Key terms from Global English
Below is the list of key terms that you will need to be familiar with for the exam (from
Canvas)
Each Key Term includes a summary and definition (where applicable).
Key Term 1 - British Empire
- English was spread around the globe as the language of the British Empire.
- The colonial expansion of Britain began during the Elizabethan Age, building an
Empire that spanned the globe.
- It all began in the seventeenth century (1600).
- Originally trade was the most immediate goal, especially when in 1600 the
East India Company was granted a charter for the Far Eastern trade.
- Settlement and exploitation followed soon, first in North America, then in the
Caribbean.
- The British Empire grew to gain material profits from trade, cultivation, and
political dominance.
- In the second half of the eighteenth century (1750s), several events redirected the
British attention. In the New World, the American colonies declared and gained
independence, but the influx of loyalists and the victory over France established and
secured authority in Canada.
- The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (1750 - 1850) saw a rather quick
series of events that practically built the core of the Empire.
- The East India Company gained an increasing hold over South Asia, and the
Battle of Plassey in 1757 brought with it firm authority in India. In South-East
Asia, competition with the Dutch resulted in gradual expansion into Malaysia.
- Cook’s explorations opened up the Pacific. The decision to solve the domestic
problem of overspilling prisons by declaring far-away Australia a penal colony
introduced the settlement of Australia, beginning with the “First Fleet” of
convicts to Botany Bay in 1788.
- Early in the nineteenth century, after an earlier but short-lived occupation of
the Cape Province, formal authority over the region was given to the British in
the Congress of Vienna, and it was filled with life by major settlement waves
which came to the Cape in the 1820s and to Natal in the 1840s.
- In 1819, Sir Stamford Raffles founded Singapore, soon to become a thriving
colony and now a nation which owes its existence as a political entity to
British colonial activity.
- The treaty of Waitangi of 1840 stabilized and greatly expanded the influx of
British people to New Zealand; and the Opium Wars of the 1840s led to
authority over Hong Kong.
- Later on, the British expansion and involvement in all these regions, and in
most cases also the geographical range of possessions, kept growing, and
, finally the Empire also gained authority in parts of Africa, with colonies
established, for instance, in Lagos, in Uganda, in Kenya in 1920, and so on.
- Settlement colonies were the first to be released into independence via various
intermediate stages such as a dominion status.
- Elsewhere, however, the Empire’s colonial grip remained tight, typically practicing
the principle of “indirect rule,” with formal authority being assigned to indigenous
leaders who were induced to be loyal to the Crown.
- The turning point was World War II, however, with all kinds of disruptions loosening
the affiliation of many colonies with Britain. India’s independence, gained in 1947,
became a model for many others.
- Colonies were now deliberately and explicitly “developed,” which included support
for mass education in English, so that in the long run ties with the former colonial
power would be maintained. In the course of the following decades most of the
British colonies were ultimately released into independence.
- The British Empire spread and established English as a global language, but in the
twentieth century this role was secured and expanded by the rise of Britain’s former
colony, the United States of America, to the status of a global superpower – the only
one left by the end of the century.
Key Term 2 - Ownership of English
- For the last few decades, English has made inroads into local cultures. In many
countries, English has been embraced, appropriated, transformed and made “our
own.”
- Who owns English?
- The promoters of standard English must themselves have standard English at their
disposal. But to maintain it is another matter. This presupposes authority. And this
authority is claimed by those who possess the language by primogeniture and due of
birth. In other words, the native speakers.
- So when the custodians of standard English complain about the ungrammatical
language of the populace, they are in effect indicating that the perpetrators are
outsiders, non-members of the community. The only way they can become members,
and so benefit from the privileges of membership, is to learn standard English, and
those privileges include, of course, access to the institutions which the community
controls. Standard English is an entry condition and the custodians of it are the
gatekeepers.
- Standard English, then, is not simply a means of communication but the
symbolic possession of a particular community, expressive of its identity, its
conventions and values.
- The question is, which community and which culture have a rightful claim to
ownership of standard English? For standard English is no longer the preserve of a
group of people living on an off-shore European island. It is an international
language.
- It serves a whole range of different communities and their institutional
purposes, and these transcend traditional communal and cultural boundaries.
- Standard English, especially in its written form, is their language. It provides
for effective communication, but at the same time, it establishes the status
, and stability of the institutional conventions which define these international
activities.
- These activities develop their own conventions of thought and procedure,
customs and codes of practice; in short, they in effect create their own
cultures, their own standards.
- The custodians of standard English express the fear that if there is diversity, things
will fall apart and the language will divide up into mutually unintelligible varieties.
- But things in a sense have already fallen apart. The varieties of English used
for international communication in science, finance, commerce and so on are
mutually unintelligible.
- As far as lexis is concerned, their communicative viability depends on the
development of separate standards, and this means that their communication
is largely closed off from the world outside.
- The point, then, is that if English is to retain its vitality and its capability for continual
adjustment, it cannot be confined within a standard lexis.
- It is generally accepted that communities or secondary cultures which are defined by
shared professional concerns should be granted rights of ownership and allowed to
fashion the language to their needs. The same tolerance is not extended so readily to
primary cultures and communities, where the language is used in the conduct of
everyday social life.
- Lexical innovation here, equally motivated by communal requirement, is
generally dismissed as dialect.
- Take, for example, the two words depone and prepone. The first is a technical
legal term and therefore respectable. The second, prepone, is not. It is an
Indian English word coined to contrast with ‘to postpone’. To postpone an
event means to put it back, to prepone an event is to bring it forward.
- An odd Indian excrescence: obviously non-standard. And yet there is clearly
nothing deviant in the derivational process itself and, indeed, we can see it at
work in the formation of the related words predate and postdate.
- What, then, is the difference? The difference lies in the origin of the word.
Prepone is coined by a non-native speaking community, so it is not really a
proper English word.
- The innovation indicates that the language has been learned, not just as a set of fixed
conventions to conform to, but as a resource for making meaning; and making
meaning which you can call your own. You are proficient in a language to the extent
that you make it your possession, bend it to your will, assert yourself through it rather
than simply submit to dictates of its form.
- The very fact that English is an international language means that no nation can have
custody over it. To grant such custody of the language, particularly, to a nation
disposed to dwell on the past, is necessarily to arrest its development and so
undermine its international status.
- As soon as you accept that English serves the communicative and communal needs of
different communities, it follows logically that it must be diverse. An international
language has to be an independent language. Native speakers have no say in it
anymore.
- Henry G. Widdowson: The Ownership of English (1993)
