A socially realistic view of world Englishes: Reflections on gendered discourse

Abstract

The work of Braj Kachru and Yamuna Kachru has inspired generations of scholars to take a socially realistic view of the global spread of English. It is the work of Yamuna Kachru, however, who argues that taking an integrative sociocultural approach to the study of world Englishes to examine linguistic interaction expresses not only the bilingual's creativity but also provides valuable methodological and theoretical insights into the discoursal structure in world Englishes. Adopting the sociocultural linguistic approach, this paper examines how speakers construct gender in Indian English discourse. Using examples from naturally occurring spoken conversations, this paper shows that the interplay between language and identity is rooted in the cultural beliefs and values of speakers. The socially realistic approach contextualizes the culture of language to explain language variation in the Outer Circle.

Gender and the ownership of English in South Africa

“…Similarly, the World Englishes project has emphasized the need to examine ‘culturally and linguistically pluralistic contexts’ which are shaping the creation of new Englishes in the Outer and the Expanding circles (Kachru ). Providing ‘descriptions of multi‐identities of the English user’ in these contexts (Valentine : 150) and questioning how Englishes and indigenous languages are implicated in the construction of socio‐economic orders are fundamental aspects of this project (Kachru , ; Valentine ).…”

The functional and pragmatic contexts of world Englishes

“…Widening the scope beyond the Indian English variety, by the 1980s, Kachru's attention shifted from the international and intranational contexts within which English was used in India to the social realities of world Englishes, relating the ‘context of situation’ to how meaning is formed and interpreted in the South Asian English contexts and beyond—a response to the context‐dependent nature of language that contributes to the South Asianness of South Asian English (1990). Kachru argued that the cultural identity of the non‐native varieties must be taken into account in order to understand a socially realistic view of world Englishes (Valentine, ).…”

“…What began as Braj Kachru's (, ) examination of the bilingual's creativity in the context of contact literatures in English in 1983, and the processes of pragmatic and discoursal nativization and stylistic innovations exhibited in the literary works of Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola, and Raja Rao led to serious study in the literary creativity of world Englishes, and the contact between English and new cultural contexts. Illustrating the bilingual's creativity through the literary experimentation by writers of the ‘new literatures’ in the Outer Circle opened up discussions on multicanonicity and literary creativity: nativization of context, cohesion, and rhetorical strategies; postcolonial literature and world fiction (Bolton, ); transcreation of culturally embedded speech functions in African English, Indian English, and Southeast Asian English literatures (Bokamba, , ; Thumboo, ); textual competence and interpretation (Nelson, , ); speech acts in world English fiction (D'souza, , ; Y. Kachru, ; Nelson, ; Valentine, , ); speech acts in discourse (Y. Kachru, , , ; Pandharipande, ; Sridhar, ; Valentine, , ), and the (re)construction of gender identity (Valentine, , ).…”