Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Why Can't the English Learn How to Speak?

Below is my comment on the article of TIME magazine, "Why Can't the English Learn How to Speak?" Page 44  TIME, September 25, 2006.

As one of the non-native English speakers struggling to master English accents, I am envy of Lucy Fisher, the writer of this article, having inherited received pronunciation(RP) in her mother tongue even though she has been sometimes embarrassed to be seen as a person of the upper class because she actually belongs to the plain middle class.

As the number of non-native speakers such as the Indians, the Chinese and other Asian people having little sense of the social class in their English is increasing so rapidly, I expect they will soon overwhelm the RP in the motherland and change it to a new “glocal”(meaning global but local) English as the standard on earth.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home