Job Discussion Forums

[nomadder]

I was surprised to find that most non-native speakers of English use the American version in most cases. Even Europeans who live so close to Britain. Again it must be TV, movies and other media. Example-I met a Swede who I mistook for an American and he said he had never lived there.

I've even heard that British English is slowly becoming more Americanized though I don't know specifically how. But North Americans abroad often like some British phrases and expressions. Example above-fussed over- used by Wolf is not so common in these parts(we're from the same province).

[SueH]

I doubt if students would want to be taught by the likes of the Scouse call centre worker who I found virtually incomprehensible when I queried a bill last year. I thought I was used to mangled English in the classroom but had real difficulties in this case.

There was a recent program on BBC Radio 4 featuring a teacher in Jamaica who was concerned that pupils were not learning standard English but using the local patois, and that this would deny them opportunities later in life.

I've always appreciated diversity in language, so perhaps the answer lies in the Italian pattern of a local dialetto as well as standard Italian, with usage appropriate to context - rather like the arabic model quoted earlier.

[Stephen Jones]

---"I was surprised to find that most non-native speakers of English use the American version in most cases"-----

No, they juse the Swedish version or the Spanish version or the Arabic version. It's just that as an non-American you know its not your version but arent't familiar enough with either the American version or the speakers first language to be aware of it.

Though you could claim that the American accent is the language you get when you throw together a load of immigrants, few of whose first language is English :)

---"
PostPosted: Sun 04 Jan, 2004 3:39 pm Post subject:
I was surprised to find that most non-native speakers of English use the American version in most cases. Even Europeans who live so close to Britain. Again it must be TV, movies and other media. Example-I met a Swede who I mistook for an American and he said he had never lived there.

I've even heard that British English is slowly becoming more Americanized"---

Very true in terms of vocabulary. When the American troops were stationed in Britain prior to the invasion of Normandy in the Second World War, they were given a list of strange British words such as wireless and their American equivalents such as radio. Now two-thirds of the American words are standard in British English, and at least half of the British words would be unfamiliar to anybody under 30.

[leeroy]

Curiously, pretty much every Scandanavian I have met has spoken better English than I. After querying them about it, it turns out they rarely learn it communicatively or have much contact with native speakers. They simply study it at school and have exposure to western media. Somehow, Scandanavians are doing something right. And while Jamaicans and Indians have a quite specific local dialect for their English, Scandanavians on the whole do not. They speak with such little noticable "local dialect" that, in fact, it sometimes sounds a bit bland to me.

But I consider myself culturally "at home" with Scandanavian people. I do not with those from further away (culturally speaking). If we agree that language is a tool with which to perform communicative functions (which are often culturally-specific) then English will have to be adapted to meet the differing cultural needs of far-eastern students.

English is rubbish at expressing deference, for example. Do we have an easy word/function for the whiny Korean "Ooopppppaaaa!" or "Ooooonnniiii!"? Do we have a quick and easy way of saying "I understand what was implied in your statement but respectfully disagree?"

In order for English to be more easily accepted by cultures that do not fall under the "western category" (and I think we all agree that this is possible/necessary) then it will need to undergo modifications (as it has already done in other areas of the world). Post modifications, this will probably result in another set of dialects - which will be less easy to comprehend than the "standard Englishes" that we are ramming down everyone's throats at the moment, but more culturally relevant to the students at the receiving end.

[leeroy]

[Stephen Jones]

----"If we agree that language is a tool with which to perform communicative functions (which are often culturally-specific) then English will have to be adapted to meet the differing cultural needs of far-eastern students. "-----

The Sapir-Worf hypothesis, and totally discredited. English is as sutied to the expression of deference as any other language, and has developed a whole gamut of ways of doing so, as you would expect from a class-ridden society.

The problem of course is that many EFL teachers are woefully inadequate at explaining this.

Why Leroy do you say to your boss "Did you want to see me?", but to a student "Do you want to see me?". The answer is that we use the past tense because it is more distant than the present, and by marking this distance we are showing deference.

You would say to your best friend, "Lend us a fiver will you?" but asking a colleague at work would use the more deferential "Do you think you could lend us a fiver till tomorrow", the same grammatical phrase you would use to ask to borrow your best friend's car, or to borrow the bosses stapler. To borrow your colleagues car you would shamefully grovel, as if before some Mongolian warlord, and English has no phrase deferential enough for borrowing the bosses car; you just go out to face the snowstorm like in Scott of the Antartic.

Other languages grammaticize this (French with "tu" and "vous" and Spanish with "tu" and "usted", and Indonesian with I'm told, dozens of forms) but whilst this makes things easier in some respecits (and much more difficult in others, such as when the social distinctions change and you never know whether you will insult a Spaniard by being overfamiliar and calling him "tu" or too distant and possibly sarcastic by using "usted) it does not mean that English is not quite capable of expressing those disitinctions. Indeed, one of the pitfalls of English for the foreigner, and for the EFL teacher, is to fail to realize the importance of these aspects.

Another point to be born in mind is that the foreign learner is not going to be using English for interaction with his fellow countryman, and thus any elaborate kind of social deference is going to be quite unnecessary. English will be used to access technical journals and as a lingua franca between speakers of differing languages. Indeed the co-existence of differing language communites explains why you can find somebody who speaks good Engiish when you pick up any number in the Kuala Lumpur yellow pages, but will have as little or less luck in Hong Kong than you would in Barcelona.

Swedes and other Scandinavians are closer to English than Arabs not because of some cultural similarity but because both English and Scandinavian languages come from the same language family. First of all English was basically Saxon, and then you got the invasion of the Vikings. The pronunciation of but for example changes along an isogloss that is almost an exact copy of the Danegeld.

Vocabulary wise incidentally, we already have a difference. Once I called a Syrian friend in Riyadh to come down to the shop to translate. He was puzzled when he found that the shop assistant was Pakistani and didn't speak a word of Arabid. I explained I wanted my friend to translate from my English into pidgin, so that the shop assistant could understand. It worked a treat . My friend explained to the shop assistant that I wanted something "sim-sim" the article in my hand and please give me "factura".

What I find particularly farcical about the idea of "Asian English" is that it lumps together a collection of "Englishes" which only have in common the fact that they are more or less removed from the norm, occurr in a delimited but still immense geographical area, and at their lowest level show all the traits you would expect from a pidgin.

[leeroy]

(Stephen, you post with a startling level of knowledge and foresight - I am in deference! But it seems like you are endevouring to disprove me, I'm out of my depth here and am fishing for information as opposed to trying to convice people of something.)

I had assumed up until now that part of the reason dialects formed was as a result of cultures needing to "localise" their English to suit their own individual cultural (and communicative) needs. Apparently, "Sapir-Worf" thought something similar, and we are wrong.

So English is indeed flexible enough to be used in different cultural contexts - Japanese people can get by perfectly well with Standard English.

So dialects form for more social reasons, perhaps as a way of creating identity (among other things like fashion, or whatever). (My London upbringing is part of my identity, and this is inadvertently signified by my accent.)

I'm not sure quite how English was "taught" in India in the colonial days, but quite a few of them got the hang of it and localised it into their own dialect(s). Will we see that happen in Japan? Or are the contexts simply too different...

[Stephen Jones]

The "Sapir-Worf" hypothesis is that the stucture and lexis of a language affect the way we think about things. The most often quoted example is that Eskimos and us view snow differently because they have sixty-odd words for it and we have just a couple, or that we are nicer people than the Germans because we don't have "SchadenFreude" in our vocabulary (actually we have a monosyllabic verb, "to gloat", which carries more or less the same meaning. In its strong form it has been totally discredited as languages have shpwn a remarkable power to adapt to new experiences, but the weak form, which postulates that certain limits of grammar and lexis can influence our decisions, it still has advocates. The theory was proposed by a gentleman called Worf, who as he was a nobody, decided to give his theory a lot more backing by attaching the name of the most important American linguist of the beginning of the 20th century (Edward Sapir) to it. An analogy would be my calling my latest ramblings the Chomsky-Jones hypothesis!

I don;'t believe dialects develop as a result of different cultural expectations, though they will obviously affect lexis. It's more a matter of limited geographical mobility, which is why you can no longer distinguish one Yorkshire village from another by its dialect. However my objection to your theory is that you are confusing the situation with speakers of a mother tongue and learners of a second language.

At the risk of gross simplification we can distinguish five types of speakers. Firstly those speakers who speak their native dialect and nothing else, which includes most English, Russian, French and Chinese speakers for example. Seconldy those that speak their own language/dialect but because they live with another community also speak their language dialect (many Bangladeshis in England for example) Thirdly those that are thrown into a situation where much of their intercourse is with people who come from different cultures, and thus the society starts by speaking a pidgin, which then develops into a creole as the mother tongue of the second generation. Foruthly those that speak that own native dialect with their fellow speakers but often use another bridge language when speaking with members of another language community; this is presumably the case in Singapore, where the Chinese and Malay communities are mixed, and also happens among the educated in South India. In that case it is quite possible that an authentic dialect will develop, particularly if the use of English with the other geographically near language group far outweighs any use of English with other groups that do no share the dialect. Finally we have the situation you talk about where speakers of one language learn another language partly for use in access to otherwise unavailable knowledge, but more so to communicate with geographically distant speakers of another language. In this case we will probably see the native language influenced by a large number of loan words from English, but are unlikely to see a Korean or Japanese English develop because the language is only used to communicate with people who are not Korean or Japanese, and so the infiltration of Korean or Japanese localisms would be a hindrance to understanding and not a help or shortcut as they would be in the development of a dialect/creole in at least three of the other four cases.

Hope I've not been too confusing.

[leeroy]

Thank you Stephen!

[Snoopy]

When I did my Cert course, some long time ago, the tutor informed us that we were to teach Standard Southern English. I objected. I was accused of having a northern accent, but nothing was said about the lady who had a gentle Scottish accent.

[Stephen Jones]

I speak standard Northern English (that is to say I use the short "a" in bath for example). The lady who spoke Standard Scottish English would probably roll her "r's" and pronounced the 'r' at the end of teacher.

Possibly you were not speaking standard English? Do you distinguish between "but" and "butt" (phonetically that is!)?

Another possiblity is that the tutor was a jumped-up ignoramus, but you will have more ideas about that.