to the icy Argentine Patagonia, people would all be living life, using language, and expressing themselves in the same way.
With regard to South America, diversity is definitely the rule, which makes a synthesis of language relations and English presence there a challenge. Different countries and different regions display this diversity through populations that are an organic combination of the contributions of their original inhabitants (notably from the Tupi‐Guarani family of languages and Quechua, for example), immigrating people (at first Portuguese and Spanish, and later many others, including German, Italian, and Japanese) as well as the rich linguistic and cultural additions from several African groups (for example, Yoruba, Igbo, and Bantu). The resulting cultures are hard to summarize. Instead, I offer only a glimpse through the linguistic realm: Brazilian Portuguese is a creative force, a language variety spoken by 200 million people, which causes change (especially through exported media) even to the “original” European Portuguese. In Paraguay, both an European language (Spanish) and a native one (Guarani) have official status and pragmatic everyday uses. In Peru, the same is true of Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara. In Argentina and especially in Buenos Aires, the local variety of Castellano, with its predominance of voiced and voiceless palatal fricatives/affricates (e.g. lluvia and llegar – [ʃ] and [ʒ]), distinguishes its speakers from other users of Spanish almost immediately. In Venezuela, while Spanish predominates, more than 40 indigenous languages share space. It is in this environment of multiplicity that Englishes spread their reach, and undoubtedly change, too.1
Over a decade has passed since Berns and I put together that collection, and yet, it seems that the linguistic landscape and particularly the world Englishes landscape remains rich with possibility and yet underexplored. It is true that some interesting and elucidating works on South America have been written, works that advance our knowledge and cause us to consider new questions. Yet such work, although qualitatively inspiring, remains quantitatively small if compared to the descriptions offered about other areas of the globe, particularly and especially Asia, but also notably Europe. In this chapter, I bring together reflections on the sociolinguistic information from that earlier time, newer information, and works written since then to help further an understanding of English(es) and their roles across the continent. As the open‐endedness of this chapter shows, there is a great deal of new, creative world Englishes research to be conducted in these fascinating and complex environments.
In any South American capital, it is unlikely that one would walk around the central parts of the city without coming upon at least one English language school. Fueled by the perceived needs for communicative skills, especially for the realms of business and education (Friedrich 2000, 2003), and by the difficulties faced by the primary and secondary education systems to provide such skills, these language schools often pick up the task of English Language Teaching (ELT). According to Barnes and Llana (2012), writing in The Christian Science Monitor, there are at least 70 language schools teaching English in Brazil alone, with a combined number of franchises that exceeds 6,200.2 At the same time, Barnes and Llana acknowledge that four out of five Brazilians of middle‐income families do not speak any foreign language, a fact which offers these schools ample opportunity for marketing but also puts into question the dynamics of learning in the country.
In recent years, physical spaces have been joined by “virtual” ones, with many online schools offering students the promise of quick distance learning, often advertising “native‐speaker” teachers as their best selling point, and in the process ignoring the many English varieties used every day in the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles (Kachru 1986 and after) and across them every single day. However, although common among online schools, the myth of the native‐speaker teacher as “the model” for language production is not exclusive to that mode of delivery. Spezzini (2005: 82), in describing research into the pedagogical practices of a well‐known bilingual school in Paraguay, writes that all the teachers belong to the so‐called “native speaker” group, showing once more that ideas about the role of multiple Englishes are still blurred by the belief in mono‐model teaching.
While the more established schools often offer sound curricula that take into consideration that a limited, three‐ to four‐hour a week exposure to the language means that years might pass before a student is fully competent, the discourse of a number of schools is often also based on promises of “fast learning.” When expectations and reality do not match, students tend to drop out, only to try again when pragmatic concerns such as a new job or a language test reappear.
This might be a contributing factor as to why English proficiency in many parts of South America is considered low. On the one hand, those not affluent enough to attend private lessons or a language institute depend on the crowded classrooms of regular schools; on the other, those expecting that language learning will be a speedy process might simply give up. According to the group Education First, in a survey3 of 60 countries of the Outer and Expanding Circles, in South America only Argentina ranks among the 20 most proficient in English at position 19, with Brazil at 38, Chile at 44, and Venezuela at 49.
Argentina, the country with the highest reported score of English ability, has a long (and at times contentious) history of contact with English, which includes a significant presence of British citizens in the period from the 1870s to the 1910s during the construction of the Argentine railways, which were financed to a large degree by the United Kingdom. The presence of the British in Argentina is also associated with farming (Nielsen 2003: 200). During the period of greatest British influence, bankers and industrialists also saw potential in the region and several emigrated, buying land and bringing customs and language with them, elements that would eventually leave a lasting impression. Nielsen (2003: 201) explains that those who were part of the English‐speaking linguistic network “had a social prestige and economic power that was incomparably superior.”
Other countries in the region have had dissimilar histories, even if commercial and “informal” colonization ambitions from Britain also happened elsewhere in southern South America (i.e. Chile and Brazil; see Cain & Hopkins 2014). Brazil, for example, was under much less (cultural) influence from the UK, and while French was the primary foreign language until the middle of the twentieth century, the end of World War II brought growing American influence, which in turn augmented the perceived importance of American English. In general terms, the importance and association of American English and employability (Friedrich 2000, 2003) throughout the region has remained a constant even when other social forces seem to be in a continual process of change.
So what are the main uses that English and its many varieties fulfill in the region and who are the people using and learning English? Among middle‐ and high‐income families, especially in the big metropolitan areas, English enjoys the status of default “foreign language,” and learning it at times comes with little reflection on the more specific reasons why. That is, studying English is simply something that one must do: undoubtedly, think the learners, there will come trips, study opportunities, and work requirements that make the choice of studying somewhat of a nonchoice. Subconsciously, there exists the belief that English starts or advances careers and promotes access to the cultures of Inner Circle countries, as well as study opportunities in them. In a study of the Ecuadorian commercial context, Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm (2003) found that survey participants associated English with such concepts as “internationality,” “technology,” and “modern life.” We can reasonably speculate that such associations help advance the desire to learn and use English as well. In that sense, English is learned (or aspired to) so that users can participate in “international” conversations, especially within the realms of education, business, and technology. Secondarily, but still related to “modern life”, South Americans want to access media in English including websites, music, film, and books. English has a symbolic role in immersing these countries in the culture(s) of the “western world,” which curiously has often included Western Europe and North America but not their southern hemisphere counterparts.
Concomitantly – and surprisingly – little time tends to be spent by researchers considering how the availability of many varieties and their uses in international contexts could potentially complicate study‐related choices. I was able to confirm in two instances (Friedrich 2000, 2003), for example, that awareness of other varieties besides American and British English is very low, a fact which in turn contributes to the low demand for exposure to a number of other varieties that might be useful in international contexts. Even the existence of other varieties within these big umbrella terms (i.e. regional and social varieties) is somewhere between little considered and not discussed at all. As a consequence, the idea that instructional models – given that many actual situations of communication in the world take place among the so‐called nonnative users of English – do not necessarily have to be exclusively American or British was not, and continues not to be, a common concern. Likewise, awareness that familiarity with these other varieties could facilitate understanding of the English speech of members of the wider international community is equally unusual. This may well be a cultural attachment that manifests itself elsewhere on the continent.
Chacón (2005: 260), for example, writes regarding the mandate by the Ministry of Education in Venezuela that “students are required to study English in junior and senior high school based on the need to use English as a means of communication with people from English‐speaking countries.” The goal of the teaching, therefore, discounts the possibility that learners would be using English to communicate with a larger international community beyond English‐speaking countries and that the strategies and methods used in the classroom should reflect that reality. Even the possibility that “English‐speaking countries” might mean different things to different people (i.e. “Aren’t Outer Circle countries English speaking?”) is not addressed.
By the same token, and because of beliefs about the audience with whom one is likely to communicate in English, the idea that one does not have to sound “native”’ to effectively use English is usually met with skepticism by teachers and students alike. A lot of time is spent trying to eliminate “local accent,” with little distinction between, for example, sounds that could make intelligibility more difficult as opposed to those that simply give away the (nonnative) origins of the participants in the conversation. Because so much emphasis in several areas of South America is put on oral skills, such elements as “accent,” pronunciation, and native‐like “command” of the language become important foci of attention.
There are exceptions to this preference, nonetheless. Sandra McKay (2003) informs us that in Chile, the Ministry of Education took the initiative of moving away from a focus on speaking to emphasize reading and listening. This was the result of the ministry’s realization that citizens in Chile would be better served if they gained access to technical and scientific information, which often is produced and communicated in written English. This is certainly a departure from many environments of learning in South America, which in theory emphasize the importance of speaking but in practice often rely on grammar‐translation and other traditional methods to teach English to large groups. On a related note, although American English tends to be regarded as the one serving the most functional role (Friedrich 2003; Ovesdotter Alm 2003), South American varieties were in Ovesdotter Alm’s study acknowledged to serve functional roles as well, even if Spanglish, a hybrid variety of English and Spanish, “is quite stigmatized among Spanish speakers who do not code‐switch” (Ovesdotter Alm 2003: 145).
Countries in South America are not typically considered to be English norm‐generating; that is, it is expected that the varieties used there attempt to emulate and approximate as closely as possible the varieties used in Inner Circle countries. That assumption disregards users’ creativity and previous linguistic and cultural backgrounds. It also disregards the fact that we are living in a world where the lines between native and nonnative speaker, oral and written distinctions, as well as the demarcations that signal the possibility of staying within each separate circle, are being constantly challenged and redrawn. It might also be useful to remember that the Three Circles model points to the historical direction of the spread of English much more than to an expectation that lines will not be crossed or that, in our postmodern understanding of phenomena, we remain attached to less‐than‐fluid language relationships. The beauty of the model lies in its ability to represent the spread of English without constricting it. As a result, it is possible to identify realms of use and networks of users that do not synchronically fit neatly within the demarcations of historical importance and that are becoming more fluid as technology, global communications, and virtual reality continuously change the ways we interact and live.
What we see in South America, then, is a series of tensions regarding belief and practice, historical antecedents and current needs. Perhaps it is all of this intricacy that led Velez‐Rendon to state that the attitudes of Colombians regarding English are “mixed and contradictory” (2003: 194). I would argue that such is also the case for much of the rest of South America, even if the mixed feelings and contradictions may be derived from different local concerns. The tension between perceived needs, likely obstacles, actual communicative ability, and attitudes toward language spread can often be extreme. This tension adds complexity to a region already often caught between conflicting feelings toward development and underdevelopment, or between self‐assuredness and an inferiority complex left by the patterns of its colonial past. These incongruities only add to the feeling that, much as with other social and linguistic phenomena, parts of South America are fully immersed in the Expanding Circle, other parts are mostly outside of it, and the Internet, which tends to blur any resisting well‐demarcated lines, has come to add new layers of meaning, symbolic and otherwise, to this already complex discussion.
Kachru adapted and utilized within world Englishes a model by Basil Bernstein (1971)4 according to which English can perform a variety of functions: regulative, interpersonal, innovative, and instrumental. The innovative function, which is often realized by creative texts, advertising, and other forms of marketing, is very strong in South America, even if the more traditional realization through literature is rare. Rather than playing a purely communicative part, the use of English in advertising plays a symbolic role that relies on the recognition that a language carries with it prestige and status. For that reason, it is not uncommon for businesses and products to be named with English words, and for t‐shirts and other items of dress to contain English phrases, thus allowing companies to capitalize on the perceived power and prestige of English. Sometimes the linguistic items do not even have to be English; they just have to sound like English to create an association with its prestige and status. This is especially easy given that, as mentioned above, the number of people who are actually proficient in English is small. In Brazil, for example, words such as disk ‘to dial’, a clipping of the verb discar, is ubiquitous in expressions such as disk‐pizza and disk‐farmácia to mean services and their respective phone numbers for telephone ordering. In this case, disk (with this meaning) seems to be English because it reproduces a common syllabic pattern in English which is unavailable in Portuguese (final syllable ending in the plosive /k/). It is only a secondary concern that in most Inner Circle varieties disk does not correspond to known Brazilian meanings, evidencing that in specific realms and limited functions, English has come to serve local creative and self‐expressive purposes.
Because English, especially through borrowing, code‐mixing, new word formation (e.g clipping, backformation), and invention fulfills localized and specific functions within the countries, expressions typical of the various contexts can often be found throughout South America. These constitute an additional class of words and terms that are locally generated and stand beside a large number of loanwords as more traditionally defined (e.g. delivery, sale, self‐service) and others so fully incorporated in the borrowing language that spelling has been formally revised (e.g. pingue‐pongue, piquenique, futebol in Portuguese, or fútbol in Spanish). Examples of local creativity in English include the following:5
‘I am working very hard.’
‘Stay in the car while I go to the convenience store to buy water.’
(Here auto‐service does not refer to a place to service the car, but rather a gas station’s convenience store.)
‘Have you seen the new billboard down the avenue?’
(Here outdoor derives from the fact that billboards occur outdoors).
‘Let’s have a cheeseburger with lettuce and tomato?’
(Here x /∫is/, the name of the letter in Portuguese, is pronounced similarly to English cheese and stands in for it. A related term is x‐tudo, ‘cheese‐everything,’ a large burger containing among other things cheese, lettuce, tomato, and egg).
‘She was wearing a long dress and he was wearing a tuxedo.’
(Here smoking is argued to derive from a ‘smoking jacket’, a Victorian garment that has little resemblance to a tuxedo.6 With this meaning, what was originally an adjective is always used as a noun).
‘Are you going to the “pocket show?”’
(Here the expression refers to a short musical show, often in bookstores, in celebration of an album release).
‘Let’s take the children to the playground.’
(Here play is a result of back‐formation and decoded even by those not familiar with the term playground in English).
‘Have you ever travelled by trolley?’
(Here the word for trolley/tram, bonde, is an adaptation of the English ‘bond’7 in reference to the tickets that were issued for those taking such transportation.)
Terese Thonus (1992) studied naming practices by Brazilian parents and found out that up to 22% of the names registered in the 20‐year period 1967–1987 in the city of Curitiba (population two million at the time) were influenced by English. This process has created a space for once obscure English‐inspired forms to become more popular. For example, Maicon, a local realization of ‘Michael’, now occurs more often. Letters not present in the Portuguese alphabet (e.g. y, w, and k) as well as double consonants (e.g. ll) in these instances can replace more traditional spellings (e.g. Camilly instead of the more customary Camila; or Katya, where both k and y are foreign letters associated with English, even if this latter name is originally Russian). It can be speculated that the practice of naming children with English‐influenced forms is mediated by social class, with a greater frequency of these names occurring among working‐class families. Its use can also be said to symbolize a desire for inclusion in a greater international order of which the English name would be a token.
A long history connects advertising and the use of English as its medium, and in countries in South America, the language has been used in combination with other foreign languages and with Portuguese and Spanish.8
Any simple survey of business names in South America reveals the significant extent of English use. A quick perusal, for example, of the names of shops in a popular mall in Buenos Aires, Argentina, shows that one‐sixth of all the store names are clearly in English, for example, 47 Street and Airborn (without ‐e). This number excludes both international brands and names whose origin or meaning is undefined or unknown. Should these be included, the ratio would be much greater.
Still in the realm of naming businesses, Ovesdotter Alm (2003: 147) investigated the practice in 10 malls of Quito, Ecuador, and discovered that in terms of frequency, “English increases with the social class of the shopping centers’ clientele,”9 with malls that target upper‐ and middle‐class individuals presenting the greatest use of English. This escalation is likely related to the perception that more people in these groups will understand English, as well as to the symbolic connection to internationalization and status they may expect.
My own study of English in advertising in Brazil (Friedrich 2002) reveals that a range of options is available to those who choose to name their businesses in English. They span from the simplest, for example, naming a business after a city or state in an Inner Circle country, to the most sophisticated, that is, names that rely on puns and plays on words that are likely only decodable by a portion of the population. The motivations again include making the brand seem international or modern or the name clever but also enlarging the pool of creative possibilities (i.e. more than one linguistic code, more possibilities of invention), and banking on the perceived status of English and those who use it. In Friedrich (2000), a survey of a popular mall in São Paulo (respecting the same criteria mentioned for Buenos Aires) reveals that almost one‐third of all stores have names containing at least one term in English.
Because the overwhelming majority of South American countries (Guyana and the Falkland Islands are the noteworthy exceptions) do not have English as an official language, English does not serve significant roles in the legal and governmental domains in most areas. However, this has not prevented some groups from trying to legislate against English and challenging its presence in many domains. The use of English in commercial and official/public contexts has been for years the subject of discussions in Brazil, for example, with laws both at the federal and state levels proposed to regulate its presence. A law proposal (number 156/year 2009) in the state of Rio Grande do Sul already approved in the lower house and awaiting review by the governor at the time of this writing, recommends that all use of “foreignerisms” be banned, and that translated versions in Portuguese be offered instead. When an immediate translation cannot be found, the law stipulates that in written language, an explanation of the term will be offered.
Much more encompassing is the PL 1676 of 1999, which establishes the use of Portuguese in the national realm and the restriction of foreign languages in many domains of use in Brazil (see Rajagopalan 2003 for a discussion). The proposal has had a long and controversial history that has spanned the many years necessary for its approval at a number of different legislative levels. It is clear that those who believe that the “purity” of Portuguese needs to be preserved fear the growing presence of loanwords from English, whereas those who find such laws unnecessary and ineffective argue that different purposes and audiences call for different uses of language and that no language is ever “pure” but rather is a hybrid, affected throughout its history by many linguistic influences. It fact, it would be interesting to pose to the defenders of the proposal the question of what to do with such long‐incorporated borrowings, some of which already have local spellings, such as pijama (Hindi), abajur (French ‘lamplight’), ziper (English), algebra (Arabic), and so many others, should the law take effect.
These efforts also disregard the fact that where there is language contact, there is language change and borrowing, and that when a pull towards the incorporation of expressions from other languages exists, other sociopolitical and economic dynamics are likely at play.
In the 2000s, the process of implementing higher education programs in English, or of delivery of some subjects in English, intensified in the postsecondary level in countries including Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Chile. The practice, which was already solidified in schools of letters or languages, for more obvious reasons, is now particularly salient among business schools, as they aim to internationalize their programs and ensure that their graduates are ready to interact in a global community. Many master’s of business administration programs are delivered in full or in part in English and rely on international visiting faculty besides in‐house professors to teach their courses. Several programs also have a study‐abroad component, and teaching classes in English ensures that when the students travel to fulfill such a requirement the transition can be a lot smoother. The need to publish in English, given that the majority of internationally recognized scientific journals are in that language, also motivates its use at the university level.
However, the path to education in English or involving English is not always easy. Depending on the students’ high school education and access (or its lack) to English learning earlier in their academic careers, the process of incorporating English into their university experience can be easier or harder. In a survey of graduate students in health‐related fields in a Brazilian federal university (besides state universities, Brazil also has universities managed and funded at the national level), Iglesias, Regina, and Alves Batista (2010: 77) discovered that when it comes to English skills “A maioria dos pós‐graduandos (95%) se autoavalia como leitores razoáveis e bons, mas com capacidade de fala ou escrita comprometida” (“The majority of graduate students [95%] self‐evaluate as reasonable or good writers but acknowledge having a compromised ability for speaking or writing” — my translation), with 77% of respondents revealing that they need specialized help when writing the English abstract of a paper or thesis, for example.
Diniz de Figueiredo’s (2010: 8) investigation of the use of English loanwords in Brazilian websites reveals that a large degree of creativity is present in the kinds of adaptations made to “localize” many terms. They include the addition of Portuguese affixes (e.g. boyzinho, with the use of the diminutive‐forming suffix –zinho, which here yields a meaning similar to that of ‘playboy’), change of grammatical category (e.g. to give an ‘up’ to something, meaning ‘to improve’), and the combination of both processes to create new meanings (e.g nerdear, which uses the English noun nerd and the verb‐forming suffix –ear to create nerdear meaning ‘to surf the net’).
This very small but telling sample shows that within the universe of online invention, the possibilities of linguistic innovation are limitless, and that the Internet blurs geographical and linguistic lines in ways that are hard to predict. In virtual communication, it is not unusual for Internet users to be exposed to many languages in one day and for such exposure often to be simultaneous and to result in creative patterns of mixing and borrowing. The processes that ensue are likely to have lasting effects on language change and code‐switching, not only in South America but everywhere around the globe.
In this chapter, I concentrated on South American environments where Portuguese and Spanish dominate and where English, by virtue of education and commerce/business makes its presence known especially as a foreign or international language, I would be remiss not to mention those areas where a different sociolinguistic profile can be found and for which lack of detailed commentary in this chapter is not a choice but rather a feature of limited world Englishes information available thus far. I am specifically thinking if Guyana (where English is an official language), French Guiana (an overseas department of France), and Suriname (where Dutch is an official language, although the country was also colonized by the British) besides the Falkland Islands, already mentioned before.
Edwards (1983) has shown the socially motivated nature of the alternation between Standard English, Creole, and an intermediary variety (i.e. the mesolect) in Guyana, and Romero (2008) has explained that Suriname boasts such linguistic diversity that speakers of languages like Dutch, Portuguese, Javanese, Chinese, and several local Creoles coexist. French Guiana is equally linguistically rich, with Creole and native languages in use alongside Portuguese, Spanish, English, and Dutch. Yet we do not have much world Englishes knowledge of these rich environments, so I urge international and local sociolinguistics to investigate this richness and add to the growing body of work on South America.
I have often wondered about the development of parallel, specialized literatures when it comes to an understanding of linguistic issues in South America. One such literature tends to be more international in nature, written in English, and often crafted by either people from the Inner Circle or by South Americans who reside and live abroad. Another, more regional in nature, is often circulated within countries of South America, written in either Portuguese or Spanish and developed by those living in the countries. It seems a productive effort could be made to merge and intersect those literatures more, providing greater insight into a phenomenon that is often perceived differently depending on who and where you are.
This preoccupation is manifested broadly elsewhere with regard to developmental world Englishes. One of the goals of developmental world Englishes is to incorporate more views from developing countries when it comes to world Englishes theory and practice. In that sense, Bolton, Graddol, and Meiekord (2011: 460) raise the following question:
The central question emerging from this is what − at a very practical level − can WE scholars from developed countries do to establish more effective contacts and synergies with scholars from developing societies in contexts such as South America, Africa, and Asia?
Given that our views tend to be fragmented and mediated by our places in the world, complex environments can only benefit from these synergies, and South American countries are faced with a pressing need for investigations regarding their linguistic and sociolinguistic reality. Such collaborative research could have pedagogical aims but also and very important should also inform policy making, especially because it is clear that discussions taking place in political and economic arenas which are not always informed by the specialized knowledge that a field such as world Englishes can provide. At stake are the plurality of linguistic expressions in the region and the further insertion of its population in global conversations that can matter for its future.