Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

The global spread of English 147
3. An example might be the relative positions of English and German in the European Union.
German has more native speakers, hence greater prevalence, but English, with a smaller
number of native speakers in the language constellation, has greater centrality because it offers
more connections with plurilingual speakers of languages other than German or English.
4. Mufwene’s (2002) typology of forms of colonisation is more refined than a dichotomy of
settlement and exploitation colonies. He talks, for instance, of trade colonies, whose language
contact ecology has been most favourable to the emergence of new language varieties (e.g.
pidgins), and of plantation settlement colonies (e.g. Jamaica), where creoles have survived
alongside the colonial language. He also stresses, crucially, that the vitality of indigenous
languages, even in settlement colonies, has not been uniformly affected by colonisation, and
this, he goes on to argue, ‘makes it compelling for linguists to have to investigate and better
understand the socio-economic factors that affect language vitality, favouring colonial
language in some settings and indigenous ones in others’. (Mufwene 2002: 19)
5. There are, however, some countries (e.g. Nigeria, Cameroon, Papau New Guinea) where
English-based pidgins have evolved and are used by relatively large sections of the population.
6. This is one of the reasons underlying Alexander’s proposal (2000) that the Nguni and
Sotho cluster of languages be harmonised to establish two strong African languages better
equipped materially and demographically to compete with English in South Africa.
7. Finlayson and Madiba (2002: 46) observe that use as an instructional medium both creates
a ‘demand for new terms’ and provides opportunities for using them.
8. The Bill of Rights, an integral part of the constitution, gives individual citizens the right to
communicate with government departments in the language of their choice, to be tried in
court in a language they understand and to receive education in an official language of their
choice ‘where that education is reasonably practical’.
9. Tomlinson (1997: 183) cites figures for Los Angeles showing that 40 per cent of the city’s
population is composed of Asians and Latinos, and is projected to rise still further. In Leicester
the population of Asian descent is projected to rise above 50 per cent in the next thirty to forty
years.
10. One thinks here, for example, of the shipbuilding industry, once strong in the North-East
of England.
11. I am aware that the concept of native speakerness, which Davies’s (1999b, 2003) work has
done much to illuminate, is more complex and problematic than indicated here. However, for
economy of presentation I adhere here to conventional understandings of the terms ‘native
speaker’ and ‘non-native speaker’.
12. Jenkins (2003: 83) argues, very reasonably, that a more appropriate designation for this
category of speakers would be ‘bilingual English speakers’ (see Chapter 6 for a fuller
discussion).
13. Woods (2001:79) reports that ‘45.9% of papers in Science and 40.6% of papers in
Nature, or an average of 45.6% of RAs [research articles] in these two journals are written by
NNSs’.
14. The main focus in this section is on the developing world.
15. When, however, this is pointed out by foreign advisers, and recommendations made to