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Rethinking Approaches to the History of English, T. Nevalainen & E.C. Traugott, eds, OUP Contact in the Asian arenaCluster: Contact; Coordinator: R. Hickey L. Lim & U. Ansaldo

Contact in the Asian arenaLisa Lim and Umberto AnsaldoThe University of Hong Kong

1. Introduction

In a few decades, scholars considering the history of English will surely view the twenty-first century a crucial era for developments in the English language, in particular in Asia. This is not only because the region is geopolitically the site of economic power (Bruthiaux 2009) in this Asian century,1 but also because it is the venue for the largest and most quickly growing number of English users this century, with the total English-using population of Asia – over 600 million, including 300 million in India and 200 million in China (Bolton 2009) – already more than that of the 375 million of the Inner Circle, and with English being the main medium in demand for bi-/multilingualism in the region (Kachru 2005: 15). Indeed, a consideration of the Asian arena in the history of English must certainly recognise the element of contact in multilingual contexts as being perhaps the most significant phenomenon in affecting the development of the English language.

But contact-induced developments in the English language in Asia of course first hark back to the spread of English in the region due to what is considered the second diaspora of British expansion, occurring from the late eighteenth century during the agrarian and industrial revolution, with the establishment of non-settler exploitation colonies in order to service rapidly growing industries of a burgeoning capitalist economy. The finding and extracting new resources of raw materials, controlling of sea routes, and setting up of trading posts and markets for goods and profitable places for investment of surplus capital occurred in both Africa and Asia. The Asian enterprise was particularly successful once the British East India Company was granted in 1600 a Royal Charter by Elizabeth I, with the intent to favour trade privileges in India, effectively giving it a monopoly on all trade with the East Indies, and trading posts were established in India from the 1600s through to Hong Kong and Singapore in the 1800s. (For more detailed accounts, see e.g. Hickey 2005; Lim in prep a).

This article thus begins at the beginning, when the English language first entered the Asian arena through the formal channels of British colonisation and English-medium education.2 This can be traced back perhaps to the historic Macaulay’s Minute on Education, tabled in India in 1835, in which Lord Macaulay, President of the Committee of Public Instruction, Calcutta, India, advocated the central place of English in education as ‘English is better worth knowing than Sanscrit [Sanskrit] or Arabic; that the natives are desirous to be taught English… we must … do our best to form a class of interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern – a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect’. Absolute primacy was consequently given to teaching English and teaching in English, and within fifty years, by the early 1800s, a majority of Indian primary schools were English-medium (Kachru 1994: 507). This policy was also extended to British Malaya, i.e. present-day Malaysia and Singapore, where, in the latter, it has been said that it was ‘exclusively through the schools that English spread’ (Bloom 1986: 348), as well as to Hong Kong, with the first English-medium schools set up in the nineteenth century, accessible to an elite minority during colonial rule, though gradually increasing in enrolment over the decades as the population recognised the value of such a resource.

1 The term ‘Asian century’, following on the British century and American century for the 19th and 20th

centuries respectively, is attributed to a 1988 meeting with PRC leader Deng Xiaoping and Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi.2 Of course English would have been introduced to the local populations in a number of informal, at times illegitimate, settings. Of these the most important include Christian missionaries often reaching remote parts of Asia in the attempt to convert souls, and smugglers and pirates involved in the opium trade as well as other illicit commerce. It is crucial here to recognise that communication in these settings would have involved predominantly dialectal varieties, L2 varieties, and foreigner talk modes, as English was used as a lingua franca by many non-Anglophone Westerners throughout Asia (for details, see e.g. Bolton 2003; Kachru and Nelson 2006; Ansaldo 2009a).

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However, this article goes on to look more keenly than traditional accounts at the devils in the details: in particular, it considers (i) the changes in different eras in the sociopolitical contexts, (ii) the languages coming into contact with English, and the general context of multilingualism, and (iii) the other less considered input varieties.

2. Factors of contact prompting rethinking

A number of factors are significant in the consideration of the spread of English in the region, and more crucially in rethinking what ‘the English language’ has become.

2.1 Sociopolitical factors

While ecologies are always dynamic, what is certainly notable for the Asian region is how rapidly its ecologies have changed and continue to do so, in some cases within a matter of decades, in particular in the post-independence era (Lim and Gisborne 2009: 127). One vital factor comprises the language policies enacted in different countries, in particular regarding the position of English in the newly independent nation.

As has been documented for the situation of Singapore (Lim 2010a), with independence in 1965 came ratification of the local population and its languages – with Malay, Mandarin and Tamil identified as official languages to represent the Malay, Chinese and Indian founding races of Singapore – alongside maintenance and support of English as a neutral language and the language of progress. India too made English co-equal with Hindi in the Official Languages Act in 1967; thus English has retained and strengthened its place there – as in Singapore – as lingua franca, in government, education, literature, influence, and development (Ferguson 1996: 32; Kachru and Nelson 2006: 155-6). This contrasts with the choices made, for example, by Malaysia and Sri Lanka, who chose to promote their indigenous languages, to restore balance to the groups viewed as having been disadvantaged by former colonial practices of English language education, viz. the Malays and Sinhalese respectively (for details see Lim in prep a, b). Malaysia made Bahasa Malaysia the national language and medium of education, while Sri Lanka did the same with Sinhala, with Tamil as the other official language.

Thus, even if in established models of the spread of English, these varieties are considered in the same category, such as belonging to the Outer Circle (Kachru 1985), the different post-independence political choices have actually meant that English has taken different paths leading to diverse consequences. In Singapore, the English language was accessed by all in the education system and swiftly also became a primary working language and inter-ethnic lingua franca, resulting in the variety of English there going even beyond nativisation to endonormative stabilisation (Schneider 2007), and recent generations of Singaporeans being native speakers of English (Lim and Foley 2004; Lim 2010a, in prep a). In Malaysia and Sri Lanka however, the language is still commanded by a small minority, with the English language thus not nativising in any real or stable manner in the community as a whole. In other words, sociopolitical choices have significant implications for how the English language has evolved in the different countries.

2.2 Vernaculars

As suggested in Lim and Gisborne (2009: 124), the substrate languages of the community in which the English language is transplanted may be seen to be the more germane factor for accounting for the grammar of the emergent English, compared to settlement and transmission types.3 Indeed, a

3 The other two significant factors mentioned in Lim and Gisborne (2009) in considering the structure of New Englishes which have evolved in — multilingual, mostly postcolonial — contexts of Asia (thus, Asian Englishes) are the variety/ies of the English lexifier that entered the local context, and the nature of transmission of English to the local population (also see Hickey 2005: 506). It is also worth noting that, as pointed out by Schneider (2007: 25), settlement and transmission types are clear-cut and important mostly for the early phases of settlement, but tend to become increasingly blurred with

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consideration of the vernacular languages of Asia is important where rethinking the history of English is concerned, for a number of reasons. First, these comprise a rich range of languages, notable for their quantity and diversity, coming from the Austronesian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, and Sinitic families, to name just the main ones (Ansaldo 2009b; Lim and Gisborne 2009) (see Table 1). They thus offer us a comprehensive range of languages in which to view the dynamics of typologies in contact. Moreover, these languages are, for the most part, genetically unrelated to English and have typologically different grammars: this means that the English varieties that develop in these contexts have the potential for displaying features typologically distinct from those of English, typically developed through transfer of substrate grammar in the acquisition process. This contrasts with a large swathe of the earlier history of English language when it was in contact with primarily Germanic or Romance languages, whose typologies are much closer to that of English. Further, due to the dominance of different languages in the ecology as a result of changing immigration patterns and language policies, two of the more vital sociopolitical factors mentioned in section 2.1, different languages can exert an influence on the development of English in a country in different periods.4

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In what follows, we consider a number of linguistic features exhibited by some of the Asian vernaculars, namely (i) the typologically related trio of zero copula, predicative adjectives and topic prominence, (ii) discourse particles, and (iii) tone, all of which have influenced the evolution of the English language in those ecologies, and which look set to continue their influence on the development of English.5

2.2.1 Zero copula, predicative adjectives, topic prominence

In a number of Asian ecologies, such as Singapore, two of the dominant languages, viz. (Bazaar/Baba) Malay and Hokkien, show typological congruence in a number of aspects, notably zero copula, predicative adjectives and topic prominence (Ansaldo 2009c). What is interesting here is that the three traits, which often occur as a cluster in languages of the isolating type (Ansaldo 2009c), might be taken as instances on imperfect transmission. On the surface, it appears that a copula is missing in (1), and (2) shows a non-canonical word order. These, we suggest, are not appropriate analyses in this context, because the dominant languages that would interact with the development of English here do not require copular verbs, due to the predicative nature of its property words (or ‘adjectives’). Moreover, the fact that Topics, rather than Subjects, are predominant in Malay and Sinitic varieties determines the discourse patterns observed in (2).

(1) Careful, laksa very hot. (SgE, Ansaldo 2009c: 140)‘Careful, the laksa is very hot’

(2) Fish you wan? (SgE, Ansaldo 2009c: 143)‘Do you want (some) fish (to eat)?’

time in the increasing complexity in the development of society.4 This last point is not elaborated on in this section due to constraints of the chapter, though see the brief account in section 2.2.3, and but see e.g. Lim (2007, 2010a) for an illustration from the Singapore context, where, e.g., in the colonial era Bazaar Malay and Hokkien dominated the ecology, but where dominance has shifted post-independence to Mandarin, as well as Cantonese.5 Numerous other features have of course been comprehensively documented for the various Englishes in Asia, and readers may turn to other work for details (e.g. Bolton 2002; Lim 2004a; Kachru and Nelson 2006: 153-95; Bautista and Bolton 2008; Mesthrie 2008: 231-319, 546-635; Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008: 39-155; Kachru, Kachru and Nelson 2009: 90-144; Lim and Gisborne 2009). The purpose of this section is to highlight features which not only are shared across a number of Englishes in Asia and thus may be seen as more widespread, common developments, but which also have been less documented or considered imperfect learning and not features of ‘English’.

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Thus, shifting our perspective from a normative Anglocentric view of Asian English grammars to a substrate-based approach that recognises the role of transfer in L2 acquisition, we need to rethink the alleged role of ‘simplification’ in contact-induced change, and consider a more sophisticated and complex interaction between the dominant grammars and the new languages entering the ecology.

2.2.2 Discourse particles

Languages such as Cantonese, Hokkien, Mandarin, (Bazaar/Baba) Malay and Hindi all have discourse particles to some extent, which are used widely in those languages to communicate pragmatic functions of various types (see details in e.g. Lim 2007, 2009a; Lange 2009), and such particles are evident in varieties of English in Asia.

Some eight to ten particles have been documented for SgE, including lah, ah, what, hor, leh, lor, ma, and meh, with all but the first three coming from Cantonese, and lah and ah most likely from Hokkien/ Bazaar Malay (Lim 2007, 2009a; also see Platt 1987; Gupta 1992). In the Singapore component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-SIN) (see Table 2), the frequencies of lah and ah are well above 1,000 (Ler 2006), and lah – surely the most well-known of all SgE particles – has in fact long been included in Oxford English Dictionary, since 1997, both these attesting to the widespread use and (growing) recognition of such a feature in the English language.

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Though less well known than their SgE counterparts, particles are also recognised as a feature of Indian English (IndE): yaar, for instance, from Hindi, can occur with various clause types such as declaratives, interrogatives, imperatives, and exclamations. In ICE-IND, yaar occurs 127 times in the ‘direct conversation’ subsection, meaning a frequency of 0.58 per 1,000 words (Lange 2009: 211), i.e. it is much less frequent than, say, SgE’s lah. Nonetheless, this originally Hindi particle yaar, as well as the particle na, are used in IndE by speakers regardless of mother tongue (i.e. not constrained to Hindi mother tongue speakers) (Lange 2009), and thus appear to be a robust feature of IndE.

In Hong Kong, with Cantonese being its predominant language, the Hong Kong English (HKE) developing there unsurprisingly also displays numerous Cantonese particles (some of them similar to the Cantonese-origin particles in SgE). Primarily documented in electronic discourse (though see example 7), these particles are reported to be employed liberally in the Cantonese-English code-mixed text of users of icq, such that ‘almost every sentence they write ends with the little tag of a romanized particle’ (Yang 2004:110).

Examples (3) to (7) illustrate how particles are very much present in the English language in Asia.6

(3) My parents old fashion a21? Then your parents le55? (SgE, Lim 2007: 451)‘Are you saying that my parents are old-fashioned? Then what about your parents?’

(4) You’ll <,> you must be really having good patience yaar (IndE, Lange 2009: 216)

(5) Sunday will be more convenient na (IndE, Lange 2009: 213)

(6) may be LG1 [Lower Ground 1st Floor] is much better wor … noisy ma … at G/F … also u seem used to study there ma (HKE, James 2001)

(7) K: How are you a33? (HKE, Multilingual Hong Kong Corpus7)

6 In sections 2.2.2 and 2.2.3 on particles and tone, tones are represented as pitch level numbers 1 to 5 where, in the Asianist tradition, the larger the number the higher the pitch; thus 55 represents a high level tone, 24 represents a rising tone, etc.7 The Multilingual Hong Kong Corpus is in the process of being constructed, based on English-Cantonese bilingual data collected in Hong Kong in 2004-2005, and we are grateful to Katherine Chen for making the example available to us.

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It is actually not surprising to find such a widespread use of particles in varieties of Asian English. As a discourse-prominent feature, particles are very easily transferred in contact-induced change (Matras 2000; Lim and Ansaldo in prep) – and in the case of Cantonese, the additional feature of tone makes it even more pragmatically dominant (Lim 2007, 2009a, b). Particles thus comprise one of the features most likely to spread not only from the substrates to the English language, but, subsequently, also horizontally across Englishes in Asia (Lim in prep a).

2.2.3. Tone

In a number of ecologies in Asia, Sinitic languages are dominant. Singapore in its colonial and early independence eras had Hokkien as the intra-ethnic lingua franca amongst the Chinese communities as well as a widely understood and spoken language by ethnic groups, and then later Mandarin soon after independence when the language was made one of the four official languages of the nation; in addition, Cantonese, always a significant Sinitic language throughout Singapore’s history, saw a resurgence in the late 1980s to 1990s with the golden years of Cantonese cinema and Cantopop, as well as significant immigration from Hong Kong (see details in Lim 2010a). Hong Kong, even during colonial rule and even after the handover back to PR China, has always been dominantly Cantonese-speaking. Clearly tone languages have been in the majority and dominant in these ecologies, and tone has been a salient aspect of the feature pool. With suprasegmental features, including tone, being susceptible to being acquired in contact situations (Curnow 2001), and tone often acquired in a non-tonal language by borrowing or imitation due to the presence of tone in the broader linguistic environment (Gussenhoven 2004: 42ff), it is not surprising to find that SgE and HKE both exhibit (Sinitic-type) tone in their particles, as already seen in (3) and (7) above, and at the level of the word and phrase (Lim 2009b, 2010c), shown in (8) to (11), with the steps of level tones evident in the pitch contour in Figure 1.

(8) in`tend 11-55 / LH (HKE, Chen and Au 2004; Wee 2008a)`origin, `photograph 55-11-11 / HLLo`riginal 11-55-11-11 / LHLL

(9) `manage, `teacher 33-55 / MH (SgE, Ng 2008; Wee 2008a, 2008b)in`tend, a`round 11-55 / LH`origin, bi`lingual 11-33-55 / LMo`riginal, se`curity 11-33-33-55 / LMMH o`riginally 11-33-33-33-55 / LMMMH

(10) I saw the manager this morning LHHHHHHHL! (HKE, Luke 2000, 2008)

(11) I think happier LHLLM (SgE, Lim 2004b)

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While a number of creoles whose substrates involve tone languages have long been accepted as possessing tone (see details in Lim 2009b, 2010c),8 it is only very recently that a few New Englishes have been documented as exhibiting similar patterns: e.g. Nigerian English prosody is suggested to be a mixed system that stands between an intonation/stress language and a tone language (Gut 2005), and second-language learner English in mainland China shows similar patterns as HKE with H tones on accented syllables. What the above findings suggest – and what has in fact already been argued quite

8 For example, Saramaccan (English- and Portuguese-based, with African tone languages Gbe and Kikongo as substrates) exhibits a split lexicon with the majority of words marked for pitch accent and a significant minority marked for true tone (Good 2004a, b, 2006), and Papiamentu (with Portuguese lexifier) uses both contrastive stress and contrastive tonal features (Kouwenberg 2004; Remijsen and van Heuven 2005; Rivera-Castillo and Pickering 2004).

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strenuously in Lim (2009b, 2010c) – is that some varieties of the English language, such as those in Africa and Asia, if their ecologies support it, have developed to also include (lexical-type) tone in their prosodies; further, such Englishes should be seen as having tone-language prosody, and not still be considered, as the English language is traditionally, to be an intonation language (Lim 2009b: 229, 234, 2010c). This again shows the role of substrate typology in the development of English in such contact contexts.

2.3. Input varieties

The flip side to vernaculars are the input varieties, and here it first should be noted that, within the British-established English-medium mission schools, even while headmasters and headmistresses, and often senior staff, were usually from Britain (Platt 1982: 388), the teachers in fact originated from more regional bases. Some of the earliest teachers of English (as well as clerks in the civil service) in Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei (as well as Hong Kong) were South Asians, employees in the British-administered government from India or Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) (Platt and Weber 1980: 23; Gupta 1994: 44; McArthur 2003: 21; Mesthrie and Bhatt 2008: 19). And in Singapore, until the early 1920s, the largest single racial group of teachers was first the Eurasians, followed by roughly equal numbers of Europeans, comprising a majority of British, including Irish and Scottish (Gupta 1994: 43), and South Asians (Ho and Platt 1993: 6).

In addition to these ‘official’ sources of the English language via education, there were also a number of communities in Singapore and Malaysia who very early on had or soon acquired English as their dominant language, as a consequence of the English-medium schools, which did not teach local languages, but strongly encouraged the use of English both in and out of the classroom, resulting in the English becoming the only language in which pupils were literate (Platt 1983: 388). These tended to be the non-European elite to whom such schools primarily catered, and included the Eurasians, originally from Malacca, who soon shifted from Portuguese creole to (Eurasian) English (Gupta 1994: 43; Lim 2010a: 25-6), and the Straits-born Chinese (or Peranakans) who held a high regard for English education and were one of the early adopters of English, who also shifted from their vernacular Baba Malay to (Peranakan) English (Lim 2010a: 24-5; b). Additionally, Christian Malayalis from Kerala in India and Tamils from Jaffna in Sri Lanka were English-educated and worked in the civil and educational services.

While there has been little research thus far investigating the impact of the English of most of these communities on the development of the language in these settings, some very recent work has argued for Peranakan English (PerE) having a persistent influence on SgE by virtue of it having been the language of one of the founder populations in Singapore’s ecology (Lim 2010c). This is evidenced in SgE’s prosody with H tones found word- and phrase-finally (see examples 9 and 11) – rather than on accented syllables as in the prosodies of all other contact and learner varieties with tone language vernaculars, as mentioned in section 2.2 above – an influence which can be ascribed to PerE (Lim 2010b, c), and in turn to the prosodic patterns found in Malay/Indonesian varieties, where studies point to prominence on the penultimate and/or final syllable of the word, and prominence located phrase-finally (e.g. Gensler and Gil to appear; Goedemans and van Zanten to appear), including in Singapore’s Baba Malay (Wee 2000) (for more details see Lim 2010c). The inclusion of these less considered communities where input varieties of English is concerned is vital for understanding the history of English in Asia.

2.4 Plurilingualism

Closely related to the second factor of vernaculars discussed above (section 2.2) is the fact that the majority of Asian contexts involve multilingual communities (Ansaldo 2009a), and where plurilingual practices have been in existence and natural since pre-colonial times (Canagarajah 2009). Such linguistic and cultural pluralism certainly holds implications not only for bilinguals’ competence and creativity in appropriating a new variety (Kachru 2005) but also for the kind of identity alignments that multilingual speakers engage in (Ansaldo 2009a). What this means is that in such contexts where English becomes part of the linguistic fabric and one of the many codes used by the community, one may have to allow for ‘the English language’ to in fact be an English-X code (where X is another

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‘code’), that is, a monolectal-type ‘code switching’ (CS) which goes beyond considering the act of code-switching as unmarked (e.g. Li Wei’s 1994 Chinese-English CS in second-generation British-born Chinese bilinguals in northeast England, and Myers-Scotton’s 1993 Swahili-English CS in the younger generation in Nairobi, Kenya), but views the code as a single code in its own right (e.g. Meeuwis and Blommaert’s 1998 Lingala-French code used by Zaireans).

The following examples exemplify such a phenomenon: (12) presents Canagarajah’s (1995) plurilingual English (sometimes referred to as ‘Englishised Tamil’) as the unmarked everyday code in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, between L, a candidate for a faculty position, who is able to reduce the distance from P, a bilingual senior professor who interviews him for a faculty position (English, Tamil); and (13) illustrates a similarly plurilingual code in Singapore involving English, Mandarin and Hokkien (Lim 2008, 2009c), in characters Mei and Seng who are representative of the younger generation of Singaporeans, and in the older generation father, Pa.9 (Only the English idiomatic gloss is provided; Hokkien, Mandarin, English, Sinitic particles.)

(12)1 P: So you have done a masters in sociology? What is your area of research?2 L: Naan sociology of religion-ilai taan interested. enTai thesis topic vantu the rise of local

deities in the Jaffna peninsula. ‘It is in the sociology of religion that I am interested. My thesis topic was the rise of local deities in the Jaffna peninsula.’

3 P: Did this involve a field work?4 L: oom, oru ethnographic study-aai taan itay ceitanaan. kiTTattaTTa four years-aai field

work ceitanaan. ‘Yes, I did this as an ethnographic study. I did field work for roughly four years.’

5 P: appa kooTa qualitative research taan ceiyiraniir? ‘So you do mostly qualitative research?’

(13)Mei: Seng a21, time to get a job ho24? Pa and Irene spend all their savings on you already le21.

Are you waiting for Pa to buy Toto [the lottery] and get it all back me55?Pa: You say other people for what? You are just a secretary.Irene: Aiya, never mind, never mind. Anyway Seng already has a job interview on Monday.Pa: Wah, real or not?Seng: I arranged the meeting through email. Now American degrees all in demand.CB: Wah, congratulations, man.Seng: Thanks.Ma: What did they just say?Mei: Seng said that on Monday…Pa: Now you’ve come back, you can’t play the fool anymore, okay? What if you end up selling

insurance like this guy? Don’t make me lose face!

3. New trends

We have primarily focused on those Asian contexts where English has been present since colonial times and has exhibited development through contact over the decades. To round off the chapter, we also consider, albeit briefly, two significant trends where contact in Asia is concerned: the growth of English in non-colonial contexts, and twenty-first-century contact, which seems to involve the Asian region more significantly in some areas.

3.1 Contact in other Asian countries

9 The examples here come from the script of the award-winning Singapore film Singapore Dreaming (Woo, Goh and Wu 2006) whose dialogues are vouched for by Singaporeans as being completely authentic.

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In recent years, a number of Asian nations not formerly under British/American rule – categorised as belonging to the Expanding Circle (Kachru 1985) – have given or proposed giving the English language some more official status in one form or other. In Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, and more slowly in Laos and Cambodia, English is the main foreign language being learnt (Bautista and Gonzalez 2009). East Asia has seen even more serious proposals for the English language: in Japan in 2000, as a second official language; in Korea in 1999, as the second ‘public’ language; in Taiwan in 2002, as a second semi-official language (Honna 2009), with numerous other educational policies increasing the learning of English in schools, as well as the phenomenal increase in the teaching of English in private centres or by individuals, e.g. in China and Taiwan (Bolton 2003: 247-58; The Independent 2009; Lee 2010). As a result of the use of English in education, as well as its spread as an international language of commerce, trade and international relations, the number of English users is set to increase even further; China, the world’s most populous nation, now has more English users than any other country in the world (The Independent 2009). The contact that English will continue to have with the languages of these countries will certainly lead to further interesting developments in the English language, some of which have already begun to be documented (e.g. Zhang 2003; Stanlaw 2004).

3.2 Twenty-first-century contact

The impact of various phenomena associated with globalisation in the twenty-first century certainly is felt world-wide; a number of these are particularly significant in the Asian region and we briefly mention the various contexts of contact encountered in this realm, and the implications these have for the development of the English language.

The introduction of new electronic media, e.g. computers, mobile phones, has led to the emergence of new ways of expression: new literacies which are shaped by the opportunities and constraints of the electronic medium (Crystal 2001). While most practices in English SMSes seem to be fairly global, including abbreviation conventions, paralinguistic renditions, and phonological approximations (Deumert and Masinyana 2008), the use in electronic media of a Latin-alphabet-based keyboard by speakers of languages with non-Latin-based scripts, such as Chinese, has been noted to speed up phenomena such as calquing and code mixing: young Hongkongers report that they engage in such practices more in such media than in their normal spoken exchanges.

The spread of global music culture has also led to English being mixed, for example, in Malaysian and Korean hiphop (Pennycook 2007) and Hong Kong Cantopop (Wong 2009), once again with the language being used more than it might normally be in the communities’ normal spoken exchanges. These practices provide the opportunity for English to spread more swiftly, especially amongst the younger generation, in close contact with the local vernaculars, thus paralleling the patterns noted in section 2 above.

The phenomenon of outsourcing manifests in the outsourcing of medical records and legal transcription such as court transcripts from the UK and US to India and the Philippines, as well as – perhaps the best known – international call centres for multinationals and UK- and US-based companies located in the Philippines and India. This means not only greater and intensive contact with Inner Circle English varieties once again, but more poignantly, in particular in the last case, the adoption of a ‘native speaker’ or ‘standard’ variety of English (e.g. Cowie 2007; Friginal 2007). While this has been analysed by some scholars as performance or the conscious creation of a linguistic voice called forth by context and facilitated by the long-recognised Asian bilingual’s linguistic creativity (Bolton 2009b), the question of how such contact impacts on the continuing development of the English language in these countries remains to be seen.

4. Concluding remarks

In the current and future developments of the history of English in Asia, one prediction, first stated in Ansaldo and Lim (fc), is that there will be more horizontal diffusion from one Asian English to another, considering that speakers of English in Asia are increasingly using their own varieties, rather

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than a more colonial or international variety, to communicate in intra-Asian contexts (also see Kachru 1997). A number of features, especially those more pragmatically dominant and/or susceptible to contact-induced diffusion, such as discourse particles, and intonation patterns which are dominant in some respect (e.g. used by a prestigious group, dominant in discourse, etc), are envisaged as likely to spread, especially when reinforced by common or similar substrate typology.

It has, for example, been noted in Ansaldo and Lim (fc) that varieties of English that evolve in ecologies where the dominant languages are of the isolating and tonal type, as is the case for China and Southeast Asia, show (i) a tendency towards isolating morphology and (ii) reinterpretation of stress and intonation through tonal values, as well as retention of tonal distinctions in subsets of the lexicon, with the emergence of tonal features of Asian Englishes being potentially the most interesting evolving feature of the region. While we already observe (ii) in SgE and HKE, as described above, Ansaldo and Lim predict that this can reasonably be extended to comparable ecologies, from Thailand and Vietnam to Northern China.

And already there are the beginnings of anecdotal reports of other features being transmitted via contact from one variety of English used in Asia to another. The donation of educational software CDs from Singapore to rural schools in the Philippines has led to Filipino children acquiring the characteristic SgE particle lah (Aurelio Vilbar p.c. October 2009). Further, in interactions between Chinese and African traders in markets in Guangzhou in southern China,10 it has been observed that it is an African variety of English that is being acquired and used by the Chinese (Bodomo 2010). This in fact underlines the reality of today’s population movements and trade that Asia attracts – a new cycle of the old practices which once took place in the colonial era – which nurtures the richness of contact in the Asian arena that will continue to impact on the future of the history of English.

References

Ansaldo, Umberto (2009a) Contact Languages: Ecology and Evolution in Asia. Cambridge University Press.

Ansaldo, Umberto (2009b) ‘Contact and Asian varieties of English’, in Raymond Hickey (ed.), Handbook of Language Contact. Blackwell, 498-517.

Ansaldo, Umberto (2009c) ‘The Asian typology of English: Theoretical and methodological considerations’, in Lisa Lim and Nikolas Gisborne (eds.), The Typology of Asian Englishes, Special issue, English World-Wide 30(2): 133–148.

Ansaldo, Umberto and Lim, Lisa (forthcoming) ‘Areal features of English in Asia: The case of tone’, in Raymond Hickey (ed.), Areal Features of the Anglophone World (Topics in English Linguistics). Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

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10 This would be paralleled by the interactions which would be conducted in (Chinese and African varieties of) English in all the Sino-African trade relations, investments and aid taking place on the African continent.

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Table 1. Summary of range of substrates for the Asian region (adapted from Lim and Gisborne 2009)

Asian

countryi

English lexifier Substrate(s)ii

Austronesian Dravidian Indo-Aryan Sinitic

BrE AmE Other Malay Filipino Tamil Hindi Sinhala Canto-

nese

Hokkien Mandarin

Hong Kong

Singapore

Malaysia

India

Sri Lanka

Philippines

Notes:i. The list of Asian countries reflected here is not exhaustive. They are listed in an order which groups similar substrates together. In some cases there are certainly distinguishable regional subvarieties which have different substrates and exhibit different features: e.g. north, south, and northeast Indian English varieties; regional varieties of Philippine English.ii. The list of substrates reflected here is not exhaustive but is meant to represent the main or dominant varieties in each ecology; obviously many other languages are also present. The relative dominance of each substrate is not reflected here, nor is any change in dominance at different time periods.

Table 2. Frequency of SgE discourse particles in the spoken part of ICE-SIN (Ler 2006: 150)SgE particle Frequencylah 1,74211

ah 1,242hah 256what 224lor 114hor 63nah 50leh 43ma 27meh 20

11 Lange (2009) reports that a count in ICE-SIN’s subsection ‘direct conversation’ of the particle lah gives 1,605 tokens in 65 texts, i.e. a frequency occurrence of 6.11 per 1,000 words, with lah in fact occuring in all but four of the files.

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Figure 1. Sustained level step pattern in SgE utterance I think happier (from Lim 2004b)

| ai | tiŋ | hæpiə |

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