Review of: C. L. Nelson, Intelligibility in World Englishes: Theory and ... Furthermore, the proposals of Jennifer Jenkins for a Lingua Franca Core (LFC) of just ...
Language and Education, 27(1), 82–84.
Review of: C. L. Nelson, Intelligibility in World Englishes: Theory and Applications, New York and London: Routledge , 2011. pp. xiii + 134 Reviewed by David Deterding Universiti Brunei Darussalam
This slim volume offers a valuable overview of issues relating to intelligibility in English as it occurs around the world. Chapter 1 provides an introduction and summary, largely based on Braj Kachru’s Three Circles of English, of how the spread of English has resulted in a range of varieties of the language. Chapter 2 offers a detailed consideration of the three-way distinction that was proposed by Larry Smith in the 1980s: intelligibility, which involves the pronunciation of individual words; comprehensibility, which concerns the meaning of the whole sentence; and interpretability, or illocutionary force, which involves the pragmatic and cultural implications behind an utterance. Chapter 3 deals with the effect of hybridity and creativity on intelligibility, particularly the effects on English of code-mixing from such languages as Spanish, Hindi, and Russian. Chapter 4 discusses some recent studies on intelligibility, Chapter 5 considers the implications for teaching, and Chapter 6 summarises the issues and offers a prognosis of intelligibility in English as it is used around world in the future. The material in this book is substantially embedded in the theoretical framework developed by Braj Kachru in the 1980s for the study of World Englishes, and the references contain 22 items authored or co-authored by him, while there are 39 separate entries to his work in the index. For over two decades, Kachru’s Three Circles Model of English has indeed provided an invaluable basis for studying the nature and status of varieties of English around the world. However, although it is still relevant for the study of World Englishes, it is now a bit dated, particularly as it is rather geographically and historically rigid. Furthermore the model does not deal very well with places such as Argentina and Denmark which seem to be intermediate between the Outer and Expanding Circles (Jenkins, 2009, p. 20). Indeed, some writers have raised doubts about whether such fixed notions are appropriate in a globalised modern world which exhibits substantial transcultural flows (Pennycook, 2007), a world in which flexibility and fluidity in linguistic usage are so widespread that even the identity of named languages may be questioned (Blommaert, 2010). In this book, in contrast with the extensive coverage of Kachru’s work, Nelson gives less attention to some other frameworks. For example, no mention is made of the five-phase model for the emergence of postcolonial Englishes proposed by Schneider (2007), and the substantial VOICE corpus of ELF interactions developed by Barbara Seidlhofer and her colleagues in Vienna (VOICE, 2011) only gets a passing mention (p. 87). Furthermore, the proposals of Jennifer Jenkins for a Lingua Franca Core (LFC) of just those pronunciation features that are claimed to be necessary for international intelligibility are dismissed in just over one page (pp. 77–78), and in fact, even this brief coverage is a little dubious. For instance, in considering which features of pronunciation should be included in the LFC, Nelson concludes that ‘this turns out to be just about all of them’ (p. 78), which is a bit hard to reconcile with the fact that the LFC excludes a wide range of features of English pronunciation including dental fricatives, vowel quality, final consonant clusters, word stress, rhythm, and the pitch movements associated with intonational tones (Jenkins, 2007, pp. 23–24).On the same page, Nelson observes that ‘Jenkins has never made it clear just who is to promulgate this variety of English’, which seems a bit strange when she in fact takes great pains to emphasise that she is not proposing a single variety of English. The whole rationale behind the LFC proposals is to encourage a wide range of nativised varieties that reflect the individual backgrounds of different users, so there is no intention to ‘promulgate’ a single variety. One or two other statements in the book are open to debate. For example, on page 90, in discussing limitations to the audio-lingual method of teaching English, Nelson observes that the method promotes fixed patterns of achieving a particular objective rather than encouraging creativity among students, which may be a valid criticism. But then he suggests that the fixed form-function association might result in requests being framed directly by means of imperatives, and this seems rather unlikely, as it is far more likely that the pattern taught for requests in audio-lingual teaching materials would be some kind of formulaic, extremely polite ‘Would you please ….’ rather than an imperative. Some recent analysis of the patterns of English spoken in an international context has suggested that direct requests, often using imperatives, may indeed be common in ELF interactions, particularly when the participants know each other well (Smit, 2010), but there is no suggestion that this arises as a result of audio-lingual methods of teaching. The central thread of this book is the distinction between intelligibility, comprehensibility, and interpretability. This trichotomy this has proved exceptionally valuable in encouraging analysts to appreciate that understanding
involves much more than just word recognition. This framework has been employed profitably by many researchers over the past 25 years and it continues to be relevant today. At the same time anyone who works on the analysis of misunderstandings in international conversations will know how difficult it often proves to classify a particular example under one of the three categories, or even to determine whether something really involves loss of intelligibility or not. For instance, on page 63 of this book, it is suggested that the following quote from a novel by Chinua Achebe raises issues for interpretability: ‘I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eyes’ (meaning ‘I am sending you as my representative’). But is it really true that this is hard for people from other cultures to understand? Although many people in the USA or UK might generally not express themselves in this way, there does not seem to be much difficulty in understanding what it means. In contrast, Nelson suggests (p. 108) that when his Australian-born sister-in-law observed that the yoghurt that had been left outside might be ‘off’, meaning it was spoiled, this was not an issue for intelligibility. But on what basis do we determine that saying something is ‘off’ is understandable to people from other backgrounds while asking someone to ‘join these people and be my eyes’ causes problems for interpretability? The discussion of hybridity and mixing in Chapter 3 raises different issues, quite apart from the classification of individual examples, for it is not clear that code-mixing actually causes too many problems at all. Even in societies where code-mixing is the norm, virtually all speakers seem to be perfectly capable of avoiding it when the person they are talking to is not familiar with one of the languages. So although the material in Chapter 3 is certainly interesting, with lots of fascinating examples and anecdotes, it is not clear how relevant it is in a book on intelligibility. In the marketing blurbs printed on the back cover, Kamal K. Sridah says, “I have waited for over 20 years for a volume such as this …” and Larry E. Smith says, “I’ve been waiting for this book … a long time …” Undoubtedly both of these were meant entirely positively, that the book is splendid and well worth the wait. Although it is certainly a valuable volume which discusses issues concerning intelligibility with admirable clarity and with plenty of interesting examples, the coverage of a few modern theories is rather thin and occasionally a bit dubious, the selection of some of the material is at times quirky, and overall it seems somewhat dated. References Blommaert, Jan (2010). The Sociolinguistics of Globalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jenkins, Jennifer (2007). English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkins, Jennifer (2009). World Englishes: A Resource Book for Students, 2nd ed, London: Routledge. Pennycook, Alistair (2007) Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows, London: Routledge. Schneider, Edgar W. (2007). Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smit, Ute (2010). English as a Lingua Franca in Higher Education. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter Mouton. VOICE (2011). The Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English (version 1.1 online). Accessed 24 December 2011 at http://voice.univie.ac.at
