A (more intended): Started a conversation about non-native speakers’ full “ownership” of English, not as linguistic second-class citizens, but as people who can use, shape, and “own” English in their own right.
B (less
A (more intended): Started a conversation about non-native speakers’ full “ownership” of English, not as linguistic second-class citizens, but as people who can use, shape, and “own” English in their own right.
B (less intended): Made “ownership” an important metaphor for talking about users of English.
Widdowson’s speech/essay discusses issues which are still very much in play for TESOL scholars who wrestle with the implications of the spread, localization, and use of English in diverse contexts around the world: what is standard English, what are standards, how are we to understand the role of both native and non-native speakers of English as teachers of the language, and so on. At one point he posits what I take to be his central question:
“The question is which community, and which culture, have a rightful claim to ownership of standard English?”
Even if we remove “standard” from this question, in order to expand it to any sort of English, I suggest that this is not quite the right question to be asking. Especially given the recent turn that encourages us to think less of langauges as reified “things” and more as resources that people use for certain purposes, it makes less and less sense to think of languages in terms of “ownership” at all -- even though ideas about native/nonnative speakership or even things like legitimacy or authority are still very relevant, both ideologically and practically.
So, why “ownership?” Who bestows it? How does one come to claim it? Although Widdowson carefully and persuasively argues that English is not (or is no longer) under the sole provenance of British ‘native speakers,’ one might wonder whether any speaker or group of speakers of a language can be said to “own” it.
Try asking this of yourself: do I “own” my language? The pronoun I used in that sentence seems like a clue: I call English MY language. Yet it seems to me this is more of a way of denoting a closeness to or an affinity for a language, or a way of speaking, meaning, or even, dare I say, being in the world. Yoo (2014) uses the “ownership” of names as an analogy, arguing that just as Korean speakers of English using English does not mean they own English, neither does the fact that other people use your name more often than you use it mean that they own your name. Ren (2014) refutes this, arguing that a language is much larger and more complex than a name, and that it's a medium of communication through which people express their identities -- thus, NNESs can indeed "own" it.
I'd like to suggest a different analogy, but for the purposes of showing that "ownership" isn't the issue.
Let's think about the way we refer to other things as “ours.” I speak of my wife, my son, my parents -- but of course I do not in any meaningful way consider myself to “own” these people. When I call them “mine,” I am referring to the strong ties that connect us, my close relationship with them, even in some cases our biological kinship. If you’d prefer a different illustration, think of the way we talk about, say, “my hockey team,” “my university,” “my favorite song.” I don’t claim to “own” any of these things, but I feel a very strong connection to, say, the University of British Columbia in a way that many people in the world do not. I am familiar with it, I use its resources, I can get around it with ease in a way I could not before I was enrolled there.
In the same way, when I say English is “my” language, I don’t mean that I own it, but that I am close to it, I am familiar with it, I know how to use it. I’m less comfortable calling other langauges “my” languages, though I might in a pinch refer to Spanish or Chinese as “my foreign languages,” even if I feel like I’m not very good at them. The fact is that I have been surrounded by English for my entire life, so I feel very comfortable calling it “my” language, but neither I nor anyone I know, nor even the country I live in or other people who speak it, really “own” the language.
Note: Stop reading here if you’re satisfied with this argument. I’m pretty satisfied with it myself. Read more below if you want to get nit-picky about current debates in applied linguistics, world Englishes, and ELF.
So the recent back-and-forth in the Applied Linguistics forum between Yoo, who argues that Expanding Circle Countries cannot have “ownership” of English because there are no Expanding Circle varieties (which I think is wrong, though I think you have to move away from the traditional Kachruvian understanding of both “expanding circle” and “varieties” in order to explain this), and Ren, who argues convincingly that NNES(T)s can be said to own the language becau