Learning the Wrong Lesson from the Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel is an endlessly fruitful metaphor for linguists, and it's showing up in current books like Michael Erard's Babel No More (which I recently won a free copy of somehow), Nicolas Ostler's The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel, and Dan Everett's Language: the Cultural Tool.

Regardless of who's referencing it and for what purpose -- and whether in a religious or secular context -- usually the implication is that it's a drag that we don't all speak the same language, because if we did, it would be better and easier and we'd understand each other. (Think of Douglas Adams' babelfish, a creature that instantly translates from any language to any language.)

This is the wrong lesson to take from Babel -- wrong in the religious sense, and simply wrong in the sense that it  misunderstands what language is and how it works.

To briefly sum up why this is the case, I'd like to quote from Mingyan Hong's excellent dissertation "Spirituality and SLA" (Second Language Acquisition):

Many Christians cite the Babel story as clear evidence that ... that the diversity of languages is not to be celebrated, but should rather be mourned or tolerated while waiting in hope for a promised future restoration of unity. 

This in fact is not the point, she argues. Hong goes on to interview Suresh Canagarajah (a thinker whose implications for a Christian understanding of language really need to be further explored), who adds:

...this is what I see as a sign of the Tower of Babel, eliminating diversity in order to become one against God. And God punished them. The lesson is against monolingualism, or even monoculturalism, reducing the diversity of humanity by becoming one people with a single language, culture, etc.

The point, then, is that the divine mandate for human flourishing is for diversity and difference, not singularity. And indeed, most of us accept the weak form of linguistic relativity -- that linguistic (to say nothing of cultural) differences allow for different perspectives, ways of expressing things, etc. And really, if you get into social constructionism, it's our use of language that in large part creates the world(s) we live in. If we abide by that theory, a single language describing a single reality is nearly impossible. (That assertion has its own epistemological and theological controversies which would need to be sorted out.)

Also, Babel is linked with Pentecost, which is really interesting in that it is an affirmation of multilingualism (because everyone is using his own language) but it also claims that everyone understands what is being said equally. It would be worth exploring that.

The Future of English in Japan (ca. 1935)

From a 1935 issue of the Journal of the American Dialect Society.

Also of note, a related issue some 75 years later: the somewhat dramatically titled "Fall of the Japanese Language in the Age of English".

Long Time No Figure This Out

Sorry, wacky news network, I think you're wrong.

I'm pretty sure I'm inadvertently becoming the world authority on the origin of "long time no see," so I just want to clarify some points I've come across in my absurd, ongoing searches through Google Books and library databases.

1. The two main theories generally seem to be that it comes from a pidgin English, either Native American or Chinese.

2. The earliest written usages are all native English speakers "reporting" the speech of non-native speakers, from about 1840-1915. This really needs to be taken into account. You can't say that because a British navy man or an American explorer says that a Chinese prostitute or a Native American chief said it, they really said it. The literature of that era is rife with stylized English attributed to non-native speakers -- can we trust it?

3. The earliest written Chinese English usage -- that is, written in English by a Chinese writer for a Chinese audience --  I can find is from 1921, in an magazine for Chinese students studying in the USA.

4. The fact that 好久不见 can be translated as long time no see does not seem that convincing a case for a strictly Chinese origin -- there are other ways to literally translate that, and I have to assume that the 100+ year history of long time no see as an American English expression has influenced that translation.

5. Knowing Americans like I do, I'm inclined to lean much more toward the idea that LTNS is mainly a way to mock people for not speaking standard American English, but it also seems too tangled up with legitimate possibilities of pidgin usage to be only that.

6. However, LTNS seems to have been taken up by Chinese learners of English (and the current generation of English-using young people) as a kind of symbolic victory for Chinglish. It's often lumped together with Chinglish phrases that are only known in China and only used as jokes to show "ha ha, Chinglish is funny"(like "horse horse tiger tiger" and "I'll give you some color to see see"), but -- and this is key -- it's held up as an example of Chinglish that "made it" -- successfully joining the one big happy family that is English in the World.

7. So really, this goes back to something I touched on in the "driving the pigs to market" example -- an expression that previously had a relatively fixed local meaning in one variety of English, reappropriated and ideologically repurposed.

PS: I'd love to do a Google N-Gram search on this, but to search for a 4-word phrase you have to download something like 250 gigabytes worth of .csv files. No thanks.

World Englishes and Teaching Writing

I have mentioned in the past that there hasn't been much interplay between the worlds of L2 writing and world Englishes -- nor, I suppose, has the whole spirit of world Englishes (or sociolinguistics, or really applied linguistics writ large) had much impact on what we on this side of the biz call "L1 composition" -- those people who pal around at NCTE and CCCC. The reasons for this have more to do with traditional disciplinary boundaries than with willful ignorance, I think, but as I've moved toward this "acceptability" thing (that is, looking at the significance of readers' reactions to texts not in terms of how they treat "errors," but how they react to things the deem unacceptable/inappropriate for a variety of possible reasons) in my own study I've been interested to see that others are moving in a similar direction.


Three important scholars to keep an eye on in this regard are Aya Matsuda, Suresh Canagarajah, and Bruce Horner.


Canagarajah should come as no surprise; you could say that his well-known 2006 article "The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued" has jump-started the movement in this direction, and really he's been writing about this sort of thing off and on since at least his Geopolitics of Academic Writing (2002).


Matsuda has been writing about world Englishes for the last decade, but she's done some work with her husband, who is an L2 writing scholar, on WEs and teaching writing in the last couple of years. I'm hoping to see more from her on this.


Horner is an interesting case. In recent years he's been working closely with Min-Zhan Lu (whose name I should perhaps have mentioned along with his, but she doesn't much of have a website), the originator of the anecdote (the "can able to" incident, all the way back in a 1994 article) that has animated a number of Canagarajah's arguments on the subject, and they published a kind of manifesto last year on what they call a "translingual approach" to teaching writing. There is much to commend in this article, though as a stodgy TESOL/applied linguistics person I find myself not able to identify with some of its more US-centric perspective and subsequent political positions.


I say "US-centric" simply because composition studies is about teaching writing to college students in America, and there's nothing wrong with that. But its politics are also influenced by its being rooted in American higher education (which again is not wrong! I'm a product of that system and I hope to eventually work in it!), and Horner's statement on how he found his way to a more world Englishes-influenced approach to comp is interesting: "I came to this concern through my work on immigrant rights and English-only legislation in Iowa. This has led me to argue against the English monolingualism dominating the teaching and study of writing in U.S. colleges and universities." 


Thus, the notion of "English-only" policies, which are pretty uniquely American, often comes up in his work (the little of it I've seen). Of course, the ideology of monolingualism (which does need to be looked into more deeply) is implicated in most contexts, and indeed this is a reason this 'new' approach to teaching writing is really worthwhile -- but many of us outside the US are simply not dealing with the same political questions. Also, this is where I'd throw in my usual caveat -- "we don't all have the same politics, so let's try to make this palatable to the widest amount of people possible" -- if I had more time. What can I say -- I'm the academic progeny of a "vulgar pragmatist."


In any case, what I like about this approach that is emerging is the way it seeks insights from rhetoric and composition studies, TESOL, sociolinguistics/world Englishes, foreign language teaching, and translation, to be applied to the question of teaching writing to diverse groups of students in different contexts. We could all benefit from more of that kind of thing -- or hopefully, students could benefit from it.

Advice on Texts for Teaching World Englishes

(especially if your university has a stentorian copyright policy):

Use David Graddol's stuff from the British Council. They give his books away for free in PDF form!

The Future of English

English Next

English Next India

"Hegemony Takes No Prisoners"

Probably the most genius thing about the concept of hegemony is how you're not allowed to think it's not a thing...because that's what it wants you to think!!

"We disagree about the choices people make about their language use. For

RP such choices are typically imposed externally. For me they are typically

decisions made by individuals. I prefer to view people as independent

beings, capable of acting in their own best interests with regard to language

use. RP sees that as hegemonic, to which, of course, I have no reply since

hegemony takes no prisoners." - Alan Davies

Theory, Sexuality, Politics, etc (a much shorter post than you'd expect)

This is the only place I can think of engaging this issue, and I'll try to be brief in outlining what I see as a tension/dilemma which is rooted in theory/philosophy but which plays out in academic and popular debates. Super brief.

Cynthia Nelson, in a 2010 TESOL Quarterly article on gay students in language classrooms, writes: "The widespread collective ignorance about gay students may have many reasons, including...[a] tendency to view (homo)sexualities as a private matter involving physical sex, rather than a public matter involving community, identity, knowledge, and discourse..."

Aside from totally co-signing on her implication (sexuality as social -- that's some Wendell Berry stuff if ever I saw some), the other issue I thought of was "can this kind of theory 'go both ways,' as it were?" Not to crudely oppose gayness and straightness, or 'conservative' and 'liberal' ideology -- because I don't think that's necessary -- but I just wonder whether people on traditionally "opposing sides" whose political convictions demand of them (again, no intent to be simplistic here) certain orthodoxies  are both able to deploy the above bit of critical theory sincerely without pushback from the other. One rarely hears, for example, proponents of "traditional" sexuality using the language Nelson uses, yet it seems to me eminently usable by those who, like Gabriel Torretta, argue that "marriage is a mode of being." In fact, I suspect it might meet resistance from those who most often use critical theory. Am I wrong? This is relatively uncharted territory for me.

2012 Planner

Notes from meeting with advisor.

Data:

1. Do final stage of data collection (Canadian participants)

2. Establish coding system (involve second coder; she suggests doing a kind of 'work-swap' with another grad student, wherein we work on each other's projects) for AJT data.

3. Transcribe and begin coding interview data. (Note: may not need to be transcribed per se -- can work with audio files in NVivo. Will eventually need to transcribe relevant bits, at least.)

Goal: be ready by the end of the term (April) to meet w committee about what direction I plan to go with data analysis. (This means having all of the above done, basically. Which is a very tall order, really. It would be nice to do a committee meeting before the baby is born, though. I guess mid-April is a good goal to put something together.)

Writing projects:

1. Rejected "English for real use" paper: abandon for now. It was really just a haphazard thing I did on a whim and time would be better used focusing on dissertation.

2. Methodology comp as a journal article: submit to World Englishes ASAP. The hope is to get some good feedback on it (never really thought about this, but yeah). If it gets a revise and resubmit, perhaps add in some data analysis from what I'll be working on (above). Needs: continue to trim parts and revise. Not sure how long the MS can be. For some reason can't find it on their website. Goal: submit this by the end of January.

3. English Today special issue: really want to do something good for this. She says I need data. Deadline is March 30. Limit is 4,000 words, though they also accept 1500 word short pieces. Thinking of framing it as a 'post-variety' sociolx approach?

Conferences:

Not planning to attend or present at any this year, with the exception of a submission to the CSLD conference held at UBC in mid-May. No word on that yet. 

For 2013, it would be nice to try for SSLW (in China, date TBA) and possibly TESOL/AAAL, despite their being in Texas. ACLA (the big Canadian applied linguistics conference) will be in Victoria in Spring 2013, so that is a goal, too.

Work:

Again stressed that I shouldn't work too much. I think I can find a balance this year. I taught 3 classes (4 sections) in 2010 -- too much. I taught zero classes in 2011 -- not enough. So far this year I am doing 2 sections of one class at Rits and I'm doing a copyediting project (that I really need to get moving on) for another professor. Beyond this I should probably only do one course this summer (either LLED 301, LLED 489, or Sociolx at TWU) and maybe one in the fall. There needs to be a period where I'm only doing data analysis. In fact, it might be best not to teach in the fall, and to teach next spring or summer instead.

Idea for a Corpus-Like Assignment investigating variations in English(es)

1. Start with Paul Brians' classic website "Common Errors in English."

2. Identify some potential "semantic minimal pairs"(a term I thought I just invented but apparently did not) that seem interesting, like "good-by / good-bye" or "gray/grey" or some more obscure and/or clearly "errory" ones like "easedrop" vs "eavesdrop".

(Note: this is pretty subjective and you have to already know a lot about English to really choose interesting ones.)

3. Find a corpus.

4. Learn how to search it, use it, etc.

5. search for the stuff you found in #2.

6. Somehow do some kind of cool analysis of what you find.

(#6 needs some work.)

Sin Boldly (A Navel-Gazing Interlude)

I'm in no position to be giving advice about how to do research. I've long considered it my weakest academic skill. I've always thought that being an academic consisted of chiefly these four things: reading, writing, teaching, and doing research. Here's how I'd rank myself in terms of level of confidence in each of those:

1. Writing
2. Reading
3. Teaching
4. Doing research

Actually, bump those all down a notch and add:

1. Obnoxiously inserting my opinion about what I study into every possible conversation while deriding non-specialists' views, even though my only point is usually "well, it's complicated"

Which is also something academics are known for.

I sometimes think that I've made it this far (through -- dear God -- eight and a half years of postsecondary education now) based almost solely my ability to put together a readable compound-complex sentence, and while that may not be entirely true, a lifetime of reading widely has, I think, afforded me a certain facility with language, if I can say so without being arrogant. (I can write stupid sentences, too, of course.) I have a long way to go as a teacher, but if I get going about something I really know, I can do pretty well with it (I'm psyched to be teaching two sections of world Englishes next term -- kind of a dream come true). But research -- even after writing a 40-page paper on methods, taking courses on ethnography, surveys, and interviews, and having my dissertation proposal passed by my committee -- still fills me with dread.

I know that research never pans out exactly the way one hopes (I've had to lower my sights quite a bit on this project) -- but I have so little experience with data collection and analysis that I'm constantly fearful that each step I take is further in the wrong direction. And getting derailed by a lack of confidence at this stage has proven even more debilitating than the "oh-crap-I-don't-know-what-I'm-talking-about" anxiety of writing 100 pages worth of comps this summer. I spent the last month hemming and hawing about getting Ethics Review Board approval for my study (which I finally got last week, 2-4 weeks later than I'd hoped), and during that time I could have been analyzing my pilot data (which I've barely looked at), learning NVivo, doing other writing and reading, making contact with more potential participants, and so on. Instead, as best I can tell, most days I woke up at noon, felt sorry for myself that I had a broken arm and no BREB approval and was in China away from my friends and family, sent a few emails, read a few articles, and watched 6 hours of television.

I'm not proud of any of this. But as I look back on the last month, I can see how (and I can still feel how, every time something goes wrong) my main malady has been a constant fear that I'm somehow doing something horribly wrong and irrevocably ruining my chances to do a good project and actually finish my PhD. (My brilliant defense mechanism, apparently: avoid thinking about the work.)


Rationally, I know this is silly. My university grades (since an unfortunate incident involving sophomore year physics) have been impeccable. I was accepted by the top PhD programs in my field. I've had book reviews published in well-known academic journals. I've presented at the top local, national, and international conferences in my field.  I wrote and published a book just for fun. Yet now, more than ever, I hear a nagging voice saying you're doing this wrong.

What's the remedy?  Well, as Martin Luther once wrote, "sin boldly." When I was looking up the context of that phrase, I came across a college writing guide of the same title by David Williams, which I'd like to quote here:

One important point about your adopted voice and its argument: you have at least to pretend to believe it. Like Solomon and all great minds that ever contemplated the human condition, Martin Luther was right when he said that all of humankind are sinners and sin in every thought and deed and must necessarily sin, so far are we removed from God. His response was, he declared, to "sin boldly." Do not hide quivering under the bed. Do not shuffle shamefully onto the stage full of abject apologies. Be assertive, be bold, adopt a self-confident voice. Fake it if you have to. The cynics may be right. Our worldly institutions and values may all be relative and artificial constructs like the money in our wallets, paper with ink on it and not anything of real value at all. But few of those who believe this line can be found burning the ten dollar bills in their wallets. We live in the world "as if." To some that "if" is a constantly looming threat; to others it's a challenge.

Williams is writing about writing, but the same is true of research. Here I am; I'm in this. I'm doing what I came here to do. I'm definitely going to screw some things up. And then I've got eighteen more months to diagnose what happened, make sense of it all, and head back to point #1 above -- my ability to write sentences -- to tie it all together.

So, to conclude this pep talk to myself, here are some mantras for the next three weeks:

1. It's all data. Things that go right, things that go wrong, ever time I set foot on a campus, every newspaper article I come across about English education in China, every photograph I take, every student I talk to, every class I teach, every instant messenger conversation I have with a student or a colleague -- it's not all going to be rigorously analyzed, but it's all a part of the story of this dissertation. Really, the last four years, and the next two also, are part of it -- from the day we got off the plane in Shanghai to the day we moved to Vancouver to the day I arrived in Ningbo, to do the day we touch Canadian soil again in January. My job, what I'm doing right now, is writing a long-ass manuscript about what's going on with English in China, albeit with a particular focus on a certain research project.

2. Sin boldly. I haven't done a project like this before, and this methodology is, for the most part, unique. Nobody else has done it this way, so I get to make it up. The project isn't going to get better if I keep sitting down to do some work on it and I feel so depressed by my lack of progress that I abandon it.

3. Get out. Every day, meet with people, talk to people, email people, interview people. Check in with participants. Politely assert myself when I don't hear back. Get used to explaining it confidently.

4. If there's not enough data this time, it's possible to get more later. Sure, it won't be easy, but making contacts now could possibly lead to more and better help getting more data in the future if it's deemed necessary.

That's it for now.

Some Recent Recommended Academic Articles on English in China

Fong, E. T. Y. (2009). English in China: some thoughts after the Beijing Olympics. English Today 25(1), 44-49.

He, D.  & Li, D. C.S. (2009). Language attitudes and linguistic features in the ‘China English debate. World Englishes 28(1), 70-89.

Henry, E. S. (2010.) Interpretations of “Chinglish”: Native speakers, language learners and the enregisterment of a stigmatized code. Language in Society, 35, 669-688.

Lo Bianco, J. (2009), Being Chinese, Speaking English. In J. Lo Bianco, J. Orton, & Y. Gao  (Eds.), China and English: Globalization and the dilemmas of identity (pp. 200-211). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.  

You, X. (2011), Chinese white-collar workers and multilingual creativity in the diaspora. World Englishes 30, 409–427.

Time to Face Facts: This Study Isn't About "China English"

In fact, it's a reaction to the proliferation of China English studies, when I really think about it.

What influenced me to change this from a "what is China English" study to a "what do people think about English in China" study?

1. The growing consensus that labelling individual varieties of English in the Kachruvian framework is to some extent ideological

2. The notion (promoted by Saraceni) that it's more worthwhile to look at very particular contexts rather than whole "Englishes"

3. The fact that nobody I work with at UBC is academic progeny of any WEs scholars

4. I'm not entirely enthusiastic about what can be revealed by asking people direct questions about "China English"

5. I think that ideology and attitude have important implications for WE theory, but that they don't necessarily have to be attitudes and ideologies directly expressed about a variety.

Most importantly, I think that there isn't enough done to get at people's attitudes and reactions to particular instances of language use and exploring how they make judgments about language from an ideological/social perspective.


I think that's it.

Ruby Pan: Some English is More English than Others

Interpretations of “Chinglish"

One of the smartest papers on language ideology re English in China that I've read. My only beef is the emphasis on "learners" and spoken English when I think it's arguable that it is legit to call some CE speakers legitimate 'users' rather than learners, plus there is a lot more going on than speaking. He notes this, but I'd just like to see a clearer distinction made between "somebody made a funny translation on a sign" and "students make mistakes." These are almost totally conflated in popular culture, media, online, etc. I'm not saying Henry overgeneralizes -- he susses out this phenomenon better than almost anyone else. Here's the abstract:

As a linguistic curiosity, Chinglish has long fascinated native speakers of English, prompting numerous studies that analyze its form with a view towards either eliminating it or accepting it as a viable Standard English variant. In this article, I examine how various social groups involved in foreign language education in China, including Chinese students, foreign teachers and linguists, enregister Chinglish as a linguistic variety. I argue that Chinglish is not distinguished by the presence or absence of any particular linguistic feature, but a label produced in the intersubjective engagements between language learners and native speakers. Chinglish is structured by and reinforces the relations of expertise within the Chinese English language speech community, thus representing larger anxieties about nationalism and modernization in a global context.

Almost Every Conversation I Have with Taxi Drivers in China

The following takes place several times a month:
(translated from the original Chinese)

Driver: where to?
Me: (my destination)
Driver: Your Chinese is really good!
Me: Oh, no, it's not.
Driver: Yeah, it is! How long have you been studying Chinese/been in China?
Me: about 2 years. (Optional long-winded explanation about my career)
Driver: Where are you from?
Me: The US.
Driver: Lengthy monologue about the difference between the US and China in the realm of culture, politics, economy, housing, family relationships, education system, food, or language.
Me: (during monologue) Well-meaning Chinese backchannel sounds (en, ah, oh, etc.)
Driver: (reaching the end of monologue) ... right?
Me: (smiling) Sorry, I can't understand clearly. My Chinese really isn't that good.

[Ideally, we have reached our destination by this point; otherwise, silence for the remainder of the ride.]

Chinese construction of English

I think I've already mentioned several times that many examples of  so-called Chinglish,  usually presented for our educational  enlightenment or entertainment,  don't often seem like Chinglish to me. In some cases, the opposite can happen as well.

 Here's an example that I came across when I was in Beijing last month. In the English newspaper Beijing Today, there's a column which focuses on Chinese English mistakes. People who know me will know that I don't think this is necessarily the greatest use of column inches, but this particular example is interesting.

This column is an amusing story about a middle-aged Chinese man who cannot understand the idiom  “to drive one's pigs to market.”  You know,  that really common idiom that native speakers use all the time. What's that? You don't use it all the time? You've never heard of it?

Indeed. In fact, if you do a Google search for the phrase "drive one's pigs to market" you will pretty much  only find Chinese websites; deeper digging reveals this to be an obscure and long-abandoned reference to snoring.  A blog called “obsolete word of the day” gives an explanation of the phrase as an 18th-century regionalism from England.

As a native speaker, I want to chuckle at what I see as a misguided attempt  to improve language learning and explain a useful idiom.  That's not the only thing that's going on here, however.  The fact that mostly only Chinese English-learning websites use this phrase nowadays  suggests that it has been repurposed; resurrected, even. In the Chinese newspaper, the story of the older man not being familiar with an "English" term is used as  a rhetorical device to almost shame people into studying English.  “I must study English harder," the man says at the end of the article. What was once an obscure metaphor has been given a new life  as a motivational language learning tool.

On the other hand, I pity the poor college student who will someday use this phrase with his host family in England,  only to be met with blank stares.

Academic sports analogy fail

"When an American speaks of not getting to first base (not achieving initial success), the metaphor concerns . . . (a)n equally culture-specific- activity: the game of basketball."

Quirk et al (1972) quoted in Bhatia (1997).

Not sure whether Quirk or Bhatia got it wrong here, but man, did they ever.

English and the "Chinese Way of Thinking" - Really?

Saying that CE is based on the "Chinese way of thinking" is just an argument I can hardly find any sympathy for. Maybe because it hews too close to the "strong form" of linguistic relativity? Maybe because Lin Yutang was a very Chinese dude but he wrote like an American public intellectual? Maybe because I am just not trained to accept arguments that seem to be based on reified ideas about culture and psychology?

Do we see this argument in other expanding circle contexts, or by other NNEST scholars of English in other countries?

Is this a "Chinese exceptionalism" argument?

Is the phrase "Chinese way of thinking" itself "Chinglish?" [See the book to the left (中国人的思维) ]

Note to NESs: Learn to Speak English

"Strangely, many native English speakers still believe they can do all things better than non-native speakers just because they speak better English. How long will it take for them to understand that they are wrong? They have a problem that they are not able to understand. They do not see that many non-native speakers simply cannot understand them. This does not mean the native speaker’s English is bad. It means that their communication is bad; sometimes they do not even attempt to make their communication useful to everyone. Often they don’t know how."

- A reasonable section of the book "Globish the World Over" which is also part missionary tract for a particular version of intercultural communication in English (you're supposed to learn to speak Engish with only 1500 words, and everyone uses the same 1500 words). (While this, like most other attempts to engineer a language, will fail, their point above is very true.)

Further thought: If you can, as a NES, master intercultural communication in this "limited" English, you will pretty much be unstoppable. Linguistic "pwnage" can still be yours. Don't worry.

McKay on variation in written corpora

"Many studies have been undertaken to determine the types of grammatical changes that are occurring in various multilingual contexts in which English plays a significant role (see, e.g., Kachru, 2005).

Frequently, researchers begin by examining a written corpus of English of a particular multilingual context to determine what kinds of grammatical innovations exist and how acceptable these structures are to both native speakers of English and local speakers of English. In general, when investigations of language change use a  written corpus of published English, only very minor grammatical differences are found (see, e.g., Parasher, 1994).

Often the kinds of grammatical changes that occur tend to be minor differences such as variation in what is considered to be a countable noun (e.g., the standard use of luggages in the use of English in the Philippines and the use of furnitures in Nigeria) and the creation of new phrasal verbs (e.g., the use of dismissing off in the use of English in India and discuss about in Nigeria). In contexts in which such features become codified and recognized as standard within that social context there arises what Kachru (1986) has termed a nativized variety of English.

What is perhaps most puzzling in the development of alternate grammatical standards in the use of English is the fact that whereas lexical innovation is often accepted as part of language change, this tolerance is generally not extended to grammatical innovation. In Widdowson’s (1994) view, the reason for this lack of tolerance for grammatical variation is because grammar takes on another value, namely that of expressing a social identity. Hence, when grammatical standards are challenged they challenge the security of the community and institutions that support these standards."

From the Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning

cf:
Kachru, B.B.: 2005, Asian Englishes: Beyond the Cannon, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong.



Widdowson, H.G.: 1994, ‘The ownership of English’, TESOL Quarterly, 28, 377–388.