Linguistic currencies: the translative power of English in Southeast Asia and the United States

Abstract

English seems to be everywhere in the world today, as omnipresent as money. Just as the US dollar has been the Latin, as it were, of world currency, so English has been the lingua franca of a ceaselessly globalising market economy. This is as true in the vastly diverse linguistic landscapes of Southeast Asia as it is in the irreducibly plural cultures of the United States. How did the hegemony of English come about? What are the specific histories and political imperatives that have installed English at the head of a global linguistic hierarchy while situating vernacular languages below it? What effects does this linguistic hierarchy have in the reproduction oKef social relations within such nations as the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and the United States? And what are the limits of translating English into money, especially when confronted with everyday creolised speech in such forms as slang and literature?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.