Polyglossing in English: The diasporic trajectories of the English language

ABSTRACT

This article proposes to reassess the dynamic history of English in the 20th century up until the turn of the 21st century through the prism of communities in transit. Combining the perspective of the language with diaspora studies the article argues that diasporas are not only shaped by a language of former colonial origin but in turn shape it, inflecting its grammar to suit their needs, bending its rules when necessary and most of all speaking their home language through English in a sort of creative polyphony. This position, at the crossroads between diasporic and global studies, proposes to look at the diasporic perspective as a dynamic perspective on globality which allows one to gauge the degree of cultural resilience of cultural diversity and local moorings which continue to exist and are expressed in and despite a language which has become global.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora
• global languages
• Globish
• cultural globalization
• linguistic genealogies
• cultural resilience

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The unprecedented global domination of English today often makes us forget that historically speaking the first colonial nations were Portugal and Spain. The Portuguese Empire was one of the largest and longest-lived empires in world history, as it existed for almost six centuries, from the capture of Ceuta in 1415 to the handover of Portuguese Macau to China in 1999. From the early 16th century it stretched across the globe, from North America, South America and Africa to various regions of Asia and Oceania. As for the Spanish Empire, it also started in the 15th century and came to its apex in the 18th century, when Spain controlled a huge overseas territory in the New World and the Asian Archipelago of the Philippines.

2. We need to nuance this point as Chinese is also a global language which is becoming increasingly present on the Internet. As for Arabic, it is the language of another modernity whose trajectory has often been overlooked by western modernity.

3. The notion of the world as a global village comes from Marshall McLuhan ([1964] 1987).

4. Many novels by South Asian women writers describe the fondness of their female characters for a language which allows them to have some sort of recognition and existence outside the home and which they consequently perceive as empowering; Brick Lane by Monica Ali is a case in point.

5. The issue is actually even more complex as the very idea of Englishness in itself is a construct, one whose history has become the subject of critical reassessment in postcolonial studies, as is evidenced notably by The Idea of English Ethnicity (Young 2008).

6. A more in-depth analysis appeared in Král (2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Françoise Král

Françoise Král is professor of English and postcolonial studies at Université Paris Nanterre. Her research fields include postcolonial literatures and cultures, critical theory, contemporary 20th- and 21st-century anglophone literature, diaspora studies, and more recently the digital humanities vs the precarious body, a topic on which she is coordinating a seminar series at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris (2019–20). She is author of Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature (2009), Social Invisibility in Anglophone Diasporic Literature and Culture: The Fractal Gaze (2014) and Sounding out History (2018). She is a founding member of the international interdisciplinary research network Diaspolinks and has edited Re-presenting Otherness (2004), with Jean-Jaques Lecercle, and Architecture and Philosophy: New Perspectives on the Work of Arakawa and Gins (2011) as well as “Crossings”, a special issue of Commonwealth Essays and Studies 37(1) (Autumn 2014).