Publications
Publication details [#57252]
Goh, Robbie B.H., Lisa Lim and Desmond Wee, eds. 2013. The Politics of English. South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. (Studies in World Language Problems 4). John Benjamins. ix, 322 pp.
Publication type
Book – edited volume
Publication language
English
Keywords
Language as a subject
Annotation
This volume brings together contributions that explore the increasingly important roles that English plays in Asia, including its contribution to economic growth, national imaginaries and creative writing. These are issues that are political in a broad sense, but the diversity of Asian contexts also means that the social, political and cultural ramifications of the spread of English into Asia will have to be understood in relation to the challenges facing specific societies. The chapters in the book collectively illustrate this diversity by focusing on countries from South Asia, Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. Each country has two contributions devoted to it: one paper provides an overview of the country’s language policy and its positioning of English, and another provides a critical discussion of creative expressions involving the use of English. Taken together, the papers in the volume detail the most recent developments concerning the politics of English in Asia.
Articles in this volume
Vaish, Viniti. Globalization and multilingualism. Text types in the linguistic ecology of Delhi. 37–60
Lim, Lisa. Kaduva of privileged power, instrument of rural empowerment? The politics of English (and Sinhala and Tamil) in Sri Lanka. 61–80
Wee, Lionel. Governing English in Singapore. Some challenges for Singapore’s language policy. 105–124
Goh, Robbie B.H. Uncertain locale. The dialectics of space and the cultural politics of English in Singapore. 125–144