Imprisoned in English: The Hazards of English as a Default Language

by Anna Wierzbicka

In Imprisoned in English , Anna Wierzbicka argues that in the present English-dominated world, millions of people - including academics, lawyers, diplomats, and writers - can become "prisoners of English", unable to think outside English. In particular, social sciences and the humanities are now increasingly locked in a conceptual framework grounded in English. To most scholars in these fields, treating English as a default language seems a natural thing to do.

The book's approach is interdisciplinary, and its themes range over areas of central interest to anthropology, psychology, and sociology, among others. The linguistic material is drawn from languages of America, Australia, the Pacific, South-East Asia and Europe. Wierzbicka argues that it is time for human sciences to take advantage of English as a global lingua franca while at the same time transcending the limitations of the historically-shaped conceptual vocabulary of English. And she shows how this can be done.

Genres: Linguistics, Nonfiction, Language

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Anna Wierzbicka is Professor of Linguistics at Australian National University. Her many books include Semantics: Primes and Universals (OUP 1996), Emotions across Languages and Cultures (CUP 1999), and Experience, Evidence & Sense: The hidden cultural legacy of English (OUP 2010). Professors Goddard and Wierzbicka are co-editors of two collective volumes: Semantic and Lexical Universals and Meaning and Universal Grammar (John Benjamins, 1994 and 2002).

Reviews

[Klaus-Michael Lux · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wierzbicka makes a valid and convincing argument about how being unable to acknowledge that the concepts represented by most English words are not universal is harmful for different areas of research in the humanities. At times the discussion of certain examples is too detailed and contains too many repetitions and overly long quotes.

[Karen Chung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense and quite a slog, but her main point is well taken, and it was worth reading - I'm considering using some passages from it in my Introduction to Linguistics class. I enjoyed chapter 16: Philosophy, Theology, Politics the most, and also liked the quotes from J. M. Coetzee in chapter 18.

[David Nathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had high expectations of this book, having had some enjoyable exposure to W's theory of semantic primitives (NSM: Natural Semantic Metalanguage) some time ago. However, it turned out to be one of the most disappointing books I have read. It is laboured, and both defensive and self-aggrandising, and does as much to deter interest in the theory as to foster interest in it. The main point - that English terms are generally blindly accepted as a source of the metadata categories by which we conduct various kinds of science - is a good one, and valid and useful, but the book would have been 10 times better if it focused on that point. However, I came away feeling that NSM is only useful as a technique for thinking about meaning and expressing it for some (limited) purposes, and is not actually a theory of lexical semantics at all.

[Manuel Gonzalez · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book deals with a hugely timely topic, which is as pressing as under-researched. Wierzbicka picks out a number of areas where the idiosyncrasies of English are particularly problematic for cross-culturally and cross-morally solid human enquiry, presenting detailed case-studies into the kinds of scientific, socio-political and methodological issues underlying the default acceptance and use of English as a lingua franca. As expected, Wierzbicka presents her famed Natural Semantic Metalanguage as an alternative to English as a universal language, which I find as quirky as unconvincing. The main merit of the book is not so much the purported solutions as the bold and lucid description of the problem, for the first time taken at its core.

[Dori Jaffe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this is a more scholarly work, and since I'm not a scholar, it may have been too dense for me. But given all that, I basically agree with BaseRateZero's review of this book.