[lg policy] terminology question

[Miriam E Ebsworth]

Dear Anthea,

You've raised an interesting issue.

While I can't say the term European English is familiar or meaningful to me (I have heard 'European French' contrasted with 'Canadian French' and 'Haitian French' as local standards), I must say that my Anglo-Welsh husband often quotes the fact that we are 2 people separated by a common language.

This goes very far beyond pholonogy, lexicon, and syntactic distinctions- the pragmatics of the subcultures under the umbrellas of British vs. American English are very very different- and then there are the Englishes of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Nigeria.... and on and on..

And I strongly suspect that in Singapore there is something like a local standard which is distinct from the NNIVE ('Singlish') that is often discussed in the press.

It's always hard to draw clear distinctions between overlapping varieties, but oceans do help!

And then there's 'noo yaukese'....

Cheers,
Miriam



Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth, Ph.D.
<MEE1 at nyu.edu>
Director of Doctoral Programs in Multilingual Multicultural Studies
New York University,635 East Building
239 Greene St., New York, NY 10003

work phone: 212-998-5195 


----- Original Message -----
From: Anthea Fraser Gupta <A.F.Gupta at leeds.ac.uk>
Date: Wednesday, May 5, 2010 3:47 am
Subject: [lg policy] terminology question
To: Language Policy List <lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu>


> I have a question, especially for people in the US.  A speech-language 
> professor in the US contacted me with questions related to Singapore, 
> and used a term that baffled me: "European English". I didn't know if 
> it was regional (how????) or racial (why???) and simply couldn't 
> interpret it. When I asked him what he meant by the term he explained 
> that he "was referring to the English used in the schools in 
> Singapore. Perhaps I should have refered to it as standard European 
> English. Here in the U.S. we have standard American English. My use of 
> European English is more specific than just the general term standard 
> English."
>  
>  Have you ever come across this term, apparently being used where 
> other people would use 'British Standard English'? Is its meaning 
> clear to people in the US? I find it odd and rather offensive.....
>  
>  [My regular readers will know that I reckon there is ONE Standard 
> English and that categorical regional differences are tiny and rarely 
> worth mentioning.]
>  
>  Anthea
>  *     *     *     *     *
>  Anthea Fraser Gupta (Dr)
>  School of English, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT
>  <www.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/afg>
>  *     *     *     *     *
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