English as an Exotic Language

Abstract

There is a remarkable absence of commentators calling English an exotic language in the literature I have surveyed. Instead, there is a dominant discourse of English being somehow destined by nature to be a global medium of com-munication and that the process we are watching today, in which English is developing from a foreign language to a second language to a primary and ultimately the sole language of a growing number of communities, is a natural one governed by natural laws of the survival of the fittest and of rational market forces. The view that English is barbarous in the sense that it is ‘the language of the red-bristled foreign devils’ as the title of the first Pidgin English phrase book published in China suggests, is like the meaning ‘barbarous’ in the Oxford English Dictionary, obsolete, and the fact that it is not acclimatized and hence ill-suited to the needs of others again remains largely undebated.

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