globalization of English – AMERICAN CULTURAL INSULARITY

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”

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”