Jerry Won Lee

The Politics of Intentionality in Englishes: Provincializing Capitalization

This article theorizes how the privileging of “intentional” deviations from ostensibly mainstream Englishes represents a form of epistemic violence that replicates and sustains the logics of coloniality, presuming the inherent and chronic inferiority of nonmainstream cultural forms, practices, and institutions. In response, this article considers the potentiality of errors in peripheralized Englishes as moments of disinvention through an extended analysis of an artifact that represents an enunciation of political and linguistic decoloniality. Focusing on the orthographic feature of capitalization as a case in point, I enact the practice of provincialization toward exposing the inadequacies of monofunctional orthography for an inherently and increasingly plurilithic language like English. To conclude, I use alternatively capitalized English as a reconstituted and decolonizing expressive mode.

Transnational Linguistic Landscapes and the Transgression of Metadiscursive Regimes of Language

In response to the limitations of the nation-state as a conceptual frame for the study of linguistic landscapes (LL), this article argues for a transnational approach that accounts for the material reconfigurations and symbolic reimaginations of space in the context of global flows and migrations (Appadurai, 1996). This approach enables one to recognize the fluidity of language practice that transgresses the metadiscursive regimes of language (Bauman & Briggs, 2003) upon which the ideological maintenance of native speaker idealization (Kachru, 2005) hinges. Drawing primarily on theories of language practice (Pennycook, 2010), language disinvention (Makoni & Pennycook, 2005, 2007), and language transgression (Pennycook, 2007), this article analyzes a variety of linguistic tactics in the transnational Korean LL, including those of the South Korean nation-state, and of ethnic Korean enclaves in the United States, including the Koreatowns of Los Angeles and New York. Language practice in the transnational Korean LL challenges the very boundaries of language that precede linguistic hierarchization (e.g., Inner Circle variety as superior to Outer and Expanding Circle varieties) and challenge the ideological commitment to native speaker idealization.

Aestheticizing language: metapragmatic distance and unequal Englishes in Hong Kong

Abstract While scholars in World Englishes have long acknowledged the inherent equality of varieties of Englishes spoken within and across different nations, unequal relations across Englishes persist through various means. One such way, as discussed in this article, is through the aestheticization of language, which we define as a process in which individuals evaluate a language resource or usage as aesthetically appealing on the basis of its stylistic, grammatical, or phonological ‘appearance.’ This study, based on classroom ethnography in Hong Kong, demonstrates that language aestheticization is an ideological commitment that sustains a speaker’s metapragmatic distance from English. Our analysis shows how aesthetic evaluations of language represent, and can exacerbate, social and linguistic inequalities. These findings contribute to current understandings of World Englishes in Asian contexts, in that metapragmatic distance is reflective of a complex interplay of ideology and access to dominant language resources.

Mapping Korean Englishes in Transnational Contexts

This chapter maps the intellectual stakes of this collection, which considers how the performance of, and ideological commitments to, the English language within transnational contexts symbolizes the complex ways in which globalizing factors and transcultural flows interface with linguistic actions and practices. The chapter details the significance of ‘Korean Englishes’, which reflects not only the possibility that English can be a Korean language but that, contrary to the dominant expectations of world Englishes scholarship, it cannot be conceptualized in a uniform manner. It also clarifies the importance of understanding Korean Englishes in transnational contexts. It explores the extent to which ‘Korean’ is always already bound to transnational flows, and considers what happens to the very category of the ‘national’, (e.g. Korean) in the context of transnationalism, and what this means for the study of language, in particular, of Englishes.

Metrolingualism: language in the city

Metrolingualism: Language in the City, co-authored by Alastair Pennycook and Emi Otsuji, draws on ethnographic research in Tokyo and Sydney to examine the interrelationships between language and urban space. The notion of metrolingualism was originally introduced in Otsuji and Pennycook’s (2010) earlier work by developing Maher’s (2005) notion of metroethnicity, which describes the playful negotiation of ethnic identity. In the earlier work, metrolingualism was used to describe ‘the ways in which people of different and mixed backgrounds use, play with and negotiate identities through language’ (Otsuji & Pennycook, 2010, p. 246). In this book, metrolingualism accomplishes much more. Crucially, the book confronts the dominant tendency in sociolinguistics, dating to the foundational variationist paradigm of Labov (1972), to view urban space as the mere contextual background that shapes a speaker’s discrete linguistic patterns. Pennycook and Otsuji argue, instead, that language and space, particularly urban space, are rather co-dependent and coconstitutive of one another: ‘Language is bound up with all of this – it does not just happen against an urban backdrop, it is part of the city, the barber shop, the market garden, the networks of buying and selling’ (p. 33). Therefore, it should be noted that this book, in spite of its subtitle Language in the City, is not so much about language in the city as it is about language and the city, as indicated in the book’s jacket description and as suggested in the first few pages. Further, what makes Metrolingualism so unusual and so riveting is Pennycook and Otsuji’s combined efforts to understand language and space in relation to other material objects that generally fall beyond the purview of sociolinguistic inquiry but are nonetheless valuable communicative resources: the arrangement of tables and chairs in a restaurant, invisible traces of the recent past in linguistic landscapes, or even food items like ‘Japanese’ cucumbers. Metrolingualism directs readers to the possibility of ‘multilingualism from below’ by examining ‘local language practices rather than the local implementation and appropriation of top-down language policies’ (p. 13). Pennycook and Otsuji call for a shift in research in the form of ‘sociolinguistic ethnographies of language in use that include local understandings of language and do not impose pregiven understandings of language and multilingualism’ (p. 13). Metrolingualism, as Pennycook and Otsuji note, thus refers: