American Cultural Insularity in the Center and the global hegemony of “standard” written Anglo-American English

The following paper  — The Globalization of English and the Question of a Global Written Standard — which examines the key question of the different ways in which a global written standard English privileges elite Americans and solidifies their global language and general cultural hegemony, puts forward what I believe to be a powerful and accurate – and extremely important – critique of the ways in which global power brokers (re)create a cultural and linguistic order that favors them and people like them.

I submitted it for consideration for publication in two academic journals: World Englishes and Language Problems & Language Planning. In total, three anonymous academic reviewers read my  submission. All three returned what I found to be hugely unfair and also demeaning and dehumanizing rejections. The often demeaning and hypocritical and poor treatment of other academics under the cloak of anonymity is one of the things I dislike most about the academic world. My experience has shown that far too often anonymous review results in people abusing their anonymity to blast writers of submissions in deeply personal and charged ways. In this case, the reviewers clearly did not like the fact that, in this paper, I was criticizing two things:

1. They did not like my critique of a World Englishes discourse that I find to often be extremely celebratory and far too uncritical. This WE discourse almost completely ignores the ways in which Anglo-American inflected written standard English still is very much in the “driver’s seat” of the global linguistic configuration of power even though, yes, there are many varieties of English in the world. This is true inasmuch as virtually all global power domains – including, ironically, global academic publishing – require that writers submit to the hegemony of written Anglo-American standard English, or one’s voice will simply not be heard, nor published.
2. The strong bias in sociolinguistics and Global English Studies toward focusing on verbal and spoken English(es) as opposed to written English(es). A focus on speech, as I argue in this paper, means that key power questions, most notably whose English is considered acceptable in which global power domains, are largely ignored and glossed over. The result: A false sense that somehow the World Englishes realm is characterized by nearly complete “free” flow and an almost total lack of hierarchical sociolinguistic and social relations of power. Nothing could be further from the truth, as anyone who has ever tried to get an article written in Bahamian, Hong Kong, Euro, etc. English published in global academic journals such as World Englishes and Language Problems & Language Planning can attest. Yes, my comment here is deliberately facetious: Of course, no one submits academic articles to these journals, nor to any other global academic journal, in written Bahamian, Hong

   

   Kong or Euro English. They are not allowed to.

   That is exactly my point: In order to enter into the global domains of power – academic, business, law, higher education, technology, etc. – people have little choice but to submit to the hegemony of written Anglo-American standard English. This fact underscores the very clear ways in which power differentials continue to infuse and suffuse the global linguistic configuration of power. It also highlights the ways in which those of us situated in the center and at the top of the global linguistic configuration of power – elite, highly educated and, more often than not, white (male) Americans hold a clear and continued advantage vis-à-vis those who originally hail from other cultural, language and/or racial and national groups.

   This situation, where privileged, elite Americans’ own form of English dominates in global domains of power, especially in its written form, clearly contributes to a continued American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC). This, inasmuch as those located in this center have little to no idea about other forms of (written) English, rarely if ever learn about them and, on the whole, tend to have at least an implicit arrogance vis-à-vis these “other” forms of English which are not their own, believing that their form(s) are “better” more “correct”, etc.

Generally speaking, in terms of the type of research and writing I do, which falls into the domains of global media and communication research and critical applied linguistics, if your anonymous reviewers adhere to a different theoretical perspective than you do, and that is often the case for me because I lean toward seeing the world through a lens of structure and determination and in terms of hegemonic political economic and cultural forces that I believe give most of us comparatively little room for agency, a view that is antithetical to the popular views within those fields that celebrate agency, counter-flow, counter-hegemony, etc. – if your anonymous reviewers hold a different ideological view than you do, you are going to have a lot of trouble getting published.

Basically, and sadly, the bottom line in a lot of social scientific/humanities scholarship is this: Your work gets accepted if you plug into accepted and “acceptable” theories, paradigms and dominant ideologies that circulate within the disciplines in which you work and in which you try to publish your work. However, if you do not plug into these, then your work will often not be accepted. It should not be this way, but it is. Indeed, I sometimes want to laugh – and cry – when people outside of the academic domain indicate that they hold the scholarly peer-review process in a kind of reverence and even awe. In fact, what gets published and does not in the academic environment is very often not the result of whether or not the work is “good” and “valuable” but whether or not the work fits within the prescribed, hegemonic boundaries of the narrow views held by most of those working within the field, or, in my case, within the multiple fields within which, and across which, one works. A clear and pronounced ideological chasm between me, and my reviewers, was clearly in play on this paper and was, in my view, the primary reason it was rejected by World Englishes and Language Problems and Language Planning.

I hope that at least a few people come across this paper, including, perhaps a few academics on the editorial boards of World Englishes and/or Language Problems & Language Planning. Indeed, that is precisely one of the reasons that I am publishing this paper online: So that those who rejected it might see my counter-critique of their narrow and close-minded and ideologically-based rejections of it. I publish this article here, online, in the public domain, as well so that it hopefully inspires a more critical and informed view of the ways in which written standardized Anglo-American English still very much stands at the center, and at the top of, a global linguistic configuration of power that is not nearly as free and free-flowing as some of the proponents and practitioners of celebratory World Englishes discourse incorrectly claim. As I argue in the paper itself, maintaining that English has somehow broken free of unequal relations of power creates the illusion that this is the case. This actually makes it easier for those in power positions to maintain that nothing needs to change. After all, if everything is free-floating and hierarchical sociolinguistic relations of power, within, and outside of English, have miraculously fallen away, then there is no need to address inequalities, right?, because they allegedly do not exist. And that which allegedly does not exist need not be changed, correct? OMG!

Below is an abstract of my paper, The Globalization of English and the Question of a Global Written Standard. The full -length paper is available via a PDF link below the abstract. I hope that you enjoy it and its hard, and I believe, valid, critique, of largely un-critical, celebratory  and, if one’s goal is to take down structures of unequal power – and that is ALWAYS one of my primary goals – facile and even dangerous and self-defeating World Englishes discourse.

–Sincerely,
Christof Demont-Heinrich
November 9, 2020

The Globalization of English and the Question of a Global Written Standard
ENGLISH ABSTRACT
Scholars who celebrate the proliferation of a variety of Englishes around the world have largely overlooked the issue of a global written English standard and the related question of whose English(es) such a standard does, will, and ought to reflect. I highlight and reflect upon this rather surprising oversight in this article. I critically examine some of the World Englishes literature that reflects what I call an “English Belongs to Everyone” perspective. I set a critique of this literature against an examination of discourse generated by precisely those actors who some scholars have declared “irrelevant” to the World Englishes equation, notably, members of the core English speaking and writing educational elite in the United States. I conclude by suggesting that assertions that intra-linguistic hierarchies in the World Englishes arena no longer hold risk reinforcing the very hegemonic structures proponents of a deconstructive view of Anglo-American English linguistic hegemony seek to eradicate.

GERMAN ABSTRACT
Wissenschaftler, die die Verbreitung einer Vielzahl von Formen von Englisch auf der Welt feiern, haben die Frage eines globalen schriftlichen englischen Standards und die damit verbundene Frage, wessen Englisch ein solcher schriftlicher Standard reflektieren sollte, weitgehend übersehen. Ich gehe in diesem Artikel dieses ziemlich überraschende Uebersehen nach. Ich untersuche kritisch einen Teil der World Englishes-Literatur, die das widerspiegelt, der Diskurs den ich als “Englisch gehört allen” bezeichne. Ich habe eine Kritik an dieser Literatur gegen eine Untersuchung des Diskurses gerichtet, die genau von jenen Akteuren erzeugt wurde, die manche als „irrelevant“ für die World Englishes Machtfrage erklärt haben, in diesem Fall, Mitglieder der zentralen englischsprachigen und schreibenden Bildungselite in den Vereinigten Staaten, beziehungsweise Amerikanische Universitaets Studenten. Abschließend schlage ich vor, dass viele unterstuetzer des Weltenglischendiskurs machen genau das wogegen sie sich setzen: Sie machen dies wenn sie behaupten dass den Kampf ueber wer Englisch “besitzt” angeblich schon laengst vorbei ist da “alle” angeblich Englisch jetzt besitzen. Sie machen dabei die gegenwaertige und laufende Sprachenmachtsungleichbarkeit unversehbar. Sie verstaerken dabei diese sprachliche Ungleichbarkeit und hegemonie von den Menschen die immer noch sich finden in der Machtposition des WeltEnglischen Systems, hauptsaechlich die Anglo-Amerikanische Eliten fuer die “standard American Englisch” als L1 Sprache gilt.

FULL-LENGTH PAPER  ==>
The Globalization of English and the Question of a Global Written Standard — PDF version

By Christof Demont-Heinrich
Associate Professor
Department of Media, Film & Journalism Studies
University of Denver