THE ET COLUMN

The ET column is where we ask people in the know – academics, broadcasters,

educators, linguists, teachers and others connected with English worldwide – to
write a column for the journal on issues of controversy, debate, work in the
field, and matters of topical and immediate interest.

Lookalike language
sophistication of the West, with the idea of global
mobility and the universal stardom that only
English-speaking people appear to have access to.
English on a T-shirt then somehow becomes the equiv-
J A N BLOM M A E R T alent of a poster of Justin Bieber or Madonna in some-
one’s bedroom: it is an aspirational object, a projection
of dreams and fantasies that revolve more around the
When a language moves across the world, it does not elevated position of the object in a symbolic stratifica-
move through empty spaces. It moves through spaces tion – Justin Bieber as the universal teenager icon of
already filled with linguistic and semiotic codes, their the moment – than around the actual person. Very
norms and expectations, and their patterns of valuation few of those who behold Justin Bieber’s image on
and evaluation. And mobility, thus, affects mobile their bedroom walls will ever meet him, let alone get
languages – most immediately through this phenom- to know him. The Justin Bieber they adore is in actual
enon for which we use that old notion of ‘accent’. fact their own image and understanding of ‘Justin
English, of course, is learned and used with an accent Bieberism’: an ideal, a utopia, something that con-
all over the world now, in both spoken and written cludes a prayer before bedtime. Similar things happen
forms. There is accent in writing, too: influences from to English in many parts in the world.
existing scripts, local forms of pronunciation of The English that people adore, admire and aspire to
English words, locally dominant pragmatic or poetic is, to the large majority of the world’s population,
patterns projected onto English. English, then, is beyond their reach. Realistically, a black child in a
quickly absorbed into the sociolinguistic system and township near Cape Town will never acquire the kind
is adapted to it.
The results of such adaptations can be seen in thou-
sands of examples circulating on the Internet, of ‘funny
English’ or ‘Engrish’, often taken from Asian public JAN BLOMMAERT is
Professor of Language,
sites. Many of us have seen those; in fact I am con-
Culture and Globalization
vinced that many of us drift onto websites documenting and Director of the Babylon
‘funny English’ after long and tough days on the job, Center at Tilburg University,
when the cold wind is blowing outside and everything The Netherlands, and
in the world seems to go wrong. We find intensely Professor of African
entertaining things there, and even our professional Linguistics and
familiarity with such things will not prevent us from Sociolinguistics at Ghent
bursting into roaring laughter when we read ‘Welcome University, Belgium. He
to my erection campaign’ on a Japanese politician’s holds honorary appointments at University of the
website or ‘Too drunk to fuck’ on the T-shirt of a Western Cape (South Africa) and Beijing Language
and Culture University (China) and is group leader
young Thai boy.
of the Max Planck Sociolinguistic Diversity
The fact is that English in the world often appears in Working Group. He has published widely on
forms and formats that challenge our understanding of language ideologies and language inequality in the
language, not just of English. English is widely used context of globalization, including The
by people who have no active competence in it, or Sociolinguistics of Globalization (Cambridge
whose degree of fluency in the language precludes an University Press, 2010), Ethnographic Fieldwork:
accurate understanding of what they have printed on A Beginner’s Guide (Multilingual Matters 2010),
their bodies. Language, then, is not ‘language’ in the Grassroots Literacy (Routledge, 2008), Discourse:
conventional sense of a formal system by means of A Critical Introduction (Cambridge University
which propositional meanings are transmitted. It is Press, 2005) and Language Ideological Debates
(Mouton de Gruyter, 1999).
used emblematically, as a mere graphic sign exuding
Email: jmeblommaert@gmail.com
mysterious associations with the cool and the

doi:10.1017/S0266078412000193
62 English Today 110, Vol. 28, No. 2 (June 2012). Printed in the United Kingdom © 2012 Cambridge University Press
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 of English that earned Nobel Prizes for his/her fellow The presence of an ‘English-looking’ script forming
South Africans Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee. English-looking words is often enough to satisfy the
Yes, they can get English, but not that English. demand. Thus, Figure 1 shows what might best be
Globalization has in fact turned English into a global described as a soup of words, of English-looking
symbolic restratifier, a semiotic item that adds new words, printed on a pair of jogging trousers.
layers of exclusiveness to sociolinguistic systems We read cryptic things such as ‘MNWBest’ and ‘In
already marked by profound inequality in their patterns Stores Noy’; we also see a sequence of what looks
of distribution and accessibility. Wherever English like celebrity names printed back to back:
occurs, it quickly occupies the top of the symbolic pyr-
amid of social and cultural diacritics. Those who have it ELLY/MARYG.BIIBE/MIKEJAY-Z/NELLY
are almost invariably elites who can entertain realistic FAOOLOR
dreams of transnational mobility and success; those ELEPHANT MAN/THE CLARK SISTERS/
who don’t have it are aware of the function of BEENG.MAN
English as a gateway out of the ghetto, the favela or
the township, and they project such aspirations of And we see quite a bit of text written in roman script
upward and outward mobility onto the bits of English and vaguely reminiscent of ‘English’: ‘01 baby diyo go
they can acquire. bnutering any blugel mierlude’.
Such bits of English, as we saw, are sometimes not The impression we get here is that the printer pooled
really English. Their function is not to express coherent and used any form remotely known or recognizable as
linguistic meanings through the system of English. It is, ‘English’ in an attempt not to create a readable English
rather, to show and display an awareness of the potential text but to create emblematic ‘Englishness’ – something
social capital contained in forms and shapes connected to that looks sufficiently like English to be recognized as
English. My Tilburg research team have for some years English in the local context. Never mind meaning.
now been investigating such aspirational and emblematic This can count as English in Lijiang, a small tourist
displays of language, and my colleague Xuan Wang at town in the Southwestern province of Yunnan, China.
some point coined the term ‘lookalike language’ for China, as we know, is significantly more central in
them. Items of this type appear to satisfy one defining cri- the world of business and finance than in the world of
terion : they sufficiently look like English, even if the English; and Lijiang is definitely the periphery of
English they display makes no sense at all linguistically. China. English is a very rare commodity in such places,
hard to acquire and hard to develop and use as a med-
ium of communication. Yet, people know the emble-
matic value of English, and this kind of lookalike
English is widely used and displayed. In a classic socio-
linguistic fashion, such displays are not random. We
find them whenever items or places need to be
flagged as posh, expensive, better-than-normal, new,
international and aimed at the affluent and the young.
Thus, a shop where old-fashioned farmers’ and work-
men’s clothes are sold – Mao-style jackets, simple
cotton shirts, slacks and caps – shows no inscriptions
in English at all; but around the corner, a rather more
upmarket boutique targeting fashionable young custo-
mers calls itself “Panarybody” (see Figure 2).
It did take me a while before I had established that
‘panary’ stands for ‘products that have to do with
bread’. It’s a nice and exclusive word that has a fine
euphonic rhythm to it. It is connected to ‘body’ here,
so ‘panarybody’ might be understood as ‘a body that
is related to bread’. Completely puzzling, given the
nature of the shop, but distinctly different in total
semiotic effect from the working-class textile shop sell-
ing Mao jackets. The Panarybody boutique is an
entirely different place inviting different audiences
Figure 1. ‘Soup of Words’ © Jan Blommaert and offering different adjectives to the commodities
2011. sold there. Whoever buys jeans or T-shirt there should

The ET Col umn 63

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 Figure 2. ‘The Panarybody Store’ © Jan Blommaert 2011.

feel connected not with Kunming (the provincial capi- around with Chinese characters tattooed on their
tal), but with London, Milan or New York. The imita- bodies, the meaning of which is unknown to them.
tion Playboy bunny sign adds a powerful global For all it matters, the sign on their shoulder could
pointer, a kind of semiotic intensifier, to this. read ‘Two very cold beers please.’ That is not the
We have hundreds of examples of such lookalike point – the point is the imagery of exoticism and
language from all corners of the world – the peripheries Oriental mystery it articulates. It is also why a very
of English are broader and more fragmented than Braj expensive chocolate shop in central Tokyo chose
Kachru’s Outer and Expanding Circles lead us to sus- ‘Nina’s derrière’ as its name. This potentially cata-
pect. In fact, lookalike language is the mode of appear- strophic misnomer (imagine offering someone a choco-
ance and of use of an immense amount of English in the late obtained from ‘Nina’s bum’) still articulated the
world. We tend not to take it too seriously – and prefer chic and sophistication of ‘Frenchness’ – an indexical
to use it as a profoundly amusing sidekick in our field of complex scoring even higher than English in the sym-
study – but we should consider it as a fundamental part bolic stratifications of contemporary consumership in
of the phenomenology of language in the real world. Japan and drawing on materials distantly connected to
The people designing such lookalike English have a language almost universally unknown in Japan.
hardly any linguistic competence in the language; The use of language in globalization is not predicated
their linguistic knowledge of English is often nil. But on knowledge of its linguistic system. Mobile
their social knowledge of English is massive and accu- languages enter spaces in which the language cannot
rate. They know about this magic language, and they become a ‘real’ language but can lead a busy and suc-
know the magic it can perform. They know its indexical cessful life as an emblematic object of great social sig-
and emblematic potential, and they also know that even nificance. Realizing this evidently opens up a wide
a tiny bit of (what looks like) that language can set them space of theoretical and methodological inquiry, invol-
apart from others, create distinction in Bourdieu’s ving crucial questions on the nature of language, its
sense – for within their local sociolinguistic system, functions and its rules of use. Lookalike language can
very few people would be able to come to such signs be dismissed in a variety of ways, as ‘bad English’, as
with a fully developed competence in the language. ‘deeply nonnative English’ and so forth. That is fine.
Very few local people, thus, would be able to walk But we cannot afford to neglect it as language, as one
into the shop and say: ‘Panarybody is a nonsense widespread mode of occurrence of language, surely
word; you’re making a fool of yourself.’ not when we see how important its emblematic func-
Languages, thus, exist in areas where they are not tions are for its users and how significant the invest-
understood as linguistic signs but still have wide cur- ments are that such users make in their use.
rency and recognizability as emblematic signs. This is Emblematic English is at the core of the phenomenol-
why some young people in Western Europe walk ogy of English as a global language.

64 ENGLISH TODAY 110 June 2012

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