Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics Beyond Borrowing Lexical Interaction between Englishes and Asian Languages

The book Beyond Borrowing: Lexical Interaction between Englishes and Asian Languages introduces and discusses how English has influenced East-Asian languages. This book was written by the leading researchers in the area of sociolinguistics and language contact – Jieun Kiaer, Hyejeong Ahn, Hyejeong, and Danica Salazar. It was a great honor for me to be a part of this research project and contribute to this book. The book is compiled of seven chapters and gives a historical overview of the socio-linguistic contacts with English that have led to its contemporary innovative usage and incorporation into languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. The book argues that contacts between English and East-Asian languages are not unidirectional and that East-Asian languages and their speakers expand and shape their global identities and linguistic repertoire while contributing to the development of English as a global language.
 
Beyond Borrowing: Lexical Interaction between Englishes and Asian Languages can be read both as a continued narrative as well as separate and language/topic-specific chapters. The present book consists of seven chapters, each addressing different aspects of English contact with East-Asian languages and its outcomes. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the existing World Englishes paradigms, analyses their limitations, and introduces the structure of the book and the methodology of the following chapters. Chapter 2 continues with the revision of the established approaches to evaluating the impact of English as a global language and its influence on other languages and cultures. This chapter also explains the researchers’ framework incorporating the translingual and multifaceted approach to the contemporary complex, dynamic, and transcultural linguistic reality. Chapters 3-5 look into the situation in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages, respectively. Chapter 6 addresses the cases of other South-Eastern languages such as Filipino and Malay, as South-East Asia is a vast and diverse region, and focusing only on the three previously mentioned languages would have been an oversimplification. Finally, Chapter 7 summarizes the previous chapters and returns to the topic of the expansion and revision of the previously established frameworks to better describe and explain the present-day complex and dynamic nature of the multi-directional contacts between English and East-Asian languages as well as to reevaluate the role and perception of English as a global language.
 
The contact between languages and cultures is a dynamic and ongoing process, which should be viewed in the context and from various perspectives. The book Beyond Borrowing: Lexical Interaction between Englishes and Asian Languages touches upon just some aspects of this complex phenomenon.  This book could be an interesting and useful introduction to the topic for students and researchers of various linguistic fields including applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and World Englishes, to name a few.
 

(Written by Anna Bordilovskaya, Project Assistant Professor, Center for Global Education / 2023)