Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467551.003.0006
E. Schneider
This paper investigates the representation of grassroots English in a recent (2012), successful Bollywood movie, English Vinglish. The plot focusses upon Shashi, a young Indian mother who speaks hardly any English, a fact which is hugely embarrassing to herself and her family. During a stay in New York City she secretly takes beginners' English lessons with other international, instrumentally motivated learners. After a section which outlines some background, the paper's first main part analyzes language attitudes and ideologies held by the characters in this movie, presenting a short Critical Discourse Analysis of scenes from the movie, meant to disclose hidden linguistic value judgements. The second part adopts a linguistically descriptive perspective, presenting an analysis and interpretation of the basic syntactic patterns employed by Shashi and her classmates. These reduced but communicatively sufficient structures are characteristic of early adult learners' usage, and are shown to reflect internal development and to be similar to what has recently been termed "grassroots spread" of English. They are shown to display structural similarities with pidgins, patterns found in early language acquisition, and widespread nonstandard structures found in World Englishes.
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Pub Date : 2021-03-16DOI: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467551.003.0004
S. Mohr
Increasing global mobility has also affected the global language ecology and tourism is a central phenomenon in this regard, both socially and linguistically. Tourist contexts, where English as global lingua franca is often used at the grassroots level, provide an important opportunity to investigate English away from the traditionally studied academic circles of World Englishes research. This chapter analyses one such context, that is English as used and acquired in the tourist industry of Unguja island of Zanzibar. Focusing on language learning trajectories in super-diversity, the study discusses the problem of an easy attribution of individual language learning paths to particular social groups and reveals the fuzziness of the grassroots concept and its boundaries.
{"title":"English Language Learning Trajectories among Zanzibaris Working in Tourism","authors":"S. Mohr","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467551.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474467551.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Increasing global mobility has also affected the global language ecology and tourism is a central phenomenon in this regard, both socially and linguistically. Tourist contexts, where English as global lingua franca is often used at the grassroots level, provide an important opportunity to investigate English away from the traditionally studied academic circles of World Englishes research. This chapter analyses one such context, that is English as used and acquired in the tourist industry of Unguja island of Zanzibar. Focusing on language learning trajectories in super-diversity, the study discusses the problem of an easy attribution of individual language learning paths to particular social groups and reveals the fuzziness of the grassroots concept and its boundaries.","PeriodicalId":433371,"journal":{"name":"World Englishes at the Grassroots","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115306680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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