The Future of Englishes

The future of Englishes

DAVID CRYSTAL

Does an increasing awareness of the sheer international variety in the English language complex necessitate a new pedagogy for a new century?

[The following article is a slightly adapted version Press's Canto series (1998). 'Is English Really a of a paper given to the British Council Conference Family of Languages?' was the title of an article 'Innovation and Best Practice in British ELT, at in the International Herald Tribune a few years Oxford, July 1998.] ago (Rosen, 1994). And I have no doubt that we shall soon hear all the jargon of compara- tive philology turning up in the domain of ELT THE PACE is hotting up. Reluctant as I have - daughter languages, sister languages, and the been to be swayed by the fashionable neologiz- like. The question we all have to face, of ing of recent years, my title shows capitulation. course, is how a concept of 'best practice' sur- Like many since the early 1970s I have become vives in the face of such massive and unprece- used to the steady pluralization of the noun dented innovation. This must be part of what English, in such phrases as 'new Englishes' or the present conference is intending to explore. the journal title 'World Englishes'. Associated But such explorations are likely to succeed only locutions, such as 'an English' and 'each if we are clear in our theoretical thinking about English' are also now routine. 'The English lan- what might be going on, and are clear about guages' is a phrase which has been used for the facts of language change which motivate over a decade, most recently by Tom McArthur that thinking. Both levels of clarity are in short as the title of his book for Cambridge University supply, at the moment.

is the traditional criterion, and when that has Part 1: Language been applied to the case of English, there has matters hitherto been little justification for the notion of an English language family. Although there are several well-known instances of English Intelligibility and identity regional accents and dialects causing problems I begin by exploring the metaphor of 'family1 of intelligibility to people from a different a little. What could an English 'family' of dialect background, especially when encoun- languages possibly mean? The term 'family", of tered at rapid conversational speed - in Britain, course, arose with reference to such domains Cockney (London), Geordie (Newcastle), as 'Indo-European', 'Romance' and 'Slavic' - Scouse (Liverpool) and Glaswegian (Glasgow) domains where there exists a clearly identifi- are among the most commonly cited cases - able set of entities whose mutual unintelligibil- the problems largely resolve when the speaker ity would allow them to be uncontroversially slows down, or they reduce to difficulties over classified as different languages. Intelligibility isolated lexical items. This makes regional vari-

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 16:23:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400010816 eties of English no more problematic for lin- language'. A similar story can be found in any guistic theory than, say, occupational varieties part of the world where language is an emer- such as legal or scientific. It is no more illumi- gent index of socio-political identity. nating to call Cockney or Scouse 'different That is the point: if a community wishes its English languages' than it would be to call way of speaking to be considered a 'language', Legal or Scientific by such a name, and anyone and if they have the political power to support who chooses to extend the application of the their decision, who would be able to stop them term 'language' in this way finds a slippery doing so? The present-day ethos is to allow slope which eventually leads to the blurring of communities to deal with their own internal the potentially useful distinctions between policies themselves, as long as these are not 'language', Variety", and 'dialect'. perceived as being a threat to others. However, The intelligibility criterion has traditionally to promote an autonomous language policy, provided little support for an English language two criteria need to be satisfied. The first is to family (whether it will continue to do so I shall have a community with a single mind about the discuss below). But we have learned from socio- matter, and the second is to have a community linguistics in recent decades that this criterion is which has enough political-economic clout to by no means an adequate explanation for the make its decision respected by outsiders with language nomenclature of the world, as it whom it is in regular contact. When these crite- leaves out of consideration linguistic attitudes, ria are lacking, the movement is doomed. and in particular the criterion of identity. If intelligibility were the only criterion, then we would have to say that people from Norway, Ebonics Sweden and Denmark spoke a single language An illustration of a movement's failure is the - 'Scandinavian', perhaps - with several Ebonics controversy in California in 1996. This regional varieties. The socio-political history of incident received widespread publicity during these nations, of course, disallows any such December 1996, most reports sharing the con- option. Swedes speak Swedish, Norwegians tent and tone of this New York Times editorial Norwegian, and Danes Danish - or at least (as a (24 December), under the heading of 'Linguis- Dane glumly remarked to me the other day), tic Confusion': they do when they are not speaking English. Or, to take a more recent example of how language The school board in Oakland, Calif., blundered nomenclature can change (and rapidly): at the badly last week when it declared that black slang is a distinct language that warrants a beginning of the 1990s, the populations of place of respect in the classroom. The new Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia would all be policy is intended to help teach standard described as speaking varieties of Serbo-Croat- English and other subjects by building on the ian. Today, the situation has polarized, with street language actually used by many inner- Croatians considering the language they speak city children and their parents. It is also to be Croatian, and Serbs Serbian, and efforts designed to boost self-esteem for being made to maximise the regional differ- underachievers. But by labeling them linguistic ences between them. The 'Croatian variety of foreigners in their own country, the new policy will actually stigmatize African-American Serbo-Croatian' has become 'the Croatian children - while validating habits of speech that bar them from the cultural mainstream and decent jobs. DAVID CRYSTAL read English at University College London, and has held posts in linguistics at the The name Ebonics - a blend of Ebony + phon- University College of North Wales, Bangor, and at ics - was being given to the variety of English the University of Reading, where he taught for spoken by African Americans, which had previ- twenty years. He works currently as a writer, ously been called by such names as Black Ver- lecturer, and broadcaster on language and nacular English or African-American Vernacular linguistics. Among his publications are 'Listen to English. Although the intentions behind the Your Child', Who Cares About English Usage?', move were noble, it was denounced by people The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language', The Cambridge Encyclopedia', The Cambridge from across the political and ethnic spectrum, Encyclopedia of the English Language', 'English as a including such prominent individuals as Edu- Global Language', and 'Language Play' (seep.21). cation Secretary Richard W. Riley, the black civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson, and

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 16:23:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400010816 writer Maya Angelou. Quite evidently the two [My translation: But for myself, I'd crossed a criteria above did not obtain: the US black little bit [of] Rubicon all on my own - and, community did not have a single mind about after all the years that separated my father and the matter - indeed they seemed largely to me, I started to feel a considerable amount oppose the suggestion, for such reasons as surer about my own overlooked mother were mentioned in the Times editorial - and tongue.] the people who had the political-economic How does Scots stand in relation to the two cri- clout to make the decision respected were also teria referred to above? The situation is against it. The school board withdrew its pro- unclear, because the Scots community does not posal a month later. have a single mind about the matter, nor has it had enough political-economic clout to make any decision respected by outsiders. In relation Scots to the former point, the case in favour has been By giving a distinct name, Ebonics, to what had strongly argued by the leading scholar on previously been uncontroversially recognized Scots, the late Jack Aitken. After reviewing the as a variety of English, a hidden boundary in arguments, he concluded (1985: 44): the collective unconscious seems to have been All the phenomena just recounted - the crossed. It is in fact very unusual to assign a distinctiveness of Scots, its still substantial novel name to a variety of English in this way, presence in daily speech, the fact that it was other than in the humorous literature, where once the national language, its identifiably such names as Strine (a spelling of an imagined distinct history, its adoption (some Gaels would casual Australian pronunciation of the word call it usurpation) of the nation's name, and the 'Australian') can be found. With just one excep- massive and remarkable and still vital literature tion, within Britain and America, there has in it, mutually support one another and one never been a situation where a specific regional further and remarkable phenomenon - the variety of English has acquired a new name as ancient and still persistent notion that Scots is indeed 'the Scottish language'. part of its claim to be recognized as a standard in its locality. That exception is Scots. Here is But the missionary tone of this quotation, along McArthur's summary of the situation (1998: with the indication that at least one section of 138): the Scottish community thinks differently, suggests a complex sociolinguistic situation; and The people of Scotland occupy a unique historical and cultural position in the English- at the end of his article even Aitken pulled back speaking world. They use the standard from the brink: language (with distinctive phonological, I believe what I have written suggests that if grammatical, lexical, and idiomatic features) in Scots is not now a full 'language' it is something administration, law, education, the media, all more than a mere 'dialect'. A distinguished national institutions, and by and large in their German scholar once called it a Halbsprache - a dealings with Anglophones elsewhere, but in semi-language. their everyday lives a majority of them mix 'the King's English with what in an earlier age was In relation to the second criterion, it remains called 'the King's Scots'. to be seen whether the changing political situation in Scotland (the 1997 referendum on What would Scots look like, if it were written devolution agreeing the formation of a new down? A little later in the chapter (p. 149), Scots Assembly) will produce a stronger voice McArthur tells the story of a time when he was in favour of Scots. McArthur is doubtful filling in an annual form which asked him to (ibid.): state his modern language skills. The first few times he wrote 'English' and 'French'; then, as Any political change in the condition of he says, having 'grown a touch mutinous', he Scotland is unlikely to have a direct influence added 'Scots' (he is from Glasgow). He adds: on the shaky condition of Scots or Gaelic, because the movement for Scottish autonomy Nobody commented on the change; perhaps (within the EU) does not have a linguistic nobody noticed it. But fur masel, Ah'd crossit a dimension to it. wee bit Rubicon aa on ma lain - an, efter aa the years that separatit ma faither an me, Ah stertit If he is right, then that eliminates the strongest tae feel a gey wheen shairer aboot ma ain traditional contender for a separate identity owrelookit mither tongue. within an English 'family of languages'.

12 ENGLISH TODAY 58 April 1999

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 16:23:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400010816 The changing situation Different degrees of language mixing are apparent: at one extreme, a sentence might be But new contenders are entering the ring - an used which is indistinguishable from standard inevitable consequence of the emergence of English. At the other extreme a sentence might English as a genuine global language. 'Genuine' use so many words and constructions from a is used here in order to reflect the reality that contact language that it becomes unintelligible English is now spoken by more people (as a first, to those outside a particular community. In second, or foreign language) than any other between, there are varying degrees of language and is recognized by more countries hybridization, ranging from the use of a single as a desirable lingua franca than any other lexical borrowing within a sentence to several language. This is not the place to recapitulate borrowings, and from the addition of a single the relevant statistics, insofar as they can be borrowed syntactic construction (such as a tag established: this information is available else- question) to a reworking of an entire sentence where (for my own estimates, see Crystal, 1995, structure. In addition, of course, the pronunci- 1997; see also Graddol, 1998). But it is impor- ation shows similar degrees of variation, from a tant to recognize that the unprecedented scale standard British or American accent to an of the growth in usage (approaching a quarter accent which diverges widely from such stan- of the world's population) has resulted in an dards both in segmental and nonsegmental unprecedented growth in regional varieties. (intonational, rhythmical) ways (Crystal, Variation, of course, has always been part of 1996). the language, given that Angles, Saxons, and For example, within a few lines from less than Jutes must have spoken different Germanic half-a-minute of Malaysian conversation, we dialects. The emergence of Scots can be traced can extract the following utterances (for the back to the beginning of the Middle English original conversation, see Baskaran, 1994). At period. In the 18th century, Noah Webster was the top of the list is a sentence which could be one of many who argued the need to recognize called Standard Colloquial English; below it are a distinct American (as opposed to British) other sentences which show increasing degrees tongue. And the issue of identity has been cen- of departure from this norm, grammatically and tral to debate about the nature of Creole and lexically. At the bottom is a sentence (in this pidgin Englishes around the world. But it is English dialogue) which is entirely Colloquial only in recent decades (chiefly, since the inde- Malay. pendence era of the 1960s) that the diversity has become so dramatic, generating a huge lit- Standard colloquial English erature on 'world Englishes' and raising the Might as well go window-shopping a bit, at question of linguistic identity in fresh and least. Grammatical hybrids intriguing ways. My case going to be adjourned anyway. [auxiliary verb omitted] Okay, okay, at about twelve, can or not? Hybrids [distinctive tag question in English] The chief aim of McArthur's book is to draw You were saying you wanted to go shopping, attention to the remarkable 'messiness' which nak perga tak? [addition and tag question in Malay 'Want to go, not?'] characterizes the current world English situa- Can lah, no problem one! ['I can'; lah is an tion, especially in second language contexts. emphatic particle] Typically, a 'new English' is not a homogeneous Lexical hybrids entity, with clear-cut boundaries, and an easily No chance to ronda otherwise. [Malay 'loaf] definable phonology, grammar, and lexicon. You were saying, that day, you wanted to beli On the contrary, communities which are some barang-barang. [Malay 'buy ... things'] putting English to use are doing so in several But if anything to do with their stuff - golf or different ways. As McArthur puts it (p. 2), 'sta- snooker or whatever, then dia pun boleh bility and flux go side by side, centripetal and sabar one. [Malay 'he too can be patient'] Colloquial Malay centrifugal forces operating at one and the Betul juga. [True also'] same time'. And when actual examples of language in use are analysed, in such multilin- Continua of this kind have long been recog- gual settings as Malaysia and Singapore, all nized in Creole language studies. What is novel, kinds of unusual hybrids come to light. as McArthur points out, is the way phenomena

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 16:23:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400010816 of this kind have become so widespread, hap- development from Old English. French has pening simultaneously in communities all over nothing to do with it - but the fact that the the world. After reviewing several speech situ- story is reported in terms of French clearly sug- ations, he concludes (p. 22): gests the extent to which there was pressure on Worldwide communication centres on Standard the contemporary consciousness. English, which however radiates out into many As a second example, there is the comment kinds of English and many other languages, of 16th-century scholar Thomas Wilson, in The producing clarity here, confusion there, and Arte of Rhetorique (1553), objecting to the novelties and nonsenses everywhere. The result 'inkhorn terms' (i.e. learned terms) that were can be - often is - chaotic, but despite the being widely introduced into English at the blurred edges, this latter-day Babel manages to time (again, spelling and punctuation have work. been modernized). Some seek so far for oudandish English that they forget altogether their mother's language. Outlandish English And I dare swear this, if some of their mothers I imagine there would have been a similar were alive, they were not able to tell what they sense of chaos during the periods of rapid say; and yet these fine English clerks will say change in English language history, notably the they speak in their mother tongue, if a man should charge them with counterfeiting the early Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The King's English. arrival of thousands of words and expressions from French, for example, would not have 'Certainly it is hard to please every man by passed without comment. Indeed, we do occa- cause of diversity and change of language'? - sionally find such a comment. There is the 'Counterfeiting the King's English'? Hybridiza- famous 'egg' story of Caxton (Prologue to Vir- tion has been a feature of English since Anglo- gil's Book of Eneydos, c.1490), for instance (I Saxon times. Any history of English shows that have modernized the morphology, spelling and the language has always been something of a punctuation, apart from the two critical words: Vacuum-cleaner', sucking in words and expres- for the original, see the text in Crystal, 1995: sions from the other languages with which it 57): has come into contact. (This point has often And certainly our language now used varies far been neglected by countries who complain from that which was used and spoken when I these days about the extent to which they have was born. For we English men are born under been affected by 'Anglicization'. English has the domination of the moon, which is never been 'Frenchified' in the past far more than steadfast but ever wavering, waxing one season French has recently been 'Anglicized'.) But and waning and decreasing another season. today, with more contact being made with And that common English that is spoken in one other languages than ever before, the scale of shire varies from another. In so much that in the borrowing is much greater than it has been my days [it] happened that certain merchants were in a ship in Thames for to have sailed over in the past. A wider range of languages is the sea into Zealand, and for lack of wind they involved: there are over 350 modern languages tarried at the Foreland and went to land for to listed in the etymology files of the Oxford refresh them. And one of them named English Dictionary. And the borrowing is now Sheffield, a mercer, came into a house and found in all varieties of English, and not just in asked for meat, and specially he asked after the more academic or professional domains. eggys. And the good wife answered that she could speak no French. And the merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, but Novel developments would have had egges, and she understood him Moreover, we have by no means exhausted the not. And then at last another said that he would novel kinds of hybrid which linguistic change have eyren. Then the good wife said that she understood him well. Lo! What should a man in has in store for us. Consider, for example, the these days now write, egges or eyren? Certainly situation which is appearing with increasing it is hard to please every man by cause of frequency around the world in regions where diversity and change of language. there are high immigration or 'guestworker1 populations. A man and a woman from differ- Egges was a northern form, a development ent first-language backgrounds meet, fall in from Old Norse. Eyren was a southern form, a love, and get married, using the English they

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 16:23:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400010816 learned as a foreign or second language as their have no information on what their US counter- only lingua franca. They then have a baby, who parts do) were not 'talking down' to their col- learns from them - what, exactly? The child leagues, or consciously adopting simpler will hear English as a foreign language from its expressions: this was unconscious accommo- parents, but will learn this as its mother dation, which they were able to reflect upon tongue. What form will this take? Will there be only after considerable probing on my part. a linguistic growth analogous to that which takes place when a pidgin becomes a Creole - though beginning, one imagines, at a much WSPE and WSSE more advanced level of structural develop- A philosophy of diversity, recognizing the ment? What kind of English will be the out- importance of hybridization, does not exclude come? We are faced with the notion of foreign- the notion of a standard, of course. This is a language (or second-language) English as a point which the oversimplifying prescriptive mother tongue. Our nice models of World pundits of the world consistently get wrong: in English - for example, in terms of concentric honeyed tones, they think that a focus on diver- circles - will need some radical overhaul to sity must mean a dismissing of standards. On cope with this. the contrary: the need to maintain interna- Or, to take another example: the corridors of tional intelligibility demands the recognition of power in such multinational settings as Brus- a standard variety of English, at the same time sels. Although several languages are co-official as the need to maintain local identity demands in the European Union, pragmatic linguistic the recognition of local varieties of English. My realities result in English being the most widely fundamental principle is that we need both, in used language in these corridors. But what a linguistically healthy world. And our theoret- kind of common English emerges, when Ger- ical as well as pedagogical models need to mans, French, Greeks, and others come into allow for the complementarity of these two contact, each using English with its own pat- functions of language. tern of interference from the mother tongue? There are two complications which we need There will be the usual sociolinguistic accom- to anticipate. First, the emergence of new vari- modation, and the result will be a novel variety eties is very likely going to increase the pace of of 'Euro-English' - a term which has been used change in what counts as standard usage. It for over a decade with reference to the distinc- would be surprising if, at least at a spoken tive vocabulary of the Union (with its level, the trends which we see taking place Eurofighters, Eurodollars, Eurosceptics, and so simultaneously all over the English-speaking on: for a few recent examples using the Euro- world did not at some point merge, like sepa- prefix, see Knowles (1997}; for earlier exam- rate drops of oil, to produce an appreciable ples, Mort (1986)), but which must now be normative shift. What long-term chance has extended to include the various hybrid accents, the tag question got, for example, in its full grammatical constructions, and discourse pat- array of grammatical concord, faced with the terns encountered there. simplifying tendencies which can be heard On several occasions, English-as-a-first- everywhere - and which have their analogues language politicians, diplomats, and civil ser- in such first-language contexts as Estuary vants working in Brussels have told me how English (right?) or Anglo-Welsh English (re?). they have felt their own English being pulled in Would you place good euros on the long-term the direction of these foreign-language pat- survival of interdental fricatives in standard terns. A common feature, evidently, is to English, in a world where there will be five accommodate to an increasingly syllable-timed times as many English speakers for whom th is rhythm. Others include the use of simplified a pain as those for whom it is a blessing? sentence constructions, and the avoidance of The second complication is that we seem to idioms and colloquial vocabulary, a slower rate be moving towards a global situation in which of speech, and the use of clearer patterns of English speakers will have to operate with two articulation (avoiding some of the assimila- levels of spoken standard. This is not some- tions and elisions which would be natural in a thing which people have had to cope with first-language setting). It is important to stress before. Standard English, as it currently exists, that this is not the 'foreigner talk' reported in is a global reality only with reference to the an earlier ELT era. My British informants (I written language: it might more accurately be

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 16:23:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400010816 called World Standard Printed English tus as educated standards. Using myself as (WSPE). The comparison of international writ- an example, I already have my original ten varieties in The Cambridge Encyclopedia ofWelsh/Scouse mix functioning as a marker of the English Language (1995: 300ff.) showed local identity, and my educated (Standard) WSPE to be pretty well the same wherever it is British English functioning both as a means of encountered. This is what one would expect. national communication within Britain and as That is what a standard is for. It would not be a marker of national identity outside. The sce- able to fulfill its role as an international (writ- nario I have outlined suggests that one day ten) lingua franca if it were riddled with there will additionally be an international stan- regional idiosyncrasies. And, apart from a few dard of spoken English, to be used as a means instances of literature and humour involving of international communication in an increas- the representation of regional dialect, and the ingly diversified world (as well as, possibly, a occasional US/UK spelling variation, WSPE has marker of Earthly identity, once we have a no regional manifestations. community presence on other planets). In fur- But if a spoken equivalent to WSPE develops ther due course, the different kinds of standard -World Standard Spoken English (WSSE), as I may evolve their written equivalents, and we have elsewhere called it (Crystal, 1997), a will end up with two educated standards in regionally neutral international spoken stan- writing as well. To call this situation a kind of dard, acting as a stabilizing force on global spo- diglossia (or triglossia) is probably not too mis- ken diversity - this situation will change. I have leading, although the kind of functional dis- drawn attention to its emergence elsewhere tinctions involved are not really the same as the (Crystal 1998), having encountered interna- 'High' vs 'Low' functionality seen in the case of tional gatherings where people are using such languages as Greek or Arabic. It antici- English as their spoken lingua franca, while pates a day when learners will have to adapt trying to avoid the idiosyncrasies associated their British Standard English to an interna- with national varieties of expression. At one tional norm - or perhaps vice versa, learning an international seminar, for example, a casual international norm first, and modifying it to use of a baseball idiom (out in left field) by an British (or US, etc.) English. The situation may American led to the temporary disruption of not be unlike the kinds of shift which learners the meeting (as non-Americans debated what have to make these days when they visit it meant) and resulted in the selfconscious Britain, and find that the Standard British side-stepping of further regional expressions English they have been taught needs adapta- by all the participants. It might not have gone tion if it is to work to best effect in, say, Scot- that way, of course. On another occasion, the land or in Wales. But a world in which there are participants might have decided to adopt the two educated standards of spoken English US idiom - using it back to the American, and - seems inevitable. by definition - turning what was an American- ism into a global usage. That has been the pre- dominant practice in the past. Whether WSSE will prove to be predominantly American in its Part 2: Teaching historical origins, in the long term, or whether matters other varieties from around the world will 'gang up' on American English, swamping it by MUCH of the evidence presented in this paper weight of numbers, is currently unclear. But is anecdotal. It can do little more than provide some sort of WSSE, I have no doubt, will motivation for hypotheses. There is a real need emerge. for empirical research into these hybrid language situations. But it is plain that the emergence of hybrid trends and varieties raises An international norm all kinds of theoretical and pedagogical ques- Whatever the eventual character of WSSE, it tions: will occupy a world which, as far as its use of • They blur the long-standing distinctions English as a spoken lingua franca is concerned, between 'first', 'second', and 'foreign' language. will be a multidialectal one. Many of us will • They make us reconsider the notion of 'stan- have three dialects at our disposal, and - unlike dard', especially when we find such hybrids the WSPE situation - two of these will have sta- being used confidendy and fluently by groups

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 16:23:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400010816 of people who have education and influence in RP accent, this argument goes, then one should their own regional setting. continue to do so, for a whole range of familiar • They present the traditionally clear-cut reasons - the linguistic knowledge base is there notion of 'translation' with all kinds of fresh in the various analyses and descriptions, there problems, for (to go back to the Malaysian are copious course-books and materials, and example) at what point in a conversation there is a well understood correspondence should we say that a notion of translation is rel- between the norms of spoken and written evant, as we move from 'understanding1 to expression (important for examination pur- 'understanding most of the utterance precisely5 poses as well as for reading literature). In to 'understanding little of the utterance pre- short, there is a general familiarity with this cisely ("getting the drift" or "gist")' to 'under- variety which must breed a modicum of con- standing none of the utterance, despite its content. taining several features of English'? But from the viewpoint of listening compre- • And, to move into the sociolinguistic dimen- hension, there is an equally strong case for ped- sion, hybrids give us new challenges in relation agogical innovation. It is a fact that RP is to language attitudes: for example, at what changing (to be precise, continuing to change), point would our insistence on the need for and that many forms of 'regionally modified translation cause an adverse reaction from the RP' are now to be heard among educated peo- participants, who might maintain they are ple in Britain and abroad. It is a fact that sev- 'speaking English', even though we cannot eral regional accents (e.g. Edinburgh Scots, understand them? Yorkshire) are now more prestigious than they This is the Caxton situation again. used to be, and are being used in settings which would have been inconceivable 20 years ago - such as by presenters on radio and television, Towards a new pedagogy or by switchboard operators in the rapidly 'O brave new world, That has such people in't'. growing domain of telemarketing, or for that Miranda's exclamation (from The Tempest, V. i, matter by keynote lecturers at British Council 88) is apposite. It is a brave new world, indeed; conferences. It is a fact that new regional first- and those who have to be bravest of all are the language standards, in dialect as well as teachers of English. I am never sure whether to accent, are emerging in such countries as Aus- call language teaching or translating the most tralia and South Africa. difficult of all the language tasks; both are It is a fact that new regional second- undeniably highly demanding and professional language standards are emerging in such areas activities (and it is one of the world's greatest as West Africa and the subcontinent of India scandals that such professions can be so badly though less obvious how far these are country- paid). But in a world where traditional models restricted: see Crystal (1995: 358ff.). And it is and values are changing so rapidly, the task a fact that there are new hybrids emerging in facing the teacher, in particular, is immense. foreign-language contexts all over the English- Keeping abreast of all that is taking place is a speaking world. nightmare in itself. Deciding what to teach, given the proliferation of new and competing models, requires metaphors which go beyond Flexibility and variety nightmares. Is there any consensus emerging If this is the case, teachers need to prepare their about what a teacher should do, in such cir- students for a world of staggering linguistic cumstances? diversity. Somehow, they need to expose them My impression, as I travel around and listen to as many varieties of English as possible, to people reporting on their experiences, is that especially those which they are most likely to this situation - one of rapid linguistic transition encounter in their own locale. And above all, - is demanding an increased recognition of the teachers need to develop a truly flexible atti- fundamental importance of distinguishing tude towards principles of usage. The abso- between production and reception skills in lutist concept of 'proper English' or 'correct language teaching. English', which is so widespread, needs to be From a production point of view, there is a replaced by relativistic models in which literary strong case for pedagogical conservatism. If and educated norms are seen to maintain their one is used to teaching standard English and an place alongside other norms, some of which

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 16:23:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400010816 depart radically from what was once recog- RP are increasingly the norm, and regional nized as 'correct'. accents, as we have seen, are increasingly Yes, familiarity breeds content - but also accepted in educated contexts which would contempt, when it fails to keep pace with social have rejected them a generation ago. realities. All over the world there are people If you want to hear good classical RP spoken losing patience with what they perceive to be by whole communities, you will more likely an irrational traditionalism. You will all have find it in Moscow or Copenhagen than in Man- your own stories of the uncertainties and chester or Reading. In Britain itself, diversity is embarrassments generated when accepted the reality. 'Real Britannia: What Does it Mean local usages come into conflict with traditional to be British?' shouts a headline in The Indepen- standards. While there are still some parts of dent earlier this week, and the author Suzanne the world where there is a reverential attitude Moore comments, towards the end of a piece in towards British English in general, and RP in which 'a nation in search of an identity1 is the particular, this attitude is rapidly being theme: replaced by a dynamic pragmatism. If people in The question, then, is how do we create a a country increasingly observe their own high- modern version of Britishness that is inclusive ranking, highly educated people using hybrid rather than exclusive, that is based in the forms, if they increasingly hear linguistic diver- present rather than in the past, that is urban sity on the World Service of the BBC and other rather than rural, that is genuinely channels, if they find themselves being taught multicultural, that does not reside in 'middle by mother-tongue speakers who themselves England' but amongst a society of hybrids and reflect current trends in their regionally tinged mongrels. speech, then who can blame them if they begin to be critical of teaching perspectives which reflect nothing but a parochial past? Linguistic diversity and language health Our linguistic past has been shaped by recog- The new reality nizing the value of linguistic diversity; and I Britain leads the world in ELT. I believe this, believe the same should be true for our linguis- and over the past 35 years, since my first close tic future. ELT policy-making, accordingly, encounter with the British Council, I have should make diversity its central principle - repeatedly seen the effective role of that orga- removing it from the periphery to which it has nization in fostering language-teaching hitherto largely been assigned. No country has methodology. But no-one was predicting such dared do this yet. It would be another first for world language scenarios for English in the British ELT if we did so. But to do so may make 1960s. And the biggest challenge facing British many feel uncomfortable. Could the British ELT in the millennium, and thus the Council - Council ever stand up and say, openly, 'There is at least in its linguistic persona - is how to nothing wrong with teaching American and come to terms with the new global situation. other varieties of English'? One wonders what And the future I see for British English might happen to its grant-in-aid if it did! Language Teaching requires a reanalysis of the Even a statement recognizing the value of phrase: it must not be BE(LT); it has to be competing linguistic standards is too much for B(EL)T. some. I was a member of the panel which dis- The emphasis has got to move away from cussed English language issues at the Council's 'British English' or, at least, to a revised concept launch of David Graddol's book The Future of of British English which has variety at the core. English? earlier this year [1998], and I hinted For what is British English today? The spoken at this view in a contribution I made there. British English of Britain is already a mass of Afterwards, at the buffet, someone came up hybrid forms, with Celtic and immigrant and asked me if my notion of linguistic toler- language backgrounds a major presence. ance of English diversity extended to such Accent variation is always the clearest index of things as the errors foreigners made. I said it all diversity, because it is a symbol of identity: depended on what you mean by an error. / am What we might call 'classical' RP (as described knowing, for example, is not allowed in tradi- by Gimson, et at) is probably down to about 2% tional standard English, but it is normal in of the population now; and modified forms of some parts of the world, such as the Indian sub-

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 16:23:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400010816 continent (and also, incidentally, in some may have a new variety of English which has British dialects). Would you correct a French- achieved some viability. If this happened in man who said / am knowing, then, he asked? It Britain - we arrive in a Glasgow pub, shall we all depends, I said. Not if he was learning say, and find we are unable to follow the Indian English. My interlocutor's face told me speech of a group at the next table - do we turn that the concept of a Frenchman wanting to to them with a beatific ELT smile, and ask them learn Indian English was, at the very least, to speak more clearly? We all know what is novel. likely to happen. The acronym BELT now has a There was a pause. Then he said, 'Are you different force. saying that, in the British Council, we should The assumption, of course, is that if my be letting our teachers teach Indian English, Glaswegian group were to achieve higher lev- and not British English?' els of education, their speech would in the 'If the occasion warranted it, yes,' I said. process become more diglossic - they would 'I don't like the sound of that,' he said, and he acquire a more standard kind of spoken literally fled from me, upsetting a glass of wine English, alongside their original dialect. But in in the process. He didn't hear me add: 'Or even the Ghanaian type of case, the higher levels of other languages.' education are already present in the speakers. For in some parts of the world, the wisest Any motivation to change must therefore come advice would be to recommend that we divert from their felt need to make themselves under- some of our resources to maintaining the life of stood to outsiders: If- to put it succinctly- they minority languages. Identity and intelligibility need us more than we need them, then there is are both needed for a healthy linguistic life. such a motivation - and this has traditionally And the responsibility of doing something to been the case, with the centre of economic and try to minimize the ongoing damage to the political power lying outside their country. world's ecolinguistic environment - with a But we know from the predictions of David language dying somewhere in the world, on Graddol and others that power centres are average, every fortnight or so - belongs to ever-changing - and in 50 years time, who everyone, whether they are ELT specialists or knows whether we will not want them more not. than they want us? In which case, maybe we will have to take pains to accommodate to their dialect (or, of course, language), if we want to A change in mindset make inroads into their markets. It will never There is indeed a radical change of mindset be a simple question of code-switching - I here. To go back to the example of RP. Even chose the word 'accommodation' carefully. abroad, the many cases of successfully There will, I imagine, be give and take on both acquired RP - where the influence of the sides. Trade - whether in products or ideas - is mother-tongue is negligibly present in a per- a double-sided notion. But we need to begin son's speech - are far outnumbered, these days, now thinking about how such scenarios of by the cases where the RP is being filtered mutual respect would relate to our current through an overlay of local segmental phonol- teaching models and policies. At present I do ogy and syllable-timed prosody. not think they do at all. I am quite sure that This overlay, as we all know, can be so dom- most people still feel that, in the Ghanaian-type inant that it can make a person's speech unin- case, there is blame to be assigned; that the telligible to outsiders. And here we face the teaching has been unsuccessful. crux of the matter. If we observe a group of well-educated people from Ghana, or India, or Japan, talking happily together in their country 'Best practice' in a new century in English, and we find we can understand lit- I am aware that this kind of talk is controversial tle of it, what are we to say? Are we to blame - treasonable, probably. Perhaps I am already the teaching methods, the educational system, staking my claim to being the shortest-serving the motivation of the learners? Do we continue member of the Board in British Council history. trying to make their speech improve towards I hope not. For we have to address these issues. the standard British model (or US, or Aus- They will not go away. We cannot stick our tralian, or whatever model we are using)? Or heads into the sand, and pretend they are not do we recognize the possibility that here we there. Nor are we alone in having to address

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Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.34.90, on 28 Sep 2021 at 16:23:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266078400010816 them. Everywhere else is in the same boat. Or, English has it strongly- and perhaps this feature to be more accurate, they are all in their own has been an element in its global growth. As has boats, each taking on board the waters of diver- often been observed, people who have learned sification and hybridization at its own rate. English as a foreign language have been known American English, with over 350 significant to comment on the way in which they were foreign language inputs (according to the last helped by the presence in English of words which census), is at a particularly waterlogged stage, they already recognized as deriving from dieir with over a million people now panicking for own. the US English lifeboat (Crystal, 1997: Ch. 5); Any move to a new mind-set is never easy, the last decade has seen unprecedented and some will not wish to make it, for old habits amounts of water slopping into the Australian die hard. We should perhaps bring to mind the English boat; and other first-language areas are wise words of Igor Stravinsky, in his Poetics of beginning to find the waters choppy. So indeed Music (Ch. 5): 'A renewal is fruitful only when are second-language areas. There is no longer it goes hand in hand with tradition'. But there is (if there ever was) a nice, neat variety called no doubt in my mind that the concept of 'best Singapore English. The only reason we ever got practice' for the next century will need to be the opposite impression is that, when linguists grounded in a dynamic linguistic relativism, first began to describe these new Englishes, recognizing as axiomatic the notions of varia- they were working with individual informants, tion and change. This is the chief challenge fac- and their descriptions inevitably presented a ing ELT specialists as we move into the new mil- monolithic picture. As the linguistic viewpoint lennium, and it is a challenge which, I believe, widens, following more empirical research, British ELT - B(EL)T, as I think of it - is in an diversity gradually comes into focus. excellent position to meet. ED In my view, the chief task facing ELT is how to devise pedagogical policies and practices in References which the need to maintain an international Aitken, A. J. 1985. 'Is Scots a language?' In £73, 41-5. standard of intelligibility, in both speech and Baskaran, Loga. 1994. "The Malaysian English mosaic' writing, can be made to comfortably exist In £T 37, 27-32. alongside the need to recognize the importance Crystal, David. 1995. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the of international diversity, as a reflection of English Language. Cambridge:University Press. identity, chiefly in speech and eventually per- —. 1996. 'The past, present and future of English rhythm.' In M. Vaughan-Rees, Changes in haps also in writing. Pronunciation, Summer 1996 Issue of the Newsletter English (as opposed to French, Spanish, etc.) of the IATEFL Pronunciation Special Interest Group, Language Teaching is in the best position to do 8-13. Whitstable: IATEFL. this. We have an advantage in that our language —. 1997. English as a Global Language. Cambridge: has been coping with diversity for centuries. It University Press. is difficult to talk about languages as langues (as —. 1998. 'The future of English: where unity and collective community awarenesses); but the vac- diversity meet.' Keynote address to TESOL Arabia, Al Ayn, March. uum-cleaner analogy I used earlier gives a hint Graddol, David. 1998. The Future of English. London: about one feature of the English language which The British Council. must somehow be present in the subconscious Knowles, Elizabeth, ed. 1997. The Oxford Dictionary of of each of us - a readiness to assimilate new New Words. Oxford: University Press. forms. It is a thousand years since the publica- McArthur, Tom. 1998. The English Languages. tion of the first ELT conversation - the Colloquy Cambridge: University Press. Moore, Suzanne. 1998. 'Real Britannia: What Does it of Aelfric, in c.1000 - and already by that stage Mean to be British?' In The Independent (Monday English had readily borrowed hundreds of words Review), 20 July. from other languages, chiefly Latin and Norse. Mort, Simon, ed. 1986. Longman Guardian New Words. This readiness has been with us ever since. It is London: Longman. a readiness which is conspicuously lacking in, Rosen, Barbara. 1994. 'Is English Really a Family of say, the modern French langue - at least, as it Languages?Tn the International Herald Tribune, 15 has developed over the last 200 years. But October.

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