I know we've probably discussed this about a zillion times, but here's an article from the Financial Times about it:
Whose English?
Whose language
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woodcutter
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Hmmmm, gotta register to hear Graddol again 
Whose English? Who cares, you can't own a language, and people can speak however they wish, but if you want to talk about teaching it, you can only teach one variety of it really, and unless it is one with a mighty publishing and broadcasting industry backing it up then the students get uppity. Well, I suppose I'm UK and teach US, to a degree, but that's hard enough, and makes one slightly incompetent and miss out on the good jobs. If I tried to chuck in Aussie, Singapore, India and S.Africa, on a more than tit-bit basis, it would be a right pickle, and I wouldn't do it very well at all.
That means that "new Englishes" are only of interest to the teacher if they are important locally, or if new coinages are so common that wealthy publishers in New York or London come to hear of them. The same applies to international simple English, because unless somebody makes a standard, you won't know where to begin. De facto, we try and teach a basic, general kind of English in any case, don't we?
I agree with http://education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/st ... 24,00.html
in a way, but to keep our UK cash flow coming, we have to suck up to the American pole a bit harder, not go down old colonial avenues. If there is a significant difference between the two poles, British English will eventually lose out in all spheres where inertia has sustained it.
Whose English? Who cares, you can't own a language, and people can speak however they wish, but if you want to talk about teaching it, you can only teach one variety of it really, and unless it is one with a mighty publishing and broadcasting industry backing it up then the students get uppity. Well, I suppose I'm UK and teach US, to a degree, but that's hard enough, and makes one slightly incompetent and miss out on the good jobs. If I tried to chuck in Aussie, Singapore, India and S.Africa, on a more than tit-bit basis, it would be a right pickle, and I wouldn't do it very well at all.
That means that "new Englishes" are only of interest to the teacher if they are important locally, or if new coinages are so common that wealthy publishers in New York or London come to hear of them. The same applies to international simple English, because unless somebody makes a standard, you won't know where to begin. De facto, we try and teach a basic, general kind of English in any case, don't we?
I agree with http://education.guardian.co.uk/tefl/st ... 24,00.html
in a way, but to keep our UK cash flow coming, we have to suck up to the American pole a bit harder, not go down old colonial avenues. If there is a significant difference between the two poles, British English will eventually lose out in all spheres where inertia has sustained it.
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woodcutter
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- Location: London
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fluffyhamster
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It looks like you can't get at the original article without paying a subscription. Anyway, I can't see "globish" actually displacing English, but I maybe native speakers will need to be taught how to make themselves understood in international contexts like business meetings, rather than simply assume that because someone "speaks English", they'll have no problem with accents and idioms.
Maybe one day there will be an English-based global lingua franca which we'll all have to learn alongside our own language, in the same way as Latin was used by educated people across Europe, but I think that's a long way off.
Maybe one day there will be an English-based global lingua franca which we'll all have to learn alongside our own language, in the same way as Latin was used by educated people across Europe, but I think that's a long way off.