The varieties of the English language

In this blog entry I will try to give some examples of the varieties of English used in other areas then Anglo-American core areas. I will compare Nigerian Standard English, South-African English and Singapore English.

In Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-American ) they define South-Africa as one of the Anglo-American languages, but I chose not to look at South-Africa as one of the "core Anglo-American languages" because of the big differences the language has compared to the other Anglo-American languages.

To start with, Nigerian Standard English is based on British English and is mainly spoken in the urban areas, mostly in Lagos which is the biggest city in Nigeria. Even though the language is based on British areas, there are big differences when it comes to the intonation and rhythm. The vowel reductions are less pronounced then in British English, and the pronunciations have a syllable-timed rhythm instead of stress-timed rhythm.

Furthermore, South-African English is spoken with a non-rhotic accent. This means that the "r" is often excluded from the words, except when it's followed by a vowel sound in the same phrase. This is like the British people as well. Instead of saying "are" they say "aaa". One of the special things about the South-African English, is that some of the words have entered the English language. These are words such as apartheid, commando, veld and impala. In one of my pervious blog entries I wrote a little about the movie Invictus. A while ago when we were working on South-Africa (http://englishnz.blogspot.com/2011/01/this-two-couple-of-weeks-weve-been.html ), we watched a movie called "Invictus" with Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman in the lead. If you watch that movie, you can get a closer look on how the South-Africans speak.

In Singapore however, there are two different languages; one of them is the Standard Singapore English, the other one Singlish. 42 % of the population in Singapore are foreign born, and almost 50 % of the population speaks mandarin at their home. Therefore, the English fluency level of the country is varieted. The Standard Singapore English follows the British spelling and grammar. For example, shopping centers are named "shopping centres". Singlish on the other hand, borrows words from not only Mandarin, but also Hokkien and Malay.

English is one of the mostly spread languages in the world. Whenever people are in a foreign country, they always start a conversation by saying: "Excuse me, do you speak English?". Still, there are incredibly many varieties of the language. Not only American, British and Australian, but Spanglish, Singlish, Chinglish etc. And some of these different varieties of English can be quite differe

nt from the "original" English, so perhaps we need to make sure to learn about the different varieties in English so that we can all understand each other better...

Sources:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Differences_between_British_English_and_Nigerian_English

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_English

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rhotic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Standard_English

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore_English

Pictures:

http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/small_continents_map.htm

http://classifieds.justlanded.com/en/Poland/Classes_Language-classes/Private-English-Language-Lessons-5