A cultural linguistics approach to Asian Englishes

In this essay, I adopt a cultural linguistics (Sharifian, 2011) approach to explore Asian Englishes (see also Sharifian, in press). In particular, I discuss how cultural conceptualizations can be adopted as a framework for understanding intercultural communication among Asian speakers of English. As Sharifian (in press, p. 1) puts it, ‘English is used by communities of speakers around the world to express their culturally constructed conceptualizations and worldviews’. I elaborate on the framework with specific examples of cultural schemas, cultural categories and cultural conceptual metaphors. I suggest that Asian speakers of English should not only acquire linguistic competence and communicative competence associated with Asian Englishes, but also understand cultural conceptualizations and develop metacultural competence for intercultural communication. English has been widely used in Asia and the Asia-Pacific. It is the de facto national language of Australia and New Zealand, and it is adopted either as one of the associate official or co-official languages, or a second language, in countries and regions such as India, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR). It is also ‘the foreign language of choice’ in Japan, Korea and China, where ‘elements of the language have been strongly assimilated into national life and the national language in various visual and cultural ways’ (McArthur, 2003, pp. 21–22). English has been regarded as an Asian language based on observations of the sociolinguistic profiles of English in Asia (Kachru, 1998; Kirkpatrick, 2000; McArthur, 2003; Smith, 1998). More recently, Honna (2014, p. 61) argues that in the context of Asia, ‘English is the language to express our own culture, not to imitate others’. There are many different approaches to researching world Englishes, including ‘corpus linguistics’, a ‘features-based’ approach, ‘Kachruvian studies’, ‘applied linguistics’, ‘popularisers’ and ‘linguistic futurology’ (Bolton, 2003, pp. 42–43). Cultural linguistics (Sharifian, 2011) is a branch of linguistics and cognitive linguistics that explores the relationship between language and culture, and it attempts to ‘understand language as a subsystem of culture and examine how various language features reflect and embody culture’ (Sharifian, 2013a, p. 1590). Based on earlier research in cognitive linguistics and a number of other relevant disciplines, Sharifian (2011, 2013a) has developed a multidisciplinary framework of ‘cultural conceptualizations’, which views language as firmly grounded in a group-level cognition that emerges from the interactions between the members of a cultural group.