Lesson 19

STANDARD ENGLISH AND WORLD ENGLISHES

Topics

 Language Standardization and Codification

 Codification and Teacher Education
 Issues in Codification
 Two Constructs of Standards and Codification I
 Two Constructs of Standards and Codification II
 External Models in Expanding and Outer Circles

External vs. internal models in Outer and Expanding Circles

The four categories of arguments summarized in Chapter 1 are those most often applied to the
models controversy by those who see non-Inner-Circle Englishes as deficient. Notions of the
primacy of native speakers and historical precedence contribute to such positions. For example,
the argument that there should be one world-wide standard does not entail choosing, say, UK or
US English to be that standard; yet, that is the usual presumption. Similarly, an assertion that
learning and using any sort of English in any context inevitably involves users in one or another
Inner-Circle culture is a matter of belief, not of empirically verifiable fact.
Choosing internal models in countries such as India and Nigeria makes pragmatic sociolinguistic
sense (see Chapter 1). There are not enough ‘nativespeaker’ English teachers in the world to
provide significant degrees of influence on the English learning of the many millions of ‘non-
native’ users of English across the world. Just narrowing the focus of the question provides
a clear indication of the reality: English users in New England — the American northeastern
states, e.g. Connecticut — exhibit what we think of as identifiably New England English
pronunciation, grammar, and discourse characteristics (unless they are immigrants or otherwise
belong to subcategories of New Englanders); these characteristics are different in their details
from those exhibited by speakers from the northwestern states. More broadly considered,
people from both regions are all speakers of ‘American’ English; there is no good reason to view
the Indian or Nigerian English case any differently in these respects. The discussion, debate and
disagreements on standard and codification have many manifestations, some of which are
discussed below.
Two Constructs of Standards and Codification
When English is considered in a national, Inner-circle context, it is easier to preserve a working
notion of ‘a standard’ language. This has been the case in education and in ‘careful and
considered’ use, as when references are made to ‘the Queen’s English’, ‘US English’, or a ‘non-
standard English’, since the last must have some standard to be compared to.
The first great diasporic schism was American English’s emergence as a variety recognized, not
only by its speakers but internationally, as different from BrE. The spread of English as an
institutionalized language in the Outer Circle has raised the question of recognition once more.
The basic opposing views are represented here by Quirk (1988) and B. Kachru (1988).
The Quirk position
Quirk begins by categorizing into three groups the mechanisms and resulting situations of
language spread (1988: 229–30). The first type, the ‘demographic model’, refers to spread that is
directly attributable to the movement of speakers of a language; examples are North America and
Australia. Spread ‘without much population movement’ is termed the ‘econocultural model’.
Classical examples are Latin, ‘the language of learning throughout Western and Northern
Europe’, and ‘Arabic as the vehicle of Islam’. English is being spread nowadays as the medium
of much of science and technology and of business. The ‘imperial model’ of language spread is
like the econocultural type in that large-scale movement of people is not a factor: imperial spread
involves ‘political domination with only sufficient population movement to sustain an
administrative system and power structure’. This type is exemplified by several European
languages: the spread of Persian and English in India, ‘the spread of Russian throughout the
USSR’, French in some African countries, and Spanish and Portuguese in Central and South
America. The econocultural sort of spread applies clearly to English today. This is the
situation captured by B. Kachru’s category of Expanding-Circle countries. Quirk divides the
issues having to do with standards in this area into the general’ and the ‘restricted’ (1988: 232
ff.). Photo 7.1 Randolph Quirk (left) and Braj Kachru The general issues have to do with
educational concerns: who decides what the standards are, and what major models will be
adhered to. Quirk identifies two more specific concerns here: one is the ‘increasing
unwillingness or inability to identify standards in America or Britain’, and the second is the
‘false extrapolation of English “varieties” by some linguists’. By varieties, Quirk appears to
intend labelling the usage of those with an incomplete command of English — speakers of
something ‘low on the cline of Englishness’ — as, for example, so-called ‘Japlish’.
The restricted issues of standards have to do with ‘such special uses of English as Soviet
broadcasts to Third World countries, the English used in transnational corporations, … and in
such systems as the [maritime English] Seaspeak devised by Strevens and his colleagues’. These
uses are what Quirk terms the ‘genuinely and usefully international’ sense of ‘standards’ for
global use of English.
The imperial model of the spread of English refers to situations such as that of India, in which
‘[l]ocal elites [speak] the imperial language and [become] the more elite in doing so’ (p. 233);
thus, the desire and perceived need for English are maintained by those in indigenous power
structures who have adopted it. Quirk recommends ‘dispassionate needs analysis’ to distinguish
econocultural, international motivations for adopting English from internal,
link-language motives. The latter would need serious consideration of development and support
of a national, or ‘local’, standard (p. 234). Analogies between ‘designators like American
English, or Iraqi Arabic’ and Nigerian or South Asian Englishes, for example, are ‘misleading, if
not entirely false’, according to Quirk. Labels such as ‘African English’ (Bokamba, 1982 [1992])
may mean nothing more than English ‘written in Africa by black Africans’ (p. 234), and
although ‘Indian English’ is one of the most discussed and written-about putative varieties, ‘there
is still no grammar, dictionary, or phonological description for any of these nonnative norms that
is … recognized as authoritative … , a description to which teacher and learner (sic) in India
could turn for normative guidance, and from which pedagogical materials could be derived’ (pp.
235–6). Quirk argues that any candidate for local norm is always ‘a desirable acrolectal [variety]
which bears a striking resemblance to the externally established norm of Standard English, (p.
236).
This is the point at which Quirk’s often-quoted lines regarding ESL/EFL occur: But, it may be
objected, this is to ignore the distinction between English as a foreign language and English as a
second language. I ignore it partly because I doubt its validity and frequently fail to understand
its meaning. There is certainly no clear-cut distinction between ESL and EFL. (Quirk 1998: 236)
B. Kachru’s position B. Kachru (1988) addresses what he terms ‘the sociolinguistic reality of
English in the global context’ that involves multicultural identities of English in its ‘penetration
at various societal levels’, depth, and ‘its extraordinarily wide functional domains’, range. The
global situation entails that ‘any speaker of English, native or nonnative, has access to only a
subset within the patterns and conventions of cultures which English now encompasses’ (p. 207).
This stance in the debate removes the native speaker from any special, primary place
in a cline of users.
The crucial point about the diasporas and acculturations of English is that it has called up
questions about areas that were previously regarded as axiomatic (or were ‘sacred cows’).
Kachru notes ‘a crucial observation about conceptualizing the spread of English’ attributed to
Cooper (1982): English did not spread itself, like some sort of glacial accumulation and
extension; rather, more and more people began to acquire and use it (B. Kachru, 1988:
208). This conceptualization ‘emphasizes the focus on the user’ and reminds us that language is
an ‘activity’, not an object. From this perspective, it is easier to understand and accept the
adjustments that people make in their Englishes to reflect the semantic and pragmatic values of
their sociolinguistic contexts.
Kachru then begins his discussion of acquisitional, sociolinguistic, pedagogical, and theoretical
‘sacred cows’. In the area of acquisition, the traditional, ‘common sense’ view that the native
speakers are the keepers of primary patterns from which other Englishes are cut with more or
less ability to follow the lines has resulted in a no-win situation for the Outer-Circle users. The
multilingual speakers of a new variety of English will always be influenced by the other codes in
their language repertoires. All the hypotheses related to interlanguage — negative transfer, error
analysis, fossilization — have affected how researchers, teachers, and users themselves have
viewed divergent varieties of English. Kachru suggests that ‘we should seriously evaluate the
validity of the generalizations made on the basis of these concepts’ (p. 210). Criteria that may
apply to a US university student learning French in a classroom setting may well not apply to a
Malaysian or Singaporean businessperson who wants to be able to communicate profitably in
English with clients and associates from around the Pacific Rim.
In sociolinguistic terms, the spread of English, with its various centres of norm-providing and
modelling, has had significant effects in the conceptualizing of ‘English’ as an entity with very
important ideological consequences. Rather than spreading English as a unitary artifact which
everyone buys ‘as is’ and then employs in prescribed ways, ‘new canons have been established
in ‘literary, linguistic, and cultural’ terms (p. 210). When people learn English, they themselves
do not seem to become English, or American or whatever native speaker one might mythologize
as integrallyassociated with the language.
Acquiring English allows people to interact with Inner-Circle speakers, as with others from the
Outer Circle. The other ‘face’ of English is that it allows expression of ‘national and regional
identities’, to the extent that English has become in many cases ‘an effective tool of national
uprisings against the colonizers’ (p. 211). This adaptability of English gave it both ‘inward-’ and
‘outward-looking faces’, something that cannot be accounted for under the strictures of the old
‘native speakers own the language’ view. The natural adaptation of English to particular contexts
resulted in English becoming ‘more and more localized as its regional roles expanded’ (p. 212).
These developments have serious consequences in the pedagogical arena, where models,
materials and methods have to be evaluated, and it has to be determined whether the learners’
motivations can be narrowly categorized.
Certain basic concepts utilized in discussing sociolinguistic aspects of English, such as ‘speech
community’, ‘native speaker’ and ‘communicative competence’, require rethinking as well (see
Chapter 2).
The concept ‘speech community’ requires re-examination because of issues of users’ attitudes
towards English and its new ‘cultural and interactional roles’ (p. 213). A fundamental difference
between the Inner and Outer Circles is that the majority of users in the former are functionally
monolingual, while those in the latter are necessarily multilingual. The multilingual and
multicultural nature of the wider English speech community gives Outer-Circle varieties of
English a character altogether different from that in its Inner-Circle contexts. Users of English in
each region may feel more comfortable within their own speech fellowship of, say, Indian
English or Philippine English. The literature is replete with anecdotes indicating that Africans,
Indians, etc. have no desire to be linguistically mistaken as English or American.1 The ‘native
speaker’ is characterized by Kachru as ‘an age-old sacred cow carrying an immense attitudinal
and linguistic burden’ (p. 214). The term remains in current and prevalent use, in spite of many
sociolinguistics writers pointing out its irrelevance and in spite of the complications that arise if
one tries to hold to the native speaker idea and ideal (see, e.g., Paikeday, 1985, and Ferguson’s
foreword in B. Kachru, 1982b: vii).
The reality is that Outer-Circle users select languages from their available code repertoires as
they sense the appropriateness of one or another language for given situations and functions. A
monolingual ‘native speaker’ never has to deal with such choices, beyond the occasional
selection of a foreign term or phrase in an attempt to capture ‘just the right word’ or to try to
appear more impressive in some way. Multilinguals bring new dimensions to creativity with the
language (see Chapter 8). Such multilingual creativity has always been a part of the
sociolinguistics of countries and regions in the spheres of languages of wider communication;
compare the traditions in using Sanskrit and Persian in South Asia, for example. Attitudinal
factors may affect ‘those who consider themselves the “native speakers” of the language, and …
those who use the language as an “additional” code’ (p. 215). As Paikeday (1985: 72) has
observed, users do not want to stand out as anything but members of a regional or national
linguistic community: ‘[T]hey would rather affect features of Indian English than be looked
down on as foreigners’ (B. Kachru, 1988: 215). Besides, the identity as ‘native speaker’ seems to
be fluid: Kachru refers to one of the authors of this volume as ‘a speaker of Hindi, Bengali,
Marathi, and English’ who is ‘most comfortable with Bengali, Hindi and English’. Interlocutors
would consider her to be a ‘native speaker’ of Bengali or Hindi in given situations, but typically
revert to considering her a ‘native’ Marathi speaker if they learn that Marathi was her ‘home’
language as a child (B. Kachru, 1988: 215–6). Varying one’s designation of another’s ‘native’
language in such terms takes away any validity the term might have been perceived to have.
The adaptations of English to multilingual contexts are not ‘acquisitional deficiencies’; various
sorts of ‘subtle sociolinguistic messages’ are conveyed by the ‘diversification’ of English.
Indigenized-variety use carries a ‘distance’ message, asserting a regional, national or local
identity as distinct from any other variety users, including those from the Inner Circle (e.g. Ooi,
2001). ‘Creativity potential’ reflects the many and diverse cultural circumstances in which
English is used. And the ‘Caliban syndrome’ is revealed in resistance to Englishes, which may
be regarded as a hegemonic intruder, in Ng~ugi’s (1981: 3) term (B. Kachru, 1988: 218).2
The diversification of English has made it ‘a medium of cross-cultural expression’ with the
potential for its becoming a vehicle of ‘intercultural understanding’ (p. 219), but it had to pay a
price for this expansion of applications. The literary and cultural bases of the language as it was
formerly conceived have lost their automatic implicative character. The various varieties are just
that: various, ‘showing considerable diversification at the base [of a metaphorical conical
structure], or colloquial level, and less diversity as one advances to the apex, or educated level’.
The same can be readily observed in comparisons across Inner-Circle varieties, too. Questions of
communicative competence must now be related to many more sociolinguistic contexts than
were previously considered. This world-wide diversity seems to call for some sort of
‘management’ related to concerns about ‘decay’, ‘intelligibility’, and who the ‘guardians’ of
English are (p. 220). It is a fact that the number of speakers of English across the world is
increasing exponentially at all levels of society; access to the language is ‘no longer restricted to
the privileged urban segments’. It is not possible to claim, simply on the basis of ‘an idealized
past’, that standards for teaching and learning English have fallen.
A constant concern, as mentioned in the introduction of this chapter, is that as English
diversifies, intelligibility across its varieties will be lost. It is helpful to reconsider this worry in
the light of the findings of the study reported in Smith (1992) which concludes that exposure to
more varieties results in lowered resistance to allowing intelligibility to happen (see Chapter
5). It is important that preparation of teachers and researchers include exposure to as many
varieties as possible, since we cannot have international uses without internationalization, which
entails ‘nativization and acculturation’ (B. Kachru, 1988: 221).
Finally, English users in the Inner Circle can no longer be regarded as ‘guardians’ of the
language. If nothing else, sheer world numbers of speakers make such an ideal impossible to
hold on to. Kachru’s discussion ends on an optimistic note: ‘[w]here over 650 artificial
languages have failed, English has succeeded. English has been amenable to adapting, or to
being adapted, in terms of identity-shifting, “decolonization”, and flexibility for expanded
creativity in its lexical range and grammaticalizations’ (B. Kachru, 1988: 222). Issues in
standards and codification The study of world Englishes as grounded in contextually determined
criteria has raised the topic of where standards come from as never before. In the Inner Circle it
was largely possible to accept at least the myth of standard language as a given, since users of
English had little awareness of the difference between prescribed and described language. Now
the discussions are motivated by a new impetus, i.e. the need for description — and even
prescription — of the institutionalized Englishes, at least in the context of language education.
These are discussed below by considering codification in the context of the
Outer Circle and standard in language education in the context of Expanding
Circle.
Pakir on Codification
Pakir’s discussion of codification (1997: 171), following Quirk’s econocultural model, opens
from the premise that English is the source of financial opportunities across the world, in its
diasporas ‘growing like a thriving money plant’. This leaves ‘the now commonplace questions
… : which English and whose English?’
In terms of market share, there is no question that British and American English have had no
rivals historically, although Australian English is now beginning to take on significance in the
nations of Pacific Asia. As the Outer- Circle Englishes gain more general acceptance in global
domains of interaction, standards and codification of these varieties become a real concern.
While codification implies standardization, Pakir gives most of her attention to the former,
because standardization brings with it considerations that lead into other areas such as ‘the status
of a particular variety’, ‘intolerance of variability’, associations of ‘ideology’, and the treatment
of a standard language as an abstraction ‘rather than a reality’ (p. 172). Codification involves
by and large more concrete or at least relatively limited concerns, including recognition of
‘emerging canons of creativity’ and the ‘myths’ having to do with, for example, anticipated goals
of use and idealization of the native speaker.

The Englishes of the Outer Circle exist in Multilingual, Multicultural environments. Hence,
the desire to codify any such English must deal with ‘competing norms’ involving ‘competing
values in … language standardization policy’ in terms of a resolution of two contending
concepts: what the codification is supposed to do and for whom, and the reception among the
users of such codification. Codification efforts will be in the interest of two groups, depending
on how those efforts are conceived. An ‘instrumental’ focus will serve to ‘strengthen the elite’ of
society; such a dynamic is beginning to be the case in Singapore. An ‘integrative’ motivation
will strengthen the local varieties of English, which ‘would be a step towards legitimization and
liberation, since it will restore the easily marginalized’ (p. 174).
Concerning the attitudes of users and institutions, especially governments, towards de facto
functioning varieties, Pakir observes that so far, governments have chosen to call for
maintenance of the traditionally accepted standards, that is, from the UK or US. However, this
‘business-asusual’ attitude fails to recognize the sorts of existence that English has in the world
today, with more Outer- and Expanding-Circle users than Inner- Circle ones, and most English
use occurring without a native speaker present in the mix (p. 174). Along with the change in
attitudes and the requisite ‘political and economic will’ that reality demands from the Outer
Circle, there needs to be a concomitant change in the Inner Circle, such that the new English
varieties are not disparaged as deviant branches from the wholesome trunk of the language tree.
Five Challenges of Codification
The ‘procedural problems’ of codification, how such a scheme might be carried out, involve five
main sets of challenges. The oppositions that are normally seen between prescription vs.
description of the code, and internal vs. external model, etc., may not be as salient in countries of
the Outer Circle, though a few challenges still remain (Pakir, 1997: 175). Codification in the
Outer Circle involves deciding on models and pedagogical norms on the one hand, and focusing
on the cultural context of uses and users on the other hand; thus, the divide between prescription
and description is somewhat blurred. Outer-Circle English users communicate within their region
and with speakers from other circles; this pragmatic observation precludes choosing exclusively
either an internal or an external model as the standard.
Policy-makers and planners must be aware of the functions of English; codification for purposes
of ‘mutual collaboration’ would indicate a participatory function, while ‘marking boundaries’ of
distinct identity would constitute a separatist function. With reference to the content of
standards, a basic decision is to be made between two possibilities. Staying with one of the
traditionally valued codifications, ‘the classical canon of British literature, or even American
literature’ would be the most economically feasible, and the easiest. However, if the choice is in
favour of an internal model, there will be an immense amount of work to be done; the reward
would come in the self-awareness of identify and opportunities for supported creativity.
Furthermore, the acceptance of standards is not automatic; ‘[a]ttitudes towards standards which
are locally defined need the approval and support of (a) professionals (b) general population and
(c) institutions’ (p. 176). With regard to the concerns of codification, i.e. choice, functions,
content and acceptance, Pakir presents characteristics of the situation and possible options in
Singapore, where English is an official language, ‘a local educated variety of English that is
internationally intelligible’, but which has yet to be codified, though it is widely used (pp. 176–
7).

Codification and Teacher Education

Seidlhofer (1999) brings the focus of codification into the very practical realms of the profession:
how non-Inner-Circle English teachers may see themselves in the context of pedagogical
theories, methods and institutions which continue to value the native speaker as the ultimate
teaching resource. She takes the various ‘double’ aspects of non-native EFL teachers’
professional lives as opening the possibility for ‘unique contributions that [they] can make’.
Terms with negative connotations are re-examined to reveal their positive meanings for ELT
professionals: double agent, double talk, double think, and double life (p. 235). The ‘doubling’
arises out of the ‘double standards’ under which non-native EFL teachers operate:
[M]onoculturalism seems to have been replaced by multiculturalism, monolingualism with
multilingualism, and targets seem to be criterionreferenced rather than (native-speaker)norm-
referenced. (Seidlhofer 1999: 234) Still, virtually everything that has to do with the day-to-day
concerns of working teachers, such as textbooks and reference materials, refers almost entirely to
‘native speaker culture as the (uncontaminated?) source providing the language to be taught’.
The conceptual definitions of the ELT field are positive and ‘inclusive’ while the day-to-day
working definitions are negative and ‘exclusive’, driven largely by a market dominated by UK
and US people and publications (p. 234).
Given these contradictory conditions, non-native EFL teachers should think of themselves as
‘double agents’, people grounded in a solid course of teacher training and also members of their
communities, with a thorough knowledge of English as it is used in various domains in their
societies (p. 235). They have to adapt textbook material, generally having little relevance in their
contexts of use, to accord with local cultural norms. Non-native EFL teachers may find
themselves required to teach ‘authentic’ English, and to function as reliable ‘informants’
according to the method of ‘communicative language teaching’, widely regarded as the only
reasonable paradigm for inculcating a foreign language (pp. 236–7). There is no recognition of
the desirability of appropriateness of materials and methods. Fortunately, the non-native EFL
teachers have themselves been non-native EFL learners. ‘One could say that native speakers
know the destination, but not the terrain that has to be crossed to get there’, while non-native
teachers have available this background knowledge as a positive resource (p. 238). ‘Double talk’
can be investigated by teachers in ‘double think’, i.e. considering the two directions in which
non-Inner-Circle teachers are pulled by demands about what kind of English to teach. Newer
corpus-based research shows that ‘at least some of what existing textbooks contain is wrong, or
at best, misleading ...’ (p. 238). In reality, the most usual use of English in the Expanding Circle
is to deal with participants from the Outer or the Expanding Circle, where ‘real’ English is not
the same as in the UK or the US. Resolving the ‘incompatibilities from the vantage point of their
learners’ needs and interests’ becomes the EFL teacher’s major task (p. 239). Teachers as
professionals are concerned with achieving a proper ‘balance’ of language and teaching (p. 239),
and this is where good training programmes should be preparing them to make decisions and
consider ‘the choices that can be made’ (p. 240). For example, contrary to ‘modern’ language
teaching theory and practice, Seidlhofer holds that translating is useful in that it requires learners
to relate the known to the one being learned and students have always done it anyway. Other
‘outlawed’ activities worth considering in are ‘copying …, repetition and learning by heart’ (p.
240). Teacher education should encourage the exploration and development of whatever methods
might be useful and effective when prospective teachers leave the safety of the practicum
classroom.

References:

Compiled from

 Kachru, Y. & Nelson, C. L. (2006). World Englishes in Asian contexts. Hong Kong
University Press: Hong Kong. pp 96-105