This is an excellent summary of a wide range of linguist theories and research which was all I needed when revising for my final exam. I shared it with my friends who found it succinct yet detailed, providing all the information needed for the World English section of the AQA English Language Paper...
World English
Lingua franca – a language used for communication between interlocutors who don’t share a native
language
Linguist Theory/quotes Evaluation/support
Burchfield, Robert Editor of the OED in 1978 – predicted that within a few
centuries, speakers of British and American English
would be unable to understand each other.
Crystal When a language becomes the centre of international English became a global
activities it is natural for new varieties to develop as it is language due to the growth
applied to different cultural and geographical contexts of the British Empire which
and English found itself ‘at the centre of international ‘sends English around the
activity’. This is ‘for one chief reason: the power of its globe’, and the emergence
people – especially their political and military power’. of the USA as a leading
A global language is necessary to globalise academia cultural and economic
and business, a lingua franca. power in the 20th century.
Countries take up English and adapt it to discuss their
own culture, equally some of British English is not
applicable to non-British speakers e/g ‘it was like
Clapham junction in there’
Language is ‘culture bound’ – this is evidenced in
Chinglish when the phrase ‘work like a horse’ meaning ‘to
work hard’ is changed to cattle because cows rather than
horses are used as draft animals in China.
Bidialectalism in the future? People will code-switch
between dialects of the same language to suit the needs
of the context
Graddol Global English as a lingua franca requires rules to ensure Kirkpatrick’s
mutual intelligibility but these imposed standards restrict communication-identity
language variation. The adoption of English as a second continuum mirrors this,
language where it takes on local forms, is leading to suggesting that language
fragmentation and diversity (‘contradictory trends’) facilitates communication so
we must focus in the need
for mutual intelligibility but
also that language is an
expression of a speaker’s
identity so non-standard
variants may be an
expression of solidarity and
mark a member of a speech
community.
Greenblatt ‘Language is the perfect instrument of empire’ as it is It is ‘an expression of the
culture bound so inherently imposed the culture along power of the powerful over
with the language. the powerless’ (Phillipson)
This arguably understates
the agency of the colonised
‘rendering participants
cultural dupes or passive
puppets’ (Talbot)
McArthur Circle of world English visualised the spread and diversity It implies to an extent that
of world English. Useful diagram to visualise the there is a single standard of
diversification of English. English fragmenting into a English at the centre.
‘family of languages’ Kirkpatrick argued that the
Implies that English is fracturing and that at the centre notion of native and
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