Category: Language

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Large video streaming platforms are driving more dubbing — and more language options for viewers

The Amazon Original movie One Night in Miami is available in German to U.S.-based consumers. It is part of a larger trend toward Amazon and Netflix offering their own original content in more different languages to more subscribers — regardless of their geographic location.

One of my greatest and most long-running frustrations with cultural content, especially with movies and television, has been the lack of language options offered for this content. In theory, with the advent of the DVD in 1990s, it became possible to easily encode countless language options for films for the consumer.

This did NOT happen, thanks mostly to a still-in-place and archaic and infuriatingly restrictive region encoding system that ensured that consumers in one place, for instance, in the United States, would NOT have access to filmic content dubbed into languages other than, for the most part, Spanish.

In my long-term quest to raise both of my daughters, now 14 and 16 respectively, as English-German bilinguals, I bought a region-free DVD player in 2004 — the year my oldest daughter was born — and immediately began ordering large numbers of DVDs from Amazon.de (Amazon Germany) to ensure that we had a good library of mostly, but not only, American-made films (Pixar, Disney, etc.) that we could consume in German. Our DVD library eventually hit several hundred DVDs, all of these sent to us “illegally” by Amazon.de — illegally because, technically, there is a warning at the very beginning when you play each of these DVDs that it is “illegal” to purchase them from a region in which you are not living and play them on a DVD player not located in that region 🙄!

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American prestige press newspapers valorize and celebrate the global hegemony of “America’s” language

These five newspapers are among the most influential in the U.S. “ and even in the world. Their coverage of the global hegemony of English both reflects, and reproduces, American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC).

This abstract is for a paper published in the journal World Englishes that examines the ways in five major American newspapers — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times  and the Miami Herald cover the global hegemony of English. The paper itself offers an overview of my Ph.D. doctoral thesis in which I conducted a critical discourse analysis of more than 200 articles published in five American prestige press newspapers across more than a decade’s worth of time, from 1991 to 2003. The analysis found, among other things, that, in general, the newspapers valorized and celebrated the rise of English as a global language. The global hegemony of English is central to American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) as it ensures that while billions of other people around the world learn English, the dominant language in the United States, precisely because billions of others are learning English, very few English-mother tongue speakers in the U.S. learn other languages to any meaningful degree of fluency. Continue reading “American prestige press newspapers valorize and celebrate the global hegemony of “America’s” language”

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American university students and the global hegemony of English

This abstract is for a paper published in the journal World Englishes that examines the ways in which more than 100 American college undergraduates reflect upon their own linguistic privilege vis-a-vis the global hegemony of English. The students reflect as well upon the ways in which being at the center of the global linguistic configuration of power also hurts them inasmuch as it reduces their incentive, and chances, to learn a non-English language. The global hegemony of English is central to American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) as it ensures that while billions of other people around the world learn English, the dominant language in the United States, precisely because billions of others are learning English, very few English-mother tongue speakers in the U.S. learn other languages to any meaningful degree of fluency. Continue reading “American university students and the global hegemony of English”

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American, Australian and Slovenian students debate the global hegemony of English

English is, far and away, the world’s most hegemonic language. This is true inasmuch as anyone who wants to rise to the top of global domains of power such as business, technology, science, higher education and law, pretty much has to learn English, typically to a very high degree of fluency.

Below is an abstract for a paper that examines the way in which the global hegemony of English privileges Anglo-Americans. The paper is based on a critical textual analysis of online discussion board exchanges about this topic among American, Australian and Slovenian university students. The global hegemony of English is central to American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC) because it allows mother tongue speakers of English in the U.S. to get away without learning another language and therefore places a significant linguistic blinder on them. It also causes them to be more inward looking inasmuch as so few English-mother tongue speakers in the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, etc. expand their linguistic horizons in any meaningful or deep way. A failure to expand these horizons means, of course — and this is redundant, I know — that their cultural and linguistic horizons are smaller and more inward pointing that members of other language groups all of who pretty much are required to learn English. Continue reading “American, Australian and Slovenian students debate the global hegemony of English”

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

Where American vs. British English tends to be taught as the “ideal” standard for those studying English as a Foreign Language (EFL). [Credit: reddit user Speech500]
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: Continue reading “American Cultural Insularity in the Center and the global hegemony of “standard” written Anglo-American English”

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Building a theory of language and its role in human social reality — and in American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC)

People who speak languages of bigger more dominant and powerful groups are nearly always at a power advantage in terms of the global linguistic configuration of power. [Image Credit: Louise MĂ©zel, Babbel.Com]
Few things are as central to human social being, identity and interaction as language (Fairclough, 2001; Lupyan, 2015). Language shapes the ways that we perceive of and understand “reality” (Morand, 2000; Sapir, 1981). Indeed, “reality” is itself a human concept that we encode via the so-called signifier “reality” in order to describe something “out there” and assign it meaning so that we can begin to make sense of that thing.

Without language of some kind – with language here broadly defined to include all forms of signed and spoken language, including facial expressions, etc., we humans would have no way to communicate with each other about this thing we call “reality.”

Most human beings – probably nearly all – spend vast amounts of their day thinking, and, for the most part, they are thinking in language – talking to themselves and to others endlessly, and internally, in a near endless loop of internal talk and speech (Vygotsky, 1984).

Not only can we not collectively and socially refer to, and communicate about, something called “reality” without some sort of language, we can’t really make sense of the world in which we live, both the natural and social world, without language. We are constantly in the act of naming and categorizing things. We use these names and categories to create meaning and we share our meaning(s) via the stories that we tell to ourselves and others about ourselves and about others as well as about the “objective” natural world (Geertz, 1973).

Continue reading “Building a theory of language and its role in human social reality — and in American Cultural Insularity in the Center (ACIC)”