Language on the edge of the global: Communicative competence, agency, and the complexity of the local

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2013.02.002Get rights and content

Abstract

Globalization has added complexity to the notion of communicative competence. Although globalization has now become a central focus in sociolinguistics, speech communities continue to be treated as homogeneous entities in which language shifts affect everyone in similar fashion, and smaller speech communities as particularly vulnerable to language shift. In Tonga (Pacific Islands), however, alternative uses of English and Tongan are the object of intersubjective negotiations, in which ideologies of entitlement figure centrally. Rethinking communicative competence in the global age demands an engagement with the way in which old and new forms of power and inequality shape it at the convergence of global and local dynamics.

Highlights

► Rethinking communicative competence in light of globalization. ► Complexity and heterogeneity of small-scale linguistic communities on the margin of the global present. ► Defining the local is prone to contestation, and language figures centrally in these processes. ► Globalization both reproduces existing socio-economic disparities and produce new ones.

Introduction

However difficult it is to define the multi-facetted, all-encompassing, and unstructured phenomenon that we call globalization, the assertion that it has reconfigured the power structure of the world is perhaps the least controversial statement one can make about it. And since power in one form or another shapes all social relations and all interactions, globalization today looms large in the shadow of all interactions. Not surprisingly, globalization has raised particularly thorny questions about basic categories in the study of language in social context that, until recently, were generally thought to be relatively unproblematic, including the nature of a “speech community”; the meaning of “functional repertoire”; the boundedness of linguistic codes; and the nature of communicative competence (e.g., Besnier, 2007, Blommaert, 2010, Coupland, 2010, Fairclough, 2006, Heller, 2003, Silverstein, 1998).

In the last couple of decades, an increasing number of scholars of language in its social and cultural context have turned their attention to the question of how globalization is affecting linguistic practices in speech communities around the world. Through this question, they have attempted to rethink some of the basic assumptions that we make about the nature of language in general and, more specifically, about the nature of communicative competence. Yet, more often than not, works on language and globalization have treated speech communities as homogeneous entities, made up of people who behave in more-or-less similar fashion when placed in a given situation. For example, linguists have explored how shifts in language use take place in societies that are subjected to the hegemony of world languages, particularly English. They have documented the increasing prominence of lexical borrowings, code-switching practices, and other forms of language mixing (e.g., Jacquemet, 2005), as well as the attrition of local languages and local “ways of speaking”, with the Internet, television, the market, and the global flow of ideas and objects all serving as vehicles for these changes. Change is generally represented as affecting everyone in similar fashion or alternatively as affecting homogeneously particular demographic subgroups, such as “youth” or “women”, members of which are assumed to engage in the same range of social and linguistic practices. In social scientific parlance, works of this kind approach the intersection between language and globalization from the perspective of structures, rather than from the perspective of agents.

In addition, works that focus on language in a global context often represent small-scale societies on the periphery of industrial capitalism as vulnerable recipients of the workings of globalization. In these representations, in other words, globalization consists of a unidirectional flow from the “center” to the “periphery”, to use a vocabulary we have inherited from 1970s-style world-system theory (Wallerstein, 1974–88): ideas, images, and resources originate principally from economically and culturally powerful countries of the world (North America, Western Europe, Japan, the Asian Tigers, Australia and New Zealand) and “travel” to the rest of the world, where they are consumed, while the center drains the periphery of its own resources.

There is another way in which the relationship between globalization and language is often presented as a one-way process: globalization affects linguistic practices in the periphery (e.g., by endangering small-scale languages, altering their structure, or reducing their vocabulary and communicative repertoire). Not entertained is the possibility that linguistic practices, and people who partake in these practices, could actively engage with global dynamics, choosing which ones they find interesting or useful, criticizing them, altering them, or rejecting them.

Yet it takes little theoretical sophistication to find nonlinguistic counter-examples to these assumptions. Take, for example, the equation of globalization as a one-way cultural flow from center to periphery. We now have many examples of flows that take the reverse path and, even more interestingly, that follow paths that completely bypass the world’s industrial centers. Particular dramatic examples are the enthusiasm with which Nigerians consume Bollywood films (Larkin, 1997), or the equally enthusiastic response, in many parts of the developing world, to television soap operas produced in Brazil or Mexico (Rêgo and La Pastina 2007). How these “South–South” flows are affecting linguistic practices remains a largely under-explored and yet profoundly interesting question. Even more fundamentally, today more than ever, what constitutes the “center” and the “periphery” of the world is ambiguous, as attested, for example, by the ongoing ascendance of China and India as global economic powers.

In this paper, I analyze examples of how agents in one society of the developing world actively engage with tokens of globalization through their communicative practices. I also document the fact that, even in a relatively small-scale society far removed from the cultural and economic centers of the world, people do not always “agree” with one another about the relative value of the global flows to which they are exposed. In fact, in the course of daily interactions, they argue with one another, more or less explicitly, about the importance and local relevance of these tokens. My ultimate aim is to encourage a nuanced approach to the workings of globalization on language and to the role of language in globalization. This approach takes seriously the fact that people are active agents, not free of the structural power embedded in the contexts in which they operate, but nevertheless able to approach these contexts with a critical perspective that may different from person to person according to the social configurations of their lives, but that in each case may redefine the meaning of what flows in the global condition. The analysis I develop provides a new context in which to re-think communicative competence in a global context. It argues for an understanding of communicative competence as embedded in politics of several scales at once: the micro-politics of each interactional moment; the politics of local social structures; and the macro-politics of the global condition.

Section snippets

Tonga at the convergence of the local and the global

The ethnographic and linguistic context on which I focus is the Kingdom of Tonga, a relatively small-scale society in the Western Polynesian region of the Pacific Islands, peopled by 100,000 inhabitants. Since the 1960s, Tongans have been emigrating in increasingly greater numbers to the three English-speaking countries of the Pacific Rim (New Zealand, Australia, and the United States), but also to all four corners of the world. Today, the diasporic Tongan population may be around twice the

The local and the global in communicative practices in Tonga

As in all other societies of the world in which two or more languages are co-present, the use of English and Tongan is unevenly distributed among Tongans. Although everyone has at least some passive competence in English, one finds speakers who use Tongan almost exclusively, speakers who use English predominantly (including the small minority of English-speaking foreigners but also a growing number of Tongans), and many speakers who code-switch, both situationally and metaphorically (Blom and

Local and global as intersubjective productions

These dynamics became clear to me while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Tonga’s capital, Nuku‘alofa, at various times between 1999 and 2008, during which I spent a great deal of time watching, talking, and listening at the secondhand marketplace, a site where small-scale traders sells secondhand goods that they have received from overseas relatives instead of or in addition to monetary remittances. Many aspects of what takes place in this site place it outside of the traditional order: the

Communicative competence, agency, and the complexity of the local

In this article, I have argued for an approach to the role of language in the contemporary global condition that recognizes not only the complexities of the vast array of phenomena that we have come to call “globalization”, but also the complexities of the local. Even small-scale societies like the one on which I have based my analysis are rife with conflicting positions, contradictory dynamics, and divergent agendas. The global, and with it the role of linguistic tokens of the global, means

Acknowledgements

I conducted the research on which this paper is based at various stages between 1997 and 2008, with funding from the Marsden Fund of the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. I thank the Government of Tonga for permission to conduct research and the many people in Tonga who gave me their generous support. Finally, I am grateful to Kuniyoshi Kataoka and Keiko Ikeda for inviting me to

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