Debating English's Hegemony: American, Australian and Slovenian Students Discuss “The” Global Language

Abstract

This article looks at how mother-tongue English speakers and those who do not have English as a mother tongue discuss the complex questions that swirl around the global hegemony of English when given an opportunity to discuss these directly with one another. The article does so via an analysis of a series of online exchanges about English's global rise among American, Australian, and Slovenian university students. The analysis reveals that English's global expansion can look and feel quite different, and in fact is quite different, to different social actors, all of them situated differently vis-à-vis this social phenomenon along a variety of different social, cultural, national and, most notably, linguistic axes.

Notes

¹The hegemony of English is defined as the social creation of a particular, hierarchical global linguistic order by actually existing human actors. In other words, language does not create a hegemonic linguistic order, the people who socially produce language do.

²The University of the Southwest (USW), Slovenia University (SU), and University of Australia (UA) do not exist. They are pseudonyms for real universities in the United States, Slovenia, and Australia.

³The specific course name has been withheld to maintain the anonymous nature of the review process.

⁴English-centric bilingualism is a form of “multilingualism” in which people for whom English is not a first language possess a high-level of proficiency in English but do not profess similar proficiency in another foreign language. High-level proficiency is determined by an individual's ability to successfully meet the hegemonic standards imposed on a privileged written form of a language. So for example, a scholar from Italy in cultural studies for whom English is not her first-language and who is able to meet the hegemonic linguistic standards in Italian and in English-language cultural studies journals, but who cannot speak or write at a similarly high level of proficiency in a language other than Italian or English, would be defined as an English-centric bilingual.

⁵The USW and SU instructors posted occasionally to the forum while the UA instructor did not.

⁶I do not correct language errors in any of the students' posts in order to: a) draw direct attention to the hard work that using English is for non-English speakers, a fact which editing by a native English speaker such as myself serves to obscure; b) draw direct attention to the fact that native English speakers themselves often do not use “perfect” English.

⁷Please see footnote 6 for an explanation as to why I have not corrected errors in this post.

⁸Meaningful multilingualism means that an individual can fairly easily construct coherent verbal and written sentences in at least one language beyond his or her first language, that he or she is able to consistently put together several coherent sentences in a row in both verbal and written form with a minimum of errors in that language, and that he or she can do so across a breadth of subject areas in that language.