The functional and pragmatic contexts of world Englishes

Abstract

Drawing on the concepts of the 'context of situation' of J. R. Firth and the Hallidayan meaning of 'linguistic performance' , the early works of Braj Kachru presented a sociologically oriented linguistic model to the study of Indian English. Giving Indianness 'functional relevance and formal "manifestation"' , Kachru laid the foundation for contextualizing world Englishes within a sociolinguistic framework. This paper revisits the early cultural wars of language, and Kachru's efforts to explain language variation in the multilingual, multicultural contexts of English around the world within the scope of 'pragmatism and linguistic realism' (Kachru, 1986, p. 32). This paper examines the research, studies and insights of scholars who have contributed to furthering the functional and pragmatic contexts in which world Englishes are used. CULTURAL AND CANONICAL WARSOn this occasion we remember the cultural warrior Braj B. Kachru, an influential figure whose lifetime academic undertaking was dedicated to the study of the growth and spread of English as a world language and to battling the linguistic establishment and defending the legitimacy of the new English varieties, their systematicity and their non-native norms. Spanning decades, Kachru worked tirelessly to dismantle the dominant ideological linguistic notion of one English and one native speaker, and questioned the sacred linguistic cows associated with the native speaker as the only 'true and reliable' speaker (Davies, 2013;Ferguson, 1983). He replaced the premise of a single, monolingual ideal speaker norm of language with the pragmatic model of 'liberation linguistics' that advocated for pluralism and inclusivity (Hilgendorf, 2015(Hilgendorf, , 2018. Condemning the straitened linguistic attitudes and assumptions of 'purism' , 'intolerance' , 'monocentrism' , 'ethnocentrism' , 'cultural colonialism' and prescriptivism shared by Clifford Prator, Randolph Quirk, and others associated with the British group, Kachru argued for a pragmatically realistic view of language in the English speaking world-a perspective that took into account formal and functional variation, cultural appropriateness, the sociolinguistic context, and the context of situation (1976, 1981a, 1982a, 1986, 1991). Kachru supplanted the attitudinal sins of Clifford Prator (1968) and countered the linguistic deficit ideology of Randolph Quirk (1985) with the realistic vision of a pragmatic understanding of English in the sociolinguistic non-native contexts of multilingual, heterogeneous societies of the world. VALENTINE Kachru transformed the linguistic landscape by repugning the 'single, monochrome standard form' and the idealization of the chosen 'standard English' , and critically challenged the fixed mindset of the native English-speaking critics who bestowed unwarranted homage on the native speaker. Kachru attributed such linguistic intolerance to the 'native-speaker syndrome' , the lack of 'awareness of the sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and historical realities of the spread of English' and the...

Bilinguals’ Creativity in Nepali English: Sheeba Shah’s Novel The Other Queen

“…Kachru (1986, as cited in Bolton, 2010 focused explicitly on creativity in literature, the pluricentricity of World Englishes and world literatures in English. He examined the bilinguals' creativity in the context of contact literatures in English and exhibited the processes of pragmatic and discoursal nativisation and stylistic innovations in the literary works of Chinua Achebe, Amos Tutuola, and Raja Rao, which led to serious study in the literary creativity of World Englishes (Valentine, 2019). In the literary work produced in the bi/multilingual contexts, the writers employ different strategies such as codemixing, code-switching, nativisation, and other linguistic strategies, which exhibit bilinguals' literary creativity.…”

“…Because the non-native speakers of English in the bi/multilingual countries have competence in two or more languages, they create "new meanings and innovations appropriate to the new cultural contexts" (Bolton, 2010, p. 458). As a result of the creative and functional uses of English, the nonnative variety becomes one among many varieties of competence, a means to express new identities, and a way to contextualise the language to fit the cultural norms appropriate to the bilingual (Valentine, 2019). Bilinguals' creativity incorporates a wide range of creative bilingual practices (Rivlina, 2020), which can be studied from different perspectives.…”