Circles of English users&Different Englishes?

Circles of English users&Different Englishes?

English, as a world language,  relatively small number of native speakers is less important than the very large number of non-native speakers who use English as part of their everyday lives. It is very difficult to estimate the precise number of English Language Users who are not native speakers. David Crystal writing in 1995, suggested there were between 320 and 380 million native speakers of English in countries such as Ireland, Guyana, Malta, Australia,New Zealand, Canada, U.S.A., Wales, Scotland and England. There are another 150 to 300 million people who use English as a major part of the lives in countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, or Kenya because it is one of the ‘official’ languages of their country. There is also a much larger group of between 100 and 1,000 million who live in countries where English is the first choice of foreign language within the education system.

Of course, not all of these people speak ‘BBC English’. We all know of the differences between American English and British English, but what are the differences between Indian English and Australian English? Certainly, there are differences, but does this mean an Indian English speaker will not understand an Australian English speaker.

We judge the differences between languages by level of ‘comprehensibility’ or incomprehensibility’. Argentinean speakers of Spanish can comprehend understand Mexican speakers of Spanish and vice versa.

Their languages are ‘mutually comprehensible’. in the same way, Jordanian speakers of Arabic can understand Moroccan speakers of Arabic. They will speak with different accents, they will have some differences in vocabulary and possibly also in structure, but they will be mutually comprehensible.

A monolingual speaker of Dutch will understand quite a lot of German and even more of Afrikaans, but less of Swedish. The monolingual Dutch speaker will not be able to understand Hungarian, Finnish, or Arabic because these languages are ‘mutually incomprehensible’.

Perhaps surprisingly considering the very wide geographical spread of English, the different varieties are all largely ‘mutually comprehensible’. If we compare written forms of English mutual comprehensibility is even stronger.