Is english an asian language andy kirkpatrick wang lixun

3 Asian Varieties of English vs English as a Lingua Franca ELF 4 What Do Asian Multilinguals Talk about When Using English as 5 The Transfer of Features and Communicative Strategies 90 1

Is English an Asian Language?

Asia is now home to some 800 million multilingual speakers of English (morethan the total number of native English speakers), and how they use English iscontinually evolving and changing to reflect their cultural backgrounds andeveryday experiences Can English, therefore, be considered an Asianlanguage? Drawing upon the Asian corpus of English, this book is thefirstcomprehensive account of the roles, uses and features of English in Asia,encompassing several different varieties of Asian English Chapters cover thedistinctive linguistic features of English in different settings, such as in law,religion and popular culture, as well as the use of local rhetorical, pragmaticand cultural styles and its use as a lingua franca among Asian multilinguals Italso examines the role of English in education – from primary through

to higher education– and consider the implications of this for other languages

of Asia

a n d y k i r k p a t r i c k is Professor in the Department of Languages,Humanities and Social Sciences at Griffith University Publications includeWorld Englishes (CUP 2007), English as a Lingua Franca in ASEAN (2010),Trilingual Education in Hong Kong’s Primary Schools (2019) He is co-editor

of The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Asian Varieties of English (2020), andco-editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Language EducationPolicy in Asia (2019)

wang lix u nis Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics andModern Language Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong.Publications include Introduction to Language Studies (2011), AcademicWriting in Language and Education Programmes (2011), TrilingualEducation in Hong Kong Primary Schools (2019), and Identity, Motivation,and Multilingual Education in Asian Contexts (2020) He is co-editor of theSpringer book series‘Multilingual Education’

Is English an Asian Language?

Andy Kirkpatrick

Grif fith University

with Wang Lixun

The Education University of Hong Kong

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For Lucy and Cody

3 Asian Varieties of English vs English as a Lingua Franca (ELF)

4 What Do Asian Multilinguals Talk about When Using English as

5 The Transfer of Features and Communicative Strategies 90

10 Implications for English Language Teaching in Asia 179

vii

Figures and Tables

Figures

2.4 Screenshot of playing sound recordings in ACE online 41

2.7 Screenshot of concordances for‘so’ in the Leisure sub-section

2.8 Word Right collocation pattern of the search word‘so’ 442.9 Further contexts of a concordance line shown on the screen 462.10 Screenshot of the Web concordancer for searching the tagged

2.11 Screenshot of the concordances for the verb‘record’ in the

Tables

A Knowledge of English in outer circle Asian societies 10

B Knowledge of English in expanding circle Asian societies 11

2.2 Top twenty most frequent action/mental verbs in ACE 492.3 everybody/everyone/nobody/he/she/it + verb (non-marking vs

5.1 Communicative strategies of ELF users in ACE 109

6.2 Examples of changes between loanwords and the source words 119

viii

7.2 Common core of non-standard forms 131

7.4 Top candidates for morphosyntactic angloversals 1357.5 Instances of marking and non-marking of English tense among

7.6 Marking or non-marking in formal/informal contexts 138

9.1 The national language and English in education in ASEAN 1639.2 Proportion of population agedfive and over able to speak

10.1 The national language and English in education in ASEAN 180

ixFigures and Tables

I gathered from overhearing their conversation that one came from Tokyo andthe other from Shanghai What was remarkable about their conversation wasnot so much what they were talking about but that they were conducting theconversation in English They were using English as a lingua franca, as this wasthe language common to both of them and the one in which they therefore chose

a lingua franca, the language that these monks shared in common, suggestingthat at least some of these monks came from outside Thailand and were notspeakers of Thai

These two vignettes of the use of English as a lingua franca between Asiansexemplify how the use and roles of English across Asia has been growing Inthis book, I want to briefly trace the history of how English has developed inAsia and then to discuss and illustrate how English is being shaped andreformed to suit the cultures and needs of these Asian users of English I willtherefore consider how new Asian varieties of English such as Indian, Filipinoand Singaporean have developed and give examples of the distinctive linguisticand cultural features of these new Englishes I shall also discuss how the use ofEnglish as a lingua franca has grown across Asia and indicate how the use of

1

English as a lingua franca differs from the use of a particular variety of AsianEnglish Typically, the use of a specific variety of Asian English is more aboutthe speaker’s wish to present their identity among people who share the samelinguistic and cultural backgrounds, while the use of English as a lingua franca

is more about communication between people who come from different guistic and cultural backgrounds I will also consider how the perceived needfor English throughout Asia has influenced the curriculum of schools anduniversities throughout the region and ask whether this increase in the teachingand learning of English is not endangering a number of local languages I hopethat by the end of the book the reader will have an answer for the question posed

lin-in the title of the book

Before proceeding, let me explain how I came to be interested in Asia and inhow English has developed there I had, I believe, an idyllic childhood

I arrived in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia,1when I was eighteen months old, inthe company of my mother We had travelled from England to be reunited with

my father, who had taken a job as a mining engineer with a company calledHarper Gilfillan We lived in a bungalow at 208 Ampang Road, then set inspacious grounds shared by the‘big’ house at the far end of the driveway This

is unrecognisable now as 208 Jalan Ampang is now heavily built up and just upthe road from the twin structures of the Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur’s mainlandmark, visible from miles away I spent the next few years playing unhin-dered and unshod in the wonderful gardens with the children of the compound.These comprised the two expatriate children of the big house, Richard, a yearolder than me, and Sarah of about my age, and the children of the servants Itwas a carefree existence as we explored the gardens– which seemed like jungle

to us– and which contained more than fifty coconut palms – and we cated in an odd mix of Malay, Hokkien– the dialect of Chinese spoken on thecompound– and English This idyllic life continued until I was seven when

communi-I was sent home to boarding school in England, where life was somewhatdifferent I remember hating wearing the school uniform– which required, notsurprisingly, socks and shoes, items of clothing I was not used to, having spentmost of my childhood to that date running around in bare feet orflip-flops Thefood served up at the school was, to me, mainly inedible I was given specialdispensation against porridge after I threw up after thefirst two times I wasrequired to eat what to me was a foul, congealed, lumpy mess of goo The

‘knowledge’ expected of a boy (it was an all-boys preparatory school) was notknowledge I had acquired For example, on being asked in class who the PrimeMinister was, I replied‘Tunku Abdul Rahman’ This answer was treated withdisbelief.‘No, I was told It’s Harold Macmillan.’ At that age I did not possess

1 It was still Malaya then as I arrived in 1951, and Malaya received independence to become Malaysia in 1957.

2 Introduction

the wit to say that he was not the Prime Minister merely the Prime Minister ofGreat Britain My man was the Prime Minister of newly independent Malaysia.

I then spent the eight weeks of each summer holidays in Malaysia and thenSingapore, which is where my father had later been posted, until his untimelydeath in 1964, whereupon my mother decided to return to live in England.While only lasting for eight weeks a year, my annual trip back out to the FarEast kept me familiar with the languages and the ways they were used, oftenmixed together, as is the natural way with multilinguals Thus when it came towanting to choose what to study at university, Ifirst wanted to opt for Thai andMalay, but there were no undergraduate courses of that type in the UnitedKingdom in 1968, so I ended up studying Chinese at Leeds University As

a postgraduate student, I went on to study Chinese literature at FudanUniversity in Shanghai and did my doctorate in Chinese Rhetoric at theAustralian National University In addition to working at Australian univer-sities, I have worked in tertiary institutions in Myanmar, Singapore, China andHong Kong

So, my interest in languages in Asia and how English is being reshaped by itsAsian speakers is almost certainly a product of my upbringing I have beenstudying Asian varieties of English and the use of English as a lingua franca inAsia for many years, and this book is an attempt to pass on, in an accessiblestyle, what I have learned in the hope that it will be of interest and use to thereader

As a way of introducing the idea of English as an Asian language, I shall start

by reviewing an article written by the person whom most see as the founder ofthe discipline of World Englishes, Braj Kachru In his article‘English as anAsian Language’ (Kachru 1998), he starts by pointing out that English isusually discussed as being a language that is in Asia but not of Asia He usesthe metaphor ‘hydra-headed’ to describe English and notes that it is notuncommon to be asked‘Whose language is English anyway?’ (1998: 91) Hegoes on to say that‘initiatives in planning, administration and funding for theacquisition and spread of English are primarily in the hands of those Asianswho use English as an additional language’ (1998: 95) In taking this position,

he opposes the proponents of the theory of ‘linguistic imperialism’ (e.g.,Phillipson 1992) who argue that the increasing spread of English is the directconsequence of a plot hatched by the governments of English-speaking coun-tries and their allies, such as the British Council and Voice of America, inspreading the gospel, as it were It is Kachru’s belief, however, that worldEnglishes have a‘plurality of centres’ (Kachru 1998: 97) which provide thegrammatical norms and models for their acquisition In the context ofAustralasia, Kachru argues thatfirst language varieties of English (Australianand New Zealand English, for example) and second language varieties ofEnglish (Singaporean and Filipino, for example) provide the norms and models

3Introduction

for their speakers These speakers use an institutionalised variety of English as

a result of their colonial histories of having been ruled and/or settled byEnglish-speaking countries In contrast, speakers of English in countrieswhich were not ruled by English-speaking colonial masters use

a performance variety of English and they take their norms and models frominstitutionalised varieties of English They are, in Kachru’s terms, ‘norm-dependent’ users of English I shall later argue that the extraordinary increase

in the use of English in countries such as China means that they may becomenorm providers of their own variety of English rather than being norm-dependent upon an external variety such as British English

Kachru then asks if there is an Asian canon of English He believes that there

is and he listsfive uses of English in Asia (1998: 102–3):

(i) as a vehicle of linguistic communication across distinct linguistic andcultural groups;

(ii) as a nativised medium for articulating local identities within and acrossAsia;

(iii) as one of the Pan-Asian languages of creativity;

(iv) as a language that has developed its own subvarieties indicating tion at various levels; and

penetra-(v) as a language that continues to elicit a unique love–hate relationship that,nevertheless, has not seriously impeded its spread, function and prestige.Kachru further argues that once a language has established its autonomy, it isactually liberated, and its‘liberated’ uses and functions have to be separatedfrom its non-liberated uses (1998: 103) We must shift the focus of enquiry, heproposes, from a monolingual paradigm to‘paradigms relevant and appropriate

to multilingual and multicultural societies’ (1998: 104) And citing the example

of African and Asian writers of literature in English such as Soyinka, Rao andThumboo, he concludes that one major strategy is to‘acculturate the language

in our contexts of use on our terms, on Asian terms’ (1998: 105)

In this book, I shall investigate the development of English(es) across Asia,consider their roles and illustrate ways in which they have ‘acculturated’English I hope to show that the Englishes of Asia have indeed fulfilled each

of thefive uses identified by Kachru.Chapter 1will provide an introduction tohow English was introduced and then developed in various settings across Asiaand how distinct Asian varieties of English were formed.Chapter 1will alsoprovide an account of how English came to be ratified in the 2009 Charter of theAssociation of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as the sole working lan-guage of the group

Chapter 2will introduce the Asian Corpus of English (ACE) (http://corpus.ied.edu.hk/ace/), a corpus of naturally occurring English as spoken as a linguafranca by Asian multilinguals A wide range of speech events have beenincluded in ACE: interviews; press conferences; service encounters; seminar

4 Introduction

discussions; working group discussions; workshop discussions; meetings; panels;question-and-answer sessions; and conversations The transcribed speech eventsare categorised underfive major settings: education (25 per cent), leisure (10 percent), professional business (20 per cent), professional organisation (35 per cent),and professional research/science (10 per cent) The ACE corpus was collected toact as a complementary corpus to the Vienna Oxford International Corpus ofEnglish (VOICE) (www.univie.ac.at/voice/), collected by Barbara Seidlhoferand her team at the University of Vienna VOICE is a corpus of naturallyoccurring English being used as a lingua franca in primarily European set-tings The ACE corpus data have been tagged following the transcriptionconventions originally developed by the VOICE project team These tagsenable us to obtain a clear picture of the transcribed data (e.g., pauses,overlaps, pronunciation variations & coinages), and make ACE and VOICEcomparable Users can browse the corpus data according to thefive types ofsetting (as listed previously) or according to the various data collection sites(Hong Kong, Malaysia, Philippines, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Japan,Mainland China and Taiwan) A Web concordancer has been developed whichallows users to search any word/phrase in ACE, and collocation information ofthe search word/phrase will be illustrated Other than searching the corpus, userscan also listen to the sound recording of certain ACEfiles, and the transcripts areshown line by line on screen synchronously with the sound played Thesefunctions have made it possible for researchers and teachers/learners to explorethe ACE data for various research and pedagogical purposes.

Chapter 3discusses and contrasts Asian varieties of English with the use ofEnglish as a lingua franca in Asia Examples from selected varieties of AsianEnglishes are presented These examples will show how Asian varieties ofEnglish are typically code-mixed varieties as speakers use their shared linguis-tic resources as markers of identity It must be underlined that the great majority

of users of Asian varieties of English have learned English as an additionallanguage and are speakers of other languages Their variety of English willinclude linguistic features and items from their speakers’ other languages Forexample, the colloquial variety of Singaporean English typically consists ofEnglish mixed with linguistic items and features from local languages such asMalay and varieties of Chinese An Asian variety of English is used by peoplewho share the same cultural and linguistic repertoires These Asian varieties ofEnglish are then compared and contrasted with the use of English as a linguafranca in Asia, illustrating, for example, how code-mixing from other lan-guages is reduced as the primary function of the use of a lingua franca iscommunication across cultural and linguistic boundaries

Chapter 4provides empirical evidence for the claim that English is an Asianand Asia-centric language Using data from ACE, topics that Asian multi-linguals typically talk about when using English as a lingua franca are

5Introduction

described and illustrated A preliminary study into this, using a small subset ofthe ACE corpus, found that common topics were, perhaps not surprisingly,Asia-centric The topics discussed ranged from the relatively light-hearted–such as comparing in a jokey fashion the various qualities of different brands ofThai and Malaysian rice and the importance of coffee to the Vietnamese– tomore serious topics such as the treatment of Burmese refugees, ways of raisingIslamic finance and the prejudice shown towards ethnic minorities inHong Kong (Kirkpatrick, Patkin & Wu 2013) This chapter will also introducethe fundamental concepts of register and levels of formality by illustrating howdifferent topics call for different speech styles and types of interaction Thechapter will include a critical discussion on the implications of the topicscommonly discussed by Asian multilinguals for English language teaching,

in particular their implications for relevant materials and curricula It will beargued, for example, that topics found to be commonly discussed by Asianmultilinguals could provide excellent materials for Asian multilinguals who arelearning English to use with their fellow Asians

Chapter 5will provide further evidence that English is an Asia-centric/Asianlanguage Again using empirical data from ACE and from a selection of Asianvarieties of English, how local and regional cultural and pragmatic norms arerealised in the English being used by Asian multilinguals will be illustrated.Questions to be considered include ‘Do Asian multilinguals use their owncultural and pragmatic norms when using English?’ For example, I will showhow discourse markers can be transferred from the speakers’ first languages tomark levels of formality and informality while using English I also investigatewhether there is empirical evidence for the idea that there is an‘Asian’ way ofcommunication which is marked or characterised by dialogue and consensus(the English translations of two key words in Malay, namely musyawarah andmuafakat [Curley & Thomas 2007: 9]) It so happens that ACE has recordings

of consular officials discussing this very issue and this will be analysed anddiscussed The presence or otherwise of local or regional cultural conceptual-isations (Sharifian 2010) in the English as a lingua franca of these interactantswill also be considered For example,Kirkpatrick and Xu (2012)have shownthat Chinese speakers typically prefer to preface requests with reasons orjustifications for such requests This contrasts with native speakers ofAmerican English who typically prefer to make the request early in theinteraction (usually softened with some form of moderation) and then providereasons if required So, a question to be examined is whether request patterns inACE tend to follow a‘reasons for request ➜ request’ pattern or a ‘request ➜reasons for request’ pattern This chapter also provides a description anddiscussion of the communicative strategies of Asian multilinguals Questions

to be addressed include whether there is evidence to support the claim that users

of English as a lingua franca seek cooperation and strive to ensure

6 Introduction

communicative success Is there evidence to support the existence of an Asian/ASEAN way based on dialogue and consensus? Is there evidence to support theexistence of face-threatening and face-challenging behaviour in certain con-texts? In an earlier study which used a subset of the ACE corpus,Kirkpatrick(2010b) identified fifteen speaker and listener strategies adopted by Asianmultilinguals while using English as a lingua franca Speaker strategiesincluded spelling out the word, repeating the phrase, being explicit, usingparaphrase and the avoidance of idiomatic references Thesefindings supportedotherfindings using more European-based data, illustrating that English as

a lingua franca is characterised by ELF speakers’ adoption of specific nicative strategies to ensure successful communication and the preservation oftheir fellow interlocutors’ face The editors of a review of trends in ELFresearch conclude that these trends‘evidence the supportive and cooperativenature of interactions in ELF where meaning negotiation takes place at differ-ent levels’ (Archibald, Cogo & Jenkins 2011: 3) House has spoken of the

commu-‘solidarity of non-native ELF speakers’ (2003: 569) Findings pointing to thecooperative nature of ELF interactions have also been reported byFirth (1996)and Meierkord (2012) Firth identified strategies such as the ‘let it pass’principle, whereby speakers, instead of seeking immediate clarification whenthey did not understand what a speaker was saying, would let it pass, hoping,often correctly, that the meaning would become clear later Meierkord’s find-ings indicate that ‘the conversations are characterised by their participants’desire to render the interactions normal and to achieve communicative success’(2012: 15) Once again, it will be argued that context is the crucial variable, as,

in a more recent study,Kirkpatrick, Subhan and Walkinshaw (2014), it wasfound that there were occasions when speakers, far from seeking to preserve theface of their fellow interlocutors, were happy to threaten their interlocutors’face For example, in the courtroom exchanges in the ACE data, perhaps notsurprisingly, direct, confrontational questioning and bald-on-record disagree-ment are common currency, where winning the argument supersedes the desirefor interactional comity

Chapter 6, using data primarily from Asian varieties of English, willdescribe, illustrate and analyse the use of words and idioms from the speakers’first languages when they use English It thus considers further evidence forEnglish used in these contexts being an Asia-centric or Asian language.Questions to be considered when dealing with distinctive lexical featuresinclude the role of words/idioms from the speakers’ first language and/orcode-mixing and a comparison of their use when speakers are using theirAsian variety of English and when English is being used as a lingua franca

If code-mixing is used, what might the reasons for this use be? If code-mixing

is not used, what might the reasons for the lack of use be? It is generallyexpected that, as with varieties of English everywhere, speakers will use words

7Introduction

from local languages which reflect local phenomena of one sort or another.Developing the arguments presented inChapter 3, I shall consider the hypoth-esis that, when English is used as a specific Asian variety among people whobelong to the same or similar speech communities, it will be natural for them tocode-mix and use many words from their respective languages as these lan-guages are shared and interactants can be expected to understand them Thisuse of language is also a key marker of identity On the other hand, whenEnglish is used as a lingua franca, it might be expected that speakers would usefewer words and expressions from theirfirst languages because these might not

be known by their fellow interactants A preliminary study using ACE data(Kirkpatrick & McLellan 2012) supported this hypothesis, but work on theVOICE corpus showed a frequent use of the speakers’ first languages (e.g.,Pitzl 2012).Chapter 6 will further investigate the possibility that, when thespeakers’ languages are cognate and belong to the same language families – as

is the case with many European languages– there may be more of a tendency touse words from a variety offirst languages But where the languages are notcognate and belong to different language families– as is the case with manyAsian languages– this tendency may not be so prevalent.Chapter 6will alsoprovide examples from Asian literatures written in English to show how Asianwriters have‘stretched’ and ‘adapted’ English to reflect their cultural valuesand lived experiences

Chapter 7 will investigate the use, environment and frequency of standard morphosyntactic forms in English when used (i) as a specific variety

non-of Asian English and (ii) as a lingua franca by Asian multilinguals Majorquestions to be considered when dealing with distinctive morphosyntacticfeatures include an investigation into the role of the speakers’ first languages

in the creation of distinctive/non-standard forms or whether there is evidencefor the existence of vernacular universals In a preliminary study based on

a subset of the ACE corpus, Kirkpatrick and Subhan (2014) considered thehypothesis that the speakers’ first language or substrate would be significant intheir use of non-standard forms The specific question addressed was whetherthose speakers whose first language was Malay, a language which does notmark for tense, would therefore tend not to mark for tense when using English

A study of a group of speakers of varieties of Malay did not support thehypothesis On the contrary, it was found that, in formal occasions, firstlanguage speakers of Malay very seldom failed to mark for tense; and even

in more informal situations, they marked for tense more often than not in a ratio

of 3:2 This illustrates the importance of corpora for investigating the tive frequency of distinctive morphosyntactic features and the crucial signifi-cance of context and levels of formality The results here supported recentfindings of scholars such as Sharma who has argued convincingly that ‘thedegree and distribution of a given feature must be understood in relation to the

compara-8 Introduction

substrate before any universal claims can be made’ (Sharma 2009: 191) Thefindings also supported those ofHall, Schmidtke and Vickers (2013: 15), who,

in their study of the occurrence of countable mass nouns, concluded that thefirst language substrate influence was not high and that the countable use ofmass nouns, while being widespread and attestable across speakers of differentlanguages, was also infrequent, with a maximum occurrence rate of only3.5 per cent

Chapter 8considers a selection of functions that English is playing in Asiancountries Ifirst consider the role that English is playing in the legal systems ofmany post-colonial countries, even though these countries have been independ-ent for several decades The recent widespread protests in Hong Kong against

a proposed law that would allow the extradition of people from Hong Kong toface the court system of Mainland China is a prime example of how people maystill regard the colonial legacy of English law to be more transparent and justthan local systems of law This chapter also looks at how English has beenadopted for use in religion For example, I report on how certain schoolsattached to mosques in Indonesia now teach courses in‘English for IslamicValues’, providing further evidence of how its new users are adopting Englishfor their own cultural practices and purposes Chapter 8 concludes withexamples of how English is being used in popular culture across Asia.Chapter 9will consider the role of English as a language of education acrossthe region, including brief reviews of its role in primary, secondary and highereducation in selected settings It will review and critically consider languageeducation policies that have been adopted in selected countries The secondhalf of the chapter will turn to a review and critical discussion of the increasinguse of English as the medium of instruction in higher education across univer-sities in the region The chapter will conclude by arguing that language educa-tion policies need to be considered holistically and be coherent from primary totertiary education Otherwise there is a danger of English replacing locallanguages as languages of education and scholarship

Chapter 10will present a proposal based on thefindings and data discussedearlier for a lingua franca approach to English language teaching for the region.This will extend the proposal made byKirkpatrick (2014&2018) in whichprinciples of the lingua franca approach to English language are presented anddiscussed The lingua franca approach is proposed as a way of ensuring thatEnglish is successfully learned by Asian multilinguals while, at the same time,ensuring the preservation of local languages as languages of education.The concluding chapter willfirst draw together the empirical findings andreturn to thefive uses of English in Asia identified by Kachru I will argue thatEnglish is developing new domains of use and that an increasing number ofAsians are becoming highly proficient speakers of English and are shapingEnglish to their own uses and cultures, allowing them to develop a sense of

9Introduction

ownership of the language English is now an Asian language, both in and ofAsia This conclusion comes with no sense of triumphalism On the contrary,the chapter will conclude with the prediction that, unless regional governmentsdevelop holistic and coherent language education polices, it is likely thatEnglish will continue to increase its range at the expense of local and regionallanguages The region needs tofind a way in which English can co-exist withregional languages As argued inChapters 9and10, delaying the introduction

of English while students develop literacy and fluency in their respectivenational language and, where practical, their home language, is a possiblesolution It may seem counter-intuitive, but delaying the introduction ofEnglish will result in a win-win solution through which students can graduatefrom secondary school, proficient in English and fluent and literate in theirrespective national language and their home language

Before moving toChapter 1, I need tofirst to add a caveat and then indicatejust how many users of English there are in Asia today First, the caveat: Asia is

a vast area and I cannot cover all of it I shall focus on selected countries ofSouth Asia, East Asia, and on Southeast Asia, in particular the ten countrieswhich comprise the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).Second, just how many users of English are there in Asia today? Estimatingnumbers of speakers of English in Asia is an inexact science, but the mostaccuratefigures are provided byBolton and Bacon-Shone (2020) Using censusand language survey data they compiled figures for speakers of English inspecific countries of Asia.Tables AandBbelow are adapted fromBolton andBacon-Shone (2020) Outer circle countries are those which were previouslycolonies of English-speaking nations and where English retains some institu-tional role Expanding circle countries are those countries where English hastraditionally been learned in school as a foreign language The third circle, the

Table A Knowledge of English in outer circle Asian societiesSociety Current estimates Approx total of English speakers

inner circle countries, are those where English is the main language and where

it is spoken as afirst language, as in the United States or the United Kingdom.This ‘circles classification’ was made by Kachru (1992) and we shall bereferring to it throughout the volume

Adding the number of people who know English from both tables, we get

a total of 773.3 million Thisfigure vastly exceeds the number of first-languageusers of English in the United Kingdom and the United States, with populations

of 66 million and 324 million respectively And it needs to be remembered thatmany British and Americans do not speak English as afirst language So, whilestressing that it is difficult to obtain accurate figures of the number of Asianswho use English, we can safely conclude that there are more Asian users ofEnglish than there are native speakers of it I now turn to consider the develop-ment of English in Asia

Table B Knowledge of English in expanding circle Asian

societies

Society Current estimates

Approx total of English speakers

1 How English Came to Asia

In this chapter, I shall first look at how English came to the two majorpopulation centres of Asia, India and China, and show how the development

of English in these two countries differed and why I shall then look at howEnglish spread through Southeast Asia and explain how it was that, in 2009, theCharter of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – the tencountries comprising, in alphabetical order Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia,Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore andVietnam – officially made English the sole working language of the group,thereby choosing an‘outside’ language to be the sole working language of it

I shall argue that one reason why it was possible for ASEAN to adopt Englishwas because it was actually felt to be, in some sense, a language of the groupand not necessarily external to it

The British presence in India has been divided into three phases (Gilmour

2018: 3) The first, from around the beginning of the seventeenth century,consisted of scattered settlements dealing with trade The second phase,which lasted from the 1740s to the 1850s, was characterised by conflict – theSeven Years’ War took place between 1756 to 1763 – and expansion, and wasthe period when the East India Company became the major power in India Thethird andfinal phase ended with the independence of India in 1947 (and theestablishment of Pakistan) and Britain’s subsequent withdrawal

The impetus for thefirst phase came when, towards the end of her reign in theearly years of the seventeenth century, Queen Elizabeth I gave a tradingmonopoly to a group of British traders who formed the East India Company(EIC) The EIC first started trading at settlements (known as factories) inCalcutta, Bombay and later Madras (Gilmour 2018) It is important to notethat the British were just one of several European nations trading in India Forexample, the French had a settlement at Pondicherry, a settlement whichremained under French control until as late as 1954

The presence of the EIC did not mean that many British people went to Indiaduring thefirst phase In 1700, there were only some 100 British people inBombay The period of conflict during the second phase when the EIC wasfighting local wars against ‘Indian princes and French colonists’ (Gilmour12

2018: 16) saw an increased British presence in India, but this was primarilycomprised of soldiers; by 1790 there were 18,000 British soldiers stationed inIndia.

Missionaries, who normally followed hard on the heels of traders and whichwas the case in China as shall be related, were banned from India until 1813, asthe EIC felt they would cause‘trouble with their zeal and their enthusiasm forconversion’ (Gilmour 2018: 17) In 1813, however, the British House ofCommons passed a motion to promote‘useful knowledge and religious andmoral improvement’ among the ‘native inhabitants of India’ (Kachru 1983:20) By 1850, the numbers of British people in India who were unconnected tothe military and the EIC had risen to 10,000 This may seem a lot, but,compared to the population of India, represented a tiny blot As Gilmournotes, ‘So sparsely were they spread that many Indians seldom saw anEnglishman unless they happened to live in a city or near a barracks’(Gilmour 2018: 20) It is worth remembering that, at this time, India includedBurma– now independent Myanmar A frontier officer stationed in Burmareported that there were only two people with whom he could speak English, anIndian doctor and his Burmese clerk Many of the civil servants who worked forthe British government in the Burmese part of India were from India itself andthis is reflected in the Burmese word for chair, kalahtain, which literally means

‘foreigner sit’ The term foreigner, or kalah, originally referred to Indian civilservants, as these were people who sat on chairs

As indicated, the British House of Commons and Government had started totake more notice of India by the early 1800s In 1833, the charter of the EIC wasrenewed but altered its position significantly from being primarily concernedwith trade to becoming administratively responsible for the governing of India

on behalf of Britain (Graddol 2010) The Education Act of India redirectedfunds that the EIC had been required to spend on education from supportingHindu and Muslim education and the promotion of local literature to supportingWestern education and the teaching of English The Education Act was a keystage in the adoption of English as an official language of India, as it became thelanguage of administration and the law courts

The division between the‘Anglicists’ – those who argued for the teaching ofEnglish and a Western education– and the ‘Orientalists’ – those who favouredthe teaching of local languages, philosophies and literatures – remains tothis day An early promoter of the Anglicist position was the British politicianThomas Babington Macaulay It is worth quoting at some length from his 1835Minute on Indian Education:

To sum up what I have said, I think it is clear that we are not fettered by the Act ofParliament of 1813; that we are not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied; that weare free to employ our funds as we choose; that we ought to employ them in teaching

13How English Came to Asia

what is best worth knowing; that English is better worth knowing than Sanskrit orArabic; that the natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to betaught Sanskrit or Arabic; that neither as the languages of law, nor as the languages ofreligion, have the Sanskrit and Arabic any peculiar claim to our engagement; that it ispossible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars, and that tothis end our efforts ought to be directed Whoever knows [English] has ready access

to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have createdand hoarded in the course of ninety generations It may be safely said, that the literaturenow extant in that language is of far greater value than all the literature which threehundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together The questionnow before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shallteach languages, by which, by universal confession, there are not books on any subjectwhich deserve to be compared to our own; whether, when we can teach Europeanscience, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, whenever they differfrom those of Europe, differ for the worse; and whether, when we can patronise soundPhilosophy and true History, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medicaldoctrines, which would disgrace an English farrier,– Astronomy, which would movelaughter in girls at an English boarding school,– History, abounding with kings thirtyfeet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long,– and Geography, made up of seas oftreacle and seas of butter In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whosegeneral views I am opposed I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limitedmeans, to attempt to educate the body of the people We must at present do our best toform a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern;

a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals,and in intellect To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of thecountry, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Westernnomenclature, and to render them by degreesfit vehicles for conveying knowledge tothe great mass of the population (Sharp 1920: 57 ff.)

In short, Macaulay proposed the teaching of English and a Western education to

a select elite group of Indians, who would then govern the country on behalf ofGreat Britain And this is more or less what happened The importance ofEnglish in administering the country was recognised in independent India’s

1950 constitution which made English an associate official language Theconstitution also put a time limit of fifteen years on this use of English,however It had been a fervent wish of Ghandi and many others of theindependence movement, including Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, thatEnglish would eventually be removed from India and that Hindi– or ratherHindustani (contemporary Hindi is formed from a number of Hindustanivernaculars spoken across north India) (Graddol 2010: 52)– would becomethe national language But this was viewed with great concern by speakers ofIndian languages other than Hindi who campaigned fervently for the retention

of English (Kirkpatrick 2016) For example, students at Bangalore Universityadopted the slogan of‘Kill kill Hindi Kiss kiss English’ (Nault 2012: 80) Inresponse to these widespread protests, the 1967 Official Languages Act

14 How English Came to Asia

allowed English to continue to be used‘for the purposes of the Union, business

in parliament and centre regional communications involving a non-Hindispeaking region’ (Nault 2012: 80)

The current so-called three-language formula, a formula which has seenseveral iterations over the years, calls for Hindi-speaking children to also learnEnglish and one other Indian language, and for non-Hindi speaking children tolearn theirfirst language, Hindi and English In fact, most Hindi speakers learnonly English as well as Hindi, and most non-Hindi speakers prefer to learnEnglish ahead of Hindi But, as Mohanty points out, English has become‘themost common second language in all the states’ (2019: 333)

Thus, while English had only been taught to an elite during colonial times,local demand for English has burgeoned for many reasons, including itsperceived necessity for obtaining decent employment Arguments aboutwhich language should be used as a medium of instruction (MoI) in schoolsmirror the arguments presented by the Orientalists and Anglicists And, asnoted previously, the Anglicists have the upper hand The national knowledgecurriculum (NKC) in 2009 recommended the teaching of English from thefirst year of primary school in order to ‘democratise English among the masses’(Mohanty 2019: 333) and only 30 out of more than 617 universities or institu-tions of higher, technical or postgraduate-level education provide instruction in

or allow students to use a language other than English (Mohanty 2019: 334).This is despite serious concerns that most students’ currently low level ofEnglish proficiency means that they are unequipped to benefit from an English-medium education (Graddol 2010)

An example of its democratisation, has been the adoption of English by theDalit (or so-called untouchable class), which sees English as a tool for unitingthe class and presenting a united front,‘a parallel perhaps with the role thatEnglish played for those who originally fought for India’s independence’(Graddol 2010: 65)

Yet, despite this move to democratise access to English across India, thedivide between those who have access to English and those who do not isprobably increasing because the private schools which offer EMI are affordableonly by the relatively wealthy Access to English can magnify the gap betweenthe rich and the poor (Graddol 2010: 25) As will be shown, this is not restricted

to India alone

I conclude this section of the chapter by quoting from Graddol’s Afterword

in his book English Next: India

Throughout India, there is an extraordinary belief, amongst almost all castes and classes,

in both rural and urban areas, in the transformative power of English English is seen notjust as a useful skill, but as a symbol of a better life, a pathway out of poverty andoppression How can the benefits of English be enjoyed without damaging thepotential that India’s multilingualism brings, as a source of unique identity in

15How English Came to Asia

a globalised world, of cultural richness, and an important future economic resource?(Graddol 2010: 124)

There is no doubt that English is in India and of India It is impossible, however,

to accurately say how many people in India speak English The figure gested by Bolton and Bacon-Shone quoted in the Introduction was 260 million,but other estimates range from 55 million to 350 million (Graddol 2010) It isindeed possible that China, despite having no colonial institutional legacy ofEnglish, has more speakers of English than India (Bolton & Bacon-Shone’s[2020]figure for English speakers in China is 276 million) It is China to which

sug-I now turn

English in China

AsBolton (2003)notes, thefirst recorded contact between the British and theChinese took place sometime in the first half of the seventeenth century andwas described by an English trader of the time in a book entitled The Travels ofPeter Mundy After this early contact, a Chinese pidgin English developed asWestern traders and Chinese compradors or middlemen conducted business.After the Opium Wars of the nineteenth century, trade increased, conductedaround Canton and the other treaty ports and so, therefore, did the use of thispidgin English

The arrival of English in China is also closely linked to developmentsaffecting the Chinese language and changes in attitudes towards it whichtook place during the twentieth century A number of scholars were critical ofthe classical form of the Chinese language, arguing that its complexity made itdifficult for ordinary people to become literate Indeed, it has been estimatedthat only 5 per cent of the population were literate at the beginning of thetwentieth century (Woodside & Elman 1994)

The early years of the twentieth century and then the coming to power in

1949 of the Chinese Communist Party saw a number of changes to thelanguage First, the classical wenyan style was discarded in favour of thecolloquial baihua, thereby making the language far more accessible Thiswas followed by a number of major language reforms including the simplifica-tion of certain characters (Taiwan and Hong Kong still retain the traditionalcharacters) and the introduction of a romanisation system, pinyin, designed to

be used in primary schools to help Chinese children learn to read Chinese.These reforms have proved overwhelmingly successful with some 80 per cent

of the population now literate

The understanding that language reform was necessary was linked to opments in Japan At the turn of the century, Japan was seen by China as

devel-a modern devel-and powerful ndevel-ation Chindevel-a hdevel-ad been defedevel-ated in the first Sino–

16 How English Came to Asia

Japanese war of 1894–5 One reason given for Japan’s comparative modernityand power was believed to be Japan’s introduction of syllabaries, katakana andhiragana, to complement the Chinese characters in use in Japanese writing (Li

& Lee 2004) Hence the Chinese move to the simplification of their own writingsystem

China’s earlier painful defeat in the Opium Wars of the 1860s underlined tothem how technologically weak China was (Hsu 1976) As well as the need toreform Chinese itself, reformers realised that English was also important as itwas seen as the language of technology and scientific knowledge Thus, the1860s saw the establishment of the government-sponsored Tongwen Guan(School of Combined Learning), where English and other subjects considereduseful for modernisation were taught Missionaries also established schoolsand universities and English became seen as a passport for lucrative employ-ment (Feng & Adamson 2019) This led to English (or the West) being seen asproviding access to practical knowledge while Chinese provided access toChinese cultural roots or essence, as summarised in the slogan, zhongxue wei

ti, xixue wei yong (learning from China for the essence, learning from the Westfor practical knowledge) This was commonly shortened to the‘ti-yong’ debateand still underpins the learning of English and Chinese in China today, asillustrated inTable 1.1

Schools and universities which taught English were established towards theend of the nineteenth century, primarily by missionaries, often with the support

of forward-looking Chinese reformers (Hu & Adamson 2012) Adamson(2002,2004) has described the more recent history of English education inChina Table 1.1shows key dates in the twentieth century of the history ofEnglish in China

It should be noted that, with the setting up of the People’s Republic of China(PRC) in 1949, Russian, the language of the PRC’s major ally, became the firstforeign language taught But with the collapse of the Sino–Soviet alliance in themid-1950s, English resumed the place of thefirst foreign language taught, until

Table 1.1 English in China

1911 –23 Intellectual revolution; English for ideas/philosophy

1923 –49 English for diplomacy and interaction

1949 –60 English for science and technology

1961 –6 First renaissance – English for modernisation and international understanding

1966 –76 Cultural Revolution; English speakers are suspect

1976 –82 Slow recovery; English for modernisation

1982 –present English highly desirable and strongly promoted in school curricula

( Adamson 2002 : 232).

17English in China

the time of the Cultural Revolution when English was regarded as the language

of the enemy, the language of the ‘running dogs of imperialism’, in thecolourful PRC terminology of the time This message did not get through tomost Chinese however I was a student in China in the mid-1970s, and wasconstantly approached by Chinese students asking whether we could speaktogether in English so that they could practice theirs These requests became sofrequent that they became an irritation, and I developed a strategy of apologis-ing and saying that I was Albanian– Albania at that time was one of China’sfew‘foreign friends’ – and that I did not speak English well

Demand for English intensified with the re-ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping inthe 1980s and the subsequent opening up of China.1In 2001, the Ministry ofEducation promulgated the New English Curriculum Standards documentwhich stipulated that English should be introduced in all primary schoolsfrom grade 3 In the same year, the government also announced that between

5–10 per cent of all undergraduate programmes should be taught through themedium of English This caused controversy as it seemed to run counter to theLanguage Law, which stated that Putonghua2should be the primary teachingmedium The arguments about which medium of instruction should be usedechoed some of the arguments between the Orientalists and the Anglicists.Possibly in response to the criticism that English was being given too muchimportance, the Chinese recently released plans to reduce the weighting given

to English in the college entrance exams, the gaokao, and increase the ing given for Maths and Chinese These three ‘core’ subjects are currentlygiven the same weighting Some provinces have acted on this (Feng &Adamson 2019)

weight-In fact, however, the demand for English appears to be growing English isoften introduced earlier than primary 3 and given more class hours thansuggested in the curriculum guidelines There has been an exponential increase

in the number of Chinese learning English, from kindergarten through sity to language institutes where adults go to improve their English As Fengand Adamson note,‘In major cities such as Shanghai, parents use every means

univer-to get their children inuniver-to schools with reputable English programmes.Furthermore, they seek extra curricula classes and activities at whatever cost

to improve their children’s English’ (2019: 53) But, as noted in the case ofIndia, access to English magnifies the gap between the rich and the poor.Access to English is very limited in underdeveloped rural areas of China, forexample

1

Actually, this was Deng ’s third ascendancy after two previous political ‘deaths’ through purges.

He once quipped to US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, ‘You know, I am the only man who was twice resurrected ’ ( Packer 2019 : 182).

2 Literally ‘common speech’ and the term given to the national language, based on dialects of Mandarin It is also referred to as Modern Standard Chinese.

18 How English Came to Asia

Wen (2012)has estimated that in 2008 there were some 165 million schooland university students learning English in China and one can confidentlypredict that there are significantly more than this today For example, followingthe demand that universities provide 5–10 per cent of their courses in English,

an increasing number of universities are offering English-medium courses(Kirkpatrick 2014) So, the numbers of Chinese learning English will grow

As Hu and Adamson note,‘the survival and expansion of English in the schoolcurriculum mirrors the process of China’s modernization and globalization –from a closed to an ever-widening door of international collaboration and fromperiods of political revolutionary action to intense economic modernization’(2012: 15)

There is, however, a difference between the number of Chinese learningEnglish and the number of Chinese using it in their daily lives In a summary of

a study entitled the Survey of the Language Situation Across China,Wei and Su(2015), considered the reported use of English in seven major Chinese cities:Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Dalian and Shenzhen Weiand Su asked a number of questions, two of which were:

What were the averages of the nation and the selected cities with regards to the use ofEnglish, English reading proficiency and spoken proficiency?

Was there a statistically significant difference between the national average and thecity average in each of the three areas addressed in thefirst question? (2015: 178 ff.)Some interestingfindings to the research questions were as follows:

With regard to the use of English, on a scale between 1 (seldom), 2 times) and 3 (often) the national average was 1.265 Tianjin had the highestaverage at 1.874 and Chongqing the lowest at 1.355

(some-With regard to reading proficiency, on a scale between 1 (able to recognise

a few words), 2 (able to understand simple sentences) and 3 (able to understandsimple reading passages), the national average was 1.9821 Again, Tianjin hadthe highest average at 3.063 and Chongqing the lowest at 1.082 (lower than thenational average)

With regard to spoken proficiency, on a scale between 1 (able to utter a fewwords), 2 (able to say some greetings) and 3 (able to conduct daily conversa-tions), the national average was 1.9263, with Tianjin again the highest at 2.547and Chongqing the lowest at 1.956

The results suggest that, while English is being learned by millions ofChinese, it is not yet being used by quite so many But, asWei and Su (2015:184) themselves note,‘Future research needs to collect more comprehensivedata so as to achieve a better understanding of how Chinese people use English

in their daily lives.’ In just such research,Bolton and Botha (2015)investigatedthe use of English at Sun Yatsen University (SYSU) in Guangzhou The authorsfound, in general, only postgraduate students studying business and medicine

19English in China

needed English in class They also discovered that only 37 per cent of studentsreported using English for social purposes, usually for online socialising, andthen only reported the use of single words Despite this relatively low use ofEnglish, the authors noted that the students viewed English as important interms of‘internationalism’ and that they saw English as being the language ofvirtual mobility beyond‘the great firewall of China’ (2015: 207) Putonghua,the national language, was seen as the core language of education whileregional dialects were seen as‘increasingly irrelevant as the heritage languages

of parents and grandparents’ (2015: 207) In line with the call made by Wei and

Su, Bolton and Botha conclude with a call for ‘more empirical field-basedresearch on the current impact of English’, and ‘a more detailed, finer-grainedbody of sociolinguistic research in this area’ (2015: 208)

Demand for English in China is also seen in the number of private language schools being bought by Chinese interests and the establishment ofcampuses of famous English private schools and universities within Chinaitself A recent edition of The Times newspaper reported there are now somethirty-six branches of English private schools in China (The Times, Wednesday,

English-10 July 2019) At the same time, more than English-100,000 Chinese are studying atuniversities in Britain There is also some evidence that a Chinese variety ofEnglish (CE) is developing (Xu 2010;Xu, He & Deterding 2017); the linguisticand sociocultural features of CE will be discussed later in the book

The Countries of Association of Southeast Asian Nations

I The Education Act of 1892 made English an elective subject in secondaryschool By the 1920s it had become a compulsory subject in secondary school(Draper 2019) English became popular during the course of the Vietnam War,after which, however, the policy was to emphasise‘Thainess’ While continu-ing to promote the Thai language and Thainess, the 1999 Education Act madeEnglish the principal foreign language As the then-President of the PrivyCouncil, General Prem Tinsulanonda, stated in 2006, ‘The country is Thaiand the language is Thai’ (Draper 2019: 239) Yet, English is needed, not leastbecause it is the sole working language of ASEAN

20 How English Came to Asia

Of the other nine countries of ASEAN, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam formedFrench Indo–China, Indonesia was colonised by the Dutch, while Brunei,Malaysia, Myanmar and Singapore were British colonies and the Philippines

a colony of the United States

Despite being colonised by the British, the history and status of English inthe four nations colonised by Britain are remarkably different Myanmar, whichwas annexed by the British in 1886, gained independence in 1948 Beforeindependence, English was the language of government and administration.After independence, however, Burmese became the main language and themedium of education in schools, but with English being the main foreignlanguage In 1962, however, U Ne Win seized power in a military coup andthe army continued to exercise power for the nextfifty years During this fiftyyears of dictatorial and army rule (1962–2015), the country was virtuallyclosed and English was not systematically taught in schools The Burmesegovernment has only recently started to promote the use of English once more,making it a subject from primary 1, a medium of instruction for maths andscience subjects in upper secondary, and the medium of instruction in highereducation However, the lack of English over so many years has meant that itsuse as a medium of instruction is meeting severe problems, asDrinan’s (2013)report on the use of English as a medium of instruction in upper secondaryshows:

Using English as a Medium of Instruction (MoI): this is fundamentally not working forteaching Maths and Science as few teachers can use English, let alone, teach anothersubject in English Students are not learning or understanding important concepts inMaths and Science They merely remember the technical terms in English for the tests.Most teachers use a mix of Myanmar (for explanation) and English (for technical terms).(2013, cited inKirkpatrick 2015)

In the context of university teaching,‘English textbooks are usually read aloud

in English and then explained in Burmese’ (McCormick 2019: 249) Yetdespite these low levels of proficiency in English, the colonial experiencemeans that English remains a language of influence and prestige As anexample, Burmese passports, while using Burmese script on the cover, useEnglish inside, including even for the person’s name (McCormick 2019)

In contrast to Myanmar, where levels of English are low, in SingaporeEnglish is the dominant language Singapore was one of the three settle-ments, along with Penang and Malacca, known as the Straits Settlements,established by the British in 1824 English was always taught during thecolonial period and after independence in 1965, the country’s first PrimeMinister Lee Kuan Yew, made English one of the four official languages(Malay, Chinese and Tamil are the others, with Malay also being the nationallanguage) In effect, however, English is the de facto national language It is

21The Countries of ASEAN

the medium of instruction in schools and is the lingua franca forSingaporeans The national bilingual policy aims to see Singaporeans learntheir respective mother tongues and English In a policy that recalls thehistorical ti-yong debate in China previously mentioned, the mother tongue

is supposed to give citizens access to their cultural roots, while Englishprovides access to technology and participation in globalisation There aretwo comments to make about the current bilingual policy Thefirst is that thegovernment rules that a person’s mother tongue is determined by theirethnicity Thus, the mother tongue of all ethnic Singaporean Chinese, isMandarin, no matter whether this was indeed the language spoken by theirmother, which may well have been another Chinese dialect such asCantonese or Hokien Similarly, Tamil is the mother tongue of SingaporeanIndians, and this is the language they will learn at school, even though theymay be speakers of another Indian language such as Hindi For Malays, thesituation is a little easier as most ethnic Malays will have Malay as a mothertongue

The second point to make about the bilingual policy is that it has resulted inEnglish becoming thefirst home language of the majority of children A report

in the Straits Times newspaper of 10 March 2016 (Lee 2016) noted that36.9 per cent of children agedfive and older now use English most often athome This compares with the 34.9 per cent who reported they used Mandarinmost often at home This contrasts with the 2011figures which showed thatMandarin was the most common language used at home by children agedfiveand above (35.6 per cent), compared with 32.3 per cent for English What thissuggests is that English is not only playing the role of the international languagebut also becoming the ‘ti’ language, the language of the home and ofSingaporean identity One reason why the Singapore government is so keen

to ensure the people speak‘good English’ as opposed to ‘Singlish’, the localcolloquial variety of Singaporean English (as evidenced in countless recentcampaigns), is that they recognise that the local variety of English is taking onthe role the government had assigned to the mother tongues The sameGovernment Survey also reported a decline in the use of Chinese dialects andMalay, but the use of Tamil (albeit at a mere 3.3 per cent of the population) hadremained stable

English is now the lingua franca of Singapore It is clearly both in and ofSingapore As Jain and Wee argue:

Given the demand for the English-educated in the workforce and the role of thelanguage globally, the shift to English can safely be expected to escalate across thepopulation However, there is no sign that Singlish is decreasing in popularity On thecontrary, a nascent but burgeoning local film industry and other cultural activitiesprovide domestic and international markets for cultural products where the use ofSinglish and other local languages such as the various Chinese dialects are considered

22 How English Came to Asia

valuable markers of cultural authenticity The government therefore has to come to termswith the fact that Singlish is in all likelihood here to stay (Jain & Wee 2019: 283)Brunei and Malaysia were also British colonies, and in both Malay was thelanguage spoken by the majority of the population As noted, the Malay cities

of Penang and Malacca were part of the Straits Settlements and Malaysiabecame independent in 1957 Brunei became a British protectorate in 1888,and achieved independence in 1984 In both places, the debate was (and is) overthe respective roles English and Malay should play In Brunei, the proposal was

to adopt Malay as the sole medium of instruction (Malay was made the nationallanguage in 1959 and in the same year a report proposed Malay as the solemedium of instruction [Jones 2000]), but for a number of reasons– including

a diplomatic row between Brunei and Malaysia – this policy was neverimplemented Brunei did implement a bilingual policy, the‘dwibahasa policy’(Jones 2000) Initially, this policy saw Malay used as the medium of instruction(MoI) for all subjects for thefirst three years of primary school, with Englishtalking over from primary 4 as the MoI for maths, science, geography, historyand technical subjects Malay remained the MoI for Malay literature, Islamicknowledge, civics, arts handicrafts and physical education However, and instark contrast to Malaysia as will be explained, the policy has been changed to

a new education system (SPN-21) so that English is now used as the mediuminstruction for maths, science, social studies, ICT, music, drama and Englishitself in primary school, with Malay only being used for Malay, Islamicreligious knowledge, Malay Islamic monarchy and physical education (Haji-Othman, McLellan & Jones 2019) This means there is more English thanunder the dwibahasa system But it should be noted that Malay is used as themedium of instruction at religious schools, attendance at which is compulsoryfor all Bruneian Muslim students Classes are held in the afternoon and studentsbetween the ages of seven and fourteen must attend (Haji-Othman et al 2019).The history of English in Malaya/sia is complex (Kirkpatrick 2010b) Duringthe colonial period, as in India discussed previously, English was taught, butonly for the elite The British did not want the majority to learn English as thisquote from Maxwell, the Chief Secretary of the Federated Malay Statesbetween 1920 and 1926, makes clear

The aim of the government is not to turn out a few well-educated youths, nor yetnumbers of less well-educated boys; rather it is to improve the bulk of the people and tomake the son of thefisherman or peasant a more intelligent fisherman or peasant than hisfather had been, and a man whose education will enable him to understand how his ownlot in lifefits in with the scheme of life around him (Maxwell 1983: 408)

As Malaya was rich in rubber and mineral resources, the British needed toimport labour, and they imported Tamils from India to work on the rubberplantations and Chinese to work in the tin mines This, of course, added to the

23The Countries of ASEAN

linguistic diversity of the colony, and vernacular schools were establishedwhich taught in Tamil and Chinese The history of Malaysian language policyhas been about how to balance these languages with English and Malay in order

to keep their respective users happy

As we have seen, Brunei has moved to make English the MoI for maths andscience from primary 1 Malaysia did the opposite In 2002, it introducedEnglish as the MoI for maths and science from primary 1, but, after experi-menting with this for seven years, decided to revert back to Malay as the MoIfor these subjects (Gill 2012) The reasons given for this reversal of policyincluded the fact that children from lower socio-economic areas were failing inmaths along with a shortage of maths teachers able to teach the subject inEnglish (Gill 2012) And in 2016, in recognition of declining proficiency inEnglish, the government introduced a Dual Language programme, to be piloted

in 300 schools This gives the schools the choice of which medium to use–English or Malay– for the teaching of maths and science (Gill & Shaari 2019)

As these schools need to meet criteria including having teachers who can teach

in Malay and English and parental support for the scheme, people have arguedthat this will further increase the divide between the urban‘haves’ and the rural

‘have-nots’, an argument that can be heard in each of the countries underdiscussion here Language policy in Malaysia has been characterised by‘flip-flopping’ between whether to promote Malay or English as the medium ofinstruction According to Gill and Shaari, ‘Presently, in 2016, Malaysia ispretty much in the same position it was a decade ago– standards of Englishare increasingly declining with terrible impact on the students and youth andtheir employability opportunities and also a decline in the human capitalessential for industrialisation and technological development’ (Gill andShaari 2019: 268) While the history of English in these post-colonial countries

is varied, the heritage of English in Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore has led tothe development of respective varieties of English, Brunei, Malaysian andSingaporean and these will be discussed later in the book Here it is enoughsimply to state that the presence of these varieties is now accepted and that thereare grammars and so forth of these varieties of English The same can also besaid of the Philippines, to which I now turn This too was a colony of anEnglish-speaking empire, although in the case of the Philippines, it was of theAmerican empire The Treaty of Paris of 1898 ceded the Philippines toAmerica from Spain after the American defeat of the Spanish in the Spanish–American war The Philippines remained a colony of the United States untilindependence in 1946

The decision to adopt English as the medium of instruction in schools wasmade in 1901 – and here we see significant differences from Brunei andMalaysia Although all are multilingual societies, both Malaysia and Bruneihad a language, namely Malay, that was spoken by the majority of the

24 How English Came to Asia

population and which could easily be identified as the national language ThePhilippines, on the other hand, has more than 170 languages, none of whichwere spoken widely enough to be considered an obvious choice for the nationallanguage In 1941, Tagalog, the language of the capital, Manila, was made thenational language, but this was unpopular, as Tagalog is spoken only by some

5 million people living in and around Manila To deflect this criticism, in theearly 1970s, the National Language Institute was given the task of creating

a national language (Gonzalez 1996a) The result was Pilipino, rechristenedFilipino in 1987.3It is an artificial construct, based heavily on Tagalog, withfeatures from certain other Filipino languages added Nevertheless, the major-ity of Filipinos today now accept Filipino as their national language (Tupas

2007)

The advent of a national language led to a bilingual education policy (BEP)for the Philippines which, with some changes, remained in place from 1974until 2011 Filipino was used for the teaching of all subjects with the exception

of maths, science and English itself, for which English was used as the MoI.The BEP drew many critics over many years who argued for the use of morelocal languages in education To cut a long and complex story short, thePhilippines government eventually legislated in 2009 for a multilingual educa-tion policy and the adoption of mother tongue–based multilingual education(MTBMLE) This policy currently allows for nineteen languages to act as theMoI for thefirst three years of primary school While those who supportedMTBMLE feel that this is not enough, wanting MTBMLE to encompass morelanguages and to last throughout primary school, MTMBLE represents

a significant departure from the bilingual education policy The Philippines isthe only nation of those being reviewed here that has systematically adopted

a policy of MTBMLE The other nations basically run bilingual policies withthe respective national language and English being the primary languages ofeducation (Kirkpatrick & Liddicoat 2017,2019) Yet, there remains a strongpro-English lobby who want to reinstate English as the primary medium ofinstruction, not least because the Philippines derives so much wealth from itsrole in the business processing outsourcing (BPO) sector, which includes callcentres, and for which a population with high levels of proficiency in Englishare essential (Young & Igcalinos 2019: 180) The long use of English in theschool system has led to the development of a local variety of English, FilipinoEnglish, and this will be discussed later

Indonesia was also a colony, but of the Dutch Indonesia is one of the mostmultilingual and culturally diverse nations on earth with more than 700 lan-guages and 400 ethnic groups (Ethnologue 2019) After independence from the

3 This switch from Pilipino to Filipino was to make the name of the national language sound less like Tagalog as Tagalog has no [f] sound.

25The Countries of ASEAN

Dutch in 1945, Indonesia chose a form of Malay, to be called Bahasa Indonesia,

as the national language Although the language was spoken as afirst languageonly by about 3 per cent of the population at the time of its choice, itsdevelopment as the national language has been remarkably successful(Montolalu & Suryadinata 2007) and it is now the MoI in all schools and atall levels of education Indonesia is the only nation of those reviewed here thatdoes not make English a compulsory subject at primary schools Nevertheless,English is far and away thefirst foreign language taught: it is compulsory insecondary schools and at universities

In a marked contrast to the other countries under discussion here, Englishwasfirst introduced into Indonesian education at the university level In 1949,

an English language programme was set up at the Universitas Nasional Jakarta(Kohler 2019) It was nearly twenty years later, in 1967, that English wasintroduced into secondary schools and not until 1990 was it introduced intoprimary schools In 2015, the government announced that English wouldbecome a required medium of instruction at all universities, beginning withstate universities It is not yet clear to what extent this policy has beenimplemented (Kohler 2019: 292)

Despite being taught for some forty years in secondary schools, the teachingand learning of English has not been successful A recent study which used theTOEIC test to measure the proficiency levels of Indonesian senior high schoolstudents showed that more than 55 per cent tested as novices, 37 per cent tested aselementary, and only 5 per cent tested as having even intermediate proficiency inEnglish (Hamied 2011) Dardjowidjojo (2000)offers a number of reasons forthis– many of which can be heard across the other countries of Asia – such as

a lack of suitably proficient and trained teachers, a lack of appropriate and relevantmaterials, and demotivated students, especially in rural areas (Kirkpatrick 2012)

‘Yet parental and community demand for English are likely to continue and exertpressure for English to remain at least in its current form, if not with an increasedpresence in future in all levels of education’ (Kohler 2019: 294)

The demand for English in Indonesia can also be seen in perhaps unexpectedcontexts For example, some of the boarding schools attached to mosques, thepesantren, have introduced courses in English for Islamic purposes (Fahrudin

2013) A study of attitudes towards English among staff and students across

a selection of universities in the city of Yogyakarta which included Muslim,Christian and secular institutions, found that Muslim participants felt thatEnglish could have a positive effect on religious identity Sample quotes were

‘English helps the development of my religion’, ‘English can deliver informationabout my religion’, ‘It is also necessary for us to master English for proselytis-ing’ (Dewi 2012: 22; Kirkpatrick 2015: 8) Even then, in a country with noinstitutional history of English, English can be seen as of Indonesia as well as in

it I return to a discussion of the role English is playing in religion inChapter 8

26 How English Came to Asia

Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam all inherited French as their colonial language andeach country also saw Russian as a major language of education as each fell underthe influence of the then Soviet Union Despite this history, all three countriestoday have chosen to make English thefirst foreign language to be studied inschools That English is the sole official language of ASEAN and as all threecountries are ASEAN member states is just one reason why English has beenpromoted Its importance for use in ASEAN settings should not be underesti-mated As a Cambodian Minister reported:

We need to know English so that we can defend our interests You know, ASEAN is not

a kissy-kissy brotherhood The countries arefiercely competitive, and a strong knowledge

of English will help us protect our interests You know when we use English we don’tthink about the United States or England We only think about the need to communicate.(Clayton 2006: 230–3)

English has thus displaced French as thefirst foreign language in Cambodiaand in 2014, government policy decreed that it should be taught from the fourthgrade of primary school However, this has met with problems as manyteachers have low or even no English skills So, while English may officially

be on the curriculum, it is not actually taught in most primary schools, and asKosonen 2019 argues,‘Given the available human and other resources foreducation in Cambodia, the hurried attempts to promote English languageteaching seem to reflect the perhaps over-ambitious goals of political leaders’(2019: 223) But, asKosonen (2019)goes on to say, given English’s role as thesole working language of ASEAN, its importance for Cambodia is likely toincrease

The same can be said for both Laos and Vietnam In Vietnam, after theend of the Vietnam war and the unification of the nation in 1975, a surge ofnationalism led to the policy ‘of burning and binning English and Frenchtextbooks and other related materials in an effort to get rid of colonialistand imperialist legacies in the early 1980s’ (Nguyen & Nguyen 2019: 188).Then, after several years of relative isolation, a unified Vietnam opened up

to the world in 1986 under the Doi Moi policy As happened when Chinaopened up, this led to a surge in demand for English, as vividly captured by

Ho and Wong:

When Vietnam embarked on economic reforms in 1986 it prompted a nationwiderush to learn English English classes were crammed with not just students but alsoprofessionals such as doctors and engineers as well as retired government officials,senior police, army officers and diplomats (cited inHo & Wong 2004: 1)

English thus became reincarnated from being the language of the enemy to thelanguage of‘amity, hope and aspiration for the majority of the Vietnamesepeople’ (Nguyen & Nguyen 2019: 189)

27The Countries of ASEAN

English is now the most taught and learned foreign language in the schoolcurriculum with some 90 per cent of students choosing to take it (Baker, Poly &Giacchino-baker 2003) It is increasingly used as a medium of instruction inprivate schools and in certain subjects at state universities The Vietnamesegovernment is currently implementing Project 2020– recently extended by fiveyears to 2025 in recognition of the hugely ambitious nature of the project–whereby Vietnamese university graduates will be proficient in a foreign lan-guage, specifically English.

Laos gained independence from France in 1948 but only became trulyindependent with the French defeat by the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu in

1954 (Keyes 2003) As with the other countries I have described, English is thefirst foreign language taught in schools, introduced from Primary 3, althoughthe scarcity of materials and suitably qualified teachers means that the level ofEnglish is low English is the ‘mandatory first foreign language’ at lowersecondary level, while French is the ‘optional second foreign language’(Meyers 2019: 211)

Conclusion

This brief summary of the development of English in the countries underreview shows similarities and differences between them The similarities arethat English is thefirst foreign language taught in each country In Singapore, it

is the medium of instruction; in some other countries, it is used as a medium ofinstruction for certain subjects, typically maths and science Common to all isalso an apparently widening gap between those who have proficiency inEnglish and those who do not This divide is often seen between the rich andthe poor and the urban and the rural As Graddol remarked in the context ofIndia,‘We are fast moving into a world in which not to have English is to bemarginalised and excluded’ (2010: 10)

The differences include the levels of English that are spoken In thosecountries which were colonies of English-speaking empires and whichKachru (1983)has classified as ‘outer circle’ countries in which new varieties

of English have developed and provided their own linguistic norms, Englishhas gained an institutional role and has been learned and taught for manydecades Brunei, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore are examples.These countries have developed their own varieties of English and I shalldiscuss these further later in the book Myanmar provides an exception tothis rule, so there the levels of English are relatively low In those countriesthat were not colonised by English-speaking empires and where English hastraditionally been learned as a foreign language in schools and whichKachru(1983) classified as ‘expanding circle’ countries, English plays less of aninstitutional role Even in these countries, however, the uses and roles of

28 How English Came to Asia