16.1 Introduction

Recent years have witnessed the development and expansion of two closely related cognitively oriented approaches to variation in language – Cognitive Sociolinguistics and Cultural Linguistics. As subfields of Cognitive Linguistics, both share its central assumption that ‘culture … is not an external category in linguistic investigations [but] an integral dimension of it’ (Wolf and Polzenhagen Reference Wolf and Polzenhagen2009: 19). Moreover, Cognitive Sociolinguistics and Cultural Linguistics converge on the belief that culture-based conceptualizations realized in language or language varieties are systematic and open to empirical linguistic analysis. The commonalities and slight differences in theoretical and investigative orientation are perhaps best expressed in the following two quotes. The aim of Cognitive Sociolinguistics, according to Pütz, Robinson and Reif (Reference Pütz, Robinson and Reif2012: 242), is to ‘account for the meaning of variation observable across languages, speech communities, societies and cultures’. Cultural Linguistics, on the other hand, ‘explores, in explicit terms, conceptualizations that have a cultural basis and are encoded in and communicated through features of human languages’ (Sharifian 2015a: 473). That is to say, Cognitive Sociolinguistics leans more in the direction of ‘traditional’ variationist sociolinguistics, with a stronger focus on variation, while Cultural Linguistics sees its roots more in ‘classical’ anthropology, with a stronger focus on culture.² More often than not, in actual research, and as this chapter will demonstrate, the boundaries between the two are blurred, however.³

The above-mentioned tenet concerning culture-based conceptualizations expressed in language, coupled with the methodological diversity and openness of Cognitive Linguistics (see Polzenhagen and Wolf, Reference Wolf, Polzenhagen and Sharifianforthcoming), makes Cognitive Sociolinguistics an important tool for intercultural understanding. The emphasis on ‘understanding’ is important, because understanding has hitherto been neglected in intercultural pragmatics, just as the semantics of variation has been neglected in sociolinguistics so far. In order to demonstrate the usefulness of this method for the immediate topic at hand, that is, ‘communicating with Asia’ – as well as for the habitat approach to language – the chapter is structured as follows: First, we will briefly expand on the importance of a hermeneutic dimension in intercultural communication and critique a purely functionalist approach. In the main part of this chapter, we will present a cognitive-linguistic study of conceptualizations relating to the domain of ghosts in the sociocultural context of China, specifically the expression of these conceptualizations in Hong Kong (English). Not only do we aim to show how these conceptualizations are realized in language and other modes of expression, but we will also highlight how such beliefs impact upon the behaviour and decision-making of Hongkongers. The applicability of the insights gained by the cognitive-linguistic methods we suggest is the topic of the subsequent section. Here, we will provide examples from the Dictionary of Hong Kong English (Cummings and Wolf Reference Cummings and Wolf2011), in which the respective cultural conceptualizations are made explicit and hence accessible for speakers with a different cultural background.

16.2 A note on intercultural communication⁴

Other than linguistics, numerous academic disciplines, such as ‘translation studies, media and communication research, business and management, ethnography, psychology, pedagogy, sociology, philosophy, and international relations’ lay claim to ‘intercultural communication’ and ‘cross-cultural communication’, ‘intercultural training’, ‘intercultural competence’, and ‘intercultural integration’ as (nearly) identical fields of interest (Wolf Reference Wolf, Polzenhagen and Sharifian2015, 445). In linguistics, studies with a functionalist and, relatedly, ‘deconstructionist’ perspective on intercultural communication predominate. Within the functionalist framework, the primary aim for participants in intercultural encounters is, quite literally, to ‘function effectively’ (see below). ‘Deconstructionists’, moreover, confine themselves to ‘observable linguistic behaviour’ and view underlying cultural categories as lying outside the scope of linguistic analysis. On top of that, cultural issues, more often than not, are ‘deconstructed’ and recast in terms of issues of power and inequality. The reasons for these particular and, to some extent restrictive, views on intercultural communication are, on the one hand, the ‘normal ways of doing pragmatics’ (in a Kuhnian sense), that is, the conventions of the paradigm(s) functional linguists work in,⁵ and, on the other hand, a self-imposed, ‘politically correct’ outlook that eschews anything that has the air of cultural stereotyping or ‘essentializing’. If this view is taken to an extreme, intercultural communication is studied without recourse to culture. However, we deem ‘culture’ to be still an important category to reckon with. Furthermore, the study of cultural variation by nature is interpretative and hence requires the recognition of a hermeneutical dimension. In hermeneutics – as well as in cognitive-linguistic approaches – prejudices and stereotypes are (pre)-conceptions indispensible for making sense of the world and form the basis for conceptual change.

While some scholars may see the category ‘culture’ as problematic and thus try to diminish its role in intercultural communication, it tends to be neglected by linguists working in the field of English as a lingua franca (ELF) altogether, perhaps due to the fact that ‘culture’, as in the case of deconstructionists, is not deemed to be within the purview of ‘linguistics proper’ or seen as a hindrance to ELF interactions.⁶ For example, in an issue of Intercultural Pragmatics (2009), dedicated to English as a lingua franca, and also in a collective volume on this topic (Mauranen and Ranta Reference Mauranen and Elina2009), ‘culture’ is not addressed in any significant way. Instead, the focus is more on ‘linguistic’ issues such as features of ELF, intelligibility, the perception of accents, speech accommodation, and pragmatic strategies in ELF encounters. Yet using English as a lingua franca involves far more than issues at ‘the linguistic surface’. From a cognitive-linguistic standpoint, observable linguistic form and variability are, in one way or another, manifestations of thought, and, more often than not, culture-dependent. English is the international lingua franca per se, and the ‘combinability’ of different cultures in English as lingua franca interactions seem to be virtually limitless. Instead of ELF, Sharifian (Reference Sharifian2011) proposes the term English as an international language (EIL), which implies a more encompassing perspective on English as an international lingua franca. Among other approaches, EIL incorporates Cultural Linguistics and hence is better equipped to tackle the cultural complexities of English as an international language (also see Kirkpatrick, this book).

Concerning the Hong Kong context – the sociocultural context relevant to this chapter – most existing linguistic studies with an intercultural perspective fall squarely within the functionalist paradigm. For example, Bilbow (Reference Bilbow1997) investigated ‘cross-cultural impression management’ in a multicultural workplace in Hong Kong; Cheng and Tsui (Reference Cheng and Tsui2009) examined disagreement management between Hong Kong Chinese and L1-speakers of English; Wong (2010) studied ‘expressions of gratitude by Hong Kong speakers of English’; and Mak and Chui (Reference Mak and Chui2013) focused on the socialization of an expatriate to a Hong Kong workplace. While culture features prominently in these studies, intercultural understanding is at best a side effect, and divergent linguistic behaviour is hardly ever related to underlying cultural conceptualizations as a motivating factor for this behaviour. Implicitly or explicitly, diverging cultural patterns are perceived to obstruct the attainment of a communicative or institutional goal. The use of the management metaphor is especially telling, as it casts the communicative situation as a kind of business encounter and the interactants into the role of controllers or problem solvers (cf. Wolf Reference Wolf, Polzenhagen and Sharifian2015: 447). In the workplace studies, the boundaries between metaphorizing communicative situations as sites of management and actual management are fluent; the pragmatic aim here is to identify possible intercultural problems and to minimize their disruptive effect on the smooth working of a public or private institution.

Insightful as these studies may be, as Wolf and Polzenhagen (Reference Wolf and Polzenhagen2006, Reference Wolf and Polzenhagen2009) have argued, ‘successful’ or ‘effective functioning’ in intercultural settings is subsidiary to intercultural understanding, and the reasons for culturally-divergent linguistic behaviour cannot be adequately captured without recourse to the conceptual level. The process of coming to an intercultural understanding may be an epistemologically arduous one, requiring repeated intercultural encounters with and sustained exposure to ‘the other’. In this hermeneutic circle, conceptions are continuously revised in the approach to ‘truth’. Yet if this is not too naïve to say, intercultural understanding goes ‘deeper’ and is more long-lasting than shallow knowledge about how speakers differ pragmatically in certain communicative settings (also see Stilz, this book).

The tenet of the semantic primacy in Cognitive Linguistics, coupled with its broad variety of empirical and quantitative methods, make Cognitive Linguistics an ideal paradigm for intercultural studies. In the following section, we will suggest what such an approach to intercultural understanding could look like.

16.3 ghosts in Chinese culture and Hong Kong (English) specifically

In the previous section, we criticized functionalist pragmatics for either denigrating ‘culture’ or for a self-imposed (meta-)theoretical restriction to ‘successful’ and ‘effective’ functioning. Here, we will attempt to offer an alternative; our aim is to arrive at a kind of ‘thick description’ (see Geertz Reference Geertz1973: chapter 1) – linguistic and otherwise – of a certain phenomenon that is prevalent in Hong Kong: that of ghosts. Our elaboration on GHOSTS is intended to add to the hermeneutic dimension of intercultural communication in the Hong Kong context, and can serve as an illustration of what a more encompassing theoretical approach to intercultural communication could look like.

Ghosts in Chinese culture in general are part of a wider cosmology, which includes a supernatural dimension. As a note on an exhibit (showing fishermen giving offerings) at the Macau Maritime Museum (n.d.) explains,

Ironically enough, the importance of ghosts in Chinese culture is officially recognized, if not sanctioned, by the government of the People’s Republic of China – which is, after all, a communist and materialist institution. ChinaCulture.org, an official website of the Ministry of Culture, P.R. Republic of China (2013), has a webpage devoted to ‘Chinese Ghost Culture’. On this page, we learn, for example, that Confucius admonished people to respect ghosts.

In Hong Kong culture specifically, ghosts are ubiquitous – a reality for those Hongkongers who believe in them and in daily news, short stories, films, and ordinary discourse for everyone else (cf. Evans Reference Evans, Evans and Tam1997).⁹ For example, in the Sunday Morning Post (Chow Reference Chow2009), the Sunday edition of the South China Morning Post – the most respectable English-language newspaper in Hong Kong – one can find a discussion of the ‘secularization’ of joss sticks. Joss sticks are ‘food for ghosts’ (according to the first part of the title of the article), that is, offerings for the spirits of departed ancestors (see below). One Hong Kong entrepreneur has picked up on this local custom and produces candy in the form of joss sticks, as ‘a treat for the living’ (according to the second part of the title). Furthermore, ghost stories are a literary as well as a cinematic genre in Hong Kong. Their popularity is also reflected in the ICE-HK, where ghost* collocates with story/stories twelve times (within a search horizon of five words). The blurb of The Haunting Tales of Hong Kong (The Hong Kong Writers’ Circle 2005), an anthology of ghost stories, captures the widespread belief in ghosts quite well:

A linguistic indication of the salience of ghosts in Hong Kong is the fact that ghost is a cultural keyword in HKE, at least judging from a search in the ICE-HK, as compared to the ICE-GB (on the notion of ‘cultural keyword’, see Wolf and Polzenhagen Reference Wolf and Polzenhagen2009: 36–9). In the ICE-HK, the lemma ghost (including ghost and ghosts) is significantly more frequent – namely, twenty-eight times – than in the ICE-GB, where it only occurs six times (both corpora have around one million words each). The question is, how can these widespread beliefs be described linguistically, apart from the fact that ghost has been found to be a cultural keyword? For one thing, as beliefs, they are coded conceptually in the minds of individual speakers and materialize in the language used by the speech community. Hence, these beliefs are accessible via the methodological tools of Cognitive Linguistics, particularly Conceptual Metaphor Theory.¹⁰

As indicated in the tripartite distinction of supernatural beings referred to above, ghosts are a special subcategory of ancestors, namely, those ancestors who died of an unnatural death or have been neglected after their death.¹¹ Indeed, this ANCESTORS ARE ghosts conceptualization is confirmed in the following quotes (also see Wolf Reference Wolf, Kristiansen and Dirven2008: 373–4):

1. 1) The night Mum and Dad crashed you wouldn’t let me go to the car. You said horrible things about their bodies. You told me not to cry over them because their ghosts would come back and eat me if I did. <ICE-HK:W2F-012#60:1–62:A>

2. 2) Sister Ling says that with people, especially the younger generations, turning away from Chinese customs, she must burn extra incense and other offerings to the neglected spirits of ancestors whose own relatives no longer bother. (South China Morning Post, August 18, 2003: 2)

3. 3) Your mom’s spirit is over there. It means she doesn’t feel well. She comes back. (Troublesome Night 3, Meih Ah Laser Disc Co. Ltd. 1998)

These examples, as well as the blurb for The Haunting Tales of Hong Kong (note the verbs in italics there), signal yet another conceptualization, namely, that ghosts possess human qualities. ghosts are humans is expressed in the following examples (also see Wolf Reference Wolf, Kristiansen and Dirven2008: 374).

1. 4) The aim of this festivals [sic] is to feed and pacify the wandering spirits of dead, which will bring diseases and misfortune to a community. <ICE-HK:W1A-007#94:1>

2. 5) The older ghosts may enjoy watching Chinese opera, but times have changed and the younger generation of ‘ghosts’ like watching this type of performance (South China Morning Post, 2003b)

3. 6) We are good friends, bless us to make a fortune. To bring so much sacrifices to worship you each month, it costs much. (Troublesome Night 3, Meih Ah Laser Disc Co. Ltd. 1998)

4. 7) Old women burn candles, paper money and other gifts to appease the lonely spirits (South China Morning Post, 2003a)

In fact, the practice of making offerings to ancestors and ghosts is very common in Hong Kong. For example, in the seventh month of the lunar calendar, people celebrate the Yu Lan Festival (‘Festival of the Hungry Ghosts’) and ‘make efforts to appease these transient ghosts’, because it is believed that in this month, ‘restless spirits roam the earth’ (Hong Kong Tourism Board 2014). Based on the same belief, everywhere in this city one finds shrines in which fruits and other kinds of food and objects are presented for the ancestors/ghosts (Wolf Reference Wolf, Kristiansen and Dirven2008: 374; also see Wolf and Polzenhagen Reference Wolf and Polzenhagen2012: 391–3). Furthermore, on streets and in designated places, incinerators exist for people – mostly women – to burn paper money and paper models¹² for the use of the ancestors in the other world.¹³ Fire is conceived to be the conduit through which these earthly things are made ready for use by the supernatural beings (Lau Reference Lau2004, also see Scott Reference Scott2007: 20). a paper model is a real object or person in the supernatural world is expressed in the following passages (see Wolf Reference Wolf, Kristiansen and Dirven2008: 374–5; Wolf and Polzenhagen Reference Wolf and Polzenhagen2012: 393):

1. 8) We want to burn a paper woman to Ken [a 22-year-old male, who had died], let’s go. (Meih Ah Laser Disc Co. Ltd. 1998)

2. 9) Mr. Wong is so rich, he won’t live a [sic.] small house after his death. So we must burn him a big villa … I worry that he would feel lonely. So I will burn him two concubines. (Meih Ah Laser Disc Co. Ltd. 1998)

The following two photos depict such paper models and exemplify just a fraction of the numerous imaginable needs of spirits/ghosts in the other world, such as a stereo player, pets, and a car.

In Hong Kong, the belief in ghosts is not restricted to the older generation; non-representative surveys among university students conducted by one of the authors of this chapter revealed that about half of them believe in ghosts, some even go so far as to claim that they have actually seen them. A similar finding is reported in Bosco (Reference Bosco2007: 786). In a survey conducted among students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the statement ‘‘There really are ghosts’’ scored 2.3 on a five-point scale, ranging from 1 ‘‘strongly agree’’ to 5 ‘‘strongly disagree.’’ In this survey, only ten of ninety-nine students disagreed or strongly disagreed with this statement.

Concomitantly, the practice of giving offerings to spirits comes in modern forms.¹⁴ On the iTunes website one can find an advertisement for an iPhone app called ‘The Hell Money Burning Simulator’, with the following description:

• - A ‘hell bank note’ simulator for you to start wiring money to the dead anytime, anywhere

• - Comes [sic] a variety of Hell money for your burning pleasure

• - ‘Hell bank gallery’ gives you a tour on the art and mythology of Hell money from different parts of the world

• - An essay on the history of hell bank note

• - Cool animated background! (Wan Reference Wan2010, italics ours; also see YouTube 2010)

Figure 16.1. Stereo AND PETS

(By Hans-Georg Wolf)

In the case of this ‘Hell Money Burning Simulator’, one could speak of a ‘double virtuality’, as it simulates a reality that is only virtual, at least to an outsider. This app also confirms, somewhat ironically, Hofstede’s (2015) characterization of Hong Kong society as having a ‘long term orientation’, marked by ‘a pragmatic future-oriented perspective’ – the forms of enduring cultural practices, instituted to preserve long-term relationships with ancestors beyond their death, are adapted to technological developments.

The linguistic evidence for the salience of the GHOST concept and respective conceptualizations in HKE is fairly solid if corpus-linguistic methods and conceptual metaphor analysis are applied. More subtly, the cultural peculiarity of burning paper models or paper money as offerings for the spirits/ghosts also shows in the lexical realization of ‘the ditransitive or double-object construction (verb somebody something)’, in ‘I will burn him two concubines’ (example 9). In other words, culture determines the linguistic surface form of a particular construction in English (Wolf Reference Wolf, Kristiansen and Dirven2008: 375).

Figure 16.2. Car

(By courtesy of Frank Polzenhagen)

As to ‘understanding’ Hong Kong culture, one could argue, though, that the belief in ghosts is of little relevance to Hong Kong society, outside of the domains of traditional religious practice or superstition. Such an assumption would be erroneous. ghost conceptualizations have a considerable impact on the individual behaviour of Hongkongers and Hong Kong society at large. This impact is most strongly felt on the real estate market, one of the pillars of the Hong Kong economy. Another article in the Sunday Morning Post (Carney Reference Carney2012) describes a new niche for real estate agents, namely, the sale of ‘haunted houses’ or apartments.

This quote demonstrates the different conceptualizations (many) Chinese Hongkongers have vis-à-vis their expatriate counterparts. While people from the ‘West’ may also feel uncomfortable about living in a place where somebody died an unnatural death, the fact that the whole floor is seen as ‘uninhabitable’ by Chinese Hongkongers has to do with the belief in wandering ghosts. The Squarefoot.com.hk (2013a), the company that lists these ‘haunted houses’, explains this phenomenon as follows:

What is a Haunted House?

The so-called ‘Haunted House’, known as ‘Hong Za (凶宅)’ in Cantonese, generally refers to stigmatized property that has been the site of unusual happenings including murders, suicides, or accidental deaths in jumping fatalities. Other than deaths by homicide or suicide, deaths by nature causes might be haunt-related too. In the case of a death by nature causes like illness or old age, the associated properties are usually not classified as haunted, but some media have coined such units as ‘Semi-haunted House’.

The following is a screen shot from the Haunted house database (Squarefoot.com.hk 2013b), listing the date, the district, the address, the name of the building, and the various unnatural deaths that occurred in these venues.

One particular site in Hong Kong known for many suicides is on Cheung Chau, a picturesque outlying island,¹⁵ specifically an estate known as Bela Vista Villa. The Haunted house database (Squarefoot.com.hk 2013c) holds the following record for Cheung Chau:

Of the thirteen cases recorded for Cheung Chau within the period of 2007 until September 2013, six concerned Bela Vista Villa (half of which were double suicides). Examining the property transactions for Cheung Chau, specifically Bella Vista Villa, one can see a direct correlation between the cases of suicide there and the property prices for sales in this estate. For example, Property Info (n.d.) recorded a sale in Bela Vista Villa on September 20, 2012, with a price per square feet of 886 HKD, as compared to prices per square feet in Cheung Chau ranging from 2,857 HKD to 4,527 HKD for September 2012.¹⁶

The belief in ghosts is intimately connected to Feng Shui or, as it is called in HKE, fung shui.¹⁷ Many houses and apartments in Hong Kong are built, designed, and decorated according to Feng Shui principles in order to foster harmony and well-being. The presence of ghosts is understood to upset the positive energy of a dwelling place, and hence the value of a property associated with ghosts drops. There are, of course, remedies, and on the internet, one finds various Feng Shui websites giving advice on how to avoid or get rid of ghosts, such as placing a mirror in the window, keeping the apartment clean and dry, having pets, and inviting noisy children.

The example of the ‘haunted houses’ clearly shows that the conceptualizations pertaining to ghosts are not only realized in HKE but guide the behaviour of many Hongkongers as well. Returning to a linguistic take on ghosts again, we will discuss how the respective insights are made explicit in the Dictionary of Hong Kong English (Cummings and Wolf Reference Cummings and Wolf2011) and hence utilizable for intercultural communication.

16.4 Cultural conceptualizations – a lexicographic application

Given the preeminence of English as the global lingua franca, variety dictionaries of English can fulfill an important function in the process of intercultural understanding. With their focus on lexical items and usages exclusive to a given variety, these dictionaries are per se ‘cultural’. Speakers of other varieties may turn to them to ‘learn’ about the culture each one of them represents, similar to learners of English consulting learners’ dictionaries of English (Wolf and Polzenhagen Reference Wolf and Polzenhagen2012: 380). However, to go beyond gaining merely an acquaintance with ‘foreign’ lexical items and the things they denote, culture-specific information, especially the conceptualizations pertaining to culturally significant items, needs to be made explicit in variety (and learners’) dictionaries.¹⁸ To apply the theoretical proposals made in Polzenhagen (Reference Polzenhagen2007) and Wolf (Reference Wolf2012), Cummings and Wolf (Reference Cummings and Wolf2011) have incorporated culture-specific conceptualizations for a number of entries in their Dictionary of Hong Kong English (the entries here are reproduced with the kind permission of Hong Kong University Press). The ones with reference to the supernatural and thus relevant to the topic at hand are ghost, joss paper, joss stick, spirit money, and Yuen Lan.

(Cummings and Wolf Reference Cummings and Wolf2011: 64)

As the reader can see, the definition is followed by an authentic text example (also used here as example 5), and the entry includes a frequency label (the four out of five stars indicates that ghost has a fairly high frequency in HKE). The novelty of this dictionary is that the underlying conceptualizations pertaining to ghost are provided, as well as the conceptual source and target domains. In the case of joss paper, the entry has two definitions for the two senses associated with it – sense 2 is the one relevant for this chapter – but otherwise is designed identically.

(Cummings and Wolf Reference Cummings and Wolf2011: 88)

Joss stick adds yet another conceptualization to the ones already mentioned in this chapter, namely, that a smell is a valuable object in the supernatural world. Unlike in the case of paper models, which are made usable to ghosts and ancestors by transformation through fire, the odour of the incensed stick is the desirable ‘object’ itself.

(Cummings and Wolf Reference Cummings and Wolf2011: 88–9)

The entry for spirit money lists the various synonyms for the term and provides a text example for each. It also makes a reference to the entry hell, which, in Daoist belief, is the term and concept for the supernatural world referred to here.

(Cummings and Wolf Reference Cummings and Wolf2011: 163–4)

The conceptualizations related to spirit money are the same as for joss paper. In the entry for Yue Lan, the conceptualizations capture the human qualities attributed to ghosts.

One may also note that all of the items related to the supernatural have at least three out of five stars, that is, they are fairly common in HKE.¹⁹

In the Dictionary of Hong Kong English (Cummings and Wolf Reference Cummings and Wolf2011), these cultural conceptualizations – along with others not relevant to the topic at hand – are listed again as an appendix in a kind of thesaurus, arranged according to target and source domains. As one can see in the following excerpt, for the target domain deceased member of the community, the cultural conceptualization profiling this domain, a deceased member of the community is a supernatural being, is provided, as well as the lexical item instantiating this conceptualization.

(Cummings and Wolf Reference Cummings and Wolf2011: 203)

The same holds true for the target domains paper model, sweet smell, and supernatural being (Cummings and Wolf Reference Cummings and Wolf2011: 204).

Under the source domains, in turn, one finds the target domains used to specify the source domain.

(Cummings and Wolf Reference Cummings and Wolf2011: 205)

This arrangement allows the reader, who is referred to this appendix by the ‘Underlying conceptualizations’ part of the dictionary entry, to retrieve connections between lexical entries and their underlying conceptualizations (cf. Wolf and Polzenhagen Reference Wolf and Polzenhagen2012: 388–91); for example, the fact that both paper models as well as the sweet smell of joss sticks are considered as objects in the ‘world beyond’. Admittedly, this addition of conceptual information to a variety dictionary is (still) limited in scope. However, this feature is an attempt at making the culturally relevant findings that have been gained by means of cognitive-linguistic methods available to a wider public and hence, albeit in a modest way, contributes to intercultural understanding.

16.5 Conclusion

In this chapter, we looked into an important aspect of Hong Kong culture – the belief in ghosts. To borrow the term from Schatzberg (Reference Schatzberg2001: passim), the ‘alternative causalities’ – from a rationalist, ‘Western’ point of view – revealed in the conceptualizations we described are a matter of debate among anthropologists. How are spiritual, supernatural things to be dealt with theoretically by the anthropological observer, if they hold such an important place for the community in question but run counter to scientific belief? Here, we cannot enter this debate (see, e.g., Bosco Reference Bosco2007: 803–4, and Wolf and Polzenhagen Reference Wolf and Polzenhagen2009: 120–7 for longer discussions), but concede that ghosts are ‘real’ in the sense that they materialize in Hong Kong English and indeed guide the actions of its speakers.

This linguistic materialization is due to the embedment of the English language in a particular cultural environment. The fact that cultural patterns are reflected in language lends support to the habitat approach to language, which posits the transformative role of language and cultural contact. Not only has English transformed the linguistic habitat of Hong Kong, but Hong Kong has transformed the English language spoken there as well.

One of our aims was to show how this transformation can be captured by means of Cognitive Linguistics and to demonstrate how the respective conceptualizations prevalent in Hong Kong society impact upon the (economic) behaviour of its members. By doing so, we further tried to establish the usefulness of this approach for intercultural understanding, and, for the purpose of this volume, for communicating with Asia specifically. We firmly believe that the methodology applied in our study could also be used to shed light (not only) on other Asian Englishes and thus could be used to gain a more comprehensive view of Asian cultures.

17.1 Concepts and clarifications

From a European perspective, this chapter deals with the issue of how we can understand Asia (and South Asia or India, respectively, in particular) through English literature. The title, of course, needs to be specified. First of all, starting with the easier problems, the relevant scope must be envisaged. Transcending cultural nationalisms and imperialisms in a global context, “English literature” has come to include literature written in the varieties of English all over the world, irrespective of the nationality of an author. Historically speaking, under colonialism the bulk of English literature on Asia was provided by British authors and publishers, starting in the seventeenth and not altogether ending during the twentieth century. Today, Asian publishing houses contribute a notable share of English-language publishing worldwide. According to PublishersGlobal.com, they are located in India (62 publishers), Pakistan (6), Singapore (5), China (4), Hong Kong (3), Malaysia (2) and Japan (2). And this is not all: transnational authors from Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines and other Asian countries, who publish in America or Britain, describe and explain Asian realities to international audiences in English, the world language of our days (cf. Lionel Wee et al. Reference Wee, Goh and Lim2013). Many of them, above all poets and novelists (who feel notoriously admonished at home by guardians of cultural autarchy to produce authenticity in their countries of origin), have been and are being questioned and attacked for pandering to Western readers. On the other hand, fascinated by the “principle of linguistic relativity” (which is usually attributed to Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir but can be traced back to Wilhelm von Humboldt), many of those Western readers have doubted whether a “true” insight into an alien culture is at all possible without having access to the language actually spoken by its people. The question then is: On which grounds can we understand Asia (or indeed any other part of the world) through literature in English – considering that such texts might be supplied by local authors?

“Understanding”, the other critical keyword that needs to be addressed beforehand, is usually taken to be everybody’s daily practice in making sense of the world and successfully dealing with others. “Understanding” has therefore been generally valued as an indispensable requirement of epistemological and social competence. But, beyond that, since the late nineteenth century, “understanding” has become a notoriously difficult term for philosophers, anthropologists and linguists alike. Seeing historical phenomena such as words and meanings, myths and manners, stories and histories as fundamentally different from the “hard” objects discovered and described by the natural sciences, the ability and indeed the human “science” of “understanding” was shaped into the modern historical and philosophical method of hermeneutics, above all by Hans Georg Gadamer (Reference Gadamer, Weinsheimer and Marshall1960). This is not the place to recapitulate this complex debate carried on, above all, by Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas (cf. Ulin Reference Ulin1984, ch. 5 and 6). Instead, I would rather like to take a sidestep and suggest a phenomenological approach:

Structurally, therefore, we should consider literary texts as complex aggregations of audio/visual signs, intentional structures open to interpretation within the framework of hierarchical sign systems. Both their intentions and interpretations are inevitably governed by historical conventions and individual desires, subject to prejudices of all sorts. Their theoretical reflection and practical negotiation rests with the discipline of hermeneutics, which needs to be based on solid historical, social and anthropological research. While linguists usually concentrate their analysis on phonetics, morphemics, graphemics, syntax and semantics, literary analysis tends to investigate the formative systems of textual generics described in poetology, dramatology, narratology and mythology – along with their various subsystems. Thus, through our comprehensive knowledge of these systems, we can approximately understand texts and thereby part of the world – and, ideally, our communication partners.

In colonial encounters, exotic cultures may have been seen as dark areas, and foreign languages as barriers to understanding. But this was and is true for both ends of colonial speechlessness and incomprehension. In any case, such prejudices of mutual incomprehension cannot be styled into a convincing and practicable theory of cultural relativism. Neither individuals nor cultures can be considered as inaccessible or reclusive islands, however difficult or remote their language or communicative system might seem. In order to move meaningfully and responsibly in our world and in order to explain the effective reality of global communication, we must believe in the translatability and interpretability not only of texts but also of cultures and the world.

The fact that language and literature can indeed help to induce and facilitate a process of “deep understanding” between speakers, listeners, writers and readers from different cultures does not seem to be surprising. I have discussed the ways in which this understanding works and can be fostered in literature – with special reference to the New Literatures in English (Stilz Reference Stilz and Glaap1987) and, respectively, to India (Stilz Reference Stilz, Casper-Hehne and Gupte2010). It may therefore suffice to affirm that literary texts, beyond informing readers of material realities, manifest relations and efficient values in a given culture, provide entries to other ways and modes of correlating. They do so 1) by narrating stories that make readers familiar with other ways of speaking and comprehending in languages initially foreign to them, 2) by installing narrators and speakers (who represent culture-specific viewpoints and perspectives) and make readers familiar with other ways of seeing, commenting and judging, 3) by self-revelations of fictional characters and psychological inside views which train our sympathy with others so that readers become accustomed to other ways of being, and 4) by expanding and changing established genres (and thus introducing new systems of order). This inter- (and effectively trans-) cultural service is usually not offered in the routine encounters between business people of different cultural backgrounds.

However, the title of this chapter flags a third term whose implications must be curbed and defined from the outset, that is, the concept of “Asia”. This vast continent with its more than four billion inhabitants constitutes a monstrous term when dished up as a single object of “understanding”. Without wise and modest preconsideration, this mega-continent of facts, figures, people, histories and opinions would resist any serious scholarly treatment. Obviously, we must limit and qualify the target we have in mind when addressing “Asia” in the following pages. Undoubtedly, our specific interest defines our object to a certain extent. Our desire of “understanding” Asia cannot aim at matters of physical geography or other phenomena usually handled by the natural sciences. Such observations would have to be based on methods of scientific description and measuring, and they would be taken to book as scientific “knowledge”. Instead, the results of our efforts at understanding should rather be called “cultural insights”. They rest on analysis, interpretation and, possibly, evaluation. They constitute elements of transcultural wisdom and build up into registers of communicative competence which, in a postcolonial world, are traded as the tricks of intercultural communication.

Therefore, “Asia” in this context is necessarily Asian Culture – and, we hasten to add, no more than a limited and exemplary segment of Asian cultures. Talking of English literature in Asia, the impact of the British colonial past in the “Indian Empire” and its present-day effects and repercussions would immediately seem to justify our concentration on South Asian countries. Here, we have a large and rewarding research area with well-documented historical processes of long-term contact. Since the early ninteenth century, memorandums of official and personal involvement have solicited the spread and propagation of English as a useful imperial lingua franca in British India. Furthermore, in the wake of independence, vociferous public debates, political efforts and individual voices defended and attributed a new place and role to this alien language under changed and changing conditions. This rich exemplary history (made accessible through anthologies and textbooks such as Stilz and Dengel-Janic Reference Stilz and Dengel-Janic2010) may serve as a plausible argument for effectively limiting “Asia” to one of its regions. For our exemplary purposes of assessing the utility of English, South Asia will prove to be a large and in many ways representative area, still varied and complex enough, as shall be seen. However, under the auspices of its function as a world language, English in South Asia today is not only supported by the much-defiled colonial or neocolonial machinations of Britain and the United States, but also by the less clearly identifiable centres of international trade, of worldwide political organizations and global communication. Therefore, other Asian areas may sooner or later be seen as participating in and contributing to comparable intercultural problems owed to English as a postcolonial world language.

17.2 South Asian literature in English: origins – survivals – prospects

The major part of my contribution will now be reserved to reviewing the ongoing debate of understanding and mediating South Asia through English writing. In order to forestall the charge of Western neocolonial arrogance and European ethnocentricism, South Asian authors and critics will be given precedence. Arguments will be arranged on three historical levels: Colonial (c. 1820–1940), Independence (1947–1960), Towards a New Millenium (since 1990). My review will refer to both theoretical and programmatic statements and outstanding literary experiments.

When studying the Indian debate over the legitimacy of English as a language of instruction and as a valid mode of creative expression, the philosophical discussion on “understanding” at first sight seems to be a purely academic affair. With due credit to a few exceptions like Nissim Ezekiel (Reference Ezekiel and Amirthanayagam1982), most authors do not seem to bother much about this question. But we find references and core arguments that defend English as an instrument of understanding (South) Asia on grounds of an irreversible cultural history.

This rather pragmatic debate has basically oscillated between universalism and nativism.¹ In nativist statements of South Asian cultural autarchy, both cultural relativism and nationalist essentialism play a submerged but fundamental role. Those who criticize nativism and defend Indian English as a window to the world or, vice versa, as the world’s window to Asia, explicitly or implicitly rely on a reasonably well-grounded universalist notion of “understanding”. Their explanations of why English might be (and remain) a convincing and even authentic medium for South Asian self-expression largely follow four widespread assumptions. They have accompanied the debate over English in South Asia for many generations and were eventually transformed into authoritative doctrines:

1. 1) English has become a shaping force in modernizing Indian knowledge. The fact that the colonizer’s language has been the privileged medium in South Asian education for over 200 years cannot be undone without grave damage to the sources available in all fields of knowledge.

2. 2) English has become part of the Indian makeup. This assumption goes one step further by naturalizing the colonial language as a meanwhile deeply embedded feature of the “Indian mind”.

3. 3) India has always enjoyed and cultivated a tradition of polyglot behaviour. The deep impact of English in India is said to have been supported by an ancient Indian ability and readiness to speak and think in several languages at the same time (e.g., Sanskrit and Prakrit; Persian and Urdu; English and the Indian vernaculars).

4. 4) Indians have come to translate much of their traditions into an expanded realm of English. The preceding assumptions concerning the remarkable linguistic pliancy and receptivity of Indian cultures have helped to liberate South Asian intellectuals from the colonial paradigm of seeing their country as the victim of a domineering foreign language and assure their subversive and eventually confidently empowered agency to transform and expand the very medium of their subjection.

17.3 Conclusion

Altogether, this chapter claims that a convincing argument can be made for the effective use of writing in English as a helpful body of literature for understanding Asia – though some nativists might consider this fact as a deplorable irony of colonialism. Our argument can evidently be made historically most plausible and materially conclusive in an area like South Asia, where British colonialism has lowered the barriers and prepared the ground for intercultural traffic through the labours of generations of language teachers and translators. This is no less true for other anglophone colonies and protectorates in Asia, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines and even South Korea and Taiwan, where the impact of British or American cultural investments has been substantial. But undoubtedly, under the changed role of English as a transnational global language, other countries like Japan or China – even if to a lesser degree – become more easily accessible and can make themselves better understood through the work of native authors who write in English. It will be a matter for experts and committed insiders to decide whether this development should be considered as a gain or a loss in terms of cultural identity. But it seems doubtful to me whether their findings will deeply affect this powerful process of anglophone collusion in a mobile world – unless the present global power structure should change.

18.1 Introduction – regional lingua francas

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) was formally established with the Bangkok Declaration of 8 August 1967. The date was no accident, as ‘8’ is a lucky number in many Asian cultures and the double eight at least doubly so. Five countries comprised the original grouping, namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. Language – in particular which language(s) might be used as official or working languages – was not addressed. Delegates reported that they just assumed that the working language would be English (Okudaira Reference Okudaira1999). This tacit and assumed adoption of English must seem remarkable to Europeans who have lived through the genesis and growth of the European Community with its automatic adoption of national languages as official and working languages. It is even more remarkable that ASEAN adopted an English-only policy when Malay was an obvious choice to be at least a co-official language. It was an obvious choice because it is both an official and the national language of Singapore and the national language of Malaysia and Indonesia (although Bahasa Indonesia shows some variation from Bahasa Melayu). Varieties of Malay are also spoken in the southern parts of the Philippines and Thailand. Hence, Malay had a significant presence in each of the five founding member states of ASEAN. Importantly, Malay has had a long history of being a regional lingua franca. Indeed, it is currently one of those languages, along with English, Persian, Swahili and Urdu, which has more lingua franca speakers than mother tongue speakers (Ostler Reference Ostler2010: 227). Its long history as a lingua franca starts at the beginning of the first millennium, when Chinese travellers to the Indonesian Archipelago called the lingua franca in use there Kw’enlun. ‘There is no doubt that the Kw’enlun of the early travellers was a form of Malay’ (Alisjahbana Reference Alisjahbana and Joshua1974: 392). While a form of Malay acted as a lingua franca for several centuries, the first glossary we have of the language was the one recorded in 1521 by Pigafetta, a member of Magellan’s party in his voyage around the world. In 1614, a Dutch navigator, Jan Huygen van Linschoten, wrote that Malay was both widely spoken and the most prestigious language of the Orient (Alisjahbana Reference Alisjahbana and Joshua1974: 363). It was used as a lingua franca by the Dutch during the period of their 300-year (1650–1950) rule over Indonesia (Ostler Reference Ostler2010). To a certain extent, this backfired, as it was adopted as the lingua franca by groups seeking independence, ‘the language of unity against the Dutch’ (Bernard Reference Bernard, Brown and Ganguly2003: 273).

This was a strong reason why it then became adopted as the national language of an independent Indonesia, although it was only spoken by a very small minority of the population. In fact, the low number of native speakers also worked in its favour in its adoption of the national language. The largest Indonesian language, with some 75 million speakers, is Javanese (Montolalu and Suryadinata Reference Montolalu, Suryadinata, Guan and Suryadinata2007). But, as the Javanese were already the most powerful ethnic group in Indonesia, there was reluctance at further advantaging them by making their language the national language. Other reasons for caution at the adoption of Javanese is that the Javanese society is highly hierarchical and these hierarchies are linguistically reflected in complex ways in the language. A further reason for the adoption of Malay as the national language of Indonesia is that it is relatively easy to learn (Ostler Reference Ostler2005). Its adoption as Indonesia’s national language – now called Bahasa Indonesia – means, of course that it has become the lingua franca of Indonesia, a richly diverse and multilingual nation where some 700 languages are spoken by several hundred different ethnic groups (Lewis et al. 2014).

It is this long history and current use of Malay as a regional lingua franca that makes it surprising that Malay was not suggested as a working language of the original ASEAN grouping. In the years following the founding of ASEAN in 1967, five more countries have joined at various times so that Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam are now all members. Vietnam, in preparation for membership in 1995, asked whether French could also be adopted as a working language of ASEAN, but this was summarily turned down (Okudaira Reference Okudaira1999). A request for Malay was tabled in 1997, but was not taken up. In 2009, the ASEAN Charter was signed. Article 34 of the Charter, ‘Working Language of ASEAN’, simply reads, ‘The working language of ASEAN shall be English’, thus making official forty years of unofficial practice.

We have seen how English has become the official and sole working language of ASEAN and how Malay, although denied an official role within ASEAN, has become the national language – and thus the national lingua franca – of Indonesia. The nations of ASEAN have likewise promoted national languages in an effort to encourage a sense of national identity and these have become national if not regional lingua francas. For example, the Philippines, a country with around 170 languages (Dekker and Young Reference Dekker and Young2005) has established Filipino as the national language. The very name of the national language has itself been a creation, as, to some extent, has the language itself. In 1959, it was decreed that Pilipino would be the name given to the national language. This was to distinguish it from Tagalog, the language spoken in and around Manila, the national capital, although, it was, in effect, Tagalog. The 1973 Constitution stated that the national language ‘needed to be formed from all existing Philippine languages’ (Gonzalez Reference Gonzalez and Bautista1996: 328). Given the number of Filipino languages, that was clearly an impossible task. The 1987 Constitution rechristened the national language from Pilipino to Filipino, significant in that there is no [F] sound in Tagalog, and this was a way of trying to indicate that Filipino was not Tagalog ‘with ethnic extras’ (Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick2010a: 37). The year 1987 also saw the creation of the National Language Institute (Komyson sa Wikang Filipino), one of whose tasks was to develop Filipino based on existing languages of the Philippines, not excluding the previous colonial languages of Spanish and English (Rappa and Wee Reference Rappa and Wee2006).

Tagalog, the language upon which Filipino is based, is the language with the largest number of speakers. There are several other major languages, including Cebuano, Ilocano, Hiligaynon, Bicol and Waray. As will be illustrated below in the section on language education, these and other languages are now used as languages of education in elementary (primary) schools. Unlike the situation in Indonesia, the choice of which language should be the national language was very much a top-down decision and it is therefore not surprising that the choice fell upon the language spoken in and around the capital, Manila.

In Vietnam, the great majority of the 80 million population are first language speakers of Vietnamese. In addition to these first language speakers of Vietnamese, there are fifty-four ethnic groups with their own languages (Thaveeporn Reference Thaveeporn, Brown and Ganguly2003). However, given that some 90 percent of the population are speakers of Vietnamese, the adoption of Vietnamese as the national language seems natural. These choices are easier in relatively homogeneous societies where the great majority share the same first language, as is the case, for example, in Japan and Korea. In China, however, the linguistic situation is more complex, as will be illustrated below.

As is well known, China is the most populous nation on earth with a total population approaching 1.4 billion. It represents a further example of where the national language, Putonghua, has been decided by the government. Putonghua, which literally means ‘common language’, is based on the northern variety of Mandarin. The Chinese language can be divided, however, into seven dialect groups, many of which have many millions of speakers. Shanghainese (or Wu to give the language group its official name) has 77 million speakers and Cantonese (or Yue) has more than 56 million speakers (Ostler Reference Ostler2010: 227). The Min dialect group comprises Min Nan Hua (Southern Min, of which Hokkien is a variety) and which is also the major dialect of Taiwan and spoken widely among the Chinese diaspora (Wei Reference Wei2010). The Xiang, Hakka and Gan languages make up the seven major groupings. It is important to underline that the spoken forms of these dialects are mutually unintelligible.

The National Language Law of China proscribes the use of any of these Chinese languages other than the national language, Putonghua, as a language of education. This means, for example, that, by law, Cantonese cannot be taught in the schools of Guangdong Province. The only languages, other than ‘foreign’ languages such as English, which can be taught in the government school system are the languages of certain national minorities, such as Mongolian and Zhuang, and I return to this in the section under language education below.

The Chinese government’s promotion of Putonghua as the national language has been an outstanding success in that the majority of Chinese now report being able to understand and use the language. There has also been a substantial increase in demand outside China for Putonghua. Partly to meet this demand, but more to promote Chinese and Chinese culture outside China, the Chinese government has, since 2004, established a number of Confucian Institutes. By 2010, 396 Confucian Institutes had already been established across eighty-seven countries (Ostler Reference Ostler2010: 245). The goal is for 1,000 Institutes by 2020.

In this introduction, I have given a brief review of languages that are being used either as regional or national lingua francas in East and Southeast Asia. It is interesting to note that the reasons for the choices of the respective national lingua francas were different. In the case of Filipino and Putonghua, the language spoken in and around the respective capitals was chosen as the national lingua franca. In the case of Vietnam, the language spoken by the great majority of the people was chosen. And, in the case of Indonesia, a language spoken only by a very small minority of the people was chosen.

This is not, by any means, an exhaustive list. Many other languages act as national lingua francas, with Burmese and Khmer, the language of Cambodia, just two examples. In the next section, I examine in more detail the role of English as a lingua franca within the region, and consider the consequence of this for language education practices and policies.

18.2 English as a lingua franca

As noted above, English is the sole working language of ASEAN. This fact is particularly significant in that English is playing an official role in cultural contexts beyond its traditional native speaker Anglo-cultural sphere. It is true, of course, that this is not the first and only time for English to play that role. Many different varieties of English have developed across the world, giving rise, for example, to new varieties of English across Africa and Asia. It is axiomatic that these new varieties of English have developed ways of referring to and reflecting the cultures of their speakers (Kachru Reference Kachru1983; Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick2007). There is nothing new or surprising in this. In the same way, for example, that Australian English has developed to reflect the cultures of Australians, so too have the various Englishes of Africa and Asia. A common method of indigenization is to adopt words from local languages to describe or refer to local phenomena. Thus, kangaroo, boomerang and koala are now words of Australian English, but remain also part of the lexis of (different) local Australian Aboriginal languages. Thus, kampong (village), makan (food/eat) and adat (traditional customs) are now words of Malaysian English, but remain part of the lexis of Malay. New varieties also express the cultural conceptualizations of their speakers. For example, specific kinship terms in varieties of African English represent the importance these cultures place on family ties (Wolf Reference Wolf and Kirkpatrick2010). New varieties are also linguistically influenced by the first languages of their speakers. The extent of this influence is a matter of degree, but is seen in all varieties (Mufwene Reference Mufwene2001). I shall not expound on the development of Asian varieties of World English in any detail here. Interested readers are referred to Bolton (Reference Bolton2003), Kachru (Reference Kachru2005), Kirkpatrick (Reference Kirkpatrick2007) and Low and Azirah (Reference Low and Hashim2012). The point to be stressed here is that with its official adoption as the working language of this group of ten Asian countries, English has been voluntarily chosen by ASEAN members to act as the lingua franca where there are no native speakers, as traditionally defined, of the language. This role is moving English into a post-Anglo-cultural sphere and into an Asian sphere. As a minister in the Cambodian government reported some years ago, ‘You know, when we use English, we don’t think about the United States or England. We only think about the need to communicate’ (Clayton Reference Clayton2006: 233).

In order to investigate what this use of English as a lingua franca across ASEAN entails, a group of researchers collected a corpus of English as used as a spoken lingua franca by Asian multilinguals. This is the Asian Corpus of English (ACE), which was released in 2014.¹ It may seem obvious to point out, but the topics that such Asian multilinguals discuss are topics which are relevant, important and interesting to them. The topics are centred in Asian cultural contexts (Kirkpatrick, Patkin and Wu Reference Kirkpatrick, Patkin, Jingjing, Sharifian and Jamarani2013). These Asian multilinguals have taken ownership of English and, as will be explored in further detail below, this means that those visiting Asia need to become familiar with Asian varieties of English and how it is used in lingua franca contexts. The cultural frame of reference required is an Asian one, not an Anglo-American one.

A noteworthy example of the use of English as a lingua franca in new fields and in cultural contexts that are firmly divorced from Anglo-American influences is its use in the teaching of English for Islamic values in boarding schools attached to mosques in Indonesia. These schools are known as pesantren and have been teaching English for many years, although parents were concerned that the English being taught should be in accord with Islamic values (Fahrudin Reference Fahrudin2013). Fahrudin reports how the pesantren have managed the apparent conflicts between Islam and an English loaded with western cultural values and have successfully integrated Islamic perspectives. As a simple example, when children in the pesantren are taught the use of ‘will’ to indicate promises or plans, they attach the suffix ‘insya’Allah’ (or God willing) to give a sentence such as ‘I will come tomorrow, insya’Allah’. Fahrudin also reports that some mosques in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, now use English for the seven-minute talk which follows prayers, due to the increase in the number of foreigners attending these mosques.

18.3 Implications for language(s) education

The take up of English in East and Southeast Asia has, not surprisingly, been reflected in the school curricula throughout the region. Indonesia is the only country of ASEAN which does not make English a compulsory subject in primary school, and the new curriculum, currently being trialled, also drops it as a compulsory and discrete subject from the secondary school syllabus. All the other countries in the ASEAN group make English compulsory from primary school. At the opposite end of the English language continuum from Indonesia lies Singapore. Singapore has a bilingual policy that can be summarized as English +1. It places the most importance upon English by making it the medium of instruction for all subjects from Primary 1. The ‘+1’ represents the so-called mother tongue, of which three languages are taught, namely, Mandarin Chinese (known as huayu in Singapore), Malay and Tamil. These ‘mother tongues’ are actually determined by ethnicity rather than language. Thus, all ethnically Chinese Singaporeans learn Mandarin as their mother tongue in school, no matter whether this is their first language or not. Not surprisingly given the bilingual policy, English is becoming the dominant home language of an increasing number of Singaporeans. This has meant that the government has had to rethink how to teach the mother tongues and to treat them more as foreign languages. English is now playing an increasing role in the teaching of these mother tongues (Silver and Bokhorst-Heng Reference Silver and Wendy2013). The original idea behind the bilingual policy was for English to ensure that Singaporeans were able to participate in and contribute to globalization and modernization and for the mother tongue to keep them in touch with their cultural backgrounds. However, the development of Singapore English and in particular the informal colloquial variety of Singaporean English, Singlish, has, in my view, taken over both roles, those of modernization and local identity (Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick2010a).

Brunei has long implemented a bilingual (dwibahasa) policy with standard Malay and English being the two languages in question (Jones Reference Jones, Bautista, Llamzon and Sibayana2000), but with some variations in the roles each of the languages have played. For example, until 2009, Malay was the medium of instruction until Primary 3, with English taking over as the medium of instruction (MoI) for a range of subjects including maths, science, geography, history and technical subjects from Primary 4, with Malay remaining the MoI for Malay literature, Islamic knowledge, civics, physical education and handicrafts. The adoption in 2011 of the National Education System for the twenty-first century introduced English as the MoI from Primary 1 for the teaching of maths and science. This move to introduce English as the MoI from Primary 1 represents the reverse of the new policy in Malaysia, which has abandoned the use of English as a MoI for maths and science from Primary 1, replacing it with Malay (Gill Reference Gill, Kirkpatrick and Sussex2012). English remains a subject to be taught in Primary school. As Gill notes, the scrapping of the English-medium policy, which had been in force since 2002, was caused by a complex array of reasons including the results of research studies which showed that the policy disadvantaged students from rural and lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and the lack of proficiency in English of some students and teachers, especially for the teaching of maths and science (Gill Reference Gill, Kirkpatrick and Sussex2012: 45).

Another country in the ASEAN group to have recently revised its language education policies is the Philippines. Until the recent changes, English and the national language, Filipino, were the two media of instruction in schools from Primary 1 (known as Grade 1 in the Philippines). For example, the revised Bilingual Education Policy (BEP) of 1987 made English the MoI for maths, science and English and Filipino the MoI for the other subjects. As reported above, Filipino is actually derived from Tagalog and Tagalog is traditionally restricted to the capital, Manila and the surrounding areas. The choice of Filipino as the national lingua franca and one of the two official mediums of instruction therefore meant that non-Tagalog speaking children could arrive in primary school to find they had to learn in two new languages. To simplify an extremely complex series of language policy debates, over the years there have been ‘frequent efforts at incorporating vernacular languages into the curriculum…’ (Dekker and Young Reference Dekker and Young2005: 186), but it was not until the Education Department issued an order, Institutionalising Mother Tongue-based Multlilingual Education, in 2009 that the advantages of using the child’s first language in education were officially endorsed. More recently, in May 2013, President Benigno Aquino signed into law the Enhanced Basic Education Act, extending compulsory education to thirteen years, comprising one year of kindergarten, six years of primary and six years secondary. Part of the act reads, ‘For kindergarten and the first three years of elementary education, instruction, teaching materials and assessment shall be in the regional or native language of the learners’.

This seems a Herculean task, given, as mentioned above that 168 languages are used in the Philippines. In effect, languages with orthographies will be chosen and a list of nineteen major languages which can be used as languages of education has been published.

The Act also stipulates that Grades 4–6 will be a transition period when English and Filipino gradually take over as MoI in preparation for secondary school. This has dissatisfied many of the proponents of Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE), who are still calling for the local vernaculars to be used throughout primary school. In any event, it will probably be about another three to five years before the use of MTB-MLE can be properly evaluated (Nolasco, personal communication, May 30, 2013).

English plays a possibly unique role among the Filipino workforce, as proficiency in English allows so many Filipinos to work overseas. This overseas workforce remits part of its earnings home. The most recent figures from the National Statistics Office of the Philippines reported that, in 2011, over 2 million Filipinos were working overseas – with a roughly equal gender ratio. The homeward remittances of Filipino overseas workers in 2012 totaled more than US$2 billion (National Statistics Office 2013). This opportunity to work overseas is crucially important, as the country suffers from chronic under-employment. One avenue for work at home is provided by the growing Call Centre Industry (Bolton Reference Bolton and Kirkpatrick2010). This industry employed 300,000 workers in 2008 and this number had increased to 416,000 by 2011, with a projected additional 150,000 jobs to come as the industry moves beyond Metro Manila and into the so-called Next Wave Cities (Everest Group 2012). But, although this exemplifies ‘the role of English as the language of modernity and development in Asia’s dramatically developing economies’ (Bolton Reference Bolton and Kirkpatrick2010: 562), call centre English is very much connected with an Anglo-American cultural context, as the English used by call centre operatives is required to mimic American English. That this is resented by the operatives themselves is illustrated by the lyrics of the ‘Call Centre Song’, by the band, Cambio, ‘Now let’s get one thing straight, I don’t really want to work this way, but I get paid for my American accent, I got money to pay the rent’ (Bolton Reference Bolton and Kirkpatrick2010: 559).

For the final example of national language education policy, I move beyond ASEAN and consider the situation in China. It is impossible to predict with any accuracy the number of people learning English in China, but English is a compulsory school subject from Grade 3 upwards. The Chinese Ministry of Education figures for 2008 show that there are about 71 million students in Grades 3–6, 85 million secondary school students and 10 million tertiary students (Qiufang Reference Qiufang, Kirkpatrick and Sussex2012). As the overwhelming majority of these students are learning English, this means that there are some 160 million students learning English from primary through to undergraduate level. This does not take into account those schoolchildren learning English privately, students at postgraduate level or adults who are learning English for whatever reason. In any event, it seems safe to assume that Chinese speakers learning English now outnumber the total number of native speakers of it. This development has given rise to some debate over whether a new Chinese variety of English has developed. Zhichang (Reference Zhichang2010), in describing a series of linguistic features, presents a persuasive account that one can now indeed sensibly talk about a Chinese variety of English.

English currently enjoys a uniquely privileged position in China’s language education policy, with more people learning the language than learning Chinese languages, other than Putonghua itself. As indicated above, the National Language Law prescribes Putonghua as the sole Chinese language of education, going as far as to proscribe the teaching of other Chinese languages. The government does allow the teaching of national minority languages (such as Mongolian, Korean and Zhuang), but the success of these bilingual (or trilingual if one includes English) policies is limited (Feng and Adamson, Reference Anwei and Adamson2015).

One area where English has made significant inroads is in higher education – and this also is true in many other Asian countries (Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick, Murray and Scarino2013) – but here the focus will be on China and Hong Kong. As long ago as 2001, the then Chinese Premier, Zhu Rongji, announced while on a visit to the School of Economics and Management at the prestigious Tsinghua University: ‘I hope that all classes will be taught in English. I don’t worship foreign languages, but we need to exchange our ideas with the rest of the world’.

China’s University and College Admissions System (CUCAS) provides a link to degree programmes taught in English under the tab ‘Quick access to hot majors in English’. These include a wide range of undergraduate degrees in Medicine and Dentistry, Economics and Management, Law, Engineering (eight branches), Biology and Journalism. A range of Masters and Doctoral programmes available in English are also listed.

In Hong Kong, six of the eight government-funded universities are English medium. Even the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which was established in 1963 to provide Chinese-medium courses, has recently moved to increase the number of English-medium courses that it offers with the explicitly stated goal of increasing its international profile (Li Reference Li, Doiz, Lasagabaster and Sierra2013). This move caused great controversy among the student body, with one student filing an application for judicial review, arguing that the university’s charter stipulated that Chinese be the major medium of instruction at the university. This application was rejected by the Court of Final Appeal in 2011, stating that the university had the right to mandate the medium of instruction (Li Reference Li, Doiz, Lasagabaster and Sierra2013: 74). As Li (Reference Li, Doiz, Lasagabaster and Sierra2013: 81) points out, there is strong evidence that English has been embraced as a form of linguistic capital, crucial for Hong Kong’s continued economic vitality and development.

This is particularly striking in the case of China and Hong Kong, where the linguistic capital of Putonghua would appear to be undervalued. While, as reported above, the Chinese government has moved to establish hundreds of Confucian Institutes throughout the world, and while many Chinese universities offer non-degree programmes in the Chinese language, most universities in China and Hong Kong seem curiously hesitant about offering bilingual degrees that would see students graduate bilingual and biliterate in Chinese and English. One would expect degrees that graduated students bilingual and biliterate in these two languages would be in high demand.

The shift to providing English-medium degree courses is, of course, not simply an Asian phenomenon, but is a worldwide trend (Doiz, Lasagabaster and Sierra Reference Doiz, Lasagabaster, Sierra, Doiz, Lasagabaster and Sierra2013; Jenkins Reference Jenkins2014), and would be very familiar to European universities. Reasons are complex and often financially driven (Knight Reference Knight2008), but a desire to climb the university rankings is commonly evident. Internationalization is a key criterion used in measuring performance in university tables, and, as this almost always leads to universities adopting more EMI courses in order to attract international students and staff, internationalization can be equated to some extent with Englishization. This role of English in the rapidly increasing internationalization of higher education is as evident in Asia as anywhere else, if not more so.

To date, I have given an account of some of the roles of English in selected countries in East and Southeast Asia, along with a discussion of the consequences of these upon language education policies and practices. In the concluding section of the chapter, I shall consider the implications of these increasing and diverse roles of English in Asia’s habitats for those needing to communicate with Asia. I shall start with a brief review of the Australian Government’s recent White Paper, Australia in the Asian Century, as this itemizes the skills it believes Australians need to navigate what it calls the Asian Century. I shall then offer some thoughts on what skills I believe are needed to successfully engage with Asia in the coming years.

18.4 Communicating with Asia

In October 2012, the Australian Government released a White Paper entitled Australia in the Asian Century (Commonwealth of Australia 2012). The government itself describes the document as a ‘roadmap to guide Australia to becoming a more prosperous and resilient nation, fully part of the region and open to the world’. It is important to note that Australian governments have long promoted the study of Asian languages, but with limited success (Rudd Reference Rudd1994; Leitner Reference Leitner2007).

The importance of Asia to Australia is illustrated by these excerpts from the recent White Paper (Commonwealth of Australia 2012: 2): ‘As a nation we also need to broaden and deepen our understanding of Asian cultures and languages, to become more Asia literate’. In order to help Australians become ‘Asia literate’, the White Paper (2012: 15) promises that ‘Every Australian student will have significant exposure to studies of Asia across the curriculum…’ and that ‘All schools will engage with at least one school in Asia to support the teaching of a priority Asian language’ (i.e., Mandarin, Hindi, Japanese and Indonesian). Although the White Paper is short on detail on how these policies might be implemented, it clearly underscores the increasing importance of Asia. And while few could argue with the need for more Australians to become Asia literate and to learn Asian languages, there is no acknowledgment in the White Paper of the new roles English is playing in the region and how an understanding of these might help Australians successfully engage with Asian multilinguals. This represents a missed opportunity, for although learning an Asian language in depth is the best way to communicate and work with Asia, it takes perseverance and commitment to reach the required proficiency to be able to operate at advanced levels. Simultaneously, it is unlikely that any one individual will be able to reach the required levels of proficiency in several Asian languages. Therefore, while individuals should certainly be encouraged to develop these high levels of linguistic proficiency, courses in intercultural communication using English as a lingua franca could be an effective way of increasing Asian literacy among a greater number of people.

A danger in referring to ‘Asia’, as in ‘The Asian Century’, is that it may lead people to view Asia as a homogenous whole with a common unified purpose, when in fact it is characterized by great diversity and differences in opinion. One component such a course would need to include would therefore be to highlight the diversity within Asia, and an introduction to the different varieties of English which operate in Asia would promote the notion that variation is both natural and widespread. This would not need to be a detailed course which discussed in any depth the complete array of linguistic features distinctive to a particular variety. Rather, it should give students an exposure to these different varieties so that they become familiar with them. ‘Familiar’ needs to be interpreted in two ways here. First, students should become familiar with these varieties in that they become aware of their existence; second, they should become familiar with these varieties so that they have experience in listening to people using these varieties. Any variety of English is more comprehensive to people who have had active exposure to it (Smith and Bisazza Reference Smith and Bisazza1982: 269). This component should also educate native speakers of English that their way of speaking is no longer the only right way, and that the development of so many different varieties of English means that many different ‘standard’ Englishes are now being spoken by educated Asians. Not only this, native speakers of English need to be made aware that their variety of English may be internationally difficult to understand. Research over several decades has shown that certain traditional native speaker varieties of English are less internationally comprehensible than are newer varieties. For example, research which tested the mutual intelligibility of native and non-native speakers of English from a wide variety of origins concluded that ‘the native speaker was always found to be among the least intelligible speakers’ (Smith and Rafiqzad Reference Smith and Rafiqzad1979: 395). Research into the comparative intelligibility of Australian, Hong Kong and Singaporean Englishes found that Australian English was the least intelligible to an international audience, and that Hong Kong English was the most intelligible (Kirkpatrick, Deterding and Wong Reference Kirkpatrick, Deterding and Wong2008). These may be uncomfortable truths for native speakers, but it is essential that a course in intercultural communication establishes that international intelligibility does not correlate with being a native speaker.

The course needs also to expose students to the way Asian multilinguals use English as a lingua franca. For example, an understanding of the strategies that English as a lingua franca users adopt to ensure smooth communication can, in itself, be very useful. Research has indicated that, generally speaking, speakers contrive to maintain collegiality and will cooperate to ensure successful outcomes (Knapp and Meierkord Reference Knapp and Meierkord2002). This phenomenon may be influenced by the so-called ASEAN way, itself based on two Malay concepts of musyawarah (dialogue) and muafakat (consensus) (Curley and Thomas Reference Curley and Thomas2007: 9). It can also be seen in the ways formal seminars are managed in Indonesia, where speaking turns are indicated by the Chair or Moderator of the session, which means that turn-stealing is rare and that people seldom talk over each other (Rusdi Reference Rusdi1999; Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick2010). Participants know when it is their turn to speak. In more informal conversational settings both speakers and listeners adopt a range of communicative strategies, either to help listeners understand the message or to help speakers get their messages across. In a study of the communicative strategies of ASEAN speakers using ACE as data, ten listener strategies and five speaker strategies were identified. Listener strategies included lexical anticipation and suggestion, requesting repetition and clarification and participant paraphrase, whereby one of the listeners might rephrase what the speaker is saying in order to help one of the participants understand the message. Speaker strategies included being explicit, using paraphrase, and avoiding colloquial or idiomatic expressions (see Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick2010: 123ff for a full discussion). Indeed, it is striking that, although, by definition, the participants are Asian multilinguals, they seldom use words from their first language when engaged in lingua franca communication. This represents a striking contrast to when they are using their local variety of English with each other, as code-mixing is characteristic of such usage (Kirkpatrick and McLellan Reference Kirkpatrick, McLellan, Handford and Gee2012). Interestingly, this also contrasts to findings from the European VOICE corpus, a corpus primarily of Europeans using English as a lingua franca, where code-switching and idiomatic usage is more commonly found. The reason may be that many European languages are related, so that lingua franca users can be expected to be familiar with certain words from different languages.

In stressing the diversity within Asia, a course in intercultural communication in the use of English as an Asian lingua franca will also need to include an introduction to Asian cultures and pragmatic norms. The course could not aim to include in-depth information about each Asian culture, but would aim to develop intercultural competence in the students (Ting-Toomey and Chung Reference Ting-Toomey and Chung2005). As the brief account of a selection of the topics discussed in ACE illustrated, the great majority of discussion is centred around Asia, Asian events and Asian cultures. The course should also include an introduction to cultural conceptualizations, as these show how the culture of the speaker is reflected in the variety of English. For example, Sharifian describes key cultural conceptualizations as reflected in Persian English (Sharifian Reference Sharifian and Kirkpatrick2010) and Wolf shows how varieties of West and East African Englishes share cultural values (Wolf Reference Wolf and Kirkpatrick2010). The chapter by Wolf and Chan (this volume) is relevant to this point.

18.5 Conclusion

In this chapter, I have outlined the burgeoning roles of the use of English as a lingua franca across East and Southeast Asia, illustrating these with specific examples. I have then considered the implications of the increasing roles of English for regional language education policies, again illustrating these with specific examples from across the region. In the final section of the chapter, I considered the implications of the roles of English in Asia for those wishing to communicate successfully with Asia and provided some suggestions for components for a course designed to help in this.

19.1 Introduction

Australian public policy on ‘communicating with Asia’ can be readily distinguished from counterparts in other parts of the world by several important characteristics. First, what we are calling the ‘Australian Asia project’ is a shared commitment across the national political spectrum, including the most important institutions and large segments of the general population, well beyond the professional concerns of educators or the advocacy of commercial interests. Second, though conceptually arranged under a series of different rubrics at different times, such as ‘engagement’, Colombo Plan, New Colombo Plan, Asia literacy, Asia capability, Asia competence, or ‘regional integration’, the idea that a policy is needed to foster ‘communicating with Asia’ has been a stable presence in government activity, best thought of as a series of programmes in pursuit of a widely endorsed national meta-policy. The overarching aim involves harnessing mainstream educational endeavours to improve communication with Asian societies in response to a shared political interpretation of the national interest. The Asia project has been a stable component of educational investments for the past thirty years, ranging from school to higher and technical education, addressed to general curriculum reform as well as specific language and culture studies, and invariably involving student and staff exchanges. Asia has loomed in Australia’s political consciousness over a much longer period, however, defining much of its military, population and education legislation since political Federation in 1901.

19.2 Reading Asia: the project of Asia literacy

Australia’s relationship with Asia is a multifaceted one, historically complex, and influenced by political allegiances and ideologies, military engagement and rapprochement during the modern era. Unlike European nations, whose relations with Asia involve a degree of optionality, geographic proximity to the Asian land mass has made Australian engagement with Asian states inevitable.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the very word ‘Asia’ functioned to catalyse national anxieties, for the most part differentiated by particular social categories, so that for workers and unions, Asia invoked fears of cheap labour threatening the wages and conditions that their militancy and solidarity had gained. For imperially loyal British-Australians, Asia was already encountered through participation in imperial administration, from India to Malaya, and the Pacific, with connections of family, shared stories and identification with the apparatus and justification of imperial governance. Nationalists, attached to the idea of securing permanence for the British Empire, often invoked Asia as a caution against the social damage which would result from admitting Asian cultures into an Australia perceived to be a distant and vulnerable outpost of Western and specifically British civilization (Lake and Reynolds Reference Lake and Reynolds2008; Akami and Milner Reference Akami, Milner, Bashford and Macintyre2013). Even independence-minded nationalists, concerned to forge an autonomous Australian identity with its fusion of Irish and wider European populations, had national security concerns resulting from the large and expanding populations to the north.

Other than for a few pioneers, such as academics invested in the study of Asian societies, cultures and histories, and some farsighted individuals, pejorative connotations attaching to the term ‘Asia’ persisted until the last two decades of the twentieth century (Beeson and Jayasuriya Reference Beeson and Jayasuriya2009). During the transforming ethos that swept Australian education policy in the 1980s, 1990s, and more recently, a radical change has been effected, so that the connotations of Asia are mostly positive, invoking potentially productive relations between interacting societies, representing markets for the destination of Australian raw materials, primary produce, manufactured products and services, including the export of English-medium education.

A key and often neglected dimension of this change has been the greater involvement of the Federal, rather than State, governments, who are constitutionally responsible for education, but more locally focused. Ultimately and decisively, ‘Asia’ has come to suggest meanings associated with the Federal aspect of governance. Key ones are the population-transforming idea of immigrants as ‘new’ Australians, of tens of thousands of fee-paying international students sustaining higher education, of accessible attractive holiday destinations, and of direct relations as ‘friends and neighbours’ (Milner Reference Milner1999).

This project was incubated through a strategic alliance of knowledge and power, that is, academics and other intellectuals linked to politicians and policy makers. Coinciding with the ‘triumph of neoliberalism and the waning of ideological politics of the 1960s’ (Beeson and Jayasuriya Reference Beeson and Jayasuriya2009: 373), these groups interacted to engineer Australia’s particular brand of Asia engagement, fuelled by researchers based in universities or think-tanks engaging in policy-influencing work. In their examination of these interactions Beeson and Jayasuriya (Reference Beeson and Jayasuriya2009: 374) describe Asian engagement as both a ‘mirror’ of ‘anxieties and vulnerabilities’ and a reflection of debates about the national and political identity of a ‘settler society that is both ‘in and out’ of its immediate region’. They point out that Australia is a multicultural nation solidly ensconced within the Anglosphere, sharing loyalties and identities with the United Kingdom and the United States, but located in Asian geopolitical space. The wider policy culture is one in which key academic figures often move between political, policy-making and academic environments, and this cross-fertilized and sustained the Asia competence national agenda, one intended for the entire population, rather than for a narrow band of specialists.

The idea that Asia competence should be a mass phenomenon is reflected in the national curriculum, Australia’s first common curriculum, especially in the provision of what are called ‘cross-curriculum themes’. In addition to subjects, generic and specific skills and assessment, the national curriculum contains three ‘cross-curriculum priorities’: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures, Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia and Sustainability (ACARA 2013). These priorities are intended to be incorporated across all areas of the study curriculum. The Asia priority ‘provides the opportunity for students to celebrate the social, cultural, political and economic links that connect Australia with Asia’ (ACARA 2013).

This marks a clear transition from past representations of Australia–Asia relations characterized by maintaining distance and feeling vulnerability, buttressed by broad incomprehension and repudiation. The rhetorical character of the Australian Asia project was expressed first by the work of the Asian Studies Council, a government advisory body created in 1986 to bring about more systematic teaching of Asian perspectives. In its 1988 report it declared: ‘the proper study of Asia and its languages is about national survival in an intensely competitive world’ (ASC 1988: 2). This instrumentalist remit for study of Asia invokes dramatic consequences of failure (presumably ‘national collapse’). This way to mark Asian engagement has become a staple even among sober curriculum writers, for example, the Winter 2009 issue of Education Quarterly Australia issued by Education Services Australia, a company owned by the various ministers of education of states, territories and the federal government, which was titled: Asia literacy – our future.

Between 1969 and 1994, more than forty governmental policies, investigation reports and advisory committees have documented the stocks of knowledge and skill Australia would require in its pursuit of Asian integration, invariably finding a major deficit, and calling for urgent action to increase the number of students enrolled in Asian Studies and learning Asian languages (Henderson Reference Henderson2007). Despite ebbs and flows, considerable progress has been achieved, though far below the targets set by such reports.

Since the mid-1990s, efforts to promote Asia competence have been referred to as ‘Asia literacy’, riding on the discourse of wider debates concerned with improving general literacy rates, also in the interests of enhanced international economic competitiveness. Asia literacy has two broad components: languages and ‘Studies’ of Asia. The first designation of an Asian language priority appeared in the 1987 National Policy on Languages (Lo Bianco Reference Lo Bianco1987), in which four Asian languages were included in the nine ‘priority languages of wider teaching’, specifically, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian. Thereafter, from a 1994 report (COAG 1994), all other languages were removed from consideration and Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Korean were deemed the sole priorities, based on advice from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. These four remained the privileged focus for funding, with a federal investment of over $400 million between 1994 and 2008, an enormous investment in Australian budgetary terms, although Hindi replaced Korean in 2013.

The second component, ‘Studies of Asia’, involves infusing Asian perspectives into the teaching of mainstream subjects such as history and geography; though in some cases Asian Studies refers to specific curriculum content taught directly. A key conceptual component of Asian Studies has been intercultural understanding – not just learning about cultures, which is not necessarily a transformative undertaking in and of itself, but exploring viewpoints, worldviews and culturally based perspectives (Hassim Reference Hassim2013). These developments have not been limited to Asian Studies, since intercultural understanding plays a critical role in the development of language teaching methodology more broadly (e.g., Lo Bianco, Liddicoat and Crozet Reference Lo Bianco, Liddicoat and Chantal1999; Liddicoat and Scarino Reference Liddicoat and Scarino2013).

19.3 National visioning

Language education policy has often functioned as a barometer of sociopolitical and economic directions and allegiances. During a phase of responsiveness to domestic cultural diversity, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s (Jakubowicz and Ho Reference Jakubowicz and Ho2013), the political landscape was defined by the adoption of multiculturalism in public policy and a strong preference for community-heritage languages in schooling and multicultural approaches to curriculum design. During the 1980s, a related but separate movement led to the adoption of a National Policy on Languages (Lo Bianco Reference Lo Bianco1987) which encompassed the linguistic, cultural and educational needs of Australia’s diversifying population, and linked both to Asia and a wider internationalism.

From the early 1990s, however, under the influence of neoliberal and trade-focused perspectives in education, the Asian focus prevailed in resource allocations and syllabus/curriculum design. This commenced with the prime ministership of Paul Keating (1991–1996), culminating in the National Asian Languages and Studies in Australian Schools (NALSAS) Strategy (COAG 1994; also Lo Bianco and Slaughter Reference Lo Bianco and Slaughter2009).

The chief architect of NALSAS was Kevin Rudd (former Prime Minister), who went on to become the politician most closely associated with Asia, Asian languages, and a post-European strategy for international engagement (Lo Bianco and Aliani Reference Lo Bianco and Aliani2013), bolstering the case with his authority as a prominent speaker of Mandarin and an experienced diplomat. The defining element of this undertaking, echoed in all later reports and policies, was the privileging of economic processes over cultural, sociocultural and political dimensions of engagement (Salter Reference Salter2013). Rudd chose to push the NALSAS programme through the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), the peak intergovernmental body between state/territory and federal leaders, established to facilitate cooperation on issues of national economic significance. It was an entirely unusual forum for an educational policy, but accorded with Rudd’s ideological predilections. More tellingly, Rudd had wanted to avoid any explicit references to multiculturalism (Mackenzie Reference Mackenzie2004).

Rudd put his stamp on a version of Asian engagement that wanted to render the choice natural and inevitable in light of the deep shift in economic wealth and power from Western (both European and North American) sources to the broader Asia-Pacific; as leader of the Australian Labor Party and eventually Prime Minister, he was uniquely positioned to put his vision into effect. A high profile symbolic moment occurred immediately prior to his winning the prime ministership, when he welcomed the President of the People’s Republic of China, Mr Hu Jintao, to a meeting of the Asia Pacific Economic Forum (APEC) in Sydney, in Chinese. His public use of Chinese made national headlines, and was met with both admiration and derision according to the political allegiances of various observers, but the gesture appeared to signal a shift to a concentrated China-centred version of Australia’s Asian engagement project (Lo Bianco Reference Lo Bianco, Murray and Scarino2014a). After his election as Prime Minister in 2007, Rudd had a formal mandate to pursue his Asia vision and at a much publicized address at Peking University delivered in Chinese, the Australian media declared him the first political leader of a Western nation to address a public audience in China in Mandarin.

A highly emblematic instance of Rudd’s promotion of an Asia-focused Australia was propagated through the ‘Australia 2020 Summit’, held in April 2008. Under his direct and personal guidance the Summit functioned as a kind of public, continually broadcast and social-media buttressed display of national reconstruction, aiming to chart a new national identity along with a specific political agenda (Lo Bianco and Aliani Reference Lo Bianco and Aliani2013). Two significant themes arising from the summit were ‘to reinvigorate and deepen our engagement with Asia and the Pacific’, and ‘to ensure that the major languages and cultures of our region are no longer foreign to Australians but are familiar and mainstreamed into Australian society’ (Australia 2008b: 35).

A series of ‘ambition’ comments submitted by individuals and reported in the final 2020 summit document provide interesting insights into the desired change in Australian mentality towards its place in the Asia-Pacific region. The following instance captures the transformative tone and ethos of the summit and Rudd’s prime ministership:

Funding for the NALSAS programme had ceased under the previous government, and so Rudd renewed prioritization of Asian language study with a new programme, the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program (NALSSP 2008–12).

19.4 Australia in the Asian century

The 2020 summit vision would mostly remain an unfulfilled ambition, since the vast bulk of its priorities were never implemented and Kevin Rudd was himself replaced as prime minister in an internal Labor Party spill of positions on 24 June 2010. Julia Gillard became the nation’s twenty-seventh occupant of the office of head of government, fulfilling at least one small part of the desideratum cited above.

Despite lacking Rudd’s long interest in Asia, Gillard soon continued the process of national political and cultural reorientation, commissioning the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper (Taskforce Reference Tan2012). In the remit for this investigation, Gillard underscored both urgency and spread in its aims:

Released in October 2012, the White Paper reiterates longstanding economic and strategic motivations for regional engagement. It reads essentially as a document of trade, diplomacy and geopolitical strategy, with schools and languages featuring as service agents of an overarching body of evidence about trade-based national interrelationships (Lo Bianco Reference Lo Bianco2013). What is new is the nomenclature of the Asian project, with the rubric ‘Asia capability’ substituting the longstanding ‘Asia literacy’, in the search ‘to build ‘Asia-relevant’ capabilities’ from early childhood through to tertiary education, as well as ensuring that business, the public sector and national institutions have the ‘right mix of capabilities to seize the opportunities and make the most of Asia’s rise’ (Taskforce Reference Tan2012: 161).

However, although Gillard (Reference Gillard2011) recognized the emergence of Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, China and India in her telling of the rise of Asia, policy recommendations were reduced to the study of four Asian languages – Chinese, Japanese, Indonesian and Hindi.

Initially, the Asian Century White Paper attracted overwhelmingly supportive coverage in the media, but over time a more critical edge emerged as examination showed that the strategy lacked reliable or new funding. What also became clear in the ensuing public debate was that the long experience of Asia-targeted policies has produced a political rhetoric focused on ‘inevitablism’, essentially that Asia’s rise necessarily involves decline of the West and a vast transfer of economic might from the ‘West’ to the ‘East’. This is an essentially uncontested political narrative in contemporary Australia in which the few dissenting voices are limited to calls for more explicit indications of how new programmes are to be funded rather than contesting the substance of the policies.

However, accompanying this sense of unstoppable momentum and the need for adaptation is an equally solid sense that Australia’s traditional military and political alliances with the United States would remain. The latter was most sharply demonstrated through Gillard’s address to a Joint Sitting of the US Congress in March 2011 (Malcolm Reference Malcolm2011) and in her speech to the Asia Link and Asia Society later in the same year.

In her address on the ‘Asia Century’, Gillard interspersed her advancement of the Asia imperative with a clear indication of the foundations which allow for Australia’s confident step into the ‘East’.

It is clear that the Asia Century that Australian conceptions have in mind is one with a central, enduring alliance with a security-providing and Asia-engaged United States.

19.5 Where do allegiances lie?

Despite the profusion of reports on the need for ‘Asia’ competence, and targeted funding programmes for the four prioritized Asian languages, education systems have repeatedly failed to meet the targets set for numbers to be enrolled in these languages, and for the most part language programmes are of insufficient duration and depth to produce the ambitious and, occasionally, naïve targets. Most egregious among these was the 2007 aim that by 2020 ‘at least 12 per cent of students would complete Year 12 with … fluency in one of the target Asian languages (Mandarin, Indonesian, Japanese and Korean) sufficient for engaging in trade and commerce in Asia and/or university study’ (DEEWR/AEF, 2011: 2).

Given that students spend approximately 600–700 hours studying a language at the secondary level, the target of ‘fluency’ illustrates a clear lack of understanding on the part of policy-makers of the time/content requirements for effective language proficiency gains. The failure to reach targets has resulted in an ongoing, circular debate around the ‘crisis’ of Asian language study, declining enrolments (Sturak and Naughten Reference Sturak and Naughten2010), plummeting student interest and low proficiency attainment (Scarino and Elder Reference Scarino and Elder2012).

Figure 19.1. President Obama and Prime Minister Gillard entering the Australian Parliament during Mr Obama’s November 2011 visit to Canberra. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

The uptake of Asian language study could indeed be construed as a failure, if measured by the overreaching targets of Asia-specific language policy documents. However, at the federal level, contradictory policies and documents have coexisted in recent years. Along with the Asian language focused policies, there has also been a range of general language support statements, such as the National Statement and Plan for Languages (which includes many Asian languages, other than the prioritized four), and the National Indigenous Languages Policy, which have supported the breadth of languages studied in Australia. In addition, the aims and character of the Australian Curriculum also stand in stark contrast to the Asia Century White Paper. The new national curriculum is ‘replete with ideas about cultural reciprocity as a critical feature of language learning, and treats the ineradicable multilingualism of Australian life as a necessary component of language planning’ (Lo Bianco Reference Lo Bianco2013: 75). All these policies are evidence of the competing interests that preclude tightly coordinated language planning, with some policy documents promoting objectives which work against the aims of other policy documents.

Given this contradiction of directives, we must ask what is actually occurring in language education in schools. If we measure the success of language planning by a broad rationale, which supports a range of cultural, intellectual and personal motivations for languages education, it would be hard to defend the claim that there is a generalized ‘crisis’.

Student enrolments in languages are typically divided between the two major groups of Asian and European languages. Just over 90 per cent of students study one of six languages, around 45 per cent of enrolments are in Indonesian, Japanese and Chinese, and 45 per cent in Italian, French and German (Table 19.1). This pattern is also reflected at the primary school level, although at the secondary level, there is still a slight preference for the top three European languages (40.9 per cent) over the top three Asian languages (35.3 per cent) (Table 19.2).

We can conclude that parents, students and schools only partly share the goals espoused by Asia-prioritizing policies, and that there are multiple reasons and purposes underlying the choice of language. It also might be concluded that language policies that encompass the widest range of rationales for languages study are more effective than highly selective ones with more narrow constructions of the national interest.

19.6 Funding effects

While Asia literacy has maintained a high profile in a recently volatile political scene, funding directed to schools for the priority programmes has been intermittent, resulting, in part, in differential uptake and continuation of Asian language study. Recent figures in Table 19.3 illustrate the varying fates of languages and give an indication of why some commentators claim that language study is beset by crisis.

These figures show that enrolments in Chinese have increased, while enrolments in Indonesian notably declined between 2000 and 2008. It was within this period that funding for the NALSAS programme ceased in 2002, followed by a funding void, then the introduction of the reduced NALSSP programme in 2008. From a much higher base, Japanese, and a much lower base, Korean, both declined.

19.7 Whose Australia?

While a clear national focus has been maintained since the mid-1980s, public authorities and government have relied on idealized interpretations of Australian people and of communication and engagement across geographical and cultural boundaries. They have continually failed to understand and reflect the linguistic and cultural diversity which constitutes modern-day Australia. They have relied on an antiquated view of us and them, divided by distinct boundaries and languages, and failed to recognize Australia’s transformation into a multicultural and multilingual country.

Australia’s migration history and priorities have changed significantly since the end of the Second World War. While initial waves of mass migrants were faced with the expectation that they would disassociate themselves from their languages and cultures of origin, significant changes in attitudes and maturing of the national consciousness have allowed for the development of dual and multiple cultural and linguistic identities. The premigration experiences of migrants differ vastly as well, with new Australians arriving, broadly speaking, as refugees, skilled workers and business people. The different routes through which migrants reach Australia can be linguistically, culturally and geographically complex (Clyne and Kipp Reference Clyne and Kipp2006).

The migrant presence in Australian life was reframed through the embrace of rhetoric and adoption of policies of multiculturalism in the 1970s. Australia’s first language policy, the NPL, partly arose from multicultural general policy, and reflected a range of requirements, including the needs of monolingual speakers of English or languages other than English, of multilinguals, and of emerging multilinguals such as migrant and Indigenous children. The rationale underpinning this and other policy frameworks before the 1990s narrowed its focus onto an exclusively trade/security agenda, including the economic, social, cultural and political requirements of a comprehensive approach to national language and literacy needs. The NPL took a broad view of what the national interest is and how it is determined, hence indigenous and immigrant community languages, world languages and foreign languages were all supported, without engaging in the European/Asian dichotomies that have prevailed since.

Currently, around one in five Australians predominantly speaks a language other than English at home. In Sydney and Melbourne, 33 per cent and 29 per cent respectively, do. In the Northern Territory, outside of its capital Darwin, 42 per cent of people speak a language other than English at home, overwhelmingly indigenous languages of which some 200, both recognized languages and dialect forms, and more than 250 migrant languages and dialects, are spoken across Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012).

This diversity is reflected in the education system, where 133 languages, including fifty indigenous languages, were taught in some kind of formal education programme in 2006. Forty-seven languages were examined nationally. While 97 per cent of students are learning one of only ten languages, many smaller languages are taught by community organizations often supported by public grants under the premises of older policy frameworks (Lo Bianco and Slaughter Reference Lo Bianco and Slaughter2009). But along with the rearing of children multilingually in familial environments, what these figures reveal is the linguistic and cultural ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec Reference Vertovec2007) of contemporary Australia, and underscore our claim that appropriate language policies for such a pluralistic environment cannot ignore the communication ecology of vibrant multilingualism. The advantages of engaging with this communication ecology are not only linguistic, but include the intercultural capabilities inherent in the dual/multiple identities of many Australians. The differing needs of language learners, their personal, familial and identity-based reasons for engaging in language study, and the existing linguistic and intercultural capabilities they offer the nation are completely missed in the reductive and exclusively economically motivated language policies we have been discussing.

However, past national policies are challenged by a further environmental reality. In addition to neglecting community multilingualism, they also fail to recognize the transforming effects of globalization. Identifying economic entities as being coterminous with national states, immune from the accelerating mobility of people, ideas and cultural formations, fails to recognize that national affiliation is increasingly supplemented, disrupted or even subverted by a profusion of individual, familial and professional linkages (Castells Reference Castells2009; Castles and Miller Reference Castles and Miller2009).

19.8 Whose Asia?

One of the most inflammatory issues troubling the prioritization of Asian languages over many decades has been the question of to whom the study of Asian languages belongs (Clyne Reference Clyne2005). The positioning of the Asian languages prioritized in the education system as languages of ‘outside’ communication has failed to recognize Australians with an Asian heritage situated within its own society, despite descendants of migrants from Asia being long-established in the country, even occasionally ‘racializing’ their educational experiences (Tan Reference Tan2005).

The indelible nature of Asian-Australian identity ensures that it is a marker for generation after generation of Asian-Australians. In her study of Australians of Chinese ancestry, Tan (Reference Tan2005: 66–7) argues that racial appearance and ‘looks’ play a significant role ‘in demarcating the boundaries between those who are unconditionally accepted as ‘real’ Australians’. This phenomenon unfortunately plays out in language classrooms, where students of an Asian heritage are sometimes presumed to have an unfair advantage or even struggle with reconciling their ethnicity with the limitations of their cultural and linguistic capabilities (Slaughter Reference Slaughter2008).

Multiple references can be found in newspaper discourse to Chinese surnames among top scorers for Chinese language examinations, as an apparent indictor of the unfair advantage Anglo-Australians have to struggle against (Slaughter Reference Slaughter, May, Franken and Barnard2005). Policy making and journalistic reporting on the study of Chinese is underscored by the troubling qualification that most learners of Chinese are of Chinese background; a reservation that alludes to notions of inequity and unfair advantage based on ethnic background. This position unfairly views the students as the problem, rather than considering the failure of policy and curricula to adequately cater to these students and the skills they possess (Lo Bianco Reference Lo Bianco2013).

Curriculum authorities have also been continually challenged to construct courses which exclude or segregate those with an Asian background, who are perceived as having an ‘unfair advantage’ (e.g., Hyland Reference Hyland2008; Butt and Marshall Reference Butt and Marshall2013). Given that the school system by itself will never be able to produce the numbers, range and experiences in languages that are already inherent in the Australian population, it is a recipe for systemic failure for policy to not encompass and develop the nation’s intangible cultural heritage (Lo Bianco and Slaughter Reference Lo Bianco and Slaughter2009; UNESCO 2009).

Research into learning achievements in the four prioritized Asian languages have shown that learner groups are highly mixed, with heritage learners (with varying degrees of exposure to their language) and new learners in the same class (Lo Bianco Reference Lo Bianco2012). However, there is no direct correlation between having a linguistic and/or cultural background and performing well across all components of language study, with speaking, reading, listening and writing skills differing significantly depending on, for example, exposure to language, whether a standard form of the language or a dialect is spoken at home, or whether literacy skills have been developed (Elder Reference Elder2000).

It is not just heritage speakers of languages who need consideration in the curriculum. Research has also revealed differential outcomes for speakers of languages with similar writing and tonal systems, and whether or not the strengths and weaknesses they bring to the language learning classroom are acknowledged (e.g., Scrimgeour Reference Scrimgeour2012).

Such issues address questions of marginalization and discrimination, and are not just confined to Asian Australian contexts. Non-Anglo but non-Asian Australians have also been relegated to the margins, and Asian community language speakers are ‘recruited only when convenient to serve short-term utilitarian interpretations of the national interest’ (Lo Bianco Reference Lo Bianco2013: 74). Minority languages across Australia have therefore been treated as possible hindrances to greater economic engagement with Asia, as a possible hindrance to integration or loyalty to Australia, or as an obstacle to the acquisition of English. Arguably, there has been at times a fear that Australia should not make itself dependent on minorities, as exemplified by the reporting that Chinese ‘is overwhelmingly a matter of Chinese teaching Chinese to Chinese’ (Hyland Reference Hyland2008: 8).

19.9 What is missing?

Another flaw in the Australian promotion of Asian communication has been its silence about English in Asia, sometimes significantly denying its presence, as if to bolster the case for direct study of languages, or expressing concern that to acknowledge English and its deep penetration of global, particularly economic, life, is to suggest colonial inclinations. Additionally, in a country such as Australia, language advocates are required to continually reason against the ‘English is enough’ mentality (Clyne Reference Clyne2005) and are, arguably, quite keen to avoid deeper discussion of the issue. A rare attempt that moves towards an ecological focus on Asian languages and English in the overall communication planning for Asian Australian connections is Leitner (Reference Leitner2007), interestingly generated from a German university. This distance perhaps allows the author the perspective that has eluded Australian writers, unwilling to address English in Asia in relation to advocacy of Asian language teaching, and inattentive to the wider motivations and purposes for learning languages that are current in Australian life.

Undoubtedly, English plays an important role in languages education in all of Asia (Cha and Ham Reference Cha, Ham, Spolsky and Hult2008), although it is important to note that the acquisition of English is highly stratified, with proficiency levels attained and the kinds of English learned determined by place of residence and socioeconomic opportunity. Effectively, poorer rural children acquire English less well than urban and privileged children (Kirkpatrick Reference Kirkpatrick2010a; Lo Bianco Reference Lo Bianco, Farrell, Singh and Giri2011). There is a large body of research, with many studies based in Asia, on the importance of mother-tongue based multilingual education, which often gets drowned out by a false but dominant national language/foreign language dichotomy in education systems (e.g., UNESCO 2005, 2007).

Nevertheless, English continues to play a dominant role across the region. It has become the official language of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) from its inception in 2015 (Kirkpatrick, Reference Kirkpatrick2010a). Reconceptualization of English and the teaching of English is also impacting the role of English in Asia. There is no doubt that the predominant reality of English in Asian education remains focused firmly on its native speaker centres. However, it is tempting to speculate that recent reconceptualizations of English in Asia represent a movement away from English as a foreign language, towards English as a lingua franca (e.g., Mauranen and Ranta Reference Mauranen and Elina2009). The English as a lingua franca movement essentially advocates that the linguistic and pragmatic norms of English communication should be sensitive to local varieties of the language and its local multilingual contexts of use. Closer identification with English as a regionalized lingua franca would arguably contribute to its growing role across domains. One of the implications in considering English as an Asian language is that native speakers of English will need to concede space for a fairer communication order to develop. This will provide legitimacy for various forms of English as a Foreign Language, as well as the political enfranchisement of non-native speakers (Lo Bianco Reference Lo Bianco2014b).

This gap in Australia’s Asia communication strategy is made deeply ironic by the vast presence of Asian international fee-paying students in Australian schools and universities, many essentially purchasing English-mediated certificates. Failing to grasp the essentially ecological nature of the language learning choices is a significant limitation in how Asian communication programmes have been devised in recent years in Australia.

19.10 Concluding comments

The Australian model of Asian language promotion can be described as consisting of externally established targets, imposed timelines and discretionary funding accompanied by a strong top–down rhetoric of ‘national survival’. This panoply of activity is directed at schools, teachers and the wider community aiming to secure growth in enrolments in a preferentially determined small number of languages associated most closely with the trade volumes exchanged between Australia and key Asian markets, with the addition of security considerations in relation to Indonesia. This long-term enterprise has been sometimes based on the misguided subtext that ‘Asia literate knowledge is all that is needed to invert reliance on Asia and assert Australia’s economic dominance’ (Salter Reference Salter2013: 9).

But the privileging of the economic domain carries risks. These include failing to engage directly with student and community interests and excessive narrowing of the purposes and reasons for language study. This can lead to policy initiatives ignoring and potentially alienating large sectors of the community who are excluded from the attentions of such policy because they do not speak or identify with favoured languages. Relying on state to state, or economy to economy, understandings of contemporary life is especially problematical because social media, population movement, study and the transnational realities of twenty-first century living global communication are readily available to most people unmediated by education or government.

Still, the geographical proximity between Australia and Asia provides many of the impetuses for the Australia–Asia communication strategy, including Australia’s economic codependency with many Asian nations, as well as significant pan-Asian migration to Australia. In multicultural and multilingual environments such as those experienced across Europe, more geographically distant to Asia in comparison to Australia, the imperative to engage with Asia seems quite dissimilar, but in fact shadows Australia’s in many ways. While Asian migration to Europe has been proportionately less, the local, regional and European communication ecology must continue to be responsive to the dynamic and changing face of European populations, regardless of the origins of migration. Instances of hostility and xenophobia experienced across the European continent attest to the critical role of intercultural engagement and linguistic accommodation. As Asian migration increases, language and cultural policies must be responsive to the dynamic, changing landscape, in order to support convergence rather than divergence among the many populations of Europe. European education systems must continue to take into account the differing motivations and needs of language learners, including their local, regional and national, as well as familial identity-based reasons for language study.

It could be argued that English fulfils many of the roles in relation to economic, science and technology-based dealings between European and Asian nations and that there is little point in studying Asian languages more broadly. Indeed, English does fill many of these functions. However, it is not as simple as deferring to the notion of English as the international language. Greater consideration needs to be given to the pluricentric and multilingual nature of English as an Asian lingua franca, and to the distinct and varied Asian cultural constructs represented in these evolving forms of English (Sharifian, Reference Sharifian, Hajek and Slaughter2015b). This consideration also extends to the teaching of English in schools and tertiary institutions across Europe. Furthermore, while many dialogues across multilingual and multicultural contexts are mediated through English, it is critical that deeper, longer term economic and cultural exchanges move beyond functional constructions of diplomacy and take into account the growing and negotiated transnational roles of major Asian languages, such as Mandarin and Indonesian/Malay, and important national languages such as Korean, Japanese and Hindi. This is not just a lesson for Australia and Europe, but a broader, global one.

This has been one strength in the continued focus on Asian languages in Australia. While there have been significant faults in Australia’s Asia communication strategy, substantial progress, improvement and favourable attitudinal change have occurred, even if well below what it would be reasonable to aspire to with policies more sociolinguistically well informed, less centred on national interest benefit in the economic domain, and more stable and long term. No imaginable position on language and cultural education in Australia could be free of a strong focus on Asia. As the national curriculum is implemented and as review and evaluation of the modest but welcome achievements of the past percolates into public discussion, it is likely that future policy positions will be more nuanced, more inclusive and more successful.