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New Englishes and teaching models 153 and can, therefore, style-shift – to a basilect when the social circumstances seem appropriate, as illustrated in the following extract from Chinua Achebe’s novel No Longer at Ease, where Christopher, a senior Nigerian civil servant, is conversing with two friends Obi and Clara. At the end of the conversation, Achebe appends a brief sociolinguistic commentary for the benefit of the reader: What can I offer you? Champagne. Ah? na Obi go buy you that-o. Me never reach that grade yet. Na squash me get. They laughed. Obi, what about some beer? If you’ll split a bottle with me. Fine. What are you people doing this evening? Make we go dance somewhere? Obi tried to make some excuses, but Clara cut him short. They would go she said. Na film I wan’ go, said Bisi. Look here, Bisi, we are not interested in what you want to do. It’s for me and Obi to decide. This na Africa, you know. Whether Christopher spoke good or ‘broken’ English depended on what he was saying, where he was saying it, and how he wanted to say it. Of course, that was to some extent true of most educated people. (Chinua Achebe 1987, No Longer at Ease) Similar style-shifting is also common in other outer circle countries. English is, of course, usually only one of the languages in individuals’ multilingual speech repertoires, and a result, alongside style-shifting between subvarieties of indigenised English, one often also finds code-mixed speech, incorporating elements from two or more languages. This mixed speech is so common, in fact, that in some settings it is the normal, unmarked code of everyday encounters. The following extract from a conversation in a Malay-English mix (McArthur 1998: 13) is an apt illustration of the phenomenon; and, though often frowned on by purists and policymakers, it is more appropriately regarded as a manifestation of bilingual creativity than of linguistic deficit. Speaker 1: Apa ini? What happened to you pagi-tudi? I tunggu tunguu sampai dah fed up! Man you pergi, joker you! Speaker 2: Nowhere lah! I was stuck in the computer room … Though most commentators would not wish to bring such speech forms within the scope of New Englishes, they merit a mention here for pointing up the lived complexity of daily language practices in intensely multilingual societies, and for calling to account the top-down assumptions of those policy-makers for whom multilingualism is no more than the coexistence of diverse but clearly bounded language entities – English, Malay, Chinese, Swahili and so on.
154 Language Planning and Education 6.2.1 An overview of linguistic characteristics of the New Englishes Study of the linguistic features of the New Englishes dates back to the 1960s, and possibly earlier, and so a large body of descriptive literature has accumulated in journal and book form (see e.g. Burchfield 1994; Cheshire 1991; de Klerk 1996; Gorlach 1995, 2002; 1992a, 1994; McArthur 1998; Platt, Weber and Ho 1984; Pride 1986; Schmied 1991; Schneider 1997). It would be uneconomical, therefore, to attempt a summary of this large body of work, nor appropriate, as our focus here is on language education policy rather than linguistic description. That said, a brief review of some of the more prominent linguistic features of the New Englishes is useful to give a flavour of the nature of the divergence from British and American standard English and indicate what exactly it is that is at stake in debates over pedagogical models. Because they are particularly well documented, we mainly draw our examples from Singapore English and Indian English, noting in passing by way of justification that Singapore English has been regarded (Platt and Weber 1980) as a classic case of ‘indigenisation’. Divergence from British or American standard English takes place at various linguistic levels – phonological, grammatical, lexical and discoursal. Let us start, then, with phonology. 6.2.1.1 Phonology Unlike British English, which is stress-timed, 1 Singapore English is syllable-timed, with a tendency to fewer intonational patterns – both characteristics reflecting transfer from the tone-based Chinese languages natively spoken by the majority of the population (Tay 1982: 65). At the segmental level, vowels tend to be shorter and less tense than in RP (received pronunciation) or GA (General American), and there are numerous consonantal differences, the most commonly cited being the realisation of /θ/ and /ð/ as [t] and [d]; the stereotypical lack of differentiation between /r/ as /l/; and the reduction of final consonant clusters to the first consonant of the cluster (see Gramley and Pätzold 1992: 449). There are also significant phonological differences between Indian English on the one hand and British or American English on the other. Word stress, for example, tends to fall on the penultimate syllable – whatever its location in British English. At the segmental level, Indian English has a seventeen-vowel system consisting of eleven pure vowels and six dipthongs (Kachru 1994: 515), though, as Jenkins (2003: 24) observes, Indian English speakers, in common with those of other New Englishes varieties, tend to a minimal distinction between the short and long vowels /i/and /i:/ (the vowels in sit and seat being rendered by /i/). The principal consonantal differences can be summarised as follows (see Kachru 1994: 514–15): 1. A tendency to retroflection of alveolar consonants (t, d); 2. The replacement of fricatives /θ/ and /ð/ by plosives [th], [d], or [dh]; 3. No distinction between clear and dark /l/; 4. The modification of initial consonant clusters (not found in North Indian
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