Distribution

FRANCE (including French West Indies), BELGIUM, SWITZERLAND, CANADA, HAITI; some parts of northwestern Italy and Luxembourg; official or widespread second language in many former French and Belgian colonies in north, west and central Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and South America.

Introduction

French belongs to the Romance group of Indo-European languages, and is closely related to Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and other Romance tongues. There are some differences between standard Belgian or Canadian French, for example, and the standard French of France, but the differences are not greater than those between British and American English; the different standard French dialects are certainly mutually comprehensible.

Because French is an Indo-European language, and because the Norman contribution to English was so great, there are some similarities between French and English, both in syntax and vocabulary. The phonological systems exhibit some important differences, however, and this usually presents French speakers with problems in understanding and producing spoken English, and in making links between spelling and pronunciation.

Phonology

General

French shares many phonological characteristics with English. French speakers do not have great difficulty in perceiving or pronouncing most English consonants, but some of the vowel sounds present problems. Perhaps most importantly, the French and English systems of word stress and rhythm are very different, and this can lead to serious difficulties both in understanding and in producing spoken English.

Distribution

Spanish: SPAIN, including the Canaries; the whole of SOUTH AMERICA except Brazil and the Guianas; CENTRAL AMERICA; MEXICO; CUBA; PUERTO RICO and THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC; Western Sahara; some urban centres in north Morocco; Equatorial Guinea; some parts of the USA.

Catalan: CATALONIA, ANDORRA, the BALEARIC ISLANDS, parts of Valencia and Alicante, France (eastern Pyrenees). Nowadays there are very few people who speak Catalan exclusively; most Catalan speakers also speak Spanish or French (depending on where they live).

Introduction

Spanish and Catalan are Romance languages, closely related to Italian and Portuguese; they belong to the Indo-European family. Variations in Spanish are noticeable within Spain itself, and also between metropolitan Spain and the varieties spoken in the Americas. However, these differences are largely confined to pronunciation and vocabulary, morphology and syntax being fairly standard everywhere. With a little experience, all varieties are mutually intelligible.

Despite its limited geographical spread, Catalan varies appreciably from one area to another, though the variations are largely within pronunciation and vocabulary. There is a large degree of mutual intelligibility, though the variety spoken in the Balearics is significantly different from mainland Catalan.

Phonology

General

While the Spanish and English consonant systems show many similarities, the vowel systems and sentence stress are very different, and these can cause great difficulty for Spanish-speaking learners of English. European Spanish speakers, in particular, find English pronunciation harder than speakers of most other European languages.

Distribution

PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA, TAIWAN, SINGAPORE, Malaysia; there are also large communities of Chinese speakers throughout southeast Asia, Oceania and North and South America. About one fifth of the world's population are native speakers of Chinese.

Introduction

The Chinese language, or the Han language, as the Chinese call it, is a collection of numerous dialects which may be classified into eight dialect groups (sometimes referred to as different languages): Northern Chinese (also known as Mandarin), Wu, Hsiang, Kan, Hakka, Northern Min, Southern Min, and Yueh (i.e. Cantonese). While the last four dialects are the mother tongues of most Chinese speakers outside China, Northern Chinese is the native dialect of over 70 per cent of the Chinese population at large, and is the basis of modern standard Chinese, which is the accepted written language for all Chinese, and has been promoted as the national language.

The Chinese dialects share not only a written language but also important basic features at all structural levels. The problems discussed in this chapter are by and large common to speakers of all dialects.

Chinese and English belong to two different language families (Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European), and have many structural differences. Difficulties in various areas at all stages of English language learning may be expected.

Phonology

General

The phonological system of Chinese is very different from that of English. Some English phonemes do not have Chinese counterparts and are hard to learn.

Distribution

INDIA, PAKISTAN, BANGLADESH, NEPAL, SRI LANKA, MALDIVES, Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, Mauritius.

Introduction

Some sixteen major languages are spoken in the countries of the Indian subcontinent. The four languages of South India (Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telegu) are members of the independent Dravidian family. The others are all Indo-Aryan languages, members of that branch of the Indo-European family which derives from Sanskrit. They include the national languages of India (Hindi), Pakistan (Urdu), Bangladesh (Bengali), Nepal (Nepali), Sri Lanka (Sinhala) and the Maldives (Divehi), besides many important regional languages of India and Pakistan (Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Panjabi). Several of these languages have been spread by emigration to other parts of the world, and the United Kingdom now has large communities of speakers of Bengali, Gujarati, Panjabi (many of these are also fluent in Urdu), and Tamil.

As a result of the long period of British rule, English has become very firmly established in South Asia. Even those with no direct command of English will have been exposed to its indirect influence through the very numerous loanwords which have entered all South Asian languages. At the other end of the spectrum, English continues to be used as a natural medium of expression by those with the highest level of education, for whom the most prestigious variety of the language remains standard British English spoken with ‘received pronunciation’. In between these two groups lie those who have varying degrees of command over ‘Indian English’.

Distribution

KOREA, China, Japan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan; significant emigrant or student groups in the UK, the USA (including Hawaii), Canada, Australia, New Zealand.

Introduction

The Korean language is regarded by some scholars as belonging, like Turkish, to the Ural-Altaic language family. There are also some similarities between Korean and Japanese in that the syntax is similar, and both Korean and Japanese still use some Chinese characters, although the pronunciation is not as it is in China. However, it is important to emphasise that the Korean language, along with many Korean customs and ways of experiencing the world, is unique and unrelated to any other oriental languages.

Korean is now spoken by nearly 72 million people, 69 million living on the Korean peninsula and islands and the remaining three million abroad. It is the official language of both North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and South Korea (Republic of Korea) but the separation of the two countries has resulted in minor differences in spelling and vocabulary choice. In South Korea there are seven dialects, including that spoken around the capital, Seoul, which is referred to as Standard Korean. There are differences of pronunciation from one dialect to another which can make them mutually incomprehensible. This also means that speakers of one dialect may have greater difficulties adapting to English than speakers of another, in that some dialects have sounds that more closely approximate to those of English than others.

Distribution

POLAND; Polish communities in the USA, Germany, Brazil, Canada and elsewhere.

Introduction

Polish is an Indo-European language, a member of the (West) Slavonic branch. As such, it is most closely related to Czech and Slovak, and more distantly to Russian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croat and Slovene.

Since the change of political system in 1989, when Poland began to tighten its links with the West, the role of English, always a popular language, has dramatically increased. English is now considered an essential part of a good education, and is widely taught in and out of schools. Many employers organise in-service EFL courses.

Because English, like Polish, is an Indo-European language, and because it is ever-present in mass culture and enjoys high prestige, Polish speakers, especially the young, do not find it particularly difficult.

Phonology

General

Polish learners of English often despair of the apparent lack of consistency between spelling and pronunciation. Learners at elementary levels expect each letter to be pronounced, and give Polish values to each letter. The multitude of stress patterns in English is also an unpleasant surprise to Poles, given the regular penultimate-syllable stress of their mother tongue. Their initial impression of English pronunciation is that ‘everything sounds together’ or that the English ‘eat their words’.

Features of the Polish pronunciation of English that contribute to a Polish accent in English include: the use of full instead of reduced vowels in unstressed syllables, giving the impression of ‘pronouncing too much’; certain intonation contours; a prominent rolled /r/ – especially word-finally; final devoicing (especially /s/ in place of /z/); and mispronunciation of th, /ŋ/ and sibilants.

Distribution

ALGERIA, BAHRAIN, EGYPT, IRAQ, JORDAN, KUWAIT, LEBANON, LIBYA, MOROCCO, OMAN, PALESTINE, QATAR, SAUDI ARABIA, SUDAN, SYRIA, TUNISIA, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES, YEMEN REPUBLIC.

Arabic is a second major language in Chad, Israel, Mauritania, Djibouti, Bangladesh; also in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Chechnya.

In addition, Arabic being the language of the Koran, the holy word of Islam, all Muslims of whatever nationality are to some extent familiar with Arabic, can recite extensively in it, and are therefore influenced by it in their ideas of how language works. Islam has a significant following in Senegal, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Guinea, Somali Republic, Kenya, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines, northern China, Mongolia and Turkey, approximately 400,000,000 people in all, and increasing.

Introduction

Arabic is a Semitic language, having a grammatical system similar to Assyrian, Aramaic, Hebrew and Ethiopian. There is a universal ‘pan-Arabic’ language, which is taught in schools, used by the mass media in all Arab countries, and for all communications of an official nature. Within each country, often in quite small areas, a wide variety of colloquial dialects have developed, differing one from another not only in pronunciation, but also in common lexical items and, to some extent, in structure. The differences from country to country are more marked than, say, differences between UK, US and Australian English.

Distribution

SOUTH INDIA, SRI LANKA, SINGAPORE, Malaysia, Indonesia, East and South Africa, Mauritius, Burma, Vietnam, Guyana, the Caribbean; there are Tamil-speaking communities in many other parts of the world.

Introduction

Many of the problems faced by speakers of Dravidian languages when they learn English are shared with speakers of other South Asian languages. For details of these, see pages 227–243. However, Dravidian languages are agglutinative languages, like Turkish; they differ radically in their phonology, morphology and syntax from the Indo-European languages of the subcontinent, and have correspondingly less in common with English than these languages. Speakers of Dravidian languages therefore encounter a number of additional problems when learning English. This chapter deals with the English of Tamil-speaking learners, but the points made are generally valid for speakers of other Dravidian languages.

Phonology

Vowels

The Tamil vowel system consists of five pairs of short and long vowels: /Λ/, /ɑ/; /i/, /iː/; /e/, /eː/; /o/, /oː/, /u/, /uː/.

All the vowels are undiphthongised, though raised or lowered in context. The two vowels /oː/ (a pure close rounded short vowel) and /oː/ (the long equivalent) have no close counterparts in standard British English, though similar vowels occur in Scottish, Irish and other regional varieties.

There are two diphthongs: /ai/ (like the vowel in buy) and /a℧/ (like the vowel in cow).

Introduction

The languages of West Africa are too numerous and diverse for detailed regional listing. Within each state many different mother tongues are spoken, often unrelated one to another and mutually quite unintelligible. Even those which have achieved some status as a lingua franca within a given area tend to have more than one dialect, and any written literature will be of recent origin. Many languages are spoken only within very small areas, and many have never been written down at all.

From an English language teaching point of view, it is more useful to classify the states of West Africa according to their official second language (English or French). The second language is the language of government and, to a large extent, of education, subject to local policy. It is also the medium of a growing African literature, since French, and particularly English, command greater prestige and a far wider market than any of the mother tongues. For these reasons, the choice of English or French as an official second language tends to have a stronger influence on English teaching materials and methods than the mother tongue of pupils or teacher.

A large proportion of the population are of limited education, and understand only a few words of English, or none at all. Those who have had an elementary education may use English only occasionally, and with severely limited competence.

Distribution

JAPAN, Korea, Hawaii.

Introduction

Japanese is probably related to Korean, and possibly to Manchurian, Mongolian and Turkish too. It is not related to Chinese. In modern Japan everybody understands and can speak an approximation to the standard language, though wide dialectal variety exists.

Japanese and English speakers find each other's languages hard to learn. One reason for this is that the broad constituents of sentence structure are ordered very differently in the two languages. The following fragment from a Japanese magazine, translated word for word into English, illustrates the learner's problem:

or, less exotically:

In addition to the difficulties posed by great grammatical, lexical and phonetic disparity, Japanese speakers' attitudes to language in general are heavily coloured by aspects of their own language. Firstly, ‘respect language’ is so finely graded that an out-of-context fragment of dialogue can tell the eavesdropper a great deal about the age, sex, relationship and relative status of both speakers: even a transcript bereft of such vocal clues as voice quality and articulation reveals a sensitive choice of vocabulary and grammar in this respect.

Distribution

THAILAND.

Introduction

Thai (formerly called ‘Siamese’) is a member of the Tai family of languages which are dispersed over a wide area of Asia, from northern Vietnam to northern India. Thai is the national language of Thailand and as such is spoken by over fifty million people. Distinct regional dialects of Thai are spoken in the north, northeast and south of the country, but the language of the Central Region is regarded as the standard and is used both in schools and for official purposes throughout the country.

Thai, like Chinese, is a tonal language, with the meaning of each syllable being determined by the pitch at which it is pronounced. Standard Thai has five tones – mid, low, high, rising and falling. It is a non-inflected language and much of its original lexicon is monosyllabic; a high percentage of polysyllabic words are foreign borrowings, particularly from the classical Indian languages, Sanskrit and Pali.

Thai is written in an alphabetic script that was originally derived from Indian sources. It is written across the page from left to right; words are not separated as in most European languages, and where spaces do occur, they very often correspond to some form of punctuation in English, such as a full stop or comma.

On the accompanying cassette and CD, speakers of the various languages referred to in the book were recorded:

1. reading the introduction to the story shown in the picture strip below;

2. continuing this story in their own words;

3. reading aloud the shopping list which follows;

4. giving brief details of their nationality, place of birth and first language.

In this way they produced samples of controlled and semi-controlled speech, in which common characteristic phonological and syntactic difficulties may be exemplified. The reading texts are briefly annotated to indicate areas of difficulty some speakers may have.

The interviews are in the order of the chapters but, for the benefit of those readers who enjoy a challenge, the nationality and first language of the speakers are not revealed until their closing remarks.

The introduction to the picture story

My uncle, John Smith, has a very good job. He's a university professor, actually, and very intelligent. But the strange thing is, he's always losing things. It's quite extraordinary. Last Thursday, for example, during a trip to London on business, he accidentally left his umbrella on the train. It must be the sixth time he's lost that same umbrella. It's a rather special one, with red and yellow stripes, a present from his youngest daughter for his birthday one year. Anyway, the next day, as soon as he was free, he called at the Lost Property Office to ask about it. Fortunately, it's in the next street to his house.

Distribution

TANZANIA, KENYA, UGANDA, MOZAMBIQUE, ZAIRE, Comoros, Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi, Oman, Zambia.

Introduction

Swahili is the most important language in East Africa, with at least 60 million speakers. Only a minority speak Swahili as their mother tongue: most speak it as a second, third, or even fourth language. Swahili is the national language of Tanzania, one of the four African national languages of Zaire, and the official language of Kenya. It plays a very important role as a lingua franca in Eastern and to some extent Central Africa, where it is very widely used both in local trade and international broadcasting. It is used in a number of newspapers, and has a growing literature.

Recent research indicates that Swahili was emerging as a separate language as early as the ninth century, and that it probably originated from around the Tana River estuary in Kenya. But as trade developed, the language spread both up and down the East African coast, and into the interior. The name Swahili comes from the Arabic word sawāhil, meaning coasts, and the language contains a number of words of Arabic origin. However, the language is essentially African.

Swahili belongs to the Bantu family of languages, which are spoken by most Africans south of a line drawn roughly from Douala in Cameroon in the west, eastwards to the north of Lake Victoria; and from the east of Lake Victoria across to Brava in Somalia.

Distribution

THE NETHERLANDS, BELGIUM, Surinam, Dutch Antilles; about 20 million people. (Its mutually intelligible descendant Afrikaans, spoken by about 6 million native speakers and used as a lingua franca by about 15 million people in South Africa and Namibia, is now officially considered a separate language.)

Introduction

Dutch is a member of the (West) Germanic branch of Indo-European, and as such is closely related to Frisian, English, German and the Scandinavian languages. It is the standard language in the Netherlands and in Flanders, the northern part of Belgium, where it is often but unofficially called ‘Flemish’. The use of the standard language as the first language is far more widespread in the Netherlands than in Flanders. There most people habitually use one of the many local dialects or an approximation of the standard language. The variation, though diminishing, is still very great. The standard language is understood almost everywhere, but dialects tend to be mutually unintelligible, both in the Netherlands and in Flanders.

Dutch and English being so closely related, they have many similarities in all areas of their grammars, and Dutch speakers regard English as easy to learn, at least initially, when they make rapid progress.

Phonology

General

The Dutch and English phonological systems are broadly similar, so that speakers of Dutch do not normally have serious difficulties in recognising or pronouncing most English sounds.

Many learners may use strong regional accents in their Dutch, and their problems with English tend to vary accordingly.