AS English continues its spread as the medium of global convenience, native speakers no longer enjoy a linguistic advantage, the Sydney Morning Herald reports.
Microsoft recently held a forum in Sydney to consider a selection of "quintessential Aussie words" for inclusion in the next version of its Office software. While the option exists to customize the language settings to an Australian English dictionary, many a local word still incurs the disapproving red line.
The focus is international. Braj Kachru, an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois, US, proposes a model which serves as a framework for studying the various roles English plays in different countries and various sociolinguistic situations. The model consists of three concentric circles: Inner, Outer and Expanding.
The Inner Circle countries are the ones where English is spoken as the mother tongue of the inhabitants. These countries are Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. The Outer Circle countries include India, Kenya, Singapore, etc. In these countries, English is the inherited second language, spoken alongside local languages and dialects. A variety of countries, for example, China, Japan and South Korea, belong to the Expanding Circle. In these countries English functions as an international language and the speakers develop performance varieties. They learn English as a foreign language and are also dependent upon the norm-providing Inner Circle countries.
Nowadays there is an explosion of English learners in the Expanding Circle. The Expanding and Outer Circle speakers of English far outnumber the Inner Circle speakers.
Ruth Wajnryb, an Australian linguist and columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, believes that the Internet changed the circumstances under which English was learned because it changed the circumstances of English availability.
English was no longer the rarefied language once learned in the classroom. "With the massive explosion of English-mediated environments - pop music, television, chat rooms - the line between 'foreign' and 'second' language learners blurred and collapsed. After all, a traditional difference between them had been the quantity of exposure to English outside the classroom." says Wajnryb.
And as the world takes on English, native English users remain painfully monolingual. The speakers of ELF(English as a Lingua Franca) are the new language shapers. Their Englishes will determine character and texture at millions of points of contact. It will be unaffected by the contents of Microsoft Office's newly augmented spellcheck. "You can prune the garden, plant a few natives, remove a few weeds but, ultimately, the garden will do what the garden will do," adds Wajnryb.
