Intelligibility in World Englishes

Theory and Application

Cecil L. Nelson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415871815
• eBook ISBN: 9781136837272
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Intelligibility is the term most generally used to address the complex of criteria that describe, broadly, how useful someone's English is when talking or writing to someone else. Set within the paradigm of world Englishes – which posits that the Englishes of the world may be seen as flexibly categorized into three Circles (Inner, Outer, Expanding) in terms of their historical developments – this text provides a comprehensive overview of the definitions and scopes of intelligibility, comprehensibility and interpretability, and addresses key topics within this paradigm:

• Who – if anyone – provides the models and norms for a given population of English users?
• Hybridity and creativity in world Englishes
• Evaluating paradigms: misinformation and disinformation
• Practicalities of dealing with the widening variety of Englishes
• Is English "falling apart"?

The much-debated issue of intelligibility touches not only sociolinguistic theory but all aspects of English language teaching, second language acquisition, language curriculum planning, and regional or national language planning. Designed for students, teacher educators, and scholars internationally, each chapter includes 'Topics for Discussion and Assignments' and 'Suggestions for Further Reading'.

1

“UNDERSTANDING” AND
INTELLIGIBILITY IN WORLD
ENGLISHES

I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.

Robert McCloskey, US State Department spokesman (attributed)

Introduction

The variety of words used to talk about kinds of “understandings” and “meanings” in the epigraph above is undeniably troublesome. The possibly apocryphal interaction presumably took place between native speakers of English who seem not to have been receiving the speaker’s intentions exactly satisfactorily.

Since English in recent decades has become ever more a worldwide language, a “language of wider communication,” its forms and uses across groups have become ever more topics of debate. These exchanges, not infrequently heated, go on not only among academic specialists, but also in the media and among people concerned with all aspects of linguistic productivity and creativity. Discussants may attribute opponents’ stands on given issues to ideology instead of a desirable pragmatism, or to one or another kind of “liberalism” instead of a reasonable acquiescence to top-down guidance from professionals, particularly language educators. Whatever the motivations for the arguments are, and whatever evidence is amassed for them, and whatever interpretations are imposed on that evidence, the controversies promise to rage on for a long, interesting time.

The field whose participants concern themselves with language as it works in societies and cultures is usually called “sociolinguistics.” Sociolinguists are not interested in teaching a language as such, but they are concerned with the complicated and complicating results of that resultant learning on individuals, on groups, and on a society. Sociolinguistic investigations range very widely, from analyzing and reporting on elements and structures in a variety of, say, English that is unique to one locality or population to concerns about the societal and economic elitism that may become associated with being “an English speaker.” It is not hard to imagine that this intersection of language and society will produce many various sets of questions that call for resolution as we seek to better understand ourselves, and our relationships to others.

Intelligibility—A First Pass

“Actually, one can easily make a case for four diasporas of English,” as Y. Kachru and Smith succinctly present the situation of varieties of English today (2008, p. 5). From within what we now call the British Isles, out to the present USA and Canada, to Australia and New Zealand, to parts of Africa and to South Asia, and to the Pacific Rim nations, the English language has spread more widely and more rapidly than any other tongue has before. This appearance in the widest imaginable context of cultures and other languages has brought about an immense degree of variation in all aspects of English’s forms and functions. For the moment, probably anyone would agree that what people call “English” in one place is likely to sound or function differently from the “English” in another place. This lack of predictability raises all sorts of concerns about whether my “English” will work for you and vice versa. Some writers take the approach that an English which will serve the needs of everyone should be promulgated. Otherwise, they believe, the utility of the language across borders will be lost.

Questions about the present and future utility of English as a language of wider communication arguably constitute the key issue in the global squabbles about what or which English people should learn and use. The usual phrase is the comparative “wider communication,” which a composition instructor might criticize as an “incomplete comparative—you need a than here.” It is used consistently in the literature to designate a language that has spread outside its homeland and its historically basic population of users. Thus, the extent of such a language has become “wider” than it was in its geographic distribution and its number of speakers, but perhaps more importantly in the diverse range of peoples who come to employ it. Well-known examples of such languages are Arabic, French, Greek, Sanskrit, and Spanish (in alphabetical order, not chronologically as to the eras of their respective spreading), and in our present times, English. Although Mandarin Chinese and Hindi, to name two prime examples, are languages with very many users, they are not included in lists of languages of wider communication because they have not spread out in the way that Arabic did or that English has. Presentations of this concept may be found in Burchfield (1994b, especially pp. 7–8), B. Kachru (1982a, and 2005, pp. xv–xviii), Fishman (1982), and Trudgill and Hannah (2002, pp. 3–8).

The necessary criterion of a language, that it be usefully communicative, is often termed “intelligibility,” and concerns about intelligibility both inform and fuel discussions of which English and whose English should be models and standards for teaching, learning, and acquisition across the world. (See a set of focused treatments of this basic issue in Greenbaum, 1985; Quirk and Widdowson, 1985b; and Svartvik, 1985.) Questions of “Standard English” and “good English” are often set in terms of ease, directness or effectiveness of communication, which are all presumed to require an at least largely common code. We agree a priori that no two varieties of English are exactly alike: they are “varieties,” after all. So the question becomes how much they have to have in common in order for us to consider them so. Users want to know whether their English will serve them with other users who are not of their immediate neighborhood, circle, region, or nation. Teachers of English want to be sure that they are teaching their students English that will meet their needs, or perhaps that they are teaching “right” English, without any particular regard for or investigation of learners’ perceptions of their needs.

This concern about utility and acceptability across diverse populations is not a problem that arises for speakers of less widely distributed languages, and might not be a problem for languages that have an established single authority to arbitrate “correctness,” whether that standard is written down or is geographical or class centered. This is the situation often attributed to French, because of its conservative Académie, though even that might be argued by someone knowledgeable about the uses of French in “the provinces” and in the Francophone countries. But for English, anyway, questions and worries such as the following always come up: “If I pronounce this vowel this way, will it cause me to be misunderstood?” “I could understand her better if she didn’t cut off her end-of-word consonants,” “How slowly (or fast) do I have to talk before these people will stop looking at me like that?” We could think of many more features and criteria to wonder about.

It is clear from everyday observation that there is no such thing as completely congruent pan-language intelligibility across the varieties of any widespread language, or even within a single given variety of a language. With exposure and practice, most speakers acquire more open-mindedness and “comfort” regarding the usage of others, as has been pointed out, for example, by Catford (1950), who wrote of lowering the “threshold of intelligibility.” In this, Catford was referring to the degree of exposure to another language or variety of a language which made a speaker familiar with it. More familiarity lowers one’s intelligibility threshold, i.e., makes the speech in question more accessible, reduces resistance, and thus allows or evinces greater intelligibility. As did Firth in his conception of a context of situation, Catford brings out the importance to intelligibility of criteria outside of the language proper, such as relevant objects and elements in the speech situation, including “perceived attitudes” of the participants (pp. 13–14; the same sorts of criteria are noted by Smith, e.g., 1992). Stereotyping undoubtedly plays some part in language users’ broad acceptance of other varieties; to US English speakers, for example, an Irish or a French accent may be regarded as having an appealing “sexiness” that an Eastern European one does not, while Hispanic accents are often openly disparaged in North America (by non-Hispanic English speakers).

We frequently encounter broad generalizations about Englishes that are made without addressing issues related to registers, genres, and discourse styles. One does not have to go to exotic locales to find that this is true. (And by “exotic,” I intend that an Indian user of English need not look to its forms and uses in the far-away USA any more than the North American needs to look to Britain.) Lexical elements, for example, take on quite different meanings and uses depending on where you find them; for example, “net,” an ordinary and easy word, means quite different things in conversations about information technology and commercial fishing. Simple demonstrations of this kind of polysemy may be seen in this excerpt from a newspaper column about bridge (the card game):

South wanted to open one no-trump. With a decent heart holding, he overcalls one no-trump. And North raises to game. Against three no-trump, West leads the heart four, low from a low tripleton in a suit partner bid that he has not supported.

Phillip Adler, Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 23 July 2007, B

While presumably transparent to any bridge player, this passage is entirely opaque to me, though I am “a native speaker” of English. Its usages range from the esoteric, like the item tripleton and the phrase a suit partner bid, to the apparently technical uses of ordinary words such as raises and supported.

Those who are only narrowly prepared in the observation of natural-language phenomena may commonly base linguistic analyses and discussions on decontextualized properties of lexical items and of grammar. However, experience and attention quickly reveal that almost any language device or element may be used in effective ways between participants who relate what is being said to the context of situation, to use Firth’s term. Firth, an early proponent in Britain of considering the contexts in which a language exists and is used, wrote that each of us “carries his culture and much of his social reality about with him wherever he goes” (1935, p. 27). In this conception, virtually anything might be relevant to making a communicative event effective—that is, for a speaker and receiver to apprehend messages, nuances and each other’s attitudes about what is being said in compatible ways. Context may be determined more narrowly, as in differentiating types of social situations, or more broadly, as in the usages of speakers who are from a particular culture and those who are not. A dinner guest who says “I can’t eat that” in response to being offered a particular dish may be motivated by religious or other ideologically determined restrictions on what she considers edible, or by health concerns, or may just intend to indicate “Thank you, but I couldn’t eat another bite (of anything)!”

Pronunciation plays its part in working communication, to be sure, and it can be affected noticeably by the context of situation. For example, I can talk to a small pet animal or a very young child in a high-pitched voice and even with altered productions of segments (“widdle” for “little,” for instance) and get away with it in almost any circumstances in which those encounters might occur, but it would never do for me to speak in that way in a class in anything but a demonstration of just this point. “Where is she?” will work without any previous spoken reference to “her” as long as both the speaker and hearer share various bits of knowledge—that “she” is someone whom we both know about, who might reasonably be expected to be here or nearby at this time of day, that there is no other “she” in the plausible context who readily matches this one, and so on. Other categories of examples will occur readily to the reader.

So, in fact, almost nothing we can say is communicative without its situation. When beginning students of English are taught and led to practice “How are you? … Fine, thank you very much,” they must have some sort of meeting and greeting situation in their heads. It is unlikely that these phatic phrases are ever introduced in a classroom without some reference to their utility and the ways they are carried out in just such situations. We can leave aside for our present purpose the intricacies of arguments about “Fifty Thousand Innate Concepts” (the title of the chapter in which Pinker discusses this and related issues) versus polysemy versus “conceptual semantics” (the theory “that word senses are mentally represented as expressions in a richer and more abstract language of thought”). It is clear from everyday observation that “[Word meanings] can be precise because the concepts zero in on some aspects of reality and slough off the rest” (Pinker, 2007, p. 150). Thus, examples such as “one waitress tells another The ham sandwich wants his check” (p. 150) and the narrative voice in The Hobbit saying of Gandalf that “Wizards after all are wizards” (Tolkien, 1938, p. 20) are not gibberish—and no one thinks that they are. Their contexts of use sort out the users’ intentions for us.

Perhaps most early treatments of intelligibility, such as that of the Indian phonetician Bansal (1969, The Intelligibility of Indian English), treated pronunciation exclusively, and regularly invoked comparisons with received pronunciation (RP), as did Bansal’s, or with some other “standard” and “native” variety of English. For example, Bansal (1969, p. 171) wrote about “further details of divergences [in Indian English] from RP,” and asserted that “The sentence stress, rhythm, and intonation patterns in Indian English are not always in accordance with the normal RP patterns. … The location of the intonation nucleus is not always at the place where it would be in normal English” (emphases added). Bansal started from the presumptions that the RP British variety of English was the “correct” one and that anyone who was not speaking correctly—as thus defined—was trying to, but was straying more or less far from the target. These assumptions are not cogent, given the world context of Englishes today. As the Nigerian language scholar Ayo Bamgboṣe (1998, p. 10) wrote on this point:

It used to be thought that such intelligibility was a one-way process in which non-native speakers are striving to make themselves understood by native speakers whose prerogative it was to decide what is intelligible and what is not. This attitude is shown in pejorative judgements on some varieties of non-native Englishes, such as Prator’s (1968).

The article by Prator that Professor Bamgboṣe refers to is now rather old in years, but the attitudes and orientations it expressed are still very much alive in various corners of the English-using and especially English-teaching worlds. Prator’s title was “The British Heresy in TESOL,” and his paper outlined his arguments against what he saw as an untoward permissiveness in not requiring learners far abroad to be held close to a good British English model. B. Kachru responded at length to this presentation in an article entitled “Models of English for the Third World: White Man’s Linguistic Burden or Language Pragmatics?” in which he referred to Prator’s commission of “seven attitudinal sins” (1986 [originally 1976], pp. 100–114).

As B. Kachru wrote, this argument is important because it touches us in our professional lives; as he put it, with a subtle tongue-in-cheekness, this is “a typical language attitude which continues to be nurtured by several educated native speakers and educators of English” (1986, pp. 100–101). If there were only “several” people with such views, we could perhaps ignore them, but such prominent voices continue to be heard. Kachru characterized Prator’s article as “a good example of linguistic purism and linguistic intolerance,” stances that are hard to maintain in the face of the global situation in which we find English today. Since Prator used “heresy,” Kachru appropriately discusses the paper using the similarly metaphorical religious term “sins”; these are “ethnocentricism” (p. 102), “wrong perception of the language attitudes on the two sides of the Atlantic” (p. 103), “not recognizing the non-native varieties of English as culture-bound codes” (pp. 103–4), “ignoring the systemicness of the non-native varieties” (p. 104), “ignoring linguistic interference and language dynamics” (pp. 104–5), “overlooking the ‘cline of Englishness’ in … intelligibility” (pp. 105–6), and, finally, “exhibiting language colonialism” (pp. 106–7). This list constitutes an outline of major issues that continue to foment debate in the ELT profession. The labels are perhaps suggestive enough to speak for themselves in an overview such as the present one, but a couple of them will bear some brief explication.

The “cline of Englishness” and the “cline of intelligibility” are closely related to one another, and Kachru combined them in this class of sin. (For treatment of the scalar concept cline of intelligibility by itself, see, e.g., B. Kachru, 1986, pp. 119–20, and B. Kachru 2005, p. 215; see also Nelson, 1982.) Englishness may readily be understood to be that aggregate of qualities that make English what it is, or, to put it the other way, to distinguish it from what it isn’t. We might usefully think about aspects of English that a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. “Understanding” and Intelligibility in World Englishes
• 2. Intelligibility,Comprehensibility, Interpretability
• 3. Hybridity, Creativity, and Intelligibility in World Englishes
• 4. Other Conceptualizations of Intelligibility
• 5. Intelligibility In English-Language Teaching
• 6. Intelligibility and the Ongoing Expansions of Englishes
• Notes
• Annotated Bibliography
• Index