Language as a Local Practice

176 Pages·2010·2.693 MB·

by  Alastair Pennycook

Language as a Local Practice
Language as a Local Practice addresses questions of language, locality and
practice as a way of moving forward in our understanding of how language
operates as an integrated social and spatial activity.
By taking each of these three elements – language, locality and practice –
and exploring how they relate to each other, Language as a Local Practice
opens up new ways of thinking about language. It questions assumptions
about languages as systems or as countable entities, and suggests instead that
language emerges from the activities it performs. To look at language as a
practice is to view language as an activity rather than a structure, as some-
thing wedorather than asystem wedrawon, as amaterialpartof social and
cultural life rather than an abstract entity.
Language as a Local Practice draws on a variety of contexts of language
use, from bank machines to postcards, Indian newspaper articles to fish-
naming in the Philippines, urban graffiti to mission statements, suggesting
that rather than thinking in terms of language use in context, we need to
consider how language, space and place are related, how language creates the
contexts where it is used, how languages are the products of socially located
activities and how they are part of the action.
Language as a Local Practice will be of interest to students on advanced
undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Applied Linguistics, Language
Education, TESOL, Literacy and Cultural Studies.
Alastair Pennycook is Professor of Language Studies at the University of
Technology,Sydney.PublicationsincludeEnglishandthediscoursesofcolonialism
(Routledge,1998),Criticalappliedlinguistics:Acriticalintroduction(Lawrence
Erlbaum,2001)andGlobalEnglishesandtransculturalflows(Routledge,2007),
which won the BAAL Book award in 2008.

Language as a Local Practice
Alastair Pennycook
Firsteditionpublished2010byRoutledge
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Pennycook,Alastair,1957-
Language as a local practice / Alastair Pennycook. – 1st ed.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Sociolinguistics.2.Languageandlanguages–Variation.I.Title.
P40.P41152010
306.44–dc22
2009037317
ISBN 0-203-84622-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0-415-54750-4 (hbk)
ISBN10:0-415-54751-2(pbk)
ISBN10:0-203-84622-2(ebk)
ISBN13:978-0-415-54750-5(hbk)
ISBN13:978-0-415-54751-2(pbk)
ISBN13:978-0-203-84622-3(ebk)
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Introduction: language as a local practice 1
2 ‘Press 1 for English’: practice as the ‘generic social thing’ 17
3 The Reverend on Ice again: similarity, difference and relocalization 34
4 Talking in the city: the linguistic landscaping of locality 52
5 Kerala tuskers: language as already local 70
6 Alibangbang and ecologies of local language practices 88
7 ‘Molding hearts … Leading minds … Touching lives’: practice as
the new discourse? 110
8 Conclusion: language as a local practice 128
Notes 144
Bibliography 147
Index 164
Acknowledgements
My particular interest in the term practice grew out of a series of seminars
andworkshops run by my colleagues in the Centre for Research on Learning
and Change at the Universityof Technology Sydney (UTS). I am particularly
grateful for the various conversations, discussions, readings and debates with
PaulHager,AlisonLee,RogerDunston,DonnaRooney,AnnReich,Hermine
Scheeres, Nicky Solomon, Keiko Yasukawa and others, as well as invited
speakerssuchasBillGreenandStevenKemmis,whoweremorethangenerous
with their time and ideas. I am fortunate too that the Language Studies
Academic Group formed in 2008 has been able to maintain a strong intel-
lectual focus on language matters, and I am grateful to all members of that
group for their sustenance. Theo van Leeuwen, a member of that group as
well as being Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UTS, has
been magnanimous with his ideas and support. I have been lucky in my col-
leagues.Meanwhileanewgenerationofdoctoralstudentshascontinuedtopush
mythinkingindifferentdirections:JulieChoi,TakakoYoshida,MariaHarissi,
Marianne Grey, Bong Jeong Lee, Breda O’Hara Davies. And it is a great
pleasure to be able to continue to work with former students, now colleagues
and co-authors, such as Celia Thompson, Ros Appleby and Emi Otsuji.
As ever, I am greatly indebted to that wonderful worldwide community of
scholarswith whom I am privileged to be able to talk through my ideas, and
fromwhomIlearnsomuch,including LynnMarioMenezesdeSouza,Elana
Shohamy, Bonny Norton, Vaidehi Ramanathan, Tim McNamara, Stephen
May,BrianMorgan,Radhakrishnan,SinfreeMakoni,SureshCanagarajah,Jan
Blommaert, Chris Stroud, Samy Alim, Awad Ibrahim, Ryuko Kubota, Claire
Kramsch, Ruanni Tupas, Beatriz Lorente, Angel Lin, Adrian Blackledge,
MonicaHeller,David Block, IngridPiller,Kimie Takahashi, CynthiaNelson,
Brian Paltridge, Martin Nakata, and many others. Thanks as ever to
Dominique Estival, flight instructor and reallinguist, forattempts tokeep my
ideas on the straight and level, and for supporting them nonetheless.
A number of parts of this book have been given a public airing elsewhere.
Thanks for the chance to talk about the idea of language practices invarious
forums, amongst which: Popular cultures and the making of new multi-
lingualisms, invited talk at the Multilingual citizenship and cities in transition
Acknowledgements vii
symposium, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa, July
2008; Spatial narrations: Graffscapes and city souls, plenary address at the
Applied Linguistics Association of Australia, July 2008; Language as local
practice, 24th Annual Singapore Association of Applied Linguistics Dis-
tinguished Speaker Lecture, Singapore, April 2008; Changing Practices in
Global ELT, plenary address to the IATEFL Conference, Exeter, UK, April
2008; Practice as the new discourse, plenary address to the Discourse and
Cultural Practices Conference, Sydney,December 2007. Thanks to all those –
LionelWee,ChngHuangHoon,RuanniTupas,BeatrizLorente,RuthWodak,
ChrisCandlin,ClaireKramsch,RyukoKubota,AhmarMaboob,ChrisStroud
and manyothers – who have given me feedbackon these and other talks.
Thanks to Oxford University Press for permission to use Chapter 3, ‘The
Reverend on Ice again: similarity, difference and relocalisation’ – a revised
version of A. Pennycook, (2007) ‘The rotation gets thick, the constraints get
thin: creativity, recontextualization and difference’, Applied Linguistics, 28(4)
579–96. Thanks too to the editors of that special edition of Applied Linguis-
tics,JanetMaybinand Joan Swann,and toGuyCook andRonaldCarterfor
further comments on earlier versions of the paper. Permission to reuse parts
of earlier papers for Chapter 4, ‘Talking in the city: the linguistic landscaping
of locality’, has been kindly granted by Routledge for a revised version of
Pennycook (2009) ‘Linguistic landscapes and the transgressive semiotics of
graffiti’, in E Shohamy and D Gorter (eds) Linguistic Landscape: Expanding
the scenery; and by Continuum for a different version of that paper: ‘Spatial
narrations: Graffscapes and city souls’, in A Jaworski and C Thurlow (eds)
Semiotic landscapes: language, image, space. I am indebted to Dirk Gorter
and Elana Shohamy for feedback on that first paper and to Crispin
Thurlow’s and Adam Jaworski’s insightful comments on the second paper.
Chapter 5 ‘Kerala tuskers: language as already local’, is a revised version of
Pennycook(2010)‘RethinkingoriginsandlocalizationinglobalEnglishes’,in
T. Omoniyi and M. Saxena (eds) Contending with world Englishes in globali-
zation.MythankstoMutlilingualMatters forpermissiontopublisharevised
versionofthatpaper.IamgratefultoSpringerforpermissiontouseagreatly
revised version of Pennycook (2004) ‘Language policy and the ecological
turn’, Language Policy, 3 (213–39) in Chapter 6, ‘Alibangbang and ecologies
of local language practices’. Anonymous reviewers have also of course played
an important role in the development of these papers.

1 Introduction
Language as a local practice
This book is about language, place and doing, about language as a form of
actioninaspecificplaceandtime.Intalkingoflanguageasalocalpractice,I
am seeking to address far wider concerns than a first reading of these terms
might suggest. To talk of language as local practice might appear to invoke
nothing more than the sociolinguistic truism that people use languages in
particular contexts. This book, by contrast, approaches the issue from a dif-
ferent perspective: the ideathat languages are systems of communication that
are used by people in different contexts is challenged in favour of a view of
language as a local practice whereby languages are a product of the deeply
social and cultural activities in which people engage. The focus here is not
therefore on language use in context, or the relations between language and
particular places. Rather, this book questions the meanings of all these
terms – language, local and practice – in conjunction: language is examined
here in ways that go against some common assumptions about language sys-
tems; locality is explored in its complex manifestations as place; and practice
is viewed in terms of mediated social activity. This opens up a range of ways
of thinking about the interrelationships among language, place and doing.
The notion of the local has become an increasingly significant focus across
the social sciences, to a large extent as a reaction to what has been seen as
broad, ungrounded theorizing throughout much of the 20th century. Rather
than talk about human nature, universal cognition, or language structure, the
focus has shifted towards the local, the grounded, the particular. To talk of
practices has also become common. We add the term to words such as lan-
guage, literacy and discourse to turn these into things we do, rather than
abstract entities: scholars of literacy are interested in literacy practices;
research across fields of language studies askswhat language practices people
are engaged in. More broadly, there is a growing interest in the practices of
everyday life. This is a move, similar to the orientation towards the local, to
capture what actually happens in particular places and at particular times. It
is a shift away from broad abstractions about language, discourse and society
towards local activity as part of everyday life. To talk of language as a local
practice, then, is about much more than language use (practice) in context
(locality). To take the notion of locality seriously, rather than merely