David Crystal - World Englishes
The topic is: the future of Englishes → English has a plural form was created about 10 -15
years ago to reflect the reality of what happens when English becomes a global language.
What happen as a country takes up the English language and adopt it? Immediately
adapts it to suit its circumstances because language exists in order for us to talk about
what we want to talk about.
You want to have an English that actually reflects your local interests, your history, things
that happen around you, all the things that you would naturally do in your own language →
if you're learning another language, you want to be able to talk in that language as well.
So what is happening in English? As it becomes a global language, the different countries
that have adopted it immediately start to make it their own, they start to shape it and push
it in a direction it never was in before. Now this has happened ever since the past times:
400 years ago when the first people arrived in America (1606), and they set on the eastern
seaboard of America (Virginia) and the result is American English.
But how long it takes for an American English to develop? It only takes weeks for a new
variety of English to start to grow, because as soon as you arrive you want to talk about
what you see [so the new variety of English developed very quickly] → what did the
mariners see and the settlers see when they arrived in America they saw new plants, new
animals, they saw Indians with behaviour that they never seen before with new clothes,
new shoes and so new words started to come like moccasin and skunk, and they wrote
these words in their letters back home. So suddenly in British English these letters were
coming through with American English.
As you look around the modern world, you see English is developing like everywhere: all
countries in the world have English either as a first language or a second language or a
privileged foreign language; and what these countries do is to take the English wherever
it come from and adapt it, to make it their own.
This adaptation taking place chiefly in the vocabulary: if you take a dictionary like South
African English’s there are 10,000 words in that dictionary that are only used in South
Africa, or perhaps just around South Africa, like Zimbabwe → they are not all from British
English: there are words from Afrikaans, words from Zulu or from Kosa and all the other
languages of South Africa.
To know the meaning of a specific word you have to know the cultural background:
“during my first visit to South Africa, driving along the road, i see a sign ahead and it says
robot and I turn to the driver I say robots? then he turns to me and says that robot is a
traffic light in South African English”.
So what happens when English goes to a new part of the world? It absorbs words from the
other languages around it and this make that English difficult for a foreigner to understand;
there is no difference between a not native and a native English speaker when they
encounter these new varieties of English → the point is that everywhere, in every
