Afterword: “Glocality” as a Mode of Variation in Today’s World

Abstract

This paper takes on two tasks. First, it reflects on the essays included in the current special edition, “Perspectives on Variation, Indigeneity, and Heritage in Historical English Language Studies,” to show how each of these essays discusses various socio-linguistic phenomena observed in a specific location – whether Alaska, Minnesota, or Seattle, WA—and yet foregrounds, in its own distinct way, the global sway of English in the modern and contemporary world. Second, in response to the underlying common theme of these essays, this paper conducts a brief study of the word glocal to approach the interaction beteen locality and globality in a new, non-binary way. Even though glocal is a blend word made up of two antonymic adjectives, it places an equal emphasis (‘both global and local’, OED3) on these elements. According to the origin section of the OED, however, this blend word was “formed within English.” While this description is correct in terms of morphology, the geo-cultural origin of glocal may well have involved global business interaction. In fact, the process of this lexical blending may well have taken place outside the English-speaking world (or the Inner Circle of the Concentric Circle model for World Englishes), for glocal, in the early stages of its history, was associated with the Japanese abstract noun dochakuka (literary, ‘localization’). The paper concludes with how HEL scholars may develop new theory, methods, and databases for more effective investigations of the global variety of English.