Dr Tomokazu Ishikawa is Associate Professor of English and Intercultural Communication at Otaru University of Commerce, Hokkaido Higher Education and Research System, Japan. His forthcoming publications include ‘Global Englishes’ (Routledge, with W.Baker and J.Jenkins) and ‘Developing ELF Programmes for Language Teaching’ (De Gruyter, edited with P.McBride and A.Suzuki).

 

Abstract:

English has spread from the traditional Anglophone to the post-colonial world and further to globalised networks. Nevertheless, the colonial legacy of linking English to the monolingualist standards of a few national varieties in the West continues to thrive even in regions that have never been directly colonised. These colonial views of English (i.e., nationalism, monolingualism, and Western-centrism) have led to the systematised construct of English as if it were a universal Western ‘product’ or what Mignolo (2021) calls a ‘global design’. Against this backdrop, the presenter locates English in currently ubiquitous multilingual and multicultural settings, critiques the lingering influence of colonial ideologies on a pluricentrist framework for Englishes in the world, and proposes decolonising English through mobile multilinguals’ daily translingual and transcultural practices. To this effect, he offers a new interpretation of the well-documented three loci of language (Risager, 2006), reimagining English as what bridges mobile multilinguals’ linguistic and cultural realities. Examples from everyday digital communication illustrate how English is inevitably linked with situated meaning-making affordances in an emerging transcultural space, as well as how meaning is irreducible to the single named language of English or the colonial perception of English as a ‘global design’. All in all, multilingual English users are invited to exercise their full agency to unleash their real-world communicative capability from ideological constraints.