means to engage with current global relations.
Sonntag insightfully points out that the rights-based approach to support for linguistic diversity and opposition to the English-Only movement "has not fundamentally altered the American projection of its vision of global English ... because a rights-based approach to promoting linguistic diversity reinforces the dominant liberal democratic project rather than dismantling it "(p.25). This is a crucial point because it points to a particular problem with the arguments against linguistic imperialism and for language rights: They are conducted in exactly the same frameworks as the politics they wish to oppose, or as Rajagopalan (1999) suggests, "the very charges being pressed against the hegemony of the English language and its putative imperialist pretensions themselves bear the imprint of a way of thinking about language moulded in an intellectual climate of excessive nationalist fervour and organized marauding of the wealth of alien nations-an intellectual climate where identities were invariably thought of in all-or-nothing terms "(p. 201) As Sonntag argues, "The willingness to use the language of human rights on the global level to frame local linguistic demands vis-Г -vis global English may merely be affirming the global vision projected by American liberal democracy "(p.25).
And yet, we also need to understand that that the new conditions of globalization require and produce new strategies of resistance. Resistance and change is possible but it will not be achieved through nostalgic longing for old identities. As Mignolo suggests, there is another side to these global designs: there is always opposition, resistance and appropriation. Drawing on the distinction used by the Brazilian sociologist and cultural critic, Renato Ortiz, and the Martinican philosopher and writer Edouard Glissant, between globalizaçaõ/globalization and mundializaçaõ/mondialization, Mignolo suggests that the first may be used to refer to these global designs, while the second term, which I am here translating as worldliness [1], may be seen in terms of "local histories in which global histories are enacted or where they have to be adapted, adopted, transformed, and rearticulated " (Mignolo, p.278). This, then, is the site of resistance, change, adaptation and reformulation. It is akin to what Canagarajah (1999a) in his discussion of resistance to the global spread of English describes as a 'resistance perspective', highlighting the ways in which postcolonial subjects "may find ways to negotiate, alter and oppose political structures, and reconstruct their languages, cultures and identities to their advantage. The intention is not to reject English, but to reconstitute it in more inclusive, ethical, and democratic terms "(p.2). From this point of view, then, there is always a response to the designs of empire, processes of resistance, rearticulation, reconstitution.
Shifting how we think about English (or language more generally) opens up several new perspectives: As Williams (1992) and Cameron (1995, 1997) have observed, sociolinguistics has operated all too often with fixed and static categories of class, gender and identity membership as if these were transparent givens onto which language can be mapped. Cameron argues that a more critical account suggests that "language is one of the things that constitutes my identity as a particular kind of subject " (1995, p.16). Instead of focusing on a 'linguistics of community,' (which is often based on a circularity of argument that suggests that a speaker of x community speaks language y because they belong to x, and the fact that they speak y proves they are a member of x), new work is starting to focus on a 'linguistics of contact' (Cf Pratt 1987), "looking instead at the intricate ways in which people use language to index social group affiliations in situations where the acceptability and legitimacy of their doing so is open to question, incontrovertibly guaranteed neither by ties of inheritance, ingroup socialisation, nor by any other language ideology "(Rampton 1999, p 422). As Hill suggests, the "kaleidoscopic, ludic, open flavor" of language use in domains of popular culture profoundly challenges the methods of mainstream sociolinguistics "by transgressing fundamental ideas of 'speakerhood'" (1999, pp 550-1).
These more recent approaches to language, identity and speakerhood open up for further question the very notion of whether languages ​​exist in any useful sense of the word, and what indeed we are engaged in when we use language (Pennycook, 2004; Reagan, 2004). As Hill goes on to suggest, we need to get beyond the localized concept of 'Speech community' or 'field site,' located as they are in modernist concepts of identity and location, and instead "attack the problem of the precise situated...
