A History of English Language

A history of the english language 382
graph of a whole essay will not reveal the nationality of the author. A century ago
American commentators often felt called upon to defend their national variety, though it
is hard to find anyone much concerned about the matter now. There is nothing at present
like the sustained controversy over Americanisms of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries (see § 251), and a judgment such as Basil De Selincourt’s would be taken as
facetious exaggeration on either side of the Atlantic: “Only when we hear English on the
lips of Americans do we fear for its integrity.” To be sure, during most of the twentieth
century Europeans preferred British English, and European instruction in English as a
foreign language followed the norms of British English in pronunciation (specifically
RP), lexical choice, and spelling. This was a result of proximity, the effective methods of
language teaching developed by British institutions such as the British Council, and the
perceived “prestige” of the British variety. As American English grew more influential in
the world, it became an option alongside British English in mainland Europe and
elsewhere. For a while, especially during the second half of the twentieth century, a
prominent attitude was that either variety was acceptable for a learner of English as long
as each variety was kept distinct. The idea was that one could speak British English or
American English but not a random mix of the two.
The global context of English described in Chapter 10 has made the traditional
categories more problematic and the choices more complex than they were previously
perceived to be. It is worth distinguishing again between English as a second language
(especially in multilingual countries where English has an official status) and English as a
foreign language. Where English is widely used as a second language, as in India, Africa,
and Singapore, national varieties have developed that are neither British nor American,
whatever the historical, political, and cultural interactions had been. Where English is
mainly a foreign language, as in France, Japan, or China, the language often has a mix of
British features and American features, Americanization being especially prominent in
business and technology. As we have seen, there is linguistic variation among groups of
native speakers within both Britain and American. Some of these varieties are more
comprehensible than others, and some can be understood in international settings only
with great difftculty. Indeed, many Scandinavian speakers of English can communicate
more effectively in these settings than many British or American speakers with a strong
regional dialect and accent. It has been argued that English as an international language is
being shaped as much by non-native speakers as by native speakers, and the variety that
is emerging will not be rooted in the culture, geography, and national sense of any
country. The term “Mid-Atlantic English” has been used to describe this cosmopolitan
variety. 76
David Crystal, one of the leading scholars in reconceptualizing the categories of an
expanding global English points to his own three dialects: his original Welsh/Liverpool
mix functioning as a marker of local identity; his educated (Standard) British English
functioning both as a means of national communication within Britian and as a marker of
national identity outside; and what he foresees as an international standard of spoken
English, to be used as a means of international communication. 77 A form of this last
variety can be seen in “Euro-English,” in which politicians, diplomats, and civil servants
from Britain working in Brussels accommodate their use of English to speakers of other
languages. This result is not “foreigner talk” or anything resembling pidgin, but