Journal of Language, Identity and Education, 3/1, 73-84, January 2004

REVIEW ARTICLE

Words of  The World: The Global Language System. Abram de Swaan. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001, 253 + xi pages, (price, hardcover US$68.95, paperback US$31.95or softcover?)..

Globalization and Language Tteaching., ed. David Block and Deborah Cameron (Ed.)., London & New York: Routledge, 2002, 196 pages, (price, hardcover £55or, paperback £15.99 softcover?).

World English: A Study of its Development., Janina Brutt-Griffler., Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2002, 215 + xiii pages, (price, hardcover US$89.95, paperback US$26.95or softcover).

Robert Phillipson

Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

I reviewed books on the global reach of English (Fishman, Conrad & Rubal-Lopez, 1996;, Graddol,  1997;, Crystal, 19979) in a volume that reflects a diversity of approaches to the pre-eminence of English (Phillipson, 2000a, in Ricento 2000). This review article concerns three further books that situate English in broader socio-political analytical frameworks. Two are unconvinced about linguistic imperialism, past or present, while the third looks at its contemporary manifestations.

Words of the world: The global language system

Abram de Swaan’s (AdS) wide-ranging book, Words of the World: The Global Language System,  elaborates an analytical framework that draws on political economy and political sociology in order to explore why people learn powerful languages. Five chapters explore languages in India, Indonesia, South Africa, selected former French and British colonies in Africa, South Africa, and the European Union. The book builds on a largely descriptive, historical foundation, and employs a mathematical template that measures the “communicative value” (Q-value) of a language. His AdS’s global language “system” essentially sees language as being a matter of individual choice, of self-interest, that assumes that the greater the range of potential language uses and users, the more reason there is for the individual to shift language “upwards.”.

In AdS’s constellation of languages, multilinguals are the key link between languages that are isolated languages and languages higher up in the hierarchy. While Aabout one hundred languages occupy a “central” position, twelve are supercentral: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili. English is the “hypercentral” language. One wonders whether Japanese connects the speakers of “a series of central languages,”, and why Bengali, which manifestly serves such purposes, and has more speakers than several of the languages included, has been excluded.

Linguists will react sceptically to AdS’s claim that it is intelligibility that makes languages distinct.  Sociolinguists will be surprised to read that “Languages are the creation of no-one in particular and they are nobody’s property” (p.30). For AdS, language death is not due to policies that eliminate minority languages, they merely “wither away” (p.15). Hierarchy is seen as a sliding scale of options for the upwardly mobile, nationally and internationally. These cosmopolitans are unconcerned about whether their language learning is additive or subtractive (concepts that he does not use). By relying on choice, and the individual’s wish to learn a language that is seen as a collective good, AdS ignores the role of the state in providing an infrastructure in education that constrains choices, and the role of the media in transmitting discourses that generate national linguistic cultures, norms and status.

AdS’s theoretical foundations are surprisingly selective. Thus a book on “the global language system” has little on globalization. AdS nods occasionally in the direction of linguistic and cultural capital, but does not link this to class or linguistically defined social stratification (linguicism) or linguistic inequality. There is no analysis of the cultural dimensions of North-South relations, global cultural flows, or McDonaldisation. One would expect there to be major  serious consideration of how border-crossing languages, English in particular, serve to integrate particular communities (states, or professions), and how particular interest groups (finance capital, corporations, media and educational products) are connected in the world system., Bbut this side of things is unexplored, since the focus is on individual countries rather than the wider networks of late modernism. AdS’s layered language “constellation” is essentially a simple model of triglossia, wrapped in algebraic game theory. Like most work in diglossia, it is loosely anchored in (neo)liberal social theory (Williams 1992). Key concepts in the sociology of language, language maintenance and shift, and language spread are scarcely mentioned. Fishman et al's work (1996) on English as a "post-imperial" language, and how this connects to global economic and political interests, is untouched. There is occasional sniping at work on linguistic imperialism, but no serious attempt to engage with dominance and hierarchy.

The privileged position of English is rightly seen as according benefits to native speakers, because of the large communicative potential of users of the language. AdS sees resistance to the hegemony of English as misguided. A language rights “movement” is falsely represented as working for “the right of human beings to speak whatever language they wish.”. This is a misreading of the thrust of efforts to codify and implement language rights, and the commitment of UNESCO, and many communities and NGOs, to maintaining the world's linguistic and cultural diversity. He seems unaware of the role of international law, particularly in human rights conventions, in seeking to constrain an oppressive state and protect language rights (de Varennes, 2000).

The descriptive chapters are relatively richer, which is not surprising considering the voluminous wealth of macro-sociolinguistic studies., bBut there are inevitably major problems in condensing the narrative into a few pages on each country.

Much of the description of languages in India is stimulating, with sensitive presentation of the complexities of the many languages and of the privileged but contested status of Hindi and English. However I doubt whether many Indian sociolinguists would agree with the claim that “Indians are an extremely unilingual people” (p.63), and AdS does not appreciate that the promotion of Hindi as an all-India language was not seen as entailing a shift from other Indian languages.  He AdS suggests that elite status in India can be achieved through either Hindi or English, and that each is as good as the other (p.78). This interpretation ignores the reality that in many domains, English is emphatically the top language, and that this supremacy is consolidated at all levels of education. The stark choice is typically between education through the medium of English (a policy that the World Bank is consolidating) or through the medium of an Indian language in under-funded schools. This has produced what Nehru claimed he was working to avoid, namely an English-speaking caste at the summit of the Indian social system. The massive brain drain and the internationalizsation of computer service industries reinforce these processes. When AdS’s figures for the Q-value of English are inconveniently low as compared with the figure for Hindi, he brings in the added value of English as an international language as a weighting factor (p.79). This doubtless tallies with what happens in reality, but this scholarly legerdemain suggests that the Q-value figures have little explanatory power, not least when the unit of analysis is a single state.

A striking feature of the chapter is that western researchers are drawn on extensively in the main body of the text, whereas Indian researchers are relegated to footnotes. This eurocentricity is an insult to Indian scholars.

The chapter on Indonesia draws on Dutch-language sources, but the same eurocentricity recurs. Indonesian independence in 1945, after centuries of Dutch colonisation and three years of Japanese occupation, was presumably a cause for rejoicing by Indonesians, but not for AdS: “the Dutch presence in Asia came to an unhappy end” (p.87). However, AdS rightly underlines the significance ofapproves of the emergence of a single state language, Bahasa, as an exception to the general pattern of colonial languages remaining in place in postcolonial states. Nor is Bahasa the mother tongue of the dominant group, which is rather than the upgrading of Javanese, the mother tongue of the dominant group, and he rightly underlines this exception to the general pattern of colonial languages remaining in place in postcolonial states.

Three types of former French/Belgian and British colonies are contrasted, countries with a single dominant local language (Rwanda/Kinyarwanda, Botswana/Tswana), with a widespread African second language (Senegal/Wolof, Tanzania/Swahili), and countries with a range of local languages (Zaire, Nigeria). However, the conclusion in each case is that elites have clung to the former colonial language, since its limited accessibility to the mass of the population gives its users a hegemonic position that is convertible into prestige and influence. This explains why even widely used languages like Wolof and Swahili do not open the top doors. AdS does not refer to the ambivalence of the Tanzanian government about introducing Swahili as the main medium of education at secondary level. It is also incorrect (120) to state that vernacular languages are used as a primary school medium of education (p.120). AdS fails to report the clear evidence of British aid organizations strongly backing the maintenance of English, and the key role of the World Bank, here as elsewhere in Africa, in putting funding into the former colonial languages rather than African languages. These pressures have been thoroughly documented in a succession of studies. Yahya-Othman and Batibo (in Fishman et. aAl., 1996), whom AdS cites, are in no doubt that neo-colonialism and linguistic imperialism have been in force and continue to be so.

It does not seem to have occurred to AdS to consider what the wealth of these elites derives from, or the role of African oil and raw materials in the global economy. To state blithely that education for a large proportion of the population is not available for “lack of funds” ignores the unfair trading terms that the North imposes on the South, and the misappropriated fortunes that end up in western banks. To write as though English and French serve exclusively local purposes ignores how elites in the South are in hock to North interests, and how corruption and clientism are often channelled along ethnolinguistic fault lines.

For AdS: “a policy ostensibly aimed at promoting a diversity of languages will actually further the hegemony of English. That is the recurrent paradox of contemporary language politics: the more languages, the more English” (p.127). Post-apartheid language policy envisages a break with the linguicist policies of the past, though how the struggle between English and African languages that have inherited low prestige will evolve is unclear, and relates to wider political and economic inequalities and policies (Alexander, 2002). AdS’s Q-value table for African languages fails to note that languages such as Zulu and Xhosa are strongly represented in the east and south respectively. In most regions, language policy aims at trilingualism rather than an unattainable competence in all eleven official languages. Language rights are enshrined in the Constitution because of  a wish to respect diversity, and not because of the efforts of misguided sociolinguists, as AdS suggests (p.139). Nor does the right to learn and use the mother tongue in any way conflict with the right to learn other languages, and in particular those that are seen to open doors.

What then explains the grip of English? For AdS “the spread of English is the mostly unintended outcome of expectations held and decisions made accordingly by hundreds of millions of people across the globe…. especially with a view to employment chances” (p.142). He concedes though that this “free choice” is triggered by “multinational entrepreneurs, who orient themselves to national and worldwide markets” and involves “collusion” with the global economic system (ibid.p.42). This merry tale of linguistic freedom is then exemplified: “Wherever different people speak different languages – for example in business, in the mines and industry, in the schools, in the courts, in government and the churches – problems of communication are almost unfailingly resolved by adopting English” (ibid. p.142). This is wishful thinking. Of South Africa’s 40.6 million population, 3.45 million have English as their mother tongue, and 7 million are estimated as having some competence in English as a second language, though there are higher estimates (1996 census figures, quoted in Lass, 2002, p.104 and de Klerk and Gough, 2002, pp.358-9). On the challenges of multilingualism, see Heugh, 2002.

The coverage of language policy in the EU contains many questionable statements. The chapter is not a useful source of basic information on the diversity of language traditions in the member states or the functioning of EU institutions (for which see Phillipson, 2003). There are points of detail that can be queried on virtually every page, but three examples will have to suffice. With reference to the eleven official EU languages, AdS states: “Everyone agrees that this is a completely unmanageable number” (p.184). But the translation and interpretation services of each of the EU institutions maintain precisely the opposite. Their political masters show no inclination to accept a reduction in language rights, which are administered in a complex system that has successfully coped with each enlargement. AdS goes on to predict that mMembers of the European Parliament will be “likely to waive their right to speak their own language” (p. 185). Quite the contrary, all the planning documents that this cardinal principle is non-negotiable. Finally, AdS states that it is “linguists” who endorse a policy of learning two foreign languages, whereas in . This has in fact it is politicians at thebeen Council of Europe (politicians) policy who embraced the idea many years ago, for several years, and it is now the official policy of the EU and its member states.

AdS’s concluding chapter is mostly a summing-up of points made earlier, but he does admit that languages other than English are in “precarious coexistence” with it (p.189), and that the globalization of science via English means that American norms apply (p.192). The over-generalizations continue to the end: “Everywhere people must cope with several languages” (p.193). Everywhere? Does this apply to US citizens? The statement is not even true of EU institutions: the translation and interpretation services permit senior people to function monolingually. For the rest of us, a diversity of tongues is “choice” within the constraints permitted by the nation-state and globalisation in a rapidly changing world, in which communication respects state borders less and less. We live in a much more complex world linguistic constellation than Abram de Swaan presents.

 All our critical faculties are needed if we are to avoid what Ngugi wa Thiong’o warns against (1986, p.20): “It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues.”

It is disturbing that Abram dDe Swaan and his publishers have produced a work which, despite being written by one of the few political scientists who work on macro-sociolinguistic issues, whose style is impressively articulate (in English as a foreign language), fails to do justice to a wealth of ongoing work and is marred by basic errors of fact. The book reads like an apologia for English come what may, with a few minor worries as afterthoughts. One would have hoped for something better from political science and Polity Press. It is perhaps ironic that a scholar who is impressively articulate in English as a foreign language seems to be guilty of what Ngugi wa Thiong’o warns against (1986, p.20): “It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues.” One would have hoped for something better from political science and Polity Press.

Globalization and language teaching

The second book, Globalization and Language Teaching, This is features an important collection of articles that traces some of the many ways that globalization impacts on language policy and language teaching. A short introduction by the editors ties together many of the themes that link articles in sections headed “The global and the local,”, “Zones of contact,” and “Methods and materials.”.

That gobalization entails cultural homogenization and triggers conflicting responses locally is made clear in the article on language teaching in Japan (Kubota).  This adheres to a naïve, essentialized belief in English as the international language, symbolized by white Anglo-American teachers and native speaker norms. In parallel with this cultural and linguistic self-colonization, a discourse of reactionary nationalism has evolved, partly as a result of the government proposing to make English a “second official’ language. These tensions are sensitively portrayed, and Kubota pleads for policies to respond more positively to linguistic diversity internally and externally.

The paper on language education in Britain (Harris, Leung & Rampton) reports on the many challenges to traditional norms of language, the state, and ethnicity that migration and globalization entail. New transnational means of communication, de-territorialization, and hybrid linguistic identities characterize urban centres (56.5% ethnic minorities in inner London, with 350 home languages). The Thatcherite-Blairite neoliberal economic order has implemented an authoritarian educational “national” curriculum with a strict focus on Standard English. Schools thus ignore the real complexity and diversity of language uses and needs: language in education policy is in denial, ignoring at its peril the “moral, cultural and political grounds now emerging at the intersection of  globalization and diaspora processes” (p.45). The article powerfully blends acute social analysis with lucid exemplification.

Heller analyses how the significance of French and English language proficiency in Canada has shifted as traditionalism gave way to modernism and, thereafter, globalization. The shift is from language as community to language as a key commodity for employment. Francophones have acquired more economic and political power, and, significantly, “both French and English are growing in importance in the service and information sectors of the globalized economy” (p.49). Bilingual skills are not necessarily essential for elite jobs, though they often are for lower level ones. Identities are shifting, as battles in communities over education (exemplified in Ontario) and employment show. Language struggles essentially represent competition over resources, a reality that the network and information society has not changed: “language is more obviously tied into processes of construction of social difference and inequality, not less, as globalization utopianists would have it” (p.62). The article has a wealth of exemplification, drawing on extensive fieldwork, and is conceptually stringent and illuminating.

Cameron traces the shift from linguistic imperialism to communicative imperialism. “Language becomes a global product available in different local flavours…. The dissemination of ‘global’ communicative norms and genres, like the dissemination of international languages, involves a one-way flow of expert knowledge from dominant to subaltern cultures” (p.70). Cameron argues that the modern focus on communication skills, defined by “experts,”, entails the dissemination of American ways of speaking, which are being extended worldwide, often without their ethnocentricity being perceived. The forms of communication, genres and styles of the dominant consumerist culture have the willing but possibly unwitting support of teachers of English and “communication” skills.

Kramsch and Thorne are less concerned with the dissemination of US cultural norms than with their interaction with French ones, when foreign language learners (in Berkeley and a lycée) interact by e-mail in a global communication network. The language learning efforts of both groups (of respectively French and English) reflect authentic communication, but analysis of the interaction reveals insensitive ignorance of different dimensions of communication, both factual and phatic/trust-building. Lack of awareness of cultural differences (in basic knowledge, and in the pragmatics of questioning, responding, and meshing into an effective shared interactive genre) was aggravated by the technology and the “myth of the internet as a person-to-person mode of communication, free from national and institutional constraints and ideologies” (p.95). These difficulties were reciprocal, so it is unfortunate that the authors, in a richly reflective empirical paper that is theoretically insightful, state that “genre is the mediator between the global and the local” (p.99), when also noting that both genres are local (ibid.), in this particular interaction involving two languages, both as foreign languages. The medium is global, but that does not guarantee neutrality, unlike Esperanto, which is an authentic “inter-local” language (Dasgupta, 2000). Though perhaps US norms are the global default norms, since globalization fundamentally means Americanization (Bourdieu, 2001, p.84;, RP’s translation):

“Globalization” serves as a password, a watchword, while in effect it is the legitimatory mask of a policy aiming to universalize particular interests and the particular tradition of the economically and politically dominant powers, above all the United States., and It aims to extend to the entire world the economic and cultural model that favours these powers most, while simultaneously presenting it as a norm, a requirement, and a fatality, a universal destiny, in such a manner as to obtain adherence or, at the least, universal resignation.

The remaining papers all address the downside of a globalizing, Englishizing language pedagogy agenda.

* There is a strong plea (Wallace) for a critical re-think of literacies and of the thrust of language teaching, so that learners of English as a second or foreign language can “participate in its critique and recreation” (p.114).

* In similar vein, Block critiques second language acquisition theory for under-rating the complexity of language learning, due to a technical-rational approach that is consonant with McDonaldization in many domains. The profession needs to escape from dehumanizing “McCommunication” approaches to research and learning.

* Canagarajah articulately stresses the inequalities of the global pedagogical village, and the inappropriacy of teaching materials and methods exported worldwide. By working through strategies and activities that represent bottom-up, eclectic but focused ways of empowering learners in meta-communicative awareness, his “postmethod” approach explicitly and persuasively goes beyond mono approaches of language, culture and method.

* Gray analyses the “one size fits all” global English teaching textbook, which is gender-inclusive but sanitized of any sensitive topics (politics, religion, sex,…) that could limit marketability. The vast British textbook business thus uncritically endorses materialism and western values. This paper also contains significant empirical verification of these conclusions, which are situated reflectively in relation to the many complex manifestations of globalization and glocalization.

As language specialists, I feel we have an obligation to tease out the links between globalization, Americanization, and Englishization. The book as a whole contributes substantially to this task, even though only a few contexts are covered,; for instance, there is no mention of regional trends such as the increased use of English in Europe. It is also ironical that the “language teaching” of the title is largely confined to a concern with English, even if the balance between English and other languages is a key issue globally and in many local contexts.

World English: A study of its development

Janina Brutt-Griffler (JBG) is also concerned with globalization and language learning in her World English: A Study of its Development. She seeks to establish that “English owes its existence as a world language in large part to the struggle against imperialism” (p.ix), arguing that the spread of English “requires primarily linguistic analysis rather than socio-political” (ibid. p.ix). One wonders how these parameters can be separated from each other, not least when JBG’s unit of analysis is the bilingual speech community. And while I strongly approve of the historical record being further explored, and of our concepts and research paradigms being refined and challenged, greater validity will only emerge through impeccable scholarship, which I regretfully feel JBG’s work does not live up to. I suspect that Pennycook’s warning about the need to draw lessons from the historical record with “great care” (2000, 50) has not been heeded. Although the book demonstrates an impressive range of reading and empirical documentation, the theoretical task that JBG has set herself, despite its many qualities, and perhaps because of the is vastly compleximmensely and perhaps impossibly difficult theoretical task that she has set herself. Pennycook’s warning about the need to draw lessons from the historical record with “great care” (2000, 50) has not been heeded.

JBG’s book has, in my view, a very poor fit between two halves that are only tenuously integrated. There is little theoretical or empirical glue binding together the two colonial case studies and the modern world. The glue is a conviction based on an exclusive focus on demand for English at the expense of supply. But supply and demand do not exclude each other, and to claim that the “impetus and agency for English language spread lies (stet) outside Center nations” (p.28) ignores the reality of North-South relations, past and present, in the global economy as much as in global English. Colonial empires were kept within English/French/Portuguese spheres of influence, where trade and language followed the flag, so it is false and anachronistic to suggest (49) that worldwide “one language had to develop as the commercial lingua franca” (p.49). According to JBG, Anglo-American hegemony in the world market has “declined” (p.112), though by 12 twelve pages later the US and the UK are back again “dominating the world market”, and World English (WE) is the “dominant socio-political language form” (p.114).

According to JBG, WE consists of language spread (a process) and language change (products). We are presumably dealing with one English rather than world Englishes. The claim is made – though not substantiated - that by switching agency from the individual to the group (“the essential actor is the acquiring speech community”, p.23), one can create a theoretically adequate foundation for the phenomenon of WE. This World English is “superseding national languages” entirely as a result of a “world historical process”, (p.124), that is presumed to be universally democratic and beneficial, even when JBG states that the need for a commercial lingua franca “springs from the economic basis of society” (p.49). This being so, presumably the functions that the “new” variants of English perform in multilingual societies, internally and externally, must be of central relevance, but JBG sees WE as doing away with “hierarchy among speech communities” (p.180), and non-Western nations “take equal part in the creation of the world econocultural system and its linguistic expression, WE” (p.108). Does JBG really think that the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the North American Free Trade Association and their like serve the whole of humanity equally and equitably? Alas, there is not one shred of evidence for this (International fForum on globalization, Cavanagh et al 2002). In JBG’s WE, “national distinctions dissolve,”, so the notion of a standard is redundant. Though as this process is supposed to be similar to the development of national languages (p.180), it is curious that norms are somehow no longer in place. These contradictions and inconsistencies do not add up to a valid analysis.

The first two chapters of JBG’s book review much of the relevant literature (in doctoral thesis fashion) in making a case for the ubiquity of English being due to “the process of second language acquisition by speech communities” (p.11), which JBG terms macroacquisition. She distances herself from a linguistic imperialism approach (Phillipson, 1992), which she regards as entailing English being spread “entirely or mainly for its own sake”  (p.27), a uniform policy of “universal and exclusive education in English” in colonies (p.29). I write precisely the opposite at several points in my book. It is intriguing that BG can read my work as detaching language from context like this, when the sine qua non of colonialism was profit, and when some commentators regard my approach as Marxist. JBG refers with approval to critics of my work, but not to my rebuttals (Phillipson, 1996, 1997, 1999my rejoinders to Bisong, Davies, and , the latter a review of Fishman, Conrad and Rubal-Lopez, a volume in which scholars from all over the world were invited to relate to my work, and in which none questioned the validity of the concept  linguistic imperialism except one of the American editors) or to more recent statements (e.g. papers by myself and others in Ricento, 2000), which would have inconvenienced her analysis.

JBG seldom refers to African or Asian scholars. Where are Gandhi and Ngugi on linguistic imperialism? Not there, since they would undermine JBG’s claim that English was “not unilaterally imposed on passive subjects, but wrested from an unwilling imperial authority as part of the struggle by them against colonialism” (p.31, italics in the original). Ali Mazrui has written (1975) revealingly about the dialectic and deeply ambivalent process for the African intelligentsia of functioning primarily in English.

JBG’s thorough descriptions of Basutoland and Ceylon are in fact entirely compatible with my analysis of colonial education, even if Basutoland was an extreme case, since the country was exclusively a labour reserve for the South African mining industry, an exploitation colony in territorial juxtaposition with a settler colony (Mufwene, 2002). Obviously much policy was reactive and ad hoc in a large empire. Clearly, genuine education can lead to resistance to an oppressive system, and colonizers sought to control minds as well as markets, irrespective of language.

JBG considers the influence of a number of key British colonial planners, and regards the twin systems of vernacular education for the masses and English-medium for the privileged as forming “bilingual education.”. But colonial education was modelled on what was done in the UK,: it replicated its content, and used its exams. I have written that Macaulay’s importance tends to be exaggerated (Phillipson, 1992, p.133), and to write that I saw him “imposing English as the language of all education in India” is a misreading of page 111 and the book as a whole. Far from Macaulay being a minor colonial official, as JBG suggests (p.40), he was near the top of the colonial hierarchy, and paid an astronomic salary (£10,000 p.a.). In contemporary terms, Macaulay would be described as a spin doctor, someone with a talent for penning quickly what others wished, with a tendency to the bombastic. Macaulay’s primary achievement in his short stay in India was writing the Indian Penal Code.

My reference to a “massive drive to establish English” relates explicitly (p.132) to “the past 30 years”, i.e. the postcolonial period from roughly 1960 onwards, the time when the sacred cows and false tenets of ELT/ESL (Kachru, 1997,; Phillipson, 1992) were being articulated, and which continued the colonial education language hierarchy, with English as the linguistic holy grail, a language that eludes the masses in Asia and Africa, however much coveted. JBG’s comforting reassurance that “there is no indication that English is supplanting other languages where it has spread as a world language” (p.121) is contradicted by the evidence among elites in India, parts of Africa, and potentially in Scandinavia.

Far from JBG’s writing being “balanced and dispassionate” (as ELT luminaries label it in the blurb on the back of the volume), it creates a one-sided case for the global status quo, even while proclaiming a commitment to multilingualism and equal rights for all users of English. It is a complex, ambitious book covering a vast range of topics and sources, many elements that in my view simply do not form a coherent, valid whole (and I also have queries or corrections about countless points of detail). If English professionals are to work for a more just world, and this goal probably unites many applied linguists, the links between economic, linguistic and other forms of globalization still need much more intensive study.

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