Philip Seargeant

English in Japan in the Era of Globalization

In a world in which global communication is becoming ever more important and in which English is increasingly being positioned as the pre-eminent international language, Japan presents a particularly compelling case for the examination of the realities of English as a global language. As is often noted by commentators, Japan shows an intense fascination towards English yet, despite the strong visual and conceptual presence the language occupies in society, it has no official status, nor, in relative terms, do the majority of citizens require any great fluency in it for their everyday lives. Yet English in some form or at some symbolic level has become a significant part of everyday life in modern Japan. This book, written by leading scholars in the field, explores the role, status and uses of English in Japan, and focuses on the ways in which globalization is influencing language practices in the country.

Exploring World Englishes: Language in a Global Context

In this book Philip Seargeant surveys varieties of English existing within the world today, and the debates and controversies surrounding its present forms, functions and status in diverse world contexts. It examines how English has evolved to become a ‘global language’ and looks at the political and cultural history that has influenced this evolution. Beginning with a discussion of real-life challenges relating to world Englishes that are faced by language professionals – particularly in the contexts of language education and language planning – the book explores and illustrates the ways in which the actual use and management of English, as well as the beliefs and ideologies associated with it, play an increasingly important role in contemporary globalized society.

Is English a threat to Chinese language and culture

The ‘threat’ of English in China might be balanced by the promotion of Chinese language and culture

Audience design and language choice in the construction and maintenance of translocal communities on social network sites

This chapter explores how multilingual users perceive their audience on semi-public social network sites (SNSs), and how these perceptions shape users’ language choices as they construct and maintain translocal communities. It does so by building upon a widely used framework for understanding style choices in spoken interaction: Bell’s ‘audience design’ (1984). Bell’s model posits that a speaker’s stylistic choices can in great part be shaped by their attempts to accommodate to their addressees and to others present in the exchange, and this basic principle also holds for online contexts. However, the particular affordances of communication via SNSs are likely to result in interesting differences between the type of audiences perceived by someone posting on an SNS such as Facebook, and the audiences which Bell’s model describes for spoken interaction. Firstly, unlike either conversational or broadcast talk, the type of interactions that typically take place on SNSs are conducted via the written mode, and yet at the same time they exhibit much of the interactivity and informality that is often found in speech. Secondly, given that they sit somewhere between personal conversation and public broadcasts, SNSs can be described as ‘semi-public’ forums in the sense that a user’s audience, while often large, diverse and unseen, generally comprises people they know.

Writing systems at play in Thai-English online interactions

Abstract This article explores the bilingual practices of a community of English-speaking Thai nationals on two online platforms: a social network site (Facebook) and an instant messaging service (MSN). Through a discourse analysis of informal conversation exchanges, the article examines the ways in which these participants play with the two languages and writing systems through practices of code- and script-switching as well as orthographic variation, and it shows how these practices contribute to the construction of interpersonal meaning, the negotiation of relationships, and the performance of social identity in these online contexts. One interesting finding which this study reports is that certain forms of orthographic variation occur not only in English but also in both romanised Thai and that written in the Thai script. This is in contrast to conclusions drawn in previous studies which find that non-Roman scripts are often imbued with values of tradition and purity and are therefore not open to the manipulation which characterises the use of the Roman script. The conclusion of this study is that, in the absence of paralinguistic cues online, the participants are drawing on all the semiotic resources available to them—including those supplied by different writing systems—in performing identities as modern, internationally-oriented Thais.

The Symbolic Meaning of Visual English in the Social Landscape of Japan

The visual display of language across the social landscape is one of the most noticeable aspects of the existence of English in modern Japan. The contemporary Japanese cityscape, with its numerous neon signs and animated billboards, is, from a purely formal perspective, strikingly bilingual: the different Japanese writing scripts are everywhere interwoven with words and phrases in the Roman alphabet, and from public information signs, through advertising hoardings, to commercial shop signs and clothing design, there is a high density of recognizably ‘English’ forms on display. The significance of this can be interpreted in various ways. Certain studies (e.g. Backhaus, 2007) have examined the phenomenon in terms of the index it provides of a developing multilingualism in the country. The ever-increasing presence of English text alongside Japanese is taken as a reflection of the way that English is beginning to be positioned more as an international rather than a foreign language; and while English may have no official status within Japan, the suggestion is that it can, now, be seen to operate as a de facto working language for certain functions in particular social contexts. Other studies (e.g. Hyde, 2002; Seargeant, 2009) look more to the emblematic significance of this display of English, and examine the way the language is mobilized within Japanese culture as a symbol of modernity and for the promotion of an international sensibility.

Introduction: The language of social media

In 1929, the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy wrote a short story called ‘Chain-links’ in which a group of friends discuss the fundamental interconnectedness of the modern world: Let me put it this way: Planet Earth has never been as tiny as it is now. It shrunk — relatively speaking of course — due to the quickening pulse of both physical and verbal communication. This topic has come up before, but we had never framed it quite this way. We never talked about the fact that anyone on Earth, at my or anyone’s will, can now learn in just a few minutes what I think or do, and what I want or what I would like to do. (2007[1929], p. 21) The character who makes this speech goes on to argue that everyone in the world is related to everyone else though a series of chains of acquaintance, and that no-one is more than five acquaintances away from anyone else on the planet. Every individual is only six degrees of separation away from any other.

PHILOSOPHIES OF LANGUAGE IN THE FICTIONS OF JORGE LUIS BORGES

Ideas about language are a major theme in many of the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, and the way in which language is conceptualized within his fiction plays an important role in the philosophical speculations of his narratives. Analyzing both the implicit linguistic assumptions upon which certain narratives are built, as well as the metalinguistic explication of imaginary languages that occur in these stories, this article examines the ways in which Borges’s philosophy of language contributes to his representation of the paradoxical nature of human experience.

Taking Offence on Social Media

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English in rural Bangladesh: how is language education perceived as a resource for development in rural communities?

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