O'Regan, JP; (2019) Capital and the Hegemony of English in a Capitalist World-System. Presented at: 24th conference of the International Association for World Englishes, Limerick, Ireland.

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Abstract

When considering the historiography of world Englishes, or the abstract notion of English as a global language, it seems evident that we have been dealing with core-periphery forms of English in a core-periphery world-system since at least the sixteenth century. The putative division of Englishes into inner, outer and expanding circle forms first appeared in the 1980s. This development was prefaced and accompanied by the critique of English as the language of colonial-orientalism and imperialism. Complementing these critiques there has since the late 1990s been a steady growth of approaches which challenge the concept and notion of native-speaker models of English as the dominant signifieds for English in the world. They include, among others, English-as-a-Lingua-Franca (ELF), superdiversity and translanguaging, all of which have as their principal time-reference the quite recent past. In keeping with a world-systems perspective, this paper presents an historically-framed overview of the global spread and diversification of English as this is connected to the global spread of capital and the rise of a capitalist world-system since approximately 1600. The paper argues that the global spread of a standardized English and its ongoing dominance needs to be understood in relation to the global spread of capital, in which the nativized model has acted as a free rider on capital. By means of capital’s global spread, English in its standard form has become ‘structured in dominance’ in the world-system, thus placing it in a position against which periphery forms – however these are demarcated – find it difficult to compete.

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