Gibson Ferguson Language Planning and Education Edinburgh ...

170 Language Planning and Education
to become, recognised as authoritative in India, a description to which teacher and
learner in India could turn for normative guidance and from which pedagogical
materials could be derived. (Quirk 1988: 235)
Since Quirk penned these words, significant progress has been made towards
developing authoritative descriptions of the New Englishes, not least through the
establishment of an International Corpus of English (ICE). Nevertheless, as
Bamgbose (1998: 12) says, there is work yet to be done, and codification therefore
remains for him ‘the priority of the moment’. It needs, moreover, to encompass
the implementation of various educational changes: the reform of textbooks, for
example, so that they cease to stigmatise localised features as errors, reform in
examinations and perhaps most important of all change in teacher education so that
all teachers are sensitised to the difference between divergence and error.
6.4.2.6 Acceptability
This leads us to a final factor of equal importance to codification – acceptability,
which is, in turn, linked to attitudes and status. It is important because recognition
of a new language, or a new standardising variety, depends, it is widely agreed (see
Joseph 2004: 139), on both formal linguistic difference and acceptance of that
difference as valid, as having status. Bamgbose (1998: 4) acknowledges as much
when he remarks with respect to the New Englishes that ‘the acceptability factor is
the ultimate test of admission of an innovation’.
On the sociolinguistic plane, then, the existence of a New English is at least as
much a matter of attitudes, belief and confidence as of linguistic difference. So, if a
community of speakers chooses – for reasons of identity or whatever – to describe
themselves as speakers, say, of Singapore English, and if they have the confidence to
accept their way of using English as an appropriate model for themselves (see Davies
1999c), then these are good grounds for conceding the sociolinguistic reality of the
indigenised variety.
Whether the requisite level of acceptance and confidence is actually present in
outer circle societies remains unclear, however. Certainly, many ELT teachers and
applied linguists no longer regard every deviation from British or American norms
as an error: they have moved on conceptually. But it is uncertain to what extent this
is true of educated users outside the academic community. Are they prepared to
describe themselves as speakers of a standardising Singapore, Indian or Nigerian
English, or do native norms still retain, as Bamgbose (1998: 5) implies, a degree of
attractiveness as benchmarks of what is taken to be competence in English?
The evidence here is slender, of course, but what little there is does suggest a
stubborn residual preference for British or American Standard English norms.
Timmis (2002: 248), for example, on the basis of an attitude questionnaire drawing
four hundred student responses from fourteen different countries, concludes that
‘there is still some desire among students to conform to native speaker norms, and
this desire is not necessarily restricted to those students who use or anticipate
using English primarily with native speakers’, admitting, though, that many of these