TAMARA M. VALENTINE
The past 50 years witnessed the transformation of English from an international language to a global language. Rejecting the notion of only one English, the study of world Englishes gives emphasis to the diverse linguistic, cultural, attitudinal, and ideological dimensions associated with the functional and formal variations; the divergent sociolinguistic contexts and ranges; the linguistic, sociocultural, and literary creativities; and the various identities that the English language has assumed as a result of acculturation in new sociolinguistic environments around the world (B. Kachru 1997). Central to this view is a pragmatically and functionally realistic model that accepts the role of English as a global contact language with multilingual English users and emerging indigenized English varieties with multiple cultural and linguistic identities (B. Kachru 1986a, 2005). Fundamental is the notion of pluralism and pluricentrism. The pluralistic, pluricentric nature of the English language represents many distinct native cultural identities or “cultural emblems” and “cross‐cultural reincarnations” (B. Kachru 2000: 18).
Within this tradition, the spread of English is depicted as three concentric circles, each circle representing the spread and functional domains in which English is used throughout the world. English as a “culturally pluralistic world language” (B. Kachru 2006: 451) is the norm; multiple identities in creativity are viewed as meaningful constructions; and language, power, and ideology are integral in understanding the changing roles, functions, and attitudes of English and its users. Terms such as bilingual’s creativity, liberation linguistics, language diasporas, multinorms, nonnative literatures, transcreativity, multicanonicity, and hybridity attest to the many expressions of the English language in the global context. And with this spread of English come increasing differentiation and complex cultural exchanges and language mixing operating transglobally and translocally. Users are continually formally and functionally building transnational English communities.
Those scholars working within the world Englishes framework argue for the “cultural context of language” addressing the relationship between language and “grammar of culture,” a term introduced by D’souza (1988: 160) that suggests a system of shared cultural conventions and specialized features of language usage and use in speaking and writing within a particular culture. Language scholars call for taking a socially realistic view of world Englishes to account for the wide range of linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, and literary creativities. Amidst the consideration paid to the pluricentric nature of English, the construction of the multilingual’s creativity, and linguistic ideologies, however, attention to a speaker’s membership in linguistic groups formed along the social lines of class, ethnicity, religion and gender is minimal. Research on sociolinguistic variation in world Englishes includes the work on ethnic interaction in South Asia (Y. Kachru 2008), ethnic variation in Cameroon English (Sala 2011), religious discourse in world Englishes (Davis 2013; Pandharipande 2008), Indian bilingualism (Sridhar 1989, 1991), language and ethnic inequality in Malaysia (Lowenberg 1991), politeness and gender in Zulu (Ige & de Kadt 2002; de Kadt 2002), language mixing in media and advertising (Bhatia 2001; Bhatia & Baumgardner 2008), English language use among mixed‐ethnic adolescent girls in Japan (Kamada 2014), and identity construction in Hindi and Indian English discourse (Valentine 1988, 1995a, 1995b, 2001b).
Taking into account the pluricentric nature of English, the notion of power, and bilingual’s creativity, this chapter addresses the creative acts of gender in the world Englishes. It looks at the research that examines gender identity in multilingual English‐speaking communities. Considering one sociolinguistic variable, this chapter reviews studies that examine the relationship between world Englishes and gender identity in spoken and written discourse, in the creative writings of literary communities, and in multimedia communication. Bilingual women’s creativity is established as one of the “various strands of pluralism” in the spread of English, and gender becomes a major factor implicated in the negotiation of identity.
The sociolinguistic reality of world Englishes is characterized by the acculturation of English in new environments and contexts. According to Braj Kachru (1992), due to the long‐term contact of English with other languages in multilingual and multicultural contexts, the varieties of world Englishes, most of which share a history of a colonial past, acquired “multicultural identities.” One consequence of the phenomenon of Englishization is the impact that the process of colonialism has had on the histories of the countries and on its participants who belong to the communities of bilingual English users. Particular to these “postcolonial voices” (Anchimbe 2011: 3) is a wide spectrum of constructed intercultural multilingual identities. What has gone largely unnoticed, however, is that when the creation of new cultural identities emerged regionally, multiple social identities of English developed with varying degrees of identification and involvement with the world language. As the postcolonial English voices traveled to all corners of the world, numerous nativized linguistic varieties developed affecting the construction of identities (B. Kachru 1982; B. Kachru & Nelson 2001). Hoping to gain a greater understanding of the ways in which the social aspects of language such as gender, ethnicity, and class are constructed in different speech communities as English spreads the globe, research that takes a socially realistic view of world Englishes has expanded its scope to include the construction and representation of multiple linguistic and social identities.
Common to both the feminist study of language and the study of world Englishes is the notion of power: the position and capacity to control and manipulate linguistically, psychologically, and sociopolitically (B. Kachru 1986b: 122). According to B. Kachru, the more important the domain, the more “powerful” the language becomes. A manifestation of the power of English derives from its great range of roles and functions and widespread use that give the language its importance in many societies. The politics and power of world Englishes are closely linked with what has been termed linguistic imperialism or the promotion of English through covert means. For linguist Robert Phillipson (1992) and Gikuyu writer Ngũgı˜ wa Thiong’o (1981), English language imperialism is a multifaceted phenomenon that has economic, political, military, cultural, social, and communicative dimensions, and the use of English is the means for effecting “unequal resource and power allocation” (Phillipson 1992: 318). Sensitive to the power of language, feminist linguistic theory is founded on the premise of power, and its aim is to explain the various structures that underlie the systematic oppression of women in the world (Cameron 1992). Gendering language is one way of perpetuating power hierarchies in world societies and of contributing to certain types of inequality.
The primary focus on power, gender, and language began in the mid‐1970s, when sociolinguistics in general and women’s studies in particular raised awareness of how language shaped the understanding of the world and women’s place within it, focusing primarily on the population of white middle‐class English‐speaking women of the Inner Circle (Labov 1972; Lakoff 1973; Trudgill 1972). By the 1980s, the gender inequity in language was replaced by the power‐based view that women’s language was a function of the existing power relationship between women and men (Fishman 1983); soon after, Tannen (1990) advanced the cross‐cultural approach to explain gender differences in language. Since that time, discourse on gendered linguistic practice has emphasized the social construction of identity through linguistic action. As a result, within the contexts of global and local multilingual communities, scholars have broadened their scope to explore gendered and ethnic accounts of bilinguals, postcolonial contexts, and diglossic linguistic situations, applying interdisciplinary perspectives, methods, and approaches to social practices – a history and vision similar to that of the study of world Englishes.
The work that informs gender identities in English multilingual settings expands on the role women as cultural and linguistic brokers play in initiating and furthering linguistic change in their local communities. Language choice is linked to cultural identity, women’s place in society, community networking, self‐image, and attitudes toward the languages in use. For example, Mascarenhas‐Keyes (1994) finds that in India, Catholic Goan women play a major role in the marginalization and displacement of the mother tongue Konkani and in promoting the dominant world languages of Portuguese and English. The legacy of Portuguese colonialism and the modern‐day emphasis on women’s social roles as teachers, writers, and progressive mothers have propelled women to act more favorably toward the prestigious European languages and varieties. As mothers and as advocates for education, women are reshaping the linguistic face of their Goan families and local community by furthering the spread of non‐Indian languages at the expense of native language maintenance and possible loss of the minority regional Indian languages.
In contrast, as in many speech communities worldwide, minority language maintenance is defined or controlled by women of the community and their actions. In the Indian village of Totagadde in Karnataka, Ullrich (1992) finds that maintaining the vernacular caste dialect Havyaka is the sole domain of the women who speak the variety among themselves in the community and transmit it to their children through child rearing, social networking, and family stability. Although the women consider themselves “linguistically limited,” they understand the economic advantage, the professional importance, and the social significance of being multilingual in English, Hindi, or Kannada for future generations. By promoting multilingualism in their community, these women offer their children greater economic advantages, as well as claim the opportunity to enhance their own self‐image and strengthen their social standing in the community.
In KwaZulu‐Natal, South Africa, de Kadt discusses the range of student attitudes toward English (1993) and how gender is one of the factors impacting the construction of gender identities of young multilingual Zulu speakers in urban and rural contexts (2002). She finds that teenage girls in the rural community accept their role in the perpetuation of traditional gender identities and so are accorded a lower social status than teenage boys. Taught at an early age to respect and protect their cultural and linguistic heritage, Zulu English‐speaking girls enforce the male power structure through language use. The male teens’ more frequent use of English in more contexts assigns the dominant male status in the rural areas. In contrast, in the urban community where an awareness of gender equity persists, females claim to use English in more contexts and domains than males do, and all speakers judge English as more desirable and important than Zulu. The use of English, then, is closely tied to gender identity; it can enhance the social status of its speakers or construct a more traditionalist feminine identity depending on the gender attitudes in urban or rural Zulu society.
In English‐using multilingual situations, women play a primary role in initiating and furthering linguistic change in their local communities when negotiating gender identity and cultural belonging. As in most studies on bilingual women (Burton, Dyson, & Ardener 1994), the second or third language is often the language of a dominant group associated with power, prestige, and economic advantage. English‐speaking bilingual women, then, within their local communities may position themselves as both guardians of their mother tongues and innovators of language change. The strength of the status of English in world communities, for example, is based in part on the choices women make to meet the needs of their speech communities and to achieve the desired results for themselves, their families, and their social groups. With English fast becoming the language of necessity around the world, women as primary language caretakers are advancing the spread of English, which in turn helps the world language to gain acceptance and merit alongside the regional, caste, and vernacular dialects, both in private and in public environments. In fact, in the case of English varieties in the Outer Circle, the English language has spread formally and functionally often to attain lingua franca status in the region, jeopardizing the traditional roles of national languages in general and threatening multilingual competence in particular (Oduol 2007). Studies on bilingual women who cross borders between languages, such as Remlinger’s 1994 work on South Asian women’s linguistic role in new American English settings and Edwards and Katbamna’s 1988 study on wedding songs among British Gujarati women further support the phenomenon of women as “keepers” of language and culture when they cross geographic and linguistic boundaries. It is clear that women play a key role in the transmission of the English language in both local and global contexts often becoming complicit in endangering multilingualism. Nonetheless, women act as agents of language change constructing new identities for themselves and their communities.
Identity can be framed as social identity, sociocultural identity, cultural identity, ethnic identity, gender identity, and linguistic identity. Speakers negotiate multiple identities in their personal lives, through their cultural behavior, and in their daily social interactions. What is not so clear is the way that speakers’ social identities are communicated, and how the relationship between group and personal identities is initiated, established, and maintained. Traditional sociolinguistic approaches have been criticized for looking at the interaction between the social dimensions of gender, ethnicity, and class as given parameters if not fundamental parameters that are evident and inevitable facts (Bing & Bergvall 1996). These dimensions have been viewed as static, absolute, and working in isolation outside other social identities, relationships, and social networks. In current research on language and gender, however, focus has shifted (Bergvall, Bing, & Freed 1996). Rather than viewing gender and other identities as something fixed, gender is viewed as fluid, creating and recreating itself along with other identities as the situation changes, and the relationships are negotiated in the social activities of the speech community. Such a perspective contextualizes gender and helps to describe the multiple cultural and linguistic systems of the indigenized varieties of English (Valentine 2006, 2008).
Research adopting a “socially realistic” approach to discourse competence across world Englishes shows that associations between language and identity are rooted in cultural beliefs and values about the speakers’ sociolinguistic conventions and the production of verbal interaction and written communication (Y. Kachru & Nelson 2006; Valentine 2015). The cultural rootedness brings multiple competences and spheres of interaction in contact and often in conflict. Comparative work in spoken and written discourse has led to research on the cultural conventions of language use across world Englishes examining the ways in which multilinguals from the different circles of English speak and write English for cross‐local and global purposes. Such research analyzes speech acts, politeness, face‐to‐face conversation, and transcultural rhetoric across gender, religious, and ethnic groups within the contexts of social and cultural interactions. Participants follow cultural conventions at the broad level of discourse to signal topic, thematic information, organizational structure, and coherence and at the conversational level of transitional and discourse markers to indicate turn‐taking, listener involvement, and floor control as well as at the utterance level to perform speech acts such as requests, greetings, apologies, and leave taking (Y. Kachru 1991, 1992a, 1992b, 1998). Scholarly work on politeness and discoursal practices in the world Englishes shows that the way speakers use language to express politeness, face saving, and distance is not the same in pluralistic societies as it is in monolingual, monocultural societies (Y. Kachru 2003; Pandharipande 1992; Ige & de Kadt 2002; Valentine 1996). To strengthen the argument, contrastive work on argumentation and persuasion across cultures suggests that written discourse follows the same parameters as in spoken discourse across world Englishes (Y. Kachru 1982, 1997, 2006; Pandharipande 1983).
Further analysis of bilingual’s creativity reveals that creative writers who belong to the Outer Circle recreate the culture‐specific speech acts, code‐switching, politeness strategies, and other interactional patterns from the indigenous languages in Indian and African English fiction (Bokamba 1982; Nelson 1991; D’souza 1991, 2001; Thumboo 2006). Such literary innovations by Indian and African writers of English illustrate the range and depth of the contextualization of gender in the creative literatures of world Englishes. The most productive processes of a bilingual’s creativity originate from the local, cultural, and stylistic. The nativization of gender is evident in the creative interactional strategies of speech acts, politeness strategies, code‐mixing, and translations. Valentine (1985, 1988, 1992, 1995a, 1995b) provides ample examples and passages from naturally occurring Hindi and English conversational interactions and from conversations in novels and short stories written by African and Indian writers of English to demonstrate the contextualization of gender in language use: forms of address and reference, abuses and insults, indirectness, politeness patterns, question asking, discourse flow and organization, floor management, topic selection, and storytelling.
Whatever the variable – gender, ethnicity, age, class, religion – the pieces of identity are assembled and the whole social identity emerges as the discourse progresses. Although the users share one linguistic medium, the sociocultural conventions of language use and usage may differ across Englishes. The creative expressions in natural conversation or in literary fiction reinforce the “multinorms of styles and strategies” (B. Kachru 1987: 130). What is creative, according to Jones, then, is “the strategic way language is used, and the new way of dealing with a situation or a new set of social relationships…When discourse is used creatively…the relationships of power among the participants may shift… and cultural conventions give rise to new kinds of social identities and new ways of seeing the world” (Jones 2010: 472‐473).
World Englishes literature is the product of transcultural creativity by English writers of the Outer Circle. The processes originate from the local and cultural levels, but through contextual nativization and creative linguistic processes, new stylistic forms and new language varieties develop. Examining the linguistic and stylistic aspects in the fiction writing of world Englishes and the influence of gender on writing styles, Baker and Eggington (1999) investigate several world English literatures written in Indian, West African, British, Anglo‐American, and Mexican‐American varieties of English by male and female authors, a corpus representing the Inner and Outer Circles of English. Among other results, Baker (2003) finds that gender differences are related to the culture of the writer. For example, texts written by male writers of West Africa and India and writers of Mexican‐American descent display marked differences in literary styles from those written by female counterparts. That female writers may have a different perception of the function of creative writing is illustrated in the differences between male and female writing based on five dimensions: involved versus informational production, narrative versus nonnarrative concerns, explicit versus situation‐dependent reference, overt expression of persuasions, and abstract versus nonabstract information. Baker’s work expands the understanding of “bilingual creativity” to include the influence of gender on the Englishizing process of stylistic forms.
Bilingual users in the many communities of practice have different associations and attitudes toward English. Chinese‐Malaysian writer Shirley Geok‐Lin Lim reflects on the colonial writing experience (1990: 175). Lim examines the subject of self and the contemporary Asian woman writer of English. Accepting that the body of creative literature published in the twentieth century by Asian women is small, she approaches the English works of early Indian poets Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu; Indian novelists Kamala Das and Gauri Deshpande; Filipino writers Paz Marquez Benitiz, Edith Tiempo, and Linda Ty‐Casper; and Southeast Asian writers such as herself from a feminist perspective arguing that women writers of the Outer Circle are marginalized by gender and by their choice of writing in English. In fact, Jacqueline Adhiambo Oduol (2007) argues that the spread of English in Kenya poses a threat to multilingualism in gender discourse, relegating the Kenyan national languages, native cultural values, and African gender identities to a subordinate status. The effect of the universalizing power of English is the globalization of a gendered language. It is clear that the spread of English is not a neutral affair; those who gain access to English may gain access to increased power, but simultaneously their choice of English condemns them to a new cultural oppressiveness.
Such language variation produces culturally distinctive writing in multilingual societies. Women in these contexts are constructing new identities as writers; they are writing from bilingual or multilingual backgrounds, and their acts of creative identity require them to straddle multiple communities. How do these writers identify with their local, ethnic, gender, national, and international communities?
The relationship between gender and the spread of English with special reference to diaspora women writers from the multilingual settings of South Asia can be classified into four literary communities of practices in diaspora: universalization, linguistic and intellectual mutedness, creative empowerment, and linguistic defiance (Valentine 2001a, 2001b). The literary community of universalization captures the complete identity of the bilingual writer. Women writers such as Kamala Das (1993), Anita Desai (1990), and Arundhati Roy (1997a, 1997b) accept English as one of the many national languages of India. They ask “What’s all the fuss?” for they can alter English or any of their languages to suit their native cultural and social needs. In contrast, writers such as Meenakshi Mukherjee (1994) and Ketaki Kushari Dyson (1994) believe that their use of English prevents them from articulating their native gender in English, a language of distance and exclusion; they belong to the community of intellectual and linguistic mutedness where English silences their inner being, intellectual thoughts, and cultural rootedness. Mukherjee (1994: 12) argues that women who write only in English are “imprisoned within the cognitive and cultural limits that language sets up.” For Dyson, the Bengali language expresses the wide and inclusive nature that can capture the fine familial and social points of her native culture that English is unable to do. For writers such as Bharati Mukherjee (1992), English is the language of creative expression and empowerment; such writers are liberated from the dominant standards to express themselves with an additional new voice.
Rather than viewing English as the language of subjugation, these writers assert their own cultural identity into the language. And the literary community of linguistic defiance challenges the dominant ideologies associated with English. Writers such as Meena Alexander (1981) and Bapsi Sidhwa (1996) reject English in its present form only to seize, dismantle, and reform it to encode their own new sounds, meanings, and structures. These writers’ choice to write in a particular language is an issue of belonging and identity.
As a result of the spread of English and of the dispersal of its users across the globe, the creation of new cultural identities has emerged and multiple social identities of English have developed. To capture the act of literary creativity in world Englishes by authors from bilingual and multilingual backgrounds, Lam and Tse (2014) identify this activity as “acts of creative identity.” Women writers who have membership in literary communities hold different attitudes toward and relationships with English; they construct new linguistic and literary identities that shed light on their creative selves and the sociolinguistic choices they must make as women in the multilingual new Englishes world.
Due to technological advances and the digital age, the postcolonial voice reverberates with all its indigenous linguistic patterns, sociocultural representations, and identity constructions across the Internet, through e‐mail communication, in newspapers, and through online social networking – all mediums accommodating diverse cultures and languages. The English language remains a dominant force of the Internet, in music, television, and film, and in popular culture, so it is only natural for the users of English of the Three Circles to develop different social relationships and create new linguistic forms and identities. As a result of these new cultural exchanges, the new linguistic forms or linguistic mixing become part of the sociolinguistic repertoires of the world English speakers. As culturally mixed speakers draw on the global nature of English, they make language decisions based on the local to produce new identities globally and a range of cultural hybridity (Rubdy & Alsagoff 2014). For example, work on hip‐hop in Tanzania discusses the reterritorialization of English‐derived words that refer to young women in lyrics (Higgins 2014); a study on the linguistic and ethnic hybrid identities of adolescent girls in Japan illustrates the development of a third ethnic identity that differs from their mixed parentage in constructing themselves as English‐knowing bilinguals (Kamada 2014); and an analysis of a television program aired on Botswana Television reveals how the argument and counterargument strategies to the Marriage Act construct both the identity of being Tswana and the cultural identity of gender (Ellece 2011).
Tej Bhatia’s work (2001) on English language advertising to an international audience illustrates the acceptance of world Englishes in consumer markets around the world. Hybridity in advertising exists at many levels: written‐spoken forms, text‐image mixing of world Englishes, multiple language mixing, English mixing with other languages, script mixing, and so on – local language, culture and identity meet globalization. Drawing on both local and global linguistic and cultural elements, Bhatia and Baumgardner (2008) show the process of localization of English in print media and advertising.
Even newspaper articles, matrimonial advertisements, and other print forms of marketing show highly contextualized English forms and styles. In the cultural and linguistic systems of the many varieties of English, English is used in a number of rhetorical and literary contexts to reflect diverse linguistic genres, situational contexts, participant and role relationships, functional domains, and conversational styles. B. Kachru’s work illustrates the highly contextualized, culture‐specific English interactions by providing evidence of the nativization of text‐types with reference to the caste and class hierarchies, regional attitudes, ethnic and gender identities, and family structures in Asian and African contexts in matrimonial advertisements, announcements of death, personal letters and other forms of written media in South Asian English and African English (1983, 1992).
To illustrate how the matrimonial advertisements in English newspapers across India contextualize gender, Nair (1992) examines the use of English in matrimonial advertisements, a highly specialized, distinct written discourse type. Embedding social ideologies and cultural presuppositions into the Indian matrimonial helps to perpetuate the native ideology of gender. Gender roles and the social institutions of matchmaking, marriage, and family organization are recreated through the use of the English language. Pandey (2004), too, examines world Englishes in the diasporic context of the English used in personals and matrimonials in newspapers from the United States and from publications targeted at Indians in the US. Not only are there certain distinctive pragmatic, discoursal, syntactic, and lexical features distinct in each ad, but also the creative aspect varies circle to circle. In her cross‐cultural analysis of gender and identity she explains the contextual differences in gendered language usage, most particularly the use of culture‐specific terms to convey the strong gender roles, relations, and expectations within the South Asian speech communities.
In a recent study, Bhatt (2014) presents code‐switched English‐Hindi data from Indian newspapers to argue that the dichotomies of local‐traditional and global‐modern gender identity are in constant negotiation. Examining the contemporary representations of women in Indian English newspapers, he argues that the authority and status of traditional women is portrayed in terms of decorative displays of gender practices, but the discursive practice of English‐Hindi code‐switching allows the modern Indian woman to challenge her traditional role in local spaces by constructing a social identity that aligns with her assigned traditional position in society. Women do not speak in one voice, but multivocally (Bhatt 2014: 125). Multiple identities coexist in the sociolinguistic landscapes of world Englishes.
Globalization has become a site for building multilingual, multicultural world communities. As the number of forms and functions of English around the world increases and the contact with bilingualism in English strengthens, the more nativized the English language becomes and the more localized its functional ranges (Y. Kachru & Smith 2009). Both the study of world Englishes and the study of language and gender and other social variables have challenged the limits of the traditional approaches, the western static, monolithic models, and monolingual standards and norms. Their histories are similar in that they both arose from existing traditional theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical models to one that accepts linguistic pluralism and multilingual creativity – from viewing gender and language as unchanging, homogeneous, and absolute to a more dynamic discussion on function, context, and the social person. Both seek a new direction consistent with an integrative approach that takes into account expanding and connecting boundaries to include the construction of multiple social and linguistic identities and diverse roles and functions, replacing dichotomies of us and them, native and nonnative, women and men, and difference and dominance with dimensions of pluralism and expansion of the canon. Considering the challenges in multilingual, multicultural communities, an integrative approach to sociolinguistic variation takes into account both local and global, the bilingual’s creativity, and the social and cultural dimensions that capture the underlying essence of World English‐ness. It is only natural, then, that as the English language expands in form and function locally and globally, the creative element of the multilingual, multicultural context be examined to establish the multiple features of pluralism and the multiple levels of penetration in the spread of English.