English from a satellite view: mapping the supra-indexical field of shared imaginaries

Abstract

Abstract Research on the attribution of value to English in ‘non-native’ environments typically focuses on single communities or specific domains (e.g., advertising, education, pop culture). This study examines the indexical potential of English on a global scale, adopting a ‘satellite perspective’ that scans across communities and spheres of use. Drawing on a corpus of 128 academic publications from around the world, it identifies over one hundred indexical associations of English-based resources and reveals a striking uniformity: values attached to English recur in different locations despite geographical and cultural distance. The analysis combines (Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). concept of ‘imaginary landscapes’ with (Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4). 453–476) indexical field framework and theories of localness and place to classify and interpret the data. The notion of supra-indexicality is introduced to extend the scale of analysis to globalised social settings and to open up a discussion of ideological constraints on meaning-making involving global linguistic resources. In this sense, the main outcome of the study – the cumulative ‘supra-indexical field’ of potential meanings of English – offers a transferable analytical framework that can be applied to virtually any community or domain and serve as a comparative basis for future research on the social value of English.