English

Abstract

Abstract English is the most widely-spoken language in the world, and it is rapidly becoming a global lingua franca. But it is not culturally neutral: like any other language, it carries with it a cultural baggage. There are many varieties of English, but there is also “Anglo” English (or what the Indian American linguist Braj Kachru has called the “English of the inner circle”). This book argues that rather than denying the existence and continued relevance of the cultural “baggage” embedded in English (“Anglo” English), it is important to explore the contents of that baggage — important for practical, as well as intellectual, reasons: for language teaching, “cultural literacy” teaching, cross-cultural training, international communication, and so on. It is important to “denaturalize” English and to identify and acknowledge the historically shaped cultural meanings embedded in it, if only so that they are no longer taken for granted as the voice of “reason” itself. To be able to reveal the cultural meanings embedded in the English language we need a suitable methodology. This book shows that such a methodology is available in the so-called “Natural Semantic Metalanguage” (NSM) approach, inaugurated by the author in her 1972 book Semantic Primitives and subsequently developed in collaboration with her Australian colleague Cliff Goddard. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a unique system of meaning description which uses simple words of ordinary language, instead of technical formalisms, used in other linguistic approaches. Thus, this book seeks to launch a new, meaning-based approach to the study of the English language. Its aim is to investigate English as a historically shaped universe of meaning and to reveal English's cultural underpinnings and their implications for the modern world.

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