English Languages

May 10, 2012 |

Whoever wants to discuss the subject of English as a language has to keep in mind three main points:

1- It does not exist only one English, but many Englishes;
2- Variety also affects Standardization of English;
3- Standard English corresponds to the acrolectic form, while Creoles may be identified with basilect and the mixture between Standard and Creole with mesolect.

For real, English Creole can be considered as a language itself: it has its own dignity and its own dialects just as Standard English does. This is based partly on the fact that Creoles, and dialects too, are as old as the correspondent standard language. Remounting to 17th Century and belonging to the social élite of south East England, dialects reached the English Colonies of North America, Africa and Asia by ship and mixed up with dialects from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland and with many maritime and trade jargons. So, only by the end of the 20th Century linguists and writers recognized the shaping of different standards in each Country: the first standard was the UK and the variety developed by its Empire; the second was the US standard. Each variety had its own established education system, its dictionaries, grammars, style and usage.

All this fostered the standardization of language even in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa so that, by the half 90s, the most important standards of English were the Standard Australian, the Standard British and the Standard American. We can assert that the standardizing process began in the Colonies and ended with the creation of a common continuum of usage called International Standard.

Now, to afford the last point we can assert, generally speaking, that social matters usually permit a native to slide from basilect speech to mesolect and acrolect production (i.e. he may be able to shift from vernacular to standard English and back again). The use of intermediate levels is frequent among English speakers and may represent non-standards which have their own criteria and even typographic conventions (this is the case of Scots, a non-standard of Northumbrian derivation).

Nativized varieties of English do also exist and carry clear differences from both standard language and traditional dialects: Tok Pisin (official creole spoken in Papua Nuova Guinea) is largely derived from English, just as French derives from Latin. Many are the pidgins derived from English too. The most important are: Krio in Sierra Leone, Kamtok in Cameroon, Sranan and Saramaccan in Surinam, Creolese in Guyana, and Patwa in Jamaica. These pidgins are, together with Scots and Tok Pisin, almost in relation with conventional English, but will be hardly understood by a Standard English speaker.

At last, we have anglo-hybrids, originated from people who learned English as a second or third language because English was once present in that territory. In these cases, rhythm, intonation, structure and words tend strongly to keep their regional character and what often happens is that people use two languages with a predominance of one. Examples of anglo-hybrids are Malenglish, Tex Mex, Spanglish, Mix Mix and Taglish. Hybridization, as a phenomenon, is also what occurred with Middle English in its first phases. But what is clear is that, in case of massive code-mixing, any language affected will probably undergo irreversible changes.

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Category: Foreign Language

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