Helen Strong

MSc English Language Teaching Management

Sociolinguistics

The question

What are the New Englishes? Using concrete examples / illustrations you are familiar with, explain and describe what they tell us about language and society, and what roles and functions, if any, you see for them in the English L2 classroom.

The extract

The term "New Englishes" originated in the 1960s and is used to refer to all varieties of English which do not include those spoken within the British Isles. It therefore covers the English used in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, as well as nations in which English has official status but is not necessarily the first language of all their inhabitants. Furthermore, the term is also used to refer to pidgins, creoles and vernacular varieties of English*, which in their written form appear to be so removed from Standard English that to the untrained eye they look like another language completely. Thus English and the New Englishes have been calculated to be spoken either as a first or second language by between 470 and 680 million people globally.**

In discourse on varieties of English it is necessary to use certain terminology. For consistency, the following expressions used in this paper have the following meanings:

  • Standard English: the prestigious variety of English that is understood all over the world where any knowledge of any variety of English exists. Standard English relates to vocabulary and grammar and is independent of pronunciation.
  • ESL: English as a Second Language. This term relates to the English used by between 150 and 300 million people in approximately 50 territories worldwide in which English is not the mother tongue, but nevertheless has special status, usually due to colonization (for example India, Pakistan, Malaysia, South Africa, parts of East and West Africa, and parts of the Caribbean).
  • EFL: English as a Foreign Language. The English learned and used by those for whom it is not their first or second tongue, i.e. the rest of the world.
  • EIL: English as an International Language. The concept that the role of English has achieved global status by being recognised in almost every country in the world, and being used by people of different nations to communicate with one another.
  • Dialects: regional varieties of English which differ from Standard English with respect to vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation.
  • Accents: regional varieties of English which differ from Standard English only in their pronunciation.

This paper will begin by providing a brief introduction to the history of the English language, tracing its development from early settlers to the British Isles in the 5th century AD, to its status as a worldwide means of communication today. The New Englishes will then be defined in more detail, drawing on models which have been proposed to represent the relationships between the many varieties of English used in the world today, and describing what they tell us about the interrelated roles of language and society.

The effects of the New Englishes will then be discussed in relation to the field of Teaching English as Foreign or Second Language, and proposals suggested as to how English teachers can break from the traditional shackles which have dogged the language-teaching profession for decades, and attempt to deal with educating students in a discipline which is constantly in flux.

*A pidgin is a language made up of elements of two or more other languages, the purpose of which is to make contact with other people. No-one has a pidgin as their mother tongue. A creole is a language that has its origin in extended language contact between two communities. It incorporates features from each language and constitutes the mother tongue of a speech community. The vernacular is the commonly spoken language of a particular people or place. An example of Vernacular English is Black English Vernacular which is spoken in parts of the US. (Definitions from Collins English Dictionary, 1998.)

**Sources: Crystal (2003), Graddol (1997) McArthur (1988)

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