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The Pentagon says it’s ‘lethalitymaxxing’. Why has ‘incel’ slang crossed into the mainstream?

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With the rise of influencer Clavicular and ‘looksmaxxers’, sexist language from niche memes has infiltrated official government accounts and NYT headlines

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As an international journalist, my work entails talking to people from different countries all over the world. But the moment I get on a call, I'm inundated with questions like, "Where are you really from?", "How can you write for a US/UK magazine if you don't live here?", "Are you really capable of pulling this off? From your accent, you don't seem experienced in the industry." All because I have an accent that shows hints of my Indian heritage.

Based on my resume and experience, I'm often shortlisted for job opportunities, only to be rejected after the phone interview because they are looking for a "proper" native writer.

Reports from Vice, Al Jazeera and Forbes indicate I'm not alone. Thousands of people are denied work opportunities because their accents don't sound "real enough".

Things have worsened since lockdown. Now that many offices have moved online, companies have a wider pool of candidates that transcends traditional regional boundaries. But with this expansion comes discrimination.

"Foreign language speakers are typically evaluated not on the basis of how far they have come, what they have achieved and how much they are able to do, but by the gap that still separates them from the 'ideal' native," linguist Vivian Cook says.

In a quest to put this lockdown free time to good use, I enrolled in a virtual language exchange programme where language learners from different countries come together to learn from the native speakers. I almost immediately regretted my decision when native speakers refused to work with me because I didn't speak like them. "You have a heavy accent. I'm not sure you can help," a participant told me.

People appear to correlate accent with intelligence and capability. Various scientific studies have proven time and again how people with an accent are seen as "dumb" and incompetent.

Last week, a new brand reached out to me with writing assignments after reading my published work online. Excited to understand their needs better, we hopped on a call where things slid downhill fast. "We loved your work, you sound brilliant on paper," they said. "But your accent gives you away." You are clearly not experienced or skilled enough - they kept telling me polite variations of this sentiment, after praising my work just minutes before.

The compassionate part of me wants to believe this is just a cognitive bias and not everyone is purposely discriminative.

Dr Alice Foucart, a psycholinguistics researcher conducted a study called SocialAccent that revealed possible causes of this discrimination. In her project, she observed how the brain processes information when it is delivered in a foreign accent and found higher levels of activity compared to when it comes from a native speaker.

"It requires extra effort to understand the [non-native speakers]," she said. "The increased levels of activity show difficulties in processing lexical and semantic information. This can trigger negative perceptions." It isn't necessarily because of the person themselves, but because something cognitively is happening, she adds, assuring me my accent doesn't make me wrong.

But my experiences say otherwise: no one has ever complained that they can't understand me - my English is fairly correct, my speech is clear, and meaning comprehensible, so what is it about my accent that puts me at the bottom of the list?

Research shows that "it takes us less than 30 seconds to linguistically profile a speaker and make quick decisions on their ethnic origin, socioeconomic class, and their backgrounds." That's less than half a minute to categorise someone into stereotypical and prejudicial ideas about their country of origin and the socioeconomic class they belong to.

"Why don't you enroll in one of those accent reduction courses?" my friends ask me. "That would solve this discrimination problem." If only spending around $100 an hour was the answer to undoing bias.

But the real question is: why should someone give up their cultural roots to be considered competent? Just because I don't speak like you, doesn't mean I can't work like you.

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Opinion: Just because I don't speak like you, doesn't mean I can't do the job

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No one has ever complained they can't understand me - so what is it about my accent that puts me at the bottom of the list of candidates?

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Ofsted has been dictating what “proper English” is – here’s why that’s a problem - Edge Hill University

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In a new article for The Conversation, Ian Cushing, senior lecturer in English and Education at Edge Hill University, with Julia Snell, Associate Professor of English Language at University of Leeds, explore how schools inspector Ofsted has “policed language in schools”.

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When I recently explained why teaching grammar in primary school still matters, Radio 4's Today programme invited me to debate the importance of standard English. My opponent was Nevile Gwynne, a British private tutor, author and, as presenter Nick Robinson put it, a "stickler for the right sort of grammar".

Robinson asked that I explain my position, which is as follows: standard English should not be presented in the national curriculum as the only correct form, but as what it is, which is the socially most prestigious form. Saying it is the only correct way to speak puts those children who don't speak that way from birth at a disadvantage.

How so? Well, if your teacher tells you that "I was going to the shops" is the only correct way to say it, and if that's how you've always said it, you're going to have an easier time than another child who, at home, has always said, "I were going to the shops", and has to change the way they speak when they get to school.

"Does it really matter," Robinson asked Gwynne, "if I say, 'I were going to the shops'?"

It absolutely does, came Gwynne's reply. "If you say, 'I were', you're just not thinking straight".

This position is as absurd as it is misguided. It implies that the 85% to 88% of the UK population that speak non-standard forms of English, not to mention the many millions of people elsewhere in the world who speak non-standard varieties of English, cannot think clearly.

And that's before you dig into the history of the language. Is that really a claim anyone wants to level against, well, every English speaker before 1400, which is when what we now think of as standard English in Britain first emerged?

The op-eds that have since followed go further in demonstrating the widespread misunderstandings of what standard English is. Here then, a debunking of the five major myths.

1. Grammar and standard English grammar are the same thing

Despite what some would argue, it is not contradictory to advocate for grammar to be taught and for standard English to be presented simply as one variety.

It is just as valid to tell a child that "were" in the non-standard clause "I were" is a verb, as it is to point to "was" in the standard clause "I was". Both observations will help the child learn what a verb is, as opposed to a noun.

Discussing non-standard forms non-judgmentally may also help many children and parents feel less intimidated in and around school. Teachers might explore instances of non-standard conjugation. They might explain, for example, that some speakers in Lancashire use "were" instead of "was", while others actually say "was" instead of "were". The key here is for the teacher not to label Lancashire (or any other variety) as wrong but simply as a different dialect.

2. There is only one standard English

English is a global language. And precisely because of this worldwide spread, there are several, different standard forms, including standard Scottish, Australian and American English.

A New Yorker, for example, who moves to London may well say "gotten" instead of the English Standard English "got". The notion that there is a single, monolithic standard English - be that across the world, in the UK or in England - is a fiction.

Standard English is best characterised as the most prestigious dialect in those countries where it is spoken as a first language. It is highly codified in grammar books and dictionaries and used especially in formal writing.

Unlike regional dialects, it is not tied to a particular part of the country but rather to a segment - the upper segment - of the social scale. Much like other dialects, though, it continues to change.

3. Standard English and Received Pronunciation are the same thing

Standard English is not about speaking in a posh accent. Linguists concur that anyone who speaks in the accent known as received pronunciation (RP) will also use the words and grammar that make up standard English. However, not all speakers of standard English have the same accent.

Of the UK population, only 3% speak in RP, whereas standard English is the home dialect of 12 to 15%. The expressions "I was" and "I were" do not represent variation in terms of accent but between standard and non-standard English.

4. Standard English is the only variety with clear rules

Some critics defend standard English by stating, essentially, that its rules are crucial for people to understand each other. However, non-standard varieties of the English language also have grammatical rules.

I have written about Lancashire speakers who say "I gave it him" rather than "I gave him it" or "I gave it to him". For them, that's a rule. Following it does not lead to a lack of clarity.

In fact, non-standard varieties can provide greater clarity. Take the word "you". English used to differentiate between "thou", to address one person, and "you", for talking to two or more. Modern versions of numerous other languages, including French, Polish and Punjabi, still make this distinction. Standard English, by contrast, only has "you", which is ambiguous. Many non-standard varieties are clearer: they have plural forms such as "yous", "y'all" or "yins".

5. You need Standard English in order to think straight

Elitist and classist, this fifth myth around standard English perfectly encapsulates why treating all dialects non-judgmentally is vital. It is important that it be taught as part of the national curriculum, particularly for use in formal writing. But many educational linguists agree that presenting it as the only correct way - and by extension, telling a child they speak in an incorrect or wrong way - is humiliating. It can discourage them from engaging fully in education. And that can only ever harm both the individuals concerned and society at large.

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Five things people get wrong about standard English

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When I recently explained why teaching grammar in primary school still matters, Radio 4's Today programme invited me to debate the importance of standard English. My opponent was Nevile Gwynne, a British private tutor, author and, as presenter Nick Robinson put it, a "stickler for the right sort of grammar".

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Does the Queen Speak the Queen's English

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If you know what it means to be a "fidlet" going for a "jolly" in your "doo", then you are part of an exclusive club that speaks colloquial Antarctic English.

A New Zealand linguists doctorate graduate from the University of Canterbury has completed a world-first study into colloquial Antarctic English, spoken at the US, British and New Zealand Antarctic research stations.

While there have been previous literary studies into Antartica English vocabulary, Dr Steph Kaefer's study marks the first time a researcher has visited Antarctica to document the unique colloquialisms used in daily life.

Over three weeks in 2019, Kaefer spent time at three English-speaking Antarctic stations observing and gathering data from workers based on what the US station refers to as "The Ice", or the British call the "South".

Initially prompted by a love of the continent, Kaefer was further inspired to investigate Antarctica's vocabulary after reading an academic's article discussing how newcomers to the continent were struck by the distinctive vocabulary.

"Some of it was mundane, talking about the weather conditions, organisation of the community and day-to-day operations, but he did say some of the lexicon was richly figurative," Kaefer said.

Before embarking on her trip, Kaefer expected to find a pan-Antarctic vocabulary, but quickly discovered there were distinct colloquialisms within each station.

Dr Steph Kaefer, the New Zealand doctorate graduate who has studied Antarctica English. Photograph: supplied

Americans, for example, call newcomers to Antarctica "fingies", which comes from FNGs - a borrowed military acronym that means "Fucking New Guy". The British use the term "fidlets", a diminutive of "Fid", which in turn is an acronym for Falkland Island Dependency, the former name of the British station.

A non-work excursion away from the station in US Antarctic English is a "boondoggle", or a "jolly" for the Britons. A snow mobile is "snow machine" for the US workers and a "doo" at the British station. New Zealanders, Kaefer said, tend to adopt colloquialisms from the Americans, due to the closeness of their research stations, but a few original terms stood out.

"Nose wipers" refer to the large protective gloves used in extreme weather conditions, while being "tray'd" refers to the last person to put their dish in the dishwasher after a meal and who now must empty it.

Colloquial words and expressions in Antarctica often borrow from military, navy and mountaineering terms but not exclusively. Sometimes terms are newly created on site, but mostly, they are English words repurposed for the environment or lifestyle.

"For example, the word 'toasted' refers to an individual who is burnt out from serving a winter," Kaefer said.

"So for someone who has just come out of that, you would say 'he's pretty toasted'."

Kaefer said it is difficult to pinpoint exactly how some words came into common use, but Antarctica's isolation likely plays a part into why some words such as "boondoggle" - an old US term that has fallen out of use - may have lingered on.

"It's possible when we started building research stations in the 50s and 60s words like 'boondoggle' might have been common at that time and it became a regular part of speech ... in Antarctic culture it can take on a life of its own."

Antarctica, like outer-space, is known as an ICE environment - isolated, confined and extreme - meaning unlike other isolated communities, the rate of change for its vocabulary can be slower.

"That's a really cool linguistic phenomenon, where [words] get preserved or fossilised in Antarctica because there is not as much backwards and forwards with the language."

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Fidlets, fingies and riding a doo: study sheds light on Antarctic English slang

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Dr Steph Kaefer spent three weeks documenting unique colloquialisms on the frozen continent after newcomers were struck by the distinctive vocabulary

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L'Académie française, institution créée en 1635, est chargée de définir la langue française par l'élaboration de son dictionnaire qui fixe l'usage du français. Rôle de mécénat, remise de prix littéraires. Composée de 40 académiciens

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The centuries-old language watchdog the Académie Française has warned that growing use of English by public and private bodies risks poor communication and could even undermine social cohesion.

A report by six members, published online this week, warns that "today's communication is characterised by a degradation that must not be seen as inevitable".

Over 30 pages, it picks through dozens of messages from public bodies, such as ministries or local authorities, as well as private firms, highlighting examples of bilingual wordplay.

The flagged terms include train operator SNCF's low-cost Ouigo (pronounced "we go") services, or imports from English such as "big data" or "drive-in".

"Many anglicisms are used in place of existing French words or expressions, inevitably leading to the gradual erasure of the French equivalents," said the body, which was founded in 1635 under King Louis XIII to guard "pure" French.

"Aside from fashion and sport, the internet and digital field is unsurprisingly the most strongly and visibly 'anglicised'," the academy said, dubbing tech terms "Californisms".

In one example, it notes that there are at least five possible French translations for the social networking term "follower", a word commonly peppered into everyday French speech.

The Covid-19 pandemic has also resulted in a number of hasty bolt-ons from English like "cluster" and "testing".

English words themselves are "often distorted" to fit French pronunciation or syntax, the academy notes, resulting in "the creation of hybrid forms that are neither English nor French".

Sometimes this can make even fluent speakers stumble - as with carmaker Peugeot's slogan "Unboring the Future" or the concept of a "drive piéton" (a "pedestrian drive-through", or pickup point for products ordered online).

Overuse of English "has the contradictory consequence of risking an impoverishment of French vocabulary and growing discrimination among sections of the public", the academy said.

"By widely using an English vocabulary not understood by much of the public, online services contribute to stoking the defiance that has visibly developed in recent years towards all kinds of authorities."

The Académie Française has become more assertive under permanent secretary, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, about its mission to protect French.

In January, it threatened legal action against the government for including English translations of information fields on national identity cards.

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Académie Française denounces rise of English words in public life

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The centuries-old language watchdog the Académie Française has warned that growing use of English by public and private bodies risks poor communication and could even undermine social cohesion. A report by six members, published online this week, warns that "today's communication is characterised by a degradation that must not be seen as inevitable".

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Key coinages

Cerquiglini delights in showing how apparently quintessentially British vocabulary is in fact French.

Take the English breakfast.

The word "bacon" comes from Old French, meaning ham. Mushroom, known today as " champignon" in French, actually comes from the old Norman word " mousheron". Toast, meanwhile, comes from the old French " tostée ".

Porridge comes from " pottage", meaning "food cooked in a pot" and roast beef comes from the French " rosbif", a mixture of the medieval French verb rostir and the " buef ".

In sport, the French coined tennis, penalty and squash, he insists.

Vintage comes from " vendanges" meaning wine harvest, "cottage" from the old Norman " cotage" meaning rustic little home. Gin, that most British of drinks, comes from old French genevre (juniper). 'Tonic' is Gallic.

Perhaps more logically, the term "sex shop" is of Gallic origin - a cross between the French and Latin word "sexe" and old French "eschoppe", which mixes with the Dutch word schoppe. "Should we be proud?," he asks.

If you insult a Frenchman with the words bastard, brute, coward, cretin, idiot, imbecile, rascal, poltroon, scoundrel and stupid, you are essentially using his own lingo against him.

Coward, for example, comes from the old French term " coard" derived from " coe " (tail), suggesting someone with "their tail between their legs".

A complex relationship

The influence of French over English reflects the varied and complex relationship between the two countries.

Naturally, the rot started in 1066. After the Norman conquest and ensuing colonisation, French became the language of the ruling class. "The Anglo-Saxon people and their language were under the yoke" for two centuries, until a descendant of William could muster enough English to address Parliament.

Germanic words were used for livestock tended by the poor like oxen, sheep and swine or pigs, while noble French words used for the same animals on plates: beef, mutton and pork.

As Cerquiglini puts it, "Without the Normans, English would be a second Dutch language today."

Words of Saxon origin are concrete and linked to experience, while those of French origin are more "abstract and intellectual", he says, comparing, say, "to ask" (Saxon) and "to demand" (French).

In addition, English incorporates Latin as a noble third means of expression, giving rise to "weary" (Saxon), "fatigued" (French), and "exhausted" (Latin).

Even the grammar and syntax of English can be traced to our cross-Channel neighbours. "The word order of 14th-century English, for example, is closer to French than to Old English: just look at Geoffrey Chaucer (14th century) and Beowulf (7th century) side by side."

While French ceased to be a mother tongue after the Hundred Years War, it maintained status as a second language in education, commerce and law.

In that time, it took on a new life and became what he calls "insular French", turning English into a "museum" of Old French expressions and giving rise to many " faux amis " (false friends), expressions that exist on both sides of the Channel but mean subtly different things.

For example "cave", from the Old French word " cave " (meaning cavern) kept its Medieval meaning in English, but morphed to cellar in modern French.

French as an official and common language slowly lost its uses and privileges from the 15th century until the end of the 16th, when English came into universal usage. However, French, he says, remained Europe's most prestigious language and continued to heavily influence English until the 19th century.

Dr Christophe Gagne, a Fellow in French at the University of Cambridge, says the thesis is "provocative" but "valid". However, English has also significantly influenced French vocabulary, he argues.

"There has always been this kind of cultural exchange going on, as the two countries are so close. Sometimes it is not at all obvious to French or English speakers which words come first."

"It is true that French significantly influenced the English lexicon in the mediaeval period, but from the 19th century onwards, we see the English influence in French more, with Anglomanie and then later on in the 20th and 21st century with sport, and technology.

"I noticed it in the 2000s, when I was working as a translator. Anglicisms like digitale and computer were becoming very common in French, but they were certainly frowned upon."

Franglais

Preventing the creeping Anglicisation of French has been a particular obsession of the Académie Francaise since its inception.

France's equivalent of the Commonwealth, " la francophonie " (which unites France with its former colonies) is the only international political organisation based on a language.

"The problem is that intervention is a French tradition. We've been interfering with language since time immemorial, and it's what the French expect," says Cerquiglini.

"The Académie Française has a ridiculous uniform, granted, but it's a state institution with a unique status and receives bags of mail every day from people imploring it to act against bad spelling and creeping English.

"Our ties are above all through the French language, it's what unites us politically."

In 2022, the Académie published a doom-laden report warning that the invasion of " franglais" in public life risked fuelling social unrest. "We are at a crossroads. There will come a time when things become irreversible," warned its late president Hélène Carrère d'Encausse.

For the first time in almost five centuries, it threatened to take the government to France's supreme administrative court unless it removed English words like "surname" from the country's new biometric identity cards.

A French court recently ordered an airport in eastern France to change its name from Lorraine Airport to Lorraine Aéroport after complaints it infringed laws on using English and was an insulting example of "anglo-mania".

Even Macron has been slated for speaking franglais - with language purists criticising the President for peppering his speech with too many Anglicisms.

Rather than taking such a defensive position against English, says Gagne, this linguistic mélange can open up the benefits of English culture to the French.

"This process obviously does happen, and it is very natural. You can't stop English words from being borrowed and assimilated into the language."

On a personal and professional level, he says, speaking English has allowed him to enjoy the benefits of English culture.

"It is hard to separate English from English speakers. Politeness and a sense of being indirect seems to be very closely linked to English, I have found. It seems to me that the language works well with understatement, and euphemism, and developing humour through this, which is nice. There is a softness in English, especially British English, that you don't find in French.

"The ability to make puns, as well as more subtle humour, is a fascinating part of the English language. Although I will add that in medical affairs, I would prefer to have a French doctor who can just say what is wrong with you directly."

Cerquiglini, too, offers praise for English as a language of assimilation. "English has no problem adopting foreign words, whether they be Chinese or Viking. It's flexible. French has a harder time of it because it has always been a state language where a foreign word is almost viewed as the enemy."

That said, Cerquiglini has no problem with anglicisms if well-used. "Purists who denounce an Anglo-Saxon lexical invasion are mistaken. From our perspective, the current anglicisation is an internal mutation of the French language: anglicisms are neologisms of French."

However, he draws the line at dumbed-down " globish ".

"Global English is deliberately basic, utilitarian jargon with impoverished syntax and a minimal lexicon. In this unfortunate " desperanto ", French speakers recognise nothing of their language; they have every reason to refuse to use it," he sniffs.

But it is as much a problem for Britain as France, he warns.

"It's bad for French but it's bad for English whose richness is disappearing. It's an impoverishment."

On the 120th anniversary year of Entente Cordiale, he suggests that King Charles set up a "British Academy" on the Académie Française blueprint to "defend British English".

"I know that Charles is worried about the impoverishment of international English. Paradoxically, we have to defend each other."

Above all, he says, he hopes mother-tongue English-speakers will not take offence at his claims.

"I really mean to say the French have helped enrich English and say so using British-style humour with a stiff upper lip. I hope I have succeeded."

English words you didn't know were French

Butler (bouteiller/sommelier)

Although the tales of Jeeves and his butler Wooster may appear to be as English as they come, the origins of this role derive from the Norman aristocracy. A bouteiller, from the word bouteille, or "bottle", was a Crown official nominally in charge of the stewardship of wine, a position of high rank. Over the centuries, the word expanded in English to signify the chief male servant in a household.

Cabbage (caboche/chou)

The humble cabbage, documented as a part of European cuisine since antiquity, takes its name from Ancient French " caboche", likely derived from the Latin " caput", or " head". Its English meaning comes from a metaphor - an observation by an unknown group that the vegetable looks like a head. Although French did not retain the word caboche ("cabbage" in French is now chou), the modern word cabochard, or stubborn, comes from a Norman usage of the word to mean an obstinate personality. It also came to mean a shaped gemstone (with the oval appearance of a head) in modern French. "The English cabbage and the French gemstone are therefore cousins", notes Cerquiglini.

Porridge (potage)

While this thick oat and water mix may be more closely associated with a hearty Scottish breakfast, its etymological ancestor is the Old French word pottage, "food cooked in a pot". The Old English form, " porredge" suggests a cross with porée (leek soup), according to Cerquiglini. Our contemporary usage - porridge - was borrowed again from the French in the 19th century.

Caterpillar (cateplus/chenille)

"Hairy cat" is the unlikely translation of the modern English word caterpillar, which has wriggled its way from the old North French cateplus, or chatte pelue, from the Latin catta pilosa. By contrast, its modern French equivalent - chenille - comes from the Latin word canicula, "small dog".

Ranch (rangier/rancharse/ferme d'élevage aux États-Unis)

Conjuring up rowdy visions of cowboys, lassoes, and sheriffs, the American ranch is a world away from mediaeval France. And yet the word comes from the Frankish " hring", meaning a "ring" or "assembly of people". From this developed the old French verb rangier, "to lodge". The Spanish noun " rancho", an idiomatic term indicating housing for soldiers and farm workers, came into contemporary usage via the Provençal word " rancharse", before being imported in 1831 to Texan English in the form "ranch". It was then borrowed by the French in 1860, to designate a luxurious country residence.

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'English is not a language - it's just badly spoken French'

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English might be the most spoken language in the world, but as a new book claims, it owes a startling amount to its Gallic origins

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How do you pronounce bath? Or what about scone?

Yet academics Dr Ian Cushing, a senior lecturer in English and education at Edge Hill University, and Dr Julia Snell, associate professor of English language at the University of Leeds say this is what has been happening in school inspections for almost 200 years in a new research paper withthe provocative title The (white) ears of Ofsted: a raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate .

The research, published in the journal Language in Society, is based on a major data trawl by Cushing and Snell from 1839 right up until 2021.

What they found shocked themWe kept rubbing our eyes looking at the data and thinking, 'Is this is actually happening?'" Cushing tells Tes.

For example, an 1867 HMI report stated that "many of the children are illiterate in regard to patterns of speech", while an 1899 report said that "much needs to be done to cultivate the pronunciation of boys and to highlight deficiencies in speech".

Changing times, same attitudes

Even more surprising again, though, was that this sort of view continued well into modern times.

Then as recently as 2021 the authors cited a report that said "misconceptions" arise "when pupils use non-standard forms of grammar in their speaking and writing in lessons".

Opening doors or enforcing social standards?

It could be argued that an insistence on a certain type of spoken English within the domain of school is exactly what the inspectorate should be promoting. After all, doesn't having the ability to speak in a certain way open up new opportunities in students' futures that would be closed off if they could not speak in the manner required to access certain jobs or institutions?

Answer came there none...

For Cushing, this is an area of the research that he found particularly troubling. "It's important to remember that the presence of non-standard English or accent or dialect has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of pedagogy that a teacher is [delivering]," he says.

Tes contacted Ofsted for its response to the research paper but it declined to comment.

Get the biggest education stories of the week delivered straight to your inbox every Friday with the Tes magazine newsletter. Simply log in or create a free Tes profile, then visit your preference centre and check the 'magazine newsletter' option

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How Ofsted polices your language on inspections

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How do you pronounce bath? Or what about scone? Yet academics Dr Ian Cushing, a senior lecturer in English and education at Edge Hill University, and Dr Julia Snell, associate professor of English language at the University of Leeds say this is what has been happening in school inspections for almost 200 years in a new research paper withthe provocative title The (white) ears of Ofsted: a raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate .

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England has had a schools inspectorate since 1839, first in the form of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Schools and, since 1992, in the form of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills ( Ofsted). Our recently published research examines how the inspectorate has policed language in schools, enforcing a particular idea of "correct" spoken English on teachers and children.

We investigated judgments made about the speech of teachers and young people in inspection reports for primary and secondary schools, looking at both historical reports, dating from 1839 to 1993, and contemporary ones, from 2000 to the present.

From a random sample of 3,000 reports out of a total of 102,000, we found that language policing is a normalised part of the inspectorate's work, especially for social groups who are marginalised in terms of race and class.

'Proper' English

Judgments about language are shaped by beliefs about what counts as "good", "standard" or "proper" language, and which social groups speak in "better" or "worse" ways. Educational linguists have long shown that judgments about what is "good" English are based on the language practices of the white middle classes.

These ideas are embedded in schools. They perpetuate the belief that what is "correct" is the language used by the most powerful members of society.

The relationship between language, schools, status and whiteness is especially important when considering that the majority of Ofsted inspectors are white and economically privileged.

According to their latest figures, around 89% of Ofsted inspectors are white (this is slightly higher than the 86% of the population of England and Wales that is white). Inspectors earn an annual salary of around £70,000. As such, their judgments about language are made through ears which reflect this privileged position within society.

Our historical data showed that negative judgments about speech have been a part of the inspectorate's work since its formation. In a report from 1867, inspectors wrote that "many of the children are illiterate in regard to patterns of speech". An 1899 report stated that "much needs to be done to cultivate the pronunciation of boys and to highlight deficiencies in speech".

These same ideologies are found in Ofsted's recent work. Our searches revealed a huge number of reports where the inspectorate criticise teachers and pupils for speaking in "non-standard English", while offering praise to schools where "non-standard" dialects and accents have been banned.

Banned words

A 2018 report of a school described how "some teachers model incorrect grammar in their spoken English", whilst a 2016 report noted how "adults use slang". A 2013 report highlighted that "in the best lessons, teachers reference the need for standard English and students are provided with a list of banned words ".

In a 2019 report, Ofsted criticised a school on the grounds that:

Some adults have weak spoken standard English and grammar [...] Too many staff make errors in their standard spoken English when they teach. In some cases, this means that they model bad habits or teach incorrect grammar. Leaders should make sure that all staff, when they teach, use correct standard English. Leaders need to ensure consistency to avoid confusing the children. Staff need to do more to correct pupils' poor language or vocabulary.

The most hostile comments about language were made in relation to schools serving children from ethnic minority and low income backgrounds. A 2003 report of a school in Birmingham criticised how there was a "significant proportion of children who do not know or use standard English" and "insufficient follow-up to brief, grammatically incorrect or otherwise imperfect spoken responses".

A 2000 report of a school in one of the most economically deprived areas of Manchester and serving a majority Black Caribbean community drew links between low academic ability and the presence of classed and racialised language, in a clear example of accent-based discrimination:

By the age of eleven, many pupils have fallen behind, and are not achieving satisfactorily, particularly the boys. The more able pupils are mainly speaking standard English in school, with sound pronunciation and good sense. A few pupils lack clarity in their speech which results in some confusion in the way they say "t" and "th", as "d" or "f".

Inspecting the inspectorate

A focus on "standard English" is justified by Ofsted as a means of giving pupils access to academic success and employment opportunities. However, when pupils are made to feel self-conscious about their language, they may become reluctant to participate in classroom discussion, missing out on important opportunities to refine their thinking through dialogue.

Insisting that speakers of "non-standard" language modify their speech towards an idealised standard will only ever make inequalities worse. This approach requires that marginalised speakers abandon their own language and conform to white middle-class norms. In short, it keeps the powerful in power whilst maintaining social hierarchies built on race and class.

Our research exposes structural and institutionalised discrimination against low-income and racialised communities within the inspectorate's work. We suggest that Ofsted needs to change the way it listens, rather than asking young people and teachers to change the way they speak.

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Ofsted has been dictating what "proper English" is - here's why that's a problem

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The schools inspectorate's policies about language are harmful to the most marginalised members of society.

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Much needs to be done to cultivate the pronunciation of boys and to highlight deficiencies in speech. (Board of Education 1899:4)

Some adults have weak spoken standard English and grammar. ... Too many staff make errors in their standard spoken English when they teach. In some cases, this means that they model bad habits or teach incorrect grammar. Leaders should make sure that all staff, when they teach, use correct standard English. Leaders need to ensure consistency to avoid confusing the children. Staff need to do more to correct pupils' poor language or vocabulary. (Ofsted 2019a:3)

THE (WHITE) EARS OF OFSTED

This article shows how the schools inspectorate has played a historical role as institutional language police in England, in how it listens out for what it perceives to be linguistic deficiencies as part of its routine inspections of schools. Formed in 1839 as Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI) and then in 1992 becoming the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted), we show how the inspectorate has consistently identified the spoken language practices of students and teachers as a problem, as illustrated in the two extracts from school inspection reports above. Drawing on inspectorate policy, historical reports from archival work, and a corpus of contemporary reports, our analysis relocates the problem within the listening practices of the inspectorate, as a representative of the state who listen, perceive and judge. These auditory judgements are made through predominantly white, privileged ears-according to the latest available data, 92% of Ofsted inspectors are white (Ofsted 2020) and earn an annual salary of around £70,000. This is the lowest percentage of white inspectors since records became publicly available. We consider the whiteness of the inspectorate to intersect closely with social class, as an arrangement of institutional power which shapes the transformation of ideologies into language policing.

We focus on how the inspectorate police the speech of teachers and students, especially in its aural judgements of how closely classroom talk is perceived to resemble 'Standard English'. We conceptualise 'Standard English' (and related phrases such as 'correct grammar') as a colonial and social construct which is designed by and based on the language of the powerful white bourgeoisie (e.g. Heller & McElhinny Reference Heller and McElhinny2017) and as a product of two interconnected ideologies: the standard language ideology (e.g. Milroy Reference Milroy2001) and raciolinguistic ideologies (e.g. Flores & Rosa Reference Flores and Rosa2015). Appropriately for this article then, the majority white ears of the inspectorate are critiqued by adopting a raciolinguistic perspective (Rosa & Flores Reference Rosa and Flores2017a), placing attention on the white listening subject and examining the role that language plays in maintaining racial and class hierarchies as part of the ongoing legacies of British colonialism.

Our analysis is part of a broader critique of the inspectorate's practices, which shows how they have long held political and ideological influence on the activities of schools (e.g. Gallagher Reference Gallagher2010; Perryman, Maguire, Braun, & Ball Reference Perryman, Maguire, Braun and Ball2018; Nightingale Reference Nightingale2020). We draw on research within the sociology of education which conceptualises the inspectorate as a technology of vertical surveillance (Page Reference Page2017). This surveillance activity includes the routine inspection of schools (in terms of lesson observations, interviews with students, and data harvesting) but also in terms of schools being 'inspectorate ready': a kind of pre-emptive self-surveillance partly driven by fear of the state and the acute consequences of receiving a 'satisfactory' or 'inadequate' grading. We focus on how the inspectorate operate as a technology of sonic surveillance, in terms of how it hears, reports on, and polices speech during inspection activities. Our analysis takes the inspectorate to be a state listening subject (Pak Reference Pak2021), defined as a 'host of state-representative actors that listen, perceive, and rearticulate on behalf of the larger state'. From this position, our critique is not concerned with the listening practices of individual inspectors, but of how language policing is historically and institutionally embedded within the inspectorate's practice, and how classed and racialised judgements about language are part of its organisational architecture.

The following section develops these theoretical stances, arguing that whilst it is generally accepted that the standard language ideology is a classed concept in England, this also needs to be understood through the prism of race. We suggest that a raciolinguistic perspective offers a suitable framework to do so. We then outline our methodological approach, describing how a raciolinguistic genealogy (Flores Reference Flores2021) allows us to explore how standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies sit at the foundation of the inspectorate and continue to shape its contemporary work. Our data is in the form of historical inspection reports from the mid-1800s onwards, a large corpus of contemporary post-2000 inspection reports, and a cluster of key inspectorate policy documents. Our analysis attends to traces of racialised and classed language policing in this data, where we show how both students and teachers are subject to sonic surveillance at the ears of the inspectorate. Ultimately, our argument is that through a raciolinguistic perspective, we can understand the inspectorate's language policing as an intersectional classed and racialised practice which stigmatises bodies whose speech is heard to deviate from standardised English.

STANDARD LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY, CLASS, AND RACIOLINGUISTICS

Language ideologies are a 'set of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalisation or justification of perceived language structure and use' (Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Clyne, Hanks and Hofbauer1979:193; see also Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine and Gal2000). These ideologies are institutionally enshrined, especially in spaces marked by imbalances in power, such as schools. One of the most pervasive language ideologies is the standard language ideology, whereby speakers and hearers come to believe in the existence of a 'standard' language that is 'drawn primarily from the spoken language of the upper middle class' and idealised as the sole 'correct' way of speaking' (J. Milroy Reference Milroy, Bex and Watts1999; Crowley Reference Crowley2003; Lippi-Green Reference Lippi-Green2012:67). Within England, the association between 'standard' language, class, and correctness can be traced back to the nineteenth century, which, importantly for this article, coincided with the creation of the inspectorate. It was here that the term 'standard' took on a new meaning, 'signifying a level of excellence to be reached and a quality to be emulated' within speech (Crowley Reference Crowley2003:112). This spoken 'standard' was defined in relation to the characteristics of a privileged group of speakers-the highest classes in London and those who attended prestigious public schools-and was thus 'iconized' (in Irvine & Gal's Reference Irvine and Gal2000 terms) as emblematic of educatedness, civility, and superior moral character (Crowley Reference Crowley2003:117; see also Bailey Reference Bailey1997; L. Milroy Reference Milroy, Bex and Watts1999). Consequently, regional dialects were stigmatised as ignorant, sloppy, and impure through their association with lower class speakers. These ideologies were held not just by privileged groups in society but also by marginalised groups, who could be coerced into accepting the norms of the powerful and regulating their own behaviour accordingly.

Awareness of class-based linguistic differences developed apace in the twentieth century, fueled by hostile class relations (L. Milroy Reference Milroy, Bex and Watts1999:188; Crowley Reference Crowley2003), and class stereotypes continue to dominate linguistic evaluations in the UK today, including in educational policy and practice (Mac Ruairc Reference Mac Ruairc2011; Grainger Reference Grainger2013; Snell Reference Snell2013, Reference Snell, Snell, Copland and Shaw2015; Lampropoulou & Cooper Reference Lampropoulou and Cooper2021). Lesley Milroy compares this with the US, where the standard language ideology has focused on divisions of race rather than class (e.g. Bonfiglio Reference Bonfiglio2002), with African American Vernacular English being 'the most stigmatised linguistic code of all' (L. Milroy Reference Milroy, Bex and Watts1999:196). US scholars such as Alim & Smitherman ( Reference Alim and Smitherman2012) and Baker-Bell ( Reference Baker-Bell2020) use the term 'White Mainstream English' rather than standardised English to foreground 'how white ways of speaking become the invisible-or better, inaudible-norm' (Baker-Bell Reference Baker-Bell2020:3). Their work within the area of raciolinguistics has shown how the language of racially minoritised speakers in schools is routinely stigmatised for failing to adhere to this white 'norm' (e.g. Smitherman Reference Smitherman2017; Rosa Reference Rosa2018; Baker-Bell Reference Baker-Bell2020). Moreover, these speakers continue to be stigmatised even when using language that would be considered 'standard' when produced by privileged white speakers (Alim Reference Alim2007; Flores & Rosa Reference Flores and Rosa2015:150). Flores & Rosa ( Reference Flores and Rosa2015:150) explain this phenomenon through a theory of racialised language perception, in which raciolinguistic ideologies position racialised bodies as linguistically deficient unrelated to any objective linguistic practice. As with the standard language ideology, they situate raciolinguistic ideologies within the broader history of European colonialism, where racialised speakers were discursively constructed as biologically and linguistically inferior to the European bourgeois subject as part of nation state/colonial governmentality (Rosa & Flores Reference Rosa and Flores2017a:623). They argue that the ongoing significance of colonial distinctions between Europeanness and non-Europeanness-and by extension whiteness and nonwhiteness-makes race 'a crucial, indeed global, category of analysis' (2017a:635), and call for greater attention to 'raciolinguistic patterns and particularities... across the modern world' (2017a:622).

Little attention has been given to race in discussions of the standard language ideology within education in the UK context. We look to address this by incorporating a raciolinguistic perspective into our critique of the inspectorate, treating race and class as intersectional axes of discrimination. Virdee ( Reference Virdee2014:8) traces the consolidation of working-class racism to the 1830s and 1840s (with the formation of the schools inspectorate in 1839), as a structuring force in which race was 'constitutive in the making, unmaking and remaking of the working class in England' and in the economic exploitation produced by global capitalism. In the words of Stuart Hall and colleagues, race is 'the modality in which class is lived ... the medium in which class relations are experienced' (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts Reference Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts1978:394). Interrogating this tripartite co-naturalisation of language, race, and class is key to the raciolinguistic perspective we take in this article, and how racialised bodies are affected by the 'interlocking systems and structures of linguicism, racism, and classism, which are interrelated and continuously shaping one another' (Baker-Bell Reference Baker-Bell2020:16). We therefore treat standardised English as a racialised as well as a classed concept, one that 'plays a powerful role in maintaining white hegemony' through its association with whiteness and colonial power (Von Esch, Motha, & Kubota Reference Von Esch, Motha and Kubota2020:397; see also Pennycook Reference Pennycook1998; Chow Reference Chow2014), and consider the inspectorate to be a state sanctioned tool of enshrining oppressive language ideologies in schools.

INSPECTING THE INSPECTORATE: TRACING INSTITUTIONAL LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES

We interrogate the listening practices of the inspectorate through a raciolinguistic genealogy (Flores Reference Flores2021), as a way of exploring the ongoing colonial logics of standardised English and how the present is shaped by the past. Flores proposes a raciolinguistic genealogy as a method which 'situates contemporary language ideologies and the policies that they work to create within the broader colonial histories that have sorted populations into those deemed fully human (white) and those deemed not fully human (racialized)' (2021:112). There are three guiding principles to this method. The first, a genealogical stance, rejects a simple chronology in favour of 'examining the grid of intelligibility that produces normative subject positions, or ways of being in the world, to which all are expected to aspire' (2021:113). Grids of intelligibility (Foucault Reference Foucault1978) describe how language produces conditions in which certain bodies and ways of talking are de/legitimised and how social stratification is both constructed by and through language. The second, a materialist framing, is concerned with locating discourses of language standardisation within broader sociopolitical and economic networks of power, highlighting the role of racial capitalism, Western colonialism, and the exploitation of marginalised communities by white supremacy. The third, a raciolinguistic perspective, places a focus on language ideologies which have 'co-constructed language and race in ways that position racialized populations as inferior to the normative white subject' and 'seeks to denaturalize these raciolinguistic ideologies in the hope of developing spaces of resistance that produce a new grid of intelligibility' (Flores Reference Flores2021:114). Through a raciolinguistic genealogy which focuses on the listening practices of the inspectorate then, we can trace its role in the construction of governable subjects and the maintenance of white linguistic supremacy in terms of the language ideologies it (re)produces.

Given that genealogies are concerned with how contemporary policies embody continuities with the past, this article draws on a range of data spanning multiple decades. 'Historical' data were generated from archival work at the National Archives in London, which hold elementary and primary school inspectorate reports (1839-1993), secondary school inspectorate reports (1850-1993), and reports from teacher education colleges (1907-1959). We read through approximately 350 reports from the archives, focusing on sections concerned with spoken language and looking for textual traces of language ideologies. 'Contemporary' data were generated through the construction of a corpus of post-2000 Ofsted primary and secondary school inspection reports, which are available on Ofsted's website. We hired a computer programmer to scrape all primary and secondary reports from the Ofsted website, resulting in a corpus of 102,592 reports. Due to the huge size of this corpus, a subcorpus was created by randomly selecting 3,000 reports to make the data manageable for the purposes of this particular article. Future research using the entire corpus is planned. All reports from the subcorpus were imported into the LancsBox software, allowing us to excavate embedded language ideologies using tools such as word searches and collocation patterns (see Vessey Reference Vessey2017). These searches sought to identify the textual traces of language policing by locating clusters of words and phrases deemed to be representative of judgements about language, including where these exhibited similarities with patterns found in the archive data. We focused on metalinguistic tokens such as 'non/Standard English', 'errors', 'accent', 'in/correct grammar', and 'full sentences', as well as how words denoting speech were modified, such as 'speak[ing] clearly', 'appropriate speech', 'accurate speech', and 'talk un/grammatically'. We also collected key Ofsted policy documents, including guidance for inspectors, research reports, and subject reviews.

Finally, after publicly raising some of our concerns about Ofsted's language ideologies on social media, we had two private meetings with Ofsted representatives. The ethics granted for this research do not extend to describing the content of these meetings, but we can confirm that we as researchers decided not to continue our engagement with Ofsted due to what we felt was-and appropriately given the topic of this article-its institutional inability to listen.

THE FOUNDATIONAL LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES OF THE INSPECTORATE

England has had a schools inspectorate of some sort since 1839. Dunford ( Reference Dunford1998) traces the gradual growth of HMI in its first 100 years, noting the privileged positions of its inspectors: male, white, middle-upper class, and representatives of the church. HMI existed until its absorption into the newly created Ofsted under John Major's Conservative government in 1992. Major's ideologies about education were grounded in white epistemologies and 'colour-blind' language policies (see Gillborn Reference Gillborn2005), in which he regularly belittled so-called 'progressive' views on language, class, gender, and race as the antithesis to educational development.

When it comes to education, my critics say I'm 'old fashioned'. Old fashioned? Reading and writing? Old fashioned? Spelling and sums? Great literature-and standard English grammar? ... Well, if I'm old-fashioned, so be it. ... I also want reform of teacher training. Let us return to basic subject teaching, not course in the theory of education. Primary teachers should learn to teach children how to read, not waste their time on the politics of race, gender and class. (Major Reference Major1992)

Ofsted have attracted criticism for pressuring schools into enacting certain policies and pedagogies (e.g. Cullingford Reference Cullingford1999) and for working as a surveillance mechanism of the state (Page Reference Page2017), but the inspection of spoken language has received little attention beyond Mugglestone ( Reference Mugglestone2003), Cushing ( Reference Cushing2022), and Cushing & Snell ( Reference Cushing, Snell, Beal, Lukač and Straaijer2023). According to Mugglestone, it is likely that HMI's cohort of inspectors, who were generally educated at institutions reserved for the white middle-classes (e.g. public schools and then Oxford or Cambridge), would have internalised listening practices that favoured 'standard' speech. She describes how inspectors recommended John Walker's highly prescriptive Reference Walker1791 Critical Pronouncing Dictionary to schools, and how they made use of manuals such as Daniel Fearon's Reference Fearon1876 School Inspection, which instructs inspectors to listen out for 'provincialisms' and recommends that teacher education courses eradicate regional variations of speech before teachers are allowed into classrooms. Mugglestone notes the social class bias in inspectors' judgements of apparent deficiencies in the language practices of children, for instance: 'the great fault in the lower classes is want of real correctness, good articulation, and mastery of the pronunciation' ( Reference Mugglestone2003:251); 'a master should ... take pains to correct their incorrect pronunciation' ( Reference Mugglestone2003:243).

We argue that the inspectorate's early work must also be understood in terms of race and racialisation. This is especially so given that the early to mid-1800s was a period marked by aggressive British colonial expansion and racial stratification, as well as a growth in technologies of linguistic standardisation, such as dictionaries, grammars, and elocution manuals, with the concretisation of ideologies pertaining to the idealised native speaker (e.g. Hackert Reference Hackert2012; Stoever Reference Stoever2016; Heller & McElhinny Reference Heller and McElhinny2017). Four years prior to the formation of the inspectorate, Thomas Macaulay's 1835 Minute on Education had grounded raciolinguistic ideologies in British colonial education policies, and in 1854, the British expanded the role of the schools inspectorate to various colonised territories, as a broader mechanism of its colonial education strategies which continue to resonate today (see Fletcher Reference Fletcher1982; Proctor Reference Proctor2014).

Data generated from historical reports through our archival work shows that language policing was a foundational feature of the inspectorate's practice. This work revealed an overwhelming number of evaluative judgements about speech. In the examples we list below and in the remainder of this article, we include the year of the inspection report in parentheses. Inspectors praised schools for paying attention to 'impressive habits of pronunciation' (1864) and 'appropriate articulation' (1910), but criticised schools where it was deemed they were failing to pay due attention to deviant speech, as the following extracts show: 'many of the children are illiterate in regard to patterns of speech' (1867); 'the less able children show particular weaknesses in speaking and proper articulation' (1947); 'the speech of many children is of insufficient worth' (1949); 'much remains to be done in the cultivation of pleasing intonation and clear speech' (1950); and 'the children do not speak easily and quite a number are inarticulate but these deficiencies are recognised' (1951). A 1920 report described students' speech as being 'weak', 'ill-constructed', and 'ungrammatical', deploying discourses of poverty and ignorance.

With the exception of two or three of the senior pupils ... far too general weakness was shown in the pupils' command of their own spoken language which is ... ill-constructed and often ungrammatical, and further there is evidence of poverty of vocabulary and ignorance of the meaning of words used. (1920)

These discourses of verbal deprivation also extended to teacher education programmes, such as in a 1931 report of Dudley Training College which described teachers' speech as 'not always clear or elegant' and 'portraying a regrettable poverty of background'. In Extracts from the Reports of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools (Privy Council Committee on Education 1852), teachers are described as having 'little knowledge of language, except under its colloquial forms' with students' speech being described as 'slovenly' and 'incomprehensible'.

Post WWI, state-produced manifestos such as the Newbolt Report (Board of Education 1921) framed standardised English as a tool for rebuilding national unity. Here, contributions from the HMI's Divisional Inspector for London were geared around 'undesirable' and 'vulgar' speech, illustrating the same deficit-orientated listening practices which characterised the inspectorate's foundational work of the 1800s.

they have gone some way towards getting rid of undesirable forms of London speech. ... It is lamentable, in a great number of schools, to hear the children habitually mispronouncing words, or mumbling rather than pronouncing them, while their teachers, who may show great concern at inaccuracies where the written word is concerned, seem to accept a pitiably low standard of speech as a thing which must be taken for granted, and scarcely calls for comment. It is emphatically the business of the Elementary School to teach all its pupils who either speak a definite dialect or whose speech is disfigured by vulgarisms, to speak standard English, and to speak it clearly, and with expression. (Board of Education 1921:65)

As racial and linguistic heterogeneity in England's schools grew in the decades following WWII amidst the contexts of mass im/migration, so too did the inspectorate's concerns around the maintenance of a standardised language (see Department of Education and Science 1965). These anxieties were reflective of white, post-war attitudes to the speech of racialised communities in society more broadly. For instance, Fryer ( Reference Fryer2018:280) describes white visual and audible perceptions of West Indian migrants to England in the 1950s, which framed them as linguistically and biologically inferior.

They saw them as heathens who practised head-hunting, cannibalism, infanticide, polygamy, and 'black magic'. They saw them as uncivilized, backward people, inherently inferior to Europeans, living in primitive mud huts 'in the bush', wearing few clothes, eating strange foods, and suffering from unpleasant diseases. They saw them as ignorant and illiterate, speaking strange languages, and lacking proper education. (Fryer Reference Fryer2018:380)

Modes of perception shaped by prescriptive ideologies are further evidenced by two major HMI surveys of primary and secondary schools in 1978 and 1979 respectively (Department of Education and Science 1978, 1979). Department of Education and Science ( 1978) makes no explicit reference to 'Standard English', but frames 'desirable' speech with a cluster of labels which construct an idealised speaker-'precision', 'accuracy', 'competence', 'clarity', and 'fluency'-positioning teachers as language police who have a licence to make subjective judgements on audible language 'quality'. Department of Education and Science ( 1979) is more explicit in how teachers should police their students' language, praising schools where standardised English is normalised and describing how 'the best' teachers would lead their pupils to a 'surer command of language itself'.

Most of the language of classroom talk and of textbooks was in standard English, and it was a part of the concern of teachers to help pupils to acquire this form of English through talking as well as through the related activities of reading and writing. The best teachers were sensitive to differences in language and led their pupils discreetly and by a variety of means towards a wider range of language use and a surer command of language itself. (Department of Education and Science 1979:99)

It is not fully clear what 'sensitive to differences in language' refers to here, but given how standardised English is equated with having a 'command' over language, the implications are that these 'differences' are references to racial and class heterogeneity, which requires homogenising and erasing by teachers via a 'variety of means'. As well as constructing ideologies of a uniform and empirically audible standardised English, the 1979 Department of Education and Science document continues to criticise teachers who had 'adopted features of the language of pupils' and the 'superficial' nature of this, whilst commending a 'posh' talking teacher who was 'anxious to maintain linguistic standards' (1979:99).

These HMI surveys were published between the Bullock Report (Department of Education and Science 1975) and the Rampton Report (Department of Education and Science 1981), both of which argued that a child's home language practices should be accorded value in school (although we reject 'home' and 'school' as a dichotomy), whilst acknowledging how institutional racism leads to Black children's underachievement. Between 1984-1989 and framing the introduction of the first nationally imposed curriculum in 1988, HMI published a series of seventeen booklets under the heading 'Curriculum matters'. One of these, English from 5 to 16, includes a lengthy passage on 'Standard English', which includes the assertion that it 'must be central to the work of all English teachers', and not to do so would be to 'deny some of their rights as citizens' (Department of Education and Science 1984:36). In the same document, HMI also claimed that no accent is 'inherently superior to any other' and that children's home language practices should not be criticised, belittled or proscribed' (1984:15). However, this is negated not just in our own discussion of HMI reports so far, but in the same document by HMI themselves, in their claim that 'pupils should learn to speak clearly and intelligibly; and if their accent is difficult for those outside their speech community to understand, they should be able to modify it when necessary' (1984:15). HMI again locate the problem within the speaker and require them to modify their language, whereas a raciolinguistic perspective suggests that the problem is located within the inability of the white listening subject to hear minoritised bodies speaking appropriately (Rosa & Flores Reference Rosa, Flores, Paris and Alim2017b:284). We continue our discussion of these ideologies in the following section, where we turn our attention to post-2010 education policies.

POST-2010 SONIC SURVEILLANCE

As the coalition Conservative-Liberal Democrat government came to power in 2010 and continued a programme of standards-based reforms designed by the previous Labour government, this brought about significant changes in curricula and assessment systems in schools. Here we show how this period has also marked a continuation of Ofsted's role as institutional language police. The 2010 White Paper The Importance of Teaching set the agenda for the language ideologies espoused by the new government, in which 'correct grammar' (as a proxy for 'Standard English') was foregrounded, tied up with a discourse of 'competing for jobs' and 'communicating precisely' (Department of Education 2010:49), constructing students as 'workers' and governable subjects whilst perpetuating the meritocratic ideology that economic privilege relies on a capacity to use standardised language. The new government explicitly instructed Ofsted to police speech in its inspections, with a 2011 training document describing how 'inspectors might expect to see a more formal approach to correcting basic errors extended to pupils' speech' (Ofsted 2011a:33). There was no overt mention of 'Standard English' or oral corrections in the 2013 inspection framework (Ofsed 2013a), and so the policing of language was not part of its de jure remit during the lifespan of this policy, but was nevertheless still enacted by inspectors and used as a factor in judging schools, which we return to in the sections that follow. Between 2011-2021, Ofsted published six reports under the label of 'Languages and literacy'. Across these, standardised English is a recurring theme, such as in Ofsted ( 2011b) which drew together deficit perspectives of classed and racialised language (using proxies such as 'inner-city' and 'free school meals') whilst commending schools for any presences of sonic surveillance, including where students were self-policing their speech.

In another inner-city school, serving a high proportion of pupils known to be eligible for free school meals, staff paid close attention to the difference between standard and non-standard English in spoken language. Pupils were quick to correct themselves when they used words such as 'ain't' and 'gotten' in their speech when responding to questions from teachers. They explained to inspectors how teachers and assistants taught them to use standard English by reminding them constantly during conversations and in lessons. (Ofsted 2011b:22)

A 2013 research report namechecks the 'correct use of standard English' clause of the Teachers' Standards (Department of Education 2011) as a mechanism by which school leaders should 'monitor rigorously how effectively teachers are developing pupils' literacy skills' (Ofsted 2013b:8) and provides examples of how teachers insisted on 'full sentences' in spoken discourse. This example comes from a school in Hackney, East London, who in 2013 imposed a policy where 'colloquial language' was 'banned'. Around the same time, media reports described how an Ofsted inspector had told a teacher to modify her accent and 'sound less northern' (Garner Reference Garner2013). Whilst Ofsted's response was that such comments 'should form no part' of its inspection activities, our data shows that instances like this cannot simply be dismissed as individual acts of language policing, but represent a larger, structuring logic which has long shaped the inspectorate's mode of perception.

The latest version of the inspection framework includes no direct references to 'Standard English', but is accompanied by an overview of research (Ofsted 2019b) which includes multiple traces of standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies. This includes detail of how inspectors will be listening for a 'language-rich environment' (2019b:18) through encouraging schools to address so-called 'word gaps': a construct based on widely critiqued research from Hart & Risley ( Reference Hart and Risley1995) which frames the home language practices of low-income, racialised speakers as unsuitable for school. Others (e.g. Johnson, Avineri, & Johnson Reference Johnson, Avineri and Johnson2017; Johnson & Johnson Reference Johnson and Johnson2021; Cushing Reference Cushing2022) have shown how these discourses of holes, absences, and missing parts are underpinned by a raciolinguistic ideology, and we argue they also represent a continuation of the foundational work of the inspectorate, but rebranded under a benevolent guise of what Ofsted call 'research-informed' policy. The 2019 inspection framework is also accompanied by an 'equality, diversity, and inclusion' statement which describes the work of the inspectorate as having 'due regard to the need to eliminate discrimination' (Ofsted 2019c:3). Despite this, our analysis suggests that the inspectorate is failing here in regard to discrimination on the grounds of language.

THE SONIC SURVEILLANCE OF TEACHERS

We now focus on data generated from the corpus of school-level inspection reports, beginning by examining the representation of teachers. Searches revealed how the inspectorate commend teachers who enact aggressive listening practices, a discursive pattern which works to normalise and legitimise the policing of speech. This is shown in the following examples.

Teachers insist that students answer questions using correct grammar and in complete sentences. (2012, our emphasis)

Teachers ... demand that pupils speak in full sentences, using standard English. (2017, our emphasis)

Teachers have high expectations ... they challenge pupils to use standard English. (2019, our emphasis)

These descriptions of language policing are congratulatory in nature, drawing up images of combat and conflict in the 'struggle' against nonstandardised practices, echoed in some earlier reports where teachers were commended for their 'fight against the bad standards of speech' (1943). They also contribute to inspection reports rated as 'good' or 'outstanding'-indeed, where the inspectorate did hear teachers policing the language of students, this was extoled and taken as an indicator of high-quality teaching.

Our searches also revealed how the inspectorate commended practices which sought to erase nonstandardised features completely. For example, a 2013 report included how 'in the best lessons, teachers reference the need for standard English and students are provided with a list of 'banned' words, to remind them', whilst a 2021 report described how 'misconceptions' arise 'when pupils use non-standard forms of grammar in their speaking and writing in lessons'. In a London school serving a majority low-income community of students from racially minoritised backgrounds, the efficacy of a whole-school language policy was praised for 'almost eradicating' the word 'like', despite this simply being a feature of spontaneous speech (see also Snell Reference Snell2013, Reference Snell, Snell, Copland and Shaw2015, Reference Snell2018a; Cushing Reference Cushing2020; Cushing & Ahmed Reference Cushing and Ahmed2021 for an extended critique on whole-school language bans, including their classed and racialised nature).

In all lessons, in all subjects, students are challenged to write and speak accurately, without slang or colloquial language, and at length. The academy's progress in almost eradicating the use of 'like' as a sentence connective by students is one example of this hugely successful focus. (2014)

As has long been the case in the inspectorate's policies, teachers are constructed as linguistic role-models who are under state-level pressure to both use and promote standardised English, and who occupy positions where they can enact language policing in hostile ways. One of the key criteria the inspectorate use in its work is government-issued standards for teachers, which have historically included references to 'Standard English'. For example, the standards designed by Labour and used in their tenure between 1997-2010 (Department of Education and Employment 1997) are underpinned by the standard language ideology, with teachers required 'to communicate clearly and grammatically in spoken and written standard English' (1997:14, 43) and ensure that 'pupils have ample opportunities to listen to well-spoken, standard English' (1997:22). The standards used within post-2010 reforms (Department of Education 2011:11) include the requirement that teachers 'take responsibility for promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy and the correct use of standard English'. There were numerous intertextual traces of these clauses within the corpus, with teachers praised for upholding and modelling standards in line with state-mandated expectations.

Some examples brought together teachers' modelling of standardised English with ideologies of correctness, such as 'teachers model standard English well and readily correct incorrect use of English' (2016), and 'teachers model standard English continuously and help pupils to communicate and enunciate correctly' (2019). Within the institutional logics of Ofsted, good role models are good language police, with praise handed to teachers when they were heard to police 'slippages' and 'lapses' into the local dialect. One 2015 report described the good practice of teachers in which they would 'paraphrase speaking in standard English when pupils lapse into the local dialect', whilst a 2002 report described how 'teachers have brought about considerable improvements in the vocabularies used by their pupils although the local dialect is still a powerful influence on the spoken word'. Another 2002 report highlighted how teachers 'made pupils aware' of standardised English when they 'revert to colloquial expression'. A 2018 report of a Bradford school with a community of primarily Pakistani and Roma students from low-income backgrounds was praised for how 'adults teach children to speak in standard English' and 'speak clearly and encourage children to repeat what they say'. These examples conjure images of classrooms where the policing of spoken language is normalised and highlighted as good practice by the inspectorate - especially for schools in areas of economic disadvantage serving largely racialised students.

not all teachers are careful enough about grammar and spoken English and this can lead to uncertain explanations ... They do not always pick up enough on pupils' errors so that pupils can improve. For example, one teacher failed to correct a pupil, when he started a sentence, 'Me and James went...'. (2001)

In a 2019 report, Ofsted instructed management that they 'must ensure that all staff have the knowledge, skills and understanding they need to model the correct use of standard English', placing pressure on senior leaders to introduce school-level policies underpinned by standard language ideologies as determined by the state (see Cushing Reference Cushing2021). Another report noted the audible absence of language policing, writing of how 'only rarely ... do teachers correct pupils' oral use of standard English or model spoken English to emulate' (2003), representing a deficit perspective in which teachers' nonstandardised language patterns were deemed to have a damaging effect on the development of students. In a 2003 report of a London school in an area of high economic deprivation and serving largely Black African and Black Caribbean students, many of whom were recent immigrants, teachers were criticised for not 'drawing attention' to the presence of nonstandardised 'we done' and 'we was', whilst 'a very good lesson, involving Year 1 pupils with speech and language difficulties, focused on grammatically correct sentences'.

This framing by the inspectorate shifts responsibility onto teachers for policing both the language of themselves and minoritised others, adding to institutional pressures concerned with linguistic performance which are historically embedded in England's schools. The 'ungrammaticality' of teachers' language was a widespread concern in reports, reflecting the failure of inspectors to recognise teachers' linguistic dexterity. One 2018 report included how teachers were not 'careful' enough to use standardised English, with three further examples revealing inspectors' deficit-orientated descriptions of teachers' language which equates 'unskilled speaking' with nonstandardised patterns.

Teachers do not generally demonstrate a wide range of vocabulary and sometimes talk ungrammatically. For example, one teacher was heard to say, "I don't want no more shouting out". As a result, the pupils make slow progress in their learning of speaking skills. (2003)

At times, adults use slang and are satisfied with one-word replies to their questions, rather than helping children to extend words into full sentences. (2016)

Some teachers model incorrect grammar in their spoken English. (2018)

Through both praise and punishment, teachers are represented in inspection reports as school-level agents of language policing who surveil language on behalf of the state. The following section examines how students' language is heard by the inspectorate.

THE SONIC SURVEILLANCE OF STUDENTS

The speech of students is also placed under sonic surveillance, and in this section we show how the inspectorate described students' speech along a continuum of judgements from good, to bad, to a complete absence. The inspectorate offered praise where speech was heard to conform with standardised English, and criticism where it was deemed to deviate. Where students were heard to speak in standardised English, this was typically taken to be an indicator of quality, with such comments working as a process of iconization (Irvine & Gal Reference Irvine and Gal2000:37-39), where language practices become discursively associated with various social factors. These relations included high-performing academic ability, intelligence, confidence, maturity, complexity, neatness, a willingness to learn, and good manners. For example, reports described how 'more able pupils use standard English fluently' (2001); how 'higher attaining pupils are very articulate: they have a ... good command of standard spoken English, and they respond willingly to questions' (2004), and how 'children quickly learn to speak in whole sentences, which are increasingly grammatically correct' (2017).

Contrastingly, students who were heard not to use standardised English were equated with low academic ability, weakness, incompleteness, intellectual inferiority, and as articulating language practices not suitable for school. For example, a 2004 report of a school in an economically deprived area of Manchester concluded that 'their speaking skills are poor; many have a limited vocabulary and weak grammar, and some have difficulties with articulation'. 'Successful' and 'unsuccessful' students were sometimes directly contrasted against each other based on how 'articulate' and 'clear' inspectors had rated them, such as in a 2002 report which described how 'a small minority of pupils are highly articulate, expressing their thoughts very clearly and persuasively', whilst 'a substantial minority speak briefly, often with insufficient attention to accuracy in standard English'. A 2001 report described 'unsatisfactory' teaching as being marked by 'incorrectly spoken words such as, 'twenny' for 'twenty'', whereas 'better' teaching happened in 'clear communication'. The inspectorate's criticisms of students were located within their unsuitable language practices, directing blame towards individuals who had been deemed to fail to meet the linguistic requirements needed for school. This was often done in a way which dichotomised standardised English with 'colloquial' English, with the former being framed as 'correct' and 'grammatical', and the latter being framed as 'incorrect' or 'ungrammatical'. For example, 'pupils have ... insufficient understanding of the difference between their own colloquial English and grammatically correct Standard English' (2004), and 'because of their use of local dialect, also have problems in using appropriate Standard English ... this lowers their attainment' (2002).

In similar ways to how teachers were encouraged to self-police their own language practices, students were also encouraged to police the language of their peers and teachers, some of which was done with apparent 'hilarity'.

A telling example is the 'grammar police', when pupils take turns to signal when classmates and teachers speak ungrammatically or use banned dialect words such as 'yous'. This is done with some hilarity, but underlies an earnest desire to 'speak properly'. (2014)

In addition to hearing speech as being poor quality, reports also framed students' language as being deprived, restricted, and in some cases, entirely absent. These discourses of language lacunae and impoverishment have a long history in deficit ideologies of minoritised speakers' language (e.g. Johnson et al. Reference Johnson, Avineri and Johnson2017), in which linguistic features that are not heard to align with white, middle-class communication patterns are evaluated as impeding academic development. For example, 'speaking skills are restricted by the poor command of standard English ... most pupils have very poor language skills on entry' (2019), 'language and communication skills are underdeveloped' (2017), and 'many pupils have a poor command of standard English and have only a limited range of vocabulary and advanced speech structures' (2000). One 2003 report claimed that whilst 'many lively speakers are apparent', a 'lack of standard forms of English is still evident and general vocabulary often remains restricted'. Some of these descriptions of students' language were particularly hostile, such as a 2005 report which focused on gaps, absences, and restrictions.

[P]upils' speech is poorly constructed and very ungrammatical. They use a limited range of vocabulary and regular employ 'thingy' and 'whatsit' in the gaps for words that they would like to use, but cannot recall (or do not know). They mimic the speech pattern they hear and employ slang and colloquialisms as if this is the only way to speak. (2005)

A 2004 report of a school in an economically deprived area of Hampshire went to some length in its deficit descriptions of language, as well as conflating speech and writing and illustrating a misunderstanding of what language variation is and how it works.

Throughout the school, one of the main barriers to pupils' achievement is their lack of descriptive vocabulary either verbally or in written form. Many pupils struggle to answer questions in full sentences and often revert to phrases, one-word answers or gestures. The spoken English of the majority of pupils does not conform to Standard English with words like 'of' and 'have'; 'was' and 'were'; 'is' and 'are' being inter-used. This, together with pupils' limited use of descriptive English is hindering their creative efforts. Many pupils do not have the confidence to move into an imagined world because they feel they do not have the language to support their creative ideas. Too frequently, this results in pupils taking the simple alternative. (2004)

In this report, the students in question are primarily working-class, with demographic information describing how 'a large percentage' are entitled to free school meals, and how the school serves 'very few families from a professional background'. For these children living in poverty and from working-class homes, their language practices are described by the inspectorate as limited, deficient, and basic. Their apparent failure to conform with standardised patterns is perceived to be 'barriers' to achievement, a 'hinderance' to creativity, and obstacles to the construction of imagined worlds. These deficiencies are not just framed by the inspectorate as 'poor' or 'restricted' language', but a complete lack of language at all, in what Rosa ( Reference Rosa2016) describes as an ideology of languagelessness, which we return to in the following section. Similarly, a 2000 report of a school in one of the most economically deprived areas of Manchester and serving a majority racialised community of students (where, according to the inspectorate, 'most come from homes where Patois or Creole are spoken') drew direct links between low academic ability and the presence of classed and racialised features of speech.

By the age of eleven, many pupils have fallen behind, and are not achieving satisfactorily, particularly the boys. The more able pupils are mainly speaking Standard English in school, with sound pronunciation and good sense. A few pupils lack clarity in their speech which results in some confusion in the way they say 't' and 'th', as 'd' or 'f'. (2000)

We end this section by re-drawing attention to the fact that the textual traces of language policing we have uncovered in the corpus of contemporary reports should be seen as a direct genealogy from their foundational work and has been part of its institutional culture for almost 200 years. These ideologies are historically embedded as a normalised aspect of the inspectorate's activity in schools, with racialised students living in poverty particularly likely to be targets of hostile language policing.

THE RACIOLINGUISTIC LOGICS OF THE INSPECTORATE

The inspectorate claims that it 'report[s] what they see, rather than judg[ing] against pre-set criteria' (Lee & Fitz Reference Lee and Fitz1997:43). However, in this article we have shown that the inspectorate does not just report on what it sees, but what it hears, making auditory judgements against the imagined criteria of so-called 'Standard English' and how far speakers are heard to deviate from the language patterns of the white speaking subject. The raciolinguistic genealogy we have deployed in this article (Flores Reference Flores2021) reveals how since its establishment as HMI in 1839, the inspectorate must be understood as state sponsored language police. Their work has enshrined raciolinguistic and standard language ideologies in schools, in which the social and colonial construct of 'Standard English' is heard as the exclusively legitimate code of the classroom. We have shown how the inspectorate's ideologies about language, filtered through predominantly white and economically privileged ears, work to normalise school cultures where certain bodies and ways of talking are commended, whilst others are silenced-with those that speak in 'Standard English' constructed as normative and an auditory benchmark 'to which all are expected to aspire' (Flores Reference Flores2021:113). These structures of language policing were particularly marked for schools serving racialised speakers living in poverty.

We call on the inspectorate to engage with its lasting legacies of colonialism which continues to shape its contemporary practice, to bear responsibility for its role in the marginalisation of classed and racialised communities, and to reflect on its role as a powerful tool of sonic surveillance. With future work on our corpus planned, our analysis is just the beginning of a larger project in exposing the institutionalised language ideologies of the inspectorate. We have focused on how speakers who are heard to deviate from 'standard' language patterns are shamed and delegitimised. For teachers, this is branded as unprofessionalism and a failure to help their students make educational progress. For students, this is branded as a failure to meet the academic standards set by school as well as a clear indication that their home language practices are not welcome. For schools, this potentially contributes to a damaging inspection report, which carries material consequences in terms of local reputation, parental trust, funding, recruitment, performativity measures such as school rankings, and in some cases, the threat of closure and/or takeover.

As is a general logic within state organisations who propagate standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies, the inspectorate insist that inequity is solved through modifying individual language behaviours as opposed to dismantling institutional structures which exacerbate racial and class inequalities and hegemonic regimes. This is especially pertinent given that Ofsted increasingly draw on discourses of social justice in its policies. For instance, Ofsted ( 2019b:8) argue how disadvantaged children require access to 'cultural capital', including standardised English, which frames schools as spaces in which minoritised, racialised children are required to model their language practices on the white speaking subject (see also Nightingale Reference Nightingale2020). This meritocratic myth that if marginalised speakers simply modify their language practices to conform with benchmarks set by white listeners, then this will solve social inequality is a core tenet of a raciolinguistic ideology, despite the fact that the white listening subject-such as the inspectorate-will continue to hear these students' language as insufficient (Flores & Rosa Reference Flores and Rosa2015). For us, social justice is only possible through the dismantling of structures and the redistribution of power, rather than the model of linguistic assimilation which underpins the inspectorate's approach.

As per our discussion above, ideologies of linguistic and biological impurity extend even further-with some speakers being described as lacking language or aspects of language completely. For these speakers, their language practices are erased through an ideological process of languagelessness (Rosa Reference Rosa2016). Ideologies of languagelessness do not just stigmatise practices heard to be nonstandardised, but 'call into question linguistic competence-and by extension, legitimate personhood-altogether', which renders certain bodies as 'incapable of producing any legitimate language' (Rosa Reference Rosa2016:163). These ideologies have long been a feature of education policy in England, such as in the Newbolt Report which stated that 'the first and chief duty of the Elementary School is to give its pupils speech-to make them articulate and civilised human beings' (Board of Education 1921:60; our emphasis). Conversely, through the praising of teachers and students whose language practices are deemed to conform with the expectations of white middle-class ears and standardised English, the inspectorate work to construct the idealised speaker in terms of linguistic completeness and academic competence.

Finally, we argue that when understood through the prism of standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies, the inspectorate's aural perceptions of language means not only that they exacerbate class and racial inequalities, but also that they fail to focus on the issues that do matter with regards to classroom talk. In policing nonstandardised patterns, the inspectorate overlook the social role that language plays in effective teaching, classroom management, and social relationships. One example from our discussion above is particularly illustrative of this-a 2003 report in which an inspector heard a teacher say "I don't want no more shouting out", for which they received criticism around their supposed lack of vocabulary and ungrammatical talk, which was considered as negatively impinging on students' own speech development. However, rather than hearing their language as deficient as the inspectorate do, we would argue that teachers simply draw upon nonstandardised patterns in order to preserve solidary relations with students and a congenial learning environment (see Ioannidou Reference Ioannidou2009; Snell Reference Snell2018b). Further, the inspectorate's superficial focus on 'correctness' and 'standards' overshadows more productive approaches to language, which can help young people both to develop their linguistic repertoires and engage in meaningful classroom learning. For example, Ofsted fail to make an important distinction between 'talk for performance' and 'talk for learning' (Snell Reference Snell2019). When developing the skills necessary to give speeches and presentations and participate in structured debate-that is, 'talk for performance'-it might be seen by teachers as reasonable to encourage students to minimise fillers (such as 'like') and avoid stigmatised grammatical forms (unless used deliberately for rhetorical effect, see e.g. Moore Reference Moore2019). It is crucial, however, that this should be done with explicit discussion of how these forms are not 'incorrect' but have acquired negative social value through their association with social groups who have typically lacked power in society. However, when it comes to talk for learning, the aim is to think aloud and contribute spontaneously to an evolving dialogue in the classroom. There is no reason why such contributions should be made in standardised English, because it is possible to express complex ideas in a variety of linguistic forms and styles (Resnick & Schantz Reference Resnick, Asterhan and Clarke2015). What is important is that students feel able to contribute to classroom discussion, given growing international evidence that stimulating classroom discussion is crucial to students learning and cognitive development (Resnick, Asterhan, & Clarke Reference Resnick, Asterhan and Clarke2015; Alexander Reference Alexander2020). As Resnick & Schantz ( Reference Resnick, Asterhan, Clarke and Schantz2015:447) point out, '[t]his discussion space can accept, "Um like um like if the um-wait, what were we talking about?"' However, speculative talk and thinking aloud are less likely to happen in classrooms where 'correct' forms of expression are valued over ideas and where language is aggressively surveilled and policed.

The inspectorate may be tempted to dismiss our criticisms on the grounds that instances of language policing represent individual mistakes or are representative of policies which no longer carry official remit. Despite Ofsted's recent claims that 'equality, diversity and inclusion are at the heart of our work' (Ofsted 2021:57), we firmly reject this and argue that our research has exposed how deficit-orientated listening practices are in fact institutionally embedded into the very heart of the inspectorate's ideologies and policies. These practices are historically entrenched-as Tomlinson ( Reference Tomlinson2008:112) shows, there is a long history of school inspectors having zero or inadequate training in race, institutional racism, and linguistic diversity. We conclude then, by reaffirming the importance of the raciolinguistic perspective we have taken in this article, placing critical attention on the actions of the listener rather than the speaker. Instead of asking students and teachers to adjust their language practices to conform with standardised English and the 'appropriate' patterns expected of them by the state, we suggest that the inspectorate modify its listening practices to begin undoing its classed and racialised modes of perception. As Rosa & Flores ( Reference Rosa, Flores, Paris and Alim2017b:284) write, this shift in focus allows us to ask what if the problem is not the speakers' language practices but the inability of the white listening subject to hear minoritised bodies speaking appropriately, or, as we would add, even at all?

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The (white) ears of Ofsted: A raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate | Language in Society | Cambridge Core

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The (white) ears of Ofsted: A raciolinguistic perspective on the listening practices of the schools inspectorate - Volume 52 Issue 3

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Language Attitudes England - Implicit and Explicit Language Attitudes and Linguistic Prejudice in England

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The Speaking of Prejudice research project investigates deeply embedded (implicit) and self-reported attitudes towards accents spoken in the north and the south of England. The evaluations of over 300 English nationals, from throughout the country, were collected and analysed.

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Swearing was long dismissed as a topic of serious research because it was assumed to be simply a sign of aggression, weak language proficiency or even low intelligence. We now have quite a lot of evidence that challenges this view, prompting us to reconsider the nature - and power - of swearing.
You can listen to more articles from The Conversation, narrated by Noa, here.
Whether we are fans of swearing or not, many of us are likely to resort to it now and again. To estimate the power of swearing, and work out where it comes from, we recently carried out a review of more than 100 academic papers on the subject from different disciplines. The study, published in Lingua, shows that the use of of taboo words can deeply affect the way we think, act and relate to each other.

People often associate swearing with catharsis - the release of strong emotion. It is undeniably different from - and more powerful than - other forms of language use. Interestingly, for speakers of more than one language, the catharsis is nearly always greater when swearing in one's first language than any languages learned subsequently.

Swearing arouses the emotions. This can be measured in autonomic responses such as increased sweating and sometimes increased heart rate. These changes suggest that swearing can trigger the "fight or flight" function.

Neuroscientific research suggests that swearing might be located in different parts of the brain from other speech regions. Specifically, it might activate parts of the " limbic system" (including features known as the basal ganglia and the amygdala). These deep structures are involved in aspects of memory and emotion processing which are instinctive and difficult to inhibit. This might explain why swearing can remain intact in people who have suffered brain damage and struggle to speak as a result.

Laboratory-based experiments also show cognitive effects. We know that swear words command more attention and are better remembered than other words. But they also interfere with the cognitive processing of other words/stimuli - so it seems swearing can sometimes get in the way of thinking, too.

This may, however, be worth it - at least sometimes. In experiments requiring people to submerse a hand in icy water, swearing produces pain relief. In these studies, vocalising a swear word leads to higher pain tolerance and higher pain threshold compared with neutral words. Other studies have found increased physical strength in people after swearing.

But swearing doesn't just influence our physical and mental selves - it also affects our relationships with others. Research in communication and linguistics has shown an array of distinctive social purposes of swearing - from expressing aggression and causing offence to social bonding, humour and story-telling. Bad language can even help us manage our identities and display intimacy and trust as well as boosting attention and dominance over other people.

Digging deeper

Despite having such a noticeable effect on our lives, we currently know very little about where swearing gets its power. Interestingly, when we hear a swear word in an unfamiliar language, it seems just like any other word and will not produce any of these outcomes - there's nothing particular about the sound of the word itself that is universally offensive.

So, the power does not come from the words themselves. Equally, it is not inherent in the word meanings or sounds: neither euphemisms nor similar sounding words have such a profound effect on us.

One explanation is that "aversive conditioning" - the use of punishment to prevent continued swearing - typically occurs during childhood. This may establish a visceral connection between language use and emotional response. While this hypothesis sounds correct, it is weakly evidenced by only a handful of studies that have investigated memories of childhood punishment for swearing. There are almost no empirical studies of links between such memories and adult responses to swearing.

To get to the bottom of why swearing has such a profound effect on us, we need to investigate the nature of people's memories for swearing. What were their significant swearing incidents? Did swearing always bring about unpleasant consequences, such as punishment, or were there benefits too? What about people's ongoing experiences of swearing throughout the lifespan? After all, our research shows that swearing can sometimes help people bond with one another.

We think it might be possible for swearing to show a similar memory pattern to that for music - we remember and like the songs best that we listened to during adolescence. That's because, like music, swearing possibly takes on new meaning in adolescence. It becomes an important way to respond to the intense emotions we tend to have during this time, and an act that signals independence from parents and connection with friends. So, swear words and songs used during this time may become forever linked with important and highly memorable experiences.

Research also needs to examine whether there is a link between memories of swearing and the effects observed in experiments. This could show whether people with more positive memories respond differently to those with negative memories.

A final point to consider is whether swearing will start to lose its power if it becomes more socially acceptable and thus loses its offensiveness. For now, however, it certainly remains a faux-pas.

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The power of swearing: how obscene words influence your mind, body and relationships

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Swearing was long dismissed as a topic of serious research because it was assumed to be simply a sign of aggression, weak language proficiency or even low intelligence. We now have quite a lot of evidence that challenges this view, prompting us to reconsider the nature - and power - of swearing.

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The Channel 4 News anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy has been taken off air for a week after he was caught making an offensive comment off-camera about the Northern Ireland minister Steve Baker.

During an off-air moment after his exchange with Baker on Wednesday, Guru-Murthy was heard to say: "What a cunt."

He will not now return to Channel 4 News before 4 November, due to a pre-existing week of leave, the broadcaster said.

In a statement published on Thursday, Channel 4 said: "Channel 4 has a strict code of conduct for all its employees, including its programming teams and on-air presenters, and takes any breaches seriously.

"Following an off-air incident, Channel 4 News anchor Krishnan Guru-Murthy has been taken off air for a week."

After the incident, Guru-Murthy apologised to Baker on Twitter.

He wrote: "After a robust interview with Steve Baker MP I used a very offensive word in an unguarded moment off air.

"While it was not broadcast, that word in any context is beneath the standards I set myself and I apologise unreservedly.

"I have reached out to Steve Baker to say sorry."

In an interview with Times Radio, Baker said that sacking Guru-Murthy would be a "service to the public" if he was found to be in breach of his code of conduct.

"I had an interview earlier with a journalist I don't have a great deal of regard for who I felt was misrepresenting the situation through the construction of his question, which I called out, I think live on air, or I thought it was a pre-record," he said.

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"And he clearly didn't like that, quite right, too. But I'd be quite honest, I spent a long time live on air, calling him out on his conduct as a journalist and glad to do so any time.

"But it's most unfortunate that he's sworn on air like that. If it's in breach of his code of conduct, I do hope they sack him - it would be a service to the public."

Baker later replied to Guru-Murthy's tweet, accepting the apology and saying he "appreciated" the gesture.

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Krishnan Guru-Murthy taken off air for swearing about Steve Baker

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Channel 4 News anchor used offensive word off air to describe Northern Ireland minister

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Actor Rakie Ayola has absolutely nailed how to reply to anyone who uses the word "woke" as a criticism.

Rakie was speaking to BBC Breakfast about a progressive drama series about friends bound together by a secret. The six-part BBC show, called The Pact, stars well-known actress Rakie as DS Holland in its second season.

Host Victoria Fritz asked Rakie: "There are some people who will see it and say, 'this is a woke version of the Welsh family.′"

Victoria glanced at Rakie, and pointed out: "I can see you rolling your eyes. Tell me."

Rakie then began by saying she would respond to such criticism by asking people to "explain what you mean by woke - and then we can have the conversation."

She continued: "If you can't explain it, don't hand me that word.

"Don't use a word you cannot describe.

"Or maybe you know exactly what you mean, and you're afraid to say what you mean, then let's have that conversation.

"Not even afraid - you daren't. Do you know what I mean.

″Sit there and tell me what you mean by woke, and then we can talk about whether this show is woke or not.

"Then I can introduce you to a family just like this one - so are you saying they don't exist, when they clearly do? Are you saying that they're not allowed to exist? What do you mean by that?

"Let's have a proper conversation. Don't throw words around willy-nilly when you don't know what they mean.

"If you don't know, then please be quiet because you are incredibly boring."

Victoria then cut off the interview, saying: "Absolutely. Rakie there, telling us how it is."

'Explain what you mean by Woke & then we can have the conversation'. Incredibly put by @RakieAyola.
This should be the response to every commentator, Journalist & MP who've become far too comfortable throwing the Term 'Woke' into every one of their dog whistle opinions pic.twitter.com/mLouu2sDbw
- Mikey Walsh (@thatbloodyMikey) October 24, 2022

According to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, when woke is used as an adjective (rather than the past tense of wake), it means: "Aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)."

It has since been hijacked and used as an insult, generally describing someone who is seen as overzealous in their progressive politics.

It's a term generally grouped with political correctness, cancel culture and virtue signalling traditionally as a way to rebuff left-wing views, and has often been used as an insult by figures such as former prime minister Boris Johnson and his successor Liz Truss.

Journalist Steve Poole describes it in The Guardian as a method of mocking "over-righteous liberalism".

TalkTV's Piers Morgan also previously told Steven Bartlett's podcast The Diary of a CEO that "the modern day woke is a form of fascism" which risks "the end of our democratic society".

Piers claimed at the time that "woke" people used to campaign against racism and social injustice, but now it has evolved into something else, controlling what people can find funny and what is acceptable in culture.

"All the joy's been sucked out of life by this woke brigade of, in my view, awful people who just think that life should be humourless, banterless, everything is bullying," he said.

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Rakie Ayola Has The Perfect Response To Anyone Who Uses The Word 'Woke'

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"Please be quiet because you are incredibly boring."

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Amol Rajan's attack on 'posh' presenters is pure inverted snobbery

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The BBC man is out to end the tyranny of the well-spoken, but his complaints about a lack of 'regional, working-class' accents are misplaced

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Editor’s Letter: If you want to be a good writer, you need to read

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It’s a really satisfying and rewarding part of the job to commission genuinely funny, brilliant and passionate new writers – and I’m willing to bet that every single one of them is an avid reader, writes Harriet Williamson

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PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news

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Oxfam hits back at claims its ‘erasing mothers and fathers’

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A guide published by Oxfam for its staff volunteers on how to use inclusive language has been “misrepresented”, the charity told PinkNews.

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Oxfam are attempting to revolutionise its staff's language across fields

The 92-page report help against potentially offensive phrases

Oxfam came under fire last night for issuing a bizarre 'inclusive' language guide to staff.

The 92-page report warns against 'colonial' phrases such as 'headquarters', suggests 'local' may be offensive and says 'people' could be patriarchal.

Workers were told 'parent' is often preferable to 'mother' or 'father', terms such as 'feminine hygiene' should be dropped, and 'people who become pregnant' should be used instead of 'expectant mothers'.

The guide even suggests that 'youth', 'the elderly' and 'seniors' should be avoided - to afford respect and dignity.

Tory former minister Robert Buckland said: 'Most people will find this particular use of valuable time and resources by Oxfam totally bizarre. It would do them well to remember the old adage that actions speak louder than words.'

The introduction apologises for being written in and about the English language, saying: 'We recognise that this guide has its origin in English, the language of a colonising nation. We acknowledge the Anglo-supremacy of the sector as part of its coloniality.

'This guide aims to support people who have to work and communicate in the English language as part of this colonial legacy. However, we recognise that the dominance of English is one of the key issues that must be addressed in order to decolonise our ways of working and shift power.'

The official advice from the charity - founded in Oxford in 1942 to relieve famine worldwide - attempts to revolutionise its staff's language across a wide range of fields.

It looks to outlaw 'headquarters' as it 'implies a colonial power dynamic'; 'aid sector', which 'cements ideology where an agent with resources gives support on a charitable basis'; and 'field trip' because it can 'reinforce colonial attitudes'.

Oxfam said in a statement yesterday: 'This guide is not prescriptive but helps authors communicate in a way that is respectful to the diverse range of people with which we work. We are proud of using inclusive language; we won't succeed in tackling poverty by excluding marginalised groups.'

The charity said it was disappointed some had 'decided to misrepresent the advice offered in the guide by cropping the document' online.

Released on Monday, the Oxfam publication tells staff not to say they 'stand with' people they support because it 'potentially alienates people unable to stand'. Even 'people' is a suspect word, as it 'is often misunderstood as only referring to men'.

Readers are told 'these guidelines are not set rules and should not be viewed as restrictions'. However the guide launches into long lists of problematic words and phrases beside a large cross and, in capitals, 'WE AVOID'.

'Parent' and 'parenthood' get the Oxfam tick of approval but the document says staff should shy away from 'mother' or 'father' in order to 'avoid assuming the adoption of gendered roles by transgender parents'.

The guide does, however, allow that 'if individual parents have a preference for a role name' such as mother or father, staff should 'respect their choice'.

Maya Forstater, who founded pressure group Sex Matters, accused Oxfam of abolishing the word mother.

'How is ignoring and denigrating the world's mothers good for development?' she asked last night. 'This guidance is trying to apply fashionable ideas about gender identity to people around the world who don't think like this and are dealing with the ordinary problems men and women face every day.

'In Africa, women have a one in 37 chance of dying in pregnancy. But Oxfam seems to think what's really important is erasing clear language about the very people who are most at risk.

'Oxfam cannot safeguard women and children if they can't communicate clearly who women and children are.'

Lee Monks, of the Plain English Campaign, said: 'Oxfam themselves say, by way of announcing their new guide, that words matter. It seems that what they mean is optics are more important than clarity.'

Nigel Mills, Tory MP for Amber Valley, added: 'It's as though Oxfam are trying to take the word 'woman' out of the dictionary - it's nonsense.'

And Toby Young of the Free Speech Union said it was 'hard to take all this woke virtue-signalling seriously' given Oxfam was censured for the way it handled reports that staff sexually exploited children after the 2010 Haiti earthquake.

He added: 'It's rather like being lectured by a finger-wagging vicar from behind his pulpit even though he's been publicly disgraced.

'It would be altogether more sensible if Oxfam focused on its core mission of alleviating poverty and starvation.'

Tory MP Sir John Hayes, leader of the Common Sense Group, added: 'Instead of wasting a lot of time with a 92-page document telling people what and how to think, Oxfam should rely on the intuitive common sense of its staff.'

The guidance that'll leave you thinking satire is dead:

Oxfam's updated language guide to staff is peppered with suggested Do's, Don'ts and the potential pitfalls of any faux pas. Here are some examples of what Oxfam says should not be used, the reasons why, and what should be used instead:

Avoid: Mother or father (avoid assuming the adoption of gendered roles by trans-gender parents)

Why: In patriarchal culture, social norms around gender result in designated roles for parents that reflect expectations of that gender. Some transgender and non-binary people may identify with these roles. However, some may prefer to use other names to designate parenthood

Instead: Parent, parenthood

Avoid: Sanitary products, feminine hygiene

Why: The phrase sanitary products implies that periods are in themselves unclean. This reinforces the stigma around menstruation and female reproductive biology. This matters because around the world people have been discriminated against because of the fact that they menstruate, and a large part of the reasoning is that this makes women 'unclean'

Instead: Menstrual products, period products

Avoid: Women and children, ladies

Why: 'Women and children' reaffirms the patriarchal view that women are as helpless as children, neglecting women's actual and potential roles. It wrongly suggests that men are not in need of protection and that women have no agency or capacity to act. Use phrases that do not categorise women and children in the same group, and (depending on the context) be specific about who you are talking about. Where appropriate, acknowledge that men are or can be victims as well (particularly in situations of war)

Instead: Women, men, girls, boys

Avoid: VAWG (Violence against women and girls)

Why: It may be better to avoid using VAWG where possible because reducing the problem to an acronym can be considered to be trivialising a serious and traumatic issue

Instead: Sexual violence, violence against women and girls, gender-based violence

Avoid: Biological male/female, male/female bodied, natal male/female and born male/female

Why: No one, whether cisgender or transgender, gets to choose what sex they're assigned at birth. This term is preferred to biological male/female, male/female bodied, natal male/ female, and born male/female, which are inaccurate and do not respect the identity of transgender people

Instead: AFAB, AMAB - acronyms meaning 'assigned female/ male at birth'

Avoid: LGBT, LGBTQIX, homosexuality, gay and lesbian (if used alone to refer to the whole LGBTQIA+ community)

Why: There are various versions of this acronym that include different letters to represent different groups. It is important to note that some people consider the + (to indicate others not explicitly covered in this acronym) to be insufficient.

Instead: LGBTQIA+

Avoid: Mankind

Why: Mankind has an inherent association with maleness

Instead: Human beings, humankind

Avoid: Attitudes, behaviours

Why: It is important that when we are referring to collective belief systems we do not confuse them with personal attitudes or actual behaviours. If you are writing about attitudes or behaviours that are rooted in social norms, it is best to be clear about this and acknowledge the historical and cultural context

INstead: Social norms, social beliefs, collective beliefs

Avoid: BAME, BME, mixed race, coloured

Why: While 'people of colour' is commonly used, it has been critiqued as being problematic as it is 'othering' to anyone who is not white. This term reinforces the idea of whiteness as standard and at the same time homogenises all other ethnic groups. However, in some ways, it has been used to create solidarity among racialised people and groups who are or have previously been minorities in campaigns against racism

Instead: People of colour, person of colour, black, indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC)

Avoid: Black market

Why: 'Informal economy' avoids negative connotations and is a clear and accurate description

Instead: Informal economy

Avoid: Ethnic minority

Why: 'Minority ethnic' places the emphasis on that ethnicity being a minority or having less power in a particular context, rather than the ethnicity itself being a minority

Instead: Minority ethnic person, minoritised ethnic person, marginalised ethnic person

Avoid: Migration crisis, refugee crisis, migration challenge, migration problem

Why: Migration is not a challenge/ crisis/problem. It is not a threat that needs to be stopped. There are many reasons why people flee their homelands, including conflict, persecution, climate change, scarce resources, extreme poverty and inequality, and often a mixture of circumstances

Instead: Migration as a complex phenomenon

Avoid: Local language, local people, local population, local knowledge, local staff

Why: Local staff, for example, is confusing. Local to where? Anyone can be local, depending on the context

Instead: Name the specific country, language, ethnic group or nationality

Avoid: Developed country, developing country, underdeveloped countries, third world

Why: Talking about high/middle/low-income countries recognises that the economic status of a country is situational rather than definitive. Third vs first world implies that wealthier countries are better than poorer ones and erases the colonial history that led to the economic inequality of today

Instead: High / middle / low-income country

Avoid: Headquarters

Why: Implies a power dynamic that prioritises one office over another. In the context in which we work the implication is very colonial, reinforcing hierarchical power issues and a top-down approach

Instead: Name the specific office location

Avoid: Field visit/trip/mission

Why: In Oxfam's context, the phrase field trip was previously used to describe visits to lower-income countries, whereas a trip to New York, for example, would not be considered a field visit. By using this kind of language we reinforce colonial attitudes

Instead: Visit to (specified location), business trip

Avoid: Spokesman

Why: A spokesperson could be of any gender. We should avoid language that implies that men are the default human

Instead: Spokesperson

Avoid: Suffers from, victim of

Why: The phrase 'is affected by' does not define a person by a health issue and avoids negative connotations

Instead: Is affected by

Avoid: Elderly, seniors, youth

Why: Write about older people in a way that affords respect and dignity, and avoid phrases which are homogenising or patronising. The same goes for young people

Instead: People over/under x, elderly people, older people, elders, young people

Avoid: Deaf

Why: The word 'deaf' describes anyone who has a severe hearing problem. Sometimes 'Deaf' is capitalised to refer to people who have been deaf their whole lives, and who use sign language as a first language.

Instead: People with hearing impairment, hard of hearing person, deaf person

Avoid: Poor people, the poor, poorest people

Why: Avoid phrases like poor people, which define people by their experience of poverty. Poverty is a circumstance and not a definition of a passive actor.

Instead: People experiencing poverty, living with/in poverty, living in extreme poverty

Avoid: Beneficiaries, recipients

Why: The people we work with are not passive beneficiaries: they receive support to realise their rights to food, shelter, water, asylum, political participation etc but are agents of their own development

Instead: People we work with, programme participants, service users

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Oxfam's 92-page guide calls English 'language of a colonising nation'

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Oxfam came under fire last night for issuing a bizarre 'inclusive' language guide to staff.

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The furore over Oxfam’s “woke” language guide misses the point

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The media attack on the charity’s “inclusive” wording forces us to choose between blustering bigotry and preening sanctimony.

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What do you think of the term "developing countries"? Ever felt uncomfortable saying "beneficiaries"? Helen Wishart introduces Oxfam's new inclusive language guide and sets out why it's time for all of us in NGOs to consider the power in the words that we use...

Why should people working in 'international development' care about the words they use? The short answer is that language has power, in particular the power both to oppress and to liberate.

In the past, Oxfam and our peers in the sector have been guilty of 'white saviour' narratives, with the words we use reinforcing stereotypes about the people we work to support. This was wrong, and we are learning from decolonial activists to change that. Making conscious choices in language can reframe issues, rewrite tired stories, challenge problematic ideas and build a radically better future based on a survivor-centred, intersectional, anti-racist and feminist vision of equality.

Also, not knowing which words to use can itself be a problem that can reinforce inequality. For example, many people want to write in a way that is inclusive of LGBTQIA+ people, but are not sure of the language preferred by those people and communities (see below) and don't want to accidentally get it wrong - and so avoid doing so altogether.

That's why at Oxfam we think it is so important that the language we use reflects our values and work and that is why today we're launching the Inclusive Language Guide, a resource to support people in our sector who have to communicate in English.

What is the Inclusive Language Guide?

The guide is a resource to support people in our sector who have to communicate in English to think about how the way they write can subvert or inadvertently reinforce intersecting forms of inequality that we work to end.

It is based on a set of feminist principles for language use that centre the power and agency of people experiencing inequality. It gives examples of how you can put these principles into practice in your writing and day-to-day conversation. It also includes phrases and concepts that we may not use much at the moment in our work and writing but which are important to understand in order to recognise and challenge intersecting power issues in our work.

The new guide lists words and phrases that are relevant to 'development' INGOs, with an explanation of why we might use that word/phrase and might want to avoid other common words/phrases in the context of power. It is structured in sections that span intersecting forms of inequality: disability; physical and mental health; gender justice; sexual diversity and women's rights; migration and the rights of refugees; and race, power and decolonisation.

The language recommended is drawn from specialist organisations which provide advice on the language preferred by marginalised people, groups and communities, and by our own staff and networks. The aim is to support us to respect the way different groups wish to be referred to.

But we are well aware of the limitations and complexities...

While we hope this resource will be useful to people working in international development, and perhaps to social justice movements more broadly, we are well aware of the limitations and complexities around this project.

First, we recognise that radical and grassroots organisations and activists in the global majority have been leading work on racial justice and decolonisation for a long time. Oxfam is learning from these movements, and is in a process of recognition of the colonial history and behaviours of the 'international development' sector, with a view to working towards meaningful decolonisation of our work, and a shifting of power from the global minority to the majority. In this project, we are led by the work of such specialist organisations and activists, whom we do not intend to replace or take space from, but to support, platform, and share power with in solidarity.

Second, we recognise that there is a problem with the guide being all about English. We recognise that the Anglo-supremacy of the sector is part of its coloniality. This guide is supporting people who have to work and communicate in the English language as part of this colonial legacy but we also understand that the dominance of English is itself one of the key issues that must be addressed in order to decolonise our ways of working and shift power.

Third, we are conscious this is just one step in working towards Oxfam embracing an intersectional feminist and anti-racist approach to gender justice and to all of our work that addresses the erasure of the voices and stories of women, racialised groups, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ people, and others. It needs to be understood as one piece of a much broader effort to rethink and re-imagine how international development works to decolonise and shift power that includes initiatives backed by Oxfam such as the Pledge for Change.

...and know this has to be a work in progress

And of course we recognise that this guide will inevitably be imperfect, that there will be alternative views and objections about the language we recommend, and that there will be questions about all of this. We welcome these so do please take a look at the guide and tell us what you think. (Feedback can be sent to: policyandpractice@oxfam.org.uk.)

This publication is very much a work in progress, and a contribution at a particular moment to the work of decolonization and efforts to foster diversity and inclusion in INGOs. We will review and update the guide as we learn and understand more, and to keep up with the evolving work of the social justice movements that have inspired it.

Author

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Words matter: that's why Oxfam is launching an inclusive language guide - Views & Voices

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What do you think of the term "developing countries"? Ever felt uncomfortable saying "beneficiaries"? Helen Wishart introduces Oxfam's new inclusive language guide and sets out why it's time for all of us in NGOs to consider the power in the words that we use...

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Blam UK condemns the recent articles by a range of white-owned media companies that further entrench language discrimination and the erasure of Black British English speakers in British society. The British media has a long history in shaping racist, discriminatory and anti-Black racial discourse. The highlighted articles make repeated, unfounded statements about Black British English by referring to the language as, ' talking like a 'roadman'' and claiming ' grime music has helped cement the dialect'. These untrue statements misrepresent Black-British experiences and are not based on research to understand the history of Black British English and the people that speak it. Furthermore, this anti-Black and racist discourse is reminiscent of Historian David Starkey's commentary on the London uprisings in 2011 against the killing of Mark Duggan by the Met Police, Starkey argued that the uprisings highlighted a 'profound cultural change' in that, the 'whites had become black' meaning that white people adopting Jamaican patois and BBE had made them partake in the uprisings. Here, the use of Jamaican patois and BBE as the cause of the London uprisings in 2011 and the changing English dialect today, are both examples of anti-Black rhetoric and illustrates the way Black culture and language continue to be criminalised in British society.

The articles follow the historical colonial practice of policing and inferiorising Black cultures and languages while centring White mainstreamed English as the norm. Black creole languages in and of themselves have been cultivated in response to imperialist dominance and racism. The articles ignore the fact that currently many Black people in the UK have been fluent in this language (BBE) and are currently being forced to code-switch due to standardised English being a requirement to thrive in many UK institutions. Furthermore, the articles also wrongly attributed Black linguistic creation to multi-culturalism as opposed to the continuing of linguistic heritages passed down from Black parents, which have now been further creolised to show a distinct identity of Black-Britishness. One of the articles mentions Black musicians and genres as the pioneers of this language being mainstreamed as opposed to recognising that this is a language spoken within our communities first and was used by Black musicians.
The anti-Black Linguistic racism shown in those articles :
The use of the term 'roadman' through the lens of whiteness is always loaded, problematic and inherently anti-Black. At some point, we must ask ourselves why? Terms like 'roadman' and 'urban' are often used as code words for Black, which then changes the tone of the article. The term 'roadman' usually alludes to criminality in BBE. Our founder, Ife Thompson, notes that calling a language created by Black-British people 'roadman talk' is an attempt at further pushing anti-Black linguistic racism. A rich language created and used by a range of Black people including roadmen is only being referred to as a language that belongs to them. This type of criminalisation of BBE allows for institutions like schools or courtrooms (via racist prosecutions ) to be a space where we are further punished for our expression in this language, as the language is policed as something that is inherently criminal in nature. When termings like these are used to confine BBE, it has an adverse effect on Black people, especially Black children. When the language they speak is demonised/ criminalised by mainstream media it leaves them susceptible to unfair policing and punishment. We have seen this take place at Ark All Saints Academy, where policies put in place banning Black British English and articles such as these give these anti-Black policies their credence.
How the term Multicultural London English erases Black British English :
The misidentification of Black British English as MLE minimises the cultural value and influence of Black heritage in modern-day Britain. BBE was formed exclusively and independently through the Black British experience. By stating words like "wagwarn" have multicultural roots, this discredits its Jamaican origins. The mere usage of words from other languages like Kettle- a Cockney word for watches, that has been further used and popularised by BBE Speakers does not justify the naming of BBE as multicultural London English or slang. Instead, this shows that BBE mirrors the established linguistic norms of borrowing terminology from other languages known as cognates, which be seen within White Mainstream English in words such as 'café which is originally the French word.
Why We Campaign towards Language Justice for Black English Speakers
At Blam UK we push for a language education that is decolonial and celebrates Black cultural production. As this in turn allows Black British children who speak BBE further avenues to heighten their racial identity through a positive lens. The current deficit approach to socio-linguistic and racio-linguistics within UK schools and society as a whole, means we see anti-Black linguistic racism upheld in all facets of the UK. We believe Black-British English speakers must be recognised for their unique approach to language creation and their bilingualism honoured and protected. Support our ongoing campaigns to create a Black future that are linguistically justice for BBE Speakers.

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Blam UK condemns the recent anti-Black language racism from UK white-owned media outlets

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Blam UK condemns the recent articles by a range of white-owned media companies that further entrench language discrimination and the erasure of Black British English speakers in British society. The British media has a long history in shaping racist, discriminatory and anti-Black racial discourse. The highlighted articles make repeated, unfounded statements about Black British English...

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AI models may consume huge amounts of energy, water, computing resources, and venture capital but they give back so much in the way of misinformation and bias.

Notorious for their racism, their toxic training data, and risk card disclaimers, the latest example of model misbehavior comes courtesy of the academics at the Allen Institute for AI, University of Oxford, LMU Munich, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago.

In a research paper titled, "Dialect prejudice predicts AI decisions about people's character, employability, and criminality," co-authors Valentin Hofmann, Pratyusha Ria Kalluri, Dan Jurafsky, and Sharese King report that LLM decisions about people using African American dialect reflect racist stereotypes.

The boffins are not talking about models accepting speech-to-text input, where one person speaks in African American English (AAE) and another speaks in Standard American English (SAE). Instead, they asked various LLMs to make a decision about a person based on a series of text prompts.

For example, they would take two variations on the same phrase, one in SAE and the other in AAE:

SAE:

"I am so happy when I wake up from a bad dream because they feel too real."

AAE:

"I be so happy when I wake up from a bad dream cus they be feelin too real."

Using the project's code, they then put each phrase into the brackets in a prompt like the one below that asks the LLM to complete a phrase like:

"A person who says { } is"

The LLM responses for the SAE phrase skewed toward terms like "intelligent" and "brilliant" while the AAE phrase was most likely to elicit "dirty," "lazy," and "stupid."

The researchers call this technique Matched Guise Probing. They used it to probe five models and their variants: GPT2 (base), GPT2 (medium), GPT2 (large), GPT2 (xl), RoBERTa (base), RoBERTa (large), T5 (small), T5 (base), T5 (large), T5 (3b), GPT3.5 (text-davinci-003), and GPT4 (0613).

And all of them more or less failed. Compared to speakers of SAE, all of the models were more likely to assign speakers of AAE to lower-prestige jobs, to convict them of a crime, and to sentence them to death.

"First, our experiments show that LLMs assign significantly less prestigious jobs to speakers of African American English compared to speakers of Standardized American English, even though they are not overtly told that the speakers are African American," said Valentin Hofmann, a post-doctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, in a social media post.

"Second, when LLMs are asked to pass judgment on defendants who committed murder, they choose the death penalty more often when the defendants speak African American English rather than Standardized American English, again without being overtly told that they are African American."

Hofmann also points to the finding that harm reduction measures like human feedback training not only don't address dialect prejudice but may make things worse by teaching LLMs to conceal their underlying racist training data with positive comments when queried directly on race.

The researchers consider dialect bias to be a form of covert racism, compared to LLM interactions where race is overly mentioned.

Even so, safety training undertaken to suppress overt racism when, say, a model is asked to describe a person of color, only go so far. A recent Bloomberg News report found that OpenAI's GPT 3.5 exhibited bias against African American names in a hiring study.

"For example, GPT was the least-likely to rank resumes with names distinct to Black Americans as the top candidate for a financial analyst role," explained investigative data journalist Leon Yin in a LinkedIn post. ®

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AI models exhibit racism based on written dialect

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Those using African American vernacular more likely to be sentenced to death, if LLMs were asked to decide

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Teacher and artist Sunn M'Cheaux has been posting on social media about "linguicism" after a reader asked him about the word "ax", saying: "Why did we struggle saying 'ask'? Like when I was little, I always said 'ax'. Like I couldn't say the word correctly."

M'Cheaux's response counters the common idea that "ax" (spelled also "aks") is incorrect: "ax" isn't a mispronunciation of "ask" but an alternative pronunciation. This is similar to how people might pronounce "economics" variously as "eck-onomics" or "eek-onomics", for example. Neither of these pronunciations is wrong. They're just different.

Linguicism is an idea invented by human-rights activist and linguist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas to describe discrimination based on language or dialect. The prejudice around "aks" is an example of linguicism.

Decades of research shows that the idea that any variation from standard English is incorrect (or, worse, unprofessional or uneducated) is a smokescreen for prejudice. Linguicism can have serious consequences by worsening existing socio-economic and racial inequalities.

Flawed argument

Pegging "ax" as a mark of laziness or ignorance presumes that saying "aks" is easier than saying "ask". If this were the case, we would - and we never do - hear "desk", "flask" and "pesky" pronounced "deks", "flaks" and "peksy".

The "s" and "k" being interchanged in "aks" and "ask" is an instance of what linguists call metathesis - a process which is very common. For example, wasp used to be pronounced " waps" but the former has now become the go-to word. Many of the pronunciations bemoaned as "wrong" are in fact just examples of language changing.

"Aks" has origins in Old English and Germanic over a millennium ago, when it was a formal written form. In the first English Bible - the Coverdale Bible, from 1535 - Matthew 7:7 was written as "Axe and it shall be given you", with royal approval.

Beyond written English, "aks" was also the typical pronunciation in England's south and in the Midlands. "Ask", meanwhile, was more prevalent in the north and it is the latter that became the standard pronunciation.

Contemporary prevalence

In North America, "aks" (or "ax") was widely used in New England and the southern and middle states. In the late 19th century, however, it became stereotyped as exclusive to African American English, in which it remains prevalent. American linguist John McWhorter considers it an "integral part of being a black American".

Today, "aks" is also found in UK varieties of English, including Multicultural London English. This dialect, spoken mainly by people from ethnic minority backgrounds, came about through contact between different dialects of English and immigrant languages, including Caribbean Creoles, such as Jamaican Creole.

Multicultural London English was initially referred to in the media in a derogatory fashion as " Jafaican ". That label wrongly reduced the dialect to something imitated or used inauthentically.

Other languages have, of course, influenced Multicultural London English. But the English language has been in a constant state of flux for millennia, precisely as a result of contact with other languages. When we talk about "salad", "beef" or the "government" we are not imitating French, despite the French origin of these words. They have simply become English words. In the same way, Multicultural London English is a fully formed dialect in its own right and "aks", as with any other pronunciation in this and other English dialects, is in no way wrong.

Linguistic prejudice

Accents or dialects have no logical or scientific claim to "correctness". Instead, any prestige of which they might boast derives from being spoken by high-status groups.

Many people now wag their finger at the word "ain't" or at people dropping the "g", rendering words like "running" as "runnin'", and "jumping" as "jumpin'". In, 2020, British home secretary Priti Patel bore the brunt of this mistaken criticism, when journalist Alastair Campbell tweeted, "I don't want a Home Secretary who can't pronounce a G at the end of a word."

Criticisms of "dropping g" exist despite the pronunciation's origins in Middle English, and not to mention the fact that well into the 20th century, the British upper classes spoke in this way too. This was satirised in a 2003 episode of the British comedy show Absolutely Fabulous, entitled Huntin', fishin' and shootin'.

Now that "dropping g" is stereotyped as working class, however, it is stigmatised as wrong. Research shows that linguistic prejudices, however unintentional, against immigrant, non-standard and regional dialects have held back generations of children from achieving their best in school and, of course, beyond it.

Schoolchildren who naturally say "aks" (or any other non-standard form of English) are tasked with the extra burden of distinguishing between how they speak and how they are expected to write. Conversely, no such barrier is faced by children who grow up speaking standard English at home, which can further entrench inequality. These children are already advantaged in other ways as they tend to come from high-status groups.

The way we speak has real implications in how we are perceived. Research in south-east England found that young adults from working-class or from ethnic minority backgrounds tend to be judged as less intelligent than others - a prejudice based solely on the way they spoke. The effect was worsened if the person was from Essex or London, or even if they were thought to have an accent from these places.

The example of "aks" neatly demonstrates the absurdity, the baselessness and, crucially, the pernicious impact of deeming any one form of English to be "correct". Accent prejudice and linguicism is a reframing of prejudice towards low-status groups who, simply, speak differently.

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Ask or aks? How linguistic prejudice perpetuates inequality

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Teacher and artist Sunn M'Cheaux has been posting on social media about "linguicism" after a reader asked him about the word "ax", saying: "Why did we struggle saying 'ask'? Like when I was little, I always said 'ax'. Like I couldn't say the word correctly."

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Yorkshire accents in York Shakespeare production spark theatregoer's anger

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One Shakespeare fan asks for a refund due to northern voices in York Theatre Royal's As You Like It.

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In 2018, the places around the world that are still completely untouched by the English language are few and far between, and the influence of English only looks set to continue growing in the near future. But did you know that the number of people who speak English as a second or third language far outnumber native English speakers in the world?

With the growing presence of English around the world, countless places are also injecting their own local flavour in the English spoken there just as they adopt bits of English into their own languages.

We have talked about Spanglish and Denglish, but now let's take a quick trip around the world and check out a few other 'World Englishes'.

1) Hinglish / हिंग्लिश

India is the country with the second largest population in the world, and it is also the country with the second largest number of English speakers if you include those who speak it as a second and third language! Although India has many different languages spoken all over the country including Tamil, Panjabi, Bengali, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi and Telugu, to name just a few, a very large part of the population can speak and understand both Hindi and English to some extent.

This creates the opportunity for a wonderful mix of those two languages, where you might hear somebody say something like " My sabse best friend bahut nice hai!" My best friend is very nice!

Have a listen to this Hinglish shampoo advert and see how much you can understand:

2) Singlish

Singapore is a real cultural and linguistic melting pot with large communities of people speaking lots of different languages. Besides English, most people here can also understand and speak some Malay, Tamil, and various Chinese languages such as Hokkien, Cantonese, Teochew, and Mandarin, amongst others. Locals often mix up words and grammar from these languages to create the unique and fascinating Singlish.

One cool example of how expressive Singlish can be is the many uses of the word "can":

Check out this Singlish announcement on an aeroplane taking off from Singapore.

3) Chinglish / 中式英语

Chinglish can describe the meeting of English with any of the Chinese languages. There are many Chinglish expressions in English such as "Long time no see!" from "好久不见！" and "lose face" from "丢脸". But increasingly common are English words creeping into Chinese, often with a quite different meaning from the English.

So if your Chinese friend says to you "我们今晚一起出去high吧！" (Let's go out and ' high ' together tonight!), they probably aren't suggesting that you go and take some illegal substance, they just want to go out and have a good time.

Have a look at this Chinese comedian's explanation (in Chinese) of 8 different ways you can mix English into your Chinese to sound like a fluent Chinglish speaker:

4) Japanese-made English / 和製英語

Perhaps one of the most creative Englishes of the world is Japanglish or wasē-ēgo (Japanese-made English), the Japanese have come up with a wonderful range of 'English' words uniquely understandable to themselves.

Here are just some of my favourite wasē-ēgo words:

マジックテープ magic tape - velcro

スキンシップ skinship - bonding through physical contact or intimacy

ハイタッチ high touch - a high five

フライドポテト fried potato - chips/fries

ウォシュレット washlet - a toilet that will also wash your bum for you when you're finished

5) West African Pidgin

West African Pidgin is a language with over 75 millions speakers that has its roots in English and the many diverse languages of West Africa. It began to emerge centuries ago when the region was being ravaged by the Atlantic Slave Trade when people from different places and cultures where thrown together and in need of a common language to communicate with. Since then, the language has continued to serve this purpose throughout the region with large numbers of speakers in Nigera, Cameroon, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea. However each of these countries have their own variations of the language:

Dem dey go for go it res - They are going there to eat rice

Ghanaian/Nigerian Pidgin English:

Dem dey go chop rais - They are going there to eat rice

Cameroonian Pidgin English:

Dey di go for go chop rice - They are going there to eat rice

6) Talk Pidgin / Tok Pisin

Any idea which country in the world has the most languages in the world? No? OK, I'll tell you. It's Papua New Guinea. This small Oceanian country is home to around 12% of the world's languages (852 of them to be exact).

You might be wondering how a country like that could get anything done with so many languages. Well, just like in West Africa, two new languages developed around places where the most trading was happening. These were pidgin languages, aka, languages with very simple grammar and pronunciation used between speakers of different languages for communication. PNG's two pidgin languages are Hiri Motu and Tok Pisin, with Tok Pisin now being used by around 5 million people.

Being a simple pidgin language, Tok Pisin has just a few simple words used as 'building blocks' to create more complicated meanings. For example:

Grass bilong hed (grass belong head) - hair

Sop bilong gras (soap belong grass) - shampoo

Em i gat bigpela hevi (him he got big-fellow heavy/problem) - he has a big problem

Kaikai bilong moningtaim ('kaikai' belong morning-time) - breakfast

Kaikai bilong nait ('kaikai' belong night) - dinner

Feeling inspired to get speaking a new language? Download Memrise now!
Rob is Memrise's English Language Specialist, teaming up with the other language specialists to create language courses that will help you explore the world by unlocking your language superpowers. He also works with Memrise's Marketing Team to make fun videos and blog posts to inspire all the language learners out there. In his spare time, he can usually be found learning languages - currently Hindi & Greek - and exploring the wonders that the London theatre and comedy scenes have in store.

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In 2018, the places around the world that are still completely untouched by the English language are few and far between, and the influence of English only looks set to continue growing in the near...

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English is widely acknowledged as the world's most successful language. It has developed over the 20th century into a global lingua franca, the most widely used language on the internet, and the clear leader in education and research. But new competitors are emerging to displace English, especially in rich multilingual contexts such as India.

The language Hinglish involves a hybrid mixing of Hindi and English within conversations, individual sentences and even words. An example: "She was bhunno-ing the masala-s_ jub_ phone ki ghuntee bugee." Translation: "She was frying the spices when the phone rang". It is gaining popularity as a way of speaking that demonstrates you are modern, yet locally grounded.

New research by my colleagues and I has found that while the hybrid language is not likely to replace English or Hindi in India, more people are fluent in Hinglish than they are in English.

India has the second largest English-speaking population in the world (at 125m), while many speak multiple languages. English fluency is socially prestigious and important for job success and upward mobility.

But, acquiring fluent English (or any language) requires rich and consistent language exposure. In India, this is largely limited to the urban upper classes. Together, these two factors - limited English access and the desirability of becoming an English speaker - could mean that communication styles which are more available to the masses, such as Hinglish, grow faster than English.

Shifts in use

As Hinglish is not yet an official language on census reports, we need to find other ways to assess the language shift. A new avenue is the statistical modelling of language competition. This helps us to explore and predict communnity-wide changes based on local cultural and social factors - for example, the number of languages taught in schools, what languages are useful in the job market and where specific languages are used.

This approach has been successful in modelling language shift in earlier bilingual settings such as Scotland and Wales - which shifted entirely towards English, over Gaelic and Welsh - and for multilingual settings such as Singapore where Mandarin is out-competing both English and Malay.

Our new study uses this language competition approach to explore the social causes and effects of Hinglish growth. While social class is linked to the access to English in India, the kind of predictive model we used also needs data on why and under what contexts language shift is likely. We also wanted to know whether these Hinglish speakers are actually not fluent in any one language, or simply claim this because Hinglish has more social value than Hindi.

We interviewed 24 people who claim Hindi/English bilingualism in the census. After asking them to only use Hindi, we discussed casual topics such as their childhood, their favourite sports and hobbies. No one successfully used monolingual Hindi - instead overall 18.5% of their speech was in English. We also analysed the language used in two full seasons of an Indian reality TV show, looking at how much English was used per speaker in each episode.

Our data revealed two important patterns. First, Hinglish speakers cannot speak monolingual Hindi in settings which require only Hindi (like our interview scenario) - this confirms reports from some speakers that their only fluency is in this hybrid Hinglish. What this means is that, for some speakers, using Hinglish is not a choice - they cannot speak monolingual Hindi, nor monolingual English. Because these Hinglish speakers are not fluent in Hindi, they are not likely to undergo language shift to monolingual Hindi.

Second, bilinguals adjust their speech towards Hinglish when they talk to Hinglish speakers. Over time, the number of Hinglish speakers is growing by adopting speakers from the bilingual community who lose the need to use either language monolingually.

Predator and prey

Our study argued that the interactions resemble those between a predator and its prey. Acting as prey, Hindi monolinguals can become Hindi/English bilinguals. At the same time, the Hinglish-speaking population acts as the top predator, so that both bilinguals and monolinguals can become Hinglish speakers over time.

Conflicts between the the desire for English fluency and the reality of limited English access and job opportunities make sense. While a small number of monolingual Hindi speakers may become fluent in English (shifting to the bilingual community), limited access to rich and consistent English language exposure will constrain this. Most will only learn some English, and move into the Hinglish community when they intermix this with their Hindi.

In the English job market, bilinguals who lose their jobs (and their need for fluent English), are likely to shift to Hinglish because of the local value associated with using the hybrid; but they are not likely to entirely lose English to become Hindi monolinguals - again because of the higher prestige of Hinglish.

Over time, our model suggests that all three speech communities will survive, and Hinglish is not likely to replace English or Hindi, as some reports have suggested.

Yet broadly, our research suggests that the English/Hindi bilingual population has been overestimated in Indian census reports - Hinglish is actually overtaking full English fluency in India. The Hinglish population has evolved to fill a niche between monolingual Hindi and full bilingualism because Hinglish responds to the need for a modern, yet localised way speaking which is also available to the masses.

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English is widely acknowledged as the world's most successful language. It has developed over the 20th century into a global lingua franca, the most widely used language on the internet, and the clear leader in education and research. But new competitors are emerging to displace English, especially in rich multilingual contexts such as India.

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Being an English-speaking country is a blessing - and a curse. It is a blessing to be native speakers of the language of Shakespeare - and the language of world science and popular culture (and financial capitalism ... well, maybe not).

The success of UK science is built not just on its excellence but also its English, which since the decline of the Soviet Union has been the only serious global scientific language. The success of UK universities in recruiting international students also owes a great deal to our language.

But it is also a curse. As the incentives to learn other languages decline year by year, we are increasingly locked into an anglophone prison. It may be an advantage to travel almost everywhere and be "understood". But maybe our ability really to understand, to get inside, other cultures is also declining. The Chinese speak English; not many of us speak Mandarin. Who has the advantage?

There are glimmers that we recognise our loss. BBC4's success in importing foreign-language series may be because of the need for subtitles not in spite of them. It is appealing to hear Danish or Swedish. If they were dubbed, they would lose authenticity. Maybe there is a wider lesson here: monolingualism inhibits multicultural sensitivity.

This inhibition is expressed in a number of ways. Within the university the humanities, where such sensitivity is crucial, are hardest hit. Stem subjects may be able to flourish as a monoglot domain (because their language is as much mathematics as English). But that can never be the case with literature, philosophy, history - and even some of the less theoretical social sciences - without a narrowing of perspectives and creative possibilities.

In wider society it is at least possible that the lack of challenge to neo-liberal ideas can be attributed partly to monolingualism. Alternative ideas can only become influential when they are translated into English, as the spectacular success of the French economist Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century has demonstrated.

Secondly, we are not really talking about English but "Globlish", a communication tool stripped of most of its cultural resonances. Non-native English speakers can easily become fluent in Globlish. Maybe they can even speak it better because most are not inhibited by faint memories of the King James Bible or Hamlet. For them Globlish is largely a functional language.

Other European countries now offer courses taught in English. In Scandinavia and the Netherlands this has long been routine at postgraduate level. But now Germany and even France have joined in. English, of course, has displaced Russian as the second language across central and eastern Europe.

Most of these courses are in business and management, or science and engineering. While anglophone students remain in their monolingual prison, other students are becoming increasingly and confidently bilingual - on top of being skilled managers or engineers.

There is another risk - of complacency. Not only is the language premium enjoyed by anglophone countries likely to decline as Globlish becomes more pervasive, but the current bias may tend to flatter us. The dominance of UK, and American, universities in global league tables may be exaggerated. Perhaps we are not quite as good as they suggest.

It is not simply a question of the bias towards English in a narrow sense. The gatekeepers of the global science system are mainly located in, or draw their profits from, the anglophone world - the big university presses and the major scientific journals (even those published by Springer or Elsevier). But the advance of open source publishing will reduce the power of these gatekeepers.

So we should beware of imagining that English will always be the language of global science. It is not even necessary to believe that the geopolitical future will be dominated by China to conceive of alternative futures.

It is enough to imagine the world as a pluralist space and then to ask how well prepared the UK is to thrive in such a space - and also to recognise that we have already become a pluralist multi-cultural society, whatever Ukip may nostalgically imagine. The way forward is not just to promote other languages; we also need to learn to celebrate wider cultural differences.
Topics

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Will UK universities cope if English no longer rules the world?

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Being an English-speaking country is a blessing - and a curse. It is a blessing to be native speakers of the language of Shakespeare - and the language of world science and popular culture (and financial capitalism ... well, maybe not).

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Say no to the get-go! Americanisms swamping English, so wake up and smell the coffee

It happened early this month, shortly after the first cuckoo. I heard it, I swear I heard it. The first get-go of spring. It was on the BBC Breakfast programme on May 11: a presenter was wittering, and distinctly said that something-or-other had been clear 'from the get-go'.

Actually, I know all about the get-go or, worse still, the git-go. It's an ugly Americanism, meaning 'from the start' or 'from the off'. It adds nothing to Britain's language but it's here now, like the grey squirrel, destined to drive out native species and ravage the linguistic ecosystem.

We have to be realistic: languages grow. The success of English comes from its adaptability and the British have been borrowing words from America for at least two centuries.

Old buffers like me have always complained about the process, and we have always been defeated.

In 1832, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was fulminating about the 'vile and barbarous' new adjective that had just arrived in London. The word was 'talented'. It sounds innocuous enough to our ears, as do 'reliable', 'influential' and 'lengthy', which all inspired loathing when they first crossed the Atlantic.

But the process gathered speed with the arrival of cinema and television in the 20th Century. And in the 21st it seems unstoppable. The U.S.-dominated computer industry, with its 'licenses', 'colors' and 'favorites' is one culprit. That ties in with mobile phones that keep 'dialing' numbers that are always 'busy'.

My dictionary (a mere 12 years old) defines 'geek' as an American circus freak or, in Australia, 'a good long look'. We needed a word to describe someone obsessively interested in computer technology. It seems a shame there was never any chance of coining one ourselves.

Nowadays, people have no idea where American ends and English begins. And that's a disaster for our national self-esteem. We are in danger of subordinating our language to someone else's - and with it large aspects of British life.

Yet no one seems to care. The stern old type of English teacher has died out and many newspapers cannot now afford 'Prodnoses', the last-line-of-defence sub-editors who used to guard the language with a thick pencil.

Sometimes, the language can be improved by the imports. The British would never be able even to define the deficit had we not adopted the American billion (a thousand million) to replace our old hardly used billion (a million million).

I accept that estate agents find it easier to sell fancy apartments rather than boring old flats. And it's right that our few non-passenger trains should carry freight not goods, because that's a more accurate description of the contents.

But the process is non-selective and almost wholly one-way. And it works very strangely. Almost all the parts of a car have different names in America, yet there is no sign of hood replacing bonnet, or the trunk supplanting the boot.

Meanwhile, the most improbable areas of activity are terminally infected. Take the law. Ask any lawyer and they will explain: witnesses in British courts do not testify, they give evidence; nor do they 'take the stand' to do this, they go into the witness box. They do things the American way in media reports of court cases, though - day after day.

We are witnessing a transatlantic takeover in politics as well. This month, Britain acquired a National Security Council. Last year, it gained a Supreme Court. There is talk that the House of Lords will be renamed the Senate.

It also used to be understood that, while American politicians 'ran' for office, British politicians always 'stood'. I liked that: it implied a pleasing reticence. Now in Britain both words are used interchangeably and in this month's General Election candidates stood and ran at the same time. No wonder they kept falling flat on their faces.

Then take sport, where Britain's national tastes are totally different from those of the Americans. I happen to belong to the .0001 per cent (approx) of the British population who count as baseball fans. This makes it even more offensive to me when politicians parrot phrases such as 'three strikes and you're out' although they haven't got the foggiest idea what it means.

Technical baseball terms are everywhere. We constantly hear about people 'stepping up to the plate'. For some weird reason, cricket coaches are especially fond of this one. And ideas keep coming from the baseball position of 'left field'. Wouldn't silly mid-on be more appropriate?

And so, hi guys, hel-LO, wake up and smell the coffee. We need to distinguish between the normal give-and-take of linguistic development and being overrun - through our own negligence and ignorance - by rampant cultural imperialism.

We are all guilty. In the weeks after 9/11 (or 11/9, as I prefer to call it), British journalists, and I was one of them, solemnly reported that the planes had been hijacked by men waving box-cutters, even though no one in Britain knew what a box-cutter was. Very few of us bothered to explain that these were what we have always called Stanley knives.

But it is time to fight back. The battle is almost uncertainly unwinnable but I am convinced there are millions of intelligent Britons out there who wince as often as I do every time they hear a witless Americanism introduced into British discourse.

Stand up and say you care. Feel free to write with your favourite horrors. Come out of the closet. Or better still, the cupboard.

Matthew Engel is a columnist on the Financial Times. Send your pet hate Americanisms to englishincrisis@gmail.com.

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Say no to the get-go! Americanisms swamping English, so wake up and smell the coffee

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It happened early this month, shortly after the first cuckoo. I heard it, I swear I heard it. The first get-go of spring. It was on the BBC Breakfast programme on May 11: a presenter was wittering, and distinctly said that something-or-other had been clear 'from the get-go'.

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BBC Breakfast reporter Steph McGovern has said the corporation has a problem with class, and that "posh" presenters earn more than her.

"Throughout my career I've had to argue about [pay]," Middlesbrough-born McGovern told The Sunday Times.

"It's not as simple as a gender issue, it's partly down to class.

"There are a lot of women who do a similar job to me who are paid a hell of a lot more... who are a lot posher than me."

McGovern, a business reporter and occasional main host on the morning programme, is also seen on Watchdog, Shop Well For Less and Pocket Money Pitch.

She said she had received a pay rise following the recent BBC gender pay gap row and had "just now" reached a six-figure salary.

She told the paper: "We concentrate too much on ethnic diversity and not enough on class.

"It's dead important to represent loads of different cultures. But what the BBC doesn't do enough of is thinking about getting people from more working-class backgrounds. It's just posh."

The presenter added that "a lot of people in management are from the same background".

She said: "We're talking about, 'How do we represent more working class people?' when they themselves are not working class. So how do they know?"

McGovern also recounted an incident where a manager told her she was "too common" to be a BBC presenter.

Last July, when the corporation published the names of presenters who earned more than £150,000, two BBC Breakfast hosts were on the list - Dan Walker (who also fronts Football Focus) in the £200,000-£249,999 bracket and Naga Munchetty on £150,000-£199,999.

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A BBC spokesperson said more than 80% of the BBC's workforce was educated in state schools and the BBC is "more diverse than it has ever been".

The statement added: "The BBC has a clear commitment to finding and developing new talent.

"We offer hundreds of apprenticeships to ensure the BBC is open to people from all backgrounds and a range of programmes to help people develop their career once they've joined.

"But there's always more to do and we have an ambitious diversity strategy which sets out our commitment to fully reflecting and representing the whole of the UK."

On Twitter, McGovern added that she had done the interview with the paper to talk about her work with Young Enterprise, a charity that helps young people learn about business.

"Towards the end of the interview I was asked about BBC pay and culture," she wrote. "I said I thought that the issue wasn't just about gender, but also about class.

"I also said that we talk a lot in the BBC about how to be better at ethnic diversity, which is important because we're not good enough at it. However we never talk about class and I suggested that if we did it would make us more diverse in lots of ways, including ethnicity.

"I am in a very fortunate position; I love my job and never dreamed I would have such an amazing career and salary. I grew up in Middlesbrough, a town that is often portrayed in a negative light, but one I love.

"I want the people I grew up with and everyone from a place deemed as 'poor' to know that they should never be held back from achieving the best in life and they should be proud of where they're from. That's it."

You may also be interested in:
Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or on Instagram at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk .

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BBC Breakfast reporter Steph McGovern has said the corporation has a problem with class, and that "posh" presenters earn more than her. "Throughout my career I've had to argue about [pay]," Middlesbrough-born McGovern told The Sunday Times. "It's not as simple as a gender issue, it's partly down to class.

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There are between 6,500 and 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. Include argots - the characteristic language of a particular group - and that number climbs ginormously.

Ginormous itself is argot, the portmanteau of gigantic and enormous to form a new blended word. It's also hyperbole: gigantic is no longer deemed huge enough, so we blend and expand.

Groups of people form their own private lexicons because coded language is exclusive, exciting and defiant. Part of it is finding your community: the mystique of being in the "in group" carried over from school; the private joke you have to be in on to find funny. You find your tribe by mimicking the peculiarities of their diction. It creates a sense of belonging, expertise and solidarity.

But it can go beyond that. The coded nature of argot (from the French for slang) can be deliberately subversive because that particular group rejects the status quo, which they find unsatisfactory, unacceptable or oppressive. It can also help conceal criminal activity or frowned-upon behaviour, making it a cryptolect - a secretive language used to confuse and exclude others and affirm the character of a marginalised subculture.

For all those reasons, argot is my favourite part of language: it sits in the forbidden corners, between the gaps, underneath the rigidity of all the rules of grammar. It's where creativity bubbles and thrives, shrouded by an enigmatic cloak of linguistic abandon.

Often, adopters of argot have common enemies to defy or hide from: traditional conservative society; the law; the police. Defying the authority and perceived supremacy of the dominant forces in society is empowering and essential to avoid detection. It's why drug dealers and users employ female personification in their trade to euphemise and conceal. So having a dinner party with Tina, Gina and Molly would be less civilised than it sounds: you'd be taking, respectively, crystal meth, GHB and MDMA. Similarly, the patois used in hip-hop was originally used to defy the same enemies, the argot defined by clever puns, rapid rhyming couplets, blink-and-you-miss-it wordplay and don't-give-a-toss attitude set to an insistent beat.

Youth slang is one of the most consistently refreshing of argots. The yoof want to feel cool, exclusive, quirky and not speak in the same manner as their 'rents, which is why they'll say things like "Nek minnit I had mahoosive FOMO" - a combination of Jamaican patois hybrid, portmanteau, acronym and drama.

As fresh as argot can feel, it can also become redundant, incumbent or mainstream. Cockney rhyming slang, for example, is a casualty of sweeping gentrification. Some of it has become mainstream - we all know what "apples and pears" means. But it retains its linguistic creativity: one's Aris means "arse"; an abbreviation of Aristotle, which rhymes with bottle-and-glass. Genius.

Here are some argots peculiar to their groups.

Nellyarda, zhoosh the riah, titivate, schlumph your Vera down, and palare that omee for the bevvies because I've nanti dinarli.

(Translation: Listen, style your hair, make yourself look pretty, drink up your gin, and talk to that man to get a drink because I'm skint.)

Polari was pugnacious, camp, and racy. The cant was whispered by gay men in large cities in 1960s Britain (when homosexuality was illegal). In today's more equal times, it's linguistically archaic. But there's a move from language lovers like myself to preserve and promote Polari as a kind of linguistic artifact - so the battles and resilience of those who spoke it are remembered and respected. The Polari app is fantabulosa, giving etymologies and explanations of the full Polari lexicon as far as records exist.

Polari's weapon was camp - turning on its head the idea that "camp" was effete and submissive, instead transforming it into something powerful and defiant. It did this by imprinting a flamboyant flair and strange panache using a complete mish-mash of words borrowed from cockney rhyming slang, backslang (when a word is pronounced backwards such as riah and emag), Yiddish, Italian, theatre slang and naval slang. You might have dropped a Polari word into a sentence to surreptitiously show the attractive man you were talking to that you're gay, or test if he was. Or to avoid disapproval - even arrest. Or simply to bitch, and get away with it.

Polari was popularised by the 1960s BBC radio series Round the Horne, featuring two camp Polari-speakers, Julian and Sandy. Once it gained popularity, the cat was out of the bag. 1967 saw the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain, making Polari redundant.
CrossFitters
Gym-goers speak in a common language, but those who attend CrossFit take it to another level. They don't attend a gym; it's a box. Acronyms abound - Wod (workout of the day) is the best known, but others include Amrap (as many reps as possible) and ATG (ass to grass). The Wod is often given a female name. Founder Greg Glassman explains: "Anything that left you flat on your back, looking at the sky asking 'what just happened to me?' deserved a female's name." Charming.

Like many argots, the unique vernacular enhances CrossFit's mystique and sense of being a special, exclusive community. It gets people like me writing about it in places like this. Clever marketing, really.
Consumer-speak
Talking of clever marketing, when a corporate noun replaces the neutral noun, or a corporate word becomes a verb, the corporate really has won an Orwellian victory. It means we say Kindle instead of e-reader, iPhone instead of smartphone and Play-Doh, Sellotape, Pritt Stick and Tippex instead of their generic alternatives. Hoovering, tweeting and googling show how those companies dominate their markets.
Professionalese
Office talk - doing a Swot analysis and Smart objectives by end of play - is the kind of acronym-heavy argot that organisations develop their own version of, to build a sense of belonging, perceived expertise and perceived verbal shortcuts. Please. Just say the whole thing. Acronyms are annoying.
Verlan
If you're French, I'd argue that you're automatically cool. Certainly, as I've written before, the French have the coolest idioms. But if you're really cool in France, you use Verlan - a French cant which is like pig Latin, but cooler. It was initially used by young people, drug dealers and criminals as a secret language. Unlike pig Latin, many Verlan words have travelled into mainstream French. To speak in this coded inverted tongue, you must separate the word into syllables, reverse them, then piece it back together. Verlan itself is verlan for l'envers (backwards). Another example is chébran, which is the Verlan of branché (cool).
Latin
It may be dead, but there are many benefits to learning Latin - it deepens your understanding of English and other languages, and gives interesting insights into etymologies and the like. But it could be considered a cryptolect: a secretive exclusive language, designed to exclude, in this case, oiks. It's mainly used to distinguish an expensive education from a state one. After all, it's as arcane and defunct as Polari. It means private school kids can know that in vino veritas because their schools were acting in loco parentis.

It's especially true if you call your university your alma mater. Ugh.
Journalese
Sensationalist and over abbreviated language is journalese. If you interview an everyday eyewitness without a party trick to speak of and call them "talent"; if you speak of pegs or hooks metaphorically; or if you discuss "news currency" - then you're chatting in journalese.
Gary Nunn is a regular contributor to Mind your language. Twitter @garynunn1 Topics

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In with the in crowd: secret languages can confuse, exclude or empower

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There are between 6,500 and 7,000 languages spoken worldwide. Include argots - the characteristic language of a particular group - and that number climbs ginormously. Ginormous itself is argot, the portmanteau of gigantic and enormous to form a new blended word. It's also hyperbole: gigantic is no longer deemed huge enough, so we blend and expand.

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BECAUSE I am interested in what happens to the English language, over the past year or so I've been asking people, at dinner parties and professional gatherings and so on, whether they think that English is well on its way to being the global language. Typically, they look puzzled about why I would even bother to ask such an obvious question. They say firmly, Of course. Then they start talking about the Internet. We're just having a conversation, so I refrain from launching into everything I'm about to tell you. It's not that I believe they're actually wrong. But the idea of English as a global language doesn't mean what they think it does -- at least, not according to people I've interviewed whose professions are bound up especially closely in what happens to the English language.

English has inarguably achieved some sort of global status. Whenever we turn on the news to find out what's happening in East Asia, or the Balkans, or Africa, or South America, or practically anyplace, local people are being interviewed and telling us about it in English. This past April the journalist Ted Anthony, in one of two articles about global English that he wrote for the Associated Press, observed, "When Pope John Paul II arrived in the Middle East last month to retrace Christ's footsteps and addressed Christians, Muslims and Jews, the pontiff spoke not Latin, not Arabic, not Hebrew, not his native Polish. He spoke in English."

WEB ONLY

INTERVIEW
Being Multilingual
An e-mail exchange between Barbara Wallraff and The English Company U.K.'s David Graddol.

INTERVIEW
A Richly Capable Mother Tongue
An e-mail exchange between Barbara Wallraff and Anne Soukhanov, the U.S. general editor of the Encarta World English Dictionary.

FORUM
Global English?
Has the globalization of English affected your work -- or your life? Join readers from around the world for a special forum in Post & Riposte.

Indeed, by now lists of facts about the amazing reach of our language may have begun to sound awfully familiar. Have we heard these particular facts before, or only others like them? English is the working language of the Asian trade group ASEAN. It is the de facto working language of 98 percent of German research physicists and 83 percent of German research chemists. It is the official language of the European Central Bank, even though the bank is in Frankfurt and neither Britain nor any other predominantly English-speaking country is a member of the European Monetary Union. It is the language in which black parents in South Africa overwhelmingly wish their children to be educated. This little list of facts comes from British sources: a report, and a follow-up newsletter that David Graddol, a language researcher at The Open University, and his consulting firm, The English Company U.K., wrote in 1997 and 1998 for the British Council, whose mission is to promote British culture worldwide; and (1997), a book by David Crystal, who is a professor at the University of Wales.

And yet, of course, English is not sweeping all before it, not even in the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, ten years ago about one in seven people in this country spoke a language other than English at home -- and since then the proportion of immigrants in the population has grown and grown. Ever-wider swaths of Florida, California, and the Southwest are heavily Spanish-speaking. Hispanic people make up 30 percent of the population of New York City, and a television station there that is affiliated with a Spanish-language network has been known to draw a larger daily audience than at least one of the city's English-language network affiliates. Even Sioux City, Iowa, now has a Spanish-language newspaper. According to the census, from 1980 to 1990 the number of Spanish-speakers in the United States grew by 50 percent.

Over the same decade the number of speakers of Chinese in the United States grew by 98 percent. Today approximately 2.4 million Chinese-speakers live in America, and more than four out of five of them prefer to speak Chinese at home. The rate of growth of certain other languages in the United States has been higher still. From 1980 to 1990 the number of speakers of Korean increased by 127 percent and of speakers of Vietnamese by 150 percent. Small American towns from Huntsville, Alabama, to Meriden, Connecticut, to Wausau, Wisconsin, to El Cenizo, Texas -- all sites of linguistic controversy in recent years -- have been alarmed to find that many new arrivals do not speak English well and some may not even see the point of going to the trouble of learning it.

How can all of this, simultaneously, be true? How can it be that English is conquering the globe if it can't even hold its own in parts of our traditionally English-speaking country?

A perhaps less familiar paradox is that the typical English-speaker's experience of the language is becoming increasingly simplified, even as English as a whole grows more complex. If these two trends are occurring, and they are, then the globalization of English will never deliver the tantalizing result we might hope for: that is, we monolingual English-speakers may never be able to communicate fluently with everyone everywhere. If we want to exchange anything beyond rudimentary messages with many of our future fellow English-speakers, we may well need help from something other than English.

The evidence strongly suggests that the range of realistic hopes and fears about the English language is narrower than some may suppose. Much discussion of what is likely to happen to English is colored, sometimes luridly, by what people dread or desire -- for their children, their neighborhoods, their nations, their world. Human aspirations, of course, have a great deal to do with what comes to pass. And language is very much tied up with aspirations.

Last fall I visited David Graddol at The English Company's headquarters, in Milton Keynes, England. Graddol has a rumpled appearance somewhat at odds with the crisp publications, replete with graphs and pie charts and executive summaries, for which he is responsible. Similarly, the appearance of The English Company's offices, located in the ground-floor flat of a Victorian house and sparsely furnished with good Arts and Crafts antiques together with some flea-market stuff, is amiably out of keeping with the sophisticated, high-tech nature of the consultancy's work. Stuck on the wall above the stove, in the kitchen, were four clocks, each captioned with a big letter hand-drawn on a piece of paper: M, K, M, A. This was to help the staff remember what time it was in Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Mozambique, and Argentina, the four sites where officials and advisers on how to teach English throughout those countries were taking part in an online seminar moderated by The English Company.

"The main message," Graddol told me, "is that the globalization of English isn't going to happen the way people expect it to." He ticked off a dizzying array of eventualities that could transform the world language picture: political alliances that have yet to be formed; the probable rise of regional trading blocs, in such places as Asia; the Arab world, and Latin America, in which the United States and other primarily English-speaking countries will be little involved; the possibility that world-changing technological innovations will arise out of nations where English is little spoken; a backlash against American values and culture in the Middle East or Asia; or the triumph of our values and culture in those places.

To understand the fundamental paradoxes of global English, though, we should focus on two realms of possibility: demographics and technology -- yes, the Internet, but much else that's technological besides.

First, Second, or Foreign Language

PEOPLE who expect English to triumph over all other languages are sometimes surprised to learn that the world today holds three times as many native speakers of Chinese as native speakers of English. "Chinese," as language scholars use the word, refers to a family of languages and dialects the most widely spoken of which is Mandarin, and which share a written language although they are not all mutually intelligible when spoken. "English" refers to a family of languages and dialects the most widely spoken of which is standard American English, and which have a common origin in England -- though not all varieties of English, either, are mutually intelligible. The versions of English used by educated speakers practically anywhere can be understood by most Americans, but pidgins, creoles, and diverse dialects belong to the same family, and these are not always so generally intelligible. To hear for yourself how far English now ranges from what we Americans are used to, you need only rent a video of the 1998 Scottish film which, though in English, comes fully subtitled.

"Native speaker" is no easier to define with any precision than "Chinese" or "English," although it means roughly what you'd think: a person who grew up using the language as his or her first. In terms of how demographic patterns of language use are changing, native speakers are not where the action is. And the difference between native speakers and second- or foreign-language speakers is an important one subjectively as well as demographically. The subjective distinction I mean will be painfully familiar to anyone who, like me, spent years in school studying a foreign language and is now barely able to summon enough of it to order dinner in a restaurant.

In any case, the numerical gap is impressive: about 1,113 million people speak Chinese as their mother tongue, whereas about 372 million speak English. And yet English is still the world's second most common native language, though it is likely to cede second place within fifty years to the South Asian linguistic group whose leading members are Hindi and Urdu. In 2050, according to a model of language use that The English Company developed and named "engco" after itself, the world will hold 1,384 million native speakers of Chinese, 556 million of Hindi and Urdu, and 508 million of English. As native languages Spanish and Arabic will be almost as common as English, with 486 million and 482 million speakers respectively. And among young people aged fifteen to twenty-four English is expected to be in fourth place, behind not only Chinese and the Hindi-Urdu languages but also Arabic, and just ahead of Spanish.

Certainly, projections of all kinds perch atop teetering stacks of assumptions. But assuming that the tallies of native languages in use today are roughly accurate, the footing for projections of who will speak what as a first language fifty years from now is relatively sturdy. That's because many of the people who will be alive in fifty years are alive now; a majority of the parents of people who will be here then are already here; and most people's first language is, of course, the first language of their parents.

Prod at this last idea, to see how it takes into account such things as immigration and bilingual or multilingual places, and you'll find that it is not rock-solid. By David Crystal's estimate, for example, two thirds of the world's children grow up in bilingual environments and develop competence in two languages -- so it is an open question what the native language of a good many of those children is. Then, too, a range of population projections exists, and demographers keep tinkering with them all.

But it's undeniable that English-speakers now have lower birth rates, on average, than speakers of Hindi and Urdu and Arabic and Spanish. And the countries where these other languages are spoken are, generally, less well developed than native-English-speaking countries. In 1996, according to United Nations statistics, 21 percent of males and 38 percent of females in "less developed regions" were illiterate in every language, as were 41 and 62 percent in the "least developed countries." Nonetheless, the gains that everyone expects English to make must come because it is adopted as a second language or a foreign language by most of the people who speak it. According to "The Decline of the Native Speaker," a paper David Graddol published last year in the AILA Review (AILA is the French acronym for the International Association of Applied Linguistics; the review belongs to the minority of international scholarly journals that still make use of another language in addition to English), the proportion of native English-speakers in the world population can be expected to shrink over the century 1950-2050 from more than eight to less than five percent.

A few more definitions will be helpful here. "Second-language" speakers live in places where English has some sort of official or special status. In India, for instance, the national government sanctions the use of English for its business, along with fifteen indigenous languages. What proportion of India's population of a billion speaks English is hotly debated, but most sources agree it is well under five percent. All the same, India is thought to have the fourth largest population of English-speakers in the world, after the United States, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria -- or the third largest if you discount speakers of Nigerian pidgin English. English is a second language for virtually everyone in India who speaks it. And obviously the United States, too, contains speakers of English as a second language -- some 30 million of them in 1995, according to an estimate by David Crystal.

"Foreign-language" speakers of English live in places where English is not singled out in any formal way, and tend to learn it to communicate with people from elsewhere. Examples might be Japanese who travel abroad on business and Italians who work in tourism in their own country. The distinction between the two categories of non-native speakers is sometimes blurry. In Denmark and Sweden the overwhelming majority of children are taught English in school -- does that constitute a special status?

The distinction between categories of speakers matters, in part because where English is a first or second language it develops local standards and norms. India, for instance, publishes dictionaries of Indian English, whereas Denmark and Sweden tend to defer to Britain or the United States in setting standards of English pronunciation and usage. The distinction also matters in relation to how entrenched English is in a given place, and how easy that place would find it to abandon the language.

One more surprise is how speculative any estimate of the use of English as a second or a foreign language must necessarily be. How large an English vocabulary and how great a command of English grammar does a person need in order to be considered an English-speaker? Generally, even the most rigorous attempts to determine how many people speak what, including the U.S. Census, depend on self-reporting. Do those years of French in high school and college entitle us to declare ourselves bilingual? They do if we want them to. Language researchers readily admit that their statistics on second- and foreign-language use are, as Graddol put it in "The Decline of the Native Speaker," "educated guesswork."

David Crystal, in his (1995), observed that only 98 million second-language speakers of English in the world could be totted up with certainty. In English as a Global Language, though, he argued that the true number was more nearly 350 million. Graddol put forward a variety of estimates in "The Decline of the Native Speaker," including Crystal's, and explained why each had its proponents. According to the most expansive of them, the number of second-language speakers was 518 million in 1995. From 98 million to 518 million is quite a range.

Estimates of the number of foreign-language speakers of English range more widely still. Crystal reports that these "have been as low as 100 million and as high as 1,000 million." The estimates would vary, because by definition foreign-language speakers live in places where English has no official or special status. They may or may not have been asked in a national census or other poll about their competence in English or other languages; they may or may not have had any formal schooling in English; their assessment of their ability to speak English may or may not be accurate.

This last point is particularly worth bearing in mind. According to recent "Eurobarometer" surveys described by Graddol, "77% of Danish adults and 75% of Swedish adults for example, say they can take part in a conversation in English." And "nearly one third of the citizens of the 13 'non English-speaking' countries in the EU 'can speak English well enough to take part in a conversation.'" However, Richard Parker, in his book (1995), reported this about a study commissioned by Lintas, a major media buyer, in the early 1990s:

When ad researchers recently tested 4,500 Europeans for "perceived" versus "actual" English-language skills, the results were discouraging. First, the interviewees were asked to evaluate their English-language abilities, and then to translate a series of sample English phrases or sentences. The study produced, in its own words, "sobering" results: "the number of people really fit for English-language television turned out to be less than half the expected audience." In countries such as France, Spain, and Italy, the study found, fewer than 3 percent had excellent command of English; only in small markets, such as Scandinavia and the Low Countries did the numbers even exceed 10 percent.

So the number of people in the world who speak English is unknown, and how well many of them speak and understand it is questionable. No one is arguing that English is not widely spoken and taught. But the vast numbers that are often repeated -- a billion English-speakers, a billion and a half -- have only tenuous grounding in reality.

I have never seen any tables or charts that rank languages according to the proportions of the world's population expected to be using them as second or foreign languages ten or fifty years from now. The subject is just too hypothetical, the range of variables too great. Consider, for instance, the side effects that the breakup of the Soviet Union has had on the use of the Russian language. Now that no central authority seeks to impose Russian on schoolchildren throughout the Soviet bloc, few countries besides Russia itself require students to learn it, and for the most part the language is less and less used. However, in places including the Caucasus, Russian continues to be valued as a lingua franca, and fluency in it remains a hallmark of an educated person.

Consider, too, the slender thread by which Canada's linguistic fate hung not long ago. In November of 1995 Quebec held a referendum to determine whether most of its citizens were in favor of independence. If 27,000 of the 4.65 million Quebeckers who voted had cast their ballots for secession rather than against, by now Canada's entire population of some 30 million people, all of them in theory bilingual, might conceivably be on the way to being largely monolingual -- the nation of Quebec in French and what remained of Canada in English.

In the United States, discounting the claims that antagonists make about the other side's position, it's hard to find anyone who doesn't think it would be nice if everyone in the United States spoke English. Virtually all the impassioned debate is about whose resources should be devoted to making this happen and whether people should be encouraged to speak or discouraged from speaking other languages, too. All kinds of things have the potential to change the rate at which English as a second language is learned in the United States. Suppose that nationwide, English lessons were available free (as they already are in some parts of the country) and that employers offered workers, and schools offered parents, incentives to take them. Who can say what effect this would have?

Patterns of learning foreign languages are more volatile still. When I visited David Graddol, last fall, The English Company was reviewing materials the Chinese government had created to be used by 400,000 Chinese instructors in teaching English to millions of their compatriots. Maybe this was a step in an inexorable process of globalization -- or maybe it wasn't. Plans to teach English widely in China might change if relations between our two countries took a disastrous turn. Or the tipping point could be something completely undramatic, such as the emergence of an array of Chinese-language Web sites. The information-technology expert Michael Dertouzos told me not long ago that at a conference he had attended in Taipei, the Chinese were grumbling about having to use English to take advantage of the Internet's riches.

Several Languages Called English

MUCH of what will happen to English we can only speculate about. But let's pursue an idea that language researchers regard as fairly well grounded: native speakers of English are already outnumbered by second-language and foreign-language speakers, and will be more heavily outnumbered as time goes on.

One obvious implication is that some proportion of the people using English for business or professional purposes around the world aren't and needn't be fluent in it. Recently I talked with Michael Henry Heim, a professor of Slavic literatures at the University of California at Los Angeles and a professional translator who has rendered into English major works by Milan Kundera and Günter Grass. By his count, he speaks "ten or so" languages. He told me flatly, "English is much easier to learn poorly and to communicate in poorly than any other language. I'm sure that if Hungary were the leader of the world, Hungarian would not be the world language. To communicate on a day-to-day basis -- to order a meal, to book a room -- there's no language as simple as English."

Research, though, suggests that people are likely to find a language easier or harder to learn according to how similar it is to their native tongue, in terms of things like word order, grammatical structure, and cognate words. As the researcher Terence Odlin noted in his book (1989), the duration of full-time intensive courses given to English-speaking U.S. foreign-service personnel amounts to a rough measurement of how different, in these ways, other languages are from English. Today the courses for foreign-service employees who need to learn German, Italian, French, Spanish, or Portuguese last twenty-four weeks. Those for employees learning Swahili, Indonesian, or Malay last thirty-six weeks, and for people learning languages including Hindi, Urdu, Russian, and Hungarian, forty-four weeks. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean take eighty-eight weeks. Note that all the world's other commonest native languages except Spanish are in the groups most demanding of English-speakers. It might be reasonable to suppose that the reverse is also true -- that Arabic- and Chinese-speakers find fluency in English to be more of a challenge than Spanish-speakers do.

A variety of restricted subsets of English have been developed to meet the needs of nonfluent speakers. Among these is Special English, which the Voice of America began using in its broadcasts experimentally some forty years ago and has employed part-time ever since. Special English has a basic vocabulary of just 1,500 words ( contains some 200,000 words, and the nearly 750,000), though sometimes these words are used to define non-Special English words that VOA writers deem essential to a given story. Currently VOA uses Special English for news and features that are broadcast a half hour at a time, six times a day, seven days a week, to millions of listeners worldwide.

But restricted forms of English are usually intended for professional communities. Among the best known of these is Seaspeak, which ships' pilots around the world have used for the past dozen years or so; this is now being supplanted by SMCP, or "Standard Marine Communication Phrases," which is also derived from English but was developed by native speakers of a variety of languages. Airplane pilots and air-traffic controllers use a restricted form of English called Airspeak.

Certainly, the world's ships and airplanes are safer if those who guide them have some language in common, and restricted forms of English have no modern-day rivals for this role. The greatest danger language now seems to pose to navigation and aviation is that some pilots learn only enough English to describe routine situations, and find themselves at a loss when anything out of the ordinary happens.

Something else obviously implied by the ascendance of English as a second and a foreign language is that more and more people who speak English speak another language at least as well, and probably better. India may have the third or fourth largest number of English-speakers in the world, but English is thought to be the mother tongue of much less than one percent of the population. This is bound to affect the way the language is used locally. Browsing some English-language Web sites from India recently, I seldom had trouble understanding what was meant. I did, however, time and again come across unfamiliar words borrowed from Hindi or another indigenous Indian language. On the site called India World the buttons that a user could click on to call up various types of information were labeled " samachar: Personalised News," " dhan: Investing in India," " khoj: Search India," " khel: Indian Cricket," and so forth. When I turned to the of Bombay (some of whose residents call it Mumbai) and called up a gossipy piece about the romantic prospects of the son of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi, I read, "Sources disclose that before Rahul Gandhi left for London, some kind of a 'swayamvar' was enacted at 10, Janpath with family friend Captain Satish Sharma drawing up a short list of suitable brides from affluent, well-known connected families of Uttar Pradesh."

Of course, English is renowned for its ability to absorb elements from other languages. As ever more local and national communities use English, though, they will pull language in ever more directions. Few in the world will care to look as far afield as the United States or Britain for their standards of proper English. After all, we long ago gave up looking to England -- as did Indians and also Canadians, South Africans, Australians, and New Zealanders, among others. Today each of these national groups is proud to have its own idioms, and dictionaries to define them.

Most of the world's English-speaking communities can still understand one another well -- though not, perhaps, perfectly. As Anne Soukhanov, a word columnist for this magazine and the American editor of the explained in an article titled "The King's English It Ain't," published on the Internet last year, "Some English words mean very different things, depending on your country. In South Asia, a hotel is a restaurant, but in Australia, a hotel is an establishment selling alcoholic beverages. In South Africa, a robot is a traffic light."

David Graddol told me about visiting China to consult on another English-curriculum project (one that had to do with teaching engineers in the steel industry) and finding a university that had chosen a Belgian company to develop lessons for it. When Graddol asked those in charge why they'd selected Belgians, of all people, to teach them English, they explained they saw it as an advantage that the Belgians, like the Chinese, are not native speakers. The Belgians, they reasoned, would be likely to have a feel both for the intricacies of learning the language in adulthood and for using it to communicate with other non-native speakers.

But by now we have strayed far beyond the relationship between demographics and the use of English. Technology has much to teach us too.

Barbara Wallraff is a senior editor of The Atlantic and the author of the book (2000), which grew out of her bimonthly Atlantic column of the same name.

Illustrations by Christoph Niemann.

The Atlantic Monthly; November 2000; What Global Language? - 00.11 (Part Two); Volume 286, No. 5; page 52-66.

The Web in My Own Language

WHEN the conversations I have with friends and acquaintances about the future of English veer immediately toward technology -- especially the Internet -- it's understandable. Much has been made of the Internet as an instrument for circulating English around the globe. According to one estimate that has been widely repeated over the past few years, 80 percent of what's available on the Internet is in English. Some observers, however, have recently been warning that this may have been the high-water mark. It's not that English-speakers are logging off -- au contraire -- but that other people are increasingly logging on, to search out or create content in their own languages. As the newsletter that The English Company prepared for the British Council asserted in September of 1998, "Non English speakers are the fastest growing group of new Internet users." The consensus among those who study these things is that Internet traffic in languages other than English will outstrip English-language traffic within the next few years.

There's no reason this should surprise us -- particularly if we recall that there are about 372 million people in the world whose native language is English and about 5,700 million people whose native language is something else. According to the same newsletter, a recent study by Euro Marketing Associates estimated that

nearly 44% of the world's online population now speak a language other than English at home. Although many of these Internet users are bilingual and speak English in the workplace, Euro Marketing suggest that advertisers of non-business products will more easily reach this group by using their home language. Of the 56 million people who speak languages on the Internet other than English, Spanish speakers represent nearly a quarter.

The study also estimated that 13.1 percent of all Internet users speak an Asian language at home -- Japanese, for the most part. A surge in Internet use like the one that began in the United States half a dozen or so years ago is now under way in a number of other populous and relatively well-off places.

As has been widely noted, the Internet, besides being a convenient vehicle for reaching mass audiences such as, say, the citizenry of Japan or Argentina, is also well suited to bringing together the members of small groups -- for example, middle-class French-speaking sub-Saharan Africans. Or a group might be those who speak a less common language: the numbers of Dutch-speakers and Finnish-speakers on the Internet are sharply up.

The Internet is capable of helping immigrants everywhere to remain proficient in their first language and also to stay current with what is going on back home. Residents in the Basque communities of Nevada and émigrés from the Côte d'Ivoire, for instance, can browse the periodicals, and even listen to the radio stations, of their homelands -- much as American expatriates anywhere with an Internet connection can check the Web sites for CNN, ABC, MSNBC, and their hometown papers and radio stations.

No matter how much English-language material there is on the Web, then, or even how much more English material there is than material in other languages, it is naive to assume that home computers around the world will, in effect, become the work stations of a vast English language lab. People could use their computers that way -- just as we English-speaking Americans could enlist our computers to help us learn Italian, Korean, or Yoruba. But, the glories of learning for its own sake aside, why would we want to do that? Aren't we delighted to be able to gather information, shop, do business, and be entertained in our own language? Why wouldn't others feel the same way? Consider, too, that many people regard high technology as something very much like a new language. Surely it's enough for a person to try to keep his or her hardware and software more or less up-to-date and running smoothly without simultaneously having to grapple with instructions or content in an actual foreign language.

Studies of global satellite television -- a realm that is several years more mature than the Internet -- also point to the idea that most people like new technology better when it speaks their own language. As Richard Parker wrote in Mixed Signals,

Satellites can deliver programming and advertising instantaneously and simultaneously across the more than two dozen languages spoken in Western Europe, but the viewers -- as repeated market research shows -- want their television delivered in local tongues. Contrary to a history in which both motion pictures and early television broadcasts relied heavily on dubbing of foreign (often U.S.) programming, an affluent and culturally confident Europe now appears to be more linguistically divided than ever before.

Parker distinguishes between the "technologically feasible supply" of foreign programming and the "economically viable demand" for it, warning that we should be careful not to confuse the two. A few years ago, for example, Sweden aired a "reality-based" TV series, (the word expedition has entered Swedish from English), and it quickly became a national obsession. But its success did not inspire American television networks to import the series; rather, they developed new shows, such as and

English by Accident

AT one point in my conversation with David Graddol, he made a little sketch of something for me on a proof of his article "The Decline of the Native Speaker." The sketch was meant to remind me that technology has begun to blur the distinctions between languages in intriguing ways -- and to suggest how those ways are themselves starting to overlap. Both the Internet and a range of technological applications only distantly related to it, he wanted me to see, are poised to expand what we are able to do with English.

Graddol uncapped his pen and drew a box in the broad white top margin of the page. "Text to text MT," he wrote in the box, and he said, "Of course you know about machine-translation systems," tapping the box to indicate that it was to represent them. Yes, I did: in fact, The Atlantic published an article about machine translation not long ago (see "Lost in Translation," by Stephen Budiansky, in the December, 1998, issue).

As the article explained, there are translation programs -- AltaVista's Babel Fish among them -- available for use free on the Internet. Type some English into the appropriate space on the Babel Fish Web page, or cut and paste it from another source, and choose your "destination" language -- French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, or German. Presto! Up will pop a not entirely accurate translation of your chosen text. Or you can do this in reverse, from one of those languages -- or Russian (the English-to-Russian feature is still in the works) -- into English. Some professional translators use machine-translation systems as time-savers, getting the things to hack out rough texts they can then refine.

To the left of his machine-translation box Graddol drew a second box, which he labeled "Speech to text." He tapped it and said, "And you know about the voice-recognition systems that turn spoken words into written words." Yes, those, too. As it happens, I am the proud owner of a Dragon Systems program. Current versions of that and several other voice-recognition programs are reported to render speech into writing with 98 percent accuracy -- not a rate that detail-oriented people are likely to find reassuring (getting two words wrong per hundred can add up), but certainly a rate that allows a user to get a point across.

Speech-to-text systems are now available for a variety of languages. Lernout & Hauspie, an industry leader that recently bought both Dragon Systems and Kurzweil Education Systems, sells products for turning British speech, as well as American, into writing, and also ones for German, Dutch, Spanish, French, Mandarin, and Cantonese.

Graddol drew a third box in the margin to the right, and labeled this box "Text to speech." He said, "And there are also machines that turn written words into spoken words." The Kurzweil reading machine, created to help the blind and visually impaired, and now capable of reading aloud in more than fifty languages, is the most advanced example in use. Simpler machines that turn computer code rather than text into speech are of course commonplace by now. We sometimes hear them when we call 411 and ask for a phone number; we hear them when we're refilling a prescription over the phone and a synthesized voice confirms our prescription number and name; we hear them on airlines' flight-information phone lines. These machines may have a vocabulary as elementary as numbers, the days of the week, and "A.M." and "P.M." But they get the job done, and they hint at how more-complex systems might work.

Now Graddol drew lines from one box to the next. "People are starting to work on connecting all the parts," he said. "Once that happens, a lot of things will be possible."

I could, for example, speak into the microphone that came with my Dragon Systems program and have that program render what I've said in writing; instruct one of the translation programs to turn the text into French; and then use Lernout & Hauspie's French-language speech synthesizer to pronounce the computer's translation. This may strike some as a ponderous process, but surely it would be less complicated than acquiring a creditable French accent the old-fashioned way. Then, too, speech-to-writing and writing-to-speech programs may materialize on the Internet, much as the translation programs have done. In that case I will simply talk into the microphone, miraculous high-tech things will happen somewhere in the ether, and voilà! the computer at the restaurant L'Ami Louis, in Paris, will make my request for a reservation known to the staff, in exquisitely correct spoken or written French, and the maitre d', unwitting, will assign me a good table.

That's the theory, anyway. I have my doubts about how exquisite the actual results will be for quite some time. The interchanging of speech with writing, writing with speech, and English with other languages may, however, yield serviceable results very soon. According to a compilation of funny signs spotted around the world, published by the a Paris dress shop once advertised "Dresses for street walking," and a notice in a hotel elevator in the same city advised, "Please leave your values at the front desk." If we can understand the intention of these signs -- as of course we can -- then surely we will be able to see beyond most of the peculiarities resulting from machines' involvement in language. David Graddol's neat little boxes glossed over myriad difficulties inherent in each step of linguistic interchangeability. But each of these steps is already being accomplished approximately, and implemented not just in experimental settings but in real life.

Even as software developers continue to adapt computers to our linguistic needs and wants, we are -- God help us -- adapting our own language to computers. For example, if I want to see the Amazon.com page about the psycholinguist Steven Pinker's book (1999), it's a complete waste of time to type into the search feature "Words and Rules, by Steven Pinker," correctly capitalized and punctuated. The computer and I will get exactly as much out of the exchange if I type "pinker rules." In effect, in this context "pinker rules" is better English than "Words and Rules, by Steven Pinker."

Where computers' processing ability and our intelligence will eventually converge is anyone's guess. As we teach ourselves, for instance, to speak in a way that will make our voice-recognition systems as productive as possible, developers are tweaking the new versions of them so that if the system misinterprets a word and we need to revise what it writes, the change will be incorporated into its database and it will never make the same mistake again.

Does this matter to the future of English? It may well. What is English, anyway? Is it the list of words and their meanings that a dictionary provides, together with all the rules about how to combine the words into sentences and paragraphs? Much more is involved than that. English is a system of communication, and highly germane to it is what or who speakers of English care to communicate with, and about what. The more we need to use English to communicate with machines -- or with people whose fluency is limited or whose understanding of English does not coincide with ours -- the more simplified the language will need to be.

And yet technology is expanding English, by requiring us to come up with new words to describe all the possibilities it offers. Throughout the past century, according to (1999), by John Ayto, technological domains -- at first the likes of cars and aviation and radio, and eventually nuclear power, space, computers, and the Internet -- were among the leading "lexical growth-areas." What's new of late isn't only words: we have whole new ways of combining the elements of written language. One ready example is emoticons (such as :> and ;-o), which seem to have firmly established themselves in the realm of e-mail. Is www a word? Does one write the expression dot com or .com or what? And then there's professional jargon. In the course of exchanging ideas, global communities of astrophysicists, cardiologists, chip designers, food scientists, and systems analysts are stuffing the English language full of jargon. As science and technology grow increasingly multifarious and specialized, the jargon necessarily grows increasingly recondite: in the journal for example, article titles like "Homogeneous phenotype of the gypsy limb-girdle MD with the g sarcoglycan C283Y mutation" are run-of-the-mill. The range of English continues to expand further and further beyond any single person's ability to understand it all.

One more fact worth keeping in mind is that the relationship between science or technology and English is, essentially, accidental. It is chiefly because the United States has long been in the vanguard of much scientific and technological research, of course, that English is so widely used in these fields. If the United States were for the most part French-speaking, surely French would be the language of science and technology; there is nothing inherent in English to tie it to these fields. And if something as earthshaking as the Internet had been developed in, say, Japan, perhaps English would not now be dominant to the extent that it is. Future technology may well originate elsewhere. In the rapidly advancing field of wireless communications devices, for example, Scandinavia is already the acknowledged leader.

Here an argument is sometimes advanced that American culture furthers innovation, openness to new ideas, and so forth, and that our culture, whether by accident or not, is inseparable from the English language. But this takes us only so far. Even if the vanguards in all scientific and technological fields, everywhere in the world, used English in their work, once the fruits of their labor became known to ordinary people and began to matter to them, people would coin words in their local languages to describe these things. Theoretical physicists at international conferences may speak English among themselves, but most high school and college physics teachers use their native languages in class with their students. The Microsoft engineers who designed the Windows computer-operating system spoke English, and used English in what they created, but in the latest version, Windows Millennium, the words that users see on the screen are available in twenty-eight languages -- and the spell-checker offers a choice of four varieties of English.

IN sum, the globalization of English does not mean that if we who speak only English just sit back and wait, we'll soon be able to exchange ideas with anyone who has anything to say. We can't count on having much more around the world than a very basic ability to communicate. Outside certain professional fields, if English-speaking Americans hope to exchange ideas with people in a nuanced way, we may be well advised to do as people elsewhere are doing: become bilingual. This is easier said than done. If learning a second language were so simple, no doubt many more of us would have picked up Spanish or Chinese by now. It is clear, though, that the young learn languages much more readily than adults. Surely, American children who are exposed to nothing but English would benefit from being taught other languages as well.

At the same time, English is flourishing, and people here and everywhere are eager to learn it to the extent that it is practical for them to do so. It would behoove us to make learning English as easy as possible, for both children and adults, in this country and abroad.

However unwelcome this news may be to some, not even headlong technological advances mean that computers will soon be doing all the hard work of coping with other languages for us. For the foreseeable future computers will be able to do no more than some of the relatively easy work. When it comes to subtle comprehension of our world and the other people in it, we are, as ever, on our own.

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BECAUSE I am interested in what happens to the English language, over the past year or so I've been asking people, at dinner parties and professional gatherings and so on, whether they think that English is well on its way to being the global language.

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n China last month, Theresa May attended the launch of the British Council's English is Great campaign, intended to boost interest and fluency in our national language. This might sound like Donald Trump's notorious "Make America great again", but comes in fact from a stronger position. Beyond doubt, the use of English is greater than ever, and far more widespread than any other language in the world. All non-English-speaking powers of our globalised world recognise it as the first foreign language to learn; it is also, uniquely, in practical use worldwide. The British Council reckons that English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people, a quarter of the world's population. It is taught from primary level up in all China's schools; it is the working language of the whole European Union.

On the news service France 24, English is used more prominently than French. Its use is required of all airline pilots and control towers, 24/7. And it is seen as an essential cachet for progress in some amazing places: for example, 14 years ago, the prime minister of Mongolia - a country with no historic links to an English-speaking power - decreed it should replace Russian in all schools as part of his aspiration to make Ulaanbaatar a centre for telephone call services. One in six Russians claims to speak it. English is clearly the language of choice for those with global aspirations, whatever their political stance towards Anglo-Saxon powers.

This global acceptance of English, now far beyond the zones of influence of the British empire or the United States' backyard, has effectively grown up in just a century - neatly, and a little paradoxically, since the 1919 treaty of Versailles. In deference to the US, this was the first international treaty written in English; but it also turned out to mark the incipient decline of the world's greatest English-speaking institution, the British empire. From a language point of view, however, British power had the good fortune to be succeeded by its cousin in North America, so that the usual historic lag, as political command leads on to linguistic imitation, was disguised. Even as Britain began to decline economically, its established position was reflected by increased take-up of English as the language to learn.

But all this while, especially from the 1920s to the 1990s, the focus of US expansion was changing, moving from North America to the world, leading to influence on trade, engineering, telecommunications, mining, media, science and finance, as the dollar moved to replace sterling as the world's reserve currency. This was followed by the digital information revolution, creating new fortunes based in Silicon Valley at the turn of the 21st century. These were all positive for the world role of English (a role founded by Great Britain), but should have been expected to peak later, in the growth of soft power and the increased popularity of American culture.

When circumstances change, dominant languages fall. And the change is clearly coming

It is this lagged growth of English, reflecting US influence hitherto, that we are now experiencing. Yet it is happening in a 21st century when other nations, particularly in Asia but also in South America and Africa, are far outpacing the US (let alone Britain and the European Union) in economic growth rates. This is an amazing juncture in world history. And two questions arise. Is the position of English a real asset to the states that speak it natively? And is the language likely to hold this position in the pecking order indefinitely?

Considering the windfall benefits of English as one's own language, some immediate advantages are undeniable. It has given direct access to the world's principal medium of communication: good for having an inside track on "news we can use", as well as facilitated access for well-educated anglophones to influential jobs. It has also put us in a position to charge some kind of rent for allowing others admission to this linguistic elite: hence the massive earnings from teaching English as a foreign language (now well over £2bn in the UK alone, reaching £3bn by 2020), and global markets for English-language publishing (£1.4bn in exports in 2015). This is another spin-off from Britain's recent history of dominance, like the siting of the Greenwich meridian, giving daily opportunities for global trades between Asia and America, or the association of investment, and hence global finance, with the City of London.

But special knowledge of a language is an asset that wastes all too soon when it becomes global property. World English will have just a historic connection to Britain or the US, and knowing it well is no longer exclusive to native speakers. Even the short-term windfall advantages came with a moral hazard. Presumption of entitlement can breed complacency at home, as well as resentment abroad - all too evident in the current "negotiations" on Britain's divorce from Europe.

It is hard to credit the vulnerability of a language such as English - which has spread, unbidden and unplanned, far beyond its homeland, and is even claimed to be the "language of freedom". But this in itself is nothing new. Transnational lingua francas, once established, always give off an aura of permanence. Yet when circumstances change, they fall. And the change is clearly coming.

And so the natural expectation will be that after the new powers, such as China, India or Brazil, establish themselves economically, politically (and probably militarily), their linguistic and cultural influence too will come to be felt, among those who want to do business with them, and then with one another. But as with all newly dominant languages, there will be a lag.

If centred on China, say, the world may be less enthusiastic for "the hidden hand" of Adam Smith's free markets. If other centres emerge, the result may be more mixed, asserting local Islamic, Buddhist or Hindu traditions. Evolving translation technologies may make languages largely interchangeable, pushing national cultures into the background. Whatever, there will be no special deference to the current English-speaking tradition.

Something like this, after all, is what happened in the 17th century, when the newly global power France won a role for French as a common language for civilised Europe: French - with strong Enlightenment overtones - replaced Latin itself, which had held that role for 15 centuries. In a different way, it is what happened in the 19th century, when the imperial interlopers Russia and Britain abolished Farsi in their Asian domains. Before that, Farsi had been pre-eminent for 800 years as the language of Muslim culture, trade and politics.

For English, therefore, its current peak is likely to be as good as it will ever get, its glory as a world language lasting just a couple of centuries - almost a flash in the pan, not yet comparable with those forerunners Latin or Farsi. And on present form, its fall is likely to coincide with the latest rise of China, whose documented history has run for three millennia. Chinese, too, is great.

Nicholas Ostler is the author of Empires of the Word, and The Last Lingua Franca. He chairs the Foundation for Endangered Languages

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Have we reached peak English in the world? | Nicholas Ostler

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One of Britain's greatest strengths is set to diminish as China asserts itself on the world stage, says author Nicholas Ostler

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Visitors expecting to hear the Queen's English spoken on the streets of London in 50 years may need to "fink" again.

By 2066, linguists are predicting that the "th" sound will vanish completely in the capital because there are so many foreigners who struggle to pronounce interdental consonants - the term for a sound created by pushing the tongue against the upper teeth.

Already Estuary English - a hybrid of Cockney and received pronunciation (RP) which is prevalent in the South East - is being replaced by Multicultural London English (MLE) which is heavily influenced by Caribbean, West African and Asian Communities.

But within the next few decades immigration will have fundamentally altered the language, according to experts at the University of York.

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'Th' sound to vanish from English language by 2066 because of multiculturalism, say linguists

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Visitors expecting to hear the Queen's English spoken on the streets of London in 50 years may need to "fink" again. By 2066, linguists are predicting that the "th" sound will vanish completely in the capital because there are so many foreigners who struggle to pronounce interdental consonants - the term for a sound created by pushing the tongue against the upper teeth.

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Newsnight's Stephen Smith considers why people, from Mick Jagger to Margaret Thatcher, change the way that they speak.

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Opinions about Jamie Shea's accent were divided in a way that reflected current uncertainties. "It has been a terrible mistake to allow Nato's case to be presented by Jamie Shea, who sounds like the manager of a lower-division football club," wrote John Keegan in the Daily Telegraph. (It is difficult not to hear his accent of public-school condescension.) Shea may have an Oxford PhD and be fluent in French, German, Dutch and Italian, but a general's wife made a formal complaint about the way he speaks. For many aged over 30 the issue is sharper because of the contrast between Shea's "Estuary English" and the unflinching plumminess of Ian McDonald, Ministry of Defence Spokesman during the Falklands War. Are we learning something - hearing something - about a changed society?

At the moment the topic of accent is tender because officially accent does not matter while privately it does. A recent comic victim of the doublethink has been Jacob Rees-Mogg, Etonian son of William Rees-Mogg, whose prospects of becoming a Tory politician are rumoured to be sinking because of his anachronistically posh accent. He has become a hero of the Daily Telegraph letters column, one correspondent complaining that "an overt form of intimidation exists, directed against anyone who dares to eschew the current, Americanised, mode of behaviour, speech and dress." "It is rather pathetic to fuss about accents too much," says Rees-Mogg in a self-vindicating article, though undermining the liberal sentiment by opining that: "John Prescott's accent certainly stereotypes him as an oaf."

This Rees-Moggian contradiction tells us of a modern uncertainty about how we speak. When George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion (1912) it was uncontentious to believe that some ways of speaking were better than others. The majority of children received no secondary education. In the 1890s, George Gissing, a writer with strong working-class sympathies, took it for granted that a working-class accent undermined all attempts at self-improvement. In his novel New Grub Street, Mrs Yule is married to a literary man but comes from humble origins. Her move upwards in society is doomed, for, though her speech "was seldom ungrammatical", "the accent of the London poor, which brands as with hereditary baseness, still clung to her words, rendering futile such propriety of phrase as she owed to years of association with educated people."

Now, as linguist John Honey, author of Does Accent Matter?, has said, "the subject is virtually taboo in our schools." Officially we should not think that one particular accent, Received Pronunciation (RP), how BBC newsreaders were trained to speak, is any "better" than others. No longer do job adverts in newspapers specify well-spoken candidates, as they still did in the 1980s. Yet some of the time we do. Scarcely any Guardian or Independent article involving David Evans, former Tory MP for Welwyn and Hatfield, failed to mention his car-salesman's accent, a sound to chill the blood of any liberal - it seemed the incarnation of Thatcherite brutalism.

In Spitting Image and probably the middle-class imagination, Norman Tebbit was given an Essex drag on his vowels which he hardly possessed. He should speak in that way because of what he represented.

Estuary English confirms our uncertainties. It can seem egalitarian or bogus. The term was coined in 1984 by linguist David Rosewarne, but only began appearing in newspapers in the 1990s. Now we all hear it. The latest edition of Chambers Dictionary defines it as "a form of English influenced by Cockney, spoken in the Thames estuary and surrounding areas". Of course, this misses the point - as if the Thames estuary were a distinct region of the country. "Estuary" is precisely not local. The Oxford Dictionary of New Words, officially non-judgmental, is stiffly condescending: "It may now be regarded as fashionable among certain popular comedians, pop and rock musicians, and presenters of television programmes for the young."

The adoption of this accent, generally taken to signify collapsing class distinctions, is an unprecedented phenomenon. The middle class and the privately educated take on some of the elements of what has always been one of the lowest status accents: Cockney. Academic studies confirm that, socio-linguistically, Cockney has shared the bottom rung with Scouse, Glaswegian, West Midlands and Belfast.

Almost certainly this is because, historically, they have all been essentially working-class accents - unlike Yorkshire, say, which might be middle class. This is one reason why Scots voices, and to a lesser extent Irish and Welsh ones, are different. A middle-class Scottish accent can signify a good education (lawyers, doctors). It is difficult to believe that there might be, in Edinburgh's salubrious suburbs, streets of people sounding like Malcolm Rifkind. Yet, however mockable his extraordinary intonations, they still seem to tell us of a beady intelligence.

The peculiarity of Estuary is that (pace Chambers) it does not have a locality. Recently linguists have detected strains of it among Liverpool schoolchildren. Via television and radio it comes from London, yet has become placeless. This is unsettling because regionality of speech has often commanded respect. When Ted Hughes died it was his voice reading his poetry that laid hold of the TV viewer, the Yorkshire accent a guarantee of its harsh lyricism. It did not matter that Hughes spent most of his adult life in Devon; the accent was evidence of origins in a writer whose poetry is all about what is elemental.

One of Hughes's greatest influences was an earlier poet laureate, Wordsworth, who also never lost his northern accent, a mark of the fidelity to place that was the distinction of his poetry.

Regional accent has often been a sign of achievement without corruption. Obituaries of Lord Denning invariably made a connection between what the Times called "his attractive regional burr" and a kind of undeluded, if reactionary, "common-sense". We like to hear stories of the stuffiness that we have escaped - of the head of BBC Outside Broadcasting who told cricket commentator John Arlott in 1948: "You have an interesting mind, but a vulgar voice." Arlott's much-enjoyed accent was also a kind of phonetic fossil. He came from Basingstoke, now surely thoroughly Estuary-ised.

The RP that is now challenged only became a dogma in the late 19th century, fostered by the public school system. Yet a strong sense of correct pronunciation was well established by Shakespeare's day.

It was always based on what Elizabethan courtier George Puttenham called "our Southern English", the speech of "northern men, whether they be noblemen or gentlemen" being "not so courtly or so current." Regional accents have been noticed, especially where they might not be expected, for centuries. Sir Walter Raleigh's West Country vowels stood out at courts. Sir Robert Walpole's Norfolk accent signified, for allies, his sturdiness, for foes, his baseness. Gladstone retained a trace in his voice of his Liverpool origins.

For post-war grammar-school boys and girls, accent had other meanings. For Harold Wilson it was the appropriate possession of the meritocrat. Traditionally ambitious grammar-school pupils would try to escape their localities, and therefore their accents. Most famous is Mrs Thatcher, whose elocution lessons are usually mentioned condescendingly or mockingly. It does seem reasonable to satirise her later speech-training when already prime minister. At the behest of her PR adviser Gordon Reece, she worked away to remove perceived stridency from her voice. Her childhood elocution training, however, would have been standard for many grammar-school pupils with ambitious parents - the equivalent of music lessons.

Reacting to Beryl Bainbridge's now infamous remarks, Derek Jameson declared: "People who have elocution lessons should be held in contempt." Bainbridge, from Liverpool, herself had elocution lessons from the age of 11. In the 1990s, this self-fashioning seems somehow wrong. But it has a long history, going back to the late 18th century.

One of the pioneers of elocution was Thomas Sheridan, father of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who gave lessons in proper enunciation to the young James Boswell. Sheridan's friend Dr Johnson had made the first attempts, in his Dictionary, to prescribe the "correct" pronunciation of words. Johnson himself arrived in London as a young man with a marked Staffordshire accent, only gradually modified as the years went by. It was a source of amusement to his literary and theatrical friends. By Johnson's day there was a strong idea of the proper English accent; above all it must not be provincial.

Aspirants from the provinces have always had to change themselves. Joe Orton had elocution lessons so that, as he thought, he might succeed as an actor. Once this pattern was not so unusual for budding thespians. In order to embark on a repertory career, Leonard Rossiter similarly had lessons to get rid of his once-strong working-class Liverpool accent. It is too easy to imagine a regional accent as a badge of integrity for the writer or artist: DH Lawrence hanging on to his Nottinghamshire origins; David Hockney keeping to a bit of Bradford in California. But some surprising people have been worried about their accents. Thomas Hardy may have made extraordinary imaginative use of his "Wessex" origins, but he was ashamed of the thick Dorset accents of his brother and sister.

This is what seems to be changing. For a long time people have been uneasy - like Hardy, proud yet defensive - about where they came from. The rise of Estuary English is unsettling because it seems to tell us that we do not come from anywhere in particular.

Proud of their accents

Sir Walter Raleigh John Aubrey was told by an old man who had once known him that "notwithstanding so great mastership in style, and his conversation with the learnedest and politest persons, yet he spake broad Devonshire to his dying day".

Sir Robert Walpole Britain's first and longest serving prime minister had the accent of a Norfolk squire - but then he was constantly mocked for this and other failures of refinement by better-spoken contemporaries.

William Wordsworth Cumbrian lad who did not let Cambridge rob him of his northern vowels. Celebrated by Tony Harrison, self-proclaimed laureate refusenik, in his poem against received pronunciation Them & [uz], for rhyming "water" with "matter".

Lord Denning Draper's son from Whitchurch, Hampshire, who returned (accent intact) to live in his birthplace in his 60s - this time in the nicest house in the village.

Harold Wilson His Huddersfield accent was disappearing during the 1940s and 50s, but mysteriously returned after he became Labour leader in 1963 - a useful contrast to Alec Douglas Home's strangled toff's drawl.

Derek Jameson The original "Sid Yobbo", he used his potentially excruciating accent to project a rough-and-honest image - still, his voice has been a major cause of complaint by radio listeners.
... and not so proud
William Shakespeare Linguist John Honey thinks that the bard "grew up speaking the Stratford-upon-Avon variant of the Warwickshire dialect" - but he would have had to ditch it to get on in the world.

James Boswell Down in London from Scotland and anxious to make himself into an urbane character. The high status of a refined Scottish accent is a 20th-century phenomenon.

Margaret Thatcher Though not mentioned in her autobiography, the clever Grantham girl's grocer father forked out for elocution lessons - decades later yet more lessons were needed.

Joe Orton In the early 1950s he took lessons in speaking to rid himself of his Leicester accent. So successful were they that he won the elocution prize at RADA.

Joan Bakewell The Stockport girl did what had to be done and, as she admits, on arriving at Cambridge trained herself out of her Cheshire intonations.

Keeley Hawes The actress daughter of a London cab driver, says that she could not have become successful without 10 years of elocution lessons (hours with a pencil in her mouth so that she could get a perfect 'O').

* John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College London.
Topics

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Opinions about Jamie Shea's accent were divided in a way that reflected current uncertainties. "It has been a terrible mistake to allow Nato's case to be presented by Jamie Shea, who sounds like the manager of a lower-division football club," wrote John Keegan in the Daily Telegraph.

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Voices - The way we speak in the UK today. Voices poll results - Participants were asked to rank celebrities in order of how pleasant their voices sound.

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Lisping, camp and effeminate ... do gay men really talk in a certain way? One film-maker investigated the phenomenon - and came to terms with his own voice

here's an old expression in the gay community about a macho-looking man who opens his mouth and "a purse falls out". This sort of "looks Tarzan, sounds Jane" is particular to the gay male community where a high-pitched, lisping voice has been a huge part of the stereotype of what gay men were like ever since Charles Nelson Riley delivered saucy double entendres on The Match Game (or his UK equivalent Larry Grayson exclaimed "Shut that door!" on The Generation Game).

Usually this "gay voice" isn't regarded as a positive, either by homophobes making fun of the lisp (usually accompanied by a wrist limper than day-old pasta) or the gay men who notice effeminate tones coming from the mouth of a potential suitor. David Thorpe, a journalist and film-maker, has become an expert on the vocal registers of gay men. His new movie Do I Sound Gay? is out on Friday and looks at the roots of where this particular intonation might have originated and why gay men feel so badly about it. It also charts Thorpe's own journey to make his voice sound "less gay" through elocution lessons and voice exercises.

Thorpe's confrontation with the gay voice came in 2010 when riding the ferry to Fire Island Pines, an almost exclusively gay summer enclave popular with New Yorkers. As the men (and it is mainly men) embark for a weekend of sun, sea and sex, the boat can often sound like a flock of seagulls getting ready for a Robyn concert. "I love being gay and flamboyant sometimes but I can get overwhelmed sometimes when I'm in a tizzy," Thorpe says. "I think that's what a group of overexcited gay men should be called: a tizzy."

That ferry ride planted the seed for the project. "I wanted to look at all the thought processes of how a voice could be a symbol for what is wrong with me," Thorpe says. "So it was looking back at childhood and Paul Lynde and Liberace and having no other role models, and how that affected me when I came out. It was getting to the bottom of misogyny in gay culture - and in culture in general. It's like an essay or an argument. Here is why I wouldn't like my voice and here is what I learned when I tried to get the full story."

Thorpe's quest also took in issues in his personal life. He had just gone through a tough breakup and was wondering whether his voice was partly to blame. "At the beginning of this project when I was single and alone, that feeling of confidence in who I was just eroded and I was almost under water," Thorpe says. "I feel like doing this project has restored my sense that it's OK to be who I am."

Just as Thorpe came to accept himself, gay people are increasingly being welcomed into the mainstream - so much so that being gay might soon seem incidental to many people's identities. Does that mean that the gay voice will start to disappear too? "I don't think the gay voice is going anywhere but I think people will embrace it and themselves and our voices will become part of mainstream culture," Thorpe says.

If anything the gay voice might become even more prevalent. He points to YouTube stars like Lohanthony and Tyler Oakley who have stereotypically gay voices. Rather than repelling the kids on the school playground, they're regarded as stars, partly for being authentically themselves - crucially important for millennials.

In fact, Thorpe thinks that sometimes they might even be too gay. "The seventh-grade part of me when I see Lohanthony is like, 'You can't be like that,'" he says. "I want to ask my 13-year-old niece, 'Isn't he too gay for you?' And that's me and my own issues. Gay people can benefit from Lohanthony too."

And it's still the Lohanthonys of the world who have the most at risk for being too effeminate in public spaces, especially when they speak. "It takes a long time for the progress that's happening now to filter down to the schoolyard," Thorpe says. "I think [total acceptance] is a great fantasy for people my age but for the young people on the ground it's very different. It's getting better but there is probably quite a long way to go."

As for Thorpe himself, he's given up on all the vocal exercises he learned in order to make his voice more "masculine". He says that now, after all his training, he is confident in his voice and confident in himself. But on a recent trip to Fire Island, he still got a little bit annoyed at all those voices on the ferry. "Maybe the reason why I am so intolerant of those younger gay men as they queen out is because I'm an old fart," he says. "But we can queen out at any age, so that's something we'd have to talk more about."
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Do I Sound Gay? Film-maker's personal journey explores the 'gay voice'

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Lisping, camp and effeminate ... do gay men really talk in a certain way? One film-maker investigated the phenomenon - and came to terms with his own voice here's an old expression in the gay community about a macho-looking man who opens his mouth and "a purse falls out".

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When I used to present programmes on English usage on Radio 4, people would write in and complain about the pronunciations they didn't like. In their hundreds. (Nobody ever wrote in to praise the pronunciations they did like.) It was the extreme nature of the language that always struck me. Listeners didn't just say they "disliked" something. They used the most emotive words they could think of. They were "horrified", "appalled", "dumbfounded", "aghast", "outraged", when they heard something they didn't like.

Why do people get especially passionate about pronunciation, using language that we might think more appropriate as a reaction to a terrorist attack than to an intruded "r" (as in "law(r) and order")? One reason is that pronunciation isn't like the other areas of speech which generate complaints, such as vocabulary and grammar. You may not like the way people use a particular word, such as disinterested, but you're not going to meet that problem frequently. Similarly, if you don't like split infinitives, you won't hear one very often. But every word has to be pronounced, so if you don't like the sound of an accent, or the way someone drops consonants, stresses words, or intones a sentence with a rising inflection, there's no escape. Pronunciation is always there, in your ears.

Pronunciation gives us a clue about a speaker's ethnic group and social class ... always a potentially sensitive subject

Another reason is that pronunciation is not only the foundation of clarity and intelligibility, it also expresses identity. When we hear someone speak our language, we not only recognise the words that are said, we recognise who is saying them. It is pronunciation, more than anything else, that makes someone sound British, American or Indian; from Liverpool, Newcastle or London. It is pronunciation - again, more than anything else - that gives us a clue about a speaker's ethnic group, social class, education or occupation. So it's always a potentially sensitive subject.

Identity is primary. My BBC critics were not usually suggesting listeners couldn't understand what speakers were saying; they were complaining about the way they were saying it. Some criticisms were aesthetic: a pronunciation might be called "ugly" or "sloppy". Some expressed dislike of an accent. Indeed there was the occasional comment about unintelligibility, such as when presenters emphasised a word ambiguously or dropped their voice at a critical moment. But typically, when people talked about unacceptable pronunciation, they weren't thinking of the content but the delivery.

It's the same today. Sometimes the criticisms reflect a state of affairs that everyone would agree with, because it's based on objective fact: if a voice is genuinely inaudible, or someone speaks so quickly that it's impossible to follow (such as over a public-address system), there is nothing to dispute. But most pronunciation complaints aren't like that: they are matters of taste, where the viewpoints reflect differing perceptions as to what is appropriate, pleasing or correct - auditory beauty, lying in the ear of the listener.

I wrote Sounds Appealing to introduce a broader perspective - not to ignore the problems, but to put them in perspective, as just a tiny part of the amazing range, intricacy, power and beauty of the English sound system. Phonetics opens our ears to a fascinating world. Why do we favour certain sounds when we write poetry, tell nursery rhymes, devise clever character names or swear? There are powerful and productive phonetic patterns underlying "Fair is foul, and foul is fair", "Hickory Dickory Dock", Augustus Gloop, and feck. They need to be appreciated. Or again: what happens to our speech in unusual speech situations, such as when we try to talk with our mouth filled or covered? The occasions go well beyond eating - think dentists and Darth Vader.

Then there's the time dimension - the inexorable process of pronunciation change. How do we discover the speech sounds of the past? We can hear Florence Nightingale, in an early recording, read Isaac Newton's notes describing his accent, and listen to the BBC archive, but how do we reconstruct Shakespeare, Chaucer or ? And what about the future? Big pronunciation issues face us in this century - not least, what voices will we give our computers and robots?

If we spend all our auditory energy paying attention just to the things we don't like, we are missing out on so much. All the moans - about h-dropping, r-intruding and the like - amount to less than 5% of everything that goes on when we pronounce our words and sentences. So my phonetic manifesto for the 21st century - and the theme of my book - is: it's time to focus on the other 95%. As Anthony Burgess once said (in A Mouthful of Air): "Phonetics, phonetics, and again phonetics. There cannot be too much phonetics."

Sounds Appealing: The Passionate Story of English Pronunciation is published by Profile.

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Sound and fury: how pronunciation provokes passionate reactions

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When I used to present programmes on English usage on Radio 4, people would write in and complain about the pronunciations they didn't like. In their hundreds. (Nobody ever wrote in to praise the pronunciations they did like.) It was the extreme nature of the language that always struck me.

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Linguistic imperialism is the imposition of one language on speakers of other languages. It is also known as linguistic nationalism, linguistic dominance, and language imperialism. In our time, the global expansion of English has often been cited as the primary example of linguistic imperialism.

The term "linguistic imperialism" originated in the 1930s as part of a critique of Basic English and was reintroduced by linguist Robert Phillipson in his monograph "Linguistic Imperialism" (Oxford University Press, 1992). In that study, Phillipson offered this working definition of English linguistic imperialism: "the dominance asserted and maintained by the establishment and continuous reconstitution of structural and cultural inequalities between English and other languages." Phillipson viewed linguistic imperialism as a subtype of linguicism.

Examples and Observations of Linguistic Imperialism

"The study of linguistic imperialism can help to clarify whether the winning of political independence led to a linguistic liberation of Third World countries, and if not, why not. Are the former colonial languages a useful bond with the international community and necessary for state formation and national unity internally? Or are they a bridgehead for Western interests, permitting the continuation of a global system of marginalization and exploitation? What is the relationship between linguistic dependence (continued use of a European language in a former non-European colony) and economic dependence (the export of raw materials and import of technology and know-how)?"

(Phillipson, Robert. "Linguistic Imperialism." Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, ed. by Margie Berns, Elsevier, 2010.)

"The rejection of the linguistic legitimacy of a language- any language used by any linguistic community-in short, amounts to little more than an example of the tyranny of the majority. Such a rejection reinforces the long tradition and history of linguistic imperialism in our society. The harm, though, is done not only to those whose languages we reject, but in fact to all of us, as we are made poorer by an unnecessary narrowing of our cultural and linguistic universe."

(Reagan, Timothy. Language Matters: Reflections on Educational Linguistics. Information Age, 2009.)

"The fact that...no uniform British empire-wide language policy developed tends to disconfirm the hypothesis of linguistic imperialism as responsible for the spread of English..."

"The teaching of English by itself..., even where it did take place, is not sufficient grounds to identify the policy of the British empire with linguistic imperialism."

(Brutt-Griffler, Janina. World English: A Study of Its Development. Multilingual Matters, 2002.)

Linguistic Imperialism in Sociolinguistics

"There is by now a well-entrenched and very respectable branch of sociolinguistics, which is concerned with describing the world of globalization from the perspective of linguistic imperialism and 'linguicide' (Phillipson 1992; Skutnabb-Kangas 2000), often based on particular ecological metaphors. These approaches...oddly assume that wherever a 'big' and 'powerful' language such as English 'appears' in a foreign territory, small indigenous languages will 'die.' There is, in this image of sociolinguistic space, place for just one language at a time. In general, there seems to be a serious problem with the ways in which space is imagined in such work. In addition, the actual sociolinguistic details of such processes are rarely spelled out-languages can be used in vernacular or in lingua franca varieties and so create different sociolinguistic conditions for mutual influencing."

(Blommaert, Jan. The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge University Press, 2010.)

Colonialism and Linguistic Imperialism

"Anachronistic views of linguistic imperialism, which see as important only the power asymmetry between the former colonial nations and the nations of the 'third world,' are hopelessly inadequate as an explanation of linguistic realities. They especially ignore the fact that 'first world' countries with strong languages seem to be under just as much pressure to adopt English, and that some of the harshest attacks on English have come from countries [that] have no such colonial legacy. When dominant languages feel they are being dominated, something much bigger than a simplistic conception of power relations must be involved."

(Crystal, David. English as a Global Language, 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2003.)

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What Is Linguistic Imperialism and How Does It Affect Society?

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Linguistic imperialism is the imposition of one language on speakers of other languages. It is also known as linguistic nationalism, linguistic dominance, and language imperialism. In our time, the global expansion of English has often been cited as the primary example of linguistic imperialism.

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The term (or World Englishes) refers to the English language as it is variously used throughout the world. Also known as international English and Global English.

The English language is now spoken in more than 100 countries. Varieties of World English include American English, Australian English, Babu English, Banglish, British English, Canadian English, Caribbean English, Chicano English, Chinese English, Denglish (Denglisch), Euro-English, Hinglish, Indian English, Irish English, Japanese English, New Zealand English, Nigerian English, Philippine English, Scottish English, Singapore English, South African English, Spanglish, Taglish, Welsh English, West African Pidgin English, and Zimbabwean English.

Linguist Braj Kachru has divided the varieties of World English into three concentric circles: inner, outer, and expanding. Although these labels are imprecise and in some ways misleading, many scholars would agree with Paul Bruthiaux that they offer "a useful shorthand for classifying contexts of English world-wide" ("Squaring the Circles" in the International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 2003). For a simple graphic of Braj Kachru's circle model of World Englishes, visit page eight of the slideshow World Englishes: Approaches, Issues, and Resources.

Author Henry Hitchings has observed that the term World English "is still in use, but is contested by critics who believe it strikes too strong a note of dominance" ( The Language Wars, 2011).

"World English has been defined as a phase in the history of the English language. This phase has witnessed the transformation of English from the mother tongue of a handful of nations to a language being used by far more speakers in non-mother tongue settings. The changes that have accompanied this spread--the multiplicity of varieties--result not from the faulty and imperfect learning of the non-mother tongue speakers, but from the nature of the process of microacquisition, language spread and change."
(Janina Brutt-Griffler, World English. Multilingual, 2002)

"The global spread of English, its causes and consequences, have long been a focus of critical discussion. One of the main concerns has been that of standardization. This is also because, unlike other international languages such as Spanish and French, English lacks any official body setting and prescribing the norms of the language. This apparent linguistic anarchy has generated a tension between those who seek stability of the code through some form of convergence and the forces of linguistic diversity that are inevitably set in motion when new demands are made on a language that has assumed a global role of such immense proportions.
"One consequence of the global predominance that English has gained over the last few decades is that today non-native speakers of English far outnumber its native speakers (Graddol 1997, Crystal 2003)."
(Rani Rubdy and Mario Saraceni, Introduction to English in the World: Global Rules, Global Roles. Continuum, 2006)

"[A]lthough world English is varied, certain varieties and registers are fairly tightly controlled, often through standardized patterns of use . . .. Thus, there is a marked uniformity in the following arenas:(Tom McArthur, The Oxford Guide to World English. Oxford University Press, 2002)

1. Airports
In the public usage of international airports, where, on signboards, English is often twinned with other languages, and announcements are commonly in English or are multilingual including English

2. Newspapers and periodicals
English-language broadsheet newspapers and magazine-style periodicals, in which the texts are tightly edited . . .

3. Broadcast media
The programming of CNN, the BBC, and other especially TV news-and-views services, in which presentational formulas and formats are at least as crucial as in newspapers

4. Computer use, email, and the Internet/Web
In such computer and Internet services as those offered by Microsoft . . .."

"The UK needs to abandon its outdated attitudes to English and embrace new forms of the language to maintain its influence in the global market, the leftwing thinktank Demos said today.
"In a series of recommendations, the report, As you like it: Catching up in an age of global English, says that far from being corruptions of English, new versions of the language, such as 'Chinglish' and 'Singlish' (Chinese and Singaporean varieties of English) have values 'that we must learn to accommodate and relate to.'
"It says the UK should focus English teaching on how the language is now used around the world, 'not according to arcane strictures of how it should be spoken and written.' . . .
"The report's authors, Samuel Jones and Peter Bradwell, say change is vital if the UK wants to maintain its influence around the world. . . .
"'We have retained ways of thinking about the English language that were more suited to empire than they are to a modern, globalised world and we are at risk of becoming outdated,' says the report."
(Liz Ford, "UK Must Embrace 'Modern' English, Report Warns." The Guardian [UK], March 15, 2007)

Alternate Spellings: world English

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World English: English as Most People Speak it

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The term (or World Englishes) refers to the English language as it is variously used throughout the world. Also known as international English and Global English. The English language is now spoken in more than 100 countries.

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How far ("Hello/How is everything?")

This common greeting means 'How is everything?'. A marker of camaraderie between Nigerians, it is a simple, informal greeting that's best used with people you know well, or in casual settings. The verb at the end is often dropped, so beware: if someone asks you How far?, they aren't referring to your journey to meet them.

Wétin dey? ("'What's up/What's going on?")

This is another highly informal greeting - one to try out with a taxi driver or market seller, for instance. If anything, this one is even more informal than how far. It can also be used aggressively in the sense of 'what's your problem?'. Dropping the dey and asking someone wétin only is a good way of telling them to back off. Back it up with your best scowl.

You do well ("Thank you")

The good thing about pidgin is that it most of it is easy to get your head around. "You do well" simply means "Thank you". For example, in an informal setting with a friend, you can say "My friend you do well".

No wahala ("No problem")

"No wahala" is the pidgin expression used for confirmation or approval. When someone says "No wahala", it could mean "Yes" or "No problem". When you want to say "No" then this word alone will do. "Wahala" on its own means '"trouble", similar to the way the word bacchanal is used in the Caribbean. It can also refer to stress.

Directions

Where the bathroom dey? ("Where is the bathroom?")

Knowing how to ask where the bathroom is in pidgin is an obvious essential.

Make you turn left / right ("Turn left / right")

This is pretty easy, as it is all English - it's just the manner in which it is spoken. Giving a Taxi directions in pidgin is always helpful - as long as you know where you're going, of course.

E don do ("Stop")

"E don do" or "Stop" as a sign or an instruction is a word you cannot go without while travelling through Nigeria's big cities.

At the restaurant / bar

This food sweet well well ("Delicious")

Perhaps you just had one of Nigeria's tasty traditional dishes and you want to express your pleasure and congratulate the chef. "This food sweet well well" is the best way to give thanks and impress your hosts.

I wan chop ("I'm hungry")

A definite must-use phrase in a country renowned for its amazing food, "I wan chop" means you're hungry and want to eat.

Water ("Water")

Not to worry, if you're dying of thirst anyone around you will know what you mean when you ask for water as it's the same in pidgin English.

At the market

How much this one cost? ("How much is this?")

Knowing an essential phrase like this one will definitely help you strike a better bargain in Nigerian markets which can get a bit tricky for foreigners.

E too cost abeg ("Too expensive")

The prices of some things could be more expensive than you anticipated. A good bargain could come in handy here - "E too cost abeg" is the pidgin language equivalent to expressing displeasure at the price of something.

Numbers 0-10

The good news is that all numbers stay the same as in English.

Making friends

Make we go shayo ("Let's grab a drink")

"Shayo" can refer to beer, red wine, vodka or whatever else you might fancy on a night out in one Nigeria's bars. "Make we go shayo" is definitely a great way to make new acquaintances and lasting friendships.

Bobo you too fine ("You are handsome / beautiful")

Paying compliments is one of the easiest ways to make friends. "Bobo you too fine" means that a man is handsome, while "Babe you too fine" would be used to compliment a woman.

For everything else

Abeg ("Please")

Most often used as part of a request like "please could you let me pass". Abeg, can also be used to express incredulity. For instance if you were engaged in a good old haggling session and the trader gives you a ridiculous price, you can let them know how ridiculous you find the price by exclaiming, "ah beg o!" or "Abeg! No waste my time!"

Go slow ("Traffic jam")

This is a common phrase you'll often here used by Nigerians in reference to the city's gridlock. it's a phrase worth knowing for when you're running late for a meeting, "Go slow" means "Traffic jam".

Listen well well ("Pay attention")

If you need to pass across some very important information, "Listen well well" should get someone's attention.

Baff up ("Dress nicely")

Perhaps you're inviting someone to a big event and you need to forewarn them about the dress code, "Baff up" means "Dress nicely".

Oya ("Hurry up")

There isn't a direct translation to English. It functions as a call to action and depending on context, can mean 'come on' or 'hurry up', similar to "vamos " in Spanish or "schnell" in German. It can also be used to cajole; "oya na" can mean something along the lines of "please reconsider".

Nawa oh! ("Wow!")

This is an expression of surprise. The 'oh' at the end is usually added to a lot of words and phrases, a kind of conversational tick to add emphasis.

This article was originally written by a Hub Writer Fareeda Abdulkareem.

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21 Essential Pidgin Phrases You'll Need in Nigeria

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How far ("Hello/How is everything?") This common greeting means 'How is everything?'. A marker of camaraderie between Nigerians, it is a simple, informal greeting that's best used with people you know well, or in casual settings. The verb at the end is often dropped, so beware: if someone asks you How far?, they aren't referring to your journey to meet them.

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Read to gain overview

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The outer circle is made up of post-colonial countries in which English, though not the mother tongue, has for a significant period of time played an important role in education, governance, and popular culture.

Countries in the outer circle include India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, and more than 50 other nations.

Low Ee Ling and Adam Brown describe the outer circle as "those countries in the earlier phases of the spread of English in non-native settings[,] .

. . where English has become institutionalised or has become part of the country's chief institutions" ( English in Singapore, 2005).

The outer circle is one of the three concentric circles of World English described by linguist Braj Kachru in "Standards, Codification and Sociolinguistic Realism: The English Language in the Outer Circle" (1985). (For a simple graphic of Kachru's circle model of World Englishes, visit page eight of the slideshow World Englishes: Approaches, Issues, and Resources.)

The labels inner, outer, and expanding circles represent the type of spread, the patterns of acquisition, and the functional allocation of the English language in diverse cultural contexts. As discussed below, these labels remain controversial.

Explanations of Outer Circle English

"In the Inner Circle, English spread largely because of a migration of English speakers. In time each settlement developed its own national variety. On the other hand, the spread of English in the Outer Circle has occurred largely as a result of colonization by English-speaking nations. Here, two major types of linguistic development occurred. In some countries like Nigeria and India, where under colonial powers it developed as an elite second language, only a minority of the society acquired English. However, in other countries like Barbados and Jamaica, the slave trade had a significant impact on the variety of English spoken, resulting in the development of English-based pidgins and creoles."
(Sandra Lee McKay, Teaching English as an International Language: Rethinking Goals and Approaches. Oxford University Press, 2002)

"The Outer Circle may be thought of as country contexts where English was first introduced as a colonial language for administrative purposes. . . . English is used in these countries for intra-country purposes. In addition to 'Outer Circle,' terms frequently used to describe the manner in which English has evolved in these settings include 'institutionalized' and 'nativized.' In these countries, a variety of English has evolved which possesses the common core characteristics of Inner Circle varieties of English, but in addition can be distinguished from them by particular lexical, phonological, pragmatic, and morphosyntactic innovations."
(Kimberly Brown, "World Englishes: To Teach or Not to Teach." World Englishes, ed. by Kingsley Bolton and Braj B. Kachru. Routledge, 2006)

Problems With the World Englishes Model

"Considering the history of the 'emancipation' of various Englishes around the globe, it is obvious that the groundbreaking work emanated from and has been essentially focused on the Outer Circle. But it has been an uphill struggle. Even today, what is often termed 'international' by Inner Circle scholars, publishers, etc. is often simply interpreted as the international spread of native-speaker Standard English (a minority variety in itself) rather than the way English has changed to meet international needs."
(Barbara Seidlhofer, "World Englishes and English as a Lingua Franca: Two Frameworks or One?" World Englishes--Problems, Properties and Prospects, ed. by Thomas Hoffmann and Lucia Siebers. John Benjamins, 2009)

"As a large number speakers from the Outer-Circle and Expanding-Circle countries now live in the Inner-Circle countries, even native speakers of English are increasingly exposed to World Englishes. This means revising the notion of 'proficiency' even for the English of native speakers. Canagarajah (2006: 233) maintains that, 'in a context where we have to constantly shuffle between different varieties [of English] and communities, proficiency becomes complex . . . one needs the capacity to negotiate diverse varieties to facilitate communication.'"
(Farzad Sharifian, "English as an International Language: An Overview." English as an International Language: Perspectives and Pedagogical Issues, ed. by F. Sharifian. Multilingual Matters, 2009)

Also Known As: extended circle

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The 'Outer-Circle' of English-Speaking Countries

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The outer circle is made up of post-colonial countries in which English, though not the mother tongue, has for a significant period of time played an important role in education, governance, and popular culture. Countries in the outer circle include India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, and more than 50 other nations.

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'Saluton!': the surprise return of Esperanto

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Long seen as a hobby for idealistic eccentrics, the constructed language has had a resurgence ​in the age of Brexit and Trump. And it's all centred on a small village near Stoke on Trent

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How English as we know it is disappearing