Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

164 Language Planning and Education
observation made forcefully by Pullum (2002) in his plenary address at the 2002
AILA conference, and reiterated by various other scholars (e.g. Gupta 2001: 370;
Crystal 1999: 16), that standard written print English, the English found in the
Straits Times or the Japan Times, is remarkably uniform around the world. True, there
are some grammatical differences between different standard and standardising
varieties of English, but these are, as Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 5) put it, ‘small
indeed relative to the full range of syntactic constructions and morphological word
forms’. Variability, then, is principally found in speech rather than print, being most
marked in pronunciation and vocabulary; not forgetting, of course, the grammatical
variation most evident in the non-standard, basilectal or colloquial subvarieties of the
New Englishes (e.g. Singlish). The key point here, however, is that against all this
variability one needs to set the stabilising, anchoring presence of a relatively uniform
standard print English.
Turning now to the conceptual aspect of intelligibility, we also find that it is
a more complex concept than Prator seems to suppose, for it may be broken down,
as Smith and Nelson (1985: 334) suggest, into a three-level complex, consisting
of (1) intelligibility (reserved for word/utterance recognition), (2) comprehensibility
(referring to a grasp of literal propositional content-word/utterance meaning) and
(3) interpretability (the apprehension of illocutionary force, the speaker’s intention).
Jenkins (2000: 78) gives emphasis to intelligibility in the first sense above,
pointing out that, due to the relative lack of shared background knowledge, second
language users/learners tend to be more reliant on the acoustic signal than fluent
(native) users, and that in her experience phonological problems are a more regular
cause of misunderstandings for the former category of users than are ‘higher level’
difficulties of pragmatic interpretation. And this leads her (see below) to give
particular attention to pronunciation as one of the graver potential impediments to
clear communication. A further point is that intelligibility is as much, or more, a
property of the interaction between the speaker and the listener than one inherent in
the linguistic forms deployed by the interlocutors. As Jenkins (2000: 79) puts it:
intelligibility is dynamically negotiable between speaker and listener, rather than
statically inherent in a speaker’s linguistic forms, even though participants [i.e.
second language learners] find the process of negotiation more problematic than
do fluent speakers.
An implication may be that in determining what contributes to intelligibility we
need to consider, among other things, the attitudes interlocutors bring to the
interaction and the effort they are prepared to invest in recovering meaning. And,
more pertinently still, who the interlocutors are, and whether intelligibility should
continue to be defined solely in terms of intelligibility for the native speaker,
as Prator (1968) implies, or more inclusively to encompass mutual intelligibility
between users of English as an international lingua franca who happen to have
different non-English first languages (L1s).
Jenkins (2000), along with others, adopts the second of these positions, arguing –
persuasively – that, given the current demographics and sociolinguistics of English