Linguistic currencies: the translative power of English in Southeast Asia and the United States

ABSTRACT

English seems to be everywhere in the world today, as omnipresent as money. Just as the US dollar has been the Latin, as it were, of world currency, so English has been the lingua franca of a ceaselessly globalising market economy. This is as true in the vastly diverse linguistic landscapes of Southeast Asia as it is in the irreducibly plural cultures of the United States. How did the hegemony of English come about? What are the specific histories and political imperatives that have installed English at the head of a global linguistic hierarchy while situating vernacular languages below it? What effects does this linguistic hierarchy have in the reproduction oKef social relations within such nations as the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and the United States? And what are the limits of translating English into money, especially when confronted with everyday creolised speech in such forms as slang and literature?

KEYWORDS:

• English
• translation
• United States
• Philippines
• Singapore
• Thailand
• creolisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Many people have contributed to the writing of this essay. It was originally conceived as a keynote address for the 6^th IATIS Conference in Hong Kong, 6 July 2018. My thanks to Robert John Neather, Mona Baker, Loredana Polezzi, Lila Shahani, Phrae Chittiphalangsri, Hephzibah Israel and many others in attendance for their sharp and generous comments on this essay. Later on, I also had the pleasure of delivering it at the 20^th Inter-Asian Cultural Studies Conference in Dumaguete, Philippines, 3 August 2019 on the kind invitation of Tejaswini Niranjana. I also thank James Maxey, Stefano Arduini and the Nida School of Translation Studies in Misano, as well as Magda Heydel and Zofia Ziemann of Jagellionian University, Krakow for inviting me to share portions of this paper. This essay is dedicated to LRS whose generosity I can never repay.

2. Obviously, this term is a riff from Wallace Stevens, ‘Money is a kind of poetry.’

3. Friederich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, ed. and translated by Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Viking Press, 1976, 46–47.

4. A number of the arguments here were first formulated in Vicente L. Rafael, Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amidst Wars of Translation, Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2016; and Vicente L. Rafael, ‘Mutant Tongues: Translating English in the Postcolonial Humanities,’ in CR: The New Centennial Review, Spring 2016, 83–113.

5. My comparative remarks on the spread of English in Southeast Asia are indebted to the valuable work of various scholars in such works as Alistair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, London: Longman, 1994; Mary Louise Pratt, ‘Comparative Literature in the Global Landscape,’ in A Companion to Comparative Literature, First Edition, ed. by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2011, 273–295; Pheng Cheah, What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature, Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2016; and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso Press, Revised edition, 2016.

6. Noah Webster, ‘Author’s Preface,’ in An American Dictionary of the English Language (Originally Published in 1826), Revised and Enlarged (Springfield, M A:

Merriam, 1862), xiii. See also the other texts by Noah Webster: Dissertation on the English Language (Boston: Thomas, 1789); A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, facsimile of the 1783 edition (Menston, England: Scolar, 1968). For an astute study of the language of Webster’s generation, see John Howe, Language and Political Meaning and Revolutionary America, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004. See also Jill Lepore, A Is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States, New York: Penguin 2003.

7. See Rafael, Motherless Tongues, chapter 4.

8. For a more detailed discussion of the American notion of translation as the end of translation, see Rafael, ibid.

9. For the history of English in the Philippines, see the references in the bibliography of Vicente L. Rafael, Motherless Tongues, chapters 2. See also: Resil Mojares, Origins of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study Until 1940, Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1983; Virgilio Almario, ‘Madalas Itanong sa Wikang Pambansa (Frequently Asked Questions about the National Language),’ trans. Marne L. Kilates, Manila, 2014. See also Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino, http://kwf.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/FAQ_2.4.15.pdf; Vicente L. Rafael, ‘Filipino, the Language Which is Not One,’ Rappler, 21 August 2015, https://www.rappler.com/thought-leaders/103304-filipino-language-not-one; Bautista, Ma. Lourdes S. and Bolton, eds. Kingsley, Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008; Gonzalez, Andrew, Language and Nationalism: The Philippine Experience Thus Far, Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1981.

10. See, for example, Jonathan Chua, ed., The Critical Villa: Essays in Literary Criticism, Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Univ. Press, 2002.

11. For Singapore, I have benefitted from the following texts: Lionel Wee, Robbie B.H. Goh and Lisa Lim, eds., The Politics of English: South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Asia-Pacific, ed. by Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Co., 2010; Lisa Lim, Anne Pakir, and Lionel Wee, eds. English in Singapore: Modernity and Management, Singapore: National University Press 2010; Sharpe, Leslie; and S. Gopinathan, ‘After Effectiveness: New Directions in the Singapore School System?’ Journal of Education Policy 17, no. 2, 2002, 151–66. See also Vicente L. Rafael, ‘Mutant Tongues.’

12. J.S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India. New York: New York University, 1956. See also Chua, Beng-Huat, ‘Singapore’s Routes of Modernity,’ Theory Culture Society 23: 469–71, 2006.

13. For English in Malaysia and Singapore, see Alistair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, London: Longman, 1994, 183–256.

14. I am grateful to Thongchai Winichakul, Rachel Harrison, Supasai Vongkulbhisal, Phrae Chittiphalangsri, Arthit Jiamrattanyoo and Thiti Jamkajornkeiat for their helpful comments on my arguments for Thailand. Some useful resources I’ve found on the subject of English in Thailand include Pairote Bennui & Azirah Hashim, ‘English in Thailand: the development of English in a non-postcolonial context,’ Asian Englishes, 16:3, Spring, 209–228; Amy H. Liu and Jacob I. Ricks, ‘Coalitions and Policy Shifts in Southeast Asia,’ World Politics 64, no. 3 (July 2012), 476–506; Adam R. Tanielian, ‘Foreign language anxiety in a new English program in Thailand,’ The International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives Vol. 13, No. 1, 2014; Voravudhi Chirasombuti, ‘History of foreign language education in Thailand until World War II,’ The International Journal of Social Language, 186 (2007), pp. 5–12; Azirah Hashim and Pairote Bennui, ‘Lexical Creativity in Thai English Fiction,’ Kritika Kultura 21/22 (2013/2014), 132–164; Wannapa Trakulkasemsuk, ‘Thai English,’ in Varieties of English Around the World: English in Southeast Asia, Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing, 2012, 101–111.

15. See for example, Pietr Muysken, ‘Creole Languages,’ in Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Language, http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/acrefore-9780199384655-e-68. Mary Louise Pratt offers a powerful version of creolisation in her notion of ‘heterolingualism’ in her essay, ‘Comparative Literature in the Global Landscape,’ in A Companion to Comparative Literature, First Edition, ed. by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas, London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011, 273–295. She writes:

The possibility of heterolingualism, of one language hosting (or invading or occupying) another arises from a third feature of human language that shapes the global languagescape: its extroversion. Languages are not just porous, they are outwardly disposed to seize elements from others with which they come in contact. This active openness of linguistic systems makes language uncontainable and transgressive. In the new languagescapes of global cities, the extrovertedness of language is another reason we have no idea what the world will look like linguistically a hundred years from now. (290)

Other works on creolisation and translation that have informed my discussion include Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourses: Selected Essays, ed. by J. Michael Dash, Charlottesville: Univ. Of Virginia Press, 1989; James T. Siegel, Solo in the New Order: Language and Hierarchy in an Indonesian City, Princeton Univ. Press, 1986, and Benedict Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990. My own explorations in the creolisation in the late Spanish Philippine context appears in Vicente L. Rafael, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translations in the Spanish Philippines, Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2005.

16. Stuart Hall, Familiar Strangers: A Life between Islands, London: Penguin, 2017, 19.

17. Hall, ibid.

18. Hall, ibid, 74–75.

19. John Agard, Mangoes and Bullets, London: Serpent’s Tail, 1985. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ywy-Tthdg7w.

20. See for example, the MLA Language Map, http://arcmap.mla.org/mla/default.aspx; and Rick Aschman’s remarkable ‘Map of English Dialects,’ http://aschmann.net/AmEng/#LargeMap4Left. See also Edward G. grey, New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999; Marc Shell, ‘Babel in America: The Politics of Language Diversity in the United States,’ Critical Enquiry 20 (1993): 103–27; Jill Lepore, A Is for American, 27–29; Don Dodd, Historical Statistics of the States of the United States: Two Centuries of the Census, 1790–1990, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993; Shirley Brice Heath, ‘Why No Official Tongue?’ in Language Loyalties: A Source Book on the Official English Controversy, ed. James Crawford, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 20–30; Edward Sagarin and Robert J. Kelly, ‘Polylingualism in the United States of America: A Multitude of Tongues amid a Monolingual Majority,’ in Language Policy and National Unity, ed. William R. Beer and James E. Jacob, Totowa, N J: Rowman and Allanheld, 1985, 20–44; Joshua Fishman, Language Loyalty in the United States: The Maintenance and Perpetuation of Non-English Mother Tongues by American Ethnic and Religious Groups (The Hague: Mouton, 1966.

21. For a discussion of Tomas Pinpin, see Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule, Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1993, ch. 2.

22. Barbara Jane Reyes, ‘To Spit Fire,’ in To Love as Aswang: Songs, Fragments, Found Objects, San Francisco, PAWA, 2017. Quoted with the author’s kind permission.

23. ‘Carnivalization’ is, of course, a term I borrow from Mikhail Bahktin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2009. His notion of heteroglossia, like Pratt’s ‘heterolingualism,’ is closely aligned with the notion of ‘creolization’ that I’ve been using to frame the insurgent possibilities of language. See Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

24. Nick Joaquin’s ‘The Language of the Streets,’ first appeared in 1963, and has been republished under his pen-name, Quijano de Manila, as The Language of the Streets and Other Essays, Manila: National Bookstore, 1980, 3–21. For a more extended treatment of this brilliant essay, see Vicente L. Rafael, Motherless Tongues, chapter 2. And for a more extended study of Nick Joaquin’s work, see Vicente L. Rafael, ‘Telling Times: Nick Joaquin, Storyteller,’ in Nick Joaquin, The Woman Who had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic, New York: Penguin Classics, 2017, 1–20.

25. See Rafael, ‘Mutant Tongues.’

26. See Vicente L. Rafael, ‘The Sovereign Trickster,’ in Journal of Asian Studies, v. 78, no. 1, February 2019, 141–166.

27. For a more detailed explication of ‘worlded’ and ‘worlding,’ distinguishing these from ‘globalization,’ see Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? and Pratt, ‘Comparative Literature in the Global Landscape.’ See also the very useful work of Alastair Pennycook, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language, especially 1–3.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vicente L. Rafael

Vicente L. Rafael is the Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History, University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of several book on the cultural and political history of the Philippines, including Contracting Colonialism, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, The Promise of the Foreign, and Motherless Tongues, all published by Duke University Press.