Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

166 Language Planning and Education
5. Production and placement of nuclear (tonic) stress, especially when used
contrastively.
(Jenkins 2000: 159; 2003: 126–7)
These proposals bring to mind previous efforts to define a core English: Ogden’s
(1930) Basic English and Quirk’s (1981) Nuclear English, for example. Jenkins (2000:
131) points out, however, that her identification of a phonological core differs from
earlier constructions in that it is based on empirical research into intelligibility
between interlocutors with different L1s and is rooted in actual speech behaviour.
Our own view is that Jenkins’s work has substantial merits, not only making a
persuasive case for discontinuing universal adherence to L1 British or American
pronunciation norms but also bringing forward detailed proposals for an alternative
LFC model, and thereby taking pedagogic innovation in pronunciation teaching
beyond mere aspiration into the realm of the feasible. A further advantage is that,
unlike many innovations, it actually reduces the pedagogic load by removing from
the syllabus items that are ‘either unteachable or irrelevant’ (Jenkins 2000: 160).
Whether or not this alternative model passes the final test of acceptability is another
matter, however, and one which we will consider shortly. First, however, we turn to
the question of identity.
6.4.2.3 Identity and the New Englishes
Language is, of course, not only an instrument of communication but an important
means by which speakers and hearers construct, or fashion, particular identities – be
these personal, ethnic, social or national (see Joseph 2004). And because this is so,
and because many users of the New Englishes wish to project a distinctive identity
in, and through, their local variety, it follows, so some argue, that that to deny
recognition to local varieties of English is to withhold acceptance of the identities
that those varieties express. To appropriate English is to develop a sense of ownership,
to claim the language as one’s own, but this is not possible if features widespread and
stable in the local educated variety continue to be regarded as ‘errors’ rather than, as
Joseph [2004: 161] puts it, ‘points at which a distinct … identity is expressed [or may
come to be expressed] in the language’. 6
Calling for attention here, however, are two main points. The first is that this
argument from identity is particularly potent as regards accent and vocabulary, for it
is these rather than the morpho-syntax of the acrolectal variety that mark a speaker
as, say, distinctively Singaporean. It is true, of course, that the basilect – Singlish in
this particular instance – also indexes a distinctive Singaporean identity through
grammatical features that diverge quite noticeably from standard British English,
but this variety is in no sense a candidate for employment as a teaching model. It is
a non-standard, uncodified contact variety, which, as Gupta (2001: 378) points out,
is functionally constrained:
the leaky diglossia of Singapore English has always leaked in one direction – that
H encroaches on the domains of the L – Standard is usable almost everywhere in