Various traditions of education have always placed an importance on the learning of other languages, though the motives have often varied. Knowing a second or third language was supposed to round out an individual’s personal education, just as knowledge of science or the arts did. Regardless of any theoretical value, however, there are many practical reasons students of any nation should learn foreign languages. The knowledge of even one more language has distinct effects on an individual.
More than 350 million people speak English as their first language:
That means English is the world's number two language after Chinese (with about one billion speakers). But English is also the ‘second language’ of perhaps 400 million more people in countries such as Nigeria and Pakistan. More than sixty countries have English as one of their official languages. The government, business and universities use it (India). In total, almost 1,500,000,000 people have some knowledge of English.
Certainly English is the worldwide language of technology and communication. The majority of the world’s mail is addressed in English. English is the language of international air controllers, and English is the medium of eighty percent of the information stored in computers around the world. Scholars from every nation publish in English in order to reach the widest possible audience.
These are the reasons why everyone needs to know English. And we need not only Standard English, but also Conversational English and Internet English.
A standard language is a variety of a language that is socially and culturally predominant and is generally accepted as the most proper form of that language (Millward, 1987).
Standard English is the kind of English that is, on the whole, used by people of education and standing in the community; and it is standard simply because such people use it. We will get along much faster if we can manage to get rid of the mysterious idea of “perfect English.” There isn’t any such thing.
Standard English is generally used in the news media and literature; described in dictionaries and grammars; taught in schools; and taught to non-native speakers.
English is one of the hardest languages, because of the spelling. People say that the spelling of English is not easy because many English words do not have the same number of sounds and letters. For example, house has four sounds and five letters, different has seven or eight sounds and nine letters, and enough has four sounds and six letters.
George Bernard Shaw thought that it was terrible. He asked what English word could the letters ghoti spell. Answering his own questions, he said that these letters could spell the word fish. How? Sometimes the letters ghare used for an f sound (in words like cough and enough), the letter o for an (i) sound (in a word like women), and the letters ti for the sh sound (in words like nation and station). Ghoti is not a real English word, of course. Shaw created it to show the problems of English spelling (Saitz & Stieglitz, 1997:6).
Another difficult aspect of the language is its punctuation.
An English professor wrote the words “Woman without her man is nothing" on the blackboard and directed his students to punctuate it correctly.
The men wrote: “Woman, without her man, is nothing."
The women wrote: “Woman! Without her, man is nothing."
And the professor (a man) marked all the women's answers wrong. He claimed that the instructions were to punctuate this sentence (singular). He refused to acknowledge he had not said that - even when someone played back a tape of the class (Author unknown).
Here is an adapted version of Richard Lederer's introduction to his book "Crazy English: the Ultimate Joy Ride Through Our Language." (Pocket Books, 1989):
Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant
or ham in hamburger;
neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France.
So we can come to the conclusion that if you want to be able to know English well, you should learn Standard English.What the Internet has done is to create a space for language that runs and slips over the boundary of public and private language. The Internet is a giant context that invites informal communication, and there is lots of experimentation going on.
Then there is the fluency in the chat room, where written and spoken language slur together. Here a correctly spelled word is a sign of the inarticulate, and a clever abbreviation is prized above all else. The basic principles governing the abbreviations are quite simple. Certain words or syllables can be represented by letters or numbers that sound the same but take up less space.
For example, look below. Do you understand what the words in capitals mean?
WERV U BIN?
PPL R starting to use SMS abbreviations all the time, OTOH not everyone understands what BCNU means.
The decoded phrases look like this:
WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?
PEOPLE ARE starting to use SMS abbreviations all the time. ON THE OTHER HAND, not everyone understands what 'BE SEEING YOU' means.
Many of those abbreviations are rapidly attaining the status of accepted conventions familiar to most users of the ‘language’. It is a method of communication that can be endlessly exploited and developed by individuals or small groups to create a kind of personal language that will remain opaque to the uninitiated. This will doubtless serve to increase its popularity.
When you are writing an E-mail, all too often you need some sort of trick to eliminate ambiguity. This usually happens in phrases that can be misunderstood or the tone of the conversation you are trying to drive. In usual face-to-face language, these ambiguities are clarified by facial expression: the same word may be an insult or a compliment depending upon whether you say it with a disdainful look or a friendly smile on your face.
To work around this problem, network users have derived a collection of "symbols" that reflect in some way body language. These symbols, called emoticons, are built using common letters and orthographic signs so that they pass as text through any computer system. To interpret them you must look at them as faces drawn horizontally: for example [ :-) ] would be a smiley face, with the [ : ] being the eyes, the [ - ] the nose and the [ ) ] the smiling mouth.
References
Sakamoto N.M. Masterson (1995), 'Conversational Ballgames'. In: Smalley, R.L. & M.K. Ruetten, Refining Composition Skills: Rhetoric and Grammar for ESL Students, pp181. Heinle.
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