BRAJ B. KACHRU
This chapter addresses two issues that continue to be debated internationally about the presence of the English language in the global context: one of celebration and triumphalism, and the other of the use of the language as part of the arsenal in what have been termed civilizational “culture wars.”
The spread of English is characterized in subtle and sometimes not‐so‐subtle tones as a triumphalistic march of the language, which has gained global currency over other major languages (see Crystal 1997 and later; and for another perspective, see Kachru 1986, 2005). It is now generally recognized that the Hydra‐like language has many heads, representing diverse cultures and linguistic identities. English represents the legendary status of the “Speaking Tree”.1 This legend goes back at least four millennia, to the period of Alexander the Great. It is said that the great warrior king was taken in India “to an oracular tree which could answer questions in the language of any [one] who addressed it” (Lannoy 1971: xxv).
The tree was unmatched, says the legend – its trunk was made of snakes and animal heads, and its branches “bore fruit like beautiful women, who sang the praises of the Sun and Moon” (Lannoy 1971: xxv). The tree acquired a special status in the Islamic tradition and in Mughal miniature paintings and is called in that tradition the Waqwaq Tree – the Speaking Tree. The Waqwaq Tree is viewed both with feelings of awe and attraction, and there are versions of this legend in other cultures, too. The metaphor of the Speaking Tree, therefore, represents both fear and celebration, aversion and esteem, and, indeed, agony and ecstasy (Kachru 1996c).
The trunk of the English language tree – the Inner Circle (e.g. the UK, the USA, Australia) – continues to evoke reactions of suspicion, of conspiracies, and of mistrust.2 There continues to be a lingering Trojan‐horse association with the language and its managers, not only in Asia and Africa, but even in the UK and the USA.
There is, however, another reality that has haltingly, but certainly, emerged since the 1950s. After a long and agonizing wait, the branches of the Waqwaq Tree are bearing delectable fruit: accessibility to a variety of methetic functions through the language, in a shared medium of pluralistic identities. It is in this sense of multiplicity and pluralism that English has become a global “access” language. What Salman Rushdie says of his much‐discussed The Satanic Verses (1991 [1988]: 394) is actually true, by extension, of world Englishes. It stands for “change‐by‐fusion, change‐by‐conjoining. It is a love song to our mongrel selves. It actually is a celebration of syncretism.”
This takes me to the first part of the title – the concept world Englishes.3 This concept entails a distinction between language as a medium and language as a message. The medium refers to the form of language – its phonology, morphology, and syntax – and the message embodies the functions in which the medium is used. There are, indeed, a variety of underlying theoretical, functional, pragmatic, and methodological reasons that demand this pluralization of the language – Englishes and not English (Kachru 1994b; see also Ch’ien 2004; McArthur 1998, 2001).4
The concept world Englishes, then, emphasizes the pluricentricity of the language and its cross‐cultural reincarnations. This conceptualization about the functions and multi‐identities of English has, therefore, become a loaded weapon for those who view the spread of the language exclusively in terms of the celebration of the Judeo‐Christian mantras of the language – the view that the “global,” “international,” and “world” presence of the language is essentially a victory of what is perceived as a monocultural western medium, and that the language is the English‐using West’s weapon in the clash of civilizations.5 That view, as I discuss below, does not represent the current global state of the language or the multiple identities English has created across cultures.
These discourses of global triumph of the language need serious reevaluation in terms of functional pragmatism – especially that of multiple canonicity in Englishes, British, North American, African, and Asian – as is reflected and discussed in various chapters in this volume. In other words, what we need is a conceptualization of world Englishes in a framework of pluricentricity and distinct cultural canon‐formation.
The issue of canonicity is critical here, since canons, as Kermode (1979, cited in Altieri 1990: 22) perceptively reminds us, are essentially “strategic constructs by which societies maintain their own interests.” And canons also provide two types of control: first, in terms of the control over the texts that “a culture takes seriously,” and second, in terms of authority “over the methods of interpretation that establish the meaning of serious.”
The “loose canons” of English, to use the term of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (1992), have yet to acquire this control, because the major paradigms in English studies – literary or linguistic – have not initiated any meaningful discussion of the global presence of English from this perspective – the perspective that the cultural identities and their interpretations have also become pluralistic.6
In the discourse on English outside the Inner Circle, reference is frequently made to Caliban – both as a symbol and as a metaphor. So now let me bring Caliban into this discussion. I shall decontextualize Caliban from the territorial contexts of colonized human beings in a part of the Western hemisphere. Whatever happened on that island symbolizes what has happened in the colonized world, irrespective of languages and cultures. In all colonial contexts, Caliban is assigned a space by control and submission. Caliban is told:
I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each
hour
One thing or other:…
I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known.
And Caliban answers:
You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
(The Tempest, I. ii)
This metaphor, then, is central to these ongoing, vibrant, provocative, and often acrimonious debates about the canons which are at linguistic and literary peripheries and continue to be associated with Caliban’s curse. The users of such canons, as Salman Rushdie warns us, are:
kept strictly apart, like squabbling children, or sexually incompatible pandas, or, perhaps, like unstable, fissile materials whose union might cause explosions.
(Rushdie 1991: 61)
The debates about these Calibans’ voices, their statuses, and the locations of such voices within the canonicity of Englishes has become increasingly articulate. The questions these voices raise in West and East Africa, South and East Asia, in the Philippines, and even in the USA and UK, are not unrelated to the broader debate on “opening of the borders” and “loose canons.” These are significant linguistic, attitudinal, and ideological questions.
And when Levine (1996) addressed this question of canons, he was essentially providing counterarguments to Bloom (1987) and a string of books by D’Souza (1991), Bennett (1992), and Bernstein (1994), to name just four authors who articulate a need to guard the borders of the western canon. The concerns of Bloom and D’Souza are not necessarily related to Caliban’s uncontrollable tongue, nor are they directly related to my discussion in this chapter. Rather, it is the underlying conceptualizations basic to these two approaches, to canon and canonicity, to language and language “ownership” and identities, that are relevant here.
This, then, takes me to the second part of my title: the ongoing “culture wars” of our times and the agendas for the new millennium. In these culture wars, we see that language – the English language – is now a major issue. It has indeed become a vital weapon for articulating various positions and visions.
The issues in this debate touch us – all of us – as members of the English‐using speech communities, irrespective of the variety of world Englishes we use or the speech fellowship of English we identify with. These speech fellowships of English cover all the continents, all major cultures, and almost all major geographical groups.
It is in that diverse, cross‐cultural sense that English is international. I have avoided the term international language with English. The term “international” used with “English” is misleading in more than one sense: it signals an international English in terms of acceptance, proficiency, functions, norms, pragmatic utility, and creativity. That actually is far from true – that is not the current international functional profile of the English language and never was.7
The English language is globally now the most sought‐after medium for initiating and accelerating bilingualism and multilingualism. This crossover across borders has brought various strands of hybridity and pluralism to the language. The need, then, is for the reconstruction and rethinking of what such hybridization and pluralism imply with reference to creativity in the language and its functions and our conceptualization of the presence of the English language in world contexts.
And now, at the dawn of a new millennium, this reconstruction of English has taken several forms, and more Cassandras have appeared on the scene, with their messages and visions of the doom and decay of English. This soothsayer’s enterprise has developed into a variety of genres. The Cassandras’ sociolinguistic speculations about English are based on what they see in their ideological crystal balls for now, and beyond the end of the millennium, in which English is vigorously being related exclusively to western civilization and to the conflicts in the “remaking of world order.” In their view, the major concerns about the English language are varied. I, however, discuss just two such concerns to illustrate my point.
The first concern has to do with what is perceived as the demographic shrinking of the English language. This concern is quite contrary to the current statistical profile of the language and to the increasing worldwide perception that the juggernaut of English is rolling over cultures and languages – both major and minor – across the world. One example of Cassandra’s cry about the decline of English is provided by Bailey (1987), who argues that:
popular journalism, and academic inquiry have all conspired to obscure a remarkable basic fact…[that]…English, too, is declining in proportional numbers of speakers and in the range of its users. [Emphasis added.]
Bailey’s concern for the decline in the numbers of users and the functional range of English is based on five phenomena. These are:
First, the initiatives to “foster multilingualism” in the USA, UK, and Australia;
Second, the efforts – in the USA and internationally – in linking “mother, mother tongue, and motherland” as “persuasive arguments” to declare that languages other than English will better serve “democratic and economic goals” (Bailey 1987: 6);
Third, the national language policy reversals and reassessments that entail shifts toward languages other than English (e.g. in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore);
Fourth, the “cultural resistance” to English in East and West Africa;
And fifth, the increasing “pluricentricity of English”: that is the multiple centers in Asia and Africa where the language has developed institutionalized norms (see also Bailey 1996).
Bailey, of course, is not the first Cassandra of the language and certainly will not be the last. The latest articulation of this view comes from Samuel P. Huntington, a distinguished Harvard political scientist, in his provocative and much‐discussed book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996a). A more accessible, and somewhat alarming, summary of the book appeared in Foreign Affairs (Huntington 1996b), with the sweet‐and‐sour title, “The West unique, not universal.”
The parts that specifically interest me relate to the English language. I do, however, share Huntington’s broader concern when he says that:
In recent years Westerners have reassured themselves and irritated others by expounding the notion that the culture of the West is and ought to be the culture of the world.
(Huntington 1996b: 28)
In Huntington’s view, as he says, “[t]his conceit manifests itself in two forms. One is the Coca‐colonization thesis…. The other has to do with modernization.” And he believes that:
Both these project the image of an emerging homogeneous, universally Western world – and both are to varying degrees misguided, arrogant, false, and dangerous.
(Huntington 1996b: 28)
Huntington provides the following profiles of speakers of major languages (in terms of percentages of the world’s population) given in Table 25.1.
Table 25.1 Speakers of major languages (in percentages)
| 1958 | 1970 | 1980 | 1992 | |
| Arabic | 2.7 | 2.9 | 3.3 | 3.5 |
| Bengali | 2.7 | 2.9 | 3.2 | 3.2 |
| English | 9.8 | 9.1 | 8.7 | 7.6 |
| Hindi | 5.2 | 5.3 | 5.3 | 6.4 |
| Mandarin | 15.6 | 16.6 | 15.8 | 15.2 |
| Russian | 5.5 | 5.6 | 6.0 | 4.9 |
| Spanish | 5.0 | 5.2 | 5.5 | 6.1 |
This profile leads him to two conclusions relevant to English:
First, “that significant declines occurred in the population of people speaking English, French, German, Russian, and Japanese.”
(1996a: 60)
Second, “that a language foreign to 92 percent of the people in the world cannot be the world’s language.”
(1996a: 60)
The second concern I discuss relates to yet another type of perceived decay – the “decay” of the language as it is appropriated by the Anglophone African and Asian countries, who are, as it were, severing their umbilical cords from the Inner Circle, or the original native‐English‐speaking countries, and thus are making English a culturally pluralistic world language. This appropriation, in the Cassandras’ view, colors the language in a variety of ways – linguistic, literary, and ideological – rendering it alien to its occidental “owners.” Even worse, they believe a hybrid English is becoming institutionalized and recognized as a viable vehicle for African and Asian norms for linguistic innovation and creativity.
Yet another expression of the concern over this phenomenon is an epilogue titled “Alice’s Unvisited” by Felipe Fernández‐Armesto (1995). In his peep into Futurology, Fernández‐Armesto’s regret is that communications have been unable to “homogenize culture.” A most “surprising example” of this, according to him, is that of the English language:
which, until recently, was widely hailed or feared as the world medium of the future; in fact, in defiance of the predicted effects of global broadcasting, the English of the English‐speaking world is breaking up into mutually unintelligible tongues, as happened with Latin in the dark ages.
(Fernández‐Armesto 1995: 730, emphasis added)
This, for Fernández‐Armesto, is not a reassuring future, and his pessimistic interpretation of the horoscope of English is that:
Krio, Pidgin, and Negerengels are already unintelligible to speakers of other forms of post‐English. The street patois of African‐American communities has to be translated for residents of neighbouring streets. The specialized jargon of communication on the Internet is a hieratic code, professed to exclude outsiders. Copy editors and authors on either side of the Atlantic sometimes keenly feel the width of the ocean.
(1995: 730–731)
This agony is identical to Bailey’s earlier concern when he saw “English at its twilight.” The metaphor “twilight”’ is like a double‐edged sword, which can be a harbinger of “bright morning” for the English language or can be frightening and murky to the tower‐builders at Babel (Bailey 1990: 84).8
One has to agree, however, with Huntington’s (1996b) more forthright and pragmatically correct observation when he says that:
The people who speak English throughout the world also increasingly speak different Englishes. English is indigenized and takes on local colorations which distinguish it from British or American English and which, at the extreme, make these Englishes almost unintelligible one to the other, as is also the case with varieties of Chinese.
(Huntington 1996b: 62)
That English has been “indigenized” is certainly true; but that “these Englishes” have, therefore, become functionally “almost unintelligible one to the other” is certainly empirically doubtful (Smith 1992 and later). In terms of functional and pragmatic uses of the English language, what actually happens is that English is used effectively for “thinking globally,” and used, by choice, “to live locally” – thus establishing a pragmatic link between the two identities – global and local.9
I do not intend to respond to each point raised by Bailey and Huntington in this chapter. One major argument, however, must be addressed here, and that is Huntington’s assertion that a language which is not used by “92 percent of the people” is not entitled to the label world language.
There are four problems with Huntington’s assumption. The first relates to the total estimated percentage of English users. Recent estimates of users of English worldwide vary from 1 billion to 2 billion. If we take the lower number, then out of the 6.5 billion people in the world (United Nations 2005), 18% use English. If we take the higher number, the percentage of English users jumps to 36%. Whichever figure is used, the important point is that the users of English in the Outer and Expanding Circles outnumber the users in the Inner Circle. Huntington does not, for whatever reason, address that vital point of global English. This disparity is an unparalleled linguistic phenomenon with a number of theoretical, methodological, pedagogical, and indeed ideological, implications (Thumboo 2001).
The second point is that the demographic profile of English across cultures is distinctly different from that of Mandarin, Hindi, and Spanish (see Table 25.1) – some of the competing languages listed by Huntington. The English language has developed a unique functional range and unprecedented identities on every continent, both in terms of the functional range of the medium and its societal depth. In India today, an estimated figure of English users is about 333 million, and there are over 200 million students enrolled in English programs in China.10 It is a reality that the sun has already set on the Empire, but it does not set on the users of English.
The third point is that Huntington and Bailey – to name just two commentators – do not make a distinction between the comparative functional domains of languages and their mere numbers of speakers: They do not rank languages either in terms of their range of functions (what one can do with a language) or in terms of their social penetration (how deep the language use is in the social hierarchy), particularly in what are generally labeled “nonnative” contexts of the English language.
The functional domains of English across the Three Circles are as in Table 25.2: as mentioned earlier, the Inner Circle represents countries such as the USA, Britain, and Australia, where English is widely used as a first language; the Outer Circle represents countries such as India, Nigeria, and Singapore where English is institutionalized; and the Expanding Circle represents countries such as China, Japan, and Korea where the diffusion of English has come about relatively recently; however, the social acceptability and social penetration of English is fast increasing (Kachru 1992, 2005).
Now, if we compare this overwhelming range and depth with other languages of wider communication, for example Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, and so on, it will be readily apparent that no other language comes close to English in number of domains of use or in penetration to various social levels. This is clearly reflected in varieties that have developed within a variety, as in Singapore, Nigeria, and India, to give just three examples.
Table 25.2 Functional domains of English.
| Function | Inner Circle | Outer Circle | Expanding Circle |
| Access Code | + | + | + |
| Advertising | + | + | + |
| Corporate trade | + | + | + |
| Development | + | + | + |
| Government | + | + | |
| Linguistic impact | + | + | + |
| Literary creativity | + | + | + |
| Literary renaissance | + | + | + |
| News broadcasting | + | + | + |
| Newspapers | + | + | + |
| Scientific higher education | + | + | + |
| Scientific research | + | + | + |
| Social interaction | + | + | + |
The fourth point relates to the life of English in the postimperial period. Bailey, for example, says that in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore, there are language policy reassessments toward languages other than English. This statement is only partially correct. In fact, the direction of the reassessments is in favor of English. In Malaysia in the 1990s, for example, the reversal of the national pro‐Bahasa‐Malaysia language policy toward favoring English indicates “compromise over its cultural convictions” (The Economist, January 15, 1994):
“There would have been riots over this ten years ago,” says Rustum Sani, a leading member of the pro‐Bahasa lobby…. Dr. Mahathir, ever the pragmatist, has said that English is necessary if the country is to stay competitive. [Emphasis added]
Malaysia’s senior educator, Asmah Haji Omar, puts this pragmatism in the right cultural context when she says:
Attitudes toward English have changed most significantly among the Malays. English is looked at as an entity which can be separated from English culture. This is evident in the urging “to learn English but not to ape the Western [meaning Anglo‐American] culture”.
(Omar 1996: 532, emphasis added)
In the Republic of Singapore, English always had the status of a dominant language. Now English is gradually being elevated to the status of first language by the younger generation. They do not hesitate to consider English their “mother tongue” (Kachru 2005: 239–343).
In the Philippines, the debate about English is also vibrant. A venerable English writer of the Philippines, Francisco Sionil José, says that “English has not colonized us but we have colonized the language,” by using it as an exponent of the Philippine culture. There is a new revival, and a fresh awakening, about the use of a liberated English in the Philippines (Bautista 1997 and Bautista & Bolton 2004).
The message here is that statistics and the numerical profiles provide some indicators about visible language and educational policies but tell us almost nothing about what have been called invisible policies, about attitudes, and about identities.11 The invisible trade in and spread of the English language is extensive and has developed into a multibillion‐dollar industry, under the characterization of “the ELT Empire” (Butler 1996), ELT meaning English Language Teaching.
In the perceptions outlined above there is an underlying concern about Caliban’s linguistic curse: the way Caliban contextualizes and recreates the medium. In its new incarnations, English has become a repertoire of culturally specific African and Asian messages (mantras). It is true that this distinction has existed from the preimperial period. But now, in the postimperial period, it is being articulated more vigorously.
The pluralism of the message is partly indicative of crossovers from what is perceived as the “center” of English. It is with reference to the center that the peripheries traditionally were defined. Formation of pluralism is a shift, then, from the Judeo‐Christian and Western identities of the English language toward its African, Asian, and African‐American visions. In these multiple identities of the language, the pluralism of world Englishes – the mādhyama, the medium – is shared by us, all of us, as members of the world Englishes community. The mantras, the messages and discourses, represent multiple identities and contexts and visions. The mantras are diverse, cross‐cultural, and represent a wide range of conventions. It is precisely in this sense that the medium has indeed gained international diffusion; it has broken the traditional boundaries associated with the language.
When we use epithets such as global, international, and universal with English, we are not talking of homogeneity and uniformity. We should not. The messages have to be learned, acquired, absorbed, and appreciated within the appropriate cultural contexts of the mantras. The medium provides a variety of shifting cultural “grids” through which users gain access to the multiple canons of the language: American, British, West African, East African, South Asian, East Asian, and so on.12
The multiple canonicity of world Englishes manifests itself in many subtle ways: formal and attitudinal, one overlapping with the other, and in turn, each contributing to distinct canons with one shared thread – that of the medium (mādhyama). The divergence and crossovers of these varieties of English are of the following types:
In these shifts and crossovers, the boundaries of the center, as embodied in the language, are permeable. The periphery increasingly comes into the foreground.
These crossovers result in a reconstruction of the language in “accord with our individual ecosystems,” as Edwin Thumboo (1985: 219) sees it. The attempt here is to establish a relationship between formal characteristics of a text – that is, its linguistic texture – and the contexts in which the language that constitutes that text functions.
Such crossovers entail recognition of three realities:
The historiography of canonicity of Englishes in Asia and Africa, indeed in all the peripheries, has yet to be written in any serious sense. The peripheries have traditionally been ignored by literary historians. A recent example of such neglect is The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 5, devoted to “English in Britain and overseas.” The planning of the volume, we are told, began in 1984, and the volume was ultimately published in 1994. The introduction tells us that:
It was the notable lack of professional scholarship at the time on the English of African countries such as Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and so on…that led to the exclusion of these varieties [from the volume].
(Burchfield 1994: 4)
The editor, the late Robert Burchfield, patronizingly assures us that “their turn will come one day….” It is worth noting, however, that the volume edited by Bailey and Görlach, published over a decade earlier, in 1982, found no such lack of “professional scholarship.” Bailey and Görlach were able to include surveys on English in East, West, and South Africa. In the same year, in putting together an edited volume, The Other Tongue, I had no problem in obtaining a scholarly survey of the Africanization of English and another study on Kenyan English. The moral seems to be “seek and you will find.” In contrast, the don’t‐look‐and‐you‐won’t‐find attitude is also evident in many scholarly books meant to assess “the state of the English language.”
One such book in particular comes to mind, perhaps because of its title: The State of the Language. This book, edited by Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, was published in 1988 and had a 1990 edition by the same editors with the names reversed. The latest edition, the jacket tells us, provides new observations, objections, angers, bemusements, hilarities, perplexities, revelations, prognostications, and warnings for the 1990s. The learned editors apparently, however, did not find any such aspects of English language use in Africa and Asia which would characterize the state of the English language or literature in these ways.
These two volumes, Burchfield (1994) and Michaels and Ricks (1988/1990), are the results of projects initiated by the English‐Speaking Union, San Francisco, and the publication of the 1990 volume was, we are told, “supported by a generous grant from the George Frederick Jewett Foundation.” The omissions made in these volumes are clear indicators of the persistent attitudes toward Caliban’s creativity (see also Kachru 1992: 1–15, particularly 2–3, and Kachru 2005, chapters 7 and 8).
The stirrings for canonicity in world Englishes have a long history. These issues of identity and innovations in creativity are not extensions of the “liberation theology” of the 1960s, resulting in articulation of “liberation linguistics,” as is sometimes argued in the literature.13 Nor did this institutionalization begin with the “Rushdiesque language” or “Rushdie’s technique.” In reality, the “hybrid form” and “radical linguistic operation” (Langeland 1996: 16) associated with Rushdie follows in the tradition of much earlier linguistic innovations and creativity in African and Asian English.
The earliest conceptualizations of indigenization go back to the 1870s. Later reformulations, and more specific characterizations, began after the 1930s. We see characterizations of African Englishes in the writings of Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe, T. M. Aluko, Buchi Emecheta, Amos Tutuola, and, of course, Wole Soyinka; in Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; in Somalia’s Nurudin Farah; in India’s Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Anita Desai, and R. K. Narayan; and in a long list of writers from Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Sri Lanka.
In South Asia, the first well‐articulated conceptualization of such a crossover – linguistic and contextual – was presented in 1937 (published in 1938) by Raja Rao, in his novel Kanthapura. However, Rao’s was not the first attempt to bring the South Asian voice to English. In a novel titled Bengal Peasant Life, published in 1874, Lal Behari Day almost apologetically presents the dilemma in contextualizing English in Bengal:
Gentle reader, allow me here to make one remark. You perceive that Badan and Alanga speak better English than most uneducated English peasants; they speak almost like educated ladies and gentlemen, without any provincialisms. But how could I have avoided this defect in my history? If I had translated their talk into the Somersetshire or the Yorkshire dialect, I should have turned them into English, and not Bengali, peasants. You will, therefore, please overlook this grave though unavoidable fault in this authentic narrative.
(cited in Kachru 1982: 368)
The shift from the norms of the center has been slow and gradual. And the approaches for establishing linguistic and literary identities adopted by each writer, in each region, and each linguistic group are not identical. One sees several major approaches for establishing local literary and linguistic identities for English.
In this approach, there is no Caliban’s sting, no Caliban saying “You taught me language, and my profit on ’t / Is I know how to curse.”
In Kanthapura, Rao provides five perspectives to authenticate the crossover of English in the South Asian context in terms of the following:
In his often‐cited “Author’s Foreword” of just 461 words, Rao did not sing the song of linguistic liberation for his innovative and nativized style or his Kannadization and Sanskritization of English. He argued on the basis of convergence, cohesion, and assimilation of the language, and thus brought English within the mainstream of India’s linguistic and cultural traditions – paramparā. And in a later paper, “The Caste of English” (Rao 1978), as I have discussed elsewhere (Kachru 1998c), Rao placed English on the same elevated pedestal of Truth on which Indians have traditionally kept Sanskrit (“The Perfected Language”) for thousands of years. He said that:
Truth…is not the monopoly of the Sanskrit language. Truth can use any language…and so long as the English language is universal, it will always remain Indian.
Rao brings to the discourse on English a certain mystique; he even involves the gods in his approach to English:
We in India welcome everything outlandish and offer it the gods, who taste it, masticate it, and give it back to us as prasadam [“offerings to the gods returned to man sanctified”]. When our English will have come to that maturity it might still achieve its own nationhood. Till then it will be like Anglo‐Norman, neither French nor English, an historical incident in the growth of culture.
And Rao responds to India’s linguistic chauvinism by declaring English “of our caste, our creed and of our tradition.” This is a subtle and sensitive way of including the language within the canon. His statement has a symbolic meaning too; it is like performing the initiation, the samskāra, of the English language, and putting around it the symbol of initiation, “the sacred thread.”
This second approach to English views the colonial medium as a strategic “linguistic blade,” to be used as an effective weapon and turned back on the colonizer. The most passionate and skillful articulation of this position is by Wole Soyinka. Soyinka recognizes that in the sociolinguistic context of Africa, English plays “unaccustomed roles” as “a new medium of communication,” in “a new organic series of mores, social goals, relationships, universal awareness – all of which go into the creation of a new culture.” And what did the African people do with this colonial weapon? Soyinka answers:
Black people twisted the linguistic blade in the hands of the traditional cultural castrator and carved new concepts into the flesh of white supremacy.
(Soyinka 1988: 88)
The result, says Soyinka, is: “the conversion of the enslaving medium into an insurgent weapon.” The medium now has a message: it is an African message. Thus, on the African continent, the English language was put to a “revolutionary use” by writers such as Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela. And, Soyinka continues (1998: 88):
The customary linguistic usage was rejected outright and a new, raw, urgent and revolutionary syntax was given to this medium which had become the greatest single repository of racist concepts.
This is a different path than the one adopted by Ngũgĩ, who considers English a racist language and abandons the medium (Ngũgĩ 1981).
The third approach to English was lucidly articulated by Chinua Achebe in 1965. Achebe provides a cogent argument for the stylistic Africanization and acculturation of English by explaining how he approaches the use of English in a contrastive way. He compares the Africanized and non‐Africanized versions of creativity and then, contrasting the two styles, he argues:
the material is the same. But the form of the one is in character [of the Africanized style], the other is not. It is largely a matter of instinct but judgment comes into it too.
(Achebe 1965: 30)
And Okara (1964: 137) conveys an identical message when he says that:
from a word, a group of words, a sentence and even a name in any African language one can glean the social norms, attitudes and values of a people.
Despite their different attitudes and positions on the acculturation of English, these three approaches converge in their underlying unity. In all these approaches, one fundamental motive is shared, and that is to move away from the Western canons of power and control – away from the putative center – and design yet another path for creativity in Asian and African English and use the medium for their mantra.
The tradition of such bilinguals’ creativity is not new in multilingual cultures. Crossovers to another medium have been an integral part of such societies, for example in literary creativity and in discourses on philosophic, epistemological, and religious topics. There has always been yet another language, yet another code, yet another style for such universes of discourse: Sanskrit for three thousand or more years and Persian after the thirteenth century in South Asia, and the High varieties of dominant regional languages such as Arabic, Greek, Tamil, Bengali, and Kashmiri. The newness is in the extension of this tradition of creativity to a western medium – a medium that has recent colonial associations and presumed external centers of power and control. All these approaches are means of working toward redefining the medium and contextualizing English in yet other sociocultural and linguistic contexts.
The metaphor of Caliban applies to other voices in English – not only to African and Asian and to other canonicities and formal experimentation. When Henry Louis Gates, Jr. uses the term “loose canons” he is actually talking of such voices, such canons, and of multiple identities of English. Gates warns us:
Cultural pluralism is not, of course, everyone’s cup of tea. Vulgar cultural nationalists – like Allan Bloom or Leonard Jeffries – correctly identify it as the enemy.
(Gates 1992: xvi)
And he continues:
These polemicists thrive on absolute partitions: between “civilization” and “barbarism,” between “black” and “white,” between a thousand versions of Us and Them.
(Gates 1992: xvi)
But for us – some of us – Gates is reassuring when he says that “[the polemicists] are whistling in the wind”.
One might then ask what, in this context, are the outward signs of these inward fires? The liberated creativity of English in Africa and Asia has resulted in two major responses from the West.
One response views this creativity and stirrings for canonicity in ideological terms as “liberation linguistics” – as loaded “liberation theology,” as mentioned above.14 The second response considers such creativity to be an indicator of what may be called “dehomogenizing creativity” – creativity that is not contributing to “homogenizing cultures.” To Fernández‐Armesto (1995: 730):
communications seem to be unable to homogenize culture; the most surprising example is that of the English language, which, until recently, was widely hailed or feared as the world medium of the future.
In Fernández‐Armesto’s view there is only one space for English, and only one representation – one cultural definition – of the medium (see also Fishman 1998/1999).15
That is not all. This creativity and articulation of cultural, linguistic, and regional identities is additionally viewed as a “managed and revolutionary shift from English to something more local” (Bailey 1990: 86, emphasis added). It is presented almost as a linguistic conspiracy. In this context, Bailey gives the example of Emeka Oreke‐Ezigbo, who defends Nigerian Pidgin as:
a partial, viable, flexible language distilled in the alembic of our native sensibility and human experience.
(Bailey 1990: 86)
This discussion reminds one of the recent controversy over Ebonics in the USA, which soon ceased to be a sociolinguistic issue and became almost entirely a political issue. In Bailey’s view, the decay of English has yet another dimension: he makes a distinction between English for “outward‐looking aspirations” and English for “inward‐looking patriotism.” And he mourns that “English as a purely mental instrument of human expression is dying” (1990: 86). The concern is about local identities of English – the African, the Asian, and so on – and its acculturation. These are, then, some of the “language‐coming‐apart” hypotheses.
The constructs of literary creativity in world Englishes in the Outer Circle (particularly in Africa and Asia) in terms of “de‐homogenizing creativity” and “managed and revolutionary shift” have not quite abated.
In distinguishing between “thoroughly developed countries” and “emergent economies,” Randolph Quirk provides yet another defining construct against what he earlier termed “liberation linguistics” (Kachru 1994a). In his paper “Getting Their Clause into English” (2001), Quirk’s concern is for utilitarian functions of English in global contexts so that it can provide “a major service to all countries on earth” (Quirk 2001: 7). In his view:
it is the people in this vast third world whose need for English is the greatest. Their claws must be firmly in it for all the reasons that obtain in rich countries.
And he elaborates on this assertion that:
To this end, their medium must be largely standard English – the “largely” mitigated by a judicious tincture of the exotic: enough (but only just enough) to engage interest abroad: thus, for example, mammachi, papachi, (Ammu) kutty in Arundhati Roy’s Booker‐Prize novel of 1997.
(Quirk 2001:7; emphasis added)
What Quirk proposes for the Outer and Expanding Circles to meet these functional ends is “an English as nearly as possible indistinguishable from that in the rest of English‐speaking commerce and officialdom” (Quirk 2001:7). In 2003, Quirk further elaborates the concept of Standard English when he says:
What is new in this late‐twentieth‐century movement is the danger, as some see it, of an erosion of the very idea of a standard language uniting a polity. This is of particular concern insofar as it applies to English‐speaking countries, because of the world‐wide reliance upon English and the concomitant assumption that English has reliable and universally recognized standards.
(Quirk 2001:13–14)
Concluding his paper, Quirk emphasizes that:
if English (or any other language) is to achieve the wide currency, the expressive effectiveness, the indisputable comprehensibility, and anything like the sheer staying power of Latin, it is the duty of those of us in linguistics to do more than just stand back and observe. No one, after all, is better placed to mount rational argument (strongly laced with realpolitik) toward the goal of ensuring that a powerful Standard English is taught and sustained world‐wide.
(Quirk 2001: 15, emphasis added)
And, for yet another perspective on standards and norms of world Englishes, see Evelyn Nien‐Ming Ch’ien’s Weird English (2004), for a voice not identical to that of Quirk. The weirdization of English, Ch’ien (2004: 11) tells us, is characterized by the following features:
In this paradigm we have yet another construct of Englishes for this ongoing debate.
What I have said above provides just an overview of the major strands of the ideological and power‐related issues that are central to the debates on culture wars. But this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of world Englishes. There are two other issues that deserve our attention and provide some explanation for current attitudes toward Caliban’s creativity.
The first issue concerns our sociolinguistic conceptualization of the architects of the canon, our view of who comprises the speech community of English, the strands that constitute the canon, and our notion of who can initiate changes and modifications in the canon. In other words, the questions are: What establishes the foundation of the canon? And who are the makers of the canon? It is by answering these questions in certain ways that we establish the territory of canonicity.
The second issue, of course, relates to the economics of English – English as a commodity, with immense value in the international language market. Those with ownership of the commodity want to safeguard it and preserve it in terms of pounds and dollars.
The sociolinguistic issues relate to the linguistic, literary, and attitudinal sacred cows in the culture of the speech community. These attitudes ultimately shape our beliefs about what constitutes a harmonious, cohesive, integrated, and motivated speech community. In the case of English, these attitudes determine how we view multilinguality or bilinguality, individual and social bilingualism, and, indeed, multilinguals’ literary creativity (Kachru 1988).
When we talk of creativity in world Englishes, particularly in Asia and Africa, we are talking of the world of creativity, in which our concepts are essentially based on various types and levels of hybridity, both linguistic and cultural. We are talking of the type of hybridity in which African and Asian interculturalism and linguistic innovations and experimentation play a vital role. This type of hybridity is in conflict with the traditional conceptualization of canons. There seem to be three reasons for being suspicious of the acquired hybridity of world Englishes. The first reason relates to the type of diversity introduced in the text by, for example, Asian and African writers. The second reason is the traditional negative attitudes toward bilingualism and pluralism in western societies. The third reason, as Lefevere (1990: 24) says, is the “monolingualization of literary history by Romantic historiographers.”
This negativity toward diversity and bilingualism has been abundantly expressed in earlier research on bilingualism, specifically in the USA, the UK, and Australia.16 These negative views come from a wide range of social scientists and humanists, and they are expressed in several ways, including assertions such as:
This is indeed a long list of problem areas, which have raised questions that have resulted in acrimonious debates in the USA and elsewhere. I will not go into that digression. One must, however, ask: what are the implications of such perceptions regarding bilingualism for our attitudes toward bilinguals’ creativity? Foster (1970: 7) argues that:
we have all been brought up to believe that each language has its mystery and its soul, and that these are very sacred things, in whose name indeed much blood has been shed.
Lefevere (1990) brings to this discussion yet another perspective, that of the monolingualization of literary history as an ideological and identity tool of the state. He points out the emphasis by Romantic historiographers on “creating ‘national’ literatures preferably as uncontaminated as possible by foreign influences” (Lefevere 1990: 24, emphasis added).
In this conceptualization, then, African and Asian creativity is not only essentially “contaminated” and contextually “foreign” to the perceived tradition of the “western canon,” it is also threatening to that canon. And equally crucial to the debates on multilinguals’ creativity is the generally held view that literary creativity is primarily carried out in one’s mother tongue – and creativity in another language is an exception, in the sense that it is contrary to the norm. This view is not uncommon in the scholarly community. Let me give here two examples of such views: one from a social scientist, Edward Shills, and the second from a linguist, David Crystal. Shills (1988: 560) believes that:
The national language of literary creation is almost always the language of the author’s original nationality.
The exceptions Shills thinks of are:
Conrad, and, at a lower level, Nabokov and Koestler, Apollinaire and Julien Green.
Even if we accept his assessment of Nabokov and the others, it is clear that Shills did not look beyond Europe. If he had, he might have changed his mind. And Crystal (cited in Paikeday 1985: 66–67), says that:
it is quite unclear what to make of cases like Nabokov and the others George Steiner (Extraterritorial papers) talks about as having no native language.
Crystal obviously considers these writers to be “marginal cases.”
The assertions of Shills and Crystal clearly reflect attitudes about multilinguals’ creativity. The distinction Crystal makes between a native and a nonnative speaker is based on “the fact that there are some topics which they [non‐native speakers] are ‘comfortable’ discussing in their first language. ‘I couldn’t make love in English,’ said one man [a non‐native speaker] to me” (Paikeday 1985: 68). In reality, the facts are quite the opposite; creativity in English is no exception to multilingual language‐user’s creativity in many other languages. The list of writers and their languages is long, and such resourcefulness has an impressive tradition in South and East Asia, in East and West Africa, and, indeed, also in Europe.
In linguistic paradigms, too, bilinguality and bilinguals’ creativity are still on the periphery. For example, describing the grammars of bilinguals is considered extremely complicated; the emphasis is on homogeneity and uniformity. In 1950, Haugen articulated this concern when, discussing bilingualism in general and the bilingual as a person, he said:
the subject was for many years markedly neglected in this country [the USA], and we might say that both popularly and scientifically, bilingualism was in disrepute. Just as the bilingual himself often was a marginal personality, so the study of his behavior was a marginal scientific pursuit.
(Haugen 1950: 272)
It is true that in recent years we as professionals have begun to ask questions and propose solutions for the complex issues concerning the forms and functions of world Englishes, and have done exciting research on various aspects of bi‐ and multilingualism. However, we are still hesitant to cross the threshold and face the complexities of multilinguals’ language behavior and the impact of that data on our hypotheses and our attitudes. We are reluctant to modify, reformulate, revisit, and reassess our favorite paradigms. The result of this attitude disinclination is the marginalization of the multiple voices heard in world Englishes.
What we see, then, is that in creativity in world Englishes we have “the interplay of diverse voices,” as Dissanayake (1989: xvi) puts it. We have multiple cultural visions, discourses, and linguistic experimentation. We have an unparalleled multicultural resource through one medium with many mantras; we have to ask ourselves how to make use of it. And this concern raises important theoretical, methodological, ideological, and pedagogical questions.
In looking at the global contexts of world Englishes, we need a perspective of “variousness,” as I have argued in the context of the mythology associated with the teaching of English (Kachru 1995). Perhaps Geertz (1983: 234) has a message for us when, addressing anthropological researchers, he says that “the world is a various place” in many ways:
various between lawyers and anthropologists, various between Muslims and Hindus, various between little tradition and great, various between colonial thens and nationalist nows….
And Geertz continues:
much is to be gained, scientifically and otherwise, by confronting that grand actuality rather than wishing it away in a haze of forceless generalities and false comforts.
The need now is to recognize the “variousness” of world Englishes and ask the right questions of the Speaking Tree. It means seeking answers for the “curatorial” and “normative” functions of canon, to use Altieri’s words (1990: 33). These are the types of questions we must ask if we do not want to continue walling up the world visions – including African and Asian – in this unique cultural and linguistic resource of our times, world Englishes.
As a closing word, I cannot resist the impulse to quote once more from the eminent American linguist James H. Sledd (1914‐2003), who in one of his last publications wrote (Sledd 1993: 275, cited in Kachru 2005: 256):
If English, rightly or wrongly, is to remain preeminent among world languages, it has to be various. It exists in the minds of its multifarious users, and its varieties mark differences among people and their multifarious purposes. Variation in English remains, and has indeed increased, despite centuries of effort to stamp it out. Its longevity results from its utility.
That, as I have concluded elsewhere, is indeed the heart of the matter.
The estimated population of India is 1 billion: There are, then, almost 333 million Indians who understand English, and almost 200 million who have some spoken competence in the language. India’s English‐using speech community is estimated to be numerically equal to the total population of the USA, the UK, and Canada. The total English‐using populations of India and China add up to 533 million. For China, see Yong and Campbell (1995); see also Kachru (1998b).