Another Kind of Global English

By Rita Raley, 18 August, 2015
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"Another Kind of Language does not gesture toward, even as fictional
performance, linguistic translation. Just as there is no correspondence
between the written characters of each language and the respective
phonetic sounds, there is also no correspondence among the different
languages. In other words, it is not the case that each is simply a translation of a single master text. Each layer, then, is discrete, the written
characters and sounds “proper” to each language contained therein.
On the one hand, this is a descriptive model for global English now:
one of three distinct sociolinguistic groups (four, if Spanish were
included), each in its place with no apparent cognizance of the others,
no visible public route toward translingualism, no obvious structure
for commonality. On the other, it is a prescriptive model, with the
inflection falling not on a refusal of exchange but rather on a hopeful
turn away from linguistic and territorial imposition, an aspiration
toward “another kind” of language that does not need to assert sovereignty or otherwise engage in “language wars” (Calvet 1998)."

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