When Dan asked what he should post about next on this blog,
one of the most common responses was this, the World Englishes topic. Maybe this is because it’s relatively new on
the AQA spec, especially if you previously did Spec B; but actually many of the
issues and debates involved should be familiar from other topics in language
diversity or language and power. I love
teaching World Englishes because it’s the most summative of all the topics, so
students can use all their knowledge of language diversity and change. We teach it at the end of year 2 for this
reason.
These are the questions that we cover:
1.
How did English become such a
dominant language in the world?
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2.
What are the different ways of
grouping English-using countries around the world?
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3.
What are some characteristics of
different global varieties of English and of English as a lingua franca
(ELF)?
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4.
Who controls the English Language?
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5.
What are the political implications
of the dominance of English? Are all groups
in English-using countries happy with it?
Why? Why not?
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6.
What effect is English having on
languages around the world? Is it
responsible for “killing” other languages?
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7.
What is the future of English around
the world?
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For question 1, the simple answer (as with all dominant
varieties of language) is power; in
this case, the power of the British Empire and, later, the cultural, economic
and political power of the USA. David
Crystal has a useful 3 minute discussion of this here, and there’s a great
one minute animated film from the Open University here. Depending on your students, you might need to
do a bit of a history lesson on the British Empire at this point, but I usually
find that at least some of my classes already know plenty about this.
For question 2, there are several models which organise different
global Englishes. I use Strevens,
which looks fairly hierarchical and is useful for showing how English spread
around the world; Kachru’s
norm providing, norm developing and norm dependent circles; and McArthur’s
‘different but equal’ wheel model. Students should be able to discuss what these
models imply about power and control of language, and all are very
useful when discussing questions 3 to 7.
For question 3, there are great resources on ELF in the CUP
book ‘Language Diversity and World Englishes’, but if you don’t have access
to this or want something extra, there is a short intro from Jennifer Jenkins here and a great article by Jenkins and Seidlhofer
covering definitions, characteristics, issues and debates here. Mario
Saraceni also debates the issues around ELF, and I’ll return to his work
when looking at question 7.
When it comes to looking at varieties of global English, we
research and discuss Englishes from India, China, the USA and Australia, then
we do a detailed case study of Singapore.
This raises lots of relevant issues and debates about control and
gatekeeping of English and about status versus identity; Singapore has a
prescriptivist language policy which privileges British and US English as high
prestige varieties, and rejects ‘Singlish’ as slang or ‘broken’ English which
could adversely affect Singapore’s position as a centre of international
trade. Here’s a sick rap in Singlish so you can hear what it sounds like; an excellent Open
University documentary covering the issues here; and a TEDx talk bigging up Singlish as the future of language in
Singapore here. At this
point, we also come back to the models we looked at for question 2 to see how
each could be applied to Singapore. This
case study also covers questions 4 and 5.
We also look at other language policies, including L’Academie Francais and the proposed language purity law in Germany; both of these
are at least partly intended to stop English making inroads into other
languages, and students might apply familiar concepts such as Aitchison’s
infectious disease metaphors here.
Leading through question 5 and into
question 6, we also cover the issue of linguistic imperialism and language
death. 2 of the world’s 7000 or so
languages die every month, and the power and dominance of super-languages such
as English and Spanish shoulders much of the blame; your more ambitious
students might want to read a transcript of David Crystal’s lecture
on this. The term linguistic imperialism
was coined by Robert Philipson, and there’s an informative and interesting
debate between him and Robert McCrum, who is far more upbeat about global
Englishes, here.
Finally, for question 7, we look at
possibilities for the future of World Englishes. There’s a nice discussion by David Crystal in this video.
Mario Saraceni thinks that England
should accept that we’ve lost control of the English language, and should now
think in terms of Englishes, plural. This means letting go of the idea of standard
British English as the ideal ‘correct’ variety.
He uses a nice simile which
students find easy to remember; we have as much control of English as Italians
do of pizza – if someone wants to stick banana and bacon on it, we’re just
going to have to let that go.
Robert McCrum talks about ‘Globish’
(a term coined and monetised by Jean
Paul Nerriere). This is really a
version of English as a lingua franca, and it raises some interesting debates;
for example, are native English speakers likely to be disadvantaged by the
spread of Globish because our use of idiom and complex grammar will make us
difficult to understand?
Maybe English as a native language
will die and various World Englishes will remain; after all, this is what
happened to previous lingua franca Latin.
Or perhaps, given the decline of Britain and the USA as global powers, another
language such as Spanish or Mandarin will take over as a lingua franca. Post-Brexit, English is certainly likely to
lose some of its importance in Europe, as Juncker
pointed out in 2017.
Finally, it’s well worth discussing
the idea that elements of World Englishes are finding their way into varieties
of British English as a result of globalisation and patterns of migration; we
go back to our study of MLE/MUBE at this point.
