- They like you!

- Thank you!

So, as he was talking, how many of you thought about "valaška" and "halušky"

and "tvaroh"?

Today we had some type of thing for lunch and we didn't know how to translate it

We have 15 minutes!

You have the possibility to ask any question you wish!

Related to language!

So anybody have a question?

It doesn't happen every day!

Wave!

well, there's one!

- Hi David! - Hi.

- I noticed you didn't speak about ELF.. -No. -Particularly at the end when you were talking about the job of the English teachers

I wondered what you think about the need to teach ELF

English as a lingua franca - one has to remember why ELF

evolved in the first place it was too to give

respect to these new varieties basically, wasn't it? Once upon a time

there was this view that there was really only one kind of English that was

correct and everything else was a bit

sort of suspicious or dubious or

deviant or gutter speak or what have you .. the inferiority complex concept of

other varieties it's applied to every new variety of English over the

centuries when

American English first came along it was dismissed in Britain as being a

completely irrelevant

horrible gutter kind of speech that they hoped would disappear

very soon and conversely you get the attitudes going in the other direction

and so these attitudes that there is one kind of English

only that respectable and correct and

the one you have to learn and everything else is rubbish was around for an awful

long time

the main thing that ELF did in my view was

it got rid of that conception or tried to and it's still trying to

to make the point that all

first of all varieties of English are equal

if you like some are more equal than others because of the power

basis that they have behind them, but all

have validity moreover it is argued

that because people are learning English in a similar way

all over the world there are going to be similarities

which will allow us to generalize

about what's going on in my talk you're quite right

I was only referring to individual varieties like Ghanian English

or Singaporean English and so on.. and the reason why I did that because I

think these are the areas where the identities are

clearest now is it possible to step back and say

but there are certain similarities in the

English produced by Ghanaians and Nigerians and Singaporeans and

all second language learners of English such

that we are able to say there is a general

a general dialect that transcends individual cultural identities

and the ELF movement it seems to me is sort of arguing in that direction

I believe it's premature to go so far

and the question is

tell me what the features of this shared

variety of English is - what are the features that identify ELF

tell me them - list them for me and

there are hypotheses around people say well this is a very widely used feature

this is a very wide feature problem is that there's been so little empirical

work done

that you can't be sure and every time I've come across one of the features it has

been suggested as an elf

defining feature I find that there are people who don't use it

or there are certain circumstances where you don't get it - I'll give you an example

and one of the things people say about learning English

is that the distinction between countable and uncountable nouns

disappears - that uncountable nouns will be treated as countable nouns

so all foreigners all over the world

will at some point say ehm - there are furnitures

in there - that sort of thing

and researches being done - rather than research, rather than furniture

or I have some important informations for you

rather than information now you know I thought that's a good feature that's very

probably true

and to begin I thought yeah! that I everywhere I've been

I found people doing that and then course I find people who don't do that at all

and even in the corpus of data that they have

the big you know million work corpus they've got their if you go searching

for words like:

informations and furnitures and so on - you don't find them!

you know - they're not there! and so you begin to think

just how much is this ELF actually

real as opposed to a kind ideal for

towards which the English language might be moving so

I'm not against it by any manner of means I don't want Henry Widdowson sitting on

my head

- he's too big - and no - you know I do I do believe that there is

there will be an accommodation of

many of these varieties which will one day

maybe produce something like this but isn't there yet

so that's my view at the moment

- You spoke of many different influences

that lead to the development of these new Englishes

could you say that there can also be one can be developed intergenerationally

with word meanings - and just two examples that I was thinking of

the word "gay" and the word "wicked"

you know

I think that used to be the case that there was a very clear intergenerational

distinction such that you could say

this particular feature is characteristic of a younger group

and that of an older group and the two don't meet very much and I noticed this in my own family

actually

in in a feature of pronunciation I say schedule

- "shed-yool" -all my kids say "skej-ool" everyone - these are British kids but the

american influences has come in

and they all say it and so now when I'm talking to them I say ""skej-ool" but I

say "shed-yool" when I'm talking to

Hillary for example and so now I've got two pronunciations

and likewise I might have two meanings of "gay"

in my head - I do because I've got the old meaning of "gay" in there as well as the new

meaning to gay

I know I'm sensitive about it and so it's it causes the usage problem every

now and again

sometimes I have to avoid the word because I don't know whether my audience will understand

this meaning or

that meaning - so it is a comp.. the chronological dynamic is a complication

but notice I said at the beginning of my answer used to be the case

and the reason why I say that is because of the Internet - you see the thing about

the internet when it comes to

interaction and dialogue so i'm talking now about

all the social media sites i'm talking about.

forums, blogging forums - you know all that sort of thing

chat rooms - who are you talking to?

when you enter which a chat room? you have no

idea ninety percent of

the people that you are encountering anonymous

you don't know whether even you know their age

certainly you don't know that sex even they male or female

straight or gay? some sites actually make you decide

but most don't - so I don't know whether this guy I'm talking to on the chat room there

and using English in a rather strange and unfamiliar way

is A) a native speaker or a non-native speaker I have no idea

whether he's male or female, old or young or anything - and so suddenly

you know those clear - clearer distinctions that I was familiar with

have disappeared

and now on the Internet I mean you know we're all using it now

in that or at least - there are two types people in the room

people below a certain age

who have never known anything other than - you've never known the world other than the internet

have you?

right? and then some slightly less young people a bit further back there

and scattered around the room - not and hardly any

less young people in the room actually - but there are a few for whom

we're not actually saying anymore - what is the internet?

but, you know, they're not native speakers on the Internet anyway

and so as a result everything has to be rethought

absolutely everything in language has to be rethought and

we're at the beginning of this transitional period so I don't know

whether

on the internet one day we will see a a resurgence of the kind of situation you

talk about

but it certainly making it less impactful

at the moment

-Do you think that in future there will be probably two or more

different pronunciations within one language within one English

that people won't understand each other - two different pronunciations

well this already happens of course me when you

when you actually look at the pronouncing dictionary

if you take one of the big pronouncing dictionaries of English - like the Cambridge one or

whatever John Wells's dictionary of Peter Roaches' dictionary

and you actually count up the number of words in

English in there that have already got two

or more pronunciations - you'd be surprised how many there are - about a

THIRD of the words - the same with

spelling - if you go through a dictionary and ask how many words in English have an

alternative spelling

you know "col-or"

"col-our" and encyclopedia

with an AE in the middle or an E in the middle, flower pot

with a hyphen in the middle or no hyphen in the middle

you find that about a quarter of all english words got

alternative spelling man

there are already - there is already so much diversity there

- do you say "uh-geyn" or do you say "uh-gen"

well of course it's both - right from Shakespeare's time on

Shakespeare uses both pronunciations and

same today "guh-rahzh" - or "gar-ij"?

there hundreds, thousands of words

with these alternative pronunciations - the BBC of course has to choose one

- and it does - and it recommends it to announcers or to you - one

of the alternative pronunciation "kon-truh-vur-see" or "kuhn-trov-er-see"

"ree-surch" or "ri-surch" and so on

but diversity of this kind has been part of

English from the very beginning

and so what I see when we talk about global English is simply an extension of

what already exists

at a world level.

-One last question? -Thank you.

-I worked and lived in the Netherlands for two years

and I was looking for a job there

and I didn't manage most of the jobs asking for a teacher who's a native speaker of English

Which I'm not and never will be

So I have a kind of deficiency that I was born with and bred with and you might not be in

the position to quadriple our salaries - could you please advocate for

the competence of non-native English teachers?

- Absolutely! I do this all the time!

absolutely right - but it's taking time for this new

mindset to establish itself you know

all of this is so recent - we're talking half a century

only - it takes a long time before the institutions

recognize the new realities - now by the institutions I mean things like the

examining boards

you see who still are very conservative and will expect

traditional British English and Received Pronunciation and so on

so forth - you know that - but even they are changing - even they're beginning

I've talked to several examining boards in last 10 years

so I'm doing what you say and and trying to persuade them to

become more tolerant of diversity and some of them are!

now absolutely - the British Council for example

another organization, another institution - once upon a time

would never have had for example an American accent

teaching in its place - now you will find them

And so slowly the institutions

are changing - if - you've mentioned the Netherlands- I know the Netherlands very

well my daughter lives there

and the level of English spoken

in the Netherlands and in Denmark and in Scandinavia generally

is is commensurate with any native speaker

that I know - in fact once or twice I had the occasion to explore

the limits of linguistic competence of one or two people from these parts of

the world comparing in other words

how much do you know in terms of any test I can think up

vocabulary range, grammatical range -stylistic range and so on

compared with a native speaker - I did with Jan Svartvik

once and Jan Svartvik - one of the co-authors of the grammar of English