Fiche de révision : English-Speaking World

📋 Plan du Cours

1. Organisation et exigences du module
2. Définir le monde anglophone
3. Empire britannique et Commonwealth
4. Colonial contexts and Englishes
5. English after the Empire
6. Ressources et mobilité internationale

📖 1. Organisation et exigences du module

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• Module purpose : Introduces the social scientific study of the English-speaking world.

★ À maîtriser

• The module covers eight themes over two semesters, and each theme includes a general introduction, a specific case study, and an analytical question.

• The written examination lasts 1 hour 30 minutes and takes place at the end of the semester.

Compléments

• The pass rate was 36% last year.

📌 Students should study their lessons and complete their homework throughout the semester rather than waiting until the end, while improving precise and correct written English.

📖 2. Définir le monde anglophone

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• English-speaking world : Consists of countries and territories in which English is an administrative, official, or cultural language.

★ À maîtriser

• English is the most spoken language worldwide, with 1.5 billion speakers, and most English speakers are non-native speakers.

Compléments

• Between 1790 and 1930, the number of English speakers grew from 12 million to around 200 million.

💡 Astuce mémo

English is everywhere, but the English-speaking world is not everywhere

📖 3. Empire britannique et Commonwealth

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• British Empire : Consisted of territories under the political control of the British government over a span of three centuries.

★ À maîtriser

📌 The First British Empire was mainly a commercial Atlantic empire based on North America and the West Indies, whereas the Second British Empire was a territorial empire that turned toward India, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa.

• The First British Empire lasted from 1689 to 1783 and ended with the independence of the United States of America.

• The British Empire developed into the Commonwealth in the mid-twentieth century as former British dependencies obtained sovereignty but retained ties to the United Kingdom.

Compléments

• The Second British Empire lasted from 1783 to 1914 and included the colonization of New Zealand and the Scramble for Africa, associated with the 1884 Berlin Conference.

💡 Astuce mémo

First Empire → Second Empire → Commonwealth

📖 4. Colonial contexts and Englishes

★ À maîtriser

• British colonial expansion disseminated English to all continents and produced national and regional varieties through contact with other and indigenous languages.

• The emergence of English varieties depends on colonial expansion, interlingual contact, and the colonial context in which English was acquired and used.

📌 Trade colonies involved light interlingual contact and produced trading jargon or pidgins, as in Ghana and The Gambia.

• Exploitation colonies used indirect rule, gave English the status of a symbol of social and political power, and produced New Englishes through large-scale second-language acquisition, as in India and Kenya.

• Plantation colonies relied heavily on slave labor, and forced heavy contact between different languages produced English-based pidgins and creoles, as in Jamaica and the Bahamas.

Compléments

• Settlement colonies involved large-scale British settlement, limited interlingual contact, and the emergence of settler dialects such as American English or Australian English.

💡 Astuce mémo

Light contact produces pidgins or settler dialects; heavy contact produces creoles

📖 5. English after the Empire

🔑 Notions clés & Définitions

• Cultural hegemony : The worldwide influence created when a country's cultural products, such as cinema, television series, and music, are consumed across the world.

★ À maîtriser

📌 After independence, some countries such as Malaysia and Tanzania attempted to abandon English, whereas Singapore and Namibia embraced it as a national language.

• Decolonization did not weaken the use of English, which is no longer owned exclusively by the British and continues to gain speakers and varieties through globalization and United States cultural imperialism.

Compléments

• American English is the most spoken variety worldwide as a result of the United States' cultural hegemony.

• Salman Rushdie wrote in Imaginary Homelands (1992) that formerly colonized people are remaking and domesticating English by creating their own territories within the language.

💡 Astuce mémo

Decolonization → English becomes global and no longer exclusively British

📖 6. Ressources et mobilité internationale

★ À maîtriser

• Spending one or two semesters at a partner university can improve language mastery and a student's CV.

📌 ERASMUS students do not have to pay the enrolment fees of the host university.

Compléments

• 🔄 To prepare for an exchange, students should: (Karine Bigand): obtain information from the first year, attend the International Month events, often in October, attend the November meeting organized by Karine Bigand

• The Centre de Formation et d'Autoformation en Langues is open Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. in room C.115 of the Egger building on the Schuman Campus.

📊 Tableaux de synthèse

British Empires compared