global english

natalia S. (Russia)
12 words 2 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. sociolinguistic
    of or relating to sociolinguistics
    But in my view this strategy is the only sensible means of finding a compromise between the educational arguments for a model of spoken En glish that would be intelligible outside one’s own state and country, and the sociolinguistic arguments which allow each community to evolve its own model.
  2. value judgement
    an assessment that reveals more about the values of the person making the assessment than about the reality of what is assessed
    But whatever its value in other contexts, it is my contention that such a dichotomy and the value judgements based on it cannot be used in the case of Global English.
  3. speech community
    people sharing a given language or dialect
    In the case of a Global Language an educational model, particular ly for spoken English can be a synthetic model, a model which is not used by any sizeable speech community within that country.
  4. indigenous language
    a language that originated in a specified place and was not brought to that place from elsewhere
    Some have been hostile to it because they tend to regard it primarily as a remnant of a foreign imposition, a vestige of our colonial past, and as a language which has usurped the rightful place of indigenous languages and their literatures.
  5. native speaker
    a speaker of a particular language who has spoken that language since earliest childhood
    The notion of a mother tongue or even of a native speaker is a n elusive one (Paikeday, 1987).
  6. mother tongue
    one's native language
    And some of these individuals are so uncommon that at first sight they hardly seem English in their _expression, and yet they stand as genuine
    creators of English literature. (emphasis added)

    Before we come to the heart of Sethna ’s case for Indian writing in English, it might be useful to note that there are two interesting points that Raine has pointedly raised here: one is that only in one ’s mother tongue can one really write poetry, and two, that a world language is no langua...
  7. phonological
    of or relating to phonology
    It also follows, as far as phonology is concerned, that whil e the actual quality of vowels and consonants may vary a great deal between one accent and another, the number of contrasts, the number of phonological units, and the number of systems being operated must also remain fairly close to those of other ‘educated accents’, since otherwise speakers of one would have greater difficulty in understanding speakers of others.
  8. subtilise
    make (senses) more keen
    You write of the land of India, subtilised in an almost physical sense, by the quality of life that has been lived there; is not the same thing true of language?
  9. intelligibility
    the quality of language that is comprehensible
    I also feel that fresh thinking is called for on this bogey of intelligibility across countries that is often raised.
  10. ethnocentrism
    belief in the superiority of one's own ethnic group
    Although Kachru’s reply was adequate to Prator’s kind of “ethnocentrism”, it does not directly address Raine’s question, which is, why does an Indian writer like, say, Sethna or Harindranath Chattopadhyay use English for writing poetry, because according to her a foreign language cannot nourish the roots of poetry.
  11. writing system
    a method of representing the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols
    I am not suggesting that English should adopt an ideographic writing system.
  12. first language
    one's native language
    Recent history of language studies shows that we made an analogous mistake in bein g tardy in recognizing that a second language variety is not a deviant form of a first language variety but in certain important ways a manifestation of a distinct theoretical construct.
Created on Thu Feb 16 08:38:07 EST 2012

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