Recentering English: New English and Global

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Recentering English: New English and Global

Michael Toolan

English Today / Volume 13 / Issue 04 / October 1997, pp 3 - 10DOI: 10.1017/S0266078400009925, Published online: 17 October 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0266078400009925

How to cite this article:Michael Toolan (1997). Recentering English: New English and Global. English Today, 13, pp 3-10doi:10.1017/S0266078400009925

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Recentering English:New English and GlobalMICHAEL TOOLAN

The times and the language are a-changin'.But how much and in how many ways?

THERE ARE many kinds of English, and manydifferent vantage points from which to exam-ine the Englishes we encounter. I want to makesome brief observations on just two contempo-rary kinds of English. One is the English used inmainstream public discourse in countrieswhere English is a major native language; theother is the public international English usedby globetrotting professionals, the only kind ofEnglish which is beginning to be truly globallydispersed. I will call these two Englishes,respectively, New English and Global. My mainpoint is that with the spread of Global, and as aresult of changed attitudes to New English,these two standard Englishes are increasinglytreated not as Anglo-Saxon and metropolitanproperties, found by or shared with others, butas resources owned by larger constituencies ofusers. Those constituencies do not merely findthe language (whether in language classes orusage manuals or elsewhere) but make or re-make it. In the case of Global, its non-Englishmajority of users are increasingly claimingownership of it.

New English, Global, and diversityBoth those labels (New English and Global) arecontentious, but perhaps New English is partic-ularly so: why the epithet New? Is today's main-stream public English, in Australia or theUnited States, significantly different from whatit has always been?

I think it is, in at least one general respect,which concerns its standing relative to usersand uses. New English is more democratized,

and is conceptualized as a joint-stock enter-prise in which we are all invested stakeholders;in the main, we care about language as neverbefore, for ours is a textualist age. Our lives andlivings depend on texts; and in the academicworld, this has fostered an attention to criticaldiscourse analysis and social linguistics which,again, is as never before.

New English and Global are developing inways that tend to diversify or re-allocate own-ership of the English language, an ownershipwhich hitherto was implicitly assigned to akind of oligarchic fraternity, namely those whowrote in the seemingly homogeneous varietyknow as Standard Written English, and who inBritain spoke a standard dialect in a reasonablyRP accent.

One of the political buzzwords of the 1980'sin the United States and beyond was diversity-Bound up in that word were a host ofacknowledgements that different strokes workfor different folks. It was more widely recog-nized that a variety of ways of being anddoing, and a variety of ways of speaking (touse the phrase Dell Hymes inherited from

MICHAEL TOOLAN is Professor of EnglishLinguistics at the University of Birmingham, havingpreviously taught for many years at the NationalUniversity of Singapore and the University ofWashington, Seattle. He has published extensivelyon narrative, stylistics, discourse analysis and theoryof language. His most recent book is Total Speech:An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language'.Duke University Press, 1996.

English Today 52, Vol. 13, No. 4 (October 1997). Printed in the United Kingdom © 1997 Cambridge University Press 3

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Benjamin Lee Whorf), merited equal respectand recognition. 'Diversity* became one of thecentral interpretations of what it meant tostrive, however failingly, for a democraticcommunity - in short that diversity amountedto democracy. In the political arena and farbeyond, into matters of dialect, education,and so on, it is clear that 'diversity1 leavesopen certain fundamental issues such as dis-tinctions to be made between 'equality ofopportunity5 and 'equality of outcome'. Butthe ways in which diversity and diversificationso often entail kinds of new enfranchisementare of great interest. And they are democratiz-ing tendencies which are arguably even to befound in something which at first gloss canappear largely antidemocratic, homogenizing,and disenfranchizing, namely the spread ofone language across the globe as the onemonopolizing tongue, part lingua franca, part'master' language, and in part the solelanguage that gives access to the world.

I will come back to 'World English' shortly;but let me turn first to two of western society'scontemporary language-related preoccupa-tions: the 'textualism' that is pervasive in ourlives, and a concomitant preoccupation withright speaking and writing, that is, withlanguage that we judge to be good, clean, clearor crisp. If the former preoccupation is suc-cinctly termed 'textualism', the latter one, con-cerning appropriate language and the quarrelsit provokes, has been memorably characterizedby Professor Deborah Cameron as a matter ofVerbal Hygiene.

The 'spirit of the age': textualismand verbal hygiene

There is a certain 'spirit of the age', in the West-ern world particularly, which has created theconditions within which a more criticalscrutiny of language can flourish. The spirit ofthe age is textualist. In the Western or so-calleddeveloped world, our lives are a patchwork oftexts and discourses, from cover to cover, as itwere. And in those countries that are presentlyless textualist, the trend is towards greater tex-tualism, and increased dissemination of dis-courses. Because information and texts aremajor driving forces of our cultures, certainpractices have grown and become quite wide-spread as a corollary, particularly within soci-eties where English, the predominant globallanguage of texts and information, is a nativelanguage. Those practices are ones of worryingand arguing over verbal correctness. The argu-ments may concern whether it is fitting to endsentences with a preposition; or they may beover just how to pronounce a certain word; orover the appropriateness of language - forinstance, over whether the phrase single par-ents is better replaced by the phrase lone par-ents. Or the language friction may relate towhether non-standard English is spreading,and whether such a spread entails debilitatingvulgarism and loss of fineness of expression.

No contemporary language has such anenormous number of diverse and influentialstakeholders as English; and more than everbefore English is subject to metalinguisticscrutiny and dispute, over word-choice, accent,

GlobalGlobal village

-(FROM OUR FILES)-

• (From Marshall McLuhan, The GutenbergGalaxy, 1962, p.31)The new electronic interdependence recreatesthe world in the image of a global village.

• (From an advertisement for Concert pic in TheEconomist, 5 Apr 97)The Global Village: an idea said to haveoriginated from Marshall McLuhan back in the'60s.

• (From Michael Ignatieff, 'The State of Belong-ing5, Time, 27 Feb 95)

Nationalism, so cosmopolitans tell us, is tearingthe global village apart, from the formerYugoslavia to Chechnya. Multiethnic states arecollapsing. Ethnic separatism is on the rise - notjust in impoverished Africa but also in wealthyEurope and even in North America. How can thispossibly be happening in the world of theInternet, 24-hour computer trading and globalcapital flows? The spread of globalism hasbecome the ruling cliche of our time. Our domi-nant condescension equates cosmopolitanismwith civilization and nationalism with bar-barism.... Why fight to preserve small languageswhen the lingua franca of the global economy isEnglish? »->

ENGLISH TODAY 52 October 1997



acceptability of constructions, connotations ofterms, etc. (The British, as a nation, are notori-ously monolingual, but now we can say that weare, at any rate, metalinguistically-mindedmonolinguals!)

There is a common tendency at work in all ofthese scrutinizings: we are now more reflexiveand more sensitive about our own language (Iwould not say, in a spirit of disparagement,that we are hypersensitive), and we do morescrutinizing of the language used in any kind ofpublic arena, than has been generally the caseever before. In this developed public quar-relling over language standards and goals, par-ticipants also stress, to the point of exaggera-tion, just how calamitous the alleged languageabuses are. So conservative language crusaderscall a split infinitive or double negative'heinous'; and heinous, too, in the eyes of pro-gressive language crusaders, is the use ofphrases like man and wife.

Why are society's skirmishes over languageand usage so much more plentiful and diversethan ever before? Partly because among thosepeople who use English as a native language,more are reading and writing than ever before,and, in this post-industrial world of informa-tion and communication, more of us make ourliving via texts and discourses than ever wasthe case in the past. It is a documented fact thatless and less of GDP in Western countriesderives from manufacture and more and morefrom a variety of kinds of production and ser-vices which are foundationally verbal. Oureconomies are rooted in the making of thingsand the consumption of things, but increas-

ingly those things that we make and consumeare texts, not houses, cars, or even computers.

Western society has not stopped makingthings, of course; but as a general trend, we areceasing to be directly physically linked to themaking of the things we use. Nor is it simply amatter, as in the recent past, of one or moremachines 'intervening' between the humanmaker and the item made; it is the fact that, inaddition, texts and scripts intervene to'instruct' those machines in their tasks of mak-ing. By and large, the western individual isbecoming more removed from the hands-onmaking of things and, perhaps, is coming closerto a day-to-day direct experience of makingtexts (or at least of using and interacting withthem). And of course looking at matters in aworld context, very many of these 'texts' (spo-ken or written) are in English - hence theimportance of ESL and EFL instruction and thegrowth of Global.

As language has come to take up a larger andlarger role in our working lives, reflexiveinspection of that language has also grown. Asdiscourse has grown more prominent, so toohas metalinguistics. So, in the UK and US,debates about the niceties and ugliness of usedlanguage have spread to virtually all areas ofsociety, every class, ethnicity, and family.Debates about language are no longer confinedto an inner circle, whether that is drawn quitenarrowly around the editorial offices of theOxford English Dictionary, or more widely toinclude the readership of the London Times. Inshort, and without anyone particularly notic-ing it, these debates have been democratized.

• (From Charles Mo, letter responding to Ignati-eff above: 'The Spread of Globalism', Time, 20Mar 95)Lost on the fast track, we see globalization asthe role of the media, the gatekeepers of infor-mation, linking the world together. They do littleto help 'noncosmopolitans' feel a part of theglobal community, and perhaps this is a causeof nationalistic wars. The media are poised tobecome the 21st century's most powerfulweapon.... In the global village, nationalism canand must survive and flourish. Who are we with-out individuality?

• (From Flora Lewis, 'Globalization Brings aNeed for Global Ethics', International HeraldTribune, 28 Mar 96)VIENNA - like it or not, globalization is here -

in some ways. It isn't a global village, nothingcozy and not that much communal about it.• (From Thomas L. Friedman, 'For OrthodoxJews, the Choice Was Netanyahu or Pizza Hut',International Herald Tribune, 23 Sep 96)The Peres vision of a 'New Middle East' in whichIsrael would have open borders, a computer inevery home, foreign investment, Pizza Hut, theDisney Channel, Blockbuster Video and 50 cablestations and be fully integrated into the globalvillage, may have animated many secular Israelisto vote Labour.

• (From James Geary, 'Speaking in Tongues',Time, 7 Jul 97)Much of the world, it seems, is coming to resem-ble a kind of new Babel, a cozy little global vil-lage of common understanding. » - •

RECENTERING ENGLISH: NEW ENGLISH AND GLOBAL



But by suggesting that these language debateshave been democratized I should emphasizethat I mean democratized in an imperfectrather than a completed sense; it is not at allthe case that everyone now has a say, let alonean equal say, in what is acceptable or betterusage or not. The point rather is that very manymore people claim a say in these matters thanever before, so that these issues have beendemocratized rather in the way that, in Britain,the Great Reform Act of 1832 democratized thefranchise. The idea that more people are nowinvolved in the application of editorial revi-sions of their own and others' language, withthe intent that their language might be moreeffective and the less alienating to as many oth-ers as possible, lies at the heart of advocacy of'inclusive language' - and, importantly, ofincreasingly inclusive language at that.

As noted, Cameron's recent book examinesthe politics of these language contests and con-testations. The book is entitled Verbal Hygienesince that formulation, in Cameron's judge-ment, best expresses what prompts publishersto employ copy- and sub-editors, what promptspeople to take courses in assertive language,what motivates people to embrace or to rejectso-called politically-correct language, andwhat leads voters to view with sympathy gov-ernmental gestures in support of standardEnglish. Cameron quite rightly emphasizes thatextant linguistic interpretations of theselanguage debates, whether in terms of tabooand euphemism, or irrational prescriptivism,are unsatisfactory, not least since they do littleto explain the forces that operate on intelligent

'lay* users of the language so as to make themso attentive to and defensive about the accept-ability of their own language. Hence her newinterpretation, in terms of verbal hygiene. Peo-ple both conservative and progressive thinksociety is healthier and more protected fromattitudinal infection (racism, class hostility,prejudice, and collective blindness) when wemind how we speak and when we aim to keepour language spotlessly clean.

Of course the logic of certain verbal hygieneproposals may be flawed, but that is a secondaryissue. Of primary interest are the many propos-als themselves and what motivates them. Tosome extent they reflect normative pressuresfurthering societal conformity. But more inter-estingly they also reflect people's sense thatlanguage can be actively engaged with, andmodified. This is analogous to the way that themodern notion of hygiene carries the idea thatpeople can actively take steps to fend off infec-tion and illness, and not simply wait passively,hoping that those threats to good health willpass them by. Verbal hygiene is flourishingalongside an awareness, gradually spreadingthrough society, that language is not invariablyfound but is to some extent at least made. Justas, long ago, the price of democracy was said tobe eternal vigilance, so in verbal-hygiene initia-tives we see a true counterpart of this: the priceof genuine or attempted democracy of speech(and writing) is a new attentiveness to theimplications of the language you choose to use.Gradually, very gradually, we are coming to seeone another less as linguistic subalterns, subjectusers of found language, and more as voiced

Global at large• (From Reginald Dale, 'In This Globalization,Jobs Stay Pur", International Herald Tribune, 24May 94)WASHINGTON - How global is globalization?Not, the answer appears to be, as global as youmight think.... Indeed, some economists fear,large parts of the globe - particularly the poorerparts - risk exclusion from the globalizationprocess.... Although most mainstream econo-mists have missed it, what we are witnessing isnot globalization, but global localization.

• (From an advertisement for the fall programat the Institute for Shipboard Education, Univer-sity of Pittsburgh, 13 Sept 95)EIL students will join a shipboard campus com-munity of 450 predominantly US undergraduate

students and share in a global learning experi-ence that will take them to ten countries aroundthe world.

• (From Martin Kettle, "Why we must not lookaway", Guardian Weekly, 3 Dec 95)Contemporary Britain has produced two globalicons in Lady Thatcher and Princess Diana.

• (From 'GLOBALIZATION', an advertisementfor the World Trade Congress in InternationalHerald Tribune 18 Jan 96)Globalization has arrived, and its implicationsfor business are staggering. Competition is inten-sifying across markets, and is as likely to comefrom the other side of the planet as from theother side of town. Opportunity is calling fromevery corner of the globe. Trade barriers arefalling in every important world market. »->




individuals, citizen makers of new language. Inthis new dispensation, all language-users arelanguage-makers.

What in the world is happening toEnglish?The short answer is that no one thing, butmany different things, are happening toEnglish. Like any widely-spread languagebefore it (widely spread in terms of geography,cultural and political association, users anduses), it is indigenizing, and those indigenizedversions can be quite distinct from each otherin vocabulary, syntax, pronunciation, and soon. There are many dialects of spoken Englisharound the world, and the indigenizationextends, to a degree, to national or regionalvarieties of English too. Accordingly, a multi-plicity of national or regional standard Eng-lishes is also emerging (the hedge over nationalor regional concerns whether, for example, it ishelpful to say that there are two standard Eng-lishes in America north of Mexico or just one,maintained in common in both the UnitedStates and Canada; similarly for India, Pakistanand Sri Lanka).

But more interestingly, because much moreof a genuinely new phenomenon, is the emer-gence of one kind of English whose writ doesrun around the entire world. But it does so withvarious qualifications which make it somewhatmisleading simply to call it 'World English'.This is the English I associate with high-flyers -literal and metaphorical (in this sense at least,it is an acrolect!). It can be heard in use by peo-

ple of every ethnicity in virtually every interna-tional airport in the world. It is the English spo-ken and written by Japanese and German busi-ness executives, attending a trade fair inMexico City; and it is the English used by gyne-cologists from Sweden, Zambia, and Korea, ata world medical congress in Moscow.

Modelled chiefly but not exclusively on stan-dard American English, it is an English emerg-ing to serve as the default medium in circum-stances like those just sketched: it is the linguafranca of cross-national discourse between pro-fessionals. As a result, even native-speakersincreasingly code-switch into it in interaction:an Irish financial consultant and an Indian onewill both accommodate their speech so as toconform to it when they talk to each other,thereby meeting on comparatively neutral lin-guistic ground. But when they go home andtalk to their colleagues they may well switch tomore indigenized Englishes, and this diver-gence will likely increase when they are talkingto nonprofessionals or people of a lower class.It is therefore not at all the case that this pro-fessionals' English has a genuinely worldwidedistribution: it is the international Englishdialect of a particular professional class; if aregion of a country has few residents who areboth professionals and international travellers,then this brand of English will have little pres-ence there.

Since this international English is not strictlya worldwide language, and since it is becomingincreasingly released from a sense of rooted-ness in one or more ethnic homelands(whether that is thought of as England, or the

The landscape of global business has changed,perhaps forever.

• (From 'Management Brief: The world matchanged the machine', The Economist, 30 Mar96)Two years ago Ford Motor Company decided totear up its management structure, abolish itsregional companies and turn itself into a globalcompany that made global cars.

• (From 'The World Turned Upside Down', areview of Kwame Anthony Appiah & Henry LouisGates, Jr., The Dictionary of Global Culture,Knopf, in The New York Review, 6 Feb 97)Despite its tide the dictionary isn't really global;the concessions to Eurocentricity are tactical, andthe true purpose is to establish a new and aggres-sive point of view.

• (From David Crystal, English as a globallanguage, Cambridge: University Press, 1997)- A language achieves a genuinely global status

when it develops a special role that is recognizedin every country.... [p.2]

- It is impossible to make confident predictionsabout the emergence of a global language.There are no precedents for this kind of lin-guistic growth, other than on a much smallerscale.... [p.22]

- How far back do we have to go in order tofind the origins of global English? In a sense,the language has always been on the move....[p.25]

- If there is a critical mass, does this mean thatthe emergence of a global language is aunique event, in evolutionary terms? It maybe that English, in some shape or form, w+




Anglo-Saxon world, or the Anglo-Americanworld), we could give it a label which uses nei-ther the misrepresenting term World nor theresidually-ethnicist one English. Hence my sug-gestion that we call it Global.

Global: 'World English' out, theworld's English in?English has been castigated in many quartersas a blatantly hegemonizing discourse, thequintessential Western cultural imperialistlanguage, which creates a playing field thatslopes in favour of Americans and Britons and- to switch metaphors - is for the rest of theworld just one more alien and alienating hoopto jump through. Are all the facts surroundingEnglish's global growth then bad, or pragmatic,or both? I would like to suggest not, and thatthere are some important underreported gainsthat accompany the undeniable local losses.Some trends point to a kind of enfranchise-ment of a wider circle or larger community, theemergence of new, revisionist ways of reading,and speaking, and writing; and certain kinds ofdeparture from the received and inherited hier-archies, standards, and privileged assump-tions. Some of this might be summarized byasking, 'Where would Professor Higgins standin the emerging world of World English?'.

Indeed, as a recent commentary from DavidCrystal reminds us, English is shockinglyemerging as the only truly global language. It isnow a mother tongue or first language for adozen nations and around 400 million speak-ers; it is an institutionally-ratified secondlanguage for perhaps another 250 million; and

it is spoken as a foreign language by perhaps asmany as a 1,000 million speakers. In sum, per-haps a third of the world's population havesome level of acquaintance with and use ofEnglish.

More interesting than these familiar facts isperhaps the way Crystal incorporates them intoa commentary about the emergence of a WorldEnglish, in his terms by dint of need. He writes,for example, that

The prospect that a lingua franca might beneeded for the whole world is a post-wardevelopment.

where I note in particular the emphasis onwhat might be needed. And he adds:

There has never been a time [in history] whenso many nations were needing to talk to eachother so much, or when so many people wishedto travel to so many places.

where again I note the emphasis on whatnations are said to now need, and what peopleare said to now wish.

These emphases on new needs and desirescould be misleading. It seems doubtful, forexample, whether the wish in people to travelis stronger or more widespread today than everbefore. It is the possibility of such travel that ismore widespread, given the growth of afflu-ence and the relative decline in the cost oftravel, facilitated by technological advances.Similarly it is very doubtful whether cross-national or cross-linguistic talk is needed todaymore than ever before, if that way of represent-ing the situation gives the impression that thisneed has emerged independently of causes and

will find itself in the service of the world com-munity for ever [p. 140].

Headlines• (From Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek, 29May 95)Global Mythmaking We aren't being taken overby the world economy.

• (From Bill Powell, Newsweek, 26 Feb 96)It's a Global Thing The populist backlash againstkiller capitalism is no longer confined to theUnited States.

• (From Eugene Linden, Time, 8 July 96)GLOBAL FEVER Climate change threatens more

dian megastorms, floods and droughts. The realperil may be disease.

• (From Newsweek, 30 Dec 9 6 - 6 Jan 97)Globoculture Creep From Beijing to Rio, fromSao Paolo to Shiraz, American pop style finds ahome away from home.The pop colonization of the planet progressedapace in 1996. Hollywood movies, fast food andNike swooshes flowed freely, casting the shadowof U.S. culture over the Earth.

• (From William Pfaff, International HeraldTribune, 2 Jan 97)If Globalizing Means Westernizing, Then ItMeans Trouble




cultural arrangements. Instead we have tounderstand the enormous role that technologyhas played in redefining what we think of asnormal and natural needs.

In many parts of the world, very largely dri-ven by the possibilities and opportunities thatnew technologies and markets have helped tocreate, this new need or expectation hasbecome naturalised or commonplace: that peo-ple from quite distant parts of the world shouldbe able to communicate with each other, with aminimized dependence on interpreters and go-betweens. So it is not the case that people havespontaneously taken it into their heads to talkand travel in foreign parts more than everbefore; it is that technology and economicdevelopments - invisible hands almost impos-sible to resist - have changed what we take tobe possible, reasonable and ordinary. We mustnot overlook the ways in which technologychanges what it is and means to be human; andrelatedly we must not overlook the ways inwhich technology changes the nature andmeaning of languages and communication.

But the fact of English's phenomenal spread,a kind of linguistic counterpart of the globalspread of Microsoft, is simply a banal fact. Sotoo, perhaps, is the following propositionwhich, though it is also widely recognized, Istill find provocative in its possible conse-quences, namely that fewer and fewer speakersof English are English. Is there any language inthe modern world that is anything like sodetached from a particular ethnic or nationalhomeland? And what might be the conse-quences of that? What happens to Englishwhen even Britons begin to recognize that, ori-

gins and history not withstanding, thelanguage no longer particularly belongs tothem? Is there a comparison with lawn tennis?Invented and first nurtured in England, fewtoday would characterize this as a pre-eminently English game.

What significant changes might we begin tosee in New English and in Global, reflecting thegeneral shift of the language's centre of gravitynot merely from Britain to North America (ashas long been noted) but now somewhat awayfrom North America towards the mass of influ-ential non-native speakers of the language, whowill soon be more numerous than the nativespeakers? At least two general trends may beginto be felt in Britain as a result of these develop-ments. Given the influence of AmericanEnglish, and the still-growing British exposureto that influence, I suspect we will find increas-ing adoption, among younger British speakers,of particular American English speech charac-teristics. You only need to have heard veryBritish Ben Elton on television, recently pre-senting pop music's Brit Awards no less, to spotthe trend. For example, he flapped his medial tsand ds (as in cudding for cutting, and boddle forbottle) with the American best of them.

This sort of dialectal re-merging can beobserved too from some British sports stars,media personalities, and even politicians andstudents: this is much more of a genuine shiftthan the faking of American pronunciation byBritish rock groups, long ago noted by PeterTrudgill. If American speech really does takehold in post-millennial Britain, what conse-quences might there be for RP? CurrentlyBritish Received Pronunciation is famously an

• (From Reginald Dale, International HeraldTribune, 14 Jan 97)The Voices of Global Doom Are WrongWASHINGTON - Prophets of doom are begin-ning to be heard warning that economic global-ization is propelling the world to some inde-scribable catastrophe. The warnings arefrequendy couched in apocalyptic terms - andusually imply it is all America's fault.Typical of the genre is a new book by the Ameri-can author William Greider, 'One World, Readyor Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism,'which is currently attracting attention in Wash-ington.

• (From The Economist, 18 Jan 97)Global economy, local mayhem?

It looks like a delicious irony, and the enemies ofglobal capitalism are pouncing gleefully upon it.Having grown rich in exports, South Korea, theerstwhile tiger, has suddenly come to resemblefamously arthritic countries such as Germanyand France ...

Now that even the tigers are being clawed, sayglobalisation's critics, is it not plain that theever-freer international flow of goods and capi-tal, and the competition it unleashes, ends up byhurting workers everywhere? "Why should work-ers bear the brunt of globalisation in pain?"huffs a columnist in the International Herald Tri-bune ...

The point of a flexible labour market is not towin some global ugliness contest for jobs ... •




r-less accent, that is, the post-vowel written r isunsounded in words like words and car. Butwill even RP, influenced by American Englishand by Global in ways it has not been by North-ern or West Country English, some day come tobe r-ful?

ConclusionThose speculations concern speech, the modal-ity perhaps more resistant to rapid change. Butwhat about writing and spelling conventions?Influenced by the international prestige ofAmerican English and by the pressures fromthose second-language users of Global men-tioned earlier, I can imagine that various Britishspelling preferences will be gradually aban-doned (hence, too, my occasional use of Globalspellings in this article - e.g. recentering). Howmuch longer will programme survive, in thecomputer-driven competition with the shortersimpler program? For how much longer willBritish publishers and writers feel they want tomaintain that extravagant 'u' in colours,rumours, and neighbours? To repeat, if Britonsdo drop the 'u' in colours, I would suggest that it

would chiefly be due to global ESL pressure,and not specifically American English pressure.Space limitations prevent me from dwelling onsyntax and vocabulary changes, but the com-bined influences of American English andGlobal are likely to affect New English in theserespects too. Take the car: am I right to suspectthat, in Britain, the handbrake is already failingto hold under pressure homparking brake? Andhow much longer will our cars support a bonnetand a boot?

In short, there are ways we are only begin-ning to notice in which, given the global spreadand status of English today, and given shiftingpatterns of affluence, education and perceivedlinguistic 'ownership' in countries like Britain,standard varieties like New English and Globalare being not merely found but also re-fash-ioned by the non-Establishment and non-English majorities (respectively) who are usingthem. ED

References

Cameron, D. 1995. Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge.Crystal, D. 1997. 'World Standard Spoken English'. In

The Guardian, 15 Feb.

Massaging the message?According to Wired Style: Principles ofEnglish Usage in the Digital Age(Hardwired, 1996: see below), MarshallMcLuhan has been greatly misunderstood.Diana Holmes, who is handling the Britishpublicity for the manual and for the digi-tally remastered edition of McLuhan's clas-sic The Medium is the Massage (1967, withQuentin Fiore), would no doubt agree.Since sending out press releases for thebook and advance copies of the manual,she has been inundated with calls askingwhy she and Hardwired have misquoted'electronic culture's immortal saint' in thepress release - and why the entry in WiredStyle reads The Medium is the Massage'while the running head reads 'the mediumis the message'.

Many works of reference suggest theyhave made a rather odd typo. ChambersBiographical Dictionary (1990) lists the pub-lication as The Medium is the Message, as doThe Cambridge Encyclopedia (1990), TheCambridge Biographical Dictionary (1994),The Oxford Companion to the EnglishLanguage (1992), and The Bloomsbury

Dictionary of Quotations (1994). Even thereprint of another McLuhan classic,Understanding Media (Routledge, 1994;originally 1964), lists it as such.

According to Holmes and Hardwired,they've all got it wrong. The first chapter ofUnderstanding Media was called 'Medium isthe Message', but there was no book withthat name. The updated CambridgeEncyclopedia (1992), The New EncyclopaediaBritannica (15th edition, 1986), and TheHutchinson Encyclopedia (10th edition,1992) agree. All three list the 1967 publica-tion as The Medium is the Massage - andHutchinson even go so far as to mark it'[sic]'.

Perhaps McLuhan knew this would hap-pen. In the book in question, he propheti-cally wrote, 'All media work us over com-pletely. They are so pervasive in theirpersonal, political, economic, aesthetic,psychological, moral, ethical, and socialconsequences that they leave no part of usuntouched, unaffected, unaltered. Themedium is the massage.'

Roshan McArthur

[See description in Recent Titles, p.60]

10 ENGLISH TODAY 52 October 1997


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