International intelligibility

What kind of English is most widely intelligible? Research by the University of Hawaii's Larry Smith suggests that Asians tend to understand each other's English pronunciation more easily than that of native speakers from America or Britain. Jean-Paul Nerriere found something similar when observing Koreans and Japanese during his time as vice-president of IBM. As well as pronunciation he thought the key to increasing intelligibility was to simplify grammar and vocabulary, and now recommends that people all over the world be taught a simplified English that he has labelled 'Globish'.

While students all over the world continue to aim at sounding like native speakers (especially Americans), British linguist Jenny Jenkins suggests they should simply concentrate on a common 'international' pronunciation of certain sounds that frequently lead to misunderstanding. British-Thai educator Christopher Wright believes his students should differentiate sounds such as 'l' and 'r', but other teachers advise learners to stop worrying too much about individual sounds and instead to concentrate on distinguishing whole words. Thus it should not matter how you say 'butter', 'batter' and 'better' as long as you say each of them differently.

Unfortunately, even native speakers disagree about which words should be distinguished. Most Scots pronounce 'cot' and 'caught' the same, whereas Australians distinguish them. Most English people pronounce 'caught' and 'court' the same while most Americans differentiate them.

Working with fellow American linguist Cecil Nelson, Smith identified three key elements in successful communication: intelligibility (recognising familiar words) ; comprehensibility (knowing their possible meanings); and interpretability (understanding what speakers mean). Thus we need knowledge of various pronunciations, the various meanings that words may have, and the way speakers from different cultures vary.

So are Indians wrong to describe their favourite film to Canadian friends as deadly? Should Filipinos take more care when warning Australians they are going to tell a green joke (which in Sydney would be called a blue one)? The problem is that native speakers also differ among themselves when it comes to vocabulary: an American man is likely to get an amused reaction if he goes into a shop in London asking for 'suspenders', for example.

And what about grammar? Many Asians understand each other perfectly well despite dropping the third-person 's' and sticking to the present tense. Indeed they might ask why it is considered wrong to say 'She write' but okay to say 'She can' or 'She may', and why we are not supposed to say 'I go to the bank yesterday' when 'I shut my account last week' is all right.

As has been argued in this blog before, there isn't really a standard form of English, just some forms that are better understood (or admired) by certain people. What is important is to increase our knowledge of linguistic and cultural differences and adjust accordingly. As Smith has argued, we do not need to make ourselves intelligible to everyone, just to those we want to communicate with.

Engrish

On my very first visit to Japan I stayed at a small hotel in central Tokyo with a sign on the door warning: Swindlers dangling with our guests around our hotel at night have no relations with us. Beware and do not be cheated by their skillful enticement. This made me quite nervous when I ventured outside into the night. Especially when a group of noisy drunken men started shouting and waving.

I woke the next morning with a terrible hangover after spending half the night drinking with these guys. Perhaps Japan was not such a dangerous place after all. That warning sign now seemed funny rather frightening, giving advice about grime prevention rather than crime prevention. I wasn't worried in the least about the batter toast with harm that the breakfast menu offered me. I realised I had entered a world of Engrish – language that kind of looks like English but somehow is not.

Over the years I've often wondered if it is acceptable to make fun of the strange English I see all over Asia, from Burmese signs warning me against umbrellaring to Malaysian foodstalls selling bugger. After all, many English speakers don't even try to use another language. And should I tell my female student the meaning of the Boyaholic shirt that she wears? Before the Olympics, Beijing launched a campaign to correct mistakes on English signs. Several foreigners volunteered to help so that tourists wouldn't make fun of China's English. But some foreign residents of the city resented these attempts to spoil their amusement at advertisements for immorality pills or signs in restaurants warning of landslide areas.

Whether or not we think it is OK to laugh at Engrish, it can be instructive to work out how it occurs. Sometimes it is the result of a spelling error, such as fruits shoot ('fruit short cake', which is quite popular in Japan, though very different from what the Americans and British call 'shortcake').

Some Engrish needs a little more time to work out. The cream pain I see at my local bakery is not an instrument of torture but a kind of bread ('pain' in French, which sounds similar to the Japanese word pan).

One tyre-shop in Beijing invites customers to use a pick foetus machine. This seems completely bizarre until we realise that the Chinese character above "foetus" is 胎, which is used in combination with some characters to mean 'foetus' but with others to mean 'tyre'.

I was also puzzled by the sign on the side of a shuttle bus run by Ritsumeikan, a prestigious university in Kyoto, which said Univemeikan Ritsurisity. Until I realised that the sign-painter, who presumably did not speak any English, must have had four strips of print – Ritsu, meikan, Unive and rsity – and managed to paste them in the wrong order. Sometimes a simple error is all the more striking for being surrounded by overly formal or poetical language, such as a label on a box at Tabei Airport that says Unforceful discard box for dangerous items ('unforceful' usually means 'weak' or 'feeble', not 'voluntary') or a Tokyo boutique sign that raises our expectations about gifts that transcend man and woman only to let us down with basic grammatical errors.

Some people actually make money out of Engrish. The website www.engrish.com, for example, not only collects pictures of Engrish from around Asia, but sells T-shirts with it printed on them. But Asians may be starting to get their own back now that so many English-speakers get themselves tattooed with 'Chinese' or 'Japanese' words that turn out to mean things like Girl Vegetable. Meanwhyile the fashion company Ichikoo (www.ichikoo.com) has started selling shirts asking お電気ですか。 (Are you electricity?) and declaring自由の洗濯!　(Freedom of washing!).

The killer language

Finnish linguist Tove Skutnabb-Kangas describes languages that spread at the expense of others as killer languages. She calls English "the biggest killer of them all". Languages by themselves cannot kill, but the people who learn and teach them can (usually unintentionally) kill off the culture and ideas of people who speak other languages.

According to UNESCO, one third of the world's 7000 languages are in danger. British linguist David Crystal estimates that one dies every two weeks. By the end of this century perhaps half of our current languages will have disappeared. While many languages are dying, English is growing. Another British linguist, David Graddol, claims that nearly a third of Asians already use it on a daily basis. But how strong is the link between the growth of English and the death of other languages?

On the one hand we have the example of the United States, where 53 local languages have disappeared since 1950. Another example is Australia, where hundreds of Aboriginal languages have been lost and many Aborigines speak only English. On the other hand, languages are disappearing in non-English-speaking countries too. Thousands of people are abandoning their traditional languages in Indonesia and India in favour of Indonesian and Hindi. In Japan, almost everyone speaks Japanese now and very few speak Ainu or Okinawan any longer. Nashi in southwest China, and Lisu in northern Thailand, are in danger from the spread of Chinese and Thai.

Another reason to question the idea of English as a killer language is the prevalence of bilingualism. If someone starts speaking English it does not mean they stop speaking other languages. However, while most of the world's people are indeed bilingual, in practice it is very difficult for small languages to compete with big ones.

Take Bidayuh. Spoken by 200,000 people in East Malaysia, where 140 primary schools have Bidayuh-speaking teachers, the language should not be in danger. But it is. It is neither a medium of instruction nor a school subject – partly because there are hardly any books in Bidayuh and there is no standard form that all its speakers understand. Children grow up studying in Malay and English. They may use Bidayuh in their village but have little need for it after moving to towns for work. When their grandparents die they often stop using it altogether.

For linguists, language death is tragic. Different languages give us different ways of describing the world. But most people are less interested in preserving their grandparents' language than in teaching their children languages that help them get jobs. History shows us that languages grow, change, recede and finally die. Few have lasted for more than a thousand years. Some dying languages undergo a process of revival, such as Israel's national language, Hebrew. But Bidayuh has no nation or religion behind it and is not used in newspapers or on television.

English may not be a cold-blooded killer, but it is not completely innocent. The main reason for the disappearance of so many languages nowadays is economic globalisation, and the main language of globalisation is English. Many English speakers themselves are monolingual and fail to understand the problems of people who speak small languages. Sri Lankans call English kadda (sword) because it is a useful and powerful weapon. But like many swords, it is double-edged.

Asian Languages in English

The many Asian loanwords in English can tell us a lot about economic and cultural links between English speakers and Asians. Mathematicians at Oxford University were studying the algebra developed by the Arabs hundreds of years before British technology had any impact on Asia. Oranges and lemons were bought from Persian and Turkish traders long before the latter were interested in buying British manufactures. But the journey of such loanwords has often been indirect or unclear.

Coffee comes from an Arabic name for a place in Africa but entered English via Turkish.

Tea comes not from Mandarin (although its own term, cha, is also used by some English people) but from the Amoy dialect of southern China. Rice comes from a Tamil word but probably entered English via Arabic. Coolie might be from Chinese or Gujarati. Ketchup might be Chinese or Malay. Some words go back and forth, such as anime, which was borrowed and shortened by the Japanese and then returned to English to describe a particular genre of animation.

Most Asian loanwords, such as sari and sushi, are closely associated with Asian culture. However, the association can fade away. When Americans describe remote areas of their country as boondocks, they don't think of the Philippines. Australians describing people who have gone crazy as running amok are not referring to Malays. Britons live in bungalows, use shampoo and complain about thugs without knowing anything about India.

As well as lending words to the English language, Asians have also invented new 'English-like' words. Walkman and discman were coined by Sony. Karaoke combines Japanese 'empty' with the first part of English 'orchestra'.

English speakers everywhere use Asian words, often unknowingly. But it is English speakers within Asia who use them most. Macquarie University's corpus of Asian English (Asiacorp) contains over four million words. The International Corpus of English (ICE) includes several Asian varieties of English, including Indian, Malaysian, Philippine and Singaporean. Asian Englishes include many words adopted from local languages, such as appa (a type of pancake in Sri Lanka and an 'elder sister' in Pakistan). They also use translations of local concepts, such as wet kitchen – an area for preparing raw food in Malaysian homes. Often, existing English words get new meanings: Singaporeans eat steamboat (a kind of stew) with their powerful (cool) friends before sending (driving) them home.

Asians born in America and Britain are yet another important influence on English. Kiss my chuddies! (kiss my underpants) became a popular (and mostly friendly) insult in the UK when Britons of Indian origin started saying it. And people all over Britain enjoy balti – a kind of cooking named after a Panjabi word for 'pot', but invented quite recently in the city of Birmingham.

English in Asian languages

Many Asian languages contain a lot of words that originated in English. We can learn something about social and technological trends from the kinds of words that are most commonly borrowed. We can also learn something about Asian languages by looking at how the pronunciation, form and meaning of the words change.

Borrowing words often happens when a new technology or practice is introduced from overseas. For example, many Asian languages have a word similar to 'taxi', such as taiksi in Urdu, teksi in Malay and diksi in Cantonese. Despite pronunciation changes, such words are obvious to English speakers. Others can be more puzzling. Sri Lankans gamble at 'bucket shops' rather than betting shops. In Korea, your sekeund is your 'second wife' or lover. In Japan a koin randorii is not a place to wash your coins but a launderette or laundromat. And the manshon so many Japanese live in nowadays are, sadly, just simple apartments.

Two thirds of new words published in Japanese dictionaries each year come from other languages, 90% of these from English. According to a newspaper survey, over 80% of Japanese are confused by these loanwords (gairaigo in Japanese). Even English-speakers get confused because meaning and pronunciation may depart widely from the original. I used to think a pusshuhon must be some kind of phone that you can push around (it means a push-button telephone) and that sumaato was smart (it means 'slim'). And it took me a long time to work out that a korukushikuru is something you open bottles of wine with.

There is now help for Japanese people who are confused about loanwords. The National Institute for the Japanese Language has a website

http://www.kokken.go.jp/public/gairaigo/index.html

and a telephone hotline (03 3900 3111) that explain the meaning of words like baachuaru (virtual) and bariyaa furii (barrier-free). It also suggests alternatives made up of Japanese words (most of them written in characters borrowed from Chinese). For 'safety net', for example, they suggest anzenmou (安全網).

Korean is also full of loanwords. Interestingly, many of these resemble Japanese ones in the way that their form and meaning vary from the original English. Both languages turn 'ballpoint pen' into ball pen, for example, use talent to mean a media personality, and call a steering wheel a handle. One reason may be that a lot of English vocabulary entered Korea while it was under Japanese occupation.

Indonesian has borrowed a lot of words because it is a relatively young language, based on an older variety of Malay. When English nouns are borrowed, they more or less retain the sound and meaning of the original. But when verbs and adjectives are borrowed, they are often changed to fit Indonesian grammar and morphology. Thus 'to control' is mengkontrol or mengontrol. You might be able to work out that melobi comes from 'to lobby' (although Indonesians use it more to mean 'discuss'). And recently on Indonesian radio, someone was heard complaining about politicians who just menothingkan (do nothing).

ESL, EFL and EIL

Educators sometimes classify countries on the basis of language use. Thus Singapore is said to be an English-as-a-first-language society. Not only is English the language of education and government there, but many parents talk to their children only in English.

Pakistan is usually called an ESL (English as-a-

second-language) country because an influential minority speak the language fluently and frequently with each other and a great deal of business, politics and education is conducted in that language.

In contrast, countries such as Syria are usually labelled

EFL (English-as-a-foreign-language) societies because the language is used primarily for communicating with

foreigners, such as tourists visiting Syrian historical sites and overseas business contacts.

Whether a country thinks of itself as ESL or EFL is often reflected in its educational system. In ESL countries such as Malaysia, English classes themselves are supposed to be taught by the direct method without using any other language but English. English is also used to teach some other subjects including maths and science. But in EFL countries such as Thailand, nearly all subjects are taught in the national language and it is also used quite a lot during English classes.

Where English is spoken as a first or second language, there is wide acceptance of local usage, such as Singaporeans' use of ‘lah’ at the end of statements, Filipinos' addition of words from Tagalog and Spanish, and Indians' preference for continuous tenses (e.g. ‘I am going to school every day’). On the other hand, local patterns used by Thais, Japanese and other EFL users are often thought of as errors, even if they are produced regularly and understood by foreigners.

Categorising whole societies as ESL or EFL is an oversimplification of Asia's complex reality. Singaporean children who use English at home generally speak it much better than those who do not, and they frequently do better in other school subjects too since these are taught in English. On the other hand, Vijaya Sankar of Taylors College in Malaysia found that some students whose first language is English do worse than others in English classes designed for ESL learners. For many educated Pakistanis, English is the first language – indeed the country's first prime minister, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, could hardly speak the national language, Urdu. But in rural areas of the same country, English is a foreign language which few people ever use.

Whether they themselves use it as a first, second or foreign language, people tend to adjust their English when talking to someone for whom English is not the first language. Moreover, the majority of communication in English around the world nowadays takes place among nonnative speakers. This kind of intermediary language has been labeled EIL (English as an International Language). Many linguists are studying EIL conversations to understand what kind of adjustments speakers make. Do they restrict the vocabulary (e.g. ‘Let's go to Osaka by plane’ instead of ‘Let's fly to Osaka’)? Do they simplify tenses? Or do they just listen more carefully and express themselves more imaginatively than native speakers usually do?

Standard English and English Standards

Proficient speakers of English are often quite interested in variation and take pride in their ability to switch between local and international Englishes. But learners – and their teachers – tend to be more interested in standards. The question then arises: which standard is best?

For many Asian learners, the main choice is between some kind of British English (still popular in Malaysia and Sri Lanka) and something more American (the usual preference of Filipinos, Japanese and South – but not North – Koreans). But reducing the choice to a simple UK-US division exaggerates the divide: many beginners cannot even hear differences between spoken British and American English, let alone see them in writing. And it overlooks the great diversity of speech within the UK and the USA.

This UK-US focus also overlooks the millions of Asians who speak fluent English with local characteristics. Even today, many Asians think of native speakers as North American, Britons and Australasians, rather than Singaporeans or Indians. The concept of native speaker is a complex and controversial one. Acquiring a language when very young may indeed bring a mastery that is almost impossible to replicate when learning another language later, but we cannot assume that everyone's strongest language is the first one they learned. To want to speak as well as a native speaker seems an admirable goal, but it can be quite a vague one. The ideal standard of English varies from person to person, depending on what they want to do with the language. And a standard suggests something that is fixed, whereas language is always changing.

In recent years I've noticed greater acceptance of different varieties of English around Asia. Schools in Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward routinely invite foreign students to give conversation classes and don't mind where they come from as long as their English is reasonably fluent. Thai television's MCOT News uses newsreaders and reporters with American, British, New Zealand and also distinctly Thai and other Asian accents. Indeed, Leeds University's Anthea Gupta argues that there are so many varieties of spoken English that it is almost impossible to choose one standard form. On the other hand, Gupta believes that written English is remarkably standard throughout the world. Written language changes much more slowly than speech, and TOEFL tests, spelling checks on computers and the narrow range of writing styles preferred by international academic journals all operate to contain variation. Nevertheless, local vocabulary and grammar are increasingly evident on the internet. Many blogs written in standard Pakistani or Filipino English are easy enough for people from other Asian countries to read, but some are quite difficult because of the use of Urdish or Taglish – English mixed with Urdu or Tagalog.

A common theme in Asia's English-language press is the apparent slide in English standards. Readers of Malaysiakini, an online newspaper, regularly post examples of ‘bad English’ (such as a law professor asking his students “Are you understand?”). Hong Kong's South China Morning Post debated why 11-year-olds could not pass exams designed for 9-year-olds. The people who complain are often from a generation that studied entirely in English, and they typically blame postcolonial educational policies that emphasise local languages – as well as the‘broken English’of text messages and blogs. But they should remember that far more Asians use the language now than in the days when it was restricted to the middle and upper classes. Inevitably, many of this new generation use it badly. But many others simply use it differently.