Jamie Shinhee Lee’s book English in Asian Popular Culture (co-edited with Andrew Moody) was published by Hong Kong University Press this spring.

The book examines an important, yet under-researched, sociolinguistic component of culture by looking at a region that is still viewed as foreign or exotic ‘other’ in Western academic discourse.

English in Asian Popular Culture features six domains of pop culture: music, TV, film, advertising, magazines, and the Internet, in a variety of speech communities in Asia including China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and the Philippines.

While English functions differently from domain to domain and in different cultures, each demonstrates the bilingual creativity and linguistic innovation that has developed from the spread of English into Asia. In all the cases described in this volume, English comes to facilitate the development of a modern identity across progressive generation of Asians.

Lee is an associate professor of linguistics at UM-Dearborn.

Be Sociable, Share!

•