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Bilingual Language Play and World Englishes

ALEXANDRA A. RIVLINA

1 Introduction

Bilingual language play is a manifestation of bilingual creativity, or “bilinguals’ creativity,” defined by Braj Kachru as “those creative linguistic processes which are the result of competence in two or more languages” (1985: 20). The concept bilingual creativity embraces a wide range of creative bilingual practices. These include, first, bilingual literary or discursive creativity found in contact literatures and in “the creative ways language is used to affect social change” (Bolton & Jones 2010: 454); and, second, linguistic creativity, or creative language per se, connected with the innovative use of linguistic forms across languages. Bilingual language play is bilingual linguistic creativity par excellence, when the manipulation of linguistic forms from two languages is foregrounded and highlighted by rhetorical devices such as punning, hybridization, or rhyming; in other words, when the juxtaposition of linguistic forms from different languages is played on.

Numerous studies show that multilingualism fosters linguistic creativity because a multilingual speaker has “both more leeway and more means for linguistic creativity than a monolingual person because he/she has more resources to draw on, manipulate and be creative with” (Hülmbauer & Seidlhofer 2013: 396). Moreover, multilingualism develops in bilinguals and multilinguals the degree of metalinguistic awareness that many monolinguals lack and that includes the awareness of the creative possibilities of bilingual resources.

The study of bilingual creativity is one of the major issues in world Englishes theory (see Bolton & Jones 2010 on creativity and world Englishes). English today, due to its globalization, has become “perhaps the single most important linguistic resource for the promotion of global bilingualism and for linguistic creativity” (Bhatia & Ritchie 2013: 571). Linguistic creativity which involves language mixing¹is a particularly salient feature of the non‐Inner Circle English varieties because it is in the Outer and Expanding Circle contexts that English is most often mixed with other languages, and it is argued that new varieties of English are basically code‐mixed varieties (McLellan 2010). Language mixing, being a universal feature of world Englishes, is seen “as a systematic and rule‐governed phenomenon which satisfies the creative needs of bilinguals” (Bhatia & Ritchie 2013: 570).²

Bilingual language play, a subtype of bilingual linguistic creativity frequently invoked but seldom defined, does not fare well among world Englishes researchers. There are few publications making bilingual language play in various countries a focal point of study, for example, Luk (2013) and Rivlina (2015). This lack of attention can be partly explained by the fact that many scholars tend to reject the traditional product‐oriented approach to bilingual creativity studies, which derives from literary stylistics and focuses primarily on the formal properties of language. They argue for more emphasis on the social and cultural conditions of creativity as a more relevant approach from the world Englishes perspective (Jones 2010: 469).

Another reason is that bilingual language play presents a serious challenge for data gathering. It is hard to predict the occurrence of bilingual language play, and in most studies on this issue, examples are obtained not by a systematic search, but by incidental, opportunistic, informal, or anecdotal sampling (Luk 2013;: 239–240, Stefanowitsch 2002: 82). Playful language data also often turn out to be the byproduct of other research, for example, the analysis of multilingual practices in linguistic landscape (J. W. Lee 2014). Overall, as many linguists complain, for a long time language play has been a badly neglected and trivialized subject of linguistic inquiry, “pushed aside as insignificant” (Maynard 2007: 26), “at best treated as a subject of marginal interest, at worst never mentioned at all” (Crystal 1998: 1). Recently, however, there has been renewed interest in the study of language play (Cook 2000; Crystal 1998; Il’iasova & Amiri 2009; Luk 2013; Sannikov 2002; Sherzer 2002; Stefanowitsch 2002; Yelenevskaya 2014; Zemskaia, Kitaigorodskaia, & Rozanova 1994). To stress the importance of language play research, Sherzer writes:

Methodologically, speech play is a valuable tool for the investigation of both language structure and language use, revealing the ways in which various elements of language can be manipulated in different contexts. From the perspective of sociolinguistics, since speech play often emerges from languages, styles, and varieties in contact, its study provides insights into the use of and attitudes towards the sociolinguistic repertoire of a community.

(2002: 9)

Within the framework of world Englishes, bilingual language play is not often dealt with in publications on regional varieties of English, except for a cursory mention in some studies, for example, Proshina (2010: 305–306). It features mainly in domain‐oriented research, especially in the study of such creative domains as advertising or pop culture (Hsu 2008; Lin 2012; Y. Kachru 2006; Martin 2007: 183–184; Moody & Matsumoto 2012; Ustinova & Bhatia 2005: 499–502), also in computer‐mediated communication (Androutsopoulos 2012; Su 2007), and linguistic landscape (J. W. Lee 2014; Luk 2013). The factual data represented in these publications show the pervasiveness of bilingual language play and provide a useful basis for its further investigation as a contact phenomenon in its own right with certain similarities and differences in different world Englishes contexts. The potential research value of a comparative‐contrastive approach to the study of creative practices was revealed in a linguistic‐anthropological study of speech play and verbal art in different cultures by Sherzer (2002). He showed that there are significant differences between the scope of language play, its appropriateness in different settings, and the types of language play most widely used in different communities. In World Englishes studies, a contrastive analysis of bilingual creativity was undertaken by D’Souza (2001), who showed how creativity is expressed differently in Singapore English and Indian English due to the unique set of sociolinguistic, cultural, and historical circumstances in each country.

This chapter highlights the possibilities of a systematic account of bilingual language play as an essential feature of world Englishes by establishing some basic similarities and peculiarities in the playful use of English‐related bilingual resources in different world Englishes contexts. Next, some key terms relevant for the discussion are specified. The major formal patterns of bilingual language play are identified, as well as various sociopsychological connotations commonly rendered through the use of these patterns. The major linguistic features of English interacting playfully with different local languages are illustrated by data analyzed in various publications and supported by examples from the author’s own corpus of English‐Russian language play. Then the implications of bilingual language play for the status and role of English in various communities are addressed. The chapter concludes with an outline of the possible directions of future research into bilingual language play that may contribute to world Englishes theory.

2 Creativity, Bilingual Creativity, and Language Play

Creativity, including literary and linguistic creativity, has been studied extensively from different perspectives (for overviews, see Bolton 2010: 457–459; Jones 2010: 467–471; Maynard 2007: 23–31; Pitzl 2012: 30–33). For the purpose of this chapter, it is important to distinguish between broad and narrow interpretations of linguistic creativity. Treated broadly, in a Chomskyan understanding of the term, linguistic creativity applies to “the normal use of language” (Chomsky 2006: 88), implying the ability of all language users to create and understand an infinite number of new speech products. In the more traditional narrow sense, connected with what Chomsky refers to as “true creativity” (Chomsky 2006: 8), linguistic creativity amounts to “inventiveness in form,” “deviation and foregrounding,” “the departure from what is expected in language” (Wales 2001: 90), “the breaking, re‐forming, and transforming of established patterns”, “curious manipulation of language” (Maynard 2007: 3), and “a marked breaking or bending of rules and norms of language, including a deliberate play with its forms and potential for meaning” (Carter 2004: 9). Functionally, linguistic creativity implies the “focus on the message for its own sake,” designated the poetic function by Jakobson (1960: 356), also known as creative, imaginative, or aesthetic function. Jakobson underscored that in poetics, the poetic function is the “dominant, determining function, but not the only one; it is superimposed upon the other functions of language” (Jakobson 1960: 359), such as the referential, emotive, directive, or other functions. Jakobson was also among the first to point out, as did many linguists after him (Carter is the most widely quoted), that the manifestations of the poetic function exist outside of the literary activities in different spheres, including everyday speech, “when some other functions are superimposed upon the poetic function” (Jakobson 1960: 359).

Similarly to linguistic creativity, bilingual linguistic creativity is seen by different researchers either in a broad way or in a narrow way. In the broad sense, the term “creativity” is often applied to all types of linguistic innovations and deviations induced by language contact, including various new and unconventional linguistic forms, and sometimes the very practice of code‐switching, code‐mixing, and borrowing (D’Souza 2001; Jenkins 2006: 26–27; Yunik 2001: 162–163). In the narrow, more traditional sense of the term, as the previous discussion suggests, bilingual linguistic creativity can be seen as dominated or determined by the creative (poetic, aesthetic) function, focusing on the innovatively mixed linguistic form itself.

In this understanding, linguistic creativity is closely interconnected with the notion of “language play,” and the “ludic,” or playful, function is defined as a subtype of the creative function, with special emphasis placed on fun, amusement, and entertainment in language manipulation (Zemskaia, Kitaigorodskaia, & Rozanova 1994: 172–173). Compare the following definitions of language play: “bending and breaking the rules of the language… for fun” (Crystal 1998: 1), “the use of language in innovative ways for amusement” (Apte 2001: 277). In bilingual speech research, language play and its types, such as puns or rhyming, are seen as specific literary and psycholinguistic functions of language mixing (Auer 2001: 444; Bhatia & Ritchie 2013: 591). Whether language play is examined as a form or a function, it should be stressed again that playfulness is never an end in itself in the process of communication. Language play, as Carter (2004: 20) puts it, “does not exist wholly for purposes of entertainment or simply for the intrinsic pleasure obtained from the recreation of new words or meanings from familiar patterns.” It is part of a complex combination of simultaneously performed functions – in cases of bilingual language play, the diverse functions performed through language mixing – and it can contribute to the construction of some serious, even critical meanings, as the following discussion demonstrates.

A terminological caveat is required in connection with the term “speech play,” which some authors choose over the term “language play” (Apte 2001; Sherzer 2002), and which emphasizes the fact that creative linguistic manipulations take place in people’s speech. Most linguists still stick to the more traditional term “language play,” arguing that play on verbal forms cannot but be based on speakers’ knowledge of the language system and the norms of language use (Sannikov 2002: 15). Another term often used interchangeably with “language play” is “word play,” but when used instead of “language play,” it is slightly inaccurate. “Language play” is a wider term, which implies that “[a]ny aspect of linguistic structure is available to become the focus of language play” (Crystal 1998: 9), including the pronunciation, the writing system, the grammar, the vocabulary, or the patterns of spoken and written discourse.

3 Formal Aspect: Techniques of Bilingual Language Play

When dealing with the formal aspect of language play, different publications enumerate a wide range of loosely compiled artistic verbal forms, such as punning, parody, teasing, verbal dueling, verbal games, riddles, nursery rhymes, mnemonic devices, tongue‐twisters, and play languages (Apte 2001: 277; Luk 2013: 238; Sherzer 2002: 10). Most of these are considered to be universal categories with the differences in structure, rules, and sociocultural contexts across languages and cultures.

As for bilingual language play, to date there is no exhaustive list of its forms or patterns, and the information about the peculiarities of the linguistic realization of playful techniques in different language combinations with English is scattered. Since, as mentioned, few publications have bilingual language play as their object of study, most scholars tend to note just a couple of the most representative examples of playful language mixing, typically, bilingual puns or hybrids, while overlooking the rest of the data.

There is ample evidence that the differences in bilingual language play forms are conditioned primarily by the typological features of local languages interacting with English. For example, mock Englishization of local languages is a widely employed, if not universal, type of bilingual language play in new varieties of English; however, only speakers of tone languages can resort to the tonal characteristics of morphosyllabic characters to mimic the intonation contours associated with familiar English expressions (see the examples in Su 2007: 74). Therefore, bilingual language play based on the foregrounding of formal typological differences is a felicitous object of linguistic inquiry, especially in investigating world Englishes.

Bringing together the information from available sources on English interacting playfully with various local languages, the following part of the chapter outlines some major techniques of bilingual language play and their peculiarities in different world Englishes contexts.

3.1 Bilingual punning

Pun, or paronomasia, is wordplay based on “foregrounded lexical ambiguity” (Wales 2001: 326) through the juxtaposition of meanings of similar‐sounding lexical units. Bilingual punning involves the juxtaposition of words, morphemes, or syllables which are homophonous in two languages, which invokes additional meanings. If bilingual language play is bilingual linguistic creativity par excellence, bilingual punning is bilingual language play par excellence; whenever bilingual language play is addressed, the example most typically provided for illustration is that of bilingual punning (see Carter 2004: 20; Hoffer 2002: 16–22; Hsu 2008: 160; Martin 2007: 183–184).

Being a common feature of bilingual speech, bilingual punning analyzed from the world Englishes perspective entails, first of all, the foregrounding of different varieties of English. Martin quotes an example from a study done by Myers on advertising in South Africa: an ad for Brooks running shoes shows a naked man with his groin covered by pictures of shoes, and the text says, “I feel naked without my Brooks.” The pun can be grasped only if one knows that in South African English brooks is a slang word borrowed from Afrikaans meaning “shorts” (Martin 2006: 590).

Furthermore, when English is mixed with local languages in bilingual punning, the local linguistic environment and the peculiarities of local varieties of English play a significant role in the creation and interpretation of puns. For example, Stefanowitsch (2002: 67) analyzes an English‐German pun Auf gates! used in an advertisement for a German home computing magazine. To process this pun one needs to know that (a) Auf geht’s! is a fixed phrase in German meaning ‘up it goes’, (b) Gates refers to Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Corporation, and (c) in a German‐speaking context, Gates is likely to be pronounced as homophonous with geht’s as /ɡe:ts/, while a typical English‐accented pronunciation of geht’s is homophonous with Gates.

Though based on similar‐sounding lexical units, most puns are recognizable only with the help of writing, therefore, it is often the typology of a writing system that determines the specific linguistic mechanisms that can be employed in English‐vernacular punning. Languages which share the Roman script with English play mainly on differences in orthography to bring in additional meanings. Stefanowitsch provides several examples of how the German word Kultur/kʊlˈtuːɐ̯/, ‘culture’, has spawned a whole family of English‐German orthographic puns, such as Kul‐Tour, repeatedly used by travel agents to refer to package tours focusing on the culture of a country, or Cool‐tur, in an ad trying to convince young people how “cool” it is to be interested in their cultural heritage (2002: 69). Languages that use non‐Roman scripts often employ script‐switching to bring out the parts of puns which are homophonous with English. For example, in the name of a hairdresser’s accessories shop БиGOODи in Moscow, the Russian word бигуди, /bɪɡudɪ/, meaning ‘hair‐rollers’, is graphically manipulated to emphasize the middle part of the word < ‐гуд‐>, /‐ɡud‐/, homophonous with the English word ‘good’, which is supposed to evoke an additional positive meaning.

Double entendre, a “near‐pun” figure of speech in which lexical ambiguity is employed to create a risqué effect, is also widespread in different world Englishes communities. For example, the English word who is partially homophonous with a taboo Russian invective; hence, the English phrase “who is who” is sometimes embedded into Russian‐based communication instead of its Russian equivalent to generate humorous or derisive connotations. The opposite direction of cross‐linguistic playful reference to an English invective is demonstrated in J. W. Lee (2014). He discusses the name of a Vietnamese restaurant “What the Ph?,” which humorously adapts the English “What the f***?” by blending in the phonetically similar Vietnamese word for ‘noodle soup’ (J. E. Lee 2014: 68–69).

3.2 Bilingual language play on scripts and orthographies

Besides being used as a tool for creating bilingual language play figures, the differences in writing systems themselves often become a focus of ludic juxtaposition. The rules of writing in general provide a fruitful source of language play manipulation, including jokes playing on spelling and punctuation, “comic spelling,” mimicking a local dialect, or “sensational spelling,” widely used in branding and advertising to attract attention, ensure brand uniqueness and thus increase its recognition and memorability. The play on different scripts and orthographies is an additional ludic option for bilinguals, or rather for “biliterates” and “biscriptals” (Bassetti 2013: 651–652), people who know and creatively employ two writing systems.

In written discourse, the globalization of English, combined with a rapid increase in new communication technologies such as text messaging or computer‐mediated communication, has contributed to a phenomenon labelled “digraphia,” or the use of two writing systems for the same language. World Englishes studies in different domains indicate that script alternation does not always coincide with language alternation, and speakers of local languages creatively broker the resources provided by the Roman alphabet, associated with the English language, in juxtaposition with their native scripts, without necessarily switching into English. For example, biscriptal practices reported in advertisement and linguistic landscape research include widespread nonce transliteration from English into local languages, resulting in “English wrapped in non‐Roman scripts” (Bhatia & Ritchie 2013: 573), or vice versa, from local languages into the Roman script, resulting in “pseudo‐English in Roman characters” (Proshina & Ustinova 2012: 43). Nonce transliteration may be seen as creative in the wider sense of the term when it is used for practical reasons, such as catering for the needs of monoliterate readers, who “are being initiated into bilingualism” (Bhatia & Ritchie 2013: 574), or coping with the technical constraints in computer‐mediated communication (“computer‐mediated digraphia,” as described in Androutsopoulos 2012). However, examples where Roman‐local script transliteration is used playfully are not uncommon. For instance, Androutsopoulos comments that the choice of the Roman script for a common Greek word Kreas, ‘meat’, to name a restaurant “contextualizes, perhaps not without a certain irony, the restaurant’s supposed cosmopolitan character” (2012: 368). Language play in this and numerous similar cases in different countries is based on a deliberate playful juxtaposition or even a clash of local vocabulary with the English/Roman graphic form.

Another linguistic technique commonly employed for bilingual language play in written discourse is the hybridization of scripts. Particularly popular in English‐Russian playful interaction is creative grapho‐hybridization through grapheme substitution, as in the name of a restaurant in Moscow, Vaниль (the Russian word Baниль means ‘vanilla’). This technique plays on the Roman letters, which differ graphically from the Cyrillic script but correspond to similar phonemes; for example, the grapheme < v > renders the sound /v/ similar to the sound rendered in Russian by the Cyrillic letter < в>. These Roman graphemes are embedded into Russian words to substitute their Cyrillic counterparts as the markers or tokens of English in Russian written text without destroying the phonemic structure of the Russian word, as in Vaниль ← Baниль. The fact that the Russian writing system is “phonologically transparent” (that is, grapheme‐phoneme correspondences in Russian are almost one to one) (Bassetti 2013: 650), makes separate grapheme substitution a very popular technique of English‐Russian language play, available to Russian speakers with different levels of English‐Russian bilingualism, even if limited by biscriptalism only.

Bilingual language play through transliteration and grapho‐hybridization is often based on just the graphic clash, the “otherness,” the unconventional use of one script against the background of the other one creating variety, attracting attention, increasing recognition and memorability, or providing “a decorative graphic design” (Hsu 2008: 161). However, in many contexts, the play on scripts and spellings also involves the play on their “visual symbolism” or “iconicity” of “script‐as‐image” (Sebba 2015), meaning that scripts are closely associated with languages and are perceived as representing them. For speakers of languages using other writing systems, the Roman script metonymically or iconically represents English as the global language, rendering the ideas of modernity, sophistication, technological advance, and internationalization, as well as contributing to various aspects of identity construction. Some linguists stress that these symbolic meanings can be constituted “by merely using a single English letter” (Gao 2012: 159). The linguistic and sociopsychological choices which emerge in the situation of global digraphia are readily played on in bilingual written discourse “to visually emphasize or blur the boundaries between the languages” (Angermeyer 2012: 255).

Alongside common bilingual language play techniques such as playful transliteration or script hybridization, there are also unique patterns of writing system manipulation determined by the unique features of the local languages interacting with English. J. W. Lee discusses a peculiar case of play on orthography in English‐Korean language mixing, which he defines as “sensational spelling,” when an extra grapheme is used, as, for example, in the name of a cocktail lounge Wine Bbar (‘Wine Bar’) in Los Angeles (2014: 63). This spelling deviation plays on the fact that Koreans commonly aspirate consonant sounds in informal spoken discourse and double graphemes traditionally reflect the peculiarities of Korean consonantism in the process of its Romanization. Qi Fang and Mo Shaobin (2016: 30) describe a unique innovative orthographic practice of “pinyin alphabetism,” which developed in Mandarin‐English interaction: for example, in the innovative form ‘ddmm’ the original Mandarin characters ‘弟弟妹妹’[dìdimèimei] (‘younger brothers and younger sisters’) are transformed into their respective initial pinyin Roman letters, that is, ‘dd’ for ‘弟弟’ [dìdi] (‘younger brothers’), and ‘mm’ for ‘妹妹’ [mèimei] (‘younger sisters’). The use of this technique for Mandarin‐English double entendre is illustrated by Li Wei (2016: 13): NBA in modern Chinese discourse has nothing to do with basketball but is the abbreviation of the pinyin for an exclamation which was originally a taboo swear word, now meaning ‘awesome’.

3.3 Bilingual lexical hybridization

Lexical hybridization is a regular pattern of word‐building by using elements from different languages, both in lexical derivation (e.g. washable: OE root + Fr./Lat. suffix) and in compounding (e.g. television: Gr. root + Lat. root; Wales 2001: 189). Kirkpatrick traces the traditions of lexical hybridization investigation in world Englishes theory to the seminal work of B. Kachru in “The Indianization of English.” He refers to Kachru’s analysis of how a local word and an English word combine to form a word or expression of Indian English, for example, tiffin carrier (tiffin means ‘lunch’ or ‘meal’; Kirkpatrick 2007: 93). Similar examples of lexical hybridization are to be found in practically all local varieties of English. Together with other innovative means of mixed lexis formation, such as semantic shifts, borrowings from local languages, and locally coined words and expressions, they are seen as indicative of the local speakers’ linguistic creativity in the broad sense of the term.

Creative in the narrow sense of the term and used primarily for fun and entertainment, ad hoc bilingual lexical mixing is described as a subtype of language play on word‐building patterns (Zemskaia et al. 1994: 190). Il’iasova and Amiri (2009: 144) call such nonce hybrids “linguistic centaurs” and analyze the use of the borrowed suffix < ‐инг>, ‘‐ing’, as one of the most revealing examples of this bilingual phenomenon in modern Russian. The suffix < ‐инг > was introduced into Russian together with numerous English loans, such as митинг (‘meeting’) or шoпинг (‘shopping’), most of them stylistically neutral. However, as the number of such borrowings dramatically increased, the suffix has developed an independent ludic usage, and today is often attached to native Russian roots jokingly, to mock in a certain way excessive Englishization of Russian or to express irony. For example, the word путинг, ‘puting’, derived from the surname of Russian president Putin, is sometimes used jokingly or ironically to denote various things this person does in politics (Il’iasova & Amiri 2009).

Especially pronounced is the creative juxtaposition of two languages in one lexical unit when the morphemes are not borrowed or transliterated, but code‐mixed inside one lexical form; in other words, when lexical hybridization is enhanced by grapho‐hybridization. For example, consider the Russian book title Дуxless (Dukhless). The book by Sergey Minaev was turned into a major movie, hugely popular and later followed by a sequel Дуxless 2. The Russian root дуx ‘soul’ is combined with the English suffix ‐less, creating a nonce blend meaning ‘soulless’. The equivalent meaning can be rendered by the Russian adjective бeздушный (bezdushnyi); however, the author chose to mix creatively Russian with English, the latter functioning as a symbol of Westernization, which allegedly corrupts people’s souls.

Another frequent combination of different language play techniques in one creative linguistic form occurs when lexical hybridization is aimed at the punning effect. For example, Luk (2013) describes an endeavor by McDonald’s to localize its food menu in Hong Kong, where, as in many other Asian regions, rice is the staple food. The advertiser replaced the first syllable in the word fantastic with the Chinese character meaning ‘rice’, 飯tastic (飯 [faan6] ‘rice’). According to Luk, the combination of this Chinese character with ‐tastic not only foregrounds the Chinese flavor but also makes ‐tastic stand out, as it may be associated with the word ‘tasty’. This example of ludic bilingual word‐formation, or “cross‐linguistic word‐formation,” as Luk defines it, “serves three different purposes: localising McDonald’s global food items, emphasising their concern with good taste, and providing a positive evaluation of their new product” (2013: 244).

3.4 Bilingual rhyming

Language play research indicates that the focus on the phonetic aspect of linguistic units in such creative forms as rhyme, rhythm, reiteration, assonance, alliteration, sound symbolism, and onomatopoeia is fascinating from early childhood, as it is the first type of language play that people engage in, and it continues throughout life (Cook 2000: 5). Rhyme, phonemic matching, the most widely used among these forms, is studied not only as a poetic device for verbal artists but also in everyday speech, as, for example, a powerful means of mastering the language coupled with enjoyment for children in “playground verbal art,” including teasing games, counting‐out rhymes, nursery rhymes, and “gibberish rhymes” (Zemskaia et al. 1994: 176; see also Cook 2000: 11–34). The psycholinguistic power of rhyming is stressed in advertising studies, where it is described as a literary device which plays an important role in product recall and information primacy effect (Bhatia & Ritchie 2013: 591).

Bilingual rhyming based on the phonemic matching of English and vernacular words is often reported to create an artistic effect in different countries, especially in the domain of pop‐culture. Lin (2012) presents an in‐depth analysis of English mixed with Cantonese and Putonghua (the spoken form of Mandarin Chinese) in Cantopop music in Hong Kong, showing how “code‐mixing and code‐switching enhance the poetic resources available to the lyricist and facilitate rhyming in the verses” (Lin 2012: 67). She examines the lyrics of the hip‐hop group Fama, which frequently mixes English letters, words, or phrases into its Cantonese “matrix” to enhance both internal and sentence‐final rhymes. According to Lin, through bilingual lyrics, Fama invokes its ideal audience – “a suave, urban, hybrid crowd of multilingual youths,” “reasserting an English‐speaking cosmopolitan identity” (Lin 2012: 68) and “having the bilingual resources to decode, recognize and enjoy their ‘bilingual‐ness’ and bilingual (and sometimes trilingual) rhymes” (Lin 2012: 70).

Y. Kachru presents another type of sociopsychological effect in her analysis of humorous Hindi‐English rhyming in film songs in India. In one song, an Indian English abbreviation funda, ‘fundamental’, rhymes with the Hindi word for ‘egg’, anDa. This bilingual rhyme enhances the ironic contrast created in the song through the enumeration of different words in which the letter < O > occurs, equating it with the shape of an egg; this enumeration includes English insertions for ‘fashion shows’, on the one hand, and for ‘rows for ration’, on the other hand, thus mocking a “philosophy of life” that allows for both fashion shows and food rationing (Y. Kachru 2006: 229–230). A similar ironic effect is created in the code‐mixed title of a popular Russian comic TV show Haшa Russia (Nasha Russia, ‘Our Russia’): the name of the country in English, Russia, rhymes with the Russian word nasha, ‘our’, both words ending with the similar sound sequence /‐ʃɑ/. This rhyming increases the playful, humorous effect created by the clash of the possessive determiner nasha, ‘our’, implying endearment and intimacy, with the foreign spelling of the name of the country, which evokes a certain ironic distancing.

3.5 Mock Englishization of local languages or localization of English

The concept of “mock languages” was developed in linguistic anthropology to describe the practice of exaggerating and spoofing the stereotypical linguistic features of non‐native speakers in order to create a jocular or pejorative effect. Though the notion of bilingual language play is not necessarily employed, “mock language” is interpreted as “styling the Other” (Hill 1999; Rampton 2009), a form of verbal imitation and parody based on juxtaposition of languages or language varieties.³ For example, incorporated into English‐based American discourse, “Mock Spanish” implies such linguistic strategies as the use of Spanish morphology mixed with English vocabulary (el cheap‐o), or “hyperanglicized,” parodic pronunciations and orthographic representations of Spanish loan words (grassy‐ass for gracias, ‘thank you’; Hill 1998: 682). The ambivalent nature of “mock language” is described with Bakhtinian notions of “inner dialogue,” “double‐voicedness” and “carnivalization” (Bakhtin 1981: 24–25, 327): “mock language” is seen as a specific language play technique of “wearing a verbal mask” (Zemskaia et al. 1994: 180) or “a linguistic costume” (Brown & Jie 2014: 80) in a symbolic inner dialogue between “self” and “other.” “Double‐voicedness” of “mock language” is also manifested in its “dual indexicalities” (Hill 1999: 547), ranging from innocuous “variety humour” to outright marginalization and stigmatization of the variety and its speaker.

In world Englishes research, mock Englishization of local languages and, vice versa, exaggerated localization of English, which together may be labelled “Mock English,” are often addressed as a source of fun. Luk (2013) demonstrates that the dominant type of language play among the students in Hong Kong involves phonetically anglicized Cantonese (Cantonese words pronounced with a high level tone) combined with word‐for‐word literal translation from Cantonese to English. Englishization combined with playful “hyper‐vernacularization” strategies is often displayed in special “language entertainment” genres, as described in Moody (2009, 2011) or Moody and Matsumoto (2012): for example, in a Japanese TV program featuring soramimi (‘empty ear’) videos, the line “I want to hold your hand” from the eponymous Beatles song was substituted in the subtitles by a similar sounding Japanese phrase aho na hounyou han, which means ‘foolish urinating criminal’, a mondegreen, or mistaken lyrics causing a comic effect (Moody 2009: 190–193).

This language play strategy of “code‐ambiguation” (Moody 2009: 189), similar to “code‐approximation” (J. Sh. Lee 2014), and other “mock English” strategies may be used just for nonsensical fun or may simultaneously access multiple locally relevant macro‐social and micro‐social language ideologies. For example, deliberately excessive Russianization of borrowed English terms is reported as the most common type of language play among Russian information technology (IT) professionals: мeйл, ‘mail, email’ may be substituted by a similar sounding Russian word мылo, mylo, meaning ‘soap’, and виндoуз, ‘Windows’ may be turned into виндa, виндюк, виндoвoз (vinda, vind’uk, vindavoz), with various colloquial Russian suffixes attached to the proper, stylistically neutral borrowing. It is claimed that these playful distortions are employed (a) just for fun and relaxation in intense working environment; (b) to voice the resistance, conscious or subconscious, to English computer terminology in the context of strong competition between Russian IT specialists and their international/American counterparts; and (c) to mock Russian computer dummies, who tend to misunderstand and mispronounce English terms (Mechkovskaia 2009: 504–506).

What is particularly important for World Englishes is that, in non‐English‐speaking communities, it is often not English per se that is playfully stylized in opposition to local languages in order to index global vs. local, West vs. East ideologies. Parodic “mock English” strategies are employed primarily to highlight and exaggerate English language deficiencies of local English speakers (J. Sh. Lee 2014: 35) or to mimic “the perceived linguistic practices of a local stereotype” (Brown & Jie 2014: 63), based on ethnic, class, gender, age, or educational identifications. Different lectal local varieties of English are represented by their own peculiar “mock English” tokens with their own indexicalities, which allow for the creation of a comical persona or situation, for various self‐mocking narratives, for the ridicule of those who “pose as someone they are not” and other locally meaningful forms of bilingual humor (J. Sh. Lee 2014). The purpose of English‐related humorous styling may be either to identify with the “Other” in order to create a communicative bond over a shared, often frustrating experience of English learning, to deal with personal and societal “language anxiety,” or, just the opposite, to create an ironic distance from the “ridiculous Other” and to identify the performer and their audience as being different.

3.6 Bilingual multimodal play

Nowadays, scholars pay increasingly more attention to the fact that meanings are often constructed in different modes, not only by words but also by images or sounds. Research indicates that in such domains as computer‐mediated communication, pop culture, and advertising, a deeper understanding of bilingual creativity can be achieved by analyzing the ways in which verbal means are supported, complemented, modified, or disambiguated by additional semiotic forms of aural or visual expressivity. Martin (2007: 185) explores several cases of such creative “multimodal mixing” in French advertising with the help of the technique, which she defines as “visual glossing,” “whereby illustrations are used to gloss English elements that would likely be otherwise unintelligible” (Martin 2007: 184). For example, to ensure that the borrowing blemish in the product name of a facial cleanser Clinique Anti‐Blemish Solutions is intelligible to French audiences, the packaging in the illustration is covered with bright red stickers in the form of dots, which imitate pimples. In a similar vein, Dimova shows “how the narrative, musical, and visual aspects of TV commercials enhance the imaginative function of English in the Macedonian advertising context” (2012: 15), for instance, when English song lyrics support the visual representation of the local context.

Bilingual language play can be also “visually glossed,” enhanced, or even created with the help of other forms of playfulness. Moody argues that the video accompanying the soramimi “does not simply support the song; it cognitively creates the effect of the soramimi” (2011: 166). In a printed text, bilingual multimodal play can be illustrated by the following example: in the Russian version of the daily Metro the rubric Moдный лук (Modnyi luk, ‘Fashionable look’) comes with a picture of an onion, because the word лук, borrowed from English, ‘look’, is homonymous with the native Russian word meaning ‘onion’. Thus, the image brings in an association between two lexical units, one native and one borrowed, by way of joke. This technique can be described as a “bilingual visual pun,” actualized through the interaction of verbal and visual means.

Furthermore, bilingual multimodal play analysis can draw on important recent findings in sociolinguistics of written multilingualism and linguistic landscape research about the significance of the visual arrangement features. Complex layouts, multilayering, different fonts, and graphic devices are shown to have the potential to function as contextualization cues for multilingual texts (Sebba 2012: 12). An example of mixed multimodal Chinese‐English “visual parody” involving spatial and typographic features is provided in Luk (2013):

“起錨 <pull up the anchor> Act now,” was a slogan created by the Hong Kong government to lobby public support for its 2012 political reform. “超錯 <exceedingly wrong> All wrong” was created by netizens to ridicule the government’s propaganda and express their dissatisfaction with the government’s failure to introduce universal suffrage for the chief executive’s election in 2012. Both the Chinese and English texts in the parodied version parallel those in the government one in terms of the character shapes, colour schemes and textual composition.

(Luk 2013: 242)

The parodied version not only imitates the word pattern (a short bi‐syllabic expression) but also copies the word shapes and colours of the original version. The two Chinese expressions ‘超錯’ and ‘起錨’ share the same left‐hand radicals 走 and 金. Even though the English phrases “Act now” and “All wrong” only share one initial vowel, with striking similarities in character shapes, colour schemes, and spatial arrangements, the Internet version successfully parodies the government version with totally opposite meanings.

(Luk 2013: 242)

Luk (2013: 248) comments that “the spatial arrangements and typographical design of the texts contribute significantly to the playful effects in addition to the linguistic properties.”

4 The Semantics of Bilingual Language Play

As the examples discussed in this chapter demonstrate, playful language mixing is rarely restricted to formal language play. Nonsensical and unwarranted linguistic ludism “for its own sake” is considered to be “bad taste” and is one of the causes of disparaging attitudes to language play among linguists. Sherzer also points out that language play may be “conscious or unconscious, noticed or not noticed, purposeful or nonpurposeful” (2002: 2). Unconscious or nonpurposeful bilingual language play may be the result of what Auer defines as an “innocent” use of code‐alternation, when the speaker is not aware of the sociopsychological potential of language mixing and is unable to interpret the linguistic variation in social terms; Auer adds that the audience of mixed speech can be “innocent” as well, and so language mixing may remain unnoticed or may assume a non‐intended meaning (2007: 7).

However, in most cases, bilingual language play, like language mixing in general, is caused by and entails specific semantic and pragmatic interpretations, which can be conveyed “neither effectively nor efficiently by means of the single, separate linguistic systems which are at the disposal of bilinguals” (Bhatia & Ritchie 2013: 570). Various meanings and interpretations rendered by mixing local languages with English are discussed at length in Bhatia and Ritchie (2013), Higgins (2009), Hsu (2008), Jenkins (2006), Kirkpatrick (2007), Martin (2006, 2007) and numerous other publications. These interpretations can be applied to the semantic description of bilingual language play, though with extra caution, as “indexical and occasioned” (Auer 2007: 8), that is, they should be interpreted taking into account all the linguistic and sociocultural details in the context of language play.

Summarizing the semantic analyses of the examples discussed in the chapter, it should be stressed again that the primary purpose of bilingual language play is to be a source of fun and enjoyment for both sides of the communication process able to recognize, to engage in, and to appreciate bilingual creativity for what it is. Employed for just novelty and “other‐languageness,” the playful throwing of English into the local‐language‐based conversation often helps create a jocular, lighthearted, and relaxed environment, and to enhance social relationships (Higgins 2009: 52–53); in written communication, ludic English contributes to what Bhatia and Ritchie define as “cosmetic” effects (2013: 594), such as eye catching, attention getting, or memory facilitating. Various additional meanings that bilingual language play contributes to are created by contradictory ideologies of appropriation and resistance, by various indexical values attached to English, English‐mixing, and different lectal local varieties of English in different communities. As stated before, contradictory ideological meanings are hard to separate and often coexist in playful linguistic mixes, creatively manipulated for a range of “dual” or “double‐voiced” usages, which reflect competing discourses simultaneously, bringing out and at the same time “managing tensions” (Higgins 2009: 83) between native and nonnative, local and foreign, local and global, traditional and modern, mainstream and oppositional. The social indexicalities of creative language mixing are further complicated by local norms of appropriateness, formality/informality, group membership, (anti‐)authoritarianism, etc. and their interplay becomes so complex that an attempt to provide their exhaustive description becomes “a futile exercise” (Leimgruber 2012: 12). To embrace their simultaneous co‐presence and interrelatedness, as well as the co‐presence of different Englishes within a particular national or regional context, a wider Bakhtinian notion of “heteroglossia” (multivoicedness, polyphony) is employed (Jenks & Lee 2016).

Whatever sociopsychological effects are created by language mixing in each specific context, the semantic value of bilingual language play derives from the fact that it helps to foreground and highlight these effects by “focusing on the message” (Jakobson 1960: 356), by foregrounding and highlighting the formal similarities and differences in the juxtaposition of languages and varieties. In other words, the effects of language mixing are dramatically enhanced, become more revealing, and attract increased attention when the juxtaposition of languages and varieties is played on with the help of special rhetorical devices and strategies in bilingual discourse.

5 Bilingual Language Play and the Status of English

The discussion of bilingual language play supports some of the basic assumptions of world Englishes theory about the changing status of English, which becomes more than just a foreign language for its “nonnative speakers.” The practice of bilingual language play validates the agency and creativity of the English language users in non‐Inner Circle countries and in different diasporas in the Inner Circle countries. Speakers of English in non‐English speaking communities are no longer seen as passive consumers of American, western, or global linguistic and cultural products; they appropriate English, adopt and adapt it, subvert and play with it, in accord with their own creative needs. The amount of English use, the levels of individual and mass proficiency in different non‐English‐speaking communities vary a lot, but “the playfulness accompanying the convergence of multilingual ingredients” (Y. Kachru 2006: 231) seems to be ubiquitous. Playful manipulation makes English a legitimate part of local speakers’ repertoires and testifies to “an increased sense of ownership of English as a local communicative resource” (Luk 2013: 248). It also testifies to the development of English‐vernacular mass bilingualism in the community, even if only “minimal” and “truncated” (Blommaert 2015: 86), because language play is based on a “familiarity principle” (Crystal 1998: 21), which means that playing on “foreign languageness” cannot be understood and appreciated unless the audience are familiar (at least to a certain minimal level) with the language being played on. In addition, it can be argued that bilingual linguistic creativity and language play are the key factors contributing to the use of English in non‐English speaking communities. Stefanowitch (2002: 73) comments that in the countries where the local language is almost exclusively used as a means of communication, but the knowledge of English is sufficiently widespread and appreciated, the situation is ideal for English to be expected to occur in juxtaposition with the local language and mainly for creative practices such as bilingual punning (Stefanowitch 2002: 73). This makes bilingual language play one of the major factors of English use in non‐English‐speaking communities.

Essential for World Englishes research is the fact that specific forms of bilingual language play are determined by and, therefore, are indicative of language‐contact peculiarities in each context. For example, analyzing the comic performance in Lu‐go language based primarily on the relexification of Japanese sentences with English vocabulary, Moody and Matsumoto (2012) claim that it relies upon a minimal proficiency in English among the majority of Japanese audience. English in Japan, as in many other Expanding Circle countries, is learned by most citizens within formal schooling and is rarely used for intranational communication; hence, when Lu‐go “attempts to recast the relationship between English and Japanese as one of communicative language contact” (Moody & Matsumoto 2012: 114), it causes the comic effect. Moreover, there are obvious correlations between the forms of bilingual language play and the level of an individual’s language proficiency. Yelenevskaya (2014: 26) demonstrates that in immigrant communities, in the early stages of language acquisition, “the bulk of bilingual humor is based on simplest interlingual puns exploiting minimal pairs, malapropisms and discovery of obscene words in foreign lexis. As immigrants’ proficiency in the language of the host society increases, their humor becomes more sophisticated, focusing on social criticism and in‐group solidarity.”

Being the result of bilingualism, bilingual language play at the same time promotes bilingualism in world Englishes contexts. Different authors reveal the educational value of language play in language acquisition, both inside and outside classrooms (see Cook 2000; Crystal 1998). Pennycook also points out that various forms of bilingual language play “put language on display” (2007: 146) and, used either formally as a pedagogical tool or in a more general use, develop language awareness. Even if the audience are not proficient in English, playful English‐local mixing allows “incidental learning” and “unfocused language acquisition.” Besides, as was mentioned, bilingual language play is a powerful adaptation tool, which brings fun into language learning and reduces the anxiety, related to speaking a new language (Moody and Matsumoto 2012; Yelenevskaya 2014).

When discussing the issue of English‐vernacular language play, researchers emphasize that for many local communities bilingual creative practice is not a new or uncommon phenomenon from the sociolinguistic and sociohistorical points of view. For example, Hoffer (2002: 16) draws parallels between present‐day English‐Japanese word play with the earlier tradition of Chinese‐Japanese bilingual creativity, and Y. Kachru compares the way English is used creatively to parody the absurdities of Westernized behavior with the way Sanskrit and other Indian languages are used to caricature the traditional (2006: 228). These studies put mixing with English into a wider context of bilingual linguistic creativity, explain how traditions of bilingual creativity contribute to the ease with which speakers of other languages engage in English‐related language play all over the world, and at the same time demonstrate the uniqueness of English as the first truly global linguistic resource for linguistic creativity in the history of humankind.

6 Future Directions for Research

In addition to the predominantly form‐oriented comparative and contrastive investigation of English‐vernacular language play presented in this chapter, there are other promising directions of further exploration of this contact phenomenon in World Englishes research, suggested in some recent publications.

First, the study of bilingual language play should take into consideration the full range of linguistic complexity in local contexts. There may be several languages and language varieties interacting with English locally, each of them having an impact on playful verbal performances. For example, Su shows the complex playful interaction between Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese‐accented English, between English and Taiwanese‐accented Mandarin, and even between English, Hakka‐accented Mandarin and Japanese in Taiwanese online discourse (Su 2007: 73–74). Besides, as local Englishes are emancipated from the dominance of Standard English ideologies, they acquire new locally relevant indexicalities, which are invoked in English‐related discourse. Jenks and Lee show that speakers of English in Hong Kong may be ridiculed for “posing as someone they are not” when speaking native‐like Standard English (they may be labeled “fake ABCs” [American‐born Chinese]) and are forced to speak a local variety of English, for example, incorporating Cantonese particles ‘la’ and ‘ar’ (2016: 395–397). “Hybrid Englishes” (Schneider 2016) are no longer stigmatized as deficient uneducated varieties, but become a powerful tool of linguistic creativity, characterized in local contexts by covert prestige and a momentum of playfulness. Analyzing various playful techniques in today’s English‐Chinese deliberate mixing, for example, punlike play on homonymous English and Chinese words in Chinese characters and pinyin, Li Wei defines the outcome of such practices as “New Chinglish,” a “reconstituted, re‐appropriated, re‐semiotized, and re‐inscribed” variety (2016: 11–12), “which simultaneously challenges the world dominance of English of Anglo‐Saxon root and Chinese linguistic purism” (Li Wei 2016: 20). Studies indicate that in different non‐English‐speaking communities, switching between lectal local English varieties is fraught with the possibilities of humorous or ironic interpretation, for example, in jocular use of Singlish (Leimgruber 2012) or Swahinglish (Higgins 2007). Intended primarily for intranational use, creatively manipulated interplay of multilingual, multi dialectal, and subvarietal resources is one of the most dynamically developing trends in world Englishes today and one of the most crucial issues to be looked into in the future World Englishes research.

Another important direction for research is connected with the growing interest in multilingual practices that challenge the boundaries of national states and deal with what in modern sociolinguistics is defined as “translingual practices” (Canagarajah 2013) and “transcultural flows” (Pennycook 2007). In today’s globalized and increasingly mobile lifestyles, it is argued that “English is not only a variety or even a set of young varieties any longer – it is a globally available resource for speakers, including speakers with limited access to formal education, employing it for their own communicative purposes in creative ways” (Schneider 2016: 340).⁴ Following this research perspective, Li Wei (2016) describes “New Chinglish” as an example of translanguaging, and Qi Fang and Mo Shaobin use the term “translingual creativity” to characterize the practice of pinyin alphabeitism, through which “[t]he orthographic boundary between English and Mandarin is made fuzzier, even erased” (2016: 32). In addition, transnational linguistic and cultural contacts create opportunities for increased hybridization of linguistic features from different domains in global discourse, and there are examples of bilingual language play crossing national, linguistic, cultural, and domain boundaries simultaneously. Higgins (2009) provides an example of translingual and transcultural language play from one study on naming practices of hip‐hop artists in Africa: the Kenyan rapper Issa Mamur altered his Muslim name to E‐Sir, which suggests globalization through association with e‐technology and Western‐based hip hop artists’ names, using the title “sir.” It is argued that this name “goes beyond anglicization” and that global secular indexicalities “offered the artist alternative identities which may have made him more marketable in a country in which terrorism has frequently been attributed to Muslims. Either way, his alias simultaneously references his Islamic heritage and the global age” (Higgins 2009: 95).

“Transgressive playfulness” (Hill 1999: 553), as well as translanguaging and bilingual creativity in general are not new sociolinguistic phenomena, however, “[r]ecent forms of globalization have given more visibility to such forms of communication” (Canagarajah 2013: 2). Regarding the issue of language play, Crystal states that “there seems to be more of it than at any previous period of linguistic history” (1998: 1). Because of the spread of English and growing global English‐vernacular bilingualism, there certainly seems to be more bilingual English‐related language play in different world Englishes communities, but this question still requires further investigation.

7 Conclusion

The significance of language play analysis for language theorizing is emphasized by Crystal, who maintains that “[l]udic language should be at the heart of any thinking we do about linguistic issues” (1998: 1). Bilingual language play is an important object of linguistic inquiry, being a salient feature of world Englishes and one of the key factors determining English‐vernacular language mixing, especially when a localized variant of English is used in intranational communication. Though still largely underinvestigated, it has a considerable potential of contributing to World Englishes theory, providing insights into the use of and attitudes to English in different countries all over the world.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Zoya Proshina, Andrew Moody, Jerry Won Lee, and Jasmine Luk for their support and for sharing their ideas and materials with me.

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