Riassunto "Global Englishes" di J. Jenkins, Sintesi del corso di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Riassunto "Global Englishes" di J. Jenkins e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! RIASSUNTI DE “GLOBAL ENGLISHES – A RESOURCE BOOK FOR STUDENTS” DI J. JENKINS SECTIONS A-C SECTION A: INTRODUCTION Key topics in Global Englishes A1. The historical, social and political context In the period between the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the later years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, the number of speakers of English increased from five to seven million to possibly two billion. The English language is now spoken in almost every country of the world, with its majority of speakers being those for whom it is not the first language. This language moved from the British Islands to 75 countries where is spoken either as a first language (L1 or ENL, English as native language) or as an official and institutionalised second language (L2 or ESL, English as a second language) in fields such as government, law and education and in any other official context. English is spoken as L1 by 329.140.800 people in the world and as L2 from 430,614,500 people. David Crystal, an important linguist, points out that, whether or not pidgin and creoles are included, L2 speakers are definitely more than L1 speakers. And in fact, the most substantial increase by far is the number of L2 speakers, which is almost double from 1997 to 2003. Actually, the total number of L2 speakers is in fact still more remarkable than the one suggested by Crystal because no one takes account of one further group of L2 English speakers: those for whom English was never a colonial language and for whom it may have little or no official function within their own country. This group of English speakers were originally described as speakers of English as a foreign language (EFL). Since the mid-1990s, however, it has become common the use of the term English as a lingua franca (ELF). The new term reflects the growing trend for English users from, for example, mainland Europe, China and Brazil, to use English more frequently as a contact language among themselves rather than with native English speakers. The number of EFL/ELF speakers is increasing all the time as more and more people in these countries learn English, such that approximately one in three of the world’s population are now capable of communicating to a useful level in English. The theme of value judgments of these different Englishes is very important because the negative attitude which persists today towards certain varieties of English have their roots in the past and, especially, in the two dispersals of English. The dispersals of English happened in two historical moments with two different diasporas. The first diaspora included more or less 25.000 people that moved from the south and east of England to North America and Australia. The second diaspora, involving the colonisation of Asia and Africa, led to the development of several second language varieties, often referred to as New Englishes. The first diaspora involved large-scale migrations of mother-tongue English speakers from England, Scotland and Ireland predominantly to North America, Australia and New Zealand. The English dialects that travelled with them gradually developed into the American and Antipodean Englishes we know today. The varieties of English spoken in modern North America and Australasia are not identical with the English of their early colonisers but have altered in response to the changed and changing sociolinguistic contexts in which the migrants found themselves. For example, their vocabulary rapidly expanded through contact with the indigenous populations in the land which they colonised, to incorporate words such as moccasin and igloo. Walter Raleigh’s expedition of 1584 to America was the earliest from the British Isles to the New World, but it did not result in a permanent settlement because they were people who went back and forward in the area of Noth Carolina near Roanoke Island. During this expedition, there were conflicts between the voyagers and the native population but then they mysteriously disappeared altogether so it did not have consequences on language. From a linguistic point of view, only in 1607 the first permanent colonists arrived and settled in Jamestown in Virginia. These people came mainly from the west of England and brought with them their characteristic rhotic /r/ and voiced /s/ sounds. They were followed in 1620 by a group of puritans and others on the Mayflower who arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in New England. This group was mainly from the east of England and brought with them a non-rhotic /r/ and a non- voiced /s/ because in Great Britain there were several different linguistic backgrounds and accent. Then in the 17th century, English spread to the southern parts of America and the Caribbeans as a result of the slave trade. Slaves were deported from West Africa and exchanged on the American coast and in the Caribbeans for sugar and rum. From a linguistic viewpoint, this created the pidgin language that is a variety of a language that is created when people use English as a language of contact, of communication. So the communications between the slaves and their captors created a sort of mix of their two languages. So pidgin languages do not have mother-tongue speakers but with their use as mother tongues following the birth of the next generation, they developed into creoles. So the first generation of pidgin speakers, the ones that invented that language use it as a second language, but when they have children pidgin becomes creole because it’s their first language, their mother tongue language. During the 18th century, lots of immigration to America came from Northern Ireland. After the Declaration of American Independence in 1776 many Loyalists (the British settlers who had supported the British government) left for Canada. Meanwhile, comparable events were soon to take place in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. James Cook landed in Australia in 1770, in modern-day Queensland and the First Fleet landed in New South Wales in 1778. Then until 1852, around 160.000 prisoners were transported to Australia from Britain and Ireland and from the 1820s also some free settlers decided to move to Australia. The largest proportions of settlers came from London and the southeast but others originated in regions such as south-west England, Lancashire, Scotland and Ireland. Because of their need to communicate with each other, the result was a situation of dialect mixing which was further influenced by the indigenous aboriginal languages. A lot of European traders decided to settle in New Zealand in the 1790s but there was no official colony until after the British-Maori Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Immigrants arrived in three stages: -in the 1840s and 1850s from Britain -in the 1860s from Australia and Ireland -from 1870 to 1885 from the UK, especially from Scotland As in Australia, there was a mixture of dialects, this time subject to a strong Maori influence especially In terms of vocabulary. Although South Africa (Namibia, Botswana and South Africa) was colonised by the Dutch from the 1650s, the British arrived there only after 1795 when they annexed the Cape but they established themselves only after 1820. So here the local languages are not influenced only by British English but also by the Dutch. The majority of Cape settlers originated in southern England, though there were also sizeable groups from Ireland and Scotland. From 1822, when English was declared the official language, it was also learnt as a second language by blacks and Afrikaans speakers and, from the 1860s, by the Indian immigrants to the territory. The second diaspora took place at various points during the 18th and 19th centuries. The history of English in Colonial Africa has two distinct patterns depending on whether we are talking about West or East Africa. English arrived in West Africa (Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon) with the beginning of the slave trade after the late 15th century. However, there weren’t major English settlements in the area and English as a lingua franca both among the indigenous population and between these people and the British traders. English has subsequently gained official status in the above countries, and some of the pidgin and creoles which developed from English contacts, such as Krio (Sierra However, the most useful and influential model of the spread of English has undoubtedly been Kachru’s ‘Three circle model of World Englishes’. Kachru’s model divides World Englishes into three groups: Inner Circle, Outer Circle and Expanding Circle. The three circles “represent the types of spread, the pattern of acquisition and the functional allocation of English in diverse cultural context”. In the Inner Circle, there are 5 Englishes that are considered norm-providing: USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In the Outer Circle, there are the countries where English is institutionalised: Bangladesh, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, Tanzania and so on. These countries are defined as norm-developing because they are developing their own standard, they got their own rules which are different from the ones of the Inner Circle. In the Expanding Circle, there are countries like China, Egypt, Israel, Japan, Saudi Arabia etc in which English is spoken as a foreign language. This circle is referred to as norm-dependent because in these countries English does not have any official status and therefore is dependent on the standards set by native speakers in the Inner Circle. The three-circle model has been highly influential and contributed greatly to our understanding of the sociolinguistic realities of the spread of English. However, over the past few years, a number of World Englishes scholars have identified limitations with the model in its current form. The main points that have been raised by various scholars are the following:  The model looks at the phenomenon from a geographical and historical point of view, the problem is we are dealing with people and people cannot be held within circles. That’s why it should be rather based on the way speakers currently identify with and use English. Yet some English users in the Outer Circle speak it as their first language, occasionally as their only language. Meanwhile, an increasing number of speaker in the Expanding Circle use English for a very wide range of purposes and often also as a medium of instruction in both school and universities  There is often a grey area between the Inner Circle and the Outer Circle: in some Outer Circle countries, English may be the first language for many people and may be spoken at home rather than used purely for institutional purposes such as education, law and government  There is also an increasingly grey area between the Outer and Expanding Circles because there are some countries in which English is moving from being an English as a foreign language (EFL) to an English as a second language (ESL), for example, Argentina, Belgium, Costa Rica, Denmark, Sudan and Switzerland. In these situations, English is becoming more and more institutionalised, used in school and in the government.  Many World Englishes speakers grow up bilingual or multilingual, using different languages to fulfil different functions in their daily lives  There is a difficulty in using the model to define speakers in terms of their proficiency in English. A native speaker may have limited vocabulary and low grammatical competence while the reverse may be true of a non-native speaker  The model implies that the situation is uniform for all countries within a particular circle whereas this is not so. Even within the Inner Circle, countries differ in the amount of linguistic diversity they contain  The term ‘Inner Circle’ implies that speakers from the ENL countries are central to the effort, whereas their worldwide influence is in fact in decline Kachru, however, believes that his model has been misinterpreted, and has defended it point by point. Several scholars have since proposed alternative models and descriptions of the spread of English, sometimes in an attempt to improve on Kachru’s model by incorporating more recent developments. Tripathi, for example, argues that the ‘third world nations’ should be considered as “an independent category that supersedes the distinction of ESL and ELF”. Another attempt to adapt Kachru’s model to take account of later developments is that of Modiano. He breaks completely with historical and geographical concerns and bases the first of his two models, ‘The centripetal circles of international English’, on what is mutually comprehensible to the majority of proficient speakers of English, be they native or non-native. The centre is made up of those who are proficient in international English (EIL), the ultimate level of proficiency for cross-regional or international communication. The main criterion, other than proficiency itself, is that they have no strong regional accent or dialect. Modiano’s next band consists of those who have proficiency in English as either a first or second language rather than as an international language. The third circle is made up of learners of English, that is those who are not yet proficient in English. Outside this circle is a final band to represent those people who do not know English at all. There were certain problems with Modiano’s model too. In particular, where do we draw the line between a strong and non-strong regional accent? And who decides? Again, given that international English is not defined, what does it mean to be proficient in ‘international English’ other than a vague notion of communicating well? A few months later, Modiano redrafted his idea in response to comments that he had received in reaction to his first model. This time he presented a model based on features common to all varieties of English. At the centre is EIL, a core of features that is comprehensible to the majority of native and competent non- native speakers of English. His second circle consists of features that may become internationally common or may fall into obscurity. Modiano’s outer area consists of five groups (American English, British English, other major native varieties, other local varieties and foreign varieties) each with features peculiar to their own speech community that are unlikely to be understood by most members of the other four groups. One of the most recent models is Mahboob’s ‘Language variation framework’. This again comprises three parts, though this time they are continuums. The first relates to users of English and concerns the social/geographic distance (global or local) between interlocutors. The second concerns uses of English, that is the purpose for which it is being used, with specialised discourse and casual conversation being at opposite ends of the continuum. The third refers to the mode of communication, spoken or written. As Mahboob points out, while each is an independent continuum, the three are not mutually exclusive, and provide eight different possible kinds of language variation: local, written, every day; local, oral, every day; local, written, specialised; local, oral, specialised; global, written, every day and so on. variety promoted through the education system and, in some definitions, that it is associated with social class. Trudgill, instead, in ‘Standard English: what it isn’t’ defines standard English by what it is not: -It is not a language, it’s just one variety of among many others of a given English -It is not an accent, in Britain, it is spoken by only 12-15% of the population -It is not a style because it can be spoken in formal, neutral and informal styles -It is not a register because, given that a register is largely a matter of lexis in relation to subject matter (for example, the register of medicine or cricket), there is no necessary connection between register and Standard English -It is not a set of prescriptive rules because it can tolerate certain features which prescriptive grammarians do not allow. For example, according to the scholars, it doesn't matter if you say “I’ve bought a new car which I’m very pleased with” or "I have bought a new car with which I’m very pleased”, it’s all English So Trudgill concludes that English is just a dialect among many others that gained greater prestige throughout the centuries, it is not necessarily associated with a specific accent and it doesn’t necessarily belong to a geographical area. So English is purely a social dialect. He goes on to point out that while standard English has many features in common with the other dialects of the country in question, there are certain differences and that these differences do not necessarily indicate the linguistic superiority of the standard forms. It is important to define standard English when we have to deal with non-standard Englishes. All countries that are outside of the Inner Circle are defined as non-standard Englishes, with the implication that all are inferior, even if all these countries have undergone the full processes of evolution of a language (for example, Standard Singapore English or Standard Indian English). Even educated Australian English belonged until recently to this category, only joining the ranks of standard English in the 1970s. up to then, Australian English was evaluated in terms of its closeness to Standard British English, with any distinctively Australian forms being regarded as ‘bad’ English. If it was so difficult for a standard native variety of English to gain acceptance, it should be no surprise that non-standard native varieties and both standards and non- standard non-native varieties have not so far met with similar success. In the case of non-standard native varieties, lack of acceptance appears to have connections with attitudes towards race in the USA and class in the UK. But again, if and when these standardisation processes has been achieved, they are still unlikely to attract the same prestige as their standard British, American and Australian counterparts. This is because of attitudes towards non-native varieties of English that are generally considered as a part of a process of fossilization and therefore non-standard Englishes. In other words, the learning of English is said to have ceased some way short of target-like competence, with the target being assumed to be either Standard British or Standard American English. A4. Variation across postcolonial Englishes British English apart, all the other Englishes whether Inner or Outer Circle resulted from one of two diasporas. The two diasporas, though, overlapped in time with, for example, the Indian English of the second diaspora preceding the Australian English of the first. The former group, members of the Inner Circle, consists primarily of North America (the US and Canada), Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The Englishes in these territories developed independently of, and differently from, English in Britain partly because of the original mixtures of dialects and accents among the people who settled in these areas, and partly because of the influence of the languages of the indigenous populations. Because of their direct descent from British English, and because they were spoken as mother tongues, there is a strong element of continuity in the use of these Englishes from pre-colonial days. On the other hand, the Englishes of the second diaspora were and still are learnt as a second language or as one language within a wider multilingual repertoire of acquisition. This group includes, for example, Indian English, Philippine English, Nigerian English and Singapore English. There are a large number of varieties of postcolonial English and these are far from uniform in their characteristics and current use. By the way, they share certain features. Platt, Weber and Ho say that the postcolonial Englishes or the new Englishes are characterized by four criteria: 1. They have developed through the education system. This means that it has been taught as a subject and, in many cases, also used as a medium of instructions in regions where languages other than English were the main languages 2. They have developed in an area where a native variety of English was not the language spoken by most of the population. 3. They are used for several functions among those who speak or write it in the region where it is used 4. They have become nativised, this means that the language adopts some language features from the local languages such as some sounds, intonations, syntax, words and expressions. Another way of looking at postcolonial English is to consider the status of its norms, and the extent to which its innovative uses of the language are accepted despite their differences from native English norms. Bamgbose highlight five internal factors that can be used to decide on the status of innovation in English:  the demographic factor: how many speakers of the acrolect, or standard variety, use it? So they count how many people speak using standard English and how many speak using the local variety of English to check which form is used the most  the geographical factor: how widely dispersed is it? They try to understand how spread out the variety of English is in the area  the authoritative factor: is this variety sanctioned or is it more tolerated? Where is its use sanctioned?  codification: is this variety of English used in grammars and dictionaries?  the acceptability factor: what is the attitude of users and non-users towards it? Bamgbose points out that of these five, codification and acceptability are the most crucial as, without them, any innovation will be regarded as an error rather than as a legitimate form characteristic of a particular postcolonial variety. For example, in the beginning, in Africa and Asia English was only spoken by native English-speaking colonisers from Britain and North America. Then years after years local schools started teaching English and other subjects through English in order to provide a local workforce able to communicate in the language. Slowly the number of students increased and they began to recruit non- native teachers that taught their own variety of English. This led to the evolutions of English from British English to postcolonial English that developed into several varieties with their own character. The main levels on which the Englishes of the two diasporas differ from the British English and from each other are the following: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary/idiom and discourse style. Pronunciation: Consonant sounds Many of these varieties have differences in the dental fricative sounds /θ/ and /ð/ as in words thin and this.  In Indian and West Indian Englishes /θ/ becomes /t/ and /ð/ becomes /d/ so these words are pronounced tin and dis.  In Lankan, Malaysian, Singapore and many African Englishes the sound /θ/ becomes /tθ/ and the sound /ð/ becomes /dð/. So thin and this becomes ‘t-thin’ and ‘d-this’. These substitutions would have started life as attempts to produce the perceived ‘correct’ L1 English sound. Over time, they gradually became regarded as local variants, rather than incorrect attempts to conform. The same is true of a host of other consonant sounds of which the following are among those most frequently described:  In Lankan and some Indian Englishes /w/ is pronounced /v/  In Indian, Philippine, Malaysian and some other postcolonial Englishes , the voiceless sounds /p/, /t/ and /k/ are pronounced at the beginnings of words without aspiration and they sound more like their voiced equivalents /b/, /d/ and /g/ (pin -> bin; tin -> din; cap -> gap)  In Ghanaian, West Indian and colloquial Singaporean , the consonants at the ends of the words are not pronounced and are replaced with glottal stops. For example, ‘cat’ -> ‘ca(t)’ or ca’ with a glottal stop.  In Indian, West African and Papua New Guinean , they use voiceless word-final consonants where standard English would have a voiced one. For example, feed -> feet; gave -> gafe; rob -> rop. Then, there are two consonant features that occur less widely among these Englishes, although, they feature in some of the Englishes of the Expanding Circle:  In Hong Kong, Singapore (of Chinese origin) and some East African Englishes there is a lack of distinction between /r/ and /l/ sounds. For examples, the words red and led are interchangeable.  In some East African and Hong Kong Englishes the /ʃ/ (sh) sound is pronounced /s/. For example, 'ship' sounds like 'sip'. Vowel sounds Vowel sounds vary across the postcolonial Englishes in terms of both their quality and their quantity. Some of the main differences in vowel sounds across the New Englishes are as follows:  In Singapore, Indian and African Englishes there is not a big difference between short and long vowels such as what happens for the sound /ɪ/ and /i:/. For example, words like sit and seat are both pronounced as /ɪ/  In Lankan, Singapore, Indian, Philippine and Jamaican Englishes the sound /a:/ as in staff sounds closer to stuff.  In African Englishes, the schwa sound /ə/ is produce more like the full vowel [a] at the end of the words, so 'matter' is pronounced [mata] instead of [matə].  In Indian, Lankan, Malaysian and some African Englishes diphthongs become monophthongs so they are pronounced as one vowel. For example, the word take that has the sound /eɪ/ loses its second element to become [e’] or the shorter [e] so that it sounds closer to tek  The majority of New Englishes varieties are syllable-timed (with all syllables occurring at regular intervals of time) rather than stress-timed (with stressed syllables falling at fairly regular intervals) Grammar Platt sum up the main grammatical tendencies of the post-colonial Englishes in referring to people, things and ideas as follows:  A tendency not to mark nouns for plural. For example: o Up to twelve year of schooling (India) o They know all four dialect (Jamaica) -crore  ten million -swadeshi  native person Philippine English: -boondock  mountain -kundiman  love song Idioms In most cases, these idioms are born from unsuccessful attempts to use idioms that belong to Inner Circle Englishes so they gradually evolve becoming local idioms. Idioms are idiomatic expression and sometimes they are a direct translation from the local language to the local variety of English. This is the case of the expression ‘to shake legs’ which come from the Malay idiom ‘goyang kaki’ which means ‘to be idle’ (Singapore/Malaysian English). In other cases these idioms are based on native-speaker English, this is the case of the expression ‘to be on the tarmac’ which means looking for a new job (East African). In other cases comes from the combination of elements from English with indigenous forms such as the Nigerian expression ‘to put sand in someone’s gari’ which means to threaten someone’s livelihood. Other forms are actually very similar to Inner Circle English but they are not the same. For example, the British English idiom ‘to have your cake and eat it’ becomes, in Singapore English, ‘to eat your cake and have it’. Then in the case of the Singapore English idiom ‘to be in hot soup’ there is a combination of two British English idioms, ‘to be in hot water’ and ‘to be in the soup’ which means to be in trouble. Discourse style Generally postcolonial Englishes are more formal than Inner Circle Englishes. In particular, their vocabulary and grammatical structure are more complex. For example, Indian English is way more formal than British English and it uses the form ‘could’ and ‘would’ where British English use ‘can’ and ‘will’ as in “We hope that you could join us” or “We hope that the vice-chancellor would investigate this matter". In both these cases, the past tense is used because it is felt to be more polite. On the other hand, both Indian and African Englishes use a discourse style which cannot be found in Inner Circle Englishes and here the indigenous culture is at least in part an influence. For example, Indian English is characterized by deferential vocabulary and the use of a lot of blessings which would seem redundant for Inner Circle English speakers such as “I am bubbling with zeal and enthusiasm to serve as a research assistant”. Another area where postcolonial Englishes differ from those of the Inner Circle is that of greeting and leave-taking because there are often direct translations from the indigenous language. For example, ‘So how?’ (Lankan English) and ‘You’re enjoying?' (Nigerian English) for greetings and ‘I’ll go and come’ (Lankan English, instead of ‘I’ll be back soon’) and ‘walk slowly ho’ (Singaporean and Malaysian English) for leave-takings. Indian English: English firstly arrived in India in the early 1600s and it coexists alongside with the many Indian languages like Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, Punjabi and so on. English spread in India through Christianity, accepted as a language of government, social elite ad national press but it developed something called the Indian accent. English syntax was heavily affected by Indian grammar. Some speaker often uses progressive tenses. For example ‘I am believing you’ instead of ‘I believe you’. The Indian English vocabulary is full of unique coinages: -restaurant -> hotel -breakfast -> tiffin -hundred thousand -> lakh -ten million -> crore -entertainment -> timepass -A4 paper -> fullscape -woman harassment -> eve-teasing Influenced by the phonetic of the native languages, other features of Indian English are: -retroflex trilled ‘r’ -‘v-w’ merging (what -> vat, water -> vater) -‘t’ pronounced with the tongue further back in the mouth -‘l’ not pronounced (table -> tabel) -‘o’ pronounced more like an ‘a’ -‘a’ pronounced more like an ‘i/e’ Tok Pisin: It is an English-based creole spoken in Papua New Guinea. In this country, there are 800 tribes and pidgin help these people with the communication with each other. Some words change and become simplified, there are no complex grammar structures, it is phonetically based. Lexis: Coffee -> Kofi Library -> Buk haus University -> Big skul Eat -> Kaikai Dinner -> Night kaikai Jungle -> Bik Bus (big bush) Please do not disturb -> Yu no ken kam insait No smoking allowed -> No ken simoke See you -> Lukim Singlish: Singlish was born from the union of English and the languages that were spoken in Singapore: Malay, Tamil, Chinese and other mandarin dialects. In Singlish sentences and words are often shortened. For examples nevermind -> nehmind; I don’t want it -> dowan; excuse me -> scuse; like that -> liddat. The sentence structure in Singlish is often directly translated from mandarin. For example, what is the time now -> now what time?. Another feature of Singlish is repeating words for effect. Another one is the drop of the last letter in the word so they pronounce 'word' -> wor; 'act' -> ac; 'find' -> fin. Five important words in Singlish: -lah, that means nothing but is used to make a phrase more casual. For example, instead of saying “I can” which sounds very serious, they say “I can lah”. -aiyoh, is an exclamation for something that usually isn’t very positive. For example “aiyoh, why so expensive?” -siao, that means crazy -sian that means bored or that you feel restless of defeated. -wah lau eh, that is an exclamation that means nothing but is used for shock and when something is not good. Curse words in Singlish are all around genitals or your parents. Some of them are: -nabeh cheebye (nbcb) that means your father’s vagine -chao cheebye that means smelly vagina -pua cheebye that means cavernous vagina -ka ni na which means fuck your mother -kanasai that means like shit Some basic sentences: -“toilet where?” instead of “where is the nearest toilet?” -“eh, cheaper lah!” instead of “can you give me a discount?” -dabao instead of takeaway -“wah, you damn chio!” instead of “wow, you’re so beautiful” -walk walk see see -> sightseeing -kena -> got -summon -> fine -toh -> drunk/wasted -tyco -> lucky -bojio -> blaming a person for not asking you out -pang seh -> don’t flake out -simi sai -> what the hell -chope -> take/reserve -cheem -> difficult/hard -no kick -> easy Malaysian English: As Singlish, Malaysian English (or Manglish) lots of vocabulary is borrowed from local languages. So Manglish is an English based creole language in Malaysia that is mixed with all kind of languages and dialects such as Chinese, Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, Malay, Tamil and so on. Is common to use the word ‘already’ at the end of the sentence instead of using ‘have you’ at the beginning when they ask a question. For example, they say “you read that book already?” instead of “have you read that book?”. Already has a lot of meaning, is used to imply that something is happening or has happened or in past tense so it is multifunctional. Some examples: -it is raining -> it is raining already -he went back home -> he went back home already -I’ve reached my home -> I’m home already -I’m hungry -> I’m hungry already Malaysians also love to use exclamation words and put them in every sentence. Some of the most used exclamation words are: -lah, is used after a noun in a sentence to stress out something without being rude (e.x. omg it’s getting dark, plead don’t rain -> walau, the sky is dark already, don’t rain lah) -ah is used at the end of the sentence to imply a question, it is similar to the word already (do you know where we are going? -> where are we going ah?). Instead, when it is used both at the front and at the end of a sentence it means that they are getting impatient, a bit angry (e.x. ah stop disturbing me ah) -wey is used at the end of the sentence after ad adjective when you are being emotional in describing something (e.x. where are we going for lunch? I’m damn hungry wey) There is also another variety of Patois called Kromanti or Deep Patois that was used by the Maroons, descendants of slaves who escaped from the Spanish when the British invaded Jamaica. This form of Patois is more heavily based in the Akan language than other forms of Patois. Deep Patois is now used as a ritual language in Maroon communities but not as a daily spoken language. Lexis:  The /θ/ and /ð/ sounds don’t exist in Jamaican Patois.  Sometimes words that have a final consonant cluster in English lose a consonant in Patois. For example, respect becomes ‘respek’  Words are often used differently. For example: -Nuf, from English ‘enough’, means many or much -Chat is used as the general word for speak or talk -Mek, from English ‘make’, is used for both make and let  Some words are created by compounding other simpler words. For example: -Nose-ole, from ‘nose hole’, means nostril -han miggle, from ‘hand middle’, means palm of your hand -yeye-wata, from ‘eye water’, means tear -red-yeye, from ‘red eye’, means envious  Some words come from languages other than English. For example: -eat -> ‘nyam’ from a West African language, perhaps Wolof -ghost -> ‘duppy’ from Akan -spider -> ‘anansi’ from Akan -awkward -> ‘bafan’ from Akan -child -> pickney from Portuguese (pequenino) Grammar:  The basic word order of Patois is similar to Standard English (S-V-O). For example, ‘Mi chat Patwah’ means ‘I speak Patois’.  There are no verb conjugations in Jamaican Patois, with the only exception of ‘fi bi’ that is ‘to be’ in English and that has one different conjugated form: ‘a’. Chinese English: When Chinese speaks English they transliterate English words with the Chinese alphabet so they pronounce Chinese sounds when they speak, and not English sounds. These are some features of this accent:  When they pronounce a word that ends with –ing the add a y. For example, do-y-ing, speak-y-ing and work-y-ing.  The /v/ sound is pronounced more like an /w/ (v(w)ery)  They tend to add an extra vowel at the end of the syllable that ends with the consonant t,d,s,k. for example, what(ə); hard(ə); has(ə) and speak(ə)  There aren’t diphthongs in Chinese so they tend to pronounce them as a short /ı/ sound instead of the long /i/ sound. (peace = piss) A5. Pidgin and Creole languages Leith identifies three types of English colony:  In the first type, in some areas, such as America and Australia, when English people arrived they basically displaced the population that was there before. This means that English in this area almost replaced the local languages.  In the second type, in other areas of the world such as Africa in general or more specifically Nigeria, when British people arrived they just settled in colonies here and there. This meant that they did not completely destroy the local population but they enforced them into slavery and allowed some of them access to learning English as a second or additional language.  In the third type, in the Caribbean Islands of Barbados and Jamaica, the local populations were actually replaced by West-African people who were brought into these islands as slaves. From a linguistic point of view, these people found themselves to live in a land that was not their own, in areas where neither English nor West African languages were native and this made them interact with the local language even more. These three different types of colonization had consequences on the language that was used and on the evolution of English itself. It gave birth to two phenomena: pidgins and creoles. a. A pidgin is a language that has no native speakers because it’s a contact language, born from interaction, from the urge to communicate. b. A creole is a pidgin that has become the first language of a new generation of speakers. So there are people who speak English and people who speak the local language, they create a pidgin and the second generation speak a creole. In the earlier stages of contact, communication tends to be restricted to basic transactions for which a small vocabulary is sufficient and in which there is little need for grammatical redundancy. Then when a creole is acquired as a first language, its vocabulary expands and its grammar increases in complexity so that is capable of expressing the entire human experience of its mother tongue speakers. However these people speaking a creole can come into extensive contact with the dominant language, with English for instance, and so creole might undergo a process of decreolisation. Therefore this creole moves forward to being more similar to standard English, as is the case, for example with AAVE. On the other hand, among younger speakers especially, the decreolized creole may show signs of moving back towards the creole, as in the case with the British-based patois known nowadays as Jafaican. Therefore, all these varieties (AAVE, Multicultural English and Jafaican) are creoles that originated from a pidgin. There are several hypotheses as to the origin of the term ‘pidgin’. Romaine lists five:  a Chinese corruption of the English word ‘business’ as in ‘gospidgin man’ (god-business-man, i.e. priest)  a Chinese corruption of the Portuguese word ‘ocupacao’ (business)  comes from the Hebrew word ‘pidjom’ which means exchange, trade  comes from the word ‘pidian’ (people) in Yago, a South American Indian language spoken in an area colonised by Britain  comes from the two Chinese characters ‘pei’ and ‘ts’in’ which means paying money The origins of the term creole are less obscure but always complex. Many authorities believe that the word comes from the Portuguese word ‘criar’, meaning to nurse, itself deriving from the Latin ‘creare’, meaning to create. Then, according to Holm, ‘crioulo’ with a diminutive suffix, came to mean ad African salve born in the New World in Brazilian usage. The word’s meaning was then extended to include Europeans born in the New World and finally came to refer to the custom and speech of Africans and Europeans born in the New World. There are several hypotheses also regarding the arise and the evolution of pidgin and creole languages. Most of these theories can be divided into three groups depending on whether they regard pidgins as having a single origin (monogenesis) or independent origin (polygenesis) or as deriving from universal strategies: 1. The independent parallel development theory: according to this theory, all pidgins and creoles developed independently, but developed in similar ways because they have a common linguistic ancestor which belongs to the Indo-European family. (polygenetic) 2. The nautical jargon theory: according to this idea, European sailors, which came from all around Europe, had their own lingua franca and these sailors’ lingua franca was passed on to the African and Asian populations with whom they came into contact. The nautical jargon formed a nucleus for the various pidgin, which were expanded in line with their learners’ mother tongues. Evidence for this theory is provided by the nautical element in all pidgins and creoles with European lexicons. (polygenetic) 3. The theory of monogenesis and relexification: according to this theory, there was an earlier lingua franca called Sabir, used by crusaders and traders in the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages. Later on, Portuguese lexis was introduced into Sabir grammar so they mixed and gave birth to a proto- pidgin language, a Portuguese pidgin, the language that was used in trading during the 15 th and 16th centuries. So all the pidgins derive from this Portuguese pidgin that slowly developed in all the European-based pidgins and then creoles. Evidence for this theory is provided by the many linguistic similarities, both lexical and syntactic, between present-day Portuguese pidgins and creoles. (monogenetic) 4. The baby-talk theory: according to this idea, pidgins were born just like baby-talk; this means that conquers tried to use very simple language with the local population. Indeed, the similarity between pidgin and baby talk are a large proportion of content words, lack of structural words, lack of morphological change, an approximation of the standard pronunciation. (universal) 5. A synthesis: the scholars that follow this last theory think that the truth is just a synthesis of all the theories above. (universal) A6. English as an International Lingua Franca Although the origin and development of lingua francas are not the same as pidgin languages, both serve the purpose of providing a means of communication among people who do not share a first language. A various times over past centuries, languages such as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Arabic and Portuguese have served as lingua francas, and in the case of Arabic and Portuguese still do so today. Over the past few decades, English has become the world’s primary lingua franca to an extent that is and has been unprecedented among the others. For over the past decades or so, there has been an increasing amount of research into ELF and its starting point was a position similar to the one held by researchers of Outer Circle Englishes: just because a language item differs from the way it is produced by Inner Circle speakers, it cannot be assumed to be an error but may be an example of contingent creativity and adaptation, or even of language contact and change in progress. A better approach to ELF than the traditional ‘varieties of English’ approach is, therefore, the notion of similects. As Mauranen points out, in the Expanding Circle countries, speakers normally use their L1 rather than English to communicate with each other, and reserve English for communication with people from different L1s than their own. Therefore, their English develops in parallel with each other through communication with people from different semilects rather than in interaction among themselves. It demonstrates how ELF is essentially hybrid and plurilingual in nature. Crystal says that several reasons led English to become the world’s primary lingua franca: In the years to come, we are very likely to witness increasing claims from English speakers outside the Inner Circle, especially in growing economies such as Brazil, Russia, India and China. There is likely to be a paradigm shift from one of language distribution to one of language spread. In this new paradigm in which English spreads and adapts according to the linguistic and cultural preferences of its users in the outer and expanding circles, many traditional assumptions about the language will no longer hold. The point is that if it is becoming the language of ‘others’, then these others have to be accorded at least the same English language rights as those claimed by mother tongue speakers. This includes the right to innovate without every difference from a standard native variety of English automatically being labelled wrong. English could lose its international role altogether or, at best, come to share it with a number of equals. this would be possible because of two main factors: I. The difficulties inherent in the English language II. The arguments in favour of Spanish as the principal world language Looking at the first factor, Inner Circle English has a lot of difficulties and these can be divided into three main categories: 1. Orthographic  English orthography can often not be predicted from how a word is pronounced 2. Phonological  standard English has twenty vowels and eight diphthongs 3. Grammatical  difficulties relate to verb forms and functions: a large number of tenses and modal verb Because of all these difficulties, some people think that there will be a move to abandon English in favour of an international language with fewer complicating linguistic factors. Spanish appears to be a major contender with its simpler pronunciation, spelling and verb system, and its increasing influence in both the EU and America. Further evidence that English may eventually give way to another language as the world’s lingua franca is provided by the internet. As Crystal points out, the web was originally a totally English medium but with the Internet’s globalization, the presence of other languages has steadily risen. Chinese is expected by most sources to become the majority language of internet users. Although English still has the largest number of internet users, the Chinese is catching up very fast. SECTION B: DEVELOPMENT Implications and issues B1. The legacy of colonialism One major legacy of colonialism and the two diasporas of English is the assumption of the inferiority of the indigenous language, culture, and even character of the colonised, alongside the assumption of the superiority of the colonisers and their language. This phenomenon is highlighted by the regular references to the ‘discovery’ of lands, as though these territories were not already populated and home often to a large number of human beings before the arrival of the colonisers. Likewise, the innocuous word ‘settlers’ is frequently used to describe people who were, in essence, invaders and annexers of lands belonging to others. Then, when colonised peoples made the effort to communicate in English, their English was denigrated as ‘broken’. The phenomenon persists to the present day in attitudes towards the English of non-native speakers, and particularly towards their accents. This led to the so-called ‘language insecurity’. For the prevailing attitude of L1 speakers as well as that of a sizeable majority of L2 speakers is still that ‘good English’ is synonymous with that of educated native speakers born and bred in the UK or North America. A second major legacy of colonialism is the way in which it has led to the destruction of the ethnic identities of many whose lands were colonised. That is the consequence of the loss of indigenous languages since identity and languages are often closely interrelated. However, it is possible to revive indigenous languages or heritage languages. According to McCarty and Zepeda, of 175 indigenous languages that are still spoken in the USA, perhaps only twenty are still being transmitted to children; it’s not just the loss of words but the loss of culture. They say “Human cultures are not interchangeable, the loss of even one language and the cultural knowledge it encodes diminishes us all. Recognizing this, many tribes are actively engaged in language restoration efforts”. Some programs are going on, for instance in California, that are trying to make some of the indigenous languages being transmitted to future generations. This is what happens with the California Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program, in which native speakers and younger apprentices live and work together over months or years, doing everyday things but communicating through the heritage language. In other cases, they are targeting the younger generation, this means that not only language but also literature is being used in school programs. Indeed, the development of indigenous literacies has accompanied many of these efforts because literacy is a powerful symbol of indigenous identity; it valorizes the community and publicly demonstrates the ways in which it is using its language in active and creative ways. However, this school program does not replace what these kids do at home, that’s up to the relatives who want to transmit their language and their culture. Without their tribal languages, many indigenous communities will cease to be, “the loss of language is like throwing away your universe”. It is not only language but also place, which provides people with a sense of identity. B2. The ‘English Today’ debate With an ever-growing number of people speaking English in an increasing number of regions of the world, it is not surprising that the language is diversifying and ‘English’ has become ‘Englishes’. Local conditions are inevitably affecting the English that is evolving in different contexts around the world. Even within the Inner Circle countries, there are differences especially in accent but also in vocabulary and grammar. World English scholars have long argued that the nativised varieties of English in the Outer Circle countries should, in their standard forms, be seen as equal in status to the standard Englishes of the Inner Circle countries, and therefore just as valid as local teaching models. On the other hand, many others regard English spoken in the Outer Circle as interlanguage (a learner language which has not yet reached the target) or fossilized language (a language used when learning has ceased short of nativelike competence). The situation is even more controversial in relation to English speakers in the Expanding Circle. The controversy over the legitimacy of non-native varieties of English is crystallised in a debate that took place in the pages of the journal English Today in the early 1990s. Quirk considered non-native Englishes as a deficit; instead, Kachru as difference. According to Quirk:  non-native Englishes must not be taught because these are not varieties of English but inadequately learned versions of Inner Circle English. This means that only Inner Circle Englishes are right and anything else is just broken English.  Native and non-native speakers have different intuitions about a language. The intuitions that you have in your own language are not the same that you have of your second language. This means that you can never be 100% authentic in a language that is not yours and that you will never be able to learn and deeply understand a second language the way you do with your first language.  The only way to get out of the barriers of your own culture, country and language is to learn standard English, this is how you get freedom and a great career future.  There are no institutionalised non-native varieties of English because you will never get to that level that you can totally use for the government, the education or for any other high-level instances  Teachers must only teach standard English, even in Outer Circle countries. According to Kachru, we have to look at non-native Englishes as a difference and not a deficit and he supports his idea by answering Quirk’s points one by one. Non-native users of English have internalizations that belong to their own language so when they learn their own language they use some structures that belong to it and they apply them to whatever language they are learning. Kachru thinks that Quirk’s approach is based on at least four false assumptions:  That English in the Outer and Expanding Circles are learned because these people want to speak with the native speakers of the language. The truth is that many people learn English to interact and communicate with other people that are not native users of it  That whoever learns English wants to understand and teach values that belong to the Inner Circle countries such as American or British cultural values  That institutionalized varieties of English are broken English. According to Kachru, these varieties of English are Englishes in their own right rather than stages on the way to more native-like English  That Inner Circle English is something sacred. He thinks that there is a need for a paradigm shift; this means we have to get out the idea that the only English that exists is the English that belongs to Inner Circle countries Therefore, other varieties of English should not be considered as deficient English but nearly as different, so in a global context, English may be a matter of difference which is based on vital sociolinguistic realities of identity, creativity and linguistic and cultural contact. B3. Standards across anglophone space The main three Englishes in Inner Circle are British, American and Australian. Although the differences across these native-speaker varieties of English are less than their similarities, each of these three standard English has certain features that characterise it as specifically British, American or Australian. Their main difference is in vocabulary. In the case of British and North American English, thousands of words either do not exist at all in one or other variety, or have completely or partially different meanings. The main reasons for this are two. Firstly, from a historical point of view, once British invaders got to several parts of the world, they had to deal with things that they have never seen before. So, they had to name these things and they did it by extending the meaning of existing English words (‘corn’ which refers to grain in Great Britain and maize in North America), creating new words (‘butte’, an isolated hill with a flat top that is very common in the USA) or borrowing items from the indigenous population (‘moccasin’, ‘squash’ or ‘toboggan’). Secondly, developments taking place since North American English separated from British English have led to divergences between the two varieties, especially with vocabulary resulting from technological innovation. For example, there are some differences in words related to cars: USA UK windshield windscreen hood bonnet  Unmarked plurality on nouns of measurement after numerals; for example ‘twenty year’ or ‘ten pound’  Different forms of the relative pronoun; for example ‘the man as/what lives here’ instead of ‘the man who lives here’  Regularisation of reflexive pronouns; such as ‘myself, yourself, hisself, herself, ourselves, yourselves, theirselves’  The distinction between main and auxiliary verb do; for example, ‘You done it, did you?’ instead of ‘You did it, did you?’ in Standard British English These differences are more linked to race rather than social class, meaning that these differences are typical of Hispanic populations or the Black English populations. However, since there are communications and interactions within the human race, some of these forms are also common among other parts of the population. Irregular verbs: In some forms of non-standard English, there are the following features:  Past tense as participle form, for example, ‘I had went down there’  Participle as past form, for example, ‘He seen something out there’ instead of ‘He saw something out there’  Infinitive form as past form, for example, ‘She come to my house yesterday’  Different irregular form, for example, ‘Something just riz up right in front of me’ instead of ‘something just rose up right in front of me’ Completive ‘done’: In these varieties of English the word ‘done’ is added to the sentence to indicate that an action it’s over, that it has been completed. For example, ‘I done forgot what you wanted’ Habitual ‘be’: In AAVE as well as in some rural American varieties ‘be’ is added to some sentences to indicates something that usually happens. For example, ‘She usually be home in the evening’ A-prefixing: This phenomenon applies not only to the AAVE but also to southern vernaculars. Usually, these Englishes add the prefix ‘a’ with progressive forms, only when the ‘–ing’ form refers to a verb. For example, ‘She was a-coming home’ or ‘He starts a-laughing’. It is used to put extra emphasis on verbs, on something that is either going to happen in the immediate future or is currently happening. It can’t be applied in those situations when the ‘–ing’ forms are used as nouns or adjectives. Double modals: In some vernacular varieties, two modal verbs can be combined together and it’s something pretty common as in ‘I might could go there’ or ‘You might oughta take it’. Adverbs: In some dialects which are used in Upper Southern America, the –ly suffix for endings is almost never used so there are no differences between adjectives and adverbs. For example, ‘They answered wrong’ or ‘She enjoyed life awful well’ or ‘I come from Virginia original’ Negation: 1. Multiple negation Type 1: in this case, there is a combination of the ‘not’ that is attached to the auxiliary verb and is followed by a negative indefinite pronoun. For example, ‘The man wasn’t saying nothing’. This is very common within all vernacular varieties of American English. Type 2: negative form at the beginning of the sentence that works as a subject of the sentence. For example, ‘Nobody didn’t like the mess’. This can be found in the northern area of the United States. Type 3: inversion of the negativised auxiliary and the pre-verbal indefinite. For example, ‘Didn’t nobody like the mess?’. This is used in the southern areas. Type 4: multiple negative marking across different clauses. For example, ‘There wasn’t much that I couldn’t do’. This is an AAVE variety that in standard English means ‘There wasn’t much that I could do’. Where standard Englishes are against the use of the double negative, in the case of non-standard Englishes this is a very common phenomenon and so there is the combination of auxiliary verbs and the indefinite pronoun used both as a subject or as an object. 2. Ain’t This is used very often to replace the auxiliary verbs: -the verb ‘to be’. For example, ‘She is not here now’ becomes ‘She ain’t here now’ -the verb ‘to have’. For example, ‘I have not seen her in a long time’ becomes ‘I ain’t seen her in a long time’ -the verb ‘to do’ in the past. For example, ‘I did not go to school yesterday’ becomes ‘I ain’t go to school yesterday’ Pronouns: The first four types of pronominal difference are found in most vernacular dialects of American English, and the fifth is specifically a southern feature.  Regularisation of reflexive forms applying the suffix ‘self/selves’ directly to the possessive adjective or pronouns. For example, ‘He hit hisself on the head’ or ‘They shaved theirselves’.  Extension of object forms to coordinate subjects. For example, ‘Me and him will do it’  Adoption of a second person plural form. For example, ‘Y’all won the game’ (southern) or ‘You guys won the game’ (southern) or ‘Youse won the game’ (northern) or ‘You’uns won the game’ (Mid- West).  Use of the object forms or pronouns as demonstrative or subjects. For example, ‘Them books are on the shelf’.  Special personal dative use of the object pronoun form. For example, ‘I got me a new car’ or ‘We had us a little old dog’. B4. ‘Legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ offspring of English According to Mufwene, the way in which postcolonial Englishes are named “has to do more with who have appropriated and speak them rather than with how they developed and how different they are structurally from each other, hence with how mutually intelligible they are.” It’s more a political issue than a linguistic issue. The Englishes that belong to the Inner Circle or that derive from Inner Circle Englishes should be considered legitimate and have the right to be named ‘English’. All the other Englishes that are very different and that does not derive from the Inner Circle Englishes must be considered illegitimate offspring and sometimes are not even considered entitled to the name ‘language’ at all. This is true for the Outer Circle and especially for the Expanding Circle. Despite the fact that in many countries they are used for a wide range of social as well as institutional purposes, and have developed their own varietal characteristics, they are to this day still called ‘non-native’ Englishes by western linguists. According to Mufwene, this classification of Englishes into ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ is based on a mistaken belief about language contact and can be true only in an abstract world. The mistake is considering this process going from a mother language that gives birth to daughter languages without considering how much these varieties are influenced by contacts with other languages. Mufwene also points out that language contact was in fact a feature of the development of the ‘legitimate’ Englishes. Kachru divides phenomenon that occurs in languages into three cases:  innovation, concerned with creativity which the gatekeepers of English in the UK have been reluctant to accept even from speakers of English in other Inner Circle countries, let alone in the countries of the Outer Circle  deviation involves a comparison with another variety, normally one from the Inner Circle  mistake relates to acquisitional deficiency B5. Characteristics of pidgin and creole languages Lexis: Pidgins lexis usually derives from one of the four dominant languages (English or French or Portuguese or Dutch) that is known as the lexifier language, while pidgin grammar is that of the indigenous African or Asian languages. Pidgin lexis is systematic and has rules of use, in particular:  Concepts are usually explained in lengthier ways . For example, in Tok Pisin, the concept of possession, which is conveyed in English by only one word ‘my’, is extended in the form ‘bilong’ and it means ‘of’. ‘Papa bilong mi’ means my father; ‘Haus bilong yu’ means your house.  Use of reduplication , the use of the same word twice or more to emphasize what I am saying. For example, in Tok Pisin, ‘tok’ is the word for talk, whereas ‘toktok’ means chatter; ‘look’ means look, whereas ‘looklook’ means stare. In some instances, reduplication is used to avoid confusion, especially when there is the linguistic phenomenon of simplification of pronunciation. For example, in some Pacific pidgins ‘sip’ means ship and ‘sipsip’ means sheep; ‘pis’ means peace while ‘pispis’ means to urinate. In some Atlantic pidgins instead ‘was’ means to watch while ‘waswas’ means to wash. Pronunciation: ELF processes and fluidity English, like any living language, evolves over time through natural processes such as regularisation. For example, in Old English, present-tense verbs had six endings but in the 18 th century, these forms have been reduced to two (with the –s and without the –s). If we consider English as a lingua franca and its evolution we may expect this process to continue and so it might happen that it will no longer be the –s. Another reason why language evolves in particular ways is physiological. Certain sounds are more marked than others and so less frequent in the world’s languages, mainly because they are more difficult to articulate. An example of a very marked sound is the voiceless dental fricative /θ/, so it would be logical to expect this sound to die out. A further factor that we have to consider in the evolution of ELF is recoverability. According to some scholars, a language tends to be ambiguous more if we remove phonological information than from adding it. For example, ‘informations’. Many of the items described above as potential features of ELF have resulted from natural processes similar to those that have been affecting ENL down the ages and, more recently, the Outer Circle Englishes. The difference is that a crucial new factor has entered the equation: language contact on a massive scale among Expanding Circle speakers. This means that on the one hand, there is still the usual contact involved in bilingual creativity. But on the other hand, there is now also a vast amount of intercultural communication via ELF, involving Expanding Circle users especially. What seems to be happening is that ELF speakers, through mutual reinforcement arising from contact among them, are accelerating some of the processes already taking place more slowly in ENL. Another aspect of ELF is its fluidity. Much of the earlier ELF research was preoccupied with identifying features that characterised this emerging use of English, in the hope of eventually being able to codify it. But as more empirical evidence was collected, it became clear that these features were being used in a highly fluid and flexible manner. Across and even within conversations, fluent ELF users who know the ‘rules’ of standard native English were observed fluctuating frequently between, for example, zero marking and –s in the third person singular, ‘advices’ and ‘advice’ etc. Researchers’ interest, therefore, shifted from the features themselves to the underlying processes that motivate their use at any specific point in an interaction. ELF scholars believe this fluidity means that ELF cannot be considered a language variety or group of varieties in the traditional sense. Seidlhofer proposes, as an alternative, Wenger’s notion of ‘communities of practice’, in which, interactions are characterised by mutual engagement in shared practices, taking part in some jointly negotiated enterprise and making use of members’ shared repertoire. Or, as Seidlhofer puts it, ELF is not a variety of English but a variable way of using it: English that functions as a lingua franca. Native and non-native speakers of English When English is used by non-native English speakers as an international lingua franca rather than as a traditional foreign language, these speakers ‘own’ their lingua franca. It, therefore, makes no sense to describe them as non-native speakers of it. In other words, while the NES/NNES distinction may be appropriate for English as a Foreign Language, it is not appropriate for ELF, which is used mainly among L2 speakers of English, often with no L1 English speakers present. Then, a lingua franca has no native speakers by definition, but all its speakers have to learn how to use it. Thinking otherwise:  Implies that the most important criterion for language proficiency is the order of acquisition and that only a single language learnt from birth can be fully proficient, whereas, for many multilingual people, order of acquisition is irrelevant for proficiency.  Fails to recognise that the Outer Circle and Expanding Circle Englishes may be spoken regularly in the home and/or for educational purpose, so how these people are not considered native speakers?  Promotes the English of the ethnic Anglophone speaker as a reference point against which all other varieties of English should be measured  Perpetuates the distinction between native and non-native which causes negative consequences on the way English is perceived by people who speak it as an ELF/EFL For these reasons, some scholars, such as Rampton, would like to replace the terms native/non-native with the term ‘expert’ to indicate people who don’t use English as their first language but who are able to communicate in all fields and all skills. He argues that expertise has the following advantages over nativeness: 1. Expertise is different from identification and is rather linked to knowing a lot about something even if it does not belong to your culture. 2. Expertise is learned, not something fixed or innate 3. Expertise is relative, one person’s expert is another person’s fool 4. Expertise is partial. People can be expert in several fields 5. To achieve expertise, one goes through processes of certification, in which one is judged by other people On the other hand, the use of the term ‘expert’ for fluent speakers of English implies the use of ‘non- expert’ to describe less fluent speakers. This imposes something of the value judgement of the term ‘non- native’. Jenkins, instead, has another idea about how to classify the speakers. She refers to monolingual English speakers (MES) as speakers of English who only know English. Then, she refers to bilingual English speakers (BES) as those speakers who are proficient or expert in English and at least one other language, regardless of the order in which they learned the languages. If these people who know more than one language are not totally expert and not perfectly bilingual but they are able to speak it at a level of reasonable competence, she refers to them as a non-bilingual English speaker (NBES). There are two advantages in this classification:  MES as an epithet is considerably less favourable than BES; so this system of labelling reflects the fact that monolingualism is not the preferable condition  BES removes the artificial distinction, in an international context, between speakers of L1 and L2 varieties of English. This should eventually lead to the end of discrimination against teachers of English because they are not ‘native speakers’ of English On the other hand, this proposal is not without disadvantages. In particular, there is a problem where to draw the line between a BES and NBES; and, of course, who should be responsible for drawing it. In fact, because of the arbitrary nature of the distinction, Jenkins later decided that it would be better to abandon the NBES category altogether. However, one suggestion from scholars Ayako and Suzuki is to replace NBES with ‘Potential BES’, which at least removes the negative associations of the prefix ‘non’. B7. En route to New Standard Englishes Without codification, the non-Inner Circle Englishes will continue to lack prestige not only in the eyes of speakers of ‘accepted’ standard varieties but also among their own speakers. One of the great obstacles to the codifying of Asian Englishes has been some scholars in the Inner Circle who support the idea of Second language acquisition (SLA). They claim that these indigenised varieties of English (IVEs) are interlanguages and therefore errors rather than legitimate L2 varieties of English, because:  The aim of second language acquisition should be native-like competence  The (native speaker) input available to learners is sufficient to allow the acquisition of full active competence  In the second language acquisition, a language can be studied even if it will never be used with the same function that the language has in the original country  The role of the learner’s L1 should be evaluated only to understand what is interfering with L2 structures  The ideal motivation for success in SLA is integrative, for example, the desire to become a member of their specific culture or of trying to imitate their lifestyle However, IVE settings have a very different character from those typical of most SLA research: o The aim is to communicate with other non-native speakers o The input is no longer coming from an Inner Circle English but is local, it comes from a variety of English spoken in a specific area o Learners of IVEs use their English in multilingual settings o The motivation of most IVE learners is instrumental rather than integrative. That is, it is learnt as a result of the desire to achieve some functional goal rather than to identify with the target language culture So, SLA is linked to the concept of Interlanguage (IL), which is defined during the language learning phase by its instability. A learner’s interlanguage is said to pass through a range of intermediate systems between the first language and the target language before reaching a point where it stabilises. Because it rarely stabilises in a form identical to that of a native speaker of the language, IL is said to ‘fossilize’ at the point of stability, with fossilization referring to the remaining non-nativelike features as deficiencies rather than differences. Since most IVEs are stable, the only way SLA can apply the concept ‘interlanguage’ to IVEs is to claim that competence “in whole groups of individuals” can become fossilized “resulting in the emergence of a new dialect, where fossilized IL competence may be the normal situation”. In other words, entire communities’ varieties of English are being characterised as ‘fossilized IL competencies’. World Englishes scholars have for many years pointed out that this view of the IVEs is unsatisfactory on the failure to take account of the bi- or multilingual context in which IVEs are acquired and used, including the fact that the goal of SLA is by definition bilingualism. Brutt-Griffler adds to the debate by arguing that another source of the problem is SLA scholars’ exclusive focus on individual acquisition of English and hence their ignoring of its acquisition by bilingual speech communities. The IVEs, particularly those of several Asian Outer Circle countries, are increasingly being recognised as fully-fledged language varieties. A second major challenge facing codifiers of Asian Englishes is the resolution of the conflict between centripetal forces pulling them inwards towards local needs and centrifugal forces pushing them outwards towards international intelligibility and acceptability. In other words, while for many Expanding Circle speakers, international communication is their primary or even sole use of English, it should not be forgotten that Outer Circle speakers also use English as a lingua franca. Asian-English intranational needs involve, for example, the acceptance of local innovations in English including the standardising in the English lexicon of non-English words for which there is no precise English equivalent. There is, then, a strong case for including such lexical gaps in a dictionary of Philippine English. Similarly, given that almost all Asian-English speakers are bi- or multilingual and make extensive use of code-switching/code-mixing, it seems logical to include this phenomenon in grammars and dictionaries of Asian Englishes. The majority of the Hindi items embedded in the text do not cover lexical gaps in English. Instead, they are part of a bilingual’s “competence in the creative use of language, a communicative choice which necessarily draws on linguistic structure as such, but also on the message and the speaker’s intentions”. In other words, speakers who have more than one language available to them code-switch/-mix as a matter of choice and for a range of pragmatic and expressive reasons that will be alien to those who are monolingual or have only ever spoken second languages in classroom settings. Finally, we need to consider the differences between the Englishes of regions that were once colonised by the British, and where English has become an official language used in daily life by large numbers of the population, and regions that do not SECTION C: EXPLORATION Current debates in Global Englishes C1. Postcolonial Africa and North America According to the US census of 1990, 62 million of a total population of 251 million belonged “visibly” to an ethnolinguistic minority group: -African: 31 million -Latin American: 22 million -Asian: 7 million -Aboriginal: 2 million But in 2010 the census registered: -African: 39 million (12.6%) -Hispanic or Latino: 50.5 million (16.3%) -Asian: 14.5 million (4.8%) -Natives: 3 million (0.9%) These numbers, therefore, had increased a lot, although they are not directly comparable because of the changes in the structure of groupings. By the time of the 2010 census, the total US population was just under 309 million. So, these four groupings made up over a third of the US total. Meanwhile, the white population continued its downward trend from 2000 to 2010, increasing their number over these ten years by only 1.2 per cent. It is against the backdrop of the increasing number of non-native English speakers in the US that the English Only Movement operates. It has its roots in the United States in the late 19th century when southern European citizens began to arrive in the US. These new immigrants were considered to be racially inferior by the northern Europeans who had initially colonised the territory. In order to safeguard their position, the US government began reversing the policy of allowing education for immigrants to take place in their native languages. By the early 1920s, nearly three-quarters of the US states were insisting on English as the only language of instruction, a policy that was often executed inhumanely. For example, Native American children were kidnapped from their reservations and forced to live in boarding schools to learn English and the culture of its mother-tongue speakers. In these schools, they studied under a forced militaristic discipline and they faced abusive treatment for ‘reverting’ to the mother tongue. They could not run away because they would be caught by agents and returned to school. Then, tolerance for other languages increased in general through the twentieth century and in 1968, the Bilingual Education Act officially recognised the need for education to be available in immigrants’ native languages. However, in the late 1960s, the arrivals from developing countries in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and Asia, led to a wave of xenophobia and to the English Only Movement, which enacted linguistic policies that would force everyone to learn English and only English. Finally, in 1968, with the Bilingual Education Act, the institutions express the need for education to be available in immigrants’ native languages. Then, in 1998, the English Language Education for Children in Public Schools Initiative (or Proposition 227) was passed in California and organized immersion programmes for a year for all children who were non-native speakers of English. Only after this year, the children could attend mainstream education. According to Richard Watts, given that the language of the environment is English and the aim to subtract rather than add a language, it would be more appropriate to describe these programmes as a ‘submersion’. Ferguson, on the other hand, uses the term for ‘the not uncommon practice’ of placing a child immediately in a mainstream classroom with no special language assistance at all. He glosses this practice “sink or swim”. Another program born in the US was the one called “No child left behind (NCLB) act” in 2002 which focused on the needs of disadvantaged children, particularly language minority students. The problem with this act is that it links school funding to these children’s fluency in English. The NCLB’s approach is therefore deemed by some observers to emphasise immigrant children’s learning of English at the expense of their mother tongues. That’s why some scholars commented that this act could more accurately be called “No child left bilingual”. Crawford describes the approach as “a misguided reform” and argues that it has a negative impact on the very language minority students that it was supposedly designed to help. Behind all these types of movements, there are the white nationalists. Indeed, English is not the official language of the US so these language policies are actually linked to the anti-immigration movement. The idea behind that is “You can’t build civilisation in the US with somebody else’s babies” so the children must be American, white and must speak fluent English. English in Africa African English is normally taken to refer to the English spoken in sub-Saharan Africa by the indigenous population. The history of English in Africa is complex and had led to the evolution of three distinct strands: West African, East African and South African Englishes. Whenever scholars refer to Englishes used in Africa, one of the main debate is: should they use their own local (endonormative) standards or should they continue to look outside to Britain for (exonormative) standards? This debate developed between two scholars: Bisong and Philipson. They try to understand whether English is just promoting the interests of Great Britain and the US by exploiting countries of the “periphery” (Outer and Expanding Circles). For these reasons, Bisong asks and answer three questions related to the linguistic imperialism claim: 1. “Has English succeeded in displacing or replacing other languages in Nigeria?” No, English has not replaced them but it actually has a function within a society that is based on multiple languages and will continue to do so, since no nation can escape its history. However, the attitudes towards English is different because it is no longer perceived as the imperial language that must be mastered at all costs. According to him, for these reasons, today we can no longer refer to them as victims of linguistic imperialism. 2. “Has the dominance of English caused Nigerian culture to be undervalued and marginalised?” No, because Nigeria is a multicultural society and so the Euro-Christian culture that is part of the English language is only one of several cultures that function to shape the consciousness of Nigerian people. 3. “Why did writers like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, all of them literate and fluent in their mother tongues, write in English?” English was just one of the language that they could have used so they chose to select that language but they could have selected anything else because they live in a multilingual and multicultural society. According to him, the sociolinguistic reality has to be accepted for what it is. Bisong answered these questions in 1995 and a year later Philipson tried to answer the same aspects and he did it by looking at four central issues. I. African multilingualism and stigmatisation : he cites evidence showing that African languages are actually marginalised in favour of English, used as the language of prestige. II. The Centre and Periphery : he points out that the local governments, such as the one in Nigeria, have tried to promote English instead of local languages. The ultimate aim was to reduce the importance of ethnicity and create a sense of belonging to the same nation. III. Literature : Phillipson notes that almost 90% of the African population does not speak English; this means that they cannot access all the literature that has been written in English itself. In this case, English used in literature did not help the spread of literature and reading but it actually reinforces the elite of those who were able to access culture, learn the language and therefore have access to the literature itself, it is a form of elitism. Bisong claims “no nation can escape its history”, do you agree? If you were asked to advise a sub-Saharan African government on the selection of a national language, would you recommend an African language of wider communication or a European language? C2. Teaching and testing Global Englishes If languages evolve, the way in which we test a language or language learners might have to change. It’s not only a matter of which variety of language we need to teach but also what are we actually going to test. In almost all cases, the varieties that are taught and tested are native speaker varieties, particularly British and North American. The teachers who are most highly requested are still native speakers of English and the tests that are taken most seriously continue to measure learners’ competence in relation to ENL norms. Whenever people are teaching or testing English around the world, they tend to use methodology and materials that come from territories in which English is a native language. Nowadays one of the most used methodologies is the communicative approach, this means that you teach a language with the aim of getting your message across, of communicating. Teachers usually use only English monolingual texts because there is the idea that only full immersion can help the learners deeply understand the structure of a language. Some scholars asked if it is really the case that the natives by definition make better teachers, or simply that they are often better knowers of English as a native language. Widdowson said that teachers of English are required to teach not English as a general linguistic phenomenon but English as a subject. He continues: “Now, nobody would suppose that somebody who lived through a particular period of history was especially well qualified to teach it as a subject. […] Similarly, it would surely be odd to argue that the best teachers of the geography of the Austrian alps are the Tyrolean shepherds. Of course, these people have a wealth of intimate experience which can be drawn upon as data, and so they can serve as expert informants on certain aspects of the subjects concerned. But this does not make them expert instructors”. Therefore, the belief that a native English speaker automatically has the expertise to teach English ignores not only the fact that native speakers of English ‘are not noted for their ready acquisition of any language other than their own’ but also the need for teachers to have substantial education in language pedagogy. Seidlhofer approaches the issue from another perspective and highlights the fact that the non-native speaker teacher has been through the process of learning the same language, often through the same L1 ‘filter’, and he/she knows what it is like to have made the foreign language his/her own, to have appropriated it for particular purposes. This is an experience that is shared only between non-native teachers and their students. Despite the fact that linguists have been making observations of these kinds for many years, as Kirkpatrick points out, native-speaker English teachers are still in great demand around the world. This demand is so high in some areas, that the only thing you have to do to be able to teach is Then, according to Cross-over View, just because a message looks typically spoken or written, it doesn’t mean that will be used as the typical medium for writing or speaking to communicate. For example, the case of audiobooks that make it possible to listen to a book rather than reading the text. To reconcile the differences in the Opposition and Continuum approaches, Leech and other scholars preferred to refer to “typical speech” and “typical writing”. By characterising typical speech and writing in this way, Leech and the others are then able to demonstrate how these operate on a continuum rather than in direct opposition. Electronically mediated communication (EMC) This acronym indicates all the type of digital communications, whatever occurs through a device. Since the end of the twentieth century, the most notable development in the way people communicate has been the rapid rise in the invention and use of digital means of communication. And because English is currently the world’s primary global language, it has probably been affected by the digital phenomenon even more than other languages have. Crystal points out that the language of the Internet cannot be identified with either spoken language or written language, even though it shares some features with both. This is because the electronic medium constrains and facilitates human strategies of communication in unprecedented ways. Harring analyses how EMC works, dividing them into two aspects:  Technological aspect  Social aspect The first set includes synchronicity, length (number of characters) and persistence (how long a message remains on the system after being received). The second set includes participant characteristics, topic and purpose of the message and the languages’ norms recognised by the participants (e.g. use of non-standard spellings and abbreviations). Despite the fact that emails make use of conventions that belong both to the oral and written forms of language, there is, as Baron notes, “evidence for an increasingly oral basis to written language” in emailing. She outlines the linguistic profile of email as follows:  Social dynamics (predominantly like writing): o interlocutors are physically distant.  Format (mixed) writing and speech: o like writing, emails are durable o like speech, emails are usually not edited  Grammar: o Lexicon is predominantly like speech o Syntax is mixed o Like writing, email has high type/token ratio o Like speech, emails use present tense and contractions.  Style (predominantly like speech): o Low level of formality o A phenomenon called ‘flaming’ meaning that emails show emotions more than written forms of communication In linguistics: Token refers to the actual number of words. For example, ‘the book is on the table’ has six tokens. Types, instead, refers to the number of different words. For example, ‘the book is on the table’ has five types because ‘the’ is calculated only one. This means that if a text has a high number of types that text is rich in words and not repetitive. The richer a text is in words, the more the person had to think about what they were saying so the text is more complex than oral communication Text messages The use of texting is the sending of short written messages from one mobile phone to another. Some typical items of texting are abbreviations and the use of emoticons. Crystal argues that people use text because it is easy and fun and it is the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative and to adapt language to suit the demands of diverse settings. He also points out that the use of abbreviations, phonetic spellings and omission of letters is not a recent phenomenon. And although texting provides a space for individual creativity, it is also logical and systematic. However, for some people, texting is harmful both to the English language and to children’s developing literacy. According to Crystal, instead, texting is good for English because, just like literature, texting gives you the opportunity to practice reading and writing. Some researches demonstrate that the more you text the better your literacy goes and the earlier you get your mobile phone, the better your literacy goes. Whereas text messages can use up to 160 characters, tweets have a maximum of 140. According to Ott, Twitter has three characteristics from a linguistic viewpoint: simplicity, impulsivity and incivility. This scholar found some similarities between how the former US president, Donald Trump, used Twitter, and how Twitter works in general. When Trump used Twitter, the way he wrote could be rated at 3 rd or 4th grade (elementary) reading level. He used a lot of monosyllabic words and simple sentences and this is just how Twitter works. Looking at the impulsivity aspect, when Trump wrote apparently his words were not prepared but according to some scholars, it was all prepared. Another characteristic is incivility, according to Amnesty International in a year more than 1.500.000 tweets include incivility against women. It is very difficult to stop hatred. In order to explore the language of tweets, Crystal entered the term ‘language’ into Twitter Search and collected a corpus of 200 tweets from different authors. He analysed these in respect of their content, grammar and pragmatics. In terms of content issues, the tweeters demonstrated the pressure they were under to keep to the maximum by making use of several shortening techniques including contractions, logograms such as & for ‘and’, abbreviations ellipsis and avoidance of non-crucial words and punctuation. Turning to grammatical issues, Crystal found the following features in his dataset:  Series of sentential fragments  Minor sentences such as ‘yeah’, ‘wow’, ‘hey’  Major complete sentences  Semantic threads like ongoing monologues or dialogues, over half of which contained a cohesive marker (conjunction, a connecting adverb, a response or a clarification)  The average sentence length was 7.1 words In terms of pragmatic issues, the largest category in Crystal’s sample was observations and opinions. The next largest group was advertising. In addition, a small number were responses to the question “What are you doing?” or “What’s happening?”. Finally, there was a number of unclear cases where a tweet had more than one function. Jenkins tried to do the same research but she typed ‘Global Englishes’ in Twitter Search. C4. Sub-varieties of English: the example of Singlish There is a difference between Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) and Standard Singapore English (SSE). The standard variety of English spoken in Singapore is SSE but there is also this other variety, considered a sub- variety, CSE, also known as Singlish. However, it is not clear whether these two varieties exist along a continuum or whether a diglossic situation exists between them, involving a clear switch between two styles of speech. Either way, young people are often able to move easily from one to the other. Some are concerned that the use of Singlish among the young is likely to affect their literacy. Another fear is that if young people grow up speaking only Singlish, they will no be able to speak an internationally acceptable or understandable form of English, something which many Singaporeans regard as crucial to the continuing success of a country with a total population of a little over 4 million. Gupta defines Singlish as a contact variety. Some features of this variety are:  Past tense it’s not marked, ‘she eat here yesterday’  Reduction of final consonant clusters when followed by a word beginning with a vowel, lif’ up for lift up  Use of [f] and [v] for final ‘th’, ‘toof’ for ‘tooth’ or ‘smoov’ for ‘smooth’ Some of these features occur in other stigmatised varieties of British and American English. But, as Wolfram points out, the uniqueness of AAVE lies in the particular combination of structures that make up the dialect, and to this day there is still no agreement about how Ebonics developed. The Ebonics debate exploded in the mid-1990s around issues such as equal education access and opportunity. On 18 December 1996, the School Board in Oakland, California, passed a resolution according to which Standard English have to be taught through AAVE to that specific part of the society. As the pupils’ English skills improved, the teaching of other subjects through the medium of English would then be phased in. The resolution included the following claims:  Many African-Americans speak Ebonics  Ebonics is not a debased dialect but a valid linguistic system influenced by the West and Niger- Congo languages spoken by their ancestors  African Language Systems are genetically based  Ebonics could and should be used as a medium for the children who were being failed by the current education system  Funds would be set aside for the devising and implementation of a teaching program in Ebonics How do you account for the fact that opposition to the resolution was expressed by members of both the black population and the conservative white population? Which side, if either, do you support, and why? C6. ELF and education English continues to be taught from the native-speaker perspective and several ELF scholars have been observing for some years that there is a mismatch between the kinds of English that are taught to NNESs at all educational levels and the kinds of English they need and use in their lives outside the classroom. A survey that Ranta conducted among secondary school students and teachers in Finland revealed the students’ awareness of the lingua franca role of English and a nascent awareness of ELF-related ideas and approaches even among the Finnish teachers of English. She also notes that the teachers in her survey felt constrained by the need to orient their teaching to the native English that would bring her students success in their final examination. They believe that the examination is ‘outdated and does not meet the present- day requirements of English language use’ and would prefer to practise more ‘real world’ skills in class. It is very difficult to propose a solution to this problem. According to some scholars, such as Cogo and Dewey, if teachers want to include ELF in their syllabus they have to:  Incorporate the global diversity of English into the curriculum rather than focusing exclusively on native English  Not focus heavily on areas that are problematic for L2 learners, for example, the use of prepositions  Avoid focusing on typical language ‘errors’ without considering the sociolinguistic realities of the teaching/learning context  Focus on effective communication rather than grammatical and lexical accuracy  Develop learners’ ability to use English in a flexible way to promote successful intercultural communication Then, according to Seidhofer: o Conformity to ENL norms is not a necessary requirement for communication o A language that has been imperfectly learnt from a conventional point of view can be put to communicative use o Teachers can set realistic objectives that are attainable and more closely correspond to the needs of the majority of users of English o This means focusing on communicative function and evaluating forms in term of their functional effectiveness rather than their closeness to native English norms Finally, according to Wen, when you are teaching or learning English in an international environment, you have to look at the cultural aspects of the language and pragmatics, not only at the grammar. According to her, in this way, learners would not be expected to simply replicate what they were taught but to use it as a means for developing effective communication strategies related to their own cultural reality. The teacher gives you some basic input; the important part of the class is the students. English medium instruction (EMI) and CLIL There is a wide range of areas, or domains, in which English is currently the global lingua franca. Education is a major one of these domains, and particularly higher education, which has become ‘globalised’ over recent years. Many universities around the world now describe themselves as international and attract large numbers of students and staff from other countries and L1s. Ten years ago, there was a clear distinction between English Medium Instruction (EMI) and Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). In the latter case, secondary and sometimes primary school subjects were taught in English and language support was offered to students alongside the L2 content teaching. In the former case, university subjects were taught in English and students were expected to have sufficient ability in the language to equip them for EMI from the start. More recently, the distinction between the two has blurred in tertiary education. According to Dalton-Puffer and Smit, the parameters of CLIL are:  It is about using a foreign language or a lingua franca to teach any subject, not a second language or a language that is regularly used in the wider society they live in  It is usually implemented once learners have already acquired literacy skills in their mother tongue  CLIL teachers are normally non-native speakers of the target language and are typically content rather than foreign-language specialists  CLIL lessons are usually timetabled as content lessons while the target language normally continues as a subject in its own right, taught by language specialists When English is used as the medium of instruction in universities, it is generally assumed to be the academic English of native English speakers. However, the view of researchers working on ELF in academic settings is different. Smit considers that the ‘E’ in EMI should be ELF rather than English. And Mauranen argues that what counts in communication within international academic communities is clarity effectiveness and contextual appropriateness of communication. While academic standards are vital, native-like English is not. Problematizing English in global higher education When universities describe themselves as ‘international’, they usually mean they want to attract diverse international students and staff and engage in research collaborations with scholars at universities in other countries. This means that universities are becoming sites rich in linguistic and cultural diversity, which potentially benefits their home students as much as those coming from other places. However, when the globalisation and internationalisation of higher education are discussed, language appears more or less invisible. The assumption that only native English is appropriate in EMI settings has, therefore, gone unquestioned. Thus, if English is not your L1 and you are studying through EMI, you probably need to achieve a certain score on one of the major examinations based on native English in order to gain your place at the university. And if, on arrival, your English was not considered sufficiently ‘native-like’ you may have been offered remedial English classes to make it more so. On the other hand, if a university wants to say that they are international they need to look at EMI but when they are using English as the medium of instruction there is always one problem they have to face. In some circumstances, if the students cannot really understand or the teachers are not good at what they are doing, this could be something bad for the university, it may create some problem for the student that cannot receive as content as they would in their L1. Then, there should be a balance between open up an institution to an international environment while still trying to preserve local language and culture. This is called glocalization, you have to be global but still, look at something local without forgetting who you are e where you come from. C7. Asian Englishes: focus on India, Hong Kong and China These three settings have a certain amount in common but there are also important differences both in the ways in which English functions in each context and in the attitudes of their users towards their own English. In particular, whereas Indian English is an established, widely accepted variety, the status of Hong Kong English is still ambivalent. Meanwhile, English in relation to China is at a much earlier stage of development. Indian English According to Crystal, India has approximately 200 million L2 and 350 thousand L1 English users. On the other hand, if Kachru is correct, then the figure for English users in India is nearer 333 million, well above that for the US. Graddol concludes that no one really knows how many Indians speak English today and the estimates vary between 55 million and 350 million. It seems likely that India currently has one of the world’s two highest populations of English users and with increasing government efforts to spread English so that it is no longer restricted to the Indian elite, the number of users of English in India will probably grow. The earliest English language policy for India was Macaulay’s Minute of 1835 that stated, “We must do our best to form a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect”. This became the British government’s official language policy in India, giving the English language priority in Indian administration, education and society. English-medium schools and universities and an English press were established in India and contributed to the gradual usurpation into English on Indian languages and its role as the official language and primary lingua franca of the country. In the post- independence era from 1947, the 1950 Constitution of India declared Hindi the official national language but allowed English to continue to be used for official purposes for the following 15 years. In 1967, with the Official Languages Act, English became the ‘associate’ official language and could continue to be used alongside Hindi in all official matters at the national level. In addition, the Constitution recognised 18 regional languages as having the right to function as the official languages of individual states. In fact, in the post-independence period, there has been a steady growth in the use of English in the country with English nowadays being used mainly for communication among Indians rather than with native speakers of English. More important is the fact that English has not killed off Indian’s indigenous languages but functions in a complementary relationship with them and the steady growth of an Indian English identity which finds expression in a linguistic variety with its own grammatical, lexical, phonological and discoursal norms. Indian English has developed its own varietal characteristics through the interaction of Indian languages and social behaviours with those of English. Then, with the Indianisation of English, there were adaptations of existing features of British English and the use of transferred mother tongue items where British English English. Some earlier studies such as Hu have suggested that Chinese speakers of English may themselves be moving towards accepting their own English as a variety. All these scholars believe it is likely that Chinese speakers’ English is destined to grow in importance: that it will become the most common kind of English spoken in Asia, and have more speakers than the total for North America and Britain. And at the point when this happens, argues Deterding, “it may start to have a major impact on the way the English language evolves”. C8. Language killer or language promoter? Scholars have two main different perspectives on the effect of the global spread of English. Firstly, its potential to cause the deaths of other languages and secondly, its role within a framework of bilingualism. English as a killer language According to 2000 estimates, the number of languages in the world vary between 3000 and 10000, but by most definitions of a ‘language’, the figure lies between 6000 and 7000. The problem is that some languages are slowly disappearing. According to Crystal, by the end of the century, something like two languages will die each month. A quarter of the world’s languages are spoken by fewer than 1000 people. Only in North America, there are almost 200 indigenous languages. Trudgill points out that one of the greatest cultural tragedies ever to befall the human race is taking place before our eyes but no one is paying attention. There are members of the British intelligentsia who profess to be concerned about language and who agonise over utter trivialities such as the failure of the nation to use hopefully or to place only “correctly”. Here is what they should be worrying about: of the world’s 6,000 or so languages, as many as 3,000 are in the process of dying out, and another 2,400 are endangered. The first stage in the process of reversing language death is to identify the cause. Although no one factor is likely to prove singly responsible for the dramatic loss of languages which are we currently witnessing, one cause is frequently named by experts as bearing the greatest share of responsibility: the English language. English operates in a global context in which the most politically and economically powerful English speakers – those in the Inner Circle countries – up to now have benefited disproportionately from the spread of the language. Several scholars wrote on endangered languages: According to Dorian : During the colonisation period, “Europeans seriously confounded technological and linguistic development. They were unable to conceive that a people who lacked a rich material culture might possess a highly developed, richly complex language, they wrongly assumed that primitive technological means implied primitive linguistic means” According to Skutnabb-Kangas: Most Western countries participate in murdering the chances that they might have to increase the linguistic diversity in their countries, because they do not give immigrants and refugees much chance of maintaining and developing their languages. Development cooperation also participates, with very few exceptions, in murdering small languages and supporting subtractive spread of the big killer languages, especially English. ‘Subtractive spread’ means that new languages are not learned in addition to the language(s) people already have, but instead of them, at the cost of the mother tongue(s), the whole homogenisation process that globalisation is made to ‘demand’ has to be problematised and nuanced before it is too late. According to Nettle and Romaine: Those who control particular linguistic resources are in a position of power over others. Linguistic capital, like all other forms of capital, is unequally distributed in society. The higher the profit to be achieved through knowledge of a particular language, the more it will be viewed as worthy of acquisition. The language of the global village (or McWorld, as some have called it) is English: not to use it is to risk ostracization from the benefits of the global economy And also Educational policy is another striking example of misguided strategies imported from the West into developing countries. Believing that tribal languages stood in the way of unity and were not suitable as languages of education and technology essential for western-style development, most newly independent countries did not develop their own languages, but continued using the languages of their former colonizers even when most of their citizens did not know them. Western policies and practices have generally reinforced European languages. Development agents sent into the field rarely bother to learn the local languages, which leads to communication problems. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund seldom refer to the possible role indigenous languages might play in development. The use of western school curricula in developing countries tends to devalue traditional culture and excludes formal study of traditional knowledge systems. Younger members of the culture are educated to believe that traditional knowledge is not worth learning because it will not lead to a job. According to Fishman: ‘Globalisation is the wave of the future’, more than one recent newspaper headline (not to mention the received popular wisdom) has announced, and, to some extent, this is so. But globalisation is both a constructive and a destructive phenomenon, both a unifying and a divisive one, and it is definitely not a culturally neutral or impartial one. In our day and age, it is definitely the globalisation of pan-Western culture (and pop-consumer culture in particular) that is the motor of language shift. And since America- dominated globalisation has become the major economic, technological and cultural thrust of worldwide modernisation and Westernisation, efforts to safeguard threatened languages must oppose the very strongest processes and powers that the world knows today. That, in a word, is exactly why it is so hard to save threatened languages. Finally, according to Graddol: Although the English language is not directly responsible for much of the threat to global diversity, it is intimately connected with the processes of economic globalisation which are indirectly causing lesser-used languages to disappear. The English language has more direct responsibility for language loss in its native speaking countries. Canada, the USA and Australia each have a large number of indigenous languages within their borders which have already been lost or are on the verge of disappearance. In Australia, for example, more than 200 languages are thought to have been lost in recent years. Is language revitalisation desirable? What do you think about these comments? (on the book) Who should promote it? English-knowing bilingualism Bilingualism and multilingualism, though threatened at least to some extent by language death, and though regarded as aberrations by English mother-tongue speakers in the UK and US, are the de facto norm throughout the rest of the world. Speakers of ‘big’ languages, particularly English, meanwhile, have long been reluctant to acquire other languages, have expected others to make the effort to learn ‘their’ language, and have viewed code-switching as a sign of linguistic incompetence. However, bilingualism will by definition play a critical role in the prevention of language death so long as efforts are made to persuade learners of English that they should become practitioners of English-knowing bilingualism. That is, according to Kachru and Pakir, the populations have to be aware of the value of maintaining their indigenous languages for local identity functions alongside their English. If English-knowing bilingualism is to become the recognised world norm, however, it will be crucial for the mother tongue English speech communities to embrace the concept. Moreover, with bilingualism will come flexibility and accommodation skills of the sort these citizens have always expected of English-speaking ‘others’ whenever English is spoken in cross-cultural contexts. People need to speak languages other than their L1 in order to develop intercultural competence. This is not to say that people need necessarily to acquire these cultural practices along with the languages. In the case of learners of English for local Outer Circle or for international use, this is generally not so, and there is rarely an imperative for them to learn British, American, or Australian culture along with the English language. English monolingualism is not only a problem for intercultural communication at the international level, however. Within the Inner Circle countries, there are, through immigration, increasingly large numbers of non-L1 English speakers. In Britain, around one person in fourteen is now from an ethnic minority group and this trend is predicted to continue. In the US, the numbers are far greater. But in both communities, the learning of another language – any language – would help to reduce that fear of the ‘other’ which is bred out of ignorance of difference, and which often leads to racist attitudes and behaviours, and to campaigns such as ‘English Only’. The monolingual orientation of many English L1 speakers can cause problems in international contexts, where English is used as a medium for communication that does not relate to intranational functions. The problem is hierarchical. That is, monolingual L1 English speakers, unaware of the bilingual’s more extensive linguistic repertoire and skills, tend to take for granted that their own English is in a senior position in the English language hierarchy. Yet many of these L1 speakers are among the least skilled users of English as an international lingua franca insofar as they are the least able to exercise accommodation skills (adjusting their language to facilitate communication), and the most biased against other varieties of the English language. According to them and a traditional viewpoint, this is how languages look like: But if we reconceptualise the hierarchy by prioritising international communication and taking into account the advantages of English-knowing bilingualism, we come up with a very different one.