iences as a doctor in pre-independence Malaya:
Among the doctors few can speak to all the patients, for in Malaya a university education, by its very insistence upon excellence in English, hampers a doctor from acquiring the vernacular languages ​​of this country.
And thus at night, when the patients confide in the darkness and in their own tongue what they have withheld from physician and nurse, I begin to understand the terror, the confusion, the essential need to prevaricate of those who are always at someone else's mercy, because they cannot communicate with those who decide their fate, except through an interpreter.
In the process, how many deviations, changes, siftings, warpings, and twistings; how many opportunities for blackmail and corruption, before, transformed, sometimes unrecognizable, the stories of the poor who do not speak English reach their rulers, who are hand-picked, among their own peoples, on the basis of their knowledge of English. (P.31)
These brief stories - A newspaper story about a death in Hong Kong, a study of communication in Cape Town hospitals, a novel set in pre-independence Malaya - are inter-connected in a number of ways: All speak to the range of contexts into which English has penetrated; all speak to the ways in which English becomes linked to forms of institutionalized power; all speak to the ways in which English functions as a class-based language; all speak to the tension between local, multiple vernacular languages ​​and the monolingualism of the language of power; all speak to the ways in which English is as much a language of global discommunication as it is a language of global communication. These examples, drawn from one interconnected domain - language use in medical contexts - but from diverse contexts, point to the many ways in which English has become a language (Though not the only language) of global disparity and discommunication. Such a role, of course, needs to be seen in terms of the complex interplay between the local and the global. It does matter that the language in the examples is English, as one of the major players in global relations. It also matters that these contexts are in Hong Kong, South Africa and Malaya, all places that have felt the insidious effects of British colonialism and its socially and ethnically divisive policies. It matters too that the domain is medicine, as one that has become based on very particular formations of knowledge and practice, so that its practitioners work with forms of supposedly universal or global, rather then locally derived, knowledge.
There are many domains in which English plays similar roles, business and the economy being one of the most salient. In the Philippines, for example, "English continues to occupy the place of privilege - it being the language of the ruling system, government, education, business and trade, and diplomacy ... The role of Philippine education ... seems to be that of supplying the world market economy with a docile and cheap labor force who are trained in English and the vocational and technical skills required by that economy. As it is we do have a decided advantage in the export market of domestic helpers and laborers. Cite their knowledge of English as that advantage "(OrdoГ±ez, 1999 pp19-20). Again we can see here the continued effects of colonialism (the particular effects of the US after the Spanish), the ways in which English is embedded in local institutional contexts (an education system that continues to favour English), and how these local contexts interrelate with broader global concerns such as IMF/World Bank pressures to develop particular types of economy, and the fact that the continuing poverty of the Philippines means that it exports its own people as cheap labour with a knowledge of English. Domestic helpers from the Philippines are popular in Hong Kong and Singapore in part because they can interact with children in English, something which is seen as a particular advantage in these two former colonies with their English-dominant language policies and dependence on global trade.
To start to understand the complex global role of English, we need to think outside questions of language communities and cultural empires. The notion of language community posits a problematic commonality both in terms of the common premises behind the term language and the usual assumptions of the term community. The notion of cultural empires is equally problematic, however, suggesting also a form of commonality, albeit an imposed one, and implying therefore that English reresents a similiarity of culture and thought. Both notions suggest a level of homogeneity as a result of a supposedly shared language. Alternative versions of the global spread of English propose a more heterogeneous version, whereby we have many Englishes and many worlds. And yet, as I shall argue here this version too has its flaw...
