Choose the English that helps you win

Iwent to the University of Southampton last week for the launch of its Centre for Global Englishes. That's right: Englishes, because, as the language spreads, people are speaking and writing it in many different ways.

There has never been anything like the world's now-global language, Anna Mauranen, professor of English at the University of Helsinki, told the launch conference. Speakers of almost every language on earth have contact with it. The internet spreads if further than ever. People are highly mobile, and their travel exposes them to many ways of speaking English.

The majority of business conversations in English today take place between people who do not speak it as a mother tongue. These speakers of English as a lingua franca - ELF, as the Southampton conference-goers call it - have their own vocabulary and constructions.

ELF speakers say "in my point of view", or use words such as "insuitable". They often use plurals - "informations", "advices", "fundings" - where native speakers use singulars. (I saw a letter from a Financial Times reader this week complaining about senior executives' "outrageous compensations".)

What if Americans, Canadians, Britons or Australians consider this plain wrong? Tough. In Prof Mauranen's experience, when people from rising economic powers such as China and Brazil speak English, they don't much care what native speakers think. According to the Royal Society, China will be publishing more scientific articles than the US by 2013. "Language goes with power," Prof Mauranen said.

There was plenty more of this. Barbara Seidlhofer, professor of English and applied linguistics at the University of Vienna, poked fun at a British Council website that encouraged learners to study English "in its natural home". The world was English's natural home, she said. And when the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary advised readers that "discuss about something" was incorrect, well, who were they to say what was right or wrong?

Writing on this subject has taught me that many people object fiercely to this view. They see it as an "anything goes" attitude that has degraded not just the language, but behaviour generally. Among the angriest critics are non-native speakers who have worked mightily to learn the "standard English" of traditional textbooks.

The ELF academics do have a point. English changes. Any word or construction that the sticklers regard as wrong more than likely appeared in Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or the King James Bible. But they are in danger of developing an orthodoxy of their own that hinders nuanced discussion. So, during a break at the Southampton conference, one non-native speaking delegate (politely) reprimanded me for complimenting her on her English. I was judging it by native-speaker standards, which I had no right to do.

There are situations that call for native-speaker humility. As I wrote recently, many international business conversations in English proceed swimmingly until a British or American speaker's use of colloquial language leaves everyone stumped.

But there are still cases where anyone who wants to succeed is better off using standard English. It all depends, as Prof Mauranen said, on where power lies.

In science, that may one day be with China, but not as soon as 2013. That Royal Society estimate is based on a linear projection of past trends. As the society makes clear, it will not happen that quickly. China's share of global scientific publications has risen, but at 10 per cent in 2004-08, it was still less than half the US's 21 per cent. American scientific influence is even bigger. In the league table of how often scientific articles were cited, the US scored 30 per cent, the UK 8 per cent and China 4 per cent. If you want to get ahead in science, you still need to write in standard English.

What of academia? Even Chinese rankings of the world's top universities are dominated by US and British institutions. Jennifer Jenkins, the Southampton centre's director, said those universities should stop insisting that all their students aim at native speaker standards. She criticised the snobbery towards "working class double negatives" (such as "we ain't got none"). But she didn't use any double negatives and nor, wherever they came from, did anyone else. As English professors, they know what it takes to get to the top.

[email protected]

© The Financial Times Limited 2012. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation