Pronunciation and Phonetics

2 Accents of English worldwide

There is no such thing as ‘the Queen’s English.’ The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

Mark Twain (1835–1910), US author, Following the Equator (1897)

Learning objectives

At the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• explain the unique place of English as a language of the world

• list problems in the definition of the terms native speaker and official language

• define English as a native, second and foreign language.

English as a world language

English is a—or, more probably, the—major world language nowadays. It is the major world language for science, the internet, commerce, etc. And this has been acknowledged for a long time. For instance, Quirk begins his 1962 book The Use of English with an important analogy about the nature of English and other languages. He points out that the question ‘Who speaks Swedish?’ has a simple answer, both in 1962 and today: it is spoken by the Swedes in Sweden, by about 10% of the population of Finland, by the descendants of Swedish immigrants in places such as Minnesota, USA, and by Swedish migrants to various countries. Since Swedish is mutually intelligible with Danish and Norwegian, speakers of these languages may claim to understand Swedish too. And some others learn Swedish as a foreign language.

In the case of Swedish, the concepts of country, citizenship and language largely coincide: most people who speak Swedish are Swedish and were born in Sweden.

However, the same question asked of English (‘Who speaks English?’) has a very complex answer that depends on various factors and moot points, including the following:

• Proficiency: How well does a person have to speak English before they can claim to ‘speak English’?

• Skills: In English, we use the term ‘speak English’ to refer to overall proficiency in English—it is not restricted to speaking. There are many speakers of English with uneven abilities. For instance, they may read and write English much better than they can speak or listen to it. For this and other reasons, the term users of English is sometimes preferred to speakers.

• Measurement: How can we measure the number of people speaking English? Procedures such as asking people to complete census forms with items such as ‘List the languages you can speak’ may lead to over-reporting. That is, people may claim to speak a language, but only have a rudimentary knowledge of it. Nobody ever checks how well they speak it.

• Status: A person in the UK, and a person in PRC China, both claiming to speak English, represent two very different types of speaker. The former may speak no language other than English and therefore use it for all communicative functions, while the latter may speak other languages and have learnt English for the purposes of international trade.

The status of English often revolves around the concept of the native speaker and English as a native language. This is likewise not a simple concept, and may have different definitions such as the following:

• A person’s native language is the language they learn first. However, some people may come to be better speakers of other languages because of migration, marriage, etc.

• A person’s native language, or mother tongue, is the language they learn from their mother. With the increasing number of inter-racial (and thus inter-language) marriages nowadays, children may not learn the language of their mothers.

• A person’s native language is the language they speak to the highest proficiency. However, because of migration and other factors, this may not be the language they learnt first.

• A person’s native language is the one they use most often, or for the most functions. Again, this may not be the language they learnt first.

In the case of a person in the UK who speaks no language other than English, all four definition categories will lead to the same conclusion: the person’s native language is English. However, for people in more diverse linguistic situations, the categories may not all lead to the same language being called the native language.

A further distinction can be drawn between whether the word native refers to people, or to situations and countries. That is, one can say ‘John is a native speaker of English’ or ‘The UK is a native English-speaking country.’

The roles and status of English in countries have traditionally been modeled using a three-way categorization: English as a native, second or foreign language. English is a native language in the UK, from which it originated, and in other countries to which speakers from the UK migrated, such as the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. English is a second language when it has special status and functions in a country, such as in government, law, education and the media. Other languages are widespread in such countries. Countries where English is a second language are often the result of colonization, as in India, Nigeria, Malaysia, Tanzania and the Philippines. Where English is a foreign language, it is typically learnt in school and other educational institutions. Virtually all the remaining countries of the world (excluding native-language and second-language countries) are foreign-language environments, since English is taught and learnt throughout the world.

A further complicating factor is the existence in many countries of official languages. This confers official recognition on the languages. However, the term official language is rather an imprecise one. Official languages:

• may or may not be the languages used in the law

• may or may not be the medium of instruction in schools

• may differ in different regions of a country

• may be the languages of former colonizers, as is often the case with English and French

• may be minority languages

• need not be spoken by everyone in the country.

Many countries have more than one official language, and some countries have no official language.

Crystal (1997) gives the figures of 320–380 million native speakers of English, 150–300 million second-language speakers, and 100–1,000 million foreign-language speakers. These figures are necessarily imprecise, because of the problems of definition outlined above.

In short, English is not a homogeneous monolith. There is a lot of accent variation caused by the fact that it is spoken throughout the world. Like other languages, there is also sociolinguistic variation caused by factors such as the formality of the situation. For this reason, it is not unusual nowadays to hear the term English languages (for example, McArthur, 1998) to encompass this variation.

It is impossible, in a book this size, to cover the pronunciation of all the major accents of English. The two major world accents used as the references in this book are a standard US one, and a standard southern British one.

The US accent is known as General American (GenAm), and ‘is what is spoken by the majority of Americans, namely those who do not have a noticeable eastern or southern accent’ (Wells, 2008, p. xiv).

The British accent used to be referred to as Received Pronunciation, a term conceived in the first half of the 20th century by the British phonetician Daniel Jones. However, that term, like The Queen’s English, is considered out-of-date now, and other labels such as standard southern British English (SSBE) and BBC English (Jones, 2006) are used. The term SSBE is used in this book.

Other languages

This book is about the pronunciation specifically of English. However, since it is aimed at teachers of English to foreigners who, by definition, come to English classes already speaking other languages fluently, the book also sometimes touches on pronunciation features of other languages. It does this in order to emphasize that English is not a superior or more basic language than others. Consideration of other languages is also needed in order to explain phonetic concepts, some of which do not occur in English. Most importantly, it helps the teacher-reader to understand some of the problems that foreign learners bring with them to the pronunciation classroom as a result of speaking other languages.

Summary

• The English language is not a homogeneous concept. The concept is often referred to as the English languages nowadays.

• The concept of the native speaker is a difficult one to maintain.

• English-speaking countries around the world are often categorized into English as a Native Language (ENL), English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) situations.

• Non-native speakers of English far outnumber native speakers.

• English is not a superior language to learners’ native languages.

Exercises

1. Which of the following countries have English as one of their official languages?

The UK	New Zealand	Barbados	Fiji
The USA	India	South Africa	Kenya
Canada	The Philippines	Cameroon	Pakistan

2. Put the following native-speaker Englishes in rank order of their country populations.

Australia	Ireland	South Africa
Canada	New Zealand	The USA
England	Scotland	Wales