Transliterated multilingualism/globalisation : English disguised in non-Latin linguistic landscapes as new type of world Englishes?

Abstract

English has, for historical reasons, risen to global prominence as the unchallenged lingua franca internationally. World Englishes (WE) has, as a result, established itself as a visible line of research, exploring localised/indigenised varieties of English from around the world (e.g. India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Nigeria). However, most of the discussions so far concern English written in the Latin script as people would normally expect. Against a backdrop of globalisation and the juggernaut of English, this article points to an increasingly salient phenomenon that English especially in superdiverse and/or (post)colonial societies (e.g. India and Pakistan) may disguise in seemingly inscrutable and ‘mysterious’ local scripts (e.g. Perso-Arabic script and Devanagari script) and even ‘pass off’ as local languages in these countries’ linguistic landscapes through phonetic transliteration. This emerging trend begs the question whether these should be understood as new varieties of local languages or new kinds of world Englishes disguised in non-Roman scripts. This phenomenon is theorised in this paper conceptually. To illustrate our point, examples of authentic signs taken from the linguistic landscapes relating to South Asia and South Asian communities are discussed. As English is increasingly glocalised and becomes part of other less dominant languages, this article calls on researchers in World Englishes (WE) and (socio)linguistics in general to look beyond English written in the Latin script in a conventional/traditional sense and to expand the scope and remit of WE research to explore how English, as a dominant code, becomes indigenised using local scripts and morphs into and even ‘passes off’ as ‘local’ surreptitiously. This fundamentally calls for the crucial need for researchers from diverse and multilingual backgrounds to work together to better understand English and other non-dominant languages’ role in the 21st century.