As More of the World Speaks English, Who Is a Native Speaker?

by Andrés T. Tapia –

As the US becomes less dominant, ironically English becomes even more ubiquitous as the global trade language. The language of US and British imperialism now has become the language of emerging markets going global at the expense of the US and Europe.

But the ironies only multiply from here. For example, after generations of British and US English being considered standard English, in today’s globalized use of English, what is standard English? who is a native speaker?

Consider the professional in Krakow who is just starting to interact regularly with professionals in India and is as unlikely to learn Hindi as her Indian counterparts are going to learn Polish. She needs to brush up on her English. But this time rather than listening to the British pronunciations she was likely exposed to during her Polish equivalent of English 101 highschool class, through her headphones linked to an English language online learning site she is hearing the proper pronunciations by that new English native speaker, the Indian from Bangalore.

Or consider the English-dominant Mexican-American Millennial whose grandparrents three generations ago, migrated from Nogales, Mexico to El Paso, Texas.  He is fluent in English, is a full US citizen, but there is a distinct Spanish-ized inflection in his fluent, English-as-a-first-language inglés.

Or consider the Korean American New Yorker who grew up bilingual Korean and English and who in the same way has a side of kimchee with with her burger also has Korean tones in her flawless English.

Redefining English

English then is being shaped and re-shaped both by these new native speakers plus by the growing legions who have learned it as a second language. Today nearly a billion people around the world speak English — which means that more people speak English as a second language than there are native speakers. In Asia, the number of English-users has surpassed 350 million–this is as many people who live in the English dominant countries of the United States, Britain and Canada. More Chinese children study English–about 100 million–than there are Britons. “There’s never before been a language that’s been spoken by more people as a second than a first,” says David Crystal whose numerous books include English as a Global Language (also click here to see him in a 2 min video).

The reshaping entails both pronunciation and vocabulary and in the process, “English will no longer privilege the native speaker,” states the voiceover in this mini (4 min) British documentary, “The Future of the English Language.”

“The new English-speakers aren’t just passively absorbing the language–they’re shaping it,” writes Newsweek reporter Carla Power in a prescient article, “Not the Queen’s English,” written a few years ago. “New Englishes are mushrooming the globe over, ranging from ‘Englog,’ the Tagalog-infused English spoken in the Philippines, to ‘Japlish”… to  ’Hinglish,’ the mix of Hindi and English that now crops up everywhere from fast-food ads to South Asian college campuses.” As an example of this she refers to an Indian ad for Domino’s pizza: “Hungry kya?” (”Are you hungry?”).

Spanglish would be another. Novelist, critic, and professor at Amherst, Ilan Stavans makes the case in his book, Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. “Latinos are learning English,” he said in an interview on NPR. “That doesn’t mean that they should sacrifice their original language or that they should give up this in-betweeness that is Spanglish. Spanglish is a creative way also of saying, ‘I am an American and I have my own style, my own taste, my own tongue.’” (Also see earlier posting, “As Español-Language Media Grows, ¿Qué Me Dices about Spanglish?“)

“English is an open-source language,” says GlobalEnglish’s CEO Deepak Desai. “There is an academy in France that decides what constitutes a French word. But there is no academy that decides what an English word is.” Continuing Desai’s technology metaphor, this makes English a language platform on which many idiomatic speaking “applications” can run.

How does this phenomenon play out on what is proper English? Let’s hear some examples from reporter Carla Power:

Researchers are starting to study non-native speakers’ “mistakes”–”She look very sad,” for example–as structured grammars. In a generation’s time, teachers might no longer be correcting students for saying “a book who” or “a person which.” Linguist Jennifer Jenkins, an expert in world Englishes at King’s College London, asks why some Asians, who have trouble pronouncing the “th” sound, should spend hours trying to say “thing” instead of “sing” or “ting.” International pilots, she points out, already pronounce the word “three” as “tree” in radio dispatches, since “tree” is more widely comprehensible.

How Much Does an Accent in Speaking English Matter
While Arizona is trying to put a finger in the dike regarding accented English by contemplating legislation that would forbid teachers with an “accent” from teaching ESL, others are fully embracing this phenomenon effectively and profitably.

GlobalEnglish is a business English language online instruction organization that uses voices of people from a variety of different nationalities who are positioned as native English speakers coming from certain parts of the world. “Global companies are increasingly made up of non-native speakers of English,” says Les Schmidt, COO of GlobalEnglish which includes mega multinationals such as IBM, Deloitte, and Hilton. “As a consequence, an enormous number of business interactions that occur in English are between two non-native speakers. Our goal is to help support the development of a common communication tool -‘a global English language.”

To this end, GlobalEnglish’s service includes a database of accents and dialects of English which provides an opportunity for learners to recognize native and non-native English accents as well as the differences in tone and appropriateness, while also mastering practical business expressions as they choose a from over 60 countries, dialects, the gender of the speaker’s voice, the speed of the reading, and whether or not to follow the transcript. Additionally, their text-to-speech tool allows learners to hear any text read aloud in a variety of “English accents.”

In my work as Chief Diversity Officer at Hewitt Associates, I consult with many of our clients on various dimensions of diversity and inclusion.  In the process, it’s not unusual for the issue of how to handle requests for accent reduction come up. Is that an inclusive thing to address or not? Well, it depends. The issue is not accent but the ability to be understood.And there are plenty of employees who have an “accent” that traditional native speakers may not like, but who are intelligible. And then there are those who, because of their accent, really have a hard time being understood. We need to distinguish between the two. Not only is lack of intelligibility a detriment to all parties concerned but it will assuredly limit that individual’s career advancement no matter how talented they are. This issue should be seen in the same category as a professional who, say, needs to improve her presentation skills in front of large groups. It’s about effectiveness.

But when people are intelligible regardless how they sound when they speak English, let’s guard against ethnocentric or even prejudicial attitudes that are demanding accent reduction just because they don’t like how they sound. And keep in mind that in an upside-down world, it’s the native English speakers who may have to brush up on their comprehension of English a la Hindi, Spanish, Polish, and Arabic.

“In the future,” suggests professor David Crystal, “there could be a tri-English world, one in which you could speak a local English-based dialect at home, a national variety at work or school, and international Standard English to talk to foreigners.”

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