Ying-Ying Tan, "Doing Justice to and in the World of Englishes"
Channel: Linguistic Justice Society
Date: 2022-04-12

Ying-Ying Tan (Nanyang Technological University)

Doing Justice to and in the World of Englishes


25 March 2022

Linguistic Justice Society Webinars

https://hiw.kuleuven.be/ripple/research/linguisticjusticesociety


ABSTRACT: One of the key ways to realizing linguistic justice, as alluded to by Philippe Van Parijs (2011), is to welcome the use of English as a global lingua franca. However, the acceptance of English as an international language, as pointed out by many scholars, including Van Parijs himself, can also lead to potentially unjust linguistic situations. Would thinking about “Englishes”, instead of a single monolithic linguistic entity “English”, resolve the conundrum as pointed out above? In this talk, I look at linguistic justice through the lens of two dominant paradigms in the field of English linguistics: the World Englishes (WE) paradigm, pioneered by Braj Kachru; and the English as Lingua Franca (ELF) paradigm, a relatively more recent alternative developed by Jennifer Jenkins. As I unpack and compare the tenets of how each paradigm views speakers of English around the world, I aim to highlight how linguistic justice can be achieved in the world of Englishes.


SPEAKER BIO: Ying-Ying Tan is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Besides writing on language planning and policy, she is also a sociophonetician who has published on accents, prosody, and intelligibility. She works primarily on languages in Singapore, focusing on Singapore English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay, and Min languages such as Teochew and Hokkien. Her work has appeared in top-tiered journals such as the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, World Englishes, English World-Wide, Interventions: Journal of Postcolonial Studies, and Social Identities.

LJS Webinar convenors: Matteo Bonotti (Monash University), Filippo Contesi (University of Barcelona), Ethan Nowak (Umeå University) & Seunghyun Song (KU Leuven)