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This article explores the evolution of Cultural Linguistics, its fusion with Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Sociolinguistics, and its application to the study of world Englishes, emphasising the cultural dimension of language and cognition. It investigates key theoretical concepts in Cultural Linguistics such as cultural categories, schemas, conceptualisations, keywords, models and scenarios as essential analytical tools for examining the interplay between thought, language and culture. Using examples from English varieties in sub-Saharan Africa, Great Britain, Ireland, India and Hong Kong, this article demonstrates how these conceptual phenomena interact at increasing levels of conceptual complexity. The discussion also distinguishes conceptual metaphor (and metonymy) from the somewhat problematic concept of ‘cultural metaphor’, previously used in some cultural-linguistic approaches to world Englishes. Finally, the article delves into Conceptual Blending Theory as a possible extension of Cultural Linguistics that synthesises diverse cultural knowledge to interpret culture-specific expressions in contemporary multilingual settings.
This research bibliography lists some of the hallmark works in the field of Cultural Linguistics and has an exclusive thematic focus on cultural-linguistic approaches to world Englishes. Therefore, other important and congenial works that have been published under the umbrella of, for example, Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) or deal with langauges other than English are excluded but can be found in the respective references of the individual contributions of this special issue. The research bibliography offers reference works for research strands of the world Englishes framework, such as English language teaching and language use in multicultural and multilingual contexts, as well as language use in the public space. Furthermore, with a collection of publications ranging from the 1980s to most recent state-of-the-art works from the year 2024, the authors identify trends and topical developments in the synthesized research of Cultural Linguistics and world Englishes and offer an outlook on new frontiers in this realm.
The objective of the present paper is to explore the potentials and challenges inherent in con- ceptualizations of global citizenship education (GCE) in the context of foreign language edu- cation. Specifically, we argue for a critical approach to GCE that emphasizes the significance of language as symbolic power by drawing on the concepts of critical literacy (e.g., Freire 1983; Janks 2014) and symbolic competence (Kramsch 2006; 2011; 2021). To illustrate the necessity of such a critical approach to GCE, we critically analyze teaching materials designed for the English language classroom as provided by the curriculum framework (KMK/ BMZ 2016). The analysis reveals how reliance on dominant Western liberal and neoliberal epistemologies, norms, and discourses might inadvertently reinforce the very inequalities that GCE actually seeks to address. By foregrounding the relationship between language, symbolic power, and GCE, we further redesign these teaching materials and incorporate pedagogical and methodological principles which are in line with a critical literacy and symbolic competence.
Beyond humanitarianism
(2022)
For world literature studies, Indian writing in English offers an exceptionally rich and variegated field of analysis: On the one hand, a set of prominent Indian or diasporic writers accrues substantial literary capital through metropolitan review circuits and award systems and thus maintains the high international visibility that Indian writing in English has acquired ever since the early 1980s. Addressing a readership that spans countries and continents, this kind of writing functions as a viable tributary to world literature. On the other hand, a new boom of Indian mass fiction in English has emerged that, while targeting a strictly domestic audience, is always already implicated in the dynamics of world literature as well, albeit in a very different way: As they deploy, appropriate and adopt a wide range of globally available templates of popular genres, these texts have globality inscribed into their very textures even if they do not circulate internationally.
Schomburgk’s Chook
(2018)
Focusing on the politics of museums, collections and the untold stories of the scientific ‘specimens’ that travelled between Germany and Australia, this article reconstructs the historical, interpersonal and geopolitical contexts that made it possible for the stuffed skin of an Australian malleefowl to become part of the collections of Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde. The author enquires into the kinds of contexts that are habitually considered irrelevant when a specimen of natural history is treated as an object of taxonomic information only. In case of this particular specimen human and non-human history become entangled in ways that link the fate of this one small Australian bird to the German revolutionary generation of 1848, to Germany’s nineteenth-century colonial aspirations, to settler–Indigenous relations, to the cruel realities that underpinned the production of scientific knowledge in colonial Australia, and to a present-day interest in reconstructing Indigenous knowledges.
Layer after Layer
(2021)
When the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in South London were opened to the general public in the 1840s, they were presented as a ‘world text’: a collection of flora from all over the world, with the spectacular tropical (read: colonial) specimens taking centre stage as indexes of Britain’s imperial supremacy. However, the one exotic plant species that preoccupied the British cultural imagination more than any other remained conspicuously absent from the collection: the banyan tree, whose non-transferability left a significant gap in the ‘text’ of the garden, thereby effectively puncturing the illusion of comprehensive global command that underpins the biopolitical designs of what Richard Grove has aptly dubbed ‘green imperialism’. This article demonstrates how, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the banyan tree became an object of fascination and admiration for British scientists, painters, writers and photographers precisely because of its obstinate non-availability to colonial control and visual or even conceptual representability.
Introduction
(2021)