Another Kind of Global English

"Another Kind of Language does not gesture toward, even as fictional performance, linguistic translation. Just as there is no correspondence between the written characters of each language and the respective phonetic sounds, there is also no correspondence among the different languages. In other words, it is not the case that each is simply a translation of a single master text. Each layer, then, is discrete, the written characters and sounds “proper” to each language contained therein. On the one hand, this is a descriptive model for global English now: one of three distinct sociolinguistic groups (four, if Spanish were included), each in its place with no apparent cognizance of the others, no visible public route toward translingualism, no obvious structure for commonality. On the other, it is a prescriptive model, with the inflection falling not on a refusal of exchange but rather on a hopeful turn away from linguistic and territorial imposition, an aspiration toward “another kind” of language that does not need to assert sovereignty or otherwise engage in “language wars” (Calvet 1998)."