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Originally Posted by banderas  I do not promote "one pure English", stewart.
Let me give you one exapmle. In London there is a big polish community. Most of these folks decided to find a better life here which is fine. They speak a poor English and the problem is they do not do much to improve it. Let's say these circumstances do not change for next 15 years and their level of English is remains the same. Can we talk about Polish dialect of English, then? There has to be some standard the learners should stick to, doesn't it?
If i am not able to understand people speking English only because of that dialect, I am not happy with that And it does not matter whether I am English native speaker or not. . Do not get me wrong, I am for diversity but it should be diversity within English language unity (i.e The European Union).
I am aware of the fact that there are plenty of English dialects all over the world (which I am happy about) but let's be down-to-earth with all this. Otherwise people start speaking 100 dialects of English and hardly anyone will be able to understand the other.
No hard feelings, stewart, but respect my opinion and do not call me ignorant.
Cheers |
I did not call you ignorant. I don't do ad hominem. Also, my name is Stuart. The regional variants of English are not dialects, at least in part because there is still a very high level of mutual intelligibility. The globalisation of communication will ensure an acceptable level of mutual intelligibility, but the reality is that the one constant in the Universe is change, and that applies to languages. For an example of real dialects, try
these tongue twisters Finally, the situation you describe with the Polish immigrant community is not analagous to the development of regional variations of English among
native-speaking populations, nor is it relevant to the situation that Crystal was discussing in the
Telegraph article. The historical reality among immigrant communities around the world is that it is the language of the former homeland that suffers among later generations, not the language of the new homeland.