Lingua Franca Romanticized

I benefited so much again from this week’s readings. The one that resonates most with me is Kubota and McKay’s ethnographic study of English as a supposedly lingua franca in Japan (Globalization and Language Learning in Rural Japan: The Role of English in the Local Linguistic Ecology). This brings me back to the linguistic landscape of my home country, China.

Motivation has always been cited to account for success or failure to learn a second language. Learners sometimes want to affiliate with a different language community by joining in and identifying with the minority or majority language’s culture activities, and consequently find their roots or form friendships. This is termed integrative motivation. Another reason is utilitarian in nature. Learners may acquire a second language to find a job and earn money, further career prospects, pass exams, or help fulfill the demands of their jobs. This is termed instrumental motivation.

As far as English is concerned in China, in most cases the two motives are all involved. The case study in Japan can be replicated anywhere in China with the same findings, with the same romanticizing and assumption of English as a lingua franca in the linguistically diverse international community and the same identification of English with the White middle-class mainstream culture.

 I once did an experiment with my students by giving them a hypothetical situation in which I would fund anyone who would like to study the following languages in their respective home countries for 2 years and see how many of them would like to go. A rough collection of data suggested a language-embodied mental map of geopolitical power: English (100%), German (85%), French (82%), Japanese (62%), Spanish (33%), Swedish (25%), Arabic (8%), Swahili (0%).

Another case in point. In any foreign language school/department embedded in a university, English together with several “major” languages are offered as a major. But any other languages other than English are called “small languages.” And some of the “small languages” are only offered as a specialization by a couple of very prestigious foreign language institutes for “strategic purposes.” At the same time, as is described in Kubota & McKay, White native speakers of English, especially from the U.S. are extremely welcomed and much sought after in all kinds of for-profit English training centers. Sometimes the bottom line is that the White native speakers are so hard to find that even non-native speakers of Caucasian race are hired to teach because parents may not tell the difference anyway if judged only by appearance.

China itself had a multicultural and multilingual past but all these are gone under a presumably greater imperative of unification and political solidarity of the nation with only one dominant Han culture. For instance, the Manchu language, which used to be spoken by the royalties and aristocrats in Qing Dynasty (1644-1972), exists now only in historical archives.

 We can always feel the impotence of multilingualism under the gigantic political pressure of economic-structural assimilation and cultural assimilation. Multilingualism, if defined as the recognition of the cohabitation of different languages as a resource and an asset for a society, can only be a dream in areas where national and cultural chauvinism is rampant, where languages are either regarded as superior or inferior as they are identified with their embedding cultures.