Over the last hundred years,

English has come to bespoken by more people inmore places than ever before.

Current estimates suggest that 1.5billion use it as a first, second, orforeign language - one in four of the

• There will be words for foodstuffs,drinks, medicines, drugs, and thepractices associated with eating,health-care, disease, and death.

• The country's mythology and religion,and practices in astronomy andastrology, will bring forth new namesfor personalities, beliefs, and rituals.

• Oral, and perhaps also written,literature will give rise to distinctivenames in sagas, poems, oratory, andfolk tales.

• There will be a body of local laws andcustoms, with their own terminology.

In the new millennium,

English will be a

countable noun, predicts

David Crystal.

world's population. And the obviousquestion is: what will happen to thelanguage, now that it has achieved sucha global presence? For, when alanguage spreads, it inevitably changes.

The vocabulary explosionThe bulk of the new distinctiveness of

English is in vocabulary - by which Imean not just new words, but newmeanings of words, and new idiomaticphrases. Words rapidly come into use inone area that are unknown in another.

It only takes a year or so. The firstpermanent English settlement in NorthAmerica was in Jamestown, Virginia, in1607; and loan words from Indianlanguages were introduced intocontemporary writing virtuallyimmediately. Captain John Smith,writing in 1608, describes a 'racoon';'totem' is found in 1609; 'caribou' and'opossum' are mentioned in 1610.

The impact of a new culture uponEnglish affects a huge amount ofvocabulary. Think of the culturaldomains likely to generate new wordswhen English came to be used in suchplaces as West Africa, Singapore, India,or South Africa, and speakers foundthemselves adapting the language tomeet fresh communicative needs.

• The country's biogeographicaluniqueness will generate potentiallylarge numbers of words for animals,fish, birds, insects, plants, trees,rivers, and so on - as well as forissues to do with land management,which is such an important feature ofindigenous lifestyles.

• The culture will have its own

technology and technical terms ­such as for vehicles, house-building,weapons, clothing, ornaments, andmusical instruments.

• The world of leisure and the arts will

have a linguistic dimension - namesof dances, musical styles, games,sports - as will distinctiveness inbody appearance (eg hair styles,tattoos, decoration).

• Virtually any aspect of socialstructure can generate complexnaming systems - local government,family relationships, clubs andsocieties, and so on.

Current estimates

suggest that1.5 billion people

speak EnglishNobody has ever worked out just howmuch of a culture is community­specific in this way, but it must be avery significant amount. So, when acommunity adopts a new language, andstarts to use it in relation to all areas of

life, there is inevitably going to be agreat deal of lexical adaptation .

New words and meaningsThis will happen in two main ways.First, some words will change theirmeaning. Words from the variety ofEnglish introduced (eg British English)will be applied to new settings and take ~ ~ ~

• Issue Fourteen January 2000 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional. 3

English is a vacuum-cleaner of a language,readily sucking in words from

whichever 0ther languages it meets

~ ~ ~: on different senses. A word won't quite. fit, but, rather than invent a new one,

people keep the old one and change itsmeaning to fit the new context. Forexample, 'lounge' in parts of SouthAfrica has come to be applied tocertain types of restaurant and placesof entertainment - one might see thename of an Indian restaurant such as

'Bhagat's Vegetarian Lounge', or aphrase such as 'beer lounge'.

Secondly, words will be taken over('borrowed') from the local setting ­usually, words from the indigenouslanguage or languages spoken in thecountry. Where many cultures co-exist,such as in South Africa or Malaysia,these words can come from several

languages. In the South AfricanSunday Times we find this sentence:'Diplomatic indabas only rarely produceneatly wrapped solutions to problems.'What is an indaba? The word is from

the Nguni group of languages. It wasoriginally a tribal conference, but hasnow been extended in meaning tomean any conference betweenpolitical groups.

How many words?How many of these words are welooking at? Word-lists and dictionariesshow some surprising results. Therewere over 3,000 items recorded in theBranfords' first edition of the

Dictionary of Sourh African English(1978). The Concise AusTralian NaTional

Dictionary, published in 1989, has10,000 items. There are over 15,000entries in Cassidy and Le Page'sDictionary of Jamaican English. ManyEnglish-speaking countries now haveon-going dictionary projects, as newwords are being invented all the time.

English speakers have alwaysadopted a welcoming attitude towardsloan-words. English is a vacuum­cleaner of a language, readily suckingin words from whichever other

languages it meets - well over 350 ofthem. Because of this, although Englishis historically a Germanic language, thebulk of its vocabulary is not - it islargely Classical/Romance in origin.And in such countries as Nigeria,where some 450 source languages areavailable, the eventual lexicaldistinctiveness of Nigerian English isbound to be considerable.

Even in countries where the number

of localised words is relatively small,their effect on the character of the

language can be great, for two reasons:

• The new words are likely to befrequently used within the localcommunity, precisely because theyrelate to distinctive notions there.

• These words tend not to occur in

isolation: if a conversation is about, say,local politics, then the names of severalpolitical parties, slogans, and otherallusions are likely to come into thesame discourse, making it increasinglyimpenetrable. 'Blairite MP in NewLabour Sleaze Trap, say Tories' mightbe a British newspaper example. Sixwords with British political meanings orovertones are used in quick succession.

Exactly the same kind of piling up offoreign expressions can be heard, andoften read, in areas where new Englishesare emerging. In this example from theSouth African Sunday Times, all thelocal words are Afrikaans in origin:

It is interesting to recall that someverkrampte Nationalists, who pose

now as super Afrikaners, were once

bittereinder bloedsappe.

[verkramp = 'bigoted'; bittereinder =

'die-hard of the Anglo-Boer war';bloedsappe = 'staunch member of the

United Party']

The difficulty for outsiders is evident.

Mixing languagesYou can see how things might developfurther. It wasn't just an Afrikaans nounwhich was distinctive in the above

example; it was a noun phrase - acombination of adjective and noun. So,if a phrase, why not something biggerthan a phrase? Add on a verb, perhaps,or make it a whole clause - in much the

same way as in English we might borrowa whole sentence from French and say'Je ne sais quot or 'c'est la vie'. Parts ofan originally English sentence mightcome to contain large chunks ofborrowed language. And in many partsof the world, where English is a secondor foreign language, this process hasbeen used with unprecedented frequency.

It is easy to see why this happens.People using English, even at a fairly

advanced level, become stuck for a word,phrase, or sentence; or, although usingEnglish as a lingua franca, they find thata particular utterance in their mother­tongue suits better what they want tosay. If they are talking to someone fromtheir own language background, there isno problem in switching into the otherlanguage to solve the communicationproblem. A dialogue may move out ofEnglish, then back again, several timesin quick succession.

The same situation obtains the other

way round, too. People begin in theirmother-tongue, then switch into Englishwhen they find their first language doesnot allow them to say what they want.This often happens when they get ontoa subject which they have learned onlyin English, such as computing - or even

having a baby. I met a French-speakingmother once who had had a baby whileliving in Britain for a year. Back inFrance, she found herself switching intoEnglish every time she wanted to talkabout the experience.

Switching codes in writingWhen people rely simultaneously ontwo or more languages to communicatewith each other, the phenomenon iscalled code-slvitching. You will hear ithappening now all over the world.between all sorts of languages, but it isespecially noticeable in English becauseit is so widespread. And it is happeningin writing as well as in speech. TomMcArthur, in The Eng/ish Languages(1998), gives an example of a leafletissued by the HongkongBank in 1994for Filipino workers in Hong Kong whosend money home to their families. It is abilingual leaflet, in English and Tagalog,but if you read the Tagalog section youwill find a great deal of English mixedin. Here is a short example:

Mag-deposito ng pera mula sa ibangHongkongBank aCCOUI1l,at anyHongkongbank ATM, using yourCash Card. Mag-transfer ng regularamount bawa't bUll'an (by StandingInstruction) ga/ang sa inyong Current

o Savings Account, whether theaccount is with HongkongBank or not.

This kind of language is oftendescribed using a compound name,

4 •ENGLISH TEACHING professional. Issue Fourteen January 2000 •

Must not these varieties become even

more differentiated, so that we end up withan English family of languages'?

eg Taglish (for Tagalog-English). Wealso have Franglais, Tex-Mex, Japlish,Spanglish, and many more.

Traditionally, these names wereused as scornful appellations. Peoplewould sneer at Tex-Mex, and say it wasneither one language nor the other. Itwas 'gutter-speak', for people who hadnot learned to talk properly. Now weknow better. You can hardly call alanguage like Taglish gutter-speak whenit is being used in writing by a majorbanking corporation. Linguists havespent a lot of time analysing these'mixed' languages, and found that theyare full of great complexity and subtletyof expression - as you would expect, ifyou have the resources of two languagesto draw upon, rather than one.

Who owns English?Code-switching is a normal feature ofcommunication in the speech of millionswho have learned English as a second orforeign language. Indeed, there areprobably now more people who useEnglish with some degree of code­switching than people who do not. Andif these speakers are in the majority, orat least represented by significantnumbers - there are, for example, asmany people speaking English in Indiaas in England - our traditional view ofthe language has to change.

It is a point often forgotten,especially by monolingual speakers ofEnglish, that a language which hascome to be spoken by so many peoplehas ceased to be the exclusive propertyof any of its constituent communities.Nobody 'owns' English now - not theBritish, with whom the language began1500 years ago, nor the Americans, whonow comprise its largest mother-tonguecommunity. Everyone has a share in thefuture of English, first-, second-, andforeign-language speakers alike.

Language is an immenselydemocratising institution. To havelearned a language is immediately tohave rights in it. You may add to it,modify it, play with it, create in it, ignorebits of it, as you will. And it is just aslikely that the course of the Englishlanguage is going to be influenced bythose who speak it as a second orforeign language as by those who speakit as a mother-tongue. Fashions count,in language, as anywhere else. Andfashions are a function of numbers. Bear

in mind that the total number of Englishmother-tongue speakers in the world(some 400 million) is steadily falling asa proportion of world English users .

New horizonsIt is perfectly possible for a linguisticfashion to be started by a group ofsecond- or foreign-language learners, orby those who speak a creole or pidginvariety, which then catches on amongother speakers - rapping is a case inpoint. And as numbers grow, andsecond/foreign-language speakers gainin national and international prestige,usages which were previously criticisedas 'foreign' - such as a new concord

rule (three person) or verb use (he berunning) - can become part of thestandard educated speech of a locality,and may eventually appear in writing.

Unexpected things are happening.All over the world, children are beingborn to parents with different first­language backgrounds who speakEnglish as a lingua franca. TheirEnglish often contains code-mixed ornon-standard forms. If these parentschoose to speak to their children in thisEnglish, as often happens, we now havethe prospect of code-mixed and non­standard English being learned as amotller-tongue - and by millions of theworld's future citizens. As the man said:

'You ain't seen nothin' yet!'

Increasing diversityMixed-English languages are certainlyon the increase, and it is important torealise that this is happening. It is quitewrong to think of future world Englishas simply a more widely-used version ofBritish English, or of American English.These varieties will stay, of course, butthey will be supplemented by othervarieties which will display increasingdifferences from them. The signs of thisperiod of diversification have beenaround a long time, but the extent of itspresence has only recently come to beappreciated. It is not something weusually see in print, but we readilyencounter it when we travel- usually inthe form of a breakdown of

comprehension. We speak to somebodyin English, and they reply - but wecannot understand what they are saying,because their English is so different.

With these experiences in mind, canwe avoid the conclusion that, left to

itself, English is going to fragment intomutually unintelligible varieties, just asVulgar Latin did a millennium ago?The forces of the past 50 years, whichhave led to so many newly-independentnation-states, certainly suggest thisoutcome. English has come to be used,in several of these countries, as theexpression of a socio-political identity,and it has received a new character as a

consequence, conventionally labelledNigerian English, Singaporean English,and so on. And if significant change

can be noticed within a relatively shortperiod of time - a few decades - mustnot these varieties become even more

differentiated over the next century, sothat we end up with an English 'familyof languages'? Tt is certainly possible.But there are pressures working in theopposite direction too.

The role ofStandard EnglishAlongside the need to reflect each localsituation and identity, which fostersdiversity, there is the need for mutualintelligibility, which fostersstandardisation. People want to be ableto understand each other, both within acountry and internationally. There hasalways been a need for 'universallanguages'. And as supra-nationalorganisations grow - political, economic,social- the need becomes more pressing.The 185 members of the UN are there,not simply to express their identities, butalso because they want to talk to eachother. And whatever official languagesare chosen by such organisations, it isessential- if the concept is to work - foreveryone to learn the same thing, astandard form. The term Standard

English has come to be widely used inthis connection. When people read orwrite for an international audience,

what they use is Standard English.A similar international standard is

also likely to develop in speech, ascontacts increase and people influenceeach other more. When we reflect on the

opportunities there are for contact thesedays, whether as a result of the media,travel, or electronic communication, thechances are that the standard element in

the international use of English will be ~ I

• Issue Fourteen January 2000· ENGLISH TEACHING professional. 5

The situation is unpredictable,with the forces promoting linguistic

identity and intelligibility competingwith each other in unexpected ways

~ ~ ~: strengthened rather than weakened.Satellite television, beaming down largequantities of educated spoken Englishinto homes all round the world, is aparticularly significant factor.

The linguistic cakeCentrifugal and centripetal forces co­exist in our world. We want both to

have our linguistic cake and to eat it.We want our language both to expressour identity and to allow us tocommunicate intelligibly. We want to bedifferent and we want to be the same.

The splendid thing about humans usinglanguage, of course, is that this is thekind of thing the human brain doesvery well. Because the brain is so multi­functional when it comes to language,we can have our cake and eat it.

One of the main insights oflinguistics during the 20th century wasto demonstrate the extraordinarycapacity of the brain for language.Bilingualism, multi-lingualism, is thenormal human condition. Well over

half of the people in the world, perhapstwo-thirds, are bilingual. Children learntheir languages - often severallanguages - at extraordinary speed.Evidently, there is something in ourmake-up which promotes theacquisition of talk.

A tri-English worldI have no difficulty in foreseeing thegradual emergence of a tri-Englishworld - a world, that is, in which threelevels of English co-exist:

• The base level, the place where we allstart, is the home, our family dialect.In my case, this was Wales, and myhome dialect was a Welsh English sostrong in accent that when my familymoved to Liverpool, when I was 10,I was immediately dubbed Taffy, andremained so even after my accent hadmoved towards Liverpudlian. I amfluent both in Welsh English('Wenglish') and Scouse. I have twohome dialects. Everybody has atleast one.

• The second level is the national varietyof Standard English which mostpeople learn when they go to school.(With a minority of people in the UK,especially in SE England, the homedialect is already Standard English.)

In my case, the second level wasBritish Standard English. I learned towrite it, and gradually to speak it,avoiding such features as am'! anddouble negatives, and learning adifferent range of grammaticalconstructions and vocabulary thanwas found in my home dialects.

• The third level is an International

Standard English - an English, inother words, which in its grammarand vocabulary is not recognisablyBritish, American, or anything else.When working abroad, many peoplebecome skilled in using a vaI:ietywhich lacks some of its originalBritishness, because they know theyare talking to people from outsidethe UK. International Standard

Spoken English is not a global realityyet, but it is getting nearer.

Similar distinctions are to be found in

other language settings too. Manyforeign learners of English will have anethnic or ancestral language for level one,and a national language for level two ­such as (in Northern Spain) Basque forthe first and Spanish for the second.The first two levels may also be verydifferent forms of the same language,such as (in Southern Italy) Neapolitanand Standard Italian, respectively.

The new revolutionI think most educated people, one day,will be tri-dialectal in English - whetherin the UK, USA, Ghana, or Singapore.Foreign-language learners will findthemselves needing to cope with thesevariations, too - developing a sense ofinternational norms alongside thenational norms which are currently thefocus of teaching. Teachers alreadyoften draw attention to local lexical and

grammatical differences, such as UK'pavement', US 'sidewalk', andAustralian 'footpath', but theperspective is invariably from one ofthese varieties towards the others .

Someone teaching British Englishdraws occasional attention to American

alternatives, or vice versa. One day, Ibelieve an international standard will

be the starting-point, with British,

American, and other varieties all seenas optionallocalisations.

I do not know how long it will takefor such a scenario to become fullyestablished. But I do know that it will

not be an easy transition, as it willinvolve significant changes in ourmethods of teaching and examining.The situation is unprecedented - withmore people using English in moreplaces than at any time in thelanguage's history - and unpredictable,with the forces promoting linguisticidentity and intelligibility competingwith each other in unexpected ways.

For those who have to work

professionally with English, it is a veryinteresting time. After all, there hasnever been such a period of rapid andfundamental change since theexplosions of development that hit the

language in the Middle Ages and theRenaissance. For the first time in 400

years, we are experiencing whathappens when English goes through aperiod of particularly dramatic change.

It is indeed a revolution in the waythe language is used - an exciting time tobe a linguist, of course, to be observingthe beginning of it, but a problematictime to be a teacher, having to guideothers through it. Doubtless traditionalpractices in teaching languageproduction will continue with littlechange for the time being, but there mustsurely be an early broadening of practicewith respect to listening comprehension.After all, we are already living in a worldwhere most of the varieties we encounter

are something other than traditionalBritish or American English. We doour students a disservice if they leaveour care unprepared for the brave new

linguistic world which awaits them. rpJ

David Crystal works inHolyhead, North Wales,as a writer, lecturer andbroadcaster on languageand general referencepublishing. Honoraryprofessor of linguistics atthe University of Wales,Bangor, his books includethe Cambridge Encyclopediaof the English Language andEnglish as a Global Language,both published by CUP.

6 .ENGLISHTEACHINGprofessional. Issue Fourteen January 2000 •