Comments on: World Englishes

By: Ismail Ali Harahap

Ismail Ali Harahap — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:53:01 +0000

This topic, World Englishes, will be discussed at LIA International Conference 2010, which is going to be held in Bali, Indonesia, April 28-30, 2010.

Topic areas focus on the implications of World Englishes in the teaching and learning of English in different countries with various cultural background.

I look forward to reading this book before the conference.

By: Vineet Singh

Vineet Singh — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 03:32:41 +0000

This is one of the topics that lay in closet for a long time and I must complement Andy KirkPatrick and Eric Roth to dwell with such candidness.

English has evolved from just a mere language to a tool of democracy. It can be considered a unifying language. As with anything that has a global reach and implication – one standard for English everywhere will not be practical.

English at local levels and for non-native speakers has to be encouraged and propagated.
I look forward to reading this book.

By: Ruby G.

Ruby G. — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:16:45 +0000

This book would definitely be of interest to anthropologists as well. This review has certainly caught my attention since this is a problem faced among other languages, especially those that are considered Indigenous to the Americas. In my experience, Mixtec and Nahuatl is commonly referred to as dialects when they should be called languages. The reasoning behind categorizing them as dialects is that they are not spoken as they were 500 years ago. But American English is a variant of the English spoken in England, and is it called a dialect? No. Personally I think that languages spoken by marginalized peoples are discriminated against… and there are people who are arguing for the same thing as Andy Kirkpatrick in Latin America, but for the written word. World Englishes and one International English shouldn’t be put against each other; both sides of the argument might be happy considering International English for the written word and World Englishes for the spoken word. Now I’m going to see if I can get the book and read it alongside my copy of Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes.