English across Borders

This book presents an account of English in the communicative repertoires of anglophone West-Africans living in Southwestern Germany. Adopting an ethnographically grounded perspective, it analyzes how participants perceive and utilize English as well as other linguistic resources at their disposal in an environment where linguistic competence is routinely under scrutiny. The book traces how linguistic practices participate in the construction of socially meaningful spaces and images of personhood and how discourse about language enables participants to position themselves in relation to these constructions. In the process, notions of languages and varieties themselves are used in surprising and sometimes conflicting ways. While these are at odds with descriptive linguistic terminology, the book takes them seriously as expressing local understandings of the relationship among ways of speaking and social positions. At the theoretical level, the book advances a shift in World Englishes research towards a reflexive approach grounded in linguistic anthropological perspectives.