Giving due recognition to local varieties of English

(By H.Shaiiff, Strait Times, Malaysia)

International English can no longer be equated with Brit­ish English or American English alone — it now represents the overlapping standard forms of different national varieties. Asian “Englishes” reflect in significant ways the various social influences of their surrounding cultures.

“Even purists are recognizing the fact that there is a growth of local varieties of English, and in fact, it is considered a big development in linguistics”, language expert Mohd Said says.

“We are not talking about the pidginized or creolized form (broken English), but we are saying that there is a standard Malaysian or Indian, or Filipino variety that is grammatically correct. These have lexical and phonological features which are influenced by local languages”, says she.

Non-native English speakers cannot be expected to speak like the natives because sounds are different in the local lan­guages. Therefore, spoken Malaysian English sounds different from Received Pronunciation (the technical name for Queen’s English) the most formal form of English. For instance, the word “notice” is usually pronounced as “notis” by Malays.

Another feature of Malaysian English are the lexical bor­rowings — the Malay, Chinese, Tamil words used when speaking English — such as the sociocultural words which have no equivalent in English.

“Malaysians speak and freely use local words in English, and sooner or later, these will become fossilized in English. For instance, “bungalow” was originally an Indian word.

1) overlapping = mutually influencing;

2) purists = perfectionists;

3) creolized = influenced by the indigenous language. Creole — local language in former French colonies;

4) phonological = phonetic;

5) sociocultural words — реалии;

6) fossilized = rooted, accepted.

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