Decentering language: displacing Englishes from the study of Englishes

ABSTRACT

Much has been written about the linguistics, pragmatics and politics of the pluralization of English under conditions of colonization and globalization. By and large, however, the focus of the work on World Englishes has understandably been on “Englishes” rather than the “world”. This paper explores the theoretical potential of strategically displacing “Englishes” from the study of World Englishes and, instead, train our lens on the study of the “world” by operationalizing such strategic decentering in the context of Philippine English studies. Thus, the specific argument of this paper concerns the need to train our lenses on what constitutes “Philippine” in Philippine English. This crucial modifier of English is rarely discussed, much more unpacked and critiqued, thus “English” remains relatively disconnected from its very complex “local” moorings. In the end, however, a strategic decentering of English from the study of Philippine English will strengthen the conceptual power of our accounting of the critical role of English in Philippine society. This mobilizes the field to go beyond the study of Philippine English and into Unequal Philippine Englishes.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There is no space in this paper for a comprehensive discussion of the rise of Tagalog – later renamed as Filipino – as the national language of the Philippines, but much has been written about this topic. See Gonzalez (1980), Tinio (2009) and Tupas & Lorente (2014).

2. International Corpus of English – Philippines.