Dear Charlotte

Not sure how wide the scope of 'Australasia' is here, and most resources will focus on Australia and New Zealand only - again, the Bayard et al is the most obvious to spring to mind, although there have been a few other more comprehensive treatments of Australian English in particular. The Pacific/Australasian book of the Mouton Varieties of English series has some recent stuff but covering quite a limited range of countries. And of course there has recently been the media-blown debate on whether Australian English derives from early colonial drunkenness (good overview here: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/fullysic/2015/10/29/when-media-gets-drunk-on-absurdity-and-tries-to-tell-us-we%E2%80%99re-the-ones-who-sound-drunk/) and comments by Crystal at http://david-crystal.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/on-one-word-reaction-to-reports-about.html 

If you want to include the South Pacific basin within your focus, there hasn't been a huge amount written - two new books are South Pacific Englishes by Carolin Biewer and Educated Fiji English by Lena Zipp. I currently teach a course on Varieties of English at the University of the South Pacific, and I've actually got more mileage out of teaching my students to critique representations of English in the Pacific than I have discussing the features of any particular variety. I've used generic texts such as Crystal & Jenkins that try to cover the spread of English everywhere, and got my students to compare the data given with their own experience. The comment I posted on our discussion forum to kick start the follow-up tutorial discussion highlights some of the issues:

Week 4 tutorial: Representations of the Pacific in the reading
I asked what you thought of the way the Pacific was represented in the text by Jenkins. This may seem tricky. On the one hand, I (the lecturer) assigned you a text to read, so I obviously think it’s worth you reading it. On the other hand, I am now asking you to critique (and potentially criticise) that same reading – so are you supposed to agree with it or not?
Well, I gave you the reading because I think it gives a concise and clear overview of the key historical information about the two diasporas of English which we also covered in the lecture. However, personally I felt that the Pacific was very poorly represented in this reading, for two main reasons:
i.	Inaccuracies (i.e. false information)
a)	Look at the figures in the table on p.2 (note that Jenkins reproduces this table from Crystal 2003, so the data is not her own). Look at Fiji, for example. If you add together the L1 and L2 speakers of English, you get 176,000 (very approximate figures and, yes, they are quite dated now, but that doesn’t account for the problem). If the total population was 850,000, that leaves us with 600,000+ people in Fiji who speak absolutely no English at all according to this table! i.e. for the vast majority of Fiji’s population English is not an institutional L2, used in education, the media, law, and so on.
b)	Some countries of the Pacific have no L1 speakers of English listed – I was interested to see whether any of you would argue that this is no longer true, particularly in Tonga where English does seem to be quite widely spoken (and there are a number of people physically living in Tonga who may have been raised in New Zealand etc. too). This is perhaps a point which is rather simplified by the table, but some of you might consider it an inaccuracy. Others of you, however, did argue against the claim that there are any L1 speakers at all, so this is clearly a point up for debate. It was a shame that more of you didn’t take this debate on!
c)	I was particularly interested in the data for Solomons, PNG and Vanuatu, which all had an asterisk (*) by their names, along with non-Pacific countries such as Nigeria. This asterisk supposedly means that “the variety of English spoken is a pidgin or creole” (p.2). So according to these figures, 0% of people in these countries speak English at all because the variety of English spoken is considered to be Melanesian Pidgin (i.e. Bislama, Pijin, Tok Pisin). This means that the language of education is Melanesian Pidgin, rather than English in these countries, which is certainly not the case, since students are often punished for speaking this language. English is one of the official languages in all three countries (in PNG and Vanuatu, the national variety of Melanesian Pidgin is a separate official language), so how can it be said that English isn’t used in these countries?

ii.	Erasure of the Pacific (i.e. lack of mention)
a)	In fig A1.1 on p.6, Jenkins lists South East Asia and the South Pacific as being influenced by the second dispersal. However, the figure provides examples only of countries within South East Asia.
b)	From p.7 onwards, she gives a detailed summary of the second dispersal. Halfway down p.8, she mentions SE Asia, S Asia and the South Pacific again. Yet again, she only really deals with the first two in any detail, making only one small mention of PNG. However, even when she mentions PNG, she, firstly, suggests that there was only a very brief influence from an English-speaking power (from 1884 to 1975, some or all of what is now PNG was ruled either by Britain or Australia, which amounts to the same thing linguistically) and, secondly, that the only English used in PNG today is Tok Pisin – an entirely separate language!
c)	You can see from the very bottom of p.9 that Jenkins begins to discuss pidgins and creoles as separate varieties from English (note that there is a break here, and the following page of our reader picks up again on p.56 – I hope this didn’t lead to confusion!). This separation of sections confirms Jenkins’ belief that ‘English’ is spoken throughout Africa, South Asia and South East Asia, but that the only English-related variety worth mentioning in the South Pacific is Melanesian Pidgin. 
d)	Of course, we cannot expect Jenkins to give a detailed account of the way English is spoken in every country of the world, but it raises the issue that there is very little that has been written and published on English in this particular region. Many of you lamented the negative views held about Pacific varieties of English – unfortunately such views are unlikely to change unless the profile is raised internationally that English is even spoken over here!
Something else that you should take from this exercise is that a text can be very useful, and yet still have flaws. You don’t have to completely agree or completely disagree with a whole text. I don’t think Jenkins has a vendetta against the Pacific, and I have great respect for some of her work, but she clearly doesn’t know very much about the region, or else feels that these 12 countries that we represent are so small and insignificant that the mainstream readership of her book won’t be interested. The only details she feels it necessary to include from our entire region are those relating to Melanesian Pidgin, as though Tok Pisin, Bislama and Solomons Pijin represent the story of 'English’ in the Pacific. I would expect you to notice this and comment on it, and yet that doesn’t mean you have to reject the whole text (until you begin your own postgraduate research and can do the region justice in the academic field of ‘varieties of English’!!).

Not sure if this helps too much Charlotte! But it would be great to think that the Pacific basin gets a bit of a look-in, because English is an official language and lingua franca throughout our region, and yet this is kind of ignored in the mainstream literature.

Fiona 


Date:    Mon, 23 Nov 2015 21:30:42 +0000
From:    Charlotte Selleck <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: English in Australasia

Hi everyone.

I'm afraid I could do with your help again...

I need to deliver a lecture on English in Australasia (including a discussion of the impact on minority languages) as part of a third year undergraduate World Englishes module. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thank you in advance,

Dr Charlotte Selleck
Lecturer in English Language
University of Worcester
e: [log in to unmask]

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End of TEACHLING Digest - 21 Nov 2015 to 23 Nov 2015 (#2015-50)
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