Volume 24, Issue 3

In this paper, we aim to anticipate a potential challenge to Singapore’s language policy, which privileges a distinction between Asian ‘mother tongues’ on the one hand and English on the other. The challenge to this policy will arise as Singapore embarks on a foreign talent policy, where the goal is to ultimately attract talented foreigners to take up Singaporean citizenship. This other policy, if successful, could drastically change the nation’s demographics, making it difficult to maintain a language policy that dichotomizes Asian and Western languages. Because policies do not occur in isolation, but are legitimized by appeals to nationalist ideologies, we make use of a framework that treats such ideologies as institutional narratives. By paying attention to how the semiotic processes of iconization, recursiveness, and erasure are manifested in such narratives, we show how Singapore’s language policy may have to change ‒ and its accompanying narrative be modified ‒ in the light of the foreign talent policy.

In his encyclopedia of language, Crystal (1995) identified two main perspectives contributing to a nation’s decisions around language: national identity and internationalism. In the former, the nation looks within itself at its societal structure and composition, defining its needs in relation to national identity. In the latter, the nation looks outside from itself at the world and global economy, and defines itself and its needs in relation to its position within that world. In multilingual Singapore, it is the juxtaposition of these two perspectives, which I call ‘glocalism’, that form the nexus of the nation’s ‘English’-plus-‘mother-tongue’ bilingual policy. And it defines the parameters of the ongoing debate about English and Singlish, the more colloquial and home-grown variety of English in Singapore. In this article, I will unpack this ‘Singlish debate’, positioning the debate in the growing body of literature on language ideologies and the ways in which they mediate between social structure and linguistic practices.

Recent attitudinal research by Bayard et al. (2001) suggested changes in the comparative evaluations of Australian, New Zealand, US and English Englishes, with US English on its way to becoming the preferred variety. We revisit these attitudes after a period of political change in the US, and using a research methodology in line with folklinguistic approaches to attitudes research (e. g. Preston 1996). Convenience samples of respondents in these four countries were asked to identify the countries where they knew English was spoken as a native language, and then quickly to write down their first reactions to those varieties. US English was viewed strikingly negatively in terms of its affective associations, and there were references to ‘excess’ from all respondent groups (e. g. overassertive, overenthusiastic). And, against expectations, the affective profile of English English was not overwhelmingly negative for all groups of respondents. We consider the results in relation to the findings and methods of the earlier studies, and also briefly consider the different statuses of these varieties in terms of the current discussion of late modernity and of different standard varieties (e. g. Kristiansen 2001b) serving different aspects of social life.

Listener responses (called backchannels) and their effect on intercultural communication were investigated in eight dyadic conversations in English between Japanese and British participants. The findings of this study revealed several differences in the way each culture used backchannels: the Japanese participants used slightly more backchannels per interlocutor word, the British participants displayed greater variability in the types of backchannels they used, and there were several differences in the lexical items making up these backchannels. Japanese participants sent noticeably more backchannels in three discourse contexts: at or directly after a pause, directly after a primary speaker’s nonverbal gesture, and directly after a tag question or an utterance ending with the lexical items ‘ya know’. This study found evidence supporting the hypothesis that backchannel conventions, which are not shared between cultures, contribute to negative perceptions and stereotyping. The findings of this study support the conclusion that backchannels warrant more attention in EFL classes in Japan.

Much attention has been paid in the literature to the writing and discourse structure of research articles, but the focus is predominantly on evaluating English research articles from an Anglo-American perspective. The unstated assumption of such studies is that writers whose first language is not English tend to write differently. Despite a number of cross-cultural comparisons in the literature, only surface discursive features have been examined, such as explicit devices that signal clausal relations, or the genre investigated has been stabilized with strong normative traditions. This study investigates how third party ideas are evaluated in research articles written in English and Chinese. The data come from three domains - the humanities, the social sciences, and the hard sciences. The results indicate that there are no large differences between English and Chinese in the weightings of evaluation categories, even though they are realized by different grammatical resources in the two languages. Chinese research articles tend to use more explicit linguistic resources with less frequent use of mitigators, possibly because of the socio-pragmatic and typological differences between English and Chinese. The study also proposes a taxonomy of evaluative resources in English and Chinese research articles, which can be used in future research.

Alan S. Kaye Perspectives on English as a World Language , edited by D. J. Allerton, Paul Skandera, and Cornelia Tschichold   Kamilla Biskupska Discourse and Social Life , edited by Srikant Sarangi and Malcolm Coulthard   Shi-xu Chinese Englishes: A Sociolinguistic History , by Kingsley Bolton