Speech 2

Here's the more serious speech:

WHOSE ENGLISH IS IT ANYWAY?

Our previous High School ALT worked hard, teaching us how to pronounce words like ADD-ress and to-MAY-der correctly.  Now our new ALT tells us that everything we learnt is wrong.  “Don’t say ADD-ress.  Say uh-DRESS.” he tells us.  “Not tuh-MAY-der.  tuh-MAA-toe”.

So which one is correct?  It seems that they both are.  The first one taught us American English, and the second one British English.  This is very confusing for us poor Japanese.  We don’t have this problem in say, Maths or Geography.  We don’t learn that two plus two is four in the first year, and two plus two is five in the second year.

If it was just the pronunciation that was different, I wouldn’t mind, but the grammar changes too!  The old ALT said, “I lost my keys!”, but the new one says, “I’ve lost my keys.”  Actually, they’re both wrong.  They didn’t lose them.  We hid their keys in ... hmm ... maybe you don’t need to know about that.

But why stop at British or American English?  For instance, have you heard of Nigerian Pidgin?  It’s the lingua franca of Nigeria, and it’s a dialect of English.  There are about eighty million speakers of Nigerian Pidgin.  That’s twenty million more than the population of the UK.

So why can’t there be one official version of English?  One version that we can all agree on?  Actually, the French tried that.  There is an organization called The French Academy which decides what is French, and what is just slang and dialect.  The only problem is, nobody actually speaks Academy French.  The most recent edition of the Academy Dictionary was published in 1935.  

Altogether, there are maybe three-or-four hundred million native speakers of English, and more than a billion people who speak English as a second language.  So I wonder, if there are more non-native speakers than native speakers, and if even the native speakers can’t agree on how to speak English, why must I, as a Japanese person, copy native speakers?  [In a strong Japanese accent.]  Maybe I should be proud to speak English like a true Japanese.  Then “Nihonglish” can receive the recognition it deserves as a dialect of English.