World English Flashcards
Methods through which the status of English globally spreads
- Air traffic control
- Migration
- Business
- Science
- Technology
Kachru’s Concentric Circles - Expanding circle
- China
- Egypt
- Indonesia
- Israel
- Korea
- Nepal
- Japan
- Saudi Arabia
- Russia
- Taiwan
- Zimbabwe
Kachru’s Concentric Circles - Outer circle
- Bangladesh
- Singapore
- Ghana
- India
- Sri Lanka
- Philippines
- Nigeria
- Tanzania
- Zambia
- Malaysia
- Pakistan
Kachru’s Concentric Circles - Inner circle
- UK
- USA
- Canada
- Australia
- New Zealand
English as a Lingua Franca
Lingua Francas do not strive to be grammatically correct and can sometimes contain more than one languae at a time
ELF is used as a functional communicative tool and blending in as a native is not significant
Common features of Lingua Francas
- Missing determiners
- Incorrect pronouns
- Redundant prepositions
- Redundant explicitness
- Use of tags
Robert Philipson - 1922
The prestige of English causes other languages to lose their own and slowly die out
David Crystal
“A language is dying every two weeks somewhere in the world today”
Spelling differences
Show identity and societal zeitgeist (eg. theater and theatre) - change comes through identity
Tok Pisin
English-based creole in Papa New Guinea
4 million speakers
150,000 native speakers
Used to some extent in the media and government
The language of instruction for the first three years of primary education
Includes a smaller vocabulary, meaning many words have two or more meanings
Nicholas Ostler - 1995
Set up the Foundation for Endangered Languages
Blamed the dying out of certain languages on:
- the spread of large metropolitan languages
- young people using mass communication
- the difficulty of acquiring minority regional languages as a third language
Scottish Gaelic
Only 50,000 native speakers
Not a traditionally written language - only book in this language is the Bible
There seems to be little effort from older generations to pass it onto the next
Bill Bryson - 1990
News reports suggest that young people moderate their accents in order to use voice recognition systems
David Crystal - Bidialectism
A combination of both disintegration and uniformity will develop with people developing their language to meet the needs of different situations and contexts
Disintegration
The argument that English speaking countries will adapt their own dialect from English
As a result, it may therefore become unrecognisable and disintegrate from the “original” English
A prescriptivist would argue against disintegration due to the aim of overt prestige
