Development of English as a Global Language - Essay Example

Changes, Attitudes and Implications: An analysis of the Development of English as a Global Language This assignment concerns the medium of English - Standard English, ELFE, RP, "the Queen's English," "Oxford English," and "BBC English" (Bowen 2005) that has achieved unprecedented status as a global language. It is spoken as a primary language in over 70 countries (Crystal 2003, p.4), by around 1.5 billion who are fluent or competent in English (Crystal, 2003, p.6). It is a first language for 380 million, and a second language for 150 to 1,000 million (Wikipedia 2005). English has definitively taken on the status of the lingua franca of the world to some degree or the other. A digression to explain the terms we have mentioned is in order. "Standard English" is a general term for a form of written and spoken English that is considered the model for educated people. There are no set rules or vocabulary for "standard English" because, unlike languages such as French, English does not have a governing body that establishes official usage. The concept of "standard English" is therefore fluid. ELFE stands for "English as a lingua franca for Europe." It is promoted by some linguistics experts, and aims to standardise the use of the English language in the European Union. RP, as in "British RP," is short for "Received Pronunciation" - received from the Queen or King, as it were. It is sometimes defined as the "educated spoken English of south-eastern England." RP is itself sometimes called the Queen's English, which stands to reason, but the Queen's English is sometimes even defined as "the language of the United Kingdom." RP was sometimes referred to as "BBC English," since this was the traditional pronunciation to be heard on the BBC, but RP is not often called "BBC English" any more-as a result of the multitude of accents heard on the BBC these days. "Oxford English" is simply the dialect of English spoken at Oxford University. Some consider Oxford English the most standardised, and sometimes even as synonymous with "Standard English," whereas others consider it pompous and pretentious. Standard English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_English RP: www.infowrangler.com/phpwiki/wiki.phtmltitle=Received_Pronounciation BBC English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_pronunciation Oxford English: Wikipedia. The rest of the information is something that I know. Official versus Global Status How does one language achieve such a status First, the using of language is a social act (Cameron, 1995); language is the means of communication. It follows that social change will contribute to a change in status of a language, as Knowles implies in his study of the history of the English language (Knowles, 1997). Next, that medium can become the official language (as distinguished from global) of a country when it is adopted (and adapted) as the mother tongue and used by "such domains as government, the law courts, media, and the educational system [of that country]" (Crystal, 2003, p.4). Finally, language achieves a genuinely global status as it "develops a specific role that is recognised in every country" (Crystal, 2003, p.3). English, however, did not achieve global status by way of one or two variables. Several factors contributed to the process and arrival of English as a global language. These factors are part of a slowly evolving phenomenon that parallel the social changes experienced by numerous cultures over many eras. Social Changes as Influences Political, military, economic, cultural, scientific and technological changes in society propelled the English language towards the historically significant status of "global language," since no other language has ever laid stake to so grand a claim. 1. Emigration and Invasion The Old Saxon language (also called Old Low German) and related dialects influenced Germanic populations. Germanic peoples from the coast of Frisia, Lower Saxony, Jutland and Southern Sweden emigrated to Britain during the Roman occupation of Britain, lasting, according to most textbooks, from 55 BC to the fifth century AD. Old English, also referred to as Anglo-Saxon, is the English language as it was from the middle of the 5th to the beginning of the 12th century. It is classified as a West Germanic language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_Kingdom Old English cannot be considered a direct derivative of Old Saxon, though there is considerable influence of the latter on the former. Consider that the word for "to seek" (German suchen) is skian in Old Saxon, while it is san in Old English. Or consider "king" (German Knig): in Old English it was cyning, and in Old Saxon it was kuning, representing already a shift from k from c. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Saxon Scandinavian words were introduced during the ninth- and tenth-century Viking invasions. These are mainly items of basic vocabulary. The Vikings spoke Old Norse, and the influence of Old Norse was responsible for words such as "sky" and "leg." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English A large transfer of Latin-based words happened in the wake of the 1066 Norman invasion, when a huge number of Norman French words entered the language. Many of these are recognisable as "the French influence on English," as in beef (compare French buf, "cow") and chivalry (compare French cheval, "horse"). The introduction of Anglo-Norman as the language of the ruling classes in England displaced the Anglo-Saxon language: Anglo-Norman retained the status of a "prestige language" for nearly 300 years. This langue d'ol was to become the official language of England. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_language "English" and French had thus been marginalised as vernaculars, while Latin was kept as the official language (Knowles, 1997). Religion was prohibited from using the English language (Knowles, 1997): John Wycliffe (1330-1384), an Oxford priest and professor, translated the Scriptures into the English prevalent at the time. His translation was banned, and after Wycliffe, the English government declared heresy a crime, with translating the Bible into English being classified as heresy. Much later, to emphasise the "Englishness" of the church of the time, Henry VIII (1491-1547) and his successors developed church documents in English: The Book of Common Prayer (1549), and The King James Bible (1611), amongst others. http://cla.calpoly.edu/jrubba/395/Unit4.pdf Latin had retained the status of official language for documents written in England in the period between 1086 and 1733. But the Church had now been challenged; English was reinstated and gained in prestige (Knowles, 1997). After 1733, official documents were written in English. 2. Economy and Growth The Culture of nationalism - mainly in the nineteenth century - and the Industrial Revolution (circa 1750 - 1850) led to worldwide expansion. The industrial and scientific revolutions brought about a technological society, as it were. This meant the need for coined words to describe, simply speaking, whatever was being invented and discovered. Latin and Greek came into play again: words such as protein and vaccine were created afresh from Greek and Latin roots, while words such as airplane and horsepower came from English roots. www.wordorigins.org/histeng.htm The rise of the British Empire, as we have mentioned elsewhere, and England's increasing global trade, not only took English out to the world, it also introduced words into English. The languages of the Indian subcontinent, for example, are responsible for the origin of many words such as juggernaut, pyjamas, shampoo, and jungle. This is from many sources on the Web-I can't recall where I got it from. In England during the Industrial Revolution, specifically, electricity, roads, railroads and airways introduced and facilitated transportation, commerce, and migration. The farmer, no longer isolated in rural domains, picked up the local dialect or brought his own to the towns. In this can be traced the rhotic origins of American pronunciation: farmers pronounced the "r" in words such as far, and this was dubbed "farmer speech." This is from Wikipedia again. As another example of farmers introducing their language to the towns, consider Tennyson's (1809 - 1892) poem Northern Farmer, Old Style, in which are the following lines: "What atta stannin' theer fur, and doesn' bring me the ale Doctor's a 'tottler, lass, and 'e's allus i' the owd tale..." The farmer here was from north of Lincolnshire. We see here the beginnings of the substitution of "fer" for "for," and the dropping of the "g" in, say, bringin' or goin', in colloquialisms. http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/phonology.htm England in the eighteenth century was an era of politeness and the phenomenon of "class in language." Class distinctions were expressed through one's language - not just vocabulary, but also in terms of accent and inflections. The status of rural dialects and accents, naturally, went into decline. As class divisions in British society increased, the urban and rural dialects were further polarised. The emerging of the middle class saw this polarisation turn, to an extent, into an amalgamation. City dwellers picked up what were once rural mannerisms, and some rural dialects became integrated into city-speak, though not in all cases. The above is from my own knowledge. An interesting fact that highlights specifically how the industrial revolution resulted in the spread of English is that of the undermining of the importance of Welsh in Wales itself. English-speaking workers were being absorbed into mines and factories there, and by 1901, English speakers had outnumbered native Welsh speakers. www.britannica.com 3. Standardisation, Colonisation and Media With the printing press, administrations, and the London-based dialect passing to greater reaches, the shifts and adaptations made English both localised and "normalised." With education, standardised English was formalised. As with any language, there were teething problems for the standardisation of English, which continued through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The prime movers in this development included the growth in geographic mobility, which can be attributed to Empire; the increasing dominance of London and south-east England, making directly for a standardised "version," as it were; and the spread and growth of print, which necessarily led to greater levels of education and literacy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the spread of English-not necessarily as a global language-can largely be attributed to Empire; in particular, the access to the education systems of the colonies. The best example is probably India, where English education was enforced upon millions of people, effectively killing or stymieing the vernaculars. To this day, English is the official language in that country, with much of the creative writing output happening in English. In the twentieth century, as we have been seeing, film, television, and satellite and other technologies have turned the trend clearly towards globalisation. The biggest factor here is, indubitably, the United States and its ubiquitous influence-in all countries and in all fields of endeavour. All this is from my personal knowledge. Another thing that must be mentioned here is English is something of a Latin-Germanic hybrid, to put it in crude terms. We have three words-begin, start, and commence-for what is essentially the same concept. This fact provides a wonderful platform for integration and expansion-it makes English versatile. Language change is also facilitated by the development of new technology that leads to improved communications (Knowles, 1997). With the Internet, for example, societies become society, worlds become world, with language contact the major influence and a major language - English is the medium most used: 513 million people were online as of August 2001 (Source: Nua Ltd). At that time, 43 per cent of the Web was English, meaning that 43 per cent of surfers were looking at English pages, whether or not it was their first language. A considerable portion of this 43 per cent were non-native speakers, and there was bound to be a vicious cycle-they would learn English to cope up with life online, making for a larger English-speaking population, which in turn would lead to more demand for English pages on the Internet. From Nielson/NetRatings, StatMarket, and ComputerEconomics, Internet usage according to language changed from a 54%-46% ratio between English and non-English speakers, to 43%-57% in 2005. The general trend seems to be that English will not dominate the Web like it once did, and Chinese and Japanese are the languages getting on the Internet the fastest. http://www.netvalley.com/intvalstat.html Attitudes toward Change(s) "Humans do not just use language," writes Deborah Cameron, "they comment on the language they use" (Cameron, 1995, p.1), and comment they do on the changes leading to the globalisation of English. David Crystal sums up a general attitude wherein English is the first language: "The British resent Americans' erosion of English Native English speakers resent non-native cultures changing the language they have adopted; [and] non-native English speakers resent invasion of English as a first language." (Crystal, 2003, p.3) What Americans might call standardisation or "informalisation," the English will, naturally, refer to as corruption. What Crystal says holds true not just about the English, but all those for whom English is the first language. Two things are to be considered here. The first is examples of changes in usage, as is the case with the word "momentarily," which under British usage means "for a moment," as in "fleeting," and under American usage means "in a moment." The second aspect to be considered is literal corruption of the language, as a native speaker would put it-that is, a "degradation" (according to the native speaker) of grammatical rules, as happens in the American "different than." This can be considered a degradation because the word "different" was intended to indicate a departure, as in the word "from"-hence "different from." "Different than," on the other hand, indicates comparison, which does not enter the picture, even though it seems to-when something is "different than" something else, it should have a quality (such as highness or lowness or smallness) that is being compared, which it does not. This is partly from a conversation I had with David Crystal (I interviewed him in 2005). You can quote it as "David Crystal, in an interview with Chip Magazine, August 2005." Those in opposition argue that such prescriptivism (Cameron, 1995) is surely more negative than positive. First, some say, it is "anti-immigrant" (ProEnglish, 1994). Others challenge the trend as threatening to civil liberties; still others claim it will exacerbate ethnic separatism. Proponents of English as a global language (and those pointing to global changes as contributing positively) are concerned that in countries where English is the official language, that "linguistic unity" (ProEnglish, 1994) will be destroyed, thereby perpetuating the segregation and 'wall[ing] off of a newly created underclass in 'linguistic ghettos'" (ProEnglish, 1994). Such advocates believe that with the evolution and inevitable adoption of English as the global language, immigrants will be encouraged to learn the language of the country in which they live: they will be able to find good jobs, as they will not lack abilities to speak English to employers, co-workers, clients and customers. And they will assimilate as immigrants have for thousands of years. Global English From http://www.askoxford.com/globalenglish/worldenglish/factors/view=uk, we learn, "From the time at which each new area was colonised, and the settlers were separated from their mother country (from the early 17th century until the late 19th century), the English spoken there began to evolve its own characteristic form." Isolation refers to the phenomenon of vocabulary items remaining in use in a colony after they vanished from British English. An example is the use of the word guess, meaning "think" or "imagine," as in "I guess so." The dialect of the area of Britain from which the settlers in question originated had an impact upon the vocabularies of the settlement. Australasian English retains British regional words such as dunny (a shortening of dunnikin)-a lavatory. South African English reflects words of Scottish origin, such as janitor-a school caretaker. The regional British accents of the original settlers affected the pronunciation of the English developing in the settlements. The settlers' level of education determined their regional accents, and thus determined the shape of the colonial accent. In the United States, it is suggested that Irish and West-country accents played a part. In South Africa it is the mixture of London, North-country, and Scottish accents amongst the British settlers of 1820 to which some attribute the local accent. The indigenous languages encountered in each new colony by English-speaking colonists invariably had an impact upon the English developing there. Also, new English-speaking communities have created new English words and phrases. Australians created new words by adding the suffixes "o" or "ie," such as arvo (afternoon), and smoko (a work break). New Zealanders coined the term chateau cardboard (wine in a box). Indian English has the term cousin brother (male cousin). In Nigeria, a person who moved from one political party to another was called a decampee. South African English created monkey's wedding (alternating or simultaneous sunshine and showers). All this is from the source I indicated in the references- http://www.askoxford.com/globalenglish/worldenglish/factors/view=uk Implications of Change(s) While "all attitudes to language and linguistic change are fundamentally ideological[with] the relationship between popular and expert ideologiescloser than one might think" (Cameron, 1995, p.4), implications still exist, impacting learners and teachers of English Where English is the official language, now, proficiency in speaking, reading and writing is a condition of employment, education and socialisation. This is directed especially at learners, who need to acknowledge that to get on in these societies, it is essential to master the official language as early in life as possible (Crystal, 2003). For learners, this might mean that, in a world where English is the global language, it guarantees societal assimilation. Also, the lack of native-language (non-English) provisions are an incentive, rather than being a discouraging factor, for the learning of English. For teachers, the globalisation of English points to disparate measures. Estuary English - that which learners are exposed to by media, technology and culture outside of the class - will clash with the forms of English teachers aim to teach (Knowles, 1997). There are examples aplenty: in Britain, the use of "innit" as a question tag is seen virtually every day on TV. In America (especially), the use of the word "like," where it serves no defined purpose, but is a placeholder, as it were, is widespread, especially amongst the youth. Then of course there is the classic example of the word "doh"-originally from The Simpsons-actually having officially entered the language. Technology brings with it its own vocabulary, and teachers might well cringe at the word "gigs" being used to refer to gigabytes of data. Furthermore the teacher will need to attend more rigorously to awareness and study of "what is involved when they attempt to transfer skills to another language" (Arndt et al, 2000)-taking into account differences of acquisition, difficulties of acquisition and varieties in socio-cultural expectations between first and second language users, and, avoiding prejudices and presuppositions, continuing to refrain from interpreting such differences as differences in fluency or ability (Crystal, 2003). As with the impact of most, if not all-contributing factors leading to the trend of the globalisation of English, the impact on English has depended upon who has the power over such a factor (as technology, politics, economics etc). So while the anti-prescriptivists say we should leave the language alone (which is not possible), we do have to be accountable for what we do with the language. References Arndt, V., Harvey, P., Nuttall, J. and Williams, M. (2003) Alive to Language: Perspectives on Language Awareness for English Language Teachers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowen, T. (2005) What is Standard English [Online], Methodology Challenge, Available from: [19 December 2005] Cameron, D. (1995) Verbal Hygiene (Politics of Language), Oxford: Routledge Crawford, J. (1997) The Official English Question, [online], Issues in U.S Language Policy, available from:http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCRAWFORD/question.htm [20 December 2005]. Crystal, D. (2003) English as a Global Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freeborn, D., peter, F. and Langford, D. (1993) Varieties of English (Studies of English Language), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gordon, R.G. (2205) Ethnologue: Languages of the World, available from: [21 December 2005] Knowles, G (1997) A Cultural History of the English Language, London: Hodder Arnold. ProEnglish (1994) Why English [Online] English as Our Official Language, available from: http://www.proenglish.org/issues/offeng/> [23 December 2005] Raley, R. (no date) What is Global English [Online], in Global English in the Academy, Dissertation, available from http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/global-English.html [19 December 2005] Wikipedia (2005) English Language [online], available from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English language > [20 December 2005] AskOxford: Factors which shaped the varieties of English [online], available from http://www.askoxford.com/globalenglish/worldenglish/factors/view=uk [10 April 2006] Read More