English Language Matters: Varieties of Englishes

Readers of and contributors to City Cost are English users, right? Likely many readers are current or former English teachers in a variety of contexts in Japan. So we all use English. But what do we mean by “English”?

Recently, the British Council, which has a presence in Tokyo, explores the Future of English, examining the needs of English teachers, learners, and users around the world. 

For the project, David Crystal, a British linguist, gave a talk with PhD students on a broad range of his experiences and insights about the variation of English. Crystal talks about the perception of perceived standards versus accents that are tied to identity. There is no one monolithic “English”, yet English textbooks produced in Japan nearly universally present General American English.

Like many foreign residents in Japan working in English education contexts, I’ve had some startling experiences when it comes to perceptions of “standard English”. Many years ago, a school asked me to record audio for a listening exam, and my variety of English was rejected. While I produce mostly General American English sounds, a few words I produce are “tells” that reveal that I was raised in Canada. Unconsciously, I produce what’s frequently called Canadian raising, a vowel quality which is higher than many North American speakers. 

But my experience of English language teaching outside Japan indicates that my variety of English doesn't make a singificant for English learners, including Japanese students of English. A casual experiment in a Canadian ESL school with a number of teachers raised in Canada, Scotland, New Zealand, and Hong Kong, revealed that our students - Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and other language speakers - noticed the difference in accents. However, they couldn’t identify what made them different. And when it came down to it, they acquired comprehensible English with their lovely variety of accents.

Has your variety of English been questioned by colleagues in the Japanese English education context?