
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”