Whose English is it, anyway?

Picture a meeting in Ho Chi Minh City between an engineer from Da Nang, a project manager from Sao Paulo and a supplier from Glasgow. The first two speak English slowly and carefully, with no idioms and few contractions, and they understand each other almost perfectly. The man from Glasgow, speaking at what he considers a normal pace, is the one who keeps being asked to repeat himself. Nobody present would say he speaks English badly. But on this occasion his native fluency is a handicap, not an advantage.

Scenes like this are no longer unusual. By most estimates, people who learnt English as a second or foreign language now outnumber native speakers by a wide margin, and a large share of the conversations held in English around the world involve no native speaker at all. The linguist Braj Kachru described the situation in the 1980s with his famous 'three circles': a small inner circle of countries where English is the mother tongue, a larger ring where it is an official or working language, and a vast outer expanse where it is studied. The balance of power between them, he suggested, was shifting.

The consequences for learners are considerable, though they are rarely admitted in the classroom. Many textbooks still treat the native speaker as the target and every departure from British or American norms as an error. Yet researchers who have recorded international conversations find that speakers from different countries regularly succeed through habits that no textbook would approve: simplifying grammar, repeating key words and checking understanding as they go. These are not signs of weakness. They are skills, and they are often the ones that matter most.

None of this means that anything goes. Grammar, vocabulary and above all clarity still count, and a learner who wants a job in a multinational company would be unwise to ignore the standard forms. The point is narrower. Aiming for intelligibility, being easily understood by many kinds of listener, is a more realistic goal than aiming for an accent that most people will never acquire and that, in international settings, may carry little weight.

Accent is where these anxieties gather. Learners are told, usually kindly, that they must lose theirs, as though it were a stain. Yet accent is mostly a matter of identity rather than intelligibility, and listeners are a good deal more tolerant than learners fear. Studies of international speakers suggest that what causes misunderstanding is not a trace of Vietnamese or Portuguese in the vowels but a handful of habits, such as swallowing the ends of words, speaking too fast or placing the stress on the wrong syllable.

Teachers are in an awkward position. They are paid to prepare students for exams and interviews that are still set by native-speaker standards, and a teacher who told a class to ignore them would not last long. The sensible course is to teach both: the standard form, for the occasions that demand it, and the flexibility to cope with everything else. A student who can write a correct report on Monday and rescue a confusing call from Lagos on Tuesday has learned more than any single model of English could teach.

The deeper question is one of ownership. A language belongs, in the end, to those who use it, and English has long since stopped answering only to the people who were born into it. That is an uncomfortable idea for anyone who has spent years trying to sound like someone else. It may also be a liberating one. The engineer from Da Nang does not need permission to be fluent. He has been understood in the meeting, which was, after all, the point.