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Keith Davidson
THE DEMOGRAPHICS of the English language classrooms. Yet English 21 is still largely predi-
are well known, and the following approxima- cated on the continuing myths of the monolin-
tions are based on figures, always provisional, gual ‘native speaker’ and a single uniform
projected by Crystal, Graddol, and McArthur ‘standard English’. The reality is rather differ-
(as cited below). Anglophones (to use a ent. While there is remarkable homogeneity in
broader term than ‘native’ or ‘mother tongue’ standard forms of English published world-
speakers of English – terms which in any case wide, Crystal (1997a,b) and McArthur (1999)
pose problems) make up some 12% of the map the development of eight main, if overlap-
global population. Speakers of English in the ping, standard(ising) varieties of regional
UK constitute about 16% of the 380 or so mil- English:
lion Anglophones worldwide. In the UK, some British and Irish
2% of the population speaks English as a sec- American and Canadian
ond language, and perhaps only 15% regularly Australian and New Zealand
speaks a southern British form of standard African
English. Only a small minority of these have a Caribbean
form of Received Pronunciation (RP) as their South Asian
normal accent, even though RP is predicated as East Asian
the basis of ‘phonics’ in initial literacy, and is (With South Pacific forms variously ascribed,
assumed to be the default accent in the second- and English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish ‘Eng-
language teaching of British English, in the UK lishes’ distinguished nearer home.)
and elsewhere (with however the notable It is a French writer, however, Jean-Paul
exception of North America). Nerrière (2004, 2005), who has recently
Worldwide there are probably at least as pointed out the practical difficulties posed by
many regular speakers of English as an addi- the developing diversity of ‘English as a global
tional language as there are Anglophones, Eng- language’. His experience in global corpora-
lish having ‘a special place’ in seventy-five ‘ter- tions – latterly as vice-president of IBM Europe
ritories’ (cf. Crystal 1997:109–110) and likely
to serve in some form, for some time yet, as the
global auxiliary language. All of which has KEITH DAVIDSON is a former senior UK examining
implications for the language education of a board officer responsible for English, and a long-
small part of the English-speaking world. time member of the Council of the UK National
While some 90% of the world’s 6,000 or so Association for the Teaching of English (NATE). He
languages are currently threatened, not least currently represents NATE on the academic
Linguistics Associations’ joint Committee for
by the domination of English, the world
Linguistics in Education (CLIE). He has previously
remains resolutely plurilingual, with most written for ET on English in education and on the
speaking one or more forms of more than one English writing system and ‘phonics’.
language. Some of this finds its way into our
DOI: 10.1017/S0266078407001095
48 English Today 89, Vol. 23, No. 1 (January 2007). Printed in the United Kingdom © 2007 Cambridge University Press
SNIPPET 2
IMAGIN ’HAIR Given that lack of the /h/ phoneme in French, the
chime here is imaginaire (‘imaginary’), but that’s hardly the point, and
the supposedly intrusive apostrophe (pace Lynne Truss) is the clue.
The French have the notion of ‘aspirated’ initial h for what were
originally Germanic (Frankish/Norman) words. The phonemic effect
is the hiatus (loss of ‘liaison’) to mark the onset of the following item,
marked here by the apostrophe to suggest the English imagine hair. A
further chime might be with imaging (modelling, styling) hair. The
overall message is ‘imaginative hair styling’.