English as a global language

Many of those who support the pro-official position feel that the pendulum has swung too far in the wrong direction. From a position where transitional programmes were being devised to get children into the English-speaking mainstream as quickly as possible, they now see a position where these programmes are being used to preserve cultural identity and to reduce integra¬tion. From a position where immigrants were expected to learn English, they note cases of non-immigrants in schools now having to learn the immigrant language. From a position where English was the language an immigrant needed for a job, they now note cases where a monolingual English person would have to learn an immigrant language in order to be eligible for a job. They fear a society in which people will be appointed first for linguistic rea-sons, and only secondly for their other abilities and experience. These fears are by no means unique to the USA, of course. They surface wherever a bilingual policy is in operation. But they are expressed with special strength in the USA, partly because of the large numbers involved, and partly because the democratic tradi-tion is so strongly supportive of the rights of the individual.

Many anti-official supporters, unconvinced by the pro-official arguments, find that there is no alternative but to conclude that the 'official English' position is one of (consciously or uncon¬sciously held) elitism or discrimination. Minority languages are not being protected, in their view, but restricted. An 'official English' law, according to an alternative proposal which was formulated (the 'English Plus Resolution', introduced in the House in July 1995 by Representative Jose Serrano), would be 'an unwar¬ranted Federal regulation ofself-expression' and would 'abrogate constitutional rights to freedom of expression and equal protec¬tion of the laws'. It would also 'contradict the spirit of the 1923 Supreme Court case Meyer v. Nebraska, wherein the Court declared that "The protection of the Constitution extends to all; to those who speak other languages as well as to those born with English on the tongue".' To disregard this tradition of thinking, it was argued, could make a difficult social situation still more difficult. The Serrano bill claimed that official English legislation would 'violate traditions of cultural pluralism' and 'divide com¬munities along ethnic lines'. By contrast, multilingualism could bring benefits to a community, helping to promote empathy between different ethnic groups. The leading linguistics organiza¬tion of the USA, the Linguistic Society of America, in 1995 issued a statement on language rights whose final paragraph summarized the tenor of this approach:

Notwithstanding the multilingual history of the United States, the role of English as our common language has never seriously been questioned. Research has shown that newcomers to America continue to learn English at rates comparable to previous generations of immigrants. All levels of government should adequately fund programs to teach English to any resident who desires to learn it. Nonetheless, promoting our com¬mon language need not, and should not, come at the cost of violating the rights oflinguistic minorities.

The 'English Plus Resolution' began by recognizing English as 'the primary language of the United States' alongside the im-portance of other languages spoken by US residents, and asserted that 'these linguistic resources should be conserved and devel-oped'. It repeatedly stressed the value of multilingualism to the US community: this would 'enhance American competitiveness in global markets', 'improve United States diplomatic efforts by fos-tering enhanced communication and greater understanding be-tween nations', and 'promote greater cross-cultural understand¬ing between different racial and ethnic groups'. It recommended that the US government should pursue policies that:

(1) encourage all residents of this country to become fully proficient in English by expanding educational opportunities;

(2) conserve and develop the Nation's linguistic resources by encour¬aging all residents of this country to learn or maintain skills in a language other than English;

(3) assist native Americans, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians, and other peoples indigenous to the United States, in their efforts to prevent the extinction of their languages and cultures;

(4) continue to provide services in languages other than English as needed to facilitate access to essential functions of government, pro¬mote public health and safety, ensure due process, promote equal educational opportunity, and protect fundamental rights, and

(5) recognize the importance of multilingualism to vital American inter¬ests and individual rights, and oppose 'English-only' measures and similar language restrictionist measures.

However, the Serrano bill made no further progress in 1996, with political attention eventually focusing exclusively on the Emerson proposal (p. 130).

By the end of 1996, the future direction ofthe 'official English' debate was still unsettled. The language arguments had become increasingly polarized, and forced into line with the party pol¬itics of an election year; and the emotional level of the debate had escalated. There seems to be something about the intimate relationship between language, thought, individuality, and social identity which generates strong emotions. And in a climate where supporters of official English (no matter how moderate) came to be routinely labelled 'racist', and immigrants wishing to use their own language (no matter how cultured) were castigated by such names as 'welfare hogs', it was difficult to see the grounds for compromise. The argument has continued unabated into the new millennium. The number of states enacting official English legislation increased from twenty-two in 1995 to twenty-seven in 2002, and a further round of legislation began in May 2001, when an English Language Unity Act was introduced in the House of Representatives (HR 1984). Opposition from the academic linguistic community continues to be intense.

3.3 New Englishes

Salman Rushdie comments, in an essay called 'Commonwealth literature does not exist', that 'the English language ceased to be the sole possession of the English some time ago'. Indeed, when even the largest English-speaking nation, the USA, turns out to have only about 20 per cent of the world's English speakers (as we saw in chapter 2), it is plain that no one can now claim sole ownership. This is probably the best way of defining a genuinely global language, in fact: that its usage is not restricted by coun¬tries or (as in the case of some artificial languages) by governing bodies.

The loss of ownership is of course uncomfortable to those, especially in Britain, who feel that the language is theirs by histor-ical right; but they have no alternative. There is no way in which any kind of regional social movement, such as the purist societies which try to prevent language change or restore a past period of imagined linguistic excellence, can influence the global out¬come. In the end, it comes down to population growth. In the list of English-speaking territories shown in chapter 2, the num¬ber of first-language (L1) speakers in the inner-circle countries is currently about the same as the number of second-language (L2) English speakers in the outer-circle countries - some 400 million. But as we have seen (p. 69), the countries of the outer circle have, combined, a much greater growth rate than those of the inner circle: in 2002, an average of 2.4 per cent com¬pared with 0.88 per cent. So, if current population and learning trends continue, the balance of speakers will change dramatically. There are probably already more L2 speakers than L1 speakers. Within fifty years, there could be up to 50 per cent more. By that time, the only possible concept of ownership will be a global one.

The remarkable number of speakers involved needs to be ap-preciated. In India, for example, the population has doubled since 1960, and passed a thousand million in 1999. It is thus the sec¬ond most populous country in the world, after China, but its population growth rate is larger than China's (1.7 per cent in the late 1990s, as opposed to 1.1 per cent). Even at the lower esti¬mate reported on p. 46, there are now almost as many speakers of English in India as there are in England; at the higher estimate, there are six times as many. If current English-language learning trends continue (and with satellite television and other sources of English increasingly available, it looks as if they will), this differ-ential will continue to widen.

An inevitable consequence of these developments is that the language will become open to the winds of linguistic change in totally unpredictable ways. The spread of English around the world has already demonstrated this, in the emergence of new varieties of English in the different territories where the language has taken root. The change has become a major talking point only since the 1960s, hence the term by which these varieties are often known: 'new Englishes'. The different dialects of British and American English provide the most familiar example. These two varieties diverged almost as soon as the first settlers arrived in America. By the time Noah Webster was writing his dictionaries, there were hundreds of words which were known in the USA but not in Britain, pronunciation had begun to diverge quite markedly, and spellings were in the process of change. Today, there are thousands of differences between British and American English - two countries, as George Bernard Shaw once put it, 'divided by a common language'.

In the USA, a concern to develop a distinctive 'American stan-dard' was prominent in Webster's thinking. He presented the case strongly in his Dissertations on the English language. It was partly a matter of honour 'as an independent nation...to have a system of our own, in language as well as government'. It was partly a matter of common sense, because in England 'the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline'. And it was partly a matter of practicality, England being at 'too great a distance to be our model'. This national or 'federal' language was inevitable, Webster thought, because the exploration of the new continent would bring many new words into the language, which Britain would not share; but it also needed fostering. Spelling reform, he concluded, would be a major step in that direction: 'a difference between the English orthography and the American... is an object ofvast political consequence'. He was right. Language and political issues are always very closely connected, as we have seen in earlier chapters.

The forces which shaped the development of American English are many and various. They have been well summarized by US dialectologist Frederic G. Cassidy:

The effect of the Revolution and of national independence was tremen¬dous. No less a figure than Noah Webster saw here a great opportunity to cast off the 'corrupt' language of England and to rationalize and refine the language for the new nation. The attempt to found an academy for such a purpose, which had several times failed in Britain, was made once again under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson. But other forces were at work - popular forces - which were to have a powerful effect, especially when actual democracy, rather than limited upper-class governance, came to the fore under Andrew Jackson.

The surge of population westward, the phenomenon of the expanding frontier in which the restraints and standards of more settled society were thrown off, was reflected in the language. With little or no education, having to cope as best they could with harsh physical conditions, the 'conquerors of the West' became freely innovative in their language, ebullient with descriptive and metaphorical inventions - with 'tall talk', exaggerated humor, vigor that had no time for refinement.

In the East, in the cities, however, education flourished; the leading class had it and it became a national ideal: the mark of progress in any settlement was that a school had been started. Self-education, espe¬cially for talented people of humble beginnings, was widely practiced and admired. Public address, often learned in the 'school of hard knocks', carried to the people educational ideals and their kudos. Some of the interesting neologisms were the direct offspring of ignorance pretend¬ing to be learned. A whole school of humor portrayed its characters as unschooled but practically wise.

Cassidy is here thinking of the humour of such authors as Josh Billings, Artemus Ward, and other 'cracker-barrel philosophers' who delighted audiences and readers all over the USA in the late nineteenth century. 'Humin natur', comments Billings, in his homespun spelling, 'is the same all over the world, cept in Nu England, and thar its akordin tu sarcumstances.'

This kind of humorous writing cannot work unless people can see it is a joke - in other words, they must be able to recognize the spellings as non-standard, and be able to identify dialect grammar and vocabulary. Webster was sixty when Billings was born. Evi¬dently, in quite a short time, American English had settled down in its new identity, and despite its dialect differences was capable of providing a unified, literary standard which the new nation was able to recognize and to which it could respond.

Many distinctive forms also identify the Englishes of the other countries of the inner circle (p. 60): Australian English, New Zealand English, Canadian English, South African English, Caribbean English, and, within Britain, Irish, Scots, and Welsh English. Among the countries of the outer circle, several vari¬eties have also grown in distinctiveness in recent decades, as we have seen in chapter 2. There is one group in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, often collectively called South Asian English. There is another group in the former British colonies in West Africa, and a further group in the former British colonies in East Africa. Other emerging varieties have been noted in the Caribbean and in parts of south-east Asia, such as Singapore.

These new Englishes are somewhat like the dialects we all rec-ognize within our own country, except that they are on an inter-national scale, applying to whole countries or regions. Instead of affecting mere thousands of speakers, as is typically the case with rural or urban regional dialects, they apply to millions. They are an inevitable consequence of the spread of English on a world scale. The study of language history shows that if two social groups come to be separated only by a mountain range or a wide river, they will soon begin to develop different habits of speech. It should not be surprising, then, to find new national dialects emerging when groups become separated by thousands of miles, and encounter totally different climates, fauna, and flora.

Dialects emerge because they give identity to the groups which own them. If you wish to tell everyone which part of a country you are from, you can wave a flag, wear a label on your coat, or (the most convenient solution, because it is always with you, even in the dark and around corners) speak with a distinctive accent and dialect. Similarly, on the world stage, if you wish to tell everyone which country you belong to, an immediate and direct way of doing it is to speak in a distinctive way. These differences become especially noticeable in informal settings; for example, they are currently well represented in discussion groups on the Internet.

International varieties thus express national identities, and are a way of reducing the conflict between intelligibility and identity. Because a speaker from country A is using English, there is an intelligibility bond with an English speaker of country B - and this is reinforced by the existence of a common written language. On the other hand, because speaker A is not using exactly the same way of speaking as speaker B, both parties retain their identities. It is another way of 'having your cake and eating it'.

The drive for identity was particularly dominant in the second half of the twentieth century, when the number of independent nations dramatically grew, and the membership of the United Nations more than tripled (p. 14). It is not difficult to see how so many new Englishes evolved, as a consequence. When a country becomes independent, there is a natural reaction to leave behind the linguistic character imposed by its colonial past, and to look for indigenous languages to provide a symbol of new nationhood. But in most cases this process proved unworkable. In Nigeria, for example, there were some 500 languages to choose from, each with strong ethnic roots. In such situations, the only solution was to keep using the former colonial language, which after many decades had become embedded in the fabric of local institutions. But the pressure for linguistic identity is remorseless, and it did not take long before the official adoption of English led to its adaptation. With new institutions came new ways of talking and writing; indigenous words became privileged. A locally distinc-tive mode of expression emerged, and in some cases began to be recorded, in the form of regional dictionary projects.

Most adaptation in a New English relates to vocabulary, in the form of new words (borrowings - from several hundred language sources, in such areas as Nigeria), word-formations, word- meanings, collocations and idiomatic phrases. There are many cultural domains likely to motivate new words, as speakers find themselves adapting the language to meet fresh communicative needs. A country's biogeographical uniqueness will generate po-tentially large numbers of words for animals, fish, birds, insects, plants, trees, rocks, rivers and so on - as well as all the issues to do with land management and interpretation, which is an especially important feature of the lifestyle of many indigenous peoples. There will be words for foodstuffs, drinks, medicines, drugs, and the practices associated with eating, health-care, disease and death. The country's mythology and religion, and practices in astronomy and astrology, will bring forth new names for personalities, beliefs and rituals. The country's oral and perhaps also written literature will give rise to distinctive names in sagas, poems, oratory and folktales. There will be a body of local laws and customs, with their own terminology. The culture will have its technology with its own terms - such as for vehicles, house-building, weapons, clothing, ornaments and musical instruments. The whole world of leisure and the arts will have a linguistic dimension - names of dances, musical styles, games, sports - as will distinctiveness in body appearance (such as hair styles, tattoos, decoration).

3.4 The future of global English The linguistic character of New Englishes

Although it has been possible to suggest answers to the question of why English has become a global language (chapters 3 and 4), the recency of the phenomenon means that we are still some dis-tance from understanding what happens to the language when it is adopted in this way. Historical experience is no real guide to the kinds of adaptation that are currently taking place. Several of the 'New Englishes' of the past have been well studied - notably, American and Australian English - but the way the language has evolved in settings where most people are native speakers is likely to be very different from the way it will evolve in settings where most are non-native speakers. There are already signs of this hap-pening, though it is difficult to make reliable generalizations given the social, ethnic and linguistic complexity within the countries where these developments are taking place, and the considerable variations between settings. However, it is possible to identify several types ofchange which are taking place, and to gain a sense of their extent, from the case studies which have been carried out. This chapter focuses on grammatical and lexical issues, but does make some reference to broader patterns of interaction and to the role of nonsegmental phonology in the communication of structural meaning.

3.4.1 Grammar

Any domain of linguistic structure and use could be the basis of variety differentiation, but the focus in comparing the tradi¬tional standards of British and American English has been almost entirely associated with vocabulary and phonology. There has been little acknowledgement of grammatical variation in those reference works which incorporate an international perspective: one grammar, talking about the distinction between British and American English, comments that 'grammatical differences are few... lexical examples are far more numerous', and it makes only sporadic reference to possibilities in other regions. The point is apparently reinforced in another, which concludes that 'gram-matical differences across registers are more extensive than across dialects' and that 'core grammatical features are relatively uniform across dialects'. Undoubtedly there is an impression of relative 'sameness', with very few points of absolute differentiation (e.g. AmE gotten), but it may well be that this is due to a set of factors which will not always obtain.

Two points are relevant. First, grammars - especially those mo-tivated by teaching considerations - have traditionally focused on standard English, and thus essentially on printed English, which provides the foundation of that standard. Non-standard vari¬eties are mentioned only in passing. However, we know from intranational dialectology that it is here where grammatical dis-tinctiveness is most likely to be found. New Englishes, which like intranational dialects are very much bound up with issues of local identity, are likely to display a similar direction of development. Second, because new varieties are chiefly associated with speech, rather than writing, they have also attracted less attention. Even in the major European reference grammars, which have always acknowledged the importance of the spoken language, there has nonetheless been a concentration on writing. Corpora are still massively biased towards the written language: the 100-million- word British National Corpus, for example, had at the outset only 10 per cent ofits material devoted to speech. The Bank of English had a remarkable 20 million words of transcribed natural speech at the point when its corpus had reached 320 million words, but this is still only 6 per cent. The 40-million-word corpus used for the Biber et al. grammar (see above) is a significant improvement in proportions, with 6.4 million words of conversational speech and 5.7 million of non-conversational speech; but even 30 per cent of a corpus is an inversion of the realities of daily language use around the world.

Traditionally, the national and international use of English has been in the hands of people who are not just literate, but for whom literacy is a significant part of their professional identity. 'Educated usage' (which usually meant 'well-educated usage' ) has been a long-standing criterion of what counts as English. The influence of the grammar of the written language has thus been pervasive, fuelled by a strongly prescriptive tradition in schools and an adult reliance on usage manuals which privileged writing above speech. Grammars totally devoted to speech are rare, and self-avowedly exploratory.22 But as English becomes increasingly global, we must expect far more attention to be paid to speech. Although there is no suggestion anywhere that standard writ¬ten English will diminish in importance, and literacy remains a dominant target, there is increasing evidence (reviewed below) of new spoken varieties growing up which are only partly re¬lated to the written tradition and which may even be totally in¬dependent of it. It is unlikely that any regional trends identified in a predominantly written corpus tradition will be predictive of the grammatical changes which will take place in global spoken English. Accordingly, the current view, that there is little macro- regional grammatical differentiation, may not be applicable for much longer.

But even in the available literature, with its bias towards writ-ing, there are more signs of grammatical differentiation than the general statements suggest. This is most in evidence in the gram-mar by Biber et al., where the results of statistical register-based comparisons are presented, and special attention is paid to areas of interaction between lexicon and grammar, with particular ref-erence to standard British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). The view that 'core grammatical features are relatively uniform across dialects' is broadly justified, but how we inter¬pret this depends on exactly what is meant by 'core', and just how much tolerance we allow in under the heading of'relatively'. Certainly, when we examine colligations (i.e. lexical collocations in specific grammatical contexts) we find a multiplicity of differ-ences. The index to Biber et al. identifies some sixty locations where its approach established some sort of contrastivity, and at many of these there is considerable lexico-grammatical variation.

An example of this variation is given in Table 3(a), where some of the adverbial differences are noted; Table 3(b) takes the topic of adverbs modifying adjectives, and extracts the relevant differences for conversation. This kind of variation is found at several places within the grammar. For example, older semi-modals (e.g. have to, begoing to) are noted to be 'considerably more common' in AmE, whereas recent semi-modals (e.g. had better, havegotto) are 'more common by far' in BrE. Variations are also noted with respect to aspect, modals, negation, concord, pronouns, complementation and several other areas. Although each point is relatively small in scope, the potential cumulative effect of a large number of local differences, especially of a colligational type, can be considerable. It is this which probably accounts for the impression of Britishness or Americanness which a text frequently conveys, without it being possible to find any obviously distinctive grammatical or lexical feature within it.

But whatever the grammatical differences between standard American and British English, these are likely to be small com-pared with the kinds of difference which are already beginning to be identified in the more recently recognized New Englishes. And areas which we might legitimately consider to be 'core' are being implicated. Several examples have been identified in case studies ofparticular regional varieties, as will be illustrated below; but it is important to note the limitations of these studies. The state of the art is such that the examples collected can only be illustrative of possible trends in the formation of new re¬gional grammatical identities. There have been few attempts to adopt a more general perspective, to determine whether a feature noticed in one variety is also to be found in others, either nearby or further afield. Nor do the case studies adopt the same kind of intra-regional variationist perspective as illustrated by Biber et al.

(1999), or examine lexico-grammatical interaction. The studies are often impressionistic - careful collections of examples by lin-guistically trained observers, but lacking the generalizing power which only systematic surveys of usage can provide. On the other hand, during the 1990s there has been a steady growth in the use of corpora and elicitation testing.

The absence of statistical data, in the literature referred to below, means that the varietal status of features identified as non-standard (with reference to British or American English) is always open to question. There are so many possibilities: a variant may be common as a localized standard form, in both written and spoken contexts, or restricted to one of these mediums; it may be formal or informal, or register-bound, occurring only in newspapers, stu¬dent slang,26 or other restricted settings; it may be idiosyncratic, as in the case of some literary creations; it may co-exist with a variant from British or American English; and it may be locally stigma-tized, or even considered to be an error (by local people). Given that it has taken forty years for corpus studies of the main vari¬eties of English to reach the stage of comparative register-specific analysis (as in Biber et al.), it is not surprising that relatively little such work has taken place elsewhere. But this does not mean that a compilation of sources, such as those listed in Table 4, is of no value. On the contrary, such studies are an excellent means of fo-cusing attention on areas ofpotential significance within a variety, and are an invaluable source of hypotheses.

Table 4 illustrates a range of features which have already been noted, some of which are very close to what anyone might rea-sonably want to call 'core'. A table of this kind needs very careful interpretation. Its only purpose is to illustrate the kinds of gram-matical feature being proposed as distinctive in studies of New Englishes, and it makes no claim to exhaustiveness or representa-tiveness. Providing an example from, say, Ghana, to instantiate a feature, is not to suggest that this feature is restricted to Ghana: Ghana is simply one of the countries in which this feature may be found (as claimed by at least one of the authors identified at the right of the table), and doubtless several others also display

The examples are all taken from the individual studies. No attempt is made to evaluate the standing of the author's claim, which in many cases is based on anecdotal instances observed in local newspapers, advertisements, conversation and so on. Taken together, it is the range of examples which is intriguing, leaving little doubt that the domain of grammar has to be considered as central, alongside vocabulary and phonology, in investigating the linguistic distinctiveness of New Englishes.

Examples like those given in Table 4 raise some interesting questions. It is not always clear whether a new feature arises as a result of transference from a contrasting feature in a local contact language or is a general property of English foreign- language learning, though individual studies sometimes suggest one or the other. The process of change is evidently rapid and pervasive, and origins are usually obscure. We need more dia- chronic typological studies. But a synchronic comparison of a distinctive English construction with the corresponding construction in the contact languages of a region is usually illumi¬nating, and well worth doing, as it is precisely this interaction that is likely to be the most formative influence on the identity of a New English. For example, Alsagoff, Bao and Wee analyse a type of why + you construction in Colloquial Singapore English (CSgE), illustrated by Why you eat so much ? - a construc¬tion which signals a demand for justification (i.e. 'unless there is a good reason, you should not eat so much'). There are parallels in BrE and AmE: Why eat so much? (which would usually suggest 'I don't think you should') vs. Why do you eat so much? (which allows the reading 'I genuinely want to know'). The au¬thors point out that the verb in such constructions is typically in its base form (not -ing) and dynamic (not stative), and thus shows similarities with the imperative, from which (they argue) the why construction inherits its properties. They draw attention to such constructions as You hold on, OK, which are somewhat impolite in BrE and AmE, but not considered offensive in CSgE; indeed, the presence of you is considered more polite than its absence. Thus, they conclude, Why you eat so much? is more po¬lite than Why eat so much ? They explain this reversal with refer¬ence to influence from Chinese, where the imperative allows the use of second-person pronouns to reduce any face-threatening impact.

While it is of course possible that other contact languages could have imperative constructions of a similar kind to those occurring in Chinese, and could thus influence a local variety of English in the same way, the probability is that such interactions are going to be specific to the contact situation in an individual country. Especially in a multilingual country, where English is being influ¬enced by a 'melting-pot' of other languages (such as Malay, Tamil and Chinese in Singapore), the likelihood of a particular constella¬tion of influences being replicated elsewhere is remote. Distinctive grammatical features are also likely to be increasingly implicated in the 'mixed languages' which arise from code-switching (see further below). Moreover, as the CSgE example suggests, even features of grammar which superficially resemble those in stan¬dard BrE or AmE might turn out to be distinctive, once their pragmatic properties are taken into account. Modal verbs, for ex¬ample, are likely to be particularly susceptible to variation, though the effects are not easy to identify. In short, there is every like¬lihood of'core' features of English grammar becoming a major feature of the description of New Englishes, as time goes by.

3.4.2 Vocabulary

As we have seen (p. 146), it does not take long before new words enter a language, once the language arrives in a fresh location. Borrowings from indigenous languages are especially noticeable. For example, the first permanent English settlement in North America was in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; and loan-words from Indian languages were introduced into contemporary writ¬ing virtually immediately. Captain John Smith, writing in 1608, describes a racoon; totem is found in 1609; caribou and opos¬sum are mentioned in 1610. However, the long-term role of borrowings, in relation to the distinctive identity of a 'New English', is unclear. In the case of American English, relatively few of the Amerindian loan-words which are recorded in the seven¬teenth and eighteenth centuries became a permanent part of the standard language. Mencken refers to a list of 132 Algonquian loans in which only 36 are still in standard American English, the others having become obsolete or surviving only in local di¬alects (e.g. squantersquash, cockarouse, cantico). Australia would later also demonstrate a similar paucity of indigenous words. On the other hand, the amount of borrowing from an indigenous language is extremely sensitive to sociopolitical pressures, as is ev¬ident in contemporary New Zealand, where loans from Maori are 30 increasing.

The amount of borrowing is also influenced by the number of cultures which co-exist, and the status which their languages have achieved. In a highly multilingual country, such as South Africa, Malaysia or Nigeria, where issues of identity are critical, we might expect a much greater use of loan-words. There is already evidence of this in the range of words collected in the Dictio¬nary of South African English, for example. In some sections of this book, depending on the initial letter-preferences of the con¬tributing languages, there are long sequences of loan-words - aandag, aandblom, aap, aar, aardpyp, aardvark, aardwolf, aas and aasvoel (all from Afrikaans) are immediately followed by abadala, abafazi, abakhaya, abakwetha, abantu, abaphansi, abathagathi and abelungu (all from Nguni languages). Only on the next page of the dictionary do we encounter items from British English such as administrator and advocate. The influence of local languages is also apparent in the form of loan-translations, such as afterclap and after-ox (from Afrikaans agter + klap ('flap') and agter + os, respectively), and in hybrid forms where a foreign root is given an English affix, as in Afrikanerdom and Afrikanerism, or where two languages are involved in a blend, as in Anglikaans. There was already a salient loan-word presence in South African English, even before the 1994 constitution recognized eleven lan¬guages as official (including English). We might therefore expect the status of these languages to be reflected in due course by a fur¬ther significant growth in the number of loan-words into South African English; but the linguistic outcome will depend on such factors as the extent to which the newfound official status ofthese languages is supported by economic and political realities, and the extent to which their lexical character itself changes as a result of

Anglicization. Some cultural domains are likely to manifest this growth sooner than others - such as restaurant menus.

All the standard processes of lexical creation are encountered when analysing the linguistic distinctiveness of New Englishes. Examples of lexical morphology have already been given (see Table 4). Several studies of Pakistani English, for example, have shown the important role played by the various kinds of word- formation.34 Compounding from English elements is found in such items as wheelcup ('hub-cap') and side-hero ('supporting actor'), with some elements proving to be especially productive: - lifter (cf. shoplifter) has generated many newwords (e.g. car lifter, luggage lifter, book lifter), as has wallah/walla ('one who does something', e.g. exam-centre-walla, coachwalla). Hybrid com¬pounds, using Urdu and English elements, in either order, are also notable: khas deposit ('special deposit'), double roti ('bread'). Distinctive prefixation is found, as in anti-mullah and deconfirm, and there is a wide range of distinctive suffixation, using both English and Urdu bases: compare endeavourance, ruinification, cronydom, abscondee, wheatish, scapegoatism, oftenly, upliftment, alongside begumocracy, sahibism, sifarashee (sifarash ('favour')), babuize (babu ('clerk')). Word-class conversion is illustrated by such verbs as to aircraft, to slogan, to tantamount, and by such noun forms as the injureds, the deads. Various processes of abbrevi¬ation, clipping and blending, are in evidence: d/o ('daughter of'), r/o ('resident of), admit card, by-polls. Baumgardner (1998) also illustrates distinctive collocations, both English only (e.g. discuss threadbare, have a soft corner) and English/Urdu combinations (e.g. commit zina ('adultery'), recite kalam ('verse')).

Finally, we can illustrate the many examples in which a word or phrase from a well-established variety is adopted by a New English and given a new meaning or use, without undergoing any structural change. In Jamaican English, for example, we find such meaning changes as cockpit ('type of valley') and beverage in the restricted sense of'lemonade'. In Ghana, we find heavy in the sense of'gorgeous' and brutal in the sense of'very nice', and a number of semantic shifts, including maiden name meaning 'given name' (applied to males) and linguist meaning 'spokesman for the chief. In parts of South Africa, lounge has come to be applied to certain types of restaurant and places of entertainment - one might see the name of an Indian restaurant such as Bhagat's Vegetarian Lounge, or a phrase such as beer lounge. There are also many words which keep the same meaning, but display a different frequency of use compared with British or American English, such as the greater frequency of Jamaican bawl ('shout', 'weep').

Lists of lexical examples of this kind, which can be found in many sources, all suffer from similar problems. Because the investi¬gator has focused on an individual country, it is often unclear, as in the discussion of grammar, whether a particular word is restricted to that country or whether it is also used in nearby countries. This is a special problem in South Asia and West Africa, where the lin¬guistic identity of several adjacent countries is in question, but it is a problem which can be encountered anywhere. It is also unclear, especially in historical studies with limited source material, just how much of the lexicon proposed as regionally distinctive is in fact personally idiosyncratic - a nonce usage, perhaps, or a piece of lexical play - or no longer in use. Authors sometimes express their doubts in the description: for example, Cassidy and Le Page add, after their inclusion of corner meaning 'variation' (as in 'It no have no more corner', said of a song), 'perhaps an individualism'. To say that Pakistani, Indian, Nigerian and other lexical norms are emerging is probably true, but we need to be very careful about the items used to substantiate such claims.

When local vocabulary from all sources is collected, a regional dictionary can quickly grow to several thousand items. There are over 3,000 items recorded in the first edition of the Dictionary of South African English, and later editions and collections show the number to be steadily growing (there are a further 2,500 entries already added in a 1996 edition). South African Indian English alone has 1,400. The Dictionary of New Zealand English has 6,000 entries. The Concise Australian national dictionary has 10,000. There are over 15,000 entries in the Dictionary of Jamaican English and 20,000 in the Dictionary of Caribbean English usage. Trinidad and Tobago alone produced some 8,000.

It should be noted that totals of this kind tend to be of individual lexical items only. The lists may contain a fair sprinkling of idioms; but collocational distinctiveness is on the whole not represented. Collocations, however, are likely to prove one of the most distinctive domains of varietal differentiation. A selection of collocational variation, along with some examples of distinctive idioms, is given in Table 5.

Even in countries where the number of localized words is rela-tively small, their effect on the character of the local English can be great, for two reasons. The new words are likely to be frequently used within the local community, precisely because they relate to distinctive notions there. And these words tend not to occur in isolation: if a conversation is about, say, local politics, then the names of several political parties, slogans and other allusions are likely to come into the same discourse, making it increasingly im-penetrable. 'Blairite MP in New Labour Sleaze Trap, say Tories' might be a British newspaper example - six words with British political meanings or overtones used in quick succession.

3.5 The future of English as a world language

Language is an immensely democratising institution. To have learned a language is immediately to have rights in it. You may add to it, modify it, play with it, create in it, ignore bits of it, as you will. And it is just as likely that the course of the English language is going to be influenced by those who speak it as a second or foreign language as by those who speak it as a mother-tongue. Fashions count, in language, as anywhere else. And fashions are a function of numbers. As we have seen (p. 69), the total number ofmother- tongue speakers in the world is steadily falling, as a proportion of world English users. It is perfectly possible (as the example of rapping suggests) for a linguistic fashion to be started by a group of second- or foreign-language learners, or by those who speak a creole or pidgin variety, which then catches on among other speakers. And as numbers grow, and second/foreign-language speakers gain in national and international prestige, usages which were previously criticized as 'foreign' - such as a new concord rule (threeperson), variations in countability (furnitures, kitchen- wares ) or verb use (he be running) - can become part of the stan¬dard educated speech of a locality, and may eventually appear in writing.

What power and prestige is associated with these new varieties of English? It is all happening so quickly that it is difficult to be sure; there have been so few studies. But impressionistically, we can see several of these new linguistic features achieving an increas¬ingly public profile, in their respective countries. Words become used less self-consciously in the national press - no longer being put in inverted commas, for example, or given a gloss. They come to be adopted, often at first with some effort, then more natu¬rally, by first-language speakers of English in the locality. Indeed, the canons of local political correctness, in the best sense of that phrase, may foster a local usage, giving it more prestige than it could ever have dreamed of - a good example is the contempo¬rary popularity in New Zealand English of Maori words (and the occasional Maori grammatical feature, such as the dropping ofthe definite article before the people name Maori itself). And, above all, the local words begin to be used at the prestigious levels of society - by politicians, religious leaders, socialites, pop musicians and others. Using local words is then no longer to be seen as slovenly or ignorant, within a country; it is respectable; it may even be 'cool'.

The next step is the move from national to international levels. These people who are important in their own communities - whether politicians or pop stars - start travelling abroad. The rest of the world looks up to them, either because it wants what they have, or because it wants to sell them something. And the result is the typical present-day scenario - an international gathering (political, educational, economic, artistic...) during which senior visitors use, deliberately or unselfconsciously, a word or phrase from their own country which would not be found in the tra¬ditional standards of British or American English. Once upon a time, the reaction would have been to condemn the usage as ig¬norance. Today, it is becoming increasingly difficult to say this, or even to think it, if the visitors have more degrees than the visited, or own a bigger company, or are social equals in everyway. In such circumstances, one has to learn to live with the new usage, as a feature of increasing diversity in English. It can take a generation or two, but it does happen. It happened within fifty years between Britain and America: by 1842, Charles Dickens was making obser¬vations about American linguistic usage - expressing amazement, for example, at the many ways that Americans use the verb fix - in tones of delight, not dismay.57 But, whatever your attitude to¬wards new usages - and there will always be people who sneer at diversity - there is no getting away from the fact that, these days, regional national varieties of English are increasingly being used with prestige on the international scene.

If these New Englishes are becoming standardized, as markers of educated regional identity, what is taking their place elsewhere within the social spectrum of these communities? Here, very little descriptive research has been done, but there are enough anecdo¬tal reports to suggest the way things are going. When actual examples of language in use are analysed, in such multilingual settings as Malaysia and Singapore, we immediately encounter varieties which make use of the different levels of code-mixing illustrated above.

That language should receive such a high profile in a 'state of the union' address is itself surprising, and that a head of govern¬ment should go out of his way to influence a television sitcom is probably unprecedented in the history of language planning! But it well illustrates the direction in which matters are moving. Singlish must now be a significant presence in Singapore for it to attract this level of attention and condemnation. And the na¬ture of the reaction also well illustrates the nature of the problem which all New Englishes encounter, in their early stages. It is the same problem that older varieties of English also encountered: the view that there can only be one kind of English, the standard kind, and that all others should be eliminated. From the days when this mindset first became dominant, in the eighteenth cen¬tury, Britain and a few other countries have taken some 250 years to confront it and replace it with a more egalitarian perspective in educational curricula. The contemporary view, as represented in the UK National Curriculum, is to maintain the importance of Standard English while at the same time maintaining the value of local accents and dialects. The intellectual basis for this policy is the recognition of the fact that language has many functions, and that the reason for the existence ofStandard English (to pro¬mote mutual intelligibility) is different from the reason for the existence of local dialects (to promote local identity). The same arguments apply, with even greater force, on a global scale. There is no intrinsic conflict between Standard English and Singlish in Singapore, as the reasons for the existence of the former, to per¬mit Singaporeans of different linguistic backgrounds to communicate with each other and with people abroad, are different from the reasons for the emergence of the latter, to provide a sense of local identity. Ironically, the prime minister himself recognized the importance of both these goals, in emphasizing that the future of Singapore needed an outward-looking set of economic and cul¬tural goals as well as an inward-looking sense of the 'something special and precious' in the Singaporean way of life. A bidialectal (or bilingual) policy allows a people to look both ways at once, and would be the most efficient way of the country achieving its aims. Fostering Standard English is one plank of such a policy. Condemning Singlish is not.

Similar attitudes will be encountered in all parts of the world where English is developing a strong non-native presence, and at all levels. Teachers of English as a Second or Foreign Language have to deal with the situation routinely, with students increasingly arriving in the classroom speaking a dialect which is markedly dif-ferent from Standard English. The question of just how much local phonology, grammar, vocabulary and pragmatics should be allowed in is difficult and contentious. But there seems no doubt that, gradually, there is a definite ameliorative trend around the English-speaking world, with expressions which were once heavily penalized as local and low-class now achieving a degree of status. How fast this trend develops depends on economic and social factors more than on anything else. If the people who use mixed varieties as markers of their identity become more influential, attitudes will change, and usages will become more acceptable. In fifty years' time, we could find ourselves with an English language which contains within itself large areas of contact-influenced vo-cabulary, borrowed from such languages as Malay or Chinese, being actively used in Singapore, Malaysia and emigrant commu-nities elsewhere. First-language speakers from those areas would instinctively select this vocabulary as their first choice in conver-sation. Everyone else would recognize their words as legitimate options - passively, at least, with occasional forays into active use. It is a familiar story, in the history ofthe English language, though operating now on a global scale.