English Now and Then

Juan Carlos Sols Rivera

English Now and Then

English as we know it now has been so since the 1800s, the so-called Modern English.
The changes English has suffered from then on have been many, but not substantially significant.
For instance, pronunciation and grammar had already been settled, so any further changes that
took place were minimal.
Language is something that goes together with society in that all the elements that make
up such are entwined with those of a language. In other words, language and society are mutually
influent. Economy and politics play an important role regarding the status of a language and its
predominance above others. Such is the case with English.
Britain was an economic power during the 18th and 19th centuries. Industrial revolution
took place in this land and made the island an small enclosed bunker of prosperity. By the time
the British Empire had already begun with the exploration and colonization of the New World
seeking wealth to accumulate more and more. It did not take long until people across Europe
started seeing English as a new way of communicating with othersdriven by necessity or even
personal desire. French, which had been the lingua franca of Europe for the previous two or so
centuries, was being slowly displaced by this upcoming language. It was not an immediate shift,
but it eventually happened. Merchants and other people related to business and politics started
looking in English what society did in French. Moreover, science was rapidly evolving and new
discoveries and inventions were being made. English had then become the language of politics,
economy, and science. The three most important factors to make a country or state thrive and
reach power, but in this case, we are not talking about a national entity itself but rather a
linguistic monopoly.
Great and powerful nations such as the United States and the United Kingdom were
establishing the foundation for the language of the future. Along came technology and all the
digital revolutiononce again lead by English. At the time it was barely possible to find any field
of science (both mathematical and social) that was not ruled by this language. Treaties, research,
and the like were all dominated by English. So, the world was faced with the need of learning this
language; learning English had become not only a desirable asset to portray in ones skills
repertoire but a basic aspect of human qualification.
An educational revolution was needed, and along came al the research on the matter. How
to teach languages? A common question asked since yore. Languages had been taught in quite an

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Sociolinguistics

English Now and Then

Juan Carlos Sols Rivera

old fashion, what linguists call Grammar Translation Method. Completely obsolete these days. It
was the foundation at the moment though. From the 70s onwards, many new other methods and
approaches would see light in search of the best way to successfully make someone learn a
language for whatever the purposes. Nonetheless, along with such wave of new methods and
approaches, other questions arose: which variety to teach?
The English language is no one straightforward entity, that is, there is no exact form that
is just reproduced in all the places where it is spoken. Language evolves through time and so it
does it on the basis of where it is spoken. The first schism can be the one that took place between
the American and British varieties. But the same has occurred in many other places and contexts
through time. Thus we can speak of Canadian English, Australian English, and more so the intranational varieties (Holmes, 2013). However, it seems that there are two prominent and desirable
varieties dictated by their long-held status of standard: The American and the British one. Old
and new media have played an important role in the spreading of these two varieties.
Newspapers, radio and television broadcasting, books, journals, andcurrentlythe Internet
have all favored one or the other. Thus, in many educational systems where English is taught as a
foreign language there has been a moment to decide which variety to teach. A standard variety or
any other variety?
Standard English is no language, an accent, a style or a register. It is just a variety of the
English language that has gone through a process of D-C-S or determination, codification and
stabilization (Trudgill, n.d.). Yes, it is the most important variety in that it is used in writing, and
in education (in all English-speaking countries). So, as Trudgill (n.d.) states, it is merely a dialect.
A new question arises, should all educational systems in EFL teach a dialect?
The answer is yes. A dialect, contrary to peoples belief is not a 100-speaker-language
spoken in some remote village of an African country. A dialect is just a variety of a language and
Standard English features most traits of a dialect except for one: pronunciation or accent. This
last feature is not present as SE is not associated with any particular accent. That exactly makes it
perfect for language instruction. The reason is that SE accounts for most of the written register of
the language. A great number of people who learn English are just looking for a way to
understand all the information they are exposed to. As mentioned above, SE is widely used in
media such as television and the Internet. By learning SE learners will then have the ability to get
the gist of most of the content they look upas long as such is appropriate for their level.

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English Now and Then

Juan Carlos Sols Rivera

Another advantage of this accentless variety is that the institution or even educational system is
able to chose the accent that suits best their purposes. That is the case of our country.
In Mexico, English is taughtas of 2006all across the educational system: preschool,
elementary school, middle school and high school. Here, SE is taught with a quasi-American
accent due to the proximity and relevance of the US to us. Nonetheless, a problem that has arisen
is that of the pronunciation. This problem is not only native to Mexico but in general to TESOL.
Non-native English speakers who seek to teach the language need to be highly trained and
prepared in order to successfully accomplish the task. The negative impact that a lack of proper
training hasand has hadis that current learner generations might be learning the language the
wrong way. It is not a catastrophe per se, but it does suggest an issue to take into matter. In my
opinion, using SE as the chosen dialect to teach along with the American accent is the way to go
in our context, i.e. in Mexico. For other contexts, for instance European countries, the accent
might be different since they have different needs. Another question to consider is how long will
this be the norm, that is, language evolves and so do standard varieties or dialects.
The future of English is uncertain. I am positive that the changes the language will suffer
will not compare to those that took place during the vowel shift era. Yes, there are changes
happening at the momentright now!concerning morphology and syntax. The morphological
paradigms of pluralization of nouns, subject-verb agreement, and even word order in reported
questions are changing. But English teachers and the whole science of Language teaching has to
adapt to the said changes. We definitely do not need obsolete teachers who clinge on old-school
prescriptive rules. We need to focus on what the 21st century language teaching era (dictated by
the CEFRL) seeks as the ultimate objective of language teaching: develop learners competences
instead of bombing them with prescriptive rules which, to be honest, are broken all the time by
even native speakers in different contexts, styles or registers. Focus on what they need and not on
what we believe is needed.
References
Holmes, J. (2013). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (4th ed.). London: Routledge.
Trudgill, P. (n.d.). Standard English: What it isnt. University of Lausanne.
http://users.clas.ufl.edu/rthompso/englishchanges.html

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