Kingsley Bolton

This article provides and introduction to the range of research issues covered by the contributions to this special issue on English in contemporary China. It is suggested that the role of English in Chinese society today cannot be considered in isolation from the sociolinguistic background, as well as the social and political context of contemporary Chinese society. With reference to the present-day sociolinguistic dynamics of China, an important issue is the current spread of Putonghua as the national language across the nation, a process linked to the demands and exigencies of the state education system. With reference to the spread of English, one continuing issue is the relationship between the learning of English, and the actual use of the language. In this context, it is relevant to consider that, in recent decades, official policies to the language have drawn their motivation from both economic and political considerations, where various ideologies have played a role.

By many, the recent popularity of English in Chinese education, at all levels of learning, has been seen as a very modern phenomenon, which followed the opening of China in the late 1970s. In fact, the learning of English in China has a long and partly forgotten history, not least at the level of higher education. From a historical perspective, it is salutary to remember that English medium universities and colleges were first established in China in the late 19th and early 20th century. Today, all the state-run key universities in China are officially Putonghua-medium, but despite that, English has an increasing presence in university education, both in the classroom and in the personal lives of Chinese university students.

This article surveys current approaches to world Englishes (WE), provides a review of recent critiques of the world Englishes paradigm, and considers the ways in which the theorisation of  world Englishes faces new challenges related to the effects of globalisation, as well as possible responses to such changes. This it does specifically by examining the sociolinguistic backgrounds and experiences of two groups of young people in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, and the complicated multilingual realities of their language worlds, in two cities geographically adjacent,
but separated by a political border. Following Blommaert's (2010) discussion of the sociolinguistics of globalisation, the article then moves on to speculate whether the notion of 'language world' has the theoretical potential to extend the WE paradigm to accommodate transnational perspectives on world Englishes.

Call centres (or telephone ‘contact centres’) of various kinds have become an increasing fact of life for many people in Europe, North America and other developed economies. Although telephone contact centres may be dated back to the 1960s and 1970s in the US, their intrusion into the lives of British and US consumers has grown exponentially since the 1980s. Since the early 2000s, however, a significant number of call centre operations have been outsourced to such destinations as India and the Philippines, thereby raising a number of issues relating to language and globalisation and the politics of English as an international language.

This paper compares trends in Sweden’s language planning and language policies, and particularly the rationale underlying recent government legislation, to actual language use at the ‘grass roots’ of society, in order to investigate the extent to which academic and official rationales are confirmed by observed language practices. The passing of the Swedish Language Act of 2009 followed debates in academia and the media which not infrequently characterised English as a major threat to the survival of Swedish. However, despite the strong belief in the utility of English widely held in Sweden, the Swedish language is the preferred language of Swedes as well as immigrants in most domains. These results reveal a contradiction between the arguments put forward by a number of academics, educators and journalists concerning the ‘threat’ of English, and the language practices of ordinary folk in their daily lives.

The growing intrusion and use of English in the public spaces of theworld’s cities alongside national languages and local languages has received increasing attention over the last fifteen years or so. The study of English and other languages in urban public signage has drawn the attention of anthropologists, cultural theorists, and various scholars in sociolinguistics, many of whom have contributed to a body of research on the topic of ‘linguistic landscapes’. Such work is of direct relevance to world Englishes, as the scope of WE is obviously not simply related to the analysis of particular ‘varieties of English’, but much more besides. Today, the linguistic worlds of young people in particular are becoming increasingly diverse, and the linguistic landscapes of individuals are not simply defined through physical space, but also through electronic space, global travel, media awareness and usage, popular culture, as well as the virtual space of the Internet.

In recent years, universities across Europe have increasingly adopted the use of English as an academic lingua franca. Our article discusses current trends in Swedish higher education by presenting the results of a large-scale survey on the use of English conducted at Stockholm University. The survey involved 668 staff and 4524 students and focused on the use of English for academic purposes and students’ and teachers’ attitudes to English as a medium of instruction. The results indicate that complex patterns of academic English use emerge, which are related to the specific discipline studied, the level of instruction (undergraduate versus Master’s) and the receptive versus productive use of English. They also indicate that in the sciences the use of English is a pragmatic reality for both teachers and students, whereas in the humanities and social sciences, English is typically used as an additional or auxiliary language in parallel with Swedish.

Over the last three decades scholars promoting the world Englishes paradigm (WE) have worked towards establishing a more positive attitude towards international varieties of English. However, despite the best intentions of Western linguists working in this field, there is an obvious imbalance between the developed and developing world in many contexts of English language education. Educators and teachers in many Outer Circle and Expanding Circle contexts face difficulties in terms of conditions, facilities, and resources very different from those of Western institutions. Academics in developing societies have parallel difficulties in publishing research, both in journals and in books with international publishers, while local options for publishing are often restricted. This paper suggests a number of ways in which linguists and other scholars might begin to engage with a range of issues related to ‘developmental world Englishes’.

Hong Kong ceased to be a colony of Britain on June 30th, 1997, thus entering a new stage of its development and evolution as a uniquely-constituted city state and urban metropolis. The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China (HKSAR) inherited a linguistic ecology that owed much to its previous existence as a British colony, where the Chinese language had had no de jure status until 1974. From 1995, the stated policy of government has been to promote a “biliterate” (Chinese and English) and “trilingual” (Cantonese, Putonghua and English) society, and various measures have also been taken to promote the use of Chinese as a medium of instruction in schools. Immediately after the change in sovereignty, Putonghua became a compulsory school subject for the first time. This paper will examine the issue of language planning and policies partly froman historical perspective, but also through a consideration of current policies and practices across a range of domains, including government, law and education. One major conclusion that emerges from this discussion is that, from a language policy perspective, the relationship between Chinese and English in the Hong Kong context is potentially far less contentious than that between Cantonese and Putonghua.

This paper argues that one approach to the notion of 'Chinese Englishes' may involve the critical re-examination of a rich history of cultural and linguistic contact and language learning and teaching that runs from the early seventeenth century to the present. From a period of 'first contact' in 1637, this history includes the era of Chinese pidgin English from the mid-eighteenth century to the recent past, the impact of missionary schools and universities, Nationalist intiatives before 1949, and the Open Door policies of the last two decades. It also involves the consideration of the recent popularity of Li Yang, a celebrity English teacher, whose method of 'Crazy English' has recently been marketed to millions of followers throughout the PRC. Li Yang's message of 'Make money internationally' serves to remind us that 'pidgin' English (typically glossed as 'business' English) arose during an earlier but no less crucial era of world trade and globalisation.

This essay looks at the history of pidgin and creole studies in the context of linguistic theory with particular reference to the study of ‘Chinese pidgin English’. It argues that, although linguistics makes the claim to be an objective and systematic science, an examination of the past reveals that its own discourses have been shaped by a range of powerful forces from outside the disciplinary study of language. In the case of pidgin and creole linguistics (or ‘creolistics’), one obvious influence is from European ‘race theory’ of the late nineteenth century, seen most clearly in the adoption of a vocabulary
which includes terms such as monogenesis, polygenesis and hybridization. In the case of Chinese pidgin English, early accounts of the use of ‘broken English’ are found in the memoirs of sailors and merchants on the South China coast, and these were later supplemented by missionary and colonial accounts from Canton, Hong Kong and the treaty ports of China. The most influential account was that of Leland (1876), whose ‘comic’ account of Pidgin-English Sing-song contributed to the formation of a cultural imaginary of Chinese people at a time of growing anti-Chinese racism in the UnitedStates and Britain. Although many pidgin and creole scholars have denied a direct link between racial mixing and language mixing, it appears evident that the fear (and attraction) of racial miscegenation was at the heart of many western responses to pidgin English in China.