Dialogue

Dean Harrison believes the old ways aren’t working anymore and calls for a new world English’.

Imagine, for a moment, just a few of the cross-cultural conversations taking place across the globe right now. A Spanish architect steps off the plane in Berlin and greets his new coworkers from an international design firm. In Guangdong, China, a local export agent is on the phone discussing shipping options with an importer based in Greece. At a beach resort in Indonesia, a Russian tourist negotiates a taxi fare for her trip across the island.

All these people share two things in common which will powerfully shape global communication in the years to come. Firstly, there’s a very good chance they are all speaking English. Secondly - and far more significant development as far as language learning is concerned-not a single person involved speaks English as their mother tongue. It is now a global lingua franca.

It all used to be much simpler. English lessons would present a model of native English(typically a prestige dialect, such as ‘BBC English’ or ‘standard American’) and students would do their best to copy its pronunciation features, grammatical structures and so on. The best learners were those who most closely approximat the speech patterns of these dialects, and their hearts would swell with pride anytime they heard the words, ‘Wow! You sound exactly like a native speaker!’

But consider this simple fact illustrated by the examples above: most English communication around the world now occurs between non-native speakers. What importance does an American or British model have for conversations like these? ‘Sounding native’ is not the mark of success here. Rather, the ability to follow a variety of English dialects and make your meaning clear in a range of contexts is now what matters.

Besides, non-native speakers now outnumber native speakers of English 4-to-1. In terms of global communication, native speakers don’t ‘own’this language anymore and they can’t expect everyone else to follow their ways. English learners should be free to develop their own style, mixing features of their first language with features of the new. After all, English now belongs to non-native speakers as much as it belongs to anyone else Soon we will open up to the truly global and democratic English of the 21st century.